!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
SHOW A LITTLE FAITH
Schools fell like dominos that spring, after the Kent State and Jackson State campus killings. All the colleges in the country, it seemed, closed their doors. At the time, I thought it was in response to the angry demonstrations clogging every campus large and small, but now I see it might have been fear that more deaths would ensue.
“So, I’m not going to walk on June 7th, won’t get to dress up and get my diploma,” Mike observed, waving W’s commencement program. He opened it up, “See, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Young – they won’t be getting their honorary degrees.” He flipped a few pages. “And here, right here” – he jabbed his finger angrily – “they won’t announce me as cum laude. Or my roommates as magna…”
He looked ready to rant for quite some time. I tried, “Wouldn’t you really rather go home early? Didn’t you say the pool opens May 31? Now you’ll get to see all your friends there, instead of showing up ten days into the season.”
His fists balled up, then gradually opened as he calmed down. “OK. I just thought, that week after you’re done, we could go somewhere, like we always did.”
We’d been so day-to-day, first cooped up together, then flung wildly to the streets, we hadn’t looked that far ahead. Now that I was free, my only thought was going home. My mother would know what to do.
The first night back, she and I were alone in the kitchen, drying the pots and pans, putting them away with a clatter that Linda would surely have set to music.
I asked, “Mom, where did I come from? How did I get here?”
She shook her head and laughed, saying, “Sweetie, isn’t it a little late for this conversation? I mean, haven’t you and Mike…”
Quickly I inserted, “No, no. I mean, where did our family, yours and dad, come from. I know where you two were born and all, and your parents. But at some point, somebody left Europe, right? Why, and from where?”
“What do you want to know, Janie?”
“I’ve been going to Hillel at Harvard now and then, and I’m wondering, thinking more, about being Jewish, what that means, the history and all.”
She put down the dish towel, folding it neatly then draping it across the oven handle. Her apron went back on the hook inside the closet door. She sat down in the kitchen nook and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, Kools.
“Mom, please don’t,” I asked quietly.
With a soft sigh of regret,, she put the pack back into her sweater pocket. “It’s just, thinking about my family, makes me sad. It’s been ten years since your Grandpa Reuben died, and it still hurts every day. And Grammy Sylvia, out there in California with your Uncle Carl, only five years ago…”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bring it up, I didn’t know…”
“No, Janie, it’s OK. It’s good to talk about it. It helps, I think.” She paused, frowning while she thought. “Don’t you remember, I’m sure I’ve told you this before? Let’s see, my dad’s folks, Grandpa Issac and his wife Sarah – remember, we named you after her? – they were both from Lithuania, I forget what little village it was. They spoke Russian, I’ll never forget when he would tell me, ‘Nyet!’. Then on mother’s side, her grandparents were from…uh, Poland, I think.” She fell silent, lost in thought and memory. I waited for her to continue.
“Then on George’s side, his grandparents, Henry and Amelia, they both came from Germany, from Bavaria, I think. No, wait, it was Baden, like bath, a spa town, and he made beer, I think. At least, that’s what he started doing when he got to Cincinnati. They had ten kids you know. Ten! Your Grandpa George ended up in Boston, the rest spread all over the midwest, Cleveland, Buffalo…Anyway, I don’t think we had any shetls or pogroms in our past, and they got out long before things went bad, there in Germany and Poland and all over.”
She’d grown quiet, slumped over a bit. With her forehead wrinkled, her dark hair half gone to grey, I felt she’d aged ten years in the months since I’d been home.
The talk of family reminded me, “Mom? Aunt Helen and Uncle Carl? Toby and Sylvia? They still live out in San Francisco, the Bay Area, right?”
At the mention of her brother and my cousins, and especially feisty Helen, she straightened up, a smile returning as she said, “Of course, they’re still out there. Did you know, your cousin Syl decided to go to law school, and she talked Helen into joining her? They’re both in the first year now, at somewhere called Golden Gate. Why?”
“I’m thinking, maybe I should go visit them, later this summer. I haven’t seen them in years, not since they spent the summer with us on the Vineyard. I ought to get to know them again, Syl especially.”
“Oh, sure, sweetie, that’s a good idea. How would you get there? When?”
“I don’t know, probably just before I go back to school. Don’t worry, I’ll figure something out, fly probably.”
F’s eyes brightened as she returned to the present. “How about Mike? Would you see him when you’re out there?”
“He’s not going until the fall. He didn’t find a job there, so he’s back at the swim club this summer,” I said brightly, as if reporting some neighborhood gossip.
She appeared skeptical. “So you two are still…?”
“No, mom, I’m pretty sure I’ve moved on, I can move on.”
“Are you going to see him anymore, with him still in town?”
“I suppose so, I mean we’re still friends, we still like to do things together, like go to movies.”
“Janie, honey, are you sure that’s such a good idea?” It was rare indeed, now that I’d turned twenty-one, that my mother chose to interject herself into my life, my dreams and feelings. “You know I’ve been worried about you and Mike, how things might not work between you. Just because you can, you know, doesn’t mean you should.”
Despite her warning, Mike and I did return to each other on occasion. I had seen M*A*S*H a few months earlier, when it first showed up in Boston. The disjointed cadences of that episodic film, the cavalier cynicism of Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland, the sneaky anti-war messaging, tinged with cannabis-inflected in-jokes stayed with me through the spring. When the film returned to the Esquire, I called up Mike, and asked him out.
“What, like on a date?” was his response. “I thought…”
“I still like you, buddy, and I know you’ve got to see this movie.”
“OK, maybe Friday? That’s my next night free. And afterwards…?”
Afterwards, with my parents gone for the weekend, playing once more in my little bed came easily, naturally to us. Two weeks later, we repeated the experiment in de-escalation, this time at Mike’s insistence.
“I read this book, I don’t know, at least a dozen times, back in 8th, 9th grade. I’ve been waiting for this movie for years.”
“Who’s in it again?”
“Art Garfunkel and Alan Arkin. It had better be funny. Probably even better than M*A*S*H, I bet.”
So we went to see Catch-22, at the brand-new suburban triplex theater near Mike’s swim club. He had built up such impossible expectations for the film version it could never match his own internal images, honed through those endless adolescent day-dreams engendered by all his time with Heller’s book.
Sitting next to him as we drove back to his house, I felt his mood as if it were my own. I reflected on our current summer fling, an almost nostalgic recreation of earlier, more innocent times together. Now, it seemed, he was willing to come when I called, but I sensed he no longer needed, or wanted me, like before. I wondered how much of that was due to my own repeated spurnings, my own confusion. I felt love for him, still, I knew that would always be a part of me. I enjoyed the physical closeness of him just as much as ever, yet I knew that would not be enough to hold us fast together across the miles, across the years. I wondered if friendship were possible, if in the future, we might be like those parents of my friends, who still exchanged Christmas letters with old roommates, decades after leaving college. “Is it him?” I asked myself. Yes, I answered. “Is it it now?” No, I thought. “Can I wait for our lives to re-intersect geographically, chronologically.”
Mike had stopped, waiting to turn left. Cars rolled by, just often enough to keep us stuck at the intersection.
“There’s no one here from yesterday,” I whispered.
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