1 IT’S ALL GOOD



Two months after the war began, I found myself single—abandoned. I was shaken, a little manic, already lonely. I dipped into the new-to-me online dating world, and before I could really figure out how the apps worked, I unwittingly flirted with guys from the other side. I even went on a date with one. The fact that his profile mentioned the word “freedom” so many times should have tipped me off, but he was nice-looking, and let’s be honest, loneliness is its own form of brain damage.

Some apps screened out the confederates, so I started to use those exclusively. Within a few months, I had a short list of men who’d hearted me back, whose grammar was good enough, and who seemed like solid unionists—but not too fanatical.

I wasn’t exactly looking for the love of my life. Or maybe I was. Per usual, I didn’t really know what I wanted.

I knew that I didn’t want to fall hard for anyone, because I could still remember that when you fall hard for someone, everything is awful. You don’t sleep. You ask yourself too often, Does he love me as much as I love him? Am I sexy? Am I interesting? It’s nice to have new-relationship energy, but it’s a lot to manage. I was neither sick enough nor well enough for that kind of nonsense.

* * *

Then I saw Ethan’s profile, and I thought, This could work.

In his pictures, he looked fit and handsome, with wavy hair, but I knew I wouldn’t be in danger of falling too hard, because he’d written, “I’m doing my up-most to live life to the fullest.”

“Live life to the fullest” isn’t the worst thing a person could write, and it’s less grating than, say, “Work hard, play hard,” which, for some reason, is something men brag about. It was “up-most” that reassured me. In my thirties, “up-most” would have been a hard pass, but at forty-two, it was a point in his favor. “Up-most” nearly guaranteed that I wouldn’t do myself the disservice of falling head over heels, as they say, which might be fine for people who are less clumsy than I am.

* * *

The war had begun in earnest in February. Or rather, that’s when it began officially. The warfare had been quite earnest for years, but we were in the habit of giving it names like “arson,” or “shootings.”

This wasn’t like the first civil war: there was no epic warfare, no impassioned “My very dear wife” letters home from the front, no battlefields soaked in sorrow. A dozen states had seceded, but there weren’t official battles, army against army. When there was fighting, it was usually over resources, like oil or natural gas, inconveniently located in Louisiana or Arkansas. The confederate army was armed to the teeth, composed of local police forces, ICE agents, Border Patrol, and private militia volunteers who were itching to use their guns. Day to day, though, the war felt less like an organized conflict and more like a free-for-all, with random confederate desperadoes using guns and pipe bombs to terrorize ordinary Americans. To create chaos, to make us afraid, they went after us in movie theaters and grocery stores, and our military approached them as foreign terrorists, trying to root them out in their militia dens. It was particularly bad in the border states, like here in Maryland.

We called ourselves Americans, unionists, and patriots, and we called our country the United States of America. Annoyingly, supporters of the New Confederated States of America thought of themselves as patriots, too, and they painted themselves as romantic rebels trying to save what was still worth saving of the “real” America they loved. “Spare me,” my husband would say whenever he heard their speeches.

He was among the traumatized idealists who felt America wasn’t retaliating hard enough. He wanted us to crush the traitors. In February, he took a course on hand-to-hand combat. March, he learned how to use a dazzling array of weapons. Come April, he left me to join a pro-Union paramilitary group that wanted to take back, by any means necessary, the states that had seceded. “There are good people trapped in those states,” he said, “and they’re not able to leave.” Our marriage had been troubled for some time—the war gave him an out.

* * *

By summer I realized that my assorted freelance assignments weren’t paying the bills. I’d carved out a beat for myself with articles that showed Baltimore as urban and urbane. My editors had wanted stories that made us look well-gardened and vibrant, with lush parks, quirky people, artisanal shops, quaint architecture, and socially responsible businesses—and I obliged. But the civil war required everyone to take a new tack. I didn’t have the skills or the stomach to pivot toward war stories, so I looked for another line of work.

In June, I took a job at a retirement village near the Inner Harbor. I told myself it would be a safe workplace, because not even a confederate would bomb a facility full of the elderly, right? And I liked the tagline: “We’re on the left side of history.”

I was hired by Ed, a former journalist himself, who had gone the “straight job” route and become a director of communications. Three times in that interview he mentioned that he’d been intending to retire, but then the war came along and muffed everything. He and his wife had been planning a move to their place in Boynton Beach.

“But who the hell wants to move to Florida now?” he asked.

As far as the job was concerned, he wanted me to help him build a more close-knit community of residents at Harbour Pointe, and their extended families. I was going to grow and amplify their online presence. Every time he said the words “grow” or “amplify,” he scowled.

“You’re not a dinosaur like me,” he said. “I’m sure you know how to grow and amplify.”

I told him I had ideas about both.

In one of our early team meetings we were starbursting, or maybe that day it was mind mapping, and I said the words “oral history project.” Ed wrote it on the whiteboard, and I immediately regretted what I’d said.

“Erase it,” I said. “Bad idea.”

“No take-backs,” said Ed.

Once it’s written on the whiteboard, it’s too late.

“We can give it the Tuesday- and Thursday-morning time slots in the Treehouse Studio,” he said.

Then he wrote “Scribbles,” in quotation marks.

“Can we make it more of a ‘written history’ class?” he asked.

Sarah, the direct-report who predated my arrival, grimaced. She was young and poised, a genuine professional, but occasionally she made faces.

“Oral histories are oral for a reason. People like to talk, and they don’t like to write,” she said. “Why can’t we keep them oral?”

“I’m thinking about the results, the ‘product,’ as they say,” said Ed. “The families will like a beautiful, printed, bound book more than they’d like, what—A sound file? An MP3? We can’t give these families a WAV file.”

“We could get them transcribed,” she said.

“If I had a budget for that…” he said, trailing off.

Sarah relented, then told me, because I was new, that very few of the villagers would have much of an estate to pass down. “At least this way they’ll leave a book.”

“I’m not qualified to teach an oral history class,” I said. “Or a written history class. Or any class.”

“You’re a fantastic writer,” said Ed. “I read your clips.”

During several months of working at the village, I’d learned that Ed had a bad habit of overstating everything. He had kids—“grown-up rug rats,” he called them—and I wondered if maybe this kind of cheerleading was what some fathers did.

“It’ll be a great use of your talents,” he said.

Sarah rolled her eyes so hard it was almost audible, but she said no more.

And just like that, against my better judgment, I was leading Scribbles, a writing class focusing on lived history. But it got me out of the office section and into the residential wing. It took me away from marketing platforms, mailing lists, and content management systems. It forced me to interact with people.

And Scribbles is how I met Mildred, for which I’m so, so grateful.

* * *

Every day I woke up and steeled myself to look at my phone, which almost always had bad news. The Conflicted app that everybody used curated all the terrible updates of the civil war and delivered it via a flashing red rhombus alert. Was the rhombus supposed to evoke an emergency vehicle? That was one theory.

You could set up your preferences, of course. In the beginning, I had all the news, local and national, delivered to me in real time like a nonstop fire hose. Over time, I refined my settings and opted for a curated daily digest of top national stories, with local events delivered more immediately. When the twelve states drafted their “Declaration of Immediate Causes that Impel Secession,” I saw it in the next morning’s digest. Ditto when the governor of Florida was appointed the provisional president of the New Confederated States of America.

In September, when the confederates poisoned Baltimore’s reservoirs, I received that alert right away. I hated spending money on bottled water, hated even more to put so much plastic waste into a bogus recycling stream, but drinking from the tap wasn’t an option.

The alerts came quickly in October, too, when the confederates bombed the grids running the sewage-processing plants. “Day three of Baltimore smelling like sewage—city asks residents not to flush” the headlines ran. I’ll give the confederates this: they knew how to chip away at an already fragile infrastructure. It didn’t take much. Blow up a server farm or bomb a cell tower, and we were hobbled. Also, they had us on tobacco, and I was surprised to see how demoralizing it was for smokers, who were getting screwed by ever-rising cigarette prices. For years, Baltimore promoted itself as the city that reads, but apparently, we were also the city that smokes.

* * *

Online dating turned out to be a great distraction from all of it. Consulting with Mildred about dating was another. In November, Ethan and I volleyed a few messages to each other, and I asked Mildred for her hot take on Ethan’s profile. As usual, she was at the front desk, watching over the lobby, leaning on her fancy cane with the silver owl’s head, a gift from her stepsons. She liked to flirt with the young French peacekeeper who patrolled our corner. (She thought he might be Belgian, not French, but we didn’t want to ask and risk insulting him.) He was in the habit of coming into the retirement village to use the bathroom, and since you can’t have too many peacekeepers keeping an eye out for you during a civil war, we staff members and residents alike fawned over him. But when Mildred saw me coming, she blew him a kiss and turned her attention to me.

“Did you remember my ashtray?” she asked.

“Mildred,” I said, “do I ever forget your ashtray?”

She leaned on the silver owl’s head, watching the peacekeeper walk out of the lobby, her eyes on his ass, his hand on the weapon clipped to his hip.

“He’s keeping it tight, wouldn’t you say, Hestia?” she asked.

Because one of Mildred’s stepsons was a major general in the U.S. Marine Corps, the retirement village made an exception for her: she was the only resident allowed to smoke in shared spaces, but she had to do it discreetly, in the therapy garden. In exchange for this favor, the major general reassigned a platoon of Marines that had been scheduled to quarter in the poolside independent living units. Their new home was a community college a few blocks away. We saw them all the time, jogging along the harbor in the workout clothes that Mildred complained were too modest.

We walked to the therapy garden and seated ourselves on two chairs with dry cushions. It wasn’t too cold for November, just cold enough for Mildred to wear her smokers’ gloves with the fingertips cut off, of which she was inordinately proud. I handed her the ashtray and her menthol 100s (imported, of course, no traitor tobacco for Mildred), and lit her cigarette. Then I showed her Ethan’s pictures. She swiped gleefully and repeated her favorite phrase, “Keeping it tight.”

At eighty-four, she’d buried three husbands, and she liked to say, “I was very lucky in my life, I married two wonderful men.”

I’ve only buried the one husband, and that was only in my mind, so she’s the authority.

“Handsome boy,” she said. “His hair looks real.”

She lingered over the one where he was rigged up in a tall, piebald tree, and reminisced about a similar tree from her childhood. In the photo, he was tied to the tree with ropes attached to belts, one around his waist, and two around his thighs, snug against his ass.

“I’d tap that like Morse code,” she said.

“Mildred,” I said. “The mouth on you.”

“I’m eighty-four, I can say whatever I want,” she said.

“Your brain is a marvel,” I said.

“‘My brain? It’s my second favorite organ,’” she said.

She was forever quoting Woody Allen, whose films were a secret pleasure for her. When she was younger, her friends disapproved because he was Jewish, and now her friends disapproved for other reasons, but she refused to give up the movies. I’d been icked out by him decades earlier, when I watched Manhattan, but I didn’t judge Mildred.

Her first husband, a man she called Yitzy, although I don’t think that was his real name, had introduced her to Allen’s films. She was a Maryland High WASP, one of those girls who grew up riding horses and drinking iced tea. As an adult she transitioned from riding breeches to tennis whites. She had pearls, several sets. She spent most of her life after age ten starving herself “just a little bit,” to avoid becoming stout, as “stout” was the worst adjective that anyone could use to describe a woman. She told me she faked orgasms, even after she learned how to have real ones, because sometimes she was just too undernourished to go for the brass ring. She married rich men, and she always had a housekeeper, and some days—and this she kept a secret from most people—she sent the nanny home and sat on the floor with her daughters, finger-painting or doing Play-Doh. Those were some of her favorite days, she said, the Play-Doh days.

She paused on a particularly handsome photo of Ethan.

“I’m not saying you should love him and leave him,” she said, “but you should definitely love him.”

Her smoky exhale scooted past my cheek.

“And then you should leave him,” she said.

I knew she had a good reason. “Why?” I asked.

“He’s too handsome. No one wants to be married to a man that handsome. You’ll always worry about him being lured away.”

She suggested that for our first date we meet somewhere public, so I could see if a lot of women flirted with him and how he handled it. It would be good for me to have that kind of information, she said.

I was still uncomfortable meeting people in public, because you never knew if your restaurant, or your bar, would be the one where the next pipe bomb would explode in a parked van. Every date, every drink with a friend—it was a risk. But what else could you do? Civil war or no, you still need to meet friends, and you still want the thrill of a first kiss. Pipe bombs can kill you quickly, but loneliness will kill you slowly. Life is a near-constant calculation of risks.

* * *

As for Scribbles, five people signed up, and their attendance was spotty. The Treehouse Studio was a room with a skylight and a few potted lemon and kumquat trees. There were cozy chairs and small tables. In those first sessions, I offered a combination of in-class writing exercises and at-home assignments, but I learned quickly that my students were not willing to do homework. Mildred reminded me, “Life is short, my dear.”

I completed every assignment along with my students, which seemed only fair. At the end of each class, I invited them to share some of what they’d written, if they wanted to, but I never took up precious time sharing my own. Mildred rarely shared, but that was fine. I probably enjoyed the class more than any of the villagers: I had no children, no husband, no siblings, and the rift between me and my parents was becoming a chasm. I figured that someday my Scribbles might be all that was left of me.

What fascinating lives the villagers had led, what history they’d seen. I was hoping they’d write about their experiences with pogroms and famines, wars and revolutions. But instead of writing about crossroads in modern history, they wrote about the best friends who had betrayed them, the fathers and mothers who drank too much, the abandonments. And always, love. The love that got away. The love they didn’t get. The love that changed their lives.

I learned that Mildred’s second wedding took place in Memphis at the very hour when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on his hotel room balcony.

But she didn’t write about Dr. King. Instead, she wrote about her daughters, Ruth and Annie, how she loved them both so much, and how, inexplicably, they couldn’t stand each other. Their rift had been expanding for decades, a little wider each time Ruth posted on social media in support of women, people of color, trans people, and the environment, or Annie posted about how her country was just fine the way it was, love it or leave it. Mildred begged them to stop, but neither could refrain, and neither would unfollow the other. The fact that her daughters hated each other was the Great Heartache of Mildred’s life.

I researched oral history projects and pulled together a collection of prompts and best practices. Good prompts, I gathered, were the heart of oral history. You can’t do questions with yes or no answers. Ask a question that allows the mind to wander. Encourage your respondents to share their opinions.

“Make sure you write your own responses to the questions, Hestia,” Ed reminded me. “You’ll want them someday.”

I doubted that very much, but I did what Ed asked, in part because he’d become a sort of father figure, and in part because I was so grateful that he had hired me. Every day I went to work and felt thankful for a job where there were guards, and metal detectors, and a state-of-the-art surveillance system minded by someone in a small room.

* * *

Question 1: In your own words, what is this war about?

DOROTHY: People say this is America’s second civil war, but come on. It’s the same civil war from more than one hundred fifty years ago. We’re in season 2, episode 1. For chrissake, in February, when they named themselves the New Confederated States of America, that’s when they showed us who they are. It’s so simple that it’s boring. It’s always racism. And misogyny— of course. The perfect cocktail. A Black Madame President was a bridge too far. People are as common as pig tracks.

CHARLES: The confederates think of themselves as freedom fighters. Some of my nieces and nephews are Black, and some are white, but all of them call confederates “zombies,” because zombies are beyond reason. You can’t save zombies. My niece told me you have to shoot zombies in the head.

JEFFREY: I knew for years before it was official that we were in a civil war. Years! Everyone else had their heads up their asses. The warning signs were right in front of us. Mass shootings. Wing nuts all over the country shouting, “What about my rights?” For crying out loud, there were nooses on tree limbs. It’s the Cracker Rebellion.

CLARA: It’s a war of goddamned grievances. They want states to make their own laws. We want the federal government to make the laws. They think it’s the War of Northern Aggression, and we think it’s the War of Southern Aggression. We’re operating on two entirely different vibrations in this country. We unionists want to make things better for everyone. But only half of America is on that frequency. The other half? I don’t like to use the word “hate,” but that half of America hates us.

* * *

The first Wednesday of every month, the retirement village hosted an ice cream social for the villagers, and in December, Mildred invited me. When I was shy about the toppings, she badgered me to heap more chocolate jimmies onto my scoop.

“The toppings are the best part, dear,” said Mildred.

She put several spoonfuls of crushed cookies onto her ice cream and grilled me.

“What are you waiting for? Get off the dime,” she said. “Tell Ethan you want to meet.”

“He’s too handsome,” I said. “I’m not as good-looking as he is.”

“Men only care about looks in the abstract,” she said. “If you’re willing, he’ll have you.”

“That’s gross,” I said.

“I know, dear,” she said.

Jeffrey, one of the villagers in Scribbles, bustled his way next to us at the toppings table. He was old and stooped, but spry. Mildred had once called him a “pip.” Apparently, his hearing was still good.

“What she forgot to say,” he said, pointing to Mildred, “is that you’re good-looking enough. And she’s right: men aren’t picky. Not like women, anyway.”

This was a topic I would have loved to explore with Jeffrey, thinking that a bent-over old man might tell me the truth about what really matters to men. But he moved on. He searched the toppings table and found a jar of walnuts in syrup. He held it up and turned around to show the villagers in line behind us.

“Wet nuts,” he said, ecstatic. “I have wet nuts!”

“That man is eighty-seven years old,” said Mildred.

* * *

Ten months into the official start of the shit show, we were all getting used to life in the new, smaller United States. The war was tragic, but when those twelve states seceded, they took their Congress members with them, and it was as if America unloaded a ton of dead weight. It reminded me of that joke: What’s the best way to lose 150 pounds fast? Break up with your bad boyfriend. Of course, the Union still had states that sent right-wing nutjobs to Congress, but we lost most of them, enough to make some changes.

Ethan and I had our first date at a restaurant that I chose. For outings, I relied on the Safe Zones app, which was different from the Conflicted app. Safe Zones tracked disruptions and violence, like traffic light outages and skirmishes, and suggested the locations most likely to be secure. It was like Waze, but for civil unrest.

I chose a low-key burger place with a bar. The bar was set up in such a way that from any barstool, you could see the front entrance and the back entrance, which was important. I arrived early.

He’d arrived even earlier than I did, because when I walked in, I found him deep in conversation with an older, beautiful woman at the bar. She was holding one of her hands over her heart while she listened to him. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, or why she was so rapt. I sucked in my stomach and approached them as any confident, self-assured woman would.

“Are you Ethan?” I blurted.

The woman at the bar took her hand off her heart and resigned herself to her drink.

“Are you Hestia?” he asked.

“It is I.”

“Is that your real name?”

It was, yes, my real name.

“I thought it was a dating site name,” he said.

I gave him the micro-story about how my parents had been professors of ancient Greek and Roman history, back when there were departments of Classics.

“So, Hestia’s a Latin thing?”

“Greek,” I said. “She’s a goddess.”

“Cool,” he said.

“Oh yeah, very cool,” I said. “My flame is never allowed to burn out.”

He was almost as handsome as his profile pictures. His hair was that nice in-between, on its way to silver but not there yet, and had an exciting life of its own. He had the right amount of beard and mustache, more than “I’m giving this a try,” but less than “The civil war has messed up the trade routes so bad I can’t get a razor.” Someday he’d be a silver fox, but not today. He wore his tallness well, no slouching, and his shoulders were broad but not so broad that I felt bad for his mother giving birth to him. His stomach was concave, which had become more and more of a turn-on as the years passed and convex became the norm.

Of course, I’d always had a convex stomach. I wasn’t trying to starve myself.

He turned in the opposite direction of the woman he’d been talking to and offered me the empty stool next to him.


Copyright © 2023 by Christine Grillo