Mrs. Everything (44 page)

“I’d been arrested at demonstrations a few times by then, and it turns out the FBI had been watching me,” Harold said. “They sent an agent to talk to me when I was locked up, and they gave me a deal. They wanted to plant me with the Black Panthers. Told me that for every person I helped them bring in, they’d pay me a few thousand dollars. I said no.” He shook his head. “I hated the war.”

Bethie shook her head, hoping her expression could adequately convey how much she, too, had despised the war.

“But I wouldn’t inform, so they gave me a choice: the army or prison. I didn’t want to fight, but I sure didn’t want to get locked up, either. I knew I’d never be able to get a job once they let me out, and I figured, if I enlist, at least I’ll get to be outside. Breathing fresh air, reading whatever books I wanted. You know? And my pops would be proud of me.” He lifted his wineglass and took a long swallow. “I did my basic training in Fort Gordon, Georgia. First time I was ever on a plane. By January 1970, I was in Cam Ranh Bay, on the Cambodian border.” He tapped his fingers on the tablecloth. His eyes were far away. “I don’t know if you ever
saw a picture, but it was all sand and palm trees. If you put up a resort there, you’d have rich people paying to stay.” He reached across the table to top off Bethie’s wineglass and to refill his own. “I started off as an armorer, in the Fourth Infantry Division. We repaired small arms, and we patrolled Highway 19 from Cambodia to Qui Nhon, trying to find caches of enemy food and weapons. They’d send us out. Clear this village, clear that one. When there was nothing else to do, we loaded sandbags.”

“Were you . . .” Bethie licked her lips. Her mouth was dry, and her mind was churning. There were so many things she wanted to ask—what he’d done to get arrested prior to the riots, what had happened to him once they’d begun, and if he’d gotten hurt. How his parents and brothers and sisters had felt when he’d gone to Georgia, then to Vietnam. Was it as bad as she’d heard, was it as unfair, were the black soldiers given the worst assignments and put on the front lines, and if he’d had a girlfriend, or even a wife; a woman who’d loved him and who’d worried while he was gone. She wanted to tell him that she, too, saw the unfairness, that she was committed to trying to change things. She cleared her throat, sipped her wine, and finally managed, “What was it like, being a soldier over there?”

“You mean, did I kill anyone?” Harold’s face was very still. “I never shot anyone face-to-face.” He snorted. “You like that answer?” He lifted his glass, looked into it, and set it down without drinking. “I was afraid. That’s what I remember most. Waking up scared, going to sleep scared, and being scared every minute in between.” He pressed his palms against his face and moved them from his cheeks to his ears, back and forth, like he was washing his face. “My last month there, I was driving an amtrac—an amphibious tractor, like a tank. It wasn’t technically my job, but they said they didn’t have anyone else to do it. We hit a mine. Got blown straight up in the air. It was . . .” He paused, bringing his hands to his face again. “It was the loudest sound I’d ever heard in my life. The gunner and I got blown straight out of the trac, and when I came down, a piece of it—a piece
of the metal—landed on my leg. And it was on fire.” His voice was steady and matter-of-fact. “My fatigues . . . my leg . . . just burning.”

“Oh, God.” Her heart was pounding, and her face felt cold. She wanted to touch him, and wondered if she could, if he’d want that. She wondered if people would see, and if they’d stare, so instead of reaching for his hand, she said, “Harold, I’m so sorry.”

He nodded without meeting her eyes.

“You don’t have to tell me anymore,” Bethie said. “I’m just so sorry. So sorry that it happened to you. It was a terrible, unjust war—”

“Yeah.” He drew a long, slow breath as Bethie cringed at the inadequacy of her words, at how clichéd they sounded. “I was in a hospital in Japan for ten months. I don’t remember a lot of it. I had surgeries and skin grafts. The doctors took off three of my toes, and for a while, they thought they were going to have to amputate my foot, but I got lucky. They said if I hadn’t been young and strong going in . . .” Harold shook his head. “It could’ve been worse,” he said. “It was for a lot of the men. Soldiers in the hospital with me, they lost their arms, their legs. One man, the whole side of his face was just gone. He’d been burned right to the bone.”

“Oh, Harold. Oh, God.” Bethie’s stomach was clenched tight as a fist. She felt a great, impotent rage sweep through her, fury at the war, and the politicians who’d sent so many young men to be maimed or killed.

“When I was well enough to go, I came back here, to Georgia. To Fort Gordon.”

“Not home?”

Harold shook his head. “My father said the army would make a man out of me. It took me a while to stop being angry about it. I needed some distance. My degree from Michigan was in economics. I got my discharge, and I took a job at the First Bank of the South.” He looked up and gave Bethie a smile that she could tell took effort. “And I kept hearing about this girl who made the
best peach preserves down at the farmers’ market. This girl from Detroit. And when I heard that she needed a loan, I made sure I was the one to see her.”

Bethie felt her cheeks turn pink. She wanted to touch him again, and contented herself with looking at him and, very quietly, saying his name.

*  *  *

Every Saturday night after that, Harold would come to her place, always in a pressed shirt, sometimes in a jacket and tie, and always with a little gift: flowers, or a box of chocolates, the new Aretha Franklin or Stevie Wonder album, and once, on her birthday, a set of combs inlaid with mother-of-pearl. He took her to the movies, always insisting on paying for her ticket, and to outdoor concerts in Chamblee. They ate pizza and drank beer and played Did You Know and Do You Remember, with Bethie realizing that there was very little overlap between the kids she’d known in high school and Harold’s friends, or between the places she’d been to eat and dance and drive, and the places he’d gone. It was as if there was a city under the city, or two cities that existed side by side, both invisible to each other. Music was where they intersected. They both had grown up listening to Motown on the radio. Harold remembered every word to every song, and she’d try to get him to sing, when she could. They talked and laughed, but Harold never touched her. It left Bethie confused and unsettled, flushed and breathless, feeling constantly like she’d misplaced something important, her car keys or her wallet, and she was always having to turn her room or her purse upside down to find it. She liked Harold, more than she’d liked any man since Devon Brady, long ago. She liked his patience, his solidity, the way he smelled. She liked his smooth skin, his big hands, with their neatly clipped square-shaped nails; the way he’d harmonize, almost unconsciously, with every song on the radio when they were driving, while drumming a backbeat on the steering wheel. But did he care for her? Was a life with Harold possible? And if it was, would Harold even want it?

After months of Saturday night dates and phone calls more weeknights than not, Thanksgiving came. Instead of going home to Detroit, or waiting to see if Jo would invite her to Connecticut, Bethie asked Harold to join her at Blue Hill Farm. There would be friends, and friends of friends, relatives and children and always a few strays, people who had nowhere else to go. “Is there going to be turkey?” Harold asked. “Because turkey is nonnegotiable.” Bethie promised him turkey, and Harold said he would bring macaroni and cheese, and he’d bake his mother’s sweet potato pie.

On the appointed Thursday, he picked her up at her apartment, wearing blue jeans that looked brand-new and a dark blue sweater that lent a richness to his skin and made Bethie think about laying her head on the broad expanse of his chest. Ronnie and Jodi and Danielle had cleared the furniture out of the living room and set up rows of folding tables, covered in slightly mismatched white tablecloths. At four o’clock, twenty-seven people gathered around the table and held hands and thanked the Earth for Her bounty before tucking into the turkey, which Bethie made sure was near their end of the table, and baked stuffed squashes, mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes, corn bread and relish, biscuits and jam, and Harold’s offerings.

When dinner was over, it was still warm enough to light a fire in the firepit out back. Blankets were spread, whiskey was sipped, a few joints were toked. Harold and Bethie sat side by side, and Harold caught her up on his siblings. “My sister Hattie’s been married twice, to two different men named Bernard.”

“Really?”

“Really. My parents call her new husband Bernard the Second.”

“I bet Hattie loves that,” Bethie murmured.

“She’s just glad they’re talking to her. They were not happy when she and the first Bernard broke up. ‘Jeffersons don’t get divorced!’ my father kept saying.” He sipped from the bottle of whiskey, passed it to Bethie, and said, “Last year my sister Ernestine brought a white boy home for Christmas.”

Bethie felt her breath catch in her throat. She peeked at
Harold’s face, which was carefully expressionless. “I take it that was not what your parents were hoping to find under the tree?”

Harold gave a brief snort of laughter and shook his head. “So how’d it go?” she asked. The fire was blazing, and people were talking, and someone was playing a banjo, and someone else was blowing into a harmonica, but Bethie couldn’t hear anything but her heart.

Harold said, “Um.”

Bethie’s heart sank.

“It didn’t go well,” Harold finally admitted. “I mean, my folks were polite while he was there. They let Ernie have it after he was gone.”

“What’d they say?”

Harold was frowning. “Probably the same stuff your parents would’ve said to you.”

Bethie winced, imagining that conversation and what her mother would say.

“They said that she was asking for trouble. That people would stare at them, or say things, or worse. That her life would be hard. That if they had kids, their lives would be impossible, because they’d never know who they were or where they belonged.”

“Wow.” Bethie’s heart was beating hard. Was this Harold’s way of letting her down easy, telling her that it could never be? “So what do you think?”

Harold turned to look at her, briefly, before returning his gaze to the fire. “I think you love who you love,” he said. Before Bethie could let herself feel happy or hopeful, he added, “I think it’s easier, for sure, if you love someone who’s like you.”

Bethie stared down at the grass, hearing her mother’s voice.
Birds of a feather must flock together.
She knew, too, what Sarah had to say about Jews who married gentiles. Her mother had friends who’d refused to attend their own children’s weddings in protest, friends who’d sat shiva when their children had married non-Jews, who’d had grandchildren they’d never even met.
Would you do that?
she’d asked her mother once, long ago.
Would you
actually skip my wedding?
Sarah had given her a hard look.
Don’t try me
, her mother had said.

“But for me . . .” Bethie saw Harold’s shoulders hunch, heard him inhale. “Well. Maybe I’m putting the cart before the horse here, but I should tell you . . .”

“Tell me what?”

“That I can’t have kids.” His voice was quiet, and his body was very still. “In Vietnam, they used chemical defoliants. They found out later that the soldiers who were exposed to them would end up with cancer. Or they’d be sterile, or their wives would have miscarriages, or they’d have kids with birth defects. I knew I’d never . . .” He breathed again. “I knew I’d never want to try, knowing what could happen. I had a vasectomy a few years ago. Just to be sure.”

Bethie felt sick, angry and sad, furious at what Harold had been cheated out of, at what that war had taken. “I’m sorry,” she said, hearing her voice crack. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

He gave a slow nod. “I was angry about it for a long time. But now . . .” Another shrug. “I couldn’t be as angry as I was forever.”

“I had an abortion,” she said into the silence. She felt like she needed to say it, to tell him what she’d never told another man, to let him see her clearly, all of her scars. To trust him with this truth as he’d trusted her with his. Sitting beside him, her eyes on her lap, she said, “I was raped the summer after my sophomore year. Dev took me to a concert, and I got high. And I got lost and ran right into a bunch of bad guys.”

For a moment, Harold was silent. Bethie could feel tension, like the air was getting thick before a storm. Then—finally—she felt Harold reach for her hand. In a hoarse voice, he said, “I don’t want anything bad to happen to you again.”

Bethie shut her eyes. “Do you think . . .” Once again, Bethie’s mind was whirling with questions. Do you think that this can work; do you think people will accept us; do you think we can find a place to be in the world? Where would they live, and what holidays would they celebrate, and would Harold want her to go
to church with him, or convert? How would his parents feel about her? How would her mother feel about him? Would Sarah be glad that Bethie was with someone, even if that someone wasn’t white and wasn’t Jewish, or would she hiss
unnatural
, the way she had at Jo?

Part of her wanted not to think at all; to take him in her arms and into her bed, to hold him and let him hold her and tell herself that tomorrow was another day, and they’d figure it out as they went. Part of her—a larger, more sensible part—knew that Harold would never agree to that. Harold was careful, deliberate, and methodical.
Measure twice, cut once
, she’d heard him say. And he wasn’t a risk-taker. He’d want to know exactly what he was getting into, exactly what he’d be gaining, and losing, by choosing her. Bethie closed her eyes, feeling sorry for herself, and feeling, too, a deep, aching sympathy for her sister, who must have asked herself all of the same questions when she’d been in love with Shelley. Where will we go, and how will we live, and is there any place on earth where we can be together?