!!!!!*****WORKING COPY DRAFT*****!!!!!
Two days later, Dad had to go back to oversee the tobacco business in Cincinnati. Mom and Linda drove him up to Logan Field in Boston, so they would be gone all day. I don’t know if Linda had something to do with assuring mom it was all right, leaving us alone, but mom loaded up the car and announced the day-long excursion at breakfast without ever mentioning me. I thought nothing of it at the time. When she asked if it were OK for us to stay there alone – “Honey, there really isn’t enough room in the car for five of us and Dad’s luggage” – I explained that Mike and I had planned a short sail in the morning, with a bike ride along the southern coast through Chilmark to Edgartown and back. With a kiss on my cheek, and “OK, sweetie, be careful, you two”, as well as a knowing look from Linda, they were off.
Mike and I slid the Sunfish into the pond around ten in the morning. Despite the warming sun, I couldn’t find any wind to get us away from the dock.
“Well, Barnacle Bess, the sailing lass, what’s up? I thought you knew how to get us going.”
“If you’ve got so much to do you can’t be a little patient, why don’t you go jump in the lake, swim back home?”
With that he stripped off his shirt, left his sandals behind, and dove in. The twelve-foot hull wobbled suddenly, catching me of guard, and I fell in too. Luckily, it didn’t tip over, and I managed to grab onto the gunwale before it drifted away. “Hey! Mike!” I shouted with more than a little fear. I could swim, sure, and the Pond was protected from the swell in the open Bight to the north, but I did have a cotton blouse and shorts on over my swim suit, and the water was about the same temperature as the air, 64 degrees. “Hey! Come back here and get me!” Luckily he was swimming breaststroke, with his head out of the water. He turned around, saw me hanging to the boat, and started back.
“What happened? Are you OK?”
“No I’m not! My clothes are all wet, I’m cold, and you knocked me in when you dove off.”
He started to haul himself up, but we were both on the same side, and I hollered, “No! You’ll tip the thing over! There’s no keel.” I wasn’t sure he knew what a keel was, or the risk of tipping the boat without that ballast, but he did fall back into the water.
“You go over to the other side, hang on – pull down if you can – and I’ll climb up here. Then we can figure out how to get back.” The tide was going out, and we’d drifted quite a way from the dock, heading toward the small inlet leading to the Bight, and the Sound beyond. The wind was still calm, though, so I was getting worried about where we might end up. Not sharing all this with Mike, I managed to struggle into the boat, where I started to shiver from both anxiety and cold. I tried the sail again, but it just luffed without catching wind, no matter where I pulled the boom. I glanced at Mike, who appeared to be having fun just drifting in the water.
“Uh, I don’t know if we can get back.” Mike said nothing, just looked up at the sail. “Mike?”
“Lemme see if I can push us in. Can you aim us toward the dock?”
I pushed on the tiller while he inched his way to the stern. Once there, he started kicking, that breaststroke whip kick he’d perfected during his years as a swimmer. Amazingly, we began to move. Not very fast, but at least away from open water. After fifteen minutes, we’d covered the two hundred yards back to shore. I jumped out, pulled the Sunfish onto the beach, tied it up, and flopped down, still shivering. Mike wandered over after grabbing his shirt and sandals from under the seat where he’d stashed them. He kneeled down beside me, saying, “Come on. We’ve gotta get back to the house, maybe take a shower, get some dry clothes on.” Always the practical one, Mike. No, “How are you?” or “I’m sorry.”
Once inside, I rushed to the upstairs shower, while he rinsed off with the hose outside. As I pulled open the screen door, he said, “After I dry off, I’m going to go lie down. I’m a little tired.”
I stood under the water for a full ten minutes before I began to warm up. Then of course I had to get my hair dry, always a chore. I wrapped a towel around my waist, another under my shoulders, and used to third to fluff and dry that mess on my head. After snagging a brush through it to gain a fighting chance it might not fly everywhere, I wrapped our last dry towel like a turban around my hair.
“Mike? Mike, where are you?” Nothing. Then I remembered, he said he was going to lie down. I guessed he was in the boys’ room, the one Eddie and George would use when they were both here. I peeked through the half-open door, and saw him lying on his right side, facing away, on the far bed, no covers, wearing a dry lifeguard’s swim suit. “Mike?” I tried again, this time whispering. Still no answer.
Without thinking, I walked over to the bed and lay beside him, facing his back. He felt so warm, I reached my left arm over to his chest, then his stomach. It felt smooth, and a funny combination of soft and firm. He stirred a bit, then mumbled encouragingly, “Mmmm …” Jerking a bit, he then said, “Janie? What are you doing?”
“Your stomach. I like the way it feels.”
He turned over, facing me now, and rested his right hand on my cheek. Without his glasses, I knew he could barely see me. His eyes had that fuzzy, far-away myopic look of near-blindness. We inched closer, and started exploring, his hands underneath the towels, mine along his bronzing skin. Slowly, luxuriantly, as if finding a new feature in every depression, mound, declivity of the geography of our bodies. In stereo, competing messages clanged inside me, alarm bells and fireworks. Eyes closed, I felt “Yes”; seeing him again, I heard “No”. Somebody had to say something, I knew, and he wasn’t talking, just pulling urgently at my lower back.
“No. We can’t. I’m not ready. Don’t hate me,” all came out at once. We both fell back, my hand still on his soft stomach, his resting on my cheek, a few wet strands of hair caught between his fingers.
He broke the silence. “You never asked for your third wish yesterday…”
“I wish…I wish we could get that right some day, just not now. There’s babies to consider, you know, and meaning, and, oh, I don’t know what I’m saying.”
After getting dressed and eating lunch, we took that bike ride, to Edgartown and back. All week, the weather held, and each day was a fantasy of riding, walking, swimming, sailing, and seeing the Vineyard through a new set of eyes. Not just Michael’s, but ours together. Evenings, we’d listen with Eddie, and sometimes Linda, to Sgt. Pepper’s.
Eddie already had the whole thing figured out. When Mike wondered about Lucy, and her kaleidoscope eyes, those plasticine porters with their looking-glass ties, my older, worldly hippie brother said, “What a protected world you’ve been living in. ‘Lucy. Sky. Diamonds.’ Get it?”
A blank expression on Mike’s face set my mind whirling, trying to solve the riddle before he could.
“LSD!” I shouted. “Timothy Leary. Don’t you see? They’re having, talking about an acid trip.”
Embarrassed, Mike blinked his own eyes rapidly, as if seeing the world through a kaleidoscope for the first time. “Sheesh. OK. Then, what about A Day In The Life? What’s that about? ‘Holes in Lancashire…going to work’…it’s just, nothing.”
Eddie recited, “I went outside, and had a smoke, somebody spoke, and I went into a dream and somebody spoke. Then the music goes swirling off into as whirl. That’s pretty obvious – his work his so boring, he can only tolerate it with a doobie.”
“A doobie?”
“Marijuana. A hand-rolled cigarette.” Eddie looked at me. “Janie, where’d you get this guy.”
I could see Mike drawing within himself, so I pulled him to me, stroked his face, and said, “He may be out of it, but he’s my guy.”
Fixing A Hole, Mr Kite, Lovely Rita, Within You Without You, Getting Better, When I’m Sixty-Four, we analyzed them all playing them over and over under the started invading my nighttime reveries. The night before Michael headed back to Cincinnati, I hummed myself to sleep with “Send me a postcard, drop me a line…if you say the word, I could stay with you.’
In his first letter that summer, Mike sent another poem, DREAMS OF A LIFE:
On the moorish banks of a sandy isle,
Flung from the mainland’s breast
Lies a glimmering, grass-covered haven,
Where dreams may come to rest.
Dream’s are born of nature’s yearnings,
But birth is never enough
To satisfy the life in you;
Living requires the stuff
Of being, a tangible barrier
Which makes you human,
And time a god,
Begging the present’s promise
Of a dream to create our future.
Set as a jewel, deep in velvet
As red as a storm-day’s morning,
Your secret cove will keep your yearnings
Till the time you’ve grown
to need them.
But now, to live at now
Is begged of you
And dreams are only meant
for dreaming,
Not living,
not yet.