!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
“Hello?”
As soon as I heard Mike’s voice on the other end, I broke down. “They came marching up the steps…pounding on the door…it was awful…dragging them out…handcuffed, by the hair, down the steps. I saw…I saw the clubs swinging. It was like…it was like…I don’t know, I don’t know what it was like!” Sniffling, shaking, exhausted from only 4 hours sleep the past two nights, I fell silent, hoping he’d make some sense where I couldn’t.
“Wait, what? Janie, is that you? What happened?”
My breath came in spasms. I looked at the clothes I’d had on for the past three days now, wrinkled almost beyond recognition. I knew my hair, not brushed the whole time, was wild with growing rat’s nests. A thought flashed by, he can’t see me like this. That brought me back, provided enough strength/stability to muster few few rational words, trying to overcome the chaos.
“The kids in Uni hall – they sent the police in after them this morning. Early this morning. Dragged them all off to jail, I guess, in buses. There was blood on their clothes, blood streaming onto the steps. They didn’t do anything, the kids, they didn’t hurt anybody. Pusey doesn’t care, he just sent the pigs in after them, no warning, hundreds of cops.” I paused, but Mike said nothing.
“Are you still there?” Still silence on the other end. “I don’t know what’s going to happen now. No one’s going to class, they’re talking about a strike, at least ‘till Monday. And Harvard’s saying, like a cornered corporation, ‘You can’t strike, we’ll lock you out.’ I don’t think it’s a good idea to come up this weekend.”
“What? Of course I should…you sound, um, scared.”
Now under control, I felt the words come out unbidden, “No. You can’t. I don’t need, don’t want you here right now.”
“What do you mean?” he almost pleaded. “It’s my birthday. We were going downtown, just walk along the river, then spend the night. Why not?”
Seeing all those SDS kids, first taking over University Hall, then getting dragged out and hauled away, must have built a new courage in me, another layer in my sense of self. “No, Mike. I’m having trouble being with you now. Not just this weekend. I’ve been meeting people here, in the SDS and others, and I need some time to find out more about who I am. I have to – need to – do that by myself, without you. I need some time for that.”
Sounding hollow, he said in a monotone, “You need time…”
“There’s just so much happening here, so many people saying so many things, not just the strike, but every day all around me. In classes, the professors. In the dorm, in the dining hall. At meetings. I’m not letting myself grow. I tell myself, ‘I have a boyfriend, I don’t have to worry about this stuff.’ And that was good – that’s still good – but it’s not where I need to be right now. I need to be here, without you, and find out what’s going on, who I am without you.”
As soon as those last words came out, I could sense his pain, his confusion, through the silence along the the line. I was lucky I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t reach out for his hands, his arms. If I had, I never would have said, “I think we need to be apart for a while, Mike, I need to be apart from us. Not you…not you, apart from us.”
He didn’t fight, he didn’t argue. He didn’t try to win me over with charm or self-pity. He simply sighed and said, “OK,” and then hung up.
I slept through most of Thursday, while the campus boiled around me. In the evening, I tore up four or five letters to Mike, trying to explain, first of all, what was going on at Harvard, and then, what I meant when I’d said, “I need time apart from us.” Every time I tried to sound rational, analytic, realistic, I’d think of him, spending the night with him, and wonder what that meant. If we lived together, if we weren’t always coming back after being apart, what would it be like? Would we feel – would I feel – as if we had to make love every time we got together? I realised that meant, not just physical love, but our whole relationship, almost as if we had to re-create it every time we got together. If I stayed apart from him for a while, we’d have some time, and space to build something wider, deeper than we seemed to have.
I tried writing one more time. “You have been – maybe you still are – my best friend. And, yes, you still are my boyfriend. But I’m not sure I know what that means anymore, Mike. I’ve been with you so much, I want to be with you so much, I’m not sure I know who I am by myself, anymore. And I don’t know who we are, apart or together. I’ve got to think about all that, got to find out about being apart, so we can be together. That’s what I was trying to say on the phone, that’s what I’ve got to do here for a while. Please don’t hate me, please try to understand.”
The next two weeks were indeed confusing, both for me and for our University. The feeling of a General Strike dissipated within a week or two. Some faculty held classes, others didn’t. Some returned to their curriculum, others held intense discussions about the nature of a University, whom it ultimately served, and the “meaning of Harvard”. Several mass meetings filled the stadium, and the Faculty issued solemn pronouncements. Eventually, Pusey endordsed their proposal reducing ROTC to “extra-curricular” status. Students were given a voice in the nature of the new Black Studies program, who would teach, what what would be taught. The SDS remained splintered between those who wanted to fight more broadly, for workers’ rights and against the war, and those who looked inward, at reforming the institution. Outside the organized activists, other students, while broadly supportive, became fatigued with constant turmoil, and returned to classes and their ambitions.
Mike wrote me several letters, at first supporting my “search”, and later, reverting to describing his own life and dreams. Chief among them were his most recent ski trip to Colorado, over spring break, just before the Strike. I seized on that as a way to keep him around without actually having to deal with him. I started knitting a sweater. Blue and white, with a pattern meant to evoke winter, something you might see in a European ski village. At first I thought I was knitting to calm myself, give my hands something to do while I read. Then I realised I was stitching a belated birthday present, handiwork from me that would last no matter what. Sometimes while knitting, my mind would wander from the book or paper I’d be reading, and light on Mike, his hair, his arms, his stomach, his smells, the sheer physicality of him. That sweater brought me back to him, and him to me. With each twist of my wrist, each flick of the yarn, I stitched over whatever was pushing us apart.
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