!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
“Hey, Janie, here we are!” Jeanne waved me over to her table, where she was finishing dinner with Marcia and two other girls I didn’t know. “Oh, this is Bev and Leslie. They’re juniors, they promised to help us with our chemistry.”
Bev had one of those smiles, all friendly at the mouth, but serious around the eyes, that I was coming to associate with Radcliffe girls. Straight black hair cut in a no-nonsense bob, she appeared all business, minimal maintenance required. “Pre-meds have to stick together,” she asserted, looking over at Leslie.
“No one else here is watching out for us. Seems everywhere we turn, all we’re getting is a pat on the head.” Leslie’s stringy blond hair fell past her shoulders. Tall and stocky, she wore a shapeless dress, white tights, and an odd-looking pair of earrings.
“What do you mean,” I asked.
“Janie, is it? Haven’t you noticed Harvard doesn’t care how smart you are, how smart we are? Don’t you feel like an adornment, or an after-thought? There’s only what, maybe 5% of doctors who are women? We can’t afford to sit around and wait for men to change. We have to demand our place. Have you read Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir?” When I shook my head, ‘No’, she reached into her bag and took out a thick, well-worn paperback, The Second Sex, shaking it towards my face.
“Oh, yeah…isn’t she Sartre’s, what do they call it, ‘partner’?”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about!” she almost shouted. “See, someone like you, smart enough to get into Radcliffe, and, from what Jeanne tells me, sophisticated enough to enjoy plays on Broadway, still thinks of a woman in terms of her relationship to a man. Do you think of yourself as a feminist?”
I wasn’t sure of what that word meant. People said it a lot, sometimes as an accusation, sometimes as a compliment. “You mean like the suffragists…?”
Leslie gave an exasperated sigh. Turning to Bev, she moaned, “See what I mean? We need a Women’s Studies program here. We need to assert ourselves, just the same as the black students are talking about, same as the anti-war people are doing.” Looking back at me, she slapped the book down on the table, saying “Here. Read this. I’ve got another. You can have this one. Pass it around, then start talking about it.” With that, Leslie got up, not waiting for any confirmation or thanks. “I’ve gotta go, get back to my apartment before they kick me out for not doing the dishes on my night.”
Bev stayed on, smiling more beatifically now. “She’s something, isn’t she?”
“What was that dress she was wearing?” I asked. Though shapeless, it nonetheless seemed fashionable, made from thick cotton, dyed blue with striking black markings scattered across the fabric.
“Um, yeah, that’s her style. Doesn’t call attention to her body, but still looks elegant. Ask her, she’ll make clear it’s a political statement. I think it’s called Marimekko. From Finland. There’s a store here in town if you want to get one.”
“Marimekko,” I murmured, making sure I remembered. Louder, “What about those earrings? They look like s snake, but they’re not metal, some kind of plastic.”
Bev, Jeanne, and Marcia all laughed, looking first at each other, then over at me. Marcia asked, “You know what an IUD is?”
“IUD? Isn’t that for contraception, Intra-Uterine Device?”
“Yup. Those are Lippes Loops.”
“But why for earrings? Is she trying to make a political point?”
Bev explained, “She never talks about them, but my idea is they are kind of a metaphor, a hidden statement to the men she encounters. ‘I don’t need you, don’t want you, stay away,’ I think she’s saying.”
“Like a cross for vampires?”
“That’s a good thought. Men are always trying to suck the life, the soul out of us, aren’t they?”
“Not all of them,” I countered, thinking of Mike.
“Where have you been cloistered?” Bev shot back. “I have yet to meet a guy who didn’t want to spend all his time talking about himself. Or if he did ‘care’ about me, it was only so he could get me into bed.”
I couldn’t respond. I didn’t want to appear naive, inexperienced, or lacking in self-assertion. But I wondered if I were indeed under the spell of a juvenile infatuation, seeing myself as a princess in a fairy tale.
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