!!!!!!!********WORKING DRAFT********!!!!!!!
Christmas day was always a bit depressing at the Stein house. If it were on a Saturday, we could hide out at the synagogue, otherwise the lack of traffic and the sounds of merriment from the gentiles all around us reminded me that, at certain times like this, we very clearly did not fit in. So I jumped at the chance when Mike invited me to go to the Krohn Conservatory for his family’s annual venture into Eden Park. We sat in the back of his parents’ blue Buick Le Sabre station wagon.
“Where’s Sheila,” I asked, when I noticed it was just the two of us back there.
His father answered, “She’s in Idaho.” That seemed to be all he was going to say on the subject, so his mother added, “She’s spending winter break at Sun Valley, working in the cafeteria and skating in the ice show. We’ve gone out in August several times since 1962, for the ice skating. The last two years, she’s spent the summer there, and met some people who convinced her to come in the winter and learn to ski. She’s growing up so fast.”
“How’s she doing at school, in St. Louis, right?” I asked
“Oh, she’s well-settled in. She joined a sorority, something she never got to do at AHS. They have an annual competition among them, putting on variety shows. She’s so talented. She helped write the songs, and choreographed the dance team.” Mike’s mother was very proud of her daughter, but I hadn’t yet heard her praise her son.
“She’s a cheerleader there. They do all the St. Louis Cardinals’ games. We went to see one last month,” his father chimed in.
“Cardinals?” I wondered. “They have cheerleaders at baseball games.”
“No, football. It’s the St. Louis football Cardinals,” Mike added with a touch of disdain in his voice I hoped only I could hear.
We passed under the new Expressway, then right past Avondale High School. This prompted Mike’s mother to ask, “Mike says you’re having another good year at school? Are you finding yourself?”
I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but then I remembered: She’s a psychologist. One who’s interested in child development. She’s probably wondering how my development is going.. With that in mind, I said, “I think I’m ready to move on. It’s lots of fun, being a senior, and in charge of everything. But high school is starting to seem small. And Cincinnati, my mother has always said, ‘It’s a great place to grow up, but I don’t think you want to live here, do you?’ I’m looking forward to getting back east, to going to school near Boston and New York, being able to see museums and plays more often, things like that.”
She turned around to face me, smiled, and said, “Good for you, Janie.”
We arrived at the giant greenhouse that was the conservatory. Through the glass panels which cover the walls and roof, Christmas lights sparkled, refracting on the water droplets forming there. I remembered, plants breath, they emit oxygen and water from photosynthesis. One of the many many little facts I’d crammed into my brain at school, I mused. How does my brain do that, I wondered, why do I remember stuff and recall it so much more easily than most people?
We wandered around, reading all the little signs in front of each plant, finally ending up at a giant Christmas tree reaching to the top of the central dome. It was covered with paper cut-outs of angels, donkeys, Virgin Marys with shawls over their heads, all made, so a sign in front proclaimed, by the children of various elementary schools. I felt like folding a blue six-pointed star and hiding it in the branches.
Outside, Mike’s parents took a little stroll around the park while we gravitated towards the giant swing set. He shouted, “Watch!” as he pumped his legs and flew higher and higher with each oscillation, almost reaching the horizontal until, finally, at the very apex of a swing, he flew off, leaning slightly forward, and landed far in front, feet first, knees bent then standing bolt upright. “Come on, go ahead, JUMP!” he hollered.
I was swinging much more gently, afraid of heights, or anything physically taxing, really. I had a skirt on, and tried not to let it slide up too far, even though I had on tights, not nylons. I tried a dainty little leap from four feet high. He ran to catch me before I fell. “That’s so much fun,” he exhilarated. “Didn’t you ever do that when you were a kid?” I watched as he flew off a few more times, trying to beat his previous height and distance each time. I was sure he’d break his leg, but he landed perfectly, with ease. He seemed to revel in his body, in the fun it could produce. I didn’t know if I could match that with him, ever enter that sanctuary.
We sat down on a bench overlooking the Ohio River, the low, late afternoon winter solstice sun weakly sparkling on the muddy flow below.
“Isn’t this where people come to watch the submarine races?” I asked sarcastically.
“Subm…wait, they don’t have submarines in the river. Do they?”
I couldn’t tell if he were kidding. He often had a dry sense of humor, and gave no clue in his expression when he was using it. “I don’t believe you. What d’ya mean?” he challenged.
“This is where people go to make out in their cars. You didn’t know that? Somebody’ll say, ‘What did you do last night.’ Then, “Oh, we went to watch the submarine races in Eden Park’.”
He pondered this, saying nothing. Finally, scratching his cheek, he mused, “I don’t think that’s the kind of people we are.”
“What kind of people are we, then?”
Again, a long pause. Finally, “I don’t think you – we – live moment to moment. You always act like you know where you’re going, what you want. You wanted to help run the Student Council, ran for office, and you won. You wanted to be on Five Fingers, and you are. You wanted to be debate team cheerleaders, you made time cards, you showed up, and you never made fun of us. You want to go to school back east, to the best place, and you will. You can find fun, I think, in so many little things, like watching a play, or walking on the beach. You don’t need submarine races, you just need time.”
“What do you want, Mike?”
“Um…wait, I told you, you tell me what you think I want, OK?
Now it was my turn to think. “Well, here’s what I know. You are the most self-directed person I know. You might be oblivious to this, but lots of people find you scary, unapproachable because of that. Girls talk, and they ask me, they wonder, what I see in you. I tell them, that man has a heart, he has a soul, he knows where he’s going, and nobody’s going to stop him. He may act like he doesn’t want anybody to touch him, like he has no personality, but he sees the world so clearly, and he can tell me about it so well, I don’t mind following.
“Sometimes, though…sometimes…” I hesitated, afraid I was about to say something he might not like. Then I remembered that first rule he’d told Marc, the night of the party when we walked forever, when I first began to use the word “love” as I thought about Michael Harrison: “Always be honest.”
I went on. “I think you get so wrapped up in yourself, you can’t see anyone…can’t see me…anymore. It hurts, because I want you to see me, see all of me, the whole me. The scared little girl I used to be. The one who thinks she has to be better than all the boys around her, has to do twice as much just to get half of what she wants. School is easy for us, but life…life, it’s not something you can learn from a book or a lecture. Life has to be lived, and I wasn’t to live it. Right now, I want to live it with you, but I also want to live it with me, from me, from what I see.” It sounded so confusing, but that’s what I felt, sitting there with him on the bench that evening, confused and wondering who we were, where each of us would go. I remembered my sister’s advice, when she told me about boys: “When in doubt, Janie, ask him a question.”
“You wrote me about that rush week at the start of school, going to see all the fraternities. What was that like?”
He signed, maybe a bit relieved, and launched into “Everybody had to go, we were in groups of, I don’t know, maybe 15 or so? There was a schedule, and all of us trooped into the house together, we had maybe 15 minutes to make an impression on whichever upper classman grabbed us at the door. Most of what I learned, I got from the others in my group as we walked down the street, as we waited for out turn to go in. Each house had a personality, it seemed. ADP, they were the jocks, the football team. Beta Theta Pi, they were the big men on campus. Psi Up, the really rich preppies, tri-Delts the conceited go-getters, another Alpha house which was for writer, KNK had the rejects, and there was even a house for non-conformists. They didn’t have greek letters, used a Latin phrase instead: Esse Quam Videri.”
“Be, rather than seem,” I murmured
He nodded. At AHS, everyone took Latin graded 7-9.
“So did you choose one? Did they choose you? How did that work?”
“Well, you could sign up for three, in order. The houses also made a list, of who they wanted. Some committee somewhere tried t match it all up. But there are only enough fraternities for about 1/3rd of the class, so maybe half the people who wanted to get in one, didn’t. I knew I wasn’t really a fraternity kind of guy. I’m younger than everyone else, I’m not really a jock, not a football player at least. I’m from the Midwest, not New England, my family’s not rich, I didn’t go to prep school. But I didn’t want to be left out. So I listed what I thought were the three worst: EQV, KNK, and the writers’ one. Nobody took me.”
“How did that make you feel?” He didn’t act at all bothered, now about getting left out, but it must have hurt, even a perennial optimist like Mike.
“Yeah, it hurt at first. I didn’t cry or anything, but it made me think a little about something one of the guys in my rush group as we were walking from there Beta house to the tri-Delts. Something like, ‘I wake up every morning feeling like I made a bad choice of motel for the night.’ He got into the writers’ fraternity – obviously he knew about metaphors.”
“So it that how you felt, at first, like you didn’t fit in there?”
“No, I don’t think so. See, all the freshmen are in the same dorms, we have our own dining room, and we take a lot of the same class, like Humanities, and for the guys going to med school, Cell Biology. I saw the same people over and over, a lot of them just like to talk, and sharing the same experiences, it was easy to be a part of that. Then in November, there was swimming, and another group to feel a part of. It’s so small there, you know, maybe 350 in a year, fourteen to fifteen hundred overall, that there’s always someone you know you can talk to wherever you go. It’s why I wanted to go to a small school, not even one the size of Harvard or Yale. I thought I might get lost in a place like that. And a school like UC or Ohio State, I just can’t imagine.”
“Same here. I’ve just about got my applications done. It’s gonna be Barnard, Smith, Wellesley, and Radcliffe.”
“Which one is your safe school,” he said playfully.
“My sister tells me ‘You don’t need no stinking safe school.’ I hope she’s right. Now, I’m the big fish in a backwater pond…”
“But AHS has a reputation, we’re not some po-dunk place, we’re just as good as Shaker Heights, New Trier, Bronx High School of Science, Boston Latin, aren’t we?”
“But we’re not a prep school. You know what that’s like, it’s all buddy-buddy, I don’t have an in like that.”
“My mother went to Radcliffe, she could write you a recommendation, couldn’t she?”