!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
That languid week after Labor Day, Mike and I spent most afternoons at his house or mine. Walking around my neighborhood, sitting on the edge of his pool, watching each other pack for school, we caught up on our summers.
One day, laying in the sun on lounge chairs in his back yard, a small radio tuned to the new FM station softly playing in the background, something about “I fought the law, and the law won”, I showed him the hair they’d taken off in the ER, a swirling mass of black lying at the bottom of a paper bag, looking ready to be plucked for lining a robin’s nest.
“Can I have that?”
“Why, what would you do with it?”
“I’m always reading how people keep a strand of hair in a locket, a necklace, a reminder.”
I countered, “No, I think people did that when someone close had died. That’s a little morbid, Mike.”
“Well, didn’t you almost die?”
“No, not even close. I just got shoved down when the fence fell over. Somebody kicked me there,” I said, pointing at the bandage on my temple. Anger flared inside. “You could have been there, you know. We stayed at this family’s apartment, a big place, people were lying everywhere on couches, on the floor. I got to listen to them planning, I got to see how dedicated they were.”
He got up, sat at the edge of the pool, and rhythmically kicked his feet in the water.
“Who’s place was it again?” he innocently asked.
“Howard Lehrman. His parents had left town. He knows Eddie from the SDS before. He went Williams, going to Harvard Law this fall.”
Mike looked back at me, raising his left eyebrow inquisitively.
I couldn’t seem to stop myself from saying more. “He’s so intense. Says he wants to be a lawyer, not so he can join some big Wall Street firm. He wants to form a group to help inner city people, tenants against landlords, fight back against companies who don’t treat their workers right. I think you’d like him – we can get together back in Cambridge, maybe?”
Mike just nodded, still kicking, soft semi-circular waves radiating from his calves. His letters had been filled with stories of that swim club where he’d worked, all about the little kids, the young teen-agers who raced on the team, names I couldn’t connect with faces, but which had been his world that summer. Unlike before, when he’d write about, say, Martin Luther King’s killing, or how the mind might work. Even the music he mentioned was, I thought, frivolous, childish, what they were calling bubble-gum pop. His hair was streaked blonde, chlorine baked by the sun, shiny like his nut-brown skin from days sitting in a lifeguard chair.
“You really liked being at that pool, didn’t you?”
He patted the concrete walk with his right hand. “Here, sit with me.” As I dropped down, he lifted up my hair, pulled back the dark band over the small cotton bandage, touching gently, then kissing it lightly. “I wish I could make it better.”
Anger at his absence that day still boiled inside, fighting with the power of his presence now, the warmth radiating from his skin, the sweetness of his comfort gestures. “Well, you can’t, so let’s forget about it, OK?” Quietly, that little radio now aired what I called the “Paranoia Song – there’s battle lines being drawn, nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.”
I took his hand from my head, squeezed his fingers while placing them firmly on his thigh, and drew my own hand away. “I want to hear about those kids, which ones did you say you like so much?”
He sighed, then brightened as he launched into one of his non-stop stories. “You mean Debbie? She’s such a good swimmer, so fast. She and her brother, and some friends, they’d all take their bikes to the club, ride there for the day, then they had to go back home to get ready for their evening swim practice with the big team. Anyway, they kind of adopted me as a mascot or something. I think I was the youngest lifeguard there, so they saw me almost as one of them. I let them sit in my car, it was always a treat to get the bucket seats. I’d ride my bike with them sometimes, on the gravel roads in the woods around the club. Evenings when they didn’t practice, and I got off early, we’d all just sit around, looking at fireflies, making fun of people. Not like school at all, where everything’s so serious. People always talking about the war, or whether women should be allowed in, or what grad school they’re trying to get into.
“And then the littler kids, under ten, I got to coach them. The coach gave me the “eight-and-unders” to work with. I think everybody else sees them as impossible, they don’t want to listen, just play around in practice. For some reason, they paid attention to me, actually did the work in practice. Of all the age groups, they were the best on the team this year. I think I’m going to be an official assistant coach next summer.”
That evening at the Harrison house, we sat with Jack and G and Shelly, watching the news while we at our dinners from what they called “TV trays”, small folding individual aluminum tables set in front of arm chairs. They were getting ready for the Miss America Pageant, apparently a family tradition. Shelly and Mike talked eagerly about Bert Parks, his smile, and the nuances of the talent competition. First, though, the local newsman tut-tutted about some protesters in Atlantic City. On the screen we watched flickering images of women of all ages throwing undergarments into a metal barrel, then setting them afire.
Jack snickered through his nose, Shelly laughed, and G quietly said, “Good for them.”
Mike asked, “Why would they want to do that? Wouldn’t it be uncomfortable?”
“I think it’s symbolic, Mike,” I tried. “Throw off the trappings of societal oppression, and all that.”
His eyes lit up. “Oh, like burning draft cards, huh?”