!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT *****!!!!!
“Hey look! See what’s at the Playhouse in the Park?”
Mid-August, summer of 1967, Mike was reading the paper after lunch at my house, while I organized what I’d be taking to Cambridge in a couple of weeks. He threw the entertainment section of the Enquirer onto the bed where my suitcases were splayed open. Picking it up, I saw a small ad for The Fantasticks, opening that evening at the Eden Park theatre for a two week run. Not the Off-Broadway cast, but then, it had been playing there for years now, and most of the original performers had moved on anyway.
“Would be nice to see it, but I bet it’s sold out,” he observed.
“You have your W ID, don’t you? Maybe we can do a student rush…”
“Student…what’s that?”
Silently, I wondered how he managed to remain so insulated amidst all those New Yorkers he went to school with. “Student rush…they open up the box office about 45 minutes before each show, and sell any unused tickets at a cut rate to impoverished students like us. All you have to do is wait in line. No guarantee we’d get seats together, or even any seats at all, but it’s worth a try sometimes. Wanna go?”
“That play was all you ever talked about last year. You made it sound so dreamy. Sure, what else are we going to do?”
As we drove by the swing sets in the park, I was reminded of our trip to the conservatory at Christmas. I felt a wave of nostalgia, remembered feeling like a little girl, slowly swinging there while Mike soared like a ski jumper high above me. Throughout the play that night, memories flooded back, of seeing the show as a fourteen year old, and identifying with the girl, only two years older, who dreamed of becoming worldly-wise, all while being swept away by love for a boy who might someday kiss her upon the eyes. Since then, I’d found a boy, and was about to live my dreams within the world, seeing it through older eyes.
“What did you think, second time around?” Mike asked as we drove back to Clifton.
“Not the same. Not like Dylan says, though.”
Mike thought a moment. “Oh. ‘I was so much younger then, I’m older than that now’?” he said, transposing that line from My Back Pages.
“Right. I’m feeling ready for Radcliffe, can’t wait to leave. I’m, tired of fantasy, of expectation. Get my feet on the ground and walk towards being an adult.”
“What’s that mean, ‘being an adult’? Like getting married, having children?”
“No,” I came back, loudly, a touch of anger in my voice. “I love kids, I loved being a kid. I know you do too, those swim classes you taught, your little cousins you told me about. But that’s not all you want, is it? You are heading dead ahead towards medical school, being a doctor. You are not going to let anything get in the way of that, are you. You think trying to have a family , even just after college, might be a problem?”
He didn’t respond, so I went on. “I’m not just going to college to find a man, a husband. I’m going on to graduate school after.”
“In what?”
“Psychology, probably. At least I want to learn a lot more about it there, see if that’s what I really want. But no matter what, I want something more than getting married, having children. That’s wrong.”
“Uh, huh. I get it. Radcliffe’s the place for that.”
I wasn’t sure he did get it. Everything had been – would be – so easy for him. Smart, a WASP from the Mayflower, not bad-looking, self-confident behind his shy exterior, I could see him gliding ever forward, friction-less, towards his goals, already staked out for him. He could even have fun along the way. It would be easy to get dragged along in his wake, let him break the path for me. I felt instead a strange and powerful ambition, that I had to find out and become the me I knew myself to be, inside.
Those last few weeks before I left for school, I grew nostalgic for all I’d leave behind. I sensed a sudden, final break. Even though I would surely some back, holidays and summers, I would never truly live here again. My dreams were pointed east, towards a denser, richer world. Mike and I would walk forever most afternoons, as he stopped by our house, on his way home from the hospital. He didn’t talk much about the psych ward, except to say, “It’s fairly depressing, to be around such sullen, sad and lonely people all the time. They’re locked in there, just like prison, and have to wear a uniform, white hospital clothes, with drugs keep them sleepy, or jittery. The doctors just play at treating them, following a book or some rules. But everyone knows no one’s really getting better.”
“Do you still think that’s what you want to do?”
“I’m still interested in why people do what they do, what makes us tick. Maybe I want to be one of those psychiatrists who sits and talks with people who aren’t really crazy, crazy enough to be locked away. That might be better.”
One afternoon, we walked down to Lafayette, a few blocks south, where the largest yards and houses sat at the edge of the hill, looking north to the Mill Creek Valley below, humming with the milling machine factory and Kroger store below. The R’s lived there, in two homes on lots which filled the entire block. Cousins P & J were home from college, former classmates of Mike. Seeing them out front, we waved, walked over, and all sat on the expansive R compound lawn.
Paul weakly smiled as he waved back, then asked, “What are you two doing here? Shouldn’t you be saying your last goodbyes?”
The grass felt dry beneath my shorts, prickly against my calves’ bare skin as I sat down. Crickets hummed in the bushes nearby, and fireflies began to spark around us. The day had been hot and muggy, that moist enveloping midwest blanket which had no cooling evening sea breeze. The air smelled of straw and flowers.
We’d left the house, as it was even hotter than outdoors. “My father still refuses to get an air conditioner, so we decided to take a walk down here, see if maybe there’d be a breeze.”
“We got ours a couple of years ago. Just in the upstairs bedrooms though,” said J.
Mike reflected, “My dad put in this whole house thing, the size of a car almost, in the basement, pumping air through the heating ducts. I dunno, it almost makes things too cold. I miss it when my mother would come in at night, on those hots nights like this one, and sprinkle water on my sheets, make them all cold and damp. I like falling asleep that way…”
Mike lay down, head resting on my feet. Craning his head back toward P, he said, “Any of you ever been to Aspen?” Without really waiting for an answer, he went on, “My dad took us out there this summer, on the way to California. The air feels so different. At night, it doesn’t stay hot, like this, it cools off right away, chilly even, ‘cause the air’s so thin, it can’t hold any heat. And the trees – not like here, no oaks or chestnuts. Dry pines on the mountains, and aspen trees down lower. All so white, and the leaves make little whistling sounds, even with the slightest breeze.”
J spoke up, “I like it here, the wilderness scares me.” He was the only one of us staying at home for school, at UC.
Paul “What about you, Janie, where would you rather be right now?”
“Honestly, it makes me nervous, but I really want to go to Cambridge. I can’t wait to find out who’s going to be in my class, what the professors are like, what a real, old city is.”
“Do you have to live on campus? Turns out, we don’t have to at Antioch, not anymore. They just changed the rule this year. I’ve already got an apartment and some roommates. Next week, I’ll be driving up there, to Yellow Springs, to get it all set.”
“No; yeah…we all live in dorms on the quad. Everybody gets her own room, but it’s run kind of like a boarding house. You have to sign in and out and all that.”
“Visitors?”
“Um, they seem real strict. Up until this year, they had a rule, ‘If you’ve got a man in your room, the door must be open, and both of you must have at least one foot on the floor at all times’.”
“Really?”
“Really. But they had a strike or something, a hunger strike, last spring, so they did away with that one.”
Mike chimed in, “Yeah, same thing, kind of, at W. Last year, all the freshmen ate in one dining hall, round, like a space ship. Everyone had to wear ties at dinner. That’s gone now, you can come in flip-flops and sweatpants if you want, I guess. And they’re talking about admitting women in a year or two. They all are, all those colleges in New England.”
“Lizzie says that’s not going to happen at Smith or Mt. Holyoke, because they have Amherst and U Mass right there. But Radcliffe and Harvard, they take classes together already, so I don’t know if anything’s going to change there.”
We feel silent for a time, the humid air a narcotic.
Mike broke the silence. “Hey, I just realised…Clifton Meadows is down there, right? At the bottom of the hill?” He pointed north, towards the unseen but seething expressway.
“Yeah. Why?” Paul answered flatly.
“That’s one of the places we’d go to have swim meets. The private pool swim club league. They weren’t very good, we always beat them pretty easily.”
The three of us, P, J and I, stayed silent. That was another club we weren’t allowed in; we had our own country club, Losantiville. The fault lines between Jews and gentiles may have been melting elsewhere, but not in summer-time leisure. Mike seemed oblivious to how this made us feel, as he went on, “I miss swimming this summer. Early morning, the fog over the pool, water warmer than the air. Then afternoon practice, blazing sun on my skin. Working hard, feeling tired. I miss that.”
Getting no response, Mike shut up at last.
We walked back home, where I had to help mom get dinner ready. Mike wanted to get back to his house, but he asked, “Can I go upstairs for a minute? Something I want to write.” He didn’t stay long, popping into the kitchen, he left with no kiss, no smile, only one of those deep-dish thinking expressions on his face as he waved at my mom and mumbled, “Good-bye.”
After dinner, upstairs in my room, I noticed my Avondale HS math pad open, his distinctive scribble covering most of one page. I read:
SUMMER…
…is a time to reconnoiter, redirect
one’s self;
Lazy, mindless days,
drifting as the sun, unhindered,
across the widest skies of August.
Horizons stretching, reaching, grabbing for the orb
of gold –
It slowly makes its journey, heedless to the passions
it possesses.
8-11-67