Laura suddenly had an odd vision as Carol talked on about the calamities at the newspaper. She saw herself walking through the doors of the Fish Market, into this rarefied air. Only she was not as she was now. She was no longer well-groomed and well-dressed, her nails French-manicured and her chestnut-brown hair drawn back with an antique golden clip to fall softly around her shoulders. She was as she had been when she was eighteen years old, her light blue eyes clear and defiant behind her granny glasses. She wore ragged bellbottom jeans and a blouse that looked like a faded American flag, and on her feet were sandals made from car tires, like the sandals the Vietnamese wore in the news films. She wore no makeup, her long hair limp and in need of brushing, her face adamant with anger. Buttons were stuck to her blouse: peace signs, and slogans like STOP THE WAR, IMPERIALIST AMERIKA, and POWER TO THE PEOPLE. All conversations of interest rates, business mergers, and ad campaigns abruptly ceased as the hippie who had once been Laura Clayborne – then Laura Beale – strode defiantly into the center of the restaurant, sandals thwacking against the carpeted floor. Most of the people here were in their mid-thirties to early forties. They all remembered the protest marches, the candlelight vigils, and the draft card burnings. Some of them, perhaps, had been on the front lines with her. But now they gaped and sneered, and some laughed nervously. "What happened?" she asked them as forks slid into bowls of seafood gumbo and hands stopped halfway to their glasses of white wine. "What the hell happened to all of us?"
The hippie couldn't answer, but Laura Clayborne knew. We got older, she thought. We grew up and took our places in the machine. And the machine gave us expensive toys to play with, and Rambo and Reagan said don't worry, be happy. We moved into big houses, bought life insurance, and made out our wills. And now we wonder, deep in our secret hearts, if all the protest and tumult had a point. We think that maybe we could have won in Vietnam after all, that the only equality among men is in the wallet, that some books and music should be censored, and we wonder if we would be the first to call out the Guard if a new generation of protesters took to the streets. Youth yearned and burned, Laura thought. Age reflected, by the ruddy fireplaces.
"… wanted to cut his hair short and let one of those rat-tail things hang down in back." Carol cleared her throat. "Earth to Laura! Come in, Laura!"
She blinked. The hippie went away. The Fish Market was a placid pool again. Laura said, "I'm sorry. What were you saying?"
"Nikki Sutcliff's little boy, Max. Eight years old, and he wanted to crop his hair and have a rat-tail. And he loves that rap junk, too. Nikki won't let him listen to it. You can't believe the dirty words on records these days! You'd better think about that, Laura. What are you going to do if your little boy wants to cut all his hair off and go around bald-headed and singing obscene songs?"
"I think," she answered, "that I'll think about it later."
The salad and the gumbo were served. Laura listened as Carol talked on about politics in the Atlanta Constitution's Life and Style department. Laura was a senior reporter specializing in social news and doing book reviews and an occasional travel piece. Atlanta was a social city, of that there was no doubt. The Junior League, the Art Guild, the Opera Society, the Greater Atlanta Museum Board: those and many more demanded Laura's attention, as well as debutante parties, donations from wealthy patrons to various art and music funds, and weddings between old southern families. It was good that she was getting back to work in March, because that was when the wedding season began to blossom, swelling to its peak in mid-June. It sometimes puzzled her how quickly she'd gotten from twenty-one to thirty-six. She'd graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Georgia, had worked as a reporter on a small paper in her hometown of Macon for two years, then had come to Atlanta. The big-time, she'd thought. It took her over a year to get onto the copy desk of the Constitution, a period she'd spent selling kitchen appliances at Sears.
She'd always harbored hopes of becoming a reporter for the Constitution. A firebrand reporter, with iron teeth and eagle eyes. She would write stories to rip off the mask of racial injustice, destroy the slumlord, and expose the wickedness of the arms dealer. After three years of drudgery writing headlines and editing the stories of other reporters, she got her chance: she was offered a position as a metro reporter. Her first assignment was covering a shooting in an apartment complex near Braves Stadium.
Only they hadn't told her about the baby. No, they hadn't.
When it was all over, she knew she couldn't do it again. Maybe she was a coward. Maybe she'd been deluding herself, thinking she could handle it like a man. But a man wouldn't have broken down and cried. A man wouldn't have thrown up right there in front of the police officers. She remembered the shriek of an electric guitar, the volume turned up and roaring over the parking lot. It had been a hot, humid night in July. A terrible night, and she still saw it sometimes in her worst dreams.
She was assigned to the social desk. Her first assignment there was covering the Civitans Stars and Bars Ball.
She took it.
Laura knew other reporters, men and women who did their jobs well. They crowded around the distraught relatives of plane-crash victims and stuck microphones in their faces. They went to morgues to count bullet holes in bodies, or stood in gloomy forests while the police hunted for pieces of murder victims. She watched them grow old and haggard, searching for some kind of purpose amid the carnage of life, and she'd decided to stay on the social desk.
It was a safe place. And as she got older, Laura realized that safe places were hard to find, and if the money was good as well, then wasn't that the best a person could do?
She wore a dark blue suit not unlike the outfits worn by the other businesswomen in the restaurant, though hers was maternity-tailored. In the parking lot was her gray BMW. Her husband of eight years was a stockbroker with Merrill Lynch in midtown Atlanta, and together they made over a hundred thousand dollars a year. She used Estee Lauder cosmetics, and she shopped for clothes and accessories in the tony little boutiques of Buckhead. She went to a place where she got manicures and pedicures, and another place where she took steambaths and had massages. She went to ballets, operas, art galleries, and museum parties, and most of the time she went alone.
Doug's work claimed him. He had a car phone in his Mercedes, and when he was home he was constantly making or receiving calls. That was a camouflage, of course. They both knew it was more than work. They were caring toward each other, like two old friends might be who had faced adversity and fought through it together, but what they had could not be called love.
"So how's Doug?" Carol asked. She'd known the truth for a long time. It would be hard to hide the truth from someone as sharp-eyed as Carol, and anyway, they both knew many other couples who lived together in a form of financial partnership.
"He's fine. Working a lot." Laura took another bite of her gumbo. "I hardly see him except on Sunday mornings. He's started playing golf on Sunday afternoons."
"But the baby's going to change things, don't you think?"
"I don't know. Maybe it will." She shrugged. "He's excited about the baby, but… I think he's scared, too."
"Scared? Of what?"
"Change, I guess. Having someone new in our lives. It's so strange, Carol." She placed a hand against her stomach, where the future lived. "Knowing that inside me is a human being who'll – God willing – be on this earth long after Doug and I are gone. And we've got to teach that person how to think and how to live. That kind of responsibility is scary. It's like… we've just been playing at being grown-ups until now. Can you understand that?"