!!!!!!!********WORKING DRAFT********!!!!!!!
Michael was due in Middletown on Labor Day. Friday, the day before he was to leave, I came over to his house. We sat at the shallow end of his pool, absorbing the still radiant late-summer sunshine. A few small clouds puffed idly overhead, hiding amongst the leaves of the giant oak tree in the corner of their yard. I wore a blue swim suit, made of a crinkly elastic kind of fabric, certainly not intended for actual swimming. Rather than the usual modest high neck I preferred, this was low cut.
I needled him. “Show me how to swim, OK?”
“I’m a terrible swimmer, and I don’t know how to teach, that’s for sure. I’m actually the worst one on the team.”
“But you got a letter?!” I asked with real incredulity.
“I showed up every day, I swam in the meets, and I earned a some points coming in second or third a couple of times, that’s all it takes. You don’t have to be actually good”
“Don’t you wasn’t to impress your girlfriend?” I mocked. We were still unsure if that’s what we were, boyfriend and girlfriend. His hesitance to say, “I love you”, as if it would somehow lead to pain, came through in the several poems he shared with me that August. And I still had trouble finding room in my life for the distractions of emotion, maybe fearing it would blunt my sense of purpose, or maybe hide me from myself.
He splashed me, taking care not to wet my hair; I figured he knew what a chore drying it would be. Submerging quickly, he pushed off the wall, and shot ahead underwater, pulling, then kicking almost the full length of the pool in a rapid breaststroke start. Hitting the other end, he rose up, gasped for air, and headed back my way. This time, he did an ungainly freestyle, punctuated by a vicious flip turn, drenching me as his legs slapped down before he pushed off again. So much for keeping my hair dry…
Hauling himself out of the deep end, he hollered back, “Lemme show you what I learned, after I taught it to the kids at the Y.”
He crawled up on the diving board, walked out to the end, and turned around. “See, in the advanced class, I had to teach them how to do a reverse dive. You know, where you jump back, then lean forward towards the board and dive in. I didn’t know how to do that, but we have this book which gives instructions on how to teach. It said something like, ‘Start by making sure the student jumps up and away from the board. His momentum will carry him away from the diving board. He should then pull his shoulders down and throw his feet up, diving in head first.’ I said all that to the kids, and they actually could do the dive! I figured, if they could do it, so could I. I realised, from physics, that as long as as I jumped back away from the board, I could not hit it. Vectors and all, you know.”
I hadn’t taken physics yet, but I understood the concept. “Impressive courage and coordination, Mike,” I said as he swam back to me in the shallow end. He got out, sat on the edge, and stared down at me. His eyes wandered from my face to the top of my breasts. I felt flustered, wanting, and not wanting, to have my body desired by him. Hoping to distract him, I asked, “When did Sheila get back?” His sister had spent the summer in Idaho, Sun Valley, working at the lodge there and skating in the ice show chorus line.
“Just a couple of days ago. She says she’s going back this Christmas, to work again and maybe learn to ski. She won’t tell our parents, but there’s a guy there she’s going to see, is the main thing.” Like me and Linda, Sheila was two years older than Mike. She seemed a lot like Lizzie – a dancer, kind of smart, always perky and going out with guys.
We were smiling, laughing, that afternoon under the sun, but I couldn’t lose the dread I felt, at losing to college this boy I had just begun to see as mine. He was the first person, ever, who had broken through my veneer. Or maybe the first one I had let break in. It didn’t matter. I’d gone after him, I wanted him, I didn’t want to lose him, but keeping him in my life seemed frightful as well. It was scary, any way I looked. “He’s going away to college, he’ll forget about me, he’ll find another girl at one of those mixers, I’ll lose him forever,” went one fantasy. “He loves me, he completes me, I’ll lose me,” went the other. I didn’t know how much I should let him see either side, see me clinging or see me pushing away. I was frozen, and he knew nothing about it. I had to let it out.
“We’re not going to see each other for almost three months, Mike. What’s going to happen?”
Matter-of-factly, he said, “We’re going to write each other, just like this summer. And then we’ll see each other at Thanksgiving,” His voice was steady, confident, but his eyes were mourning, wet. He turned away, lifted himself up to the deck, and draped a huge towel over his shoulders. “I’m going inside to change. You can too, in that room downstairs. I’ll see you out here, on the patio? Something I want to show you, give you.”
Sitting on the lounge chairs his father had built, under the dogwood tree, he handed me another onion skin paper. “I don’t know, this came out this morning. I read it, it helped me. I don’t know why I say things this way, that’s just the way it works with me, I think.
Apparently, he’d stopped numbering the poems. The last one had been #66 August 31, 1966. This one had only a date at the bottom, 9-2-66. M.H.
TO JANIE, ON MY DEARTURE
I’m leaving;
I’ll be back, we know that is true;
But when I return will you still be you?
You’ve changed before, you’ll change again,
But you’ll always remain what you’ve always been
To me:
my love.
Into my lines I’ve injected my life,
The tear-bought joy you’ve carried my way
On the wings of your smiles
To me.
Smiling again?
Showing your rareness of spirit.
Leaving.
But returning I am in the midst
Of the brown-golden leaves that fall
On the snow, newly-planted by unknown foes
Of our sorrow.
Stay with me then, in spirit and soul,
For without you I’ll never be whole.
Hear me, S. Jane: Don’t feel small;
Whatever you do, search for yourself
And see me.
I return (to you), but now I must go.
I thought of the Fantasticks song, “Much More”, especially the part about “I’d like to be worldly wise, to be the kind of girl designed to be kissed upon the eyes.” I’d played that for Michael, said it was my fantasy. And a few days later, he had kissed me on my eye. It felt a bit odd, and now I know, that what I really want, what I really am, is a girl designed to be wooed by words. Michael Harrison had them, he shared them with me, and that’s all I wanted, was more of that. From him.
[Reader beware: this is a first draft, and certainly subject to minor and major revision before the book is finished]