!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
I’d been back in Cambridge a week when Bev and I finally had a chance to sit down and eat dinner together. She experimented with an eggplant-and-broccoli concoction, laden with lentils and rice and her usual eclectic mix of spices.
“You’re looking almost gaunt, Jane, what happened?”
I had never paid much attention to my body size or shape. There was no bathroom scale in the Stein house; George and Eddie had stayed pretty much the same size into their twenties, and Linda’s constant motion kept her equally slim. Then I remembered Mike’s birthday poem, my “newly slender cheeks.”
“I don’t know, I just haven’t been much interested in eating the past few months.”
“Maybe you’ve had a lot on your mind?” Bev probed.
I stopped chewing, trying to get some inner perspective. A wave of awareness flooded my thoughts. “I think you’re right. First, there’s Mike, he’s in my mind half the time, but never around. I pushed him away, pulled him back, and don’t know what I want from him, with him.”
Bev nodded, holding her fork up for emphasis. “Boys’ll do that to you.”
“Then, that strike, that night at Uni, when the cops pulled everybody out. I’m not sure why, but that got to me more than getting kicked outside the Hilton in Chicago last summer. It just went on and on, everyone so righteous in their anger, the Harvard admin so…establishment… in their response.” I took another bite. “The broccoli might not have been the right idea? Maybe tomatoes instead next time?”
“Noted.”
“Right now, I know I’m anxious about this thing I’m doing at the Cognitive Studies Center. Dr. Kagan got me into that, and now I’m working in a group with Barry Brazelton.”
“The pediatrician?”
“Yeah. Where does Harvard get all these super-smart charismatic guys? It’s so completely what I want to do, studying and learning about how kids develop. I don’t get to do much of anything, really, just getting coffee and collating papers, like a secretary even though I’m called a ‘research assistant’. The whole thing makes me super-nervous.”
“Why? They wanted you. You have to start somewhere.”
“I know. But there’s a couple of things. I feel kind of like I don’t really belong. I’m the only undergrad, everybody knows so much more than me, can talk so much more intelligently about child psychology. I wish it didn’t take so long to get good at something.”
We sat silently a while. I tried some home-made salad dressing, hoping to hide the slight bitterness of the broccoli.
Bev prodded, “You said ‘there’s as couple of things’?”
I sighed. “Oh, yeah. That’s probably the worst. The Center had a lot of grants from all over. There’s a big one from the NIH, it’s the one I’m being paid out of. I just heard yesterday that Nixon decided not to fund it when it comes up for renewal, July 1st.”
“Oh Jesus, why? What are they going to do?”
“Well, it was such short notice, they said they could move some money around and keep me through July, but that’s it. I’m gonna have to find something else, or go back home, I guess.” I put my fork down, done eating even though the plate remained half full. “It’s just a rumor, I know, but people are saying this is some kind of retaliation. Nixon sees places like Harvard as the enemy, the eggheads out to get him, so he had the HEW secretary look for any funding he could pull right away. I mean, I knew he’s a bad guy, but this is simply evil. We’re studying mothers and babies! How is that dangerous to ‘law and order’?”
Of course I wrote to Mike about the change in plans, that I’d be coming home. I expected he might call right away, but it was ten days before I got a letter back. It was filled with his rhapsodies about the kids on his swimming team, how they were probably going to win their league championship for the third year in a row. At the end, even when he did acknowledge how my summer was not going as planned, he talked about how that meant we could be together again. Not a sympathetic word or inkling that he understood how devastated I was.
Sunday, July 20th, the team at the Center held a good-bye party for those of us cut from the staff. Someone brought in a small back-and-white TV so we could watch the moon landing. One of the post-doc fellows went on and on about the dissonance between all those billions of dollars being spent on the ‘frivolous Flash Gordon adventure’ and Nixon’s callous cutting of a few hundred thousand from our lab.
“Hell, we’re just an accounting error in the Apollo program!” he harangued.
Mike wrote the next day. He started with one of his usual trenchant observations, “We send those guys all the way to the moon, and the first thing they do is trash the place, leave a flag and lander behind, just like litter on a highway.” Then, a page and a half about his team, how they’d won the regional Junior Olympics, and how great that had made him feel. He closed by describing driving back home, alone, feeling almost depressed, having left the party of celebrating parents and swimmers, then having no one to share his joy. “It’s funny how, the happier you are, the worse it feels when it’s all over.”
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