!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
Alongside the nightly scenes of war in Southeast Asia, the evening news began to feature footage from San Francisco of hippies, long-haired dropouts. They flaunted all convention, urged everyone to do go with the flow, do their own thing, and leave others alone. “Peace” and “love” were their bywords. Although the Beatles appeared to have been under their influence for the past year, that style and tone had yet to penetrate my high school friends. Oh, we fell under the spell of the music, and a few even tried marijuana. And maybe the lure of Free Love enticed a few; there were always rumors of abortions when we giggled in gym class. But we still wore khakis and skirts to school; only the bravest boys were willing to try white levis, skirting our unofficial dress code of no blue jeans. Not going to college, not pressing on, never seemed an option.
Alongside the nightly scenes of war in Southeast Asia, the evening news began to feature footage from San Francisco of hippies, long-haired dropouts. They flaunted all convention, urged everyone to do go with the flow, do their own thing, and leave others alone. “Peace” and “love” were their bywords. Although the Beatles appeared to have been under their influence for the past year, that style and tone had yet to penetrate my high school friends. Oh, we fell under the spell of the music, and a few even tried marijuana. And maybe the lure of Free Love enticed a few; there were always rumors of abortions when we giggled in gym class. But we still wore khakis and skirts to school; only the bravest boys were willing to try white levis, skirting our unofficial dress code of no blue jeans. Not going to college, not pressing on, never seemed an option.
The New York Times featured an article, back on page 40, headlined “Organized Hippies Emerge on Coast.” No need to say which coast apparently. After multiple columns describing a dissolute life-style of total societal abnegation, it offered a grudging admiration for the Diggers, who scrounged food from dumpsters, and distributed it free among the 15,000 or so young people encamped in San Francisco’s Haight-Asbury district. The article ended with: “The city fears a mass migration of 100,000 would-be hippies to the area this summer from all over the country.”
One evening, on the phone with Eddie, I asked him, “Are you guys hippies? I keep hearing about them in San Francisco.”
He came back laughing, “No, we’re too busy to be lazy. We may look like them, with our clothes and our food and all, But when you have a kid, it all gets real, and dropping out and turning on doesn’t get the diapers changed or the bills paid. Those kids, they’re so close to Berkeley across the bay. You know, University of California, where they had the Free Speech protests a couple of years ago? And now the Governor, Reagan, he wants to clamp down on anyone who speaks out about how things could be better.”
“Things?”
“You know, get out of Vietnam, teach what the world is really like, how people around the world and even here are oppressed. Blacks. And women, too. Arlene gets mad that her professors didn’t teach how women have been held down all through history. She thinks we need women’s studies, and black studies, or all that will all remain hidden.” Arlen was a Berkley drop-out, who countered the counter-culture by heading east, to Nantucket, to find her thing.
Mike appeared again at end of March, leaving in early April for his short spring break. I felt, despite our letters, we weren’t even treading water, that we needed to take a few steps forward if we wanted to stay together the coming summer, into fall. His birthday would be a week after he got back to school, and I wanted to give him a card in person, not mail it. I spent an entire afternoon decorating it with spring flowers and tiny, floating hearts. Even a rabbit poking its ears above a clump of grass. Along the bottom, then up the edge and across the top, a declaration of love, admiration and thanks. I ended with “Radcliffe Boston Weekends” repeated three times.
After a particularly tight hug and kisses on my neck, he pulled back and asked, “When do you hear again?”
“It should be the week of April 10. Maybe I’ll hear from them all at once.”
“Right after my birthday,” he mused. “What a present if you got in.”
“Miss M says she gets notice of acceptances a day or two before the letters come to our house. She’s not supposed to tell us, but she said, if I get into Radcliffe, she’ll run down the hall…”
“She can’t run! Not in those clunky shoes she wears.”
“…and tell me first thing.”
It was a little frightening imaging that gray haired, straight-laced woman panting as she scooted over the linoleum floored halls of our school seeking out each of her Five Fingers to tell them the good (or not-so-good) news. In the end, she told us to come by her office at the start of lunch period on the 11th. She was all smiles, and couldn’t hold back. As each of us came in, she started nodding, saying, “You got it, you got it.” For Lizzie, that meant Mt. Holyoke, and for me…for me, I stood stock still when I heard, then started jumping up and down, face in my hands, smiling and crying all at once. Radcliffe. I got in.
I floated through the rest of the day, feeling at last I could relax. For once, there was no future, no past, no pressure, no fear, just an endless, perfect present. I knew it wouldn’t last. The only way to flow through to the other side was to grab Lizzie, and talk myself back to earth.
I rode home from school with her, to Woodland Park. In the car, we played with our new status as College Girls. “So you and Emily Dickinson, right? You’ll be there with all those kids from Amherst, Smith, U Mass…”
“Don’t forget Hampshire. It is the Five College Area, after all,” Liz chimed in. “And look at you. Harvard. Boston College. BU. Tufts. Emerson. Northeastern. And Boston! Boston…it’s where you’ve always wanted to be.” Shifting gears, she asked, “Have you told Mike yet?”
“How? He’s in classes, and daytime phone calls, the prices. I’ve got to wait until I get home, I guess. I hadn’t thought about that yet, telling him.”
“Really? You guys write each other, what every week or even twice? And now you get to be only two hours away, you can see each other every weekend?” Pausing, then, “Wait a minute. You went to that thing at Fountain Square with Will. Is that giving you second thoughts about Mike, you’ve found somebody else? Janie, I never knew you’d be going after one boy, much less two.”
“What? It wasn’t like that. Besides, he’s a little creepy. Like he expected me to just melt over his manliness.”
“You didn’t fall for that? Or maybe you just didn’t want to make Mike jealous?”
I gave that some thought. I’m just beginning to learn what love can be, how to give it, what it can mean for me. Jealousy seemed another level entirely. I asked, “Jealousy? I thought that was something for older people, people who’ve been together longer, like married people who have an affair or something.”
“I know, it seems a little odd to feel so possessive of someone that you can’t let them have fun.”
“What, like flirting?”
“It’s like, if you have a total connection with someone, you have both their mind and body as yours, you don’t…you can’t share them with anyone else.”
I wondered if that’s how I felt about Mike. “Hmm…I really like that Mike writes me letters all the time. If he’s doing that, I know I’m in his thoughts, in his mind all the time. That’s what I wouldn’t want to share with anyone, that emotional space, that feeling in his head.”
“You wouldn’t mind if he made out with, or even if he slept with, another girl?”
Instantly, I blushed. I looked down at my lap, where my fingers were clutching themselves so tightly they turned white. ‘Was Lizzie having sex with Leon?’ was my first thought. But I couldn’t ask her. She was so proper, so clean and innocent. Then I thought of myself. Did I have feelings that way, towards Mike? It had been so scary, just getting to kiss and hug each other last year. Then all that time apart, seeing each other only for a week or so, a few times the past year. If it entered my mind at all, it had been in a purely analytic way, almost a scientific curiosity. What would it be like? Would it hurt? Would I even want to? Would I enjoy it? So much I didn’t know, and had just begun to think about.
Lizzie heard my silence. “Wait? You guys still haven’t…?”No, we hadn’t, and probably wouldn’t any time soon.
“You mean, he doesn’t bring it up, even obliquely?” Lizzie asked the next morning. I’d spent the night at her place, where we’d fantasized about our upcoming lives in New England’s academic dreamlands. Her mother drove us to school, so we couldn’t continue the conversation until we spilled out onto the circle drive. We had about 15 minutes before the home room bell, so we sat on the steps, our backs to the brick wall, staring down at Victory Parkway. The rising April sun warmed our faces; dogwood trees blossomed on the hill below.
“He’s in college, he’s been writing to you for a year, seeing you every vacation, and all last summer. What’s been going on with you two?”
“Honestly, it’s never come up. And, to think about it, there’s the question of where, and when, isn’t there. It’s been too cold for his car, which is pretty small to begin with. Otherwise, it’s either his house or mine, and our parents are always there it seems. But like I said, we don’t talk about it.”
“So he really is a straight-laced guy? You’re sure he likes girls, maybe he thinks of you as a friend?”
I glared at her. “He doesn’t kiss me like I’m just a friend. I’m happy to leave it at that, really. We’re doing pretty good just being who we are.”
********
The New York Times featured an article, back on page 40, headlined “Organized Hippies Emerge on Coast.” No need to say which coast apparently. After multiple columns describing a dissolute life-style of total societal abnegation, it offered a grudging admiration for the Diggers, who scrounged food from dumpsters, and distributed it free among the 15,000 or so young people encamped in San Francisco’s Haight-Asbury district. The article ended with: “The city fears a mass migration of 100,000 would-be hippies to the area this summer from all over the country.”
One evening, on the phone with Eddie, I asked him, “Are you guys hippies? I keep hearing about them in San Francisco.”
He came back laughing, “No, we’re too busy to be lazy. We may look like them, with our clothes and our food and all, But when you have a kid, it all gets real, and dropping out and turning on doesn’t get the diapers changed or the bills paid. Those kids, they’re so close to Berkeley across the bay. You know, University of California, where they had the Free Speech protests a couple of years ago? And now the Governor, Reagan, he wants to clamp down on anyone who speaks out about how things could be better.”
“Things?”
“You know, get out of Vietnam, teach what the world is really like, how people around the world and even here are oppressed. Blacks. And women, too. Arlene gets mad that her professors didn’t teach how women have been held down all through history. She thinks we need women’s studies, and black studies, or all that will all remain hidden.” Arlen was a Berkley drop-out, who countered the counter-culture by heading east, to Nantucket, to find her thing.
Mike appeared again at end of March, leaving in early April for his short spring break. I felt, despite our letters, we weren’t even treading water, that we needed to take a few steps forward if we wanted to stay together the coming summer, into fall. His birthday would be a week after he got back to school, and I wanted to give him a card in person, not mail it. I spent an entire afternoon decorating it with spring flowers and tiny, floating hearts. Even a rabbit poking its ears above a clump of grass. Along the bottom, then up the edge and across the top, a declaration of love, admiration and thanks. I ended with “Radcliffe Boston Weekends” repeated three times.
After a particularly tight hug and kisses on my neck, he pulled back and asked, “When do you hear again?”
“It should be the week of April 10. Maybe I’ll hear from them all at once.”
“Right after my birthday,” he mused. “What a present if you got in.”
“Miss M says she gets notice of acceptances a day or two before the letters come to our house. She’s not supposed to tell us, but she said, if I get into Radcliffe, she’ll run down the hall…”
“She can’t run! Not in those clunky shoes she wears.”
“…and tell me first thing.”
It was a little frightening imaging that gray haired, straight-laced woman panting as she scooted over the linoleum floored halls of our school seeking out each of her Five Fingers to tell them the good (or not-so-good) news. In the end, she told us to come by her office at the start of lunch period on the 11th. She was all smiles, and couldn’t hold back. As each of us came in, she started nodding, saying, “You got it, you got it.” For Lizzie, that meant Mt. Holyoke, and for me…for me, I stood stock still when I heard, then started jumping up and down, face in my hands, smiling and crying all at once. Radcliffe. I got in.
I floated through the rest of the day, feeling at last I could relax. For once, there was no future, no past, no pressure, no fear, just an endless, perfect present. I knew it wouldn’t last. The only way to flow through to the other side was to grab Lizzie, and talk myself back to earth.
I rode home from school with her, to Woodland Park. In the car, we played with our new status as College Girls. “So you and Emily Dickinson, right? You’ll be there with all those kids from Amherst, Smith, U Mass…”
“Don’t forget Hampshire. It is the Five College Area, after all,” Liz chimed in. “And look at you. Harvard. Boston College. BU. Tufts. Emerson. Northeastern. And Boston! Boston…it’s where you’ve always wanted to be.” Shifting gears, she asked, “Have you told Mike yet?”
“How? He’s in classes, and daytime phone calls, the prices. I’ve got to wait until I get home, I guess. I hadn’t thought about that yet, telling him.”
“Really? You guys write each other, what every week or even twice? And now you get to be only two hours away, you can see each other every weekend?” Pausing, then, “Wait a minute. You went to that thing at Fountain Square with Will. Is that giving you second thoughts about Mike, you’ve found somebody else? Janie, I never knew you’d be going after one boy, much less two.”
“What? It wasn’t like that. Besides, he’s a little creepy. Like he expected me to just melt over his manliness.”
“You didn’t fall for that? Or maybe you just didn’t want to make Mike jealous?”
I gave that some thought. I’m just beginning to learn what love can be, how to give it, what it can mean for me. Jealousy seemed another level entirely. I asked, “Jealousy? I thought that was something for older people, people who’ve been together longer, like married people who have an affair or something.”
“I know, it seems a little odd to feel so possessive of someone that you can’t let them have fun.”
“What, like flirting?”
“It’s like, if you have a total connection with someone, you have both their mind and body as yours, you don’t…you can’t share them with anyone else.”
I wondered if that’s how I felt about Mike. “Hmm…I really like that Mike writes me letters all the time. If he’s doing that, I know I’m in his thoughts, in his mind all the time. That’s what I wouldn’t want to share with anyone, that emotional space, that feeling in his head.”
“You wouldn’t mind if he made out with, or even if he slept with, another girl?”
Instantly, I blushed. I looked down at my lap, where my fingers were clutching themselves so tightly they turned white. ‘Was Lizzie having sex with Leon?’ was my first thought. But I couldn’t ask her. She was so proper, so clean and innocent. Then I thought of myself. Did I have feelings that way, towards Mike? It had been so scary, just getting to kiss and hug each other last year. Then all that time apart, seeing each other only for a week or so, a few times the past year. If it entered my mind at all, it had been in a purely analytic way, almost a scientific curiosity. What would it be like? Would it hurt? Would I even want to? Would I enjoy it? So much I didn’t know, and had just begun to think about.
Lizzie heard my silence. “Wait? You guys still haven’t…?”
********