Saving Graces (9 page)

And so it was. We were part of something bigger, something that in time, years later, could have shaped a national resolve, but as much as I wanted to change the policies of the government, I participated because I had to, for me. Even if I was spitting in the wind, at least I had to try to spit. And it was so much easier to get up each morning and prepare for the march on South Building or hand out fliers for another rally in the Pit, because we were all trying together to let our outrage, our sadness, our vision be heard. I can tell you that I worked with Grady Ballenger or Charlie Dean, or that I took orders from John Rosenthal, or that I marched behind Rich Leonard, and all that would be true, but what would also be true is that I worked and marched and chanted alongside students whose names I did not know, but I knew we were joined in a cause.

Sometimes I would have to step back. At one evening rally, there was a call to march to President Friday’s house. The University provided Bill and Ida Friday with a lovely home on Chapel Hill’s main street, Franklin Street. The University also rented the house next door to the Fridays to the head of the Naval Science Department, the commanding officer of NROTC—my father. As soon as the call went out to march to President Friday’s, I took off running. Breathless, I flew in the front door, turned off the television in the front room, and told my mother and father to stay indoors. Did anyone even know the head of NROTC was in the next house? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want these worlds colliding. Mother, Dad, and I talked in the kitchen while the protesters gathered, unaware, next door.

In terms of national policy, Hugh Holman was right. Nothing we had done had changed the government’s policies. But we had been part of changing the national mind. By fall many of us who took multiple incompletes in courses the previous spring had to put away the protest signs and finish our classes for the fall semester and the previous semester, too. But we had changed things. Despite Jesse Helms’ television commentaries about the “communists in Chapel Hill,” opposition to the war was not just at coffee houses and SDS meetings anymore. It was at fraternities and in student government, who sponsored one of the largest protests, in the football stadium. Even Dad took some of the armaments that had surrounded the NROTC down in order to do his job without interruption or protest.

After all this, English graduate school seemed like another world, but I wanted to teach, particularly to teach young people to love literature as I did, so this was where I wanted to be, or so I thought at the time. English graduate schools in the early 1970s were dismal places. The learning was quite fine, the students came full of purpose and with a genuine love of literature, but there was nowhere to go, there were no jobs at the end of three years or four or five, for some it was now six and seven. It might have made a more aggressive group cutthroat and competitive, but not UNC English graduate students. We were complacent in the way that gentlemen are complacent—not in any way lazy, but civil to the point of inaction sometimes. And some were content that our bleak prospects allowed us entry into high emotion, even if the high emotion was despair. We had all been children of promise, and now we found ourselves imprisoned in a lovely garden of a town from which we could find no exit. So we didn’t really try to exit; we tried to create for ourselves a place of civility and purpose, which was, I think now, really always out of our reach. But maybe the reaching for it taught us how to create that decency when we did finally manage to—and this is too harsh a word—escape.

I started graduate school at UNC in 1971 in a program in which I would go straight to a doctorate, bypassing a master’s degree. It sounds more prestigious than it was. For me it was economics. I was borrowing money all the time to pay for school, and I didn’t want to slow down to write a master’s thesis. After our first year, we played the most erudite games of charades ever played as some studied for the master’s writtens. We even had to come up with a special hand gesture to designate that we were acting out the name of a poem. There were “conversations” in which every word spoken was a line from a different Shakespearean play. We did it because we could, but the intellectual pursuit, which meant so much to each of us, was tainted for me by the manic effort to make this lovely treading water seem important. It was like a mockery of gaiety, like a mockery of life. We all knew, but we had no choice.

I decided I had a choice. I didn’t want to keep piecing together loans and tips from waitressing so that I could keep working on a degree that would never result in the job I wanted. In some ways, waitressing itself was more satisfactory. “Mom” of Mom’s and Pop’s Restaurant told me I was a born waitress, certain, I am sure, that this was encouragement to an English graduate student. At the Pines, where I waitressed next, Leroy Merritt had quite a different idea about waitresses. He saw us as an elegant waitstaff, never hurried, never really in need of tips—which drove the women who were trying to live on tips to distraction. For all the menial parts of waitressing, it was—unlike the Shakespearean conversations of graduate school—real in a way that graduate school might have been real had it been for more of us a path to the profession we had hoped it would be. In waitressing, what I saw is what I got. Work hard six hours, then go home tired with a pocketful of quarters. Unlike graduate school, if I did my part, it did not disappoint.

By the end of my second year, I’d made the decision to go to law school. My mother had always wanted me to go; she said I was argumentative. I don’t think that distinguished me as a daughter, but I decided to follow her advice nonetheless. The transition was easy, for I wasn’t leaving the lovely garden. I would go to law school in Chapel Hill. My friend Errol wrote of Chapel Hill that everything smells of life and the air is abuzz as if it had just sifted down from heaven. Nothing quite like it.

Law school was not, as I had expected and hoped, real life. People talked more about what was happening around us than they had in graduate school. But with the exception of a table of veterans who played cards together in the student lounge, there was pretty much unanimity about the war, about equal rights for women—starting, it turned out, with trying to find space for an adequate women’s bathroom on the main floor. The small contingent of women law students started a group called Women in Law, to address issues such as bathrooms and matters of more importance, such as equal employment opportunities. The veterans countered with Veterans in Law. But it was not as contentious as it sounds. The conflicts were generally pedestrian. The biggest disagreement occurred when Susan Sabre changed the channel on the lounge television from an afternoon ACC basketball tournament game to
Sesame Street
so that her children could watch while she studied. She lost that fight.

The male law students bonded immediately. Men who had been strangers the week before went out from the law school in packs, slapping each other on the shoulder as they walked to the Tin Can to play pickup basketball. The women, on the other hand, sat uneasily on the steps of the brick courtyard and complained about bathrooms and interviews with yet another all-male firm. It created a bond, but a negative one. Men, I thought, had sports, and we did not. The only sports for women at my high school in Japan had been cheerleading and tennis. We played half-court basketball, three girls on each side of the court, the way Iowa girls played long after the rest of the country liberalized the rules, and even that was only in physical education and an annual upperclassmen-versus-underclassmen game. I was, believe it or not, the second-fastest girl in my high school, but the fastest girl, Sandy Choate, was faster than most of the boys. In another two decades, Sandy would have gone to college on that speed. But this was a different era. I could see that sports were good for boys, and they were good for those new male law students, so why, I wondered, could they not be good for us, too?

In nearly every intramural sport over three years of law school, I entered a women’s law school team. Volleyball, basketball, softball. And I want to be clear: we were terrible. In every sport. But no team had as much fun. Mary Norris Preyer getting fifteen volleyball serves straight to her corner and missing them fifteen straight times and apologizing sweetly each time. We laugh about it still. Margo Freeman showing up to play softball in bare feet. No, she couldn’t play shortstop like that; she’d at least have to go to the outfield. Donna Triptow dribbling the ball eight inches off the floor into the corner of the court and being trapped there. We were truly terrible. And yet year after year, I could still get women to sign up because we were getting to do what seemed a birthright to men: we were teammates, and then we were companions, and finally we were friends.

My dear friend Glenn Bergenfield, whom I met that first year, will tell you that I was a meddler, making people talk to one another, passing out those intramural sign-up sheets, gathering people for dinner, introducing people I didn’t know, but the truth is that it is Glenn who was the go-between. It was Glenn who said I should go out with John. John Edwards? He was a textiles major from a small town, wasn’t he? And wasn’t he the one who had had a date to a football game with a majorette? I did not think this match would work. But Glenn kept after me, and finally I agreed that I would go out with him.

John picked me up in his red Duster. It was a flood car; he and his dad had cleaned out the mud, and the black and white checked interior gleamed. He wore a bow tie—I have never seen him wear one since—and a sweater vest—also not a staple of his current wardrobe. He took me to the Holiday Inn to dance to a disc jockey under a disco ball. I could hardly hear a word he said for hours. As he drove me home, I decided that Glenn would hear from me what a waste of time this was. And then, at my door, John leaned over and kissed me on the forehead, said goodnight and walked to his car. In an era of fast-forward sexual relationships, I was used to the fight at the door, or worse, in my apartment. And then this, this sweet and tender gesture. I suppose if he hadn’t turned out to be the sweet and tender man that gesture promised, I might not be writing of this at all, but he was, and is. And so when years later I talked to our son Wade about his first kiss, I told him not to underestimate the power of a gentle kiss. It had won me over that first date. I never went out with anyone else again.

At first John was cautious. He didn’t use any words that might be construed as suggesting any permanence to this relationship. When he abandoned that, he started talking as if we had already agreed to get married. There were lots of signs of that. In one real-life gift-of-the-Magi experience, I got a job in Greensboro to be close to where his family lived in Robbins, and he got a job in Washington to be close to where my family lived in Alexandria. And then he actually lived with my family, eating breakfasts my mother made, taking the bus to his job at the Securities and Exchange Commission, then eating dinners my father made, followed by dull-as-dishwater evenings in front of my parents’ television set watching the Pirates—whose best years were behind them—play baseball. “Do you like Washington?” I asked him hopefully. His response: “I don’t know about a place where the punch lines to jokes are in French.”

In so many ways, John and I were different. I had traveled the world; he had never left the South. I had studied literature in order to teach college; he had studied textiles in order to run the mills in which his father had worked. But we had each moved from place to place, following our fathers’ jobs. We had each lived in company housing—military bases for me, mill villages for John. Neither of us had a chance to be rooted in a place, so we were each rooted in family and faith, the things we took with us. In the essential ways, we were not different at all. By our third year, it was clear we would marry.

The North Carolina State Bar Exam was July 25th, 26th, and 27th in Raleigh. Most of our friends had leases that would run out on July 31st, the end of the month. So we decided to get married on July 30th. It would be hectic, but it would be a grand party. I went home to Alexandria to buy a wedding dress. My mother and I found just the dress I wanted in a small Old Town bridal store, and the owner, his white shirt buttons pulled tight and a tape measure around his neck, looked me over and said he could size it perfectly, I didn’t need to try anything on. I should have known from that shirt that he didn’t have that great an eye. On the Saturday morning before the bar exam started on Monday, my dress arrived. I knew I didn’t need to pass the exam for my job—I would be working for a federal district judge the next year—so I could afford the luxury of being excited rather than just nervous, and I was…until I tried the dress on. Two of me could have worn it. Even alterations couldn’t fix this. In North Carolina in 1977, stores closed at 5:00
P.M
. on Saturdays and did not open at all on Sundays. And Monday morning when they reopened, I would be sitting in Memorial Auditorium in Raleigh taking the first portion of the bar exam. I took it just as quickly as I could, and when I rushed out after an hour, the poor fellow at my table, who had already snapped two pencils in frustration, was beside himself. I spent my now-extended lunch hour looking in the downtown stores—at the time, Belk’s and Montaldo’s—but I found nothing. After the exam, John and I drove back to Chapel Hill and I drove to a Durham bridal store. Still nothing. The second day of the exam, I did the same thing, only I went to Crabtree Valley Mall, where I found a dress—not the dress I dreamed of, not even a dress I liked that much, but it fit and I didn’t hate it. It was four days before the wedding. I hadn’t remembered to bring my shoes, but the women at Belk’s said that if I brought them back the next day at lunch, they would hem and then press the dress during the last afternoon session of the bar exam. So lunch on Wednesday was the same as lunch on Monday and Tuesday, but on the ride home on Wednesday afternoon, a wedding dress lay between us.

My wedding, as many weddings, was a picture of my life. In the wedding party my sister, Nancy, and her oldest daughter, Laura, and John’s sister, Kathy, were joined by Martha Hartmann from Japan, Maggie Ketchum from English graduate school, and Bonnie Weyher from law school. My brother, Jay, who went on to be an accomplished filmmaker, took the video; it is not, he would admit, his best work. My mother’s best friend, Hazel Greenwood, who had lived next door to us in Iwakuni and who never got to manage a wedding for her son Bobby because he died in law school of cancer, was a second mother to me for my wedding. After it was over we drove away from our friends and family on our way to a one-night honeymoon in Williamsburg, and I started work at the federal court in Norfolk the next day.