In the car, we headed north towards the shopping mall just opened by the new interchange of I-75 and 275. As we started towards the expressway entrance, the light turned yellow. Mike slammed on the brakes and flung his right hand out across my chest. I was flying forward with some force, but he saved me from hitting the unpadded dashboard. As we waited for the light to turn green, I hauled up the seat belt, which was lying on the floor by the door, and pulled it over to buckle with its mate.
“That’s what my mother would always do to us kids when we were riding in the front seat. I guess it’s just an unconscious habit.”
“Mine too.” I remembered my talking with his mother. “Your mom talked to me a bit while you were upstairs. She’s …impressive. I don’t really understand what it must be like, for women, I mean, trying to get a doctorate. I keep getting told that the reason somebody like me is supposed to go to a girls’ school, a good one like Radcliffe or Mt Holyoke or Smith, is so we can provide a smart home environment to our family, to make sure the kids do as well as they can growing up. That feels pretty confining, limiting, to me. I love how your mother doesn’t want to fit that mold.”
“Hmmm…never thought about that. It’s just the way my mother’s always been. She’s not normal, you mean?”
I laughed drily, finally getting the seat belt clamped together. I brushed my skirt off. “You have no idea. It’s easy for you, being a boy. No one ever tells you stuff like that. You don’t have to think about what might happen if you get pregnant, or if you get married and your husband wants to live somewhere you don’t want to. Like, my mother, she says when they left the family business in Cleveland, she tried to get my dad to go New York, where she could at least see all the museums and go to plays and things, even if she had to raise four kids. She says he never wanted to talk about it, just laughed at her. And your mother…I wonder how she felt, leaving Boston. She probably wanted to keep going to school there, but she had no choice, did she, when you father left for here?”
“I don’t know. I think I’m kinda lucky that way. I mean, I’ve been involved in sports a little bit, swimming and ice skating. They both seem to be pretty equal between men and women, not like the big ones, baseball and football. There’s only softball for girls, and no football at all. But in ice skating, they both do the same events, same in swimming.” He paused, slowing the car, and scanning around as if something were chasing us. “That reminds me. I think this is the spot where I had that car accident last summer. I was driving three girls, they were like 15, to a meet in Columbus.”
“What happened.”
“This was still under construction then. I didn’t pay attention to the signs, to slow down. It was raining, wet, I think. We spun around, slammed sideways into some metal barrier. The police came, said the car was OK, called my dad. He asked if I could still drive, and told me to just keep on going. But I’m thinking – those girls never would talk about this kind of stuff.”
“What did they talk about?” I asked, interested in how other girls might treat him.
“ Well, after worrying about their swimming and whether they would get new suits for the meet, the just started laughing about all the other boys on the team, except for one guy they thought was OK. Then it was making catty comments about the girls they knew, and the boys they went out with. They laughed at me when I didn’t follow along. Called me ‘too serious’.”
We pulled off the highway, and headed for the brand new parking lot, asphalt still shiny and slick with tar. As we headed toward the mall entrance, he stopped, and looked at me, in that serious way of his. He said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do, when you’re gone. I really, really like being with you, talking with you. I’m afraid you’ll forget me, find somebody there who’s more fun, then come back and we’ll never see each other again.”
We stood there in the rising June sun. I wanted to grab his hands, pull him towards me, hug him. But with all the people around, that didn’t feel right. I looked down at my shoes, then, smiling, back up at him. “You can write. We can write. Letters. I’ll tell you what I’m doing, you tell me about working at that pool down in Kentucky. I’m not going to forget you, Michael Harrison. Not now, not ever.”
He pulled his lips up, then they quivered. I could see his eyes getting moist, saw a struggle there. Finally, “Janie, I…There’s something I’ve, I’ve…I think I have to say…” Quiet for a long time, me waiting, “I think I love you. Janie.”
I grabbed him, for a big, long hug, there in the parking lot in front of all those people I did not know but did not care if they knew about us.
A week and a half later, the mailbox outside our beach-side rental in Menemsha on the Vineyard finally had in it, not a letter, but a thick manilla envelope addressed to me. I’d written Mike as soon as we got there, just a short letter telling him we were all fine, things like walking on the beach and finding shells, little daily small talk really. But I’d ended with a paragraph about how I thought of him every day, and missed him not being there with me, telling me things and making me laugh. I finished, “Love, Janie”, hoping he’d know I meant it.
He’s sent all his poems, numbered 1-46, typed on that crinkly onion skin paper, each dated and most of them timed. The cover letter read, in part
What you are about to read, if you have the courage, is a compilation of everything important I have written since December, 1965. I didn’t plan a bit of it, as I’ve told you a thousand times. My muse arrived sometime in March, and mysteriously departed at 11 AM, June 2nd, 1966, only to return more mysteriously in this introduction. There’s so many things I want to say, but no explanations of meaning will be offered for any of the pieces, because: (a) I didn’t know myself what they meant when I first wrote them; (b) the meaning keeps changing for me; and (c) it’s either there for you or it isn’t…
I hope you understand what’s behind the proffering of this gift. (I don’t.) This is an attempt (I guess) to pierce a suffocating layer of superficial profundity which surrounds all we do. I mean, look at who knows you, and those who think they do, and notice the difference between them in relation to you…Some people are so sure they know you so well, just from the surface contact they have with you. They have you all figured out, and placed where they feel you belong. Take Five Fingers, for example. How well do any of them (the seniors) or Mkrtchian know you? Not at all, really, I suppose. And yet, you’re chosen, not for the You you know you are, but for the superficial, uncomplicated You they have you figured out to be. And yet, you still got appointed, on the basis of the unreal (to you, and those who know you) You. Now take those who know you. There’s Lizzie and Leon, and me. We get to see the real You, even as it gets more mysterious and seems to fade away, But we still feel so close to the full picture. And yet the kids of Avondale have made you the queen of their school, without ever knowing (or caring) who Janie Stein is.