!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
Saturday morning, Mike arrived jittery, his usual calm replaced with a pensive anxiety. I held off on the present and birthday “card” while he explained. “There were people all over the bridge, I could barely get onto Mem. drive, and then the whole way to the square, it was packed. Finally I had to turn onto Brattle Street. What’s going on?”
“You haven’t heard? They’re not doing it at W? The SDS, the Student Mobe Committee, ten days of resistance? They’re calling for a nation-wide, one-day strike next Thursday. I don’t know if I’m going to the big rally in the yard. I’d like to, but my classes…”
A knock, and the door opened revealing Marcia and Leslie before I could say anything. Marcia pulled up short when she saw Mike, and looked about to apologize. Leslie acted like he wasn’t there.
“Janie. We’ve got to get down to the Square. Get that yellow thing you wear, it’s drizzling a little.” She finally realised a boy was in my room. “Who’s this?” she demanded.
“Mike Harrison, from W,” I answered in as neutral a tone as possible.
“Janie’s boyfriend,” Marcia added softly.
Leslie glared at Mike, then looked at me with a bit of pity. “OK, he’s coming too?”
We all clomped downstairs out onto Walker. Leslie warmed up to her lecture. “There’re these Harvard guys, the local SDS group, who are planning the rally on Thursday. They invited some of us from Radcliffe, but when we said anything, it was like, ‘That’s nice sweetie, why don’t you just bring us more beers?’ I’m not going back there. Even the men you’d think would understand about women’s lib, they don’t get it. They’re not going to help us. That war, it’s just men fighting men, I don’t know if I care any more, let them all kill each other. It’d make life a lot easier for us.”
Marcia countered, “You don’t really mean that, Les?”
Leslie’s steely silence and razor glare confirmed that she did, indeed, at that moment want to live in a male-free world. I let the two of them walk a bit ahead while I asked Mike, “So what’s been happening? What did you do last night?”
“I think I memorized Desolation Row.”
“That old Dylan song. It’s long, right, eleven minutes?”
“Mmm hum,” he affirmed. “Rich wanted to perform it, but he claims he can’t sing, so he asked me to.”
I laughed, “You can’t either!”
“Well, apparently I can growl like Dylan, and better than Rich. He’s pretty good on the guitar, so he just played and played while I read the lyrics off the album. First few times through, we did it with the record, then just ourselves. Wanna hear it?” He smiled a little, lifting his left eyebrow.
The rain picked up a bit. Mike was wearing a blue hard hat he’d snatched from the hockey rink construction site. Along with his scruffy faded tan leather jacket, he blended right in with the crowd on Mass Ave. “Everyone is making love, or else expecting rain.” he syncopated. “Or something like that.” He switched gears. “I got that job for the summer, at the swimming club. I’ll be a lifeguard, and they said I could help out with the swim team as well.”
“All summer? Can you get any time off, like a long weekend?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m thinking of going to the SDS convention in Chicago after the Vineyard. The convention, it’s very important. They’re going to work on the Democrats to get real about making change, the war, civil right, blacks, women, everything.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if you can get time off or you don’t know if you want to go. I really want to go, and I think you should too.”
“I guess … both…?”
We shuffled along in silence for a while behind Marcia and Leslie. Mike had always followed my lead when I chose to push it. Now, I sensed some hesitation, some pull in a different direction. Last summer, he’d worked in the psych ward, this summer, all he wanted to do was play, at being a kid, with real kids all around him. I wondered, is he afraid of being older, of dealing with the real issues in our world?
“Why not? Why don’t you want to go?” I pushed again, “I’d really like you to be there with me.”
“It seems a little scary. Dangerous. You sure that’s what you want to do?”
His reluctance made me more sure I had to be there. But it was not worth a fight, it was not a line in the sand between us. I needed him as much as he needed me, I knew. And wasn’t love about dealing with, learning from the differences between two people, building from their common ground?
That evening, Mike unwrapped his birthday present. His eyes widened, and he broke into a smile when he saw Hector Protector and As I went Over The Water, by Maurice Sendak. “You really like this guy, don’t you? Yeah, I remember, Where The Wild Things Are. And his pictures, not fairy tale stuff, more like an adult perspective on nursery rhymes.”
“Sendak, he writes kids’ books, sure, but they get to me where I am now. If I ever have kids, this is the kind of stuff I’ll show them, I’ll read to them, not those ‘Dick and Jane’ things we had in first grade.”
“Yeah, those were so dumb. You were like me, I guess, you could read those things easily, and knew they weren’t really stories, just an excuse to show us new words. But we already knew them, so it got real boring real fast.” He paused, then continued. “Hmm, kids. It would be fun to have kids, show them things, watch them grow. Wouldn’t it?”
I was thinking about families just then, but not about making one. I knew that Sendak was a Polish Jew, just like my great-great grandparents. Even though he was born in Brooklyn, his family had lost everyone they knew who still lived in Europe, during the Holocaust. I thought that might be why his pictures seemed so dark, so real. For some reason, I didn’t want to talk with Michael about this, that family means different things to different people. He could trace himself back to 1620 in this country, but my family, I thought, goes back over 3,000 years, through slavery and pogroms and ghettos. My parents, each in their own way, had downplayed all that in our life, not hiding it, but never bringing it up either. I was beginning to think it time to explore that, to come to terms with another part of who I am.
I pulled up suddenly. While the rain dripped down my yellow vinyl hat, I said, “I just remembered!”
“What?”
“Today’s Pesach.”
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