LOVE
RHYMES
An Imagined Memoir
by
Al Truscott
Author’s Note
…About a year ago, I came into possession of some artifacts – a diary, letters, poems, scientific papers, an obituary – documenting the life of someone who came of age during the 1960’s and ‘70s. Looking through them, I began to visualize a tale filling out the sparse details of her story, emerging as a memoir I imagine the narrator’s real-life inspiration would have written. While some events occurred as depicted, most names have been altered and conversations often invented. Where I lacked facts, I made them up. Otherwise, all this is true…12/14/20
BOOK ONE
#1
Now the tears have dried
leaving
smudgy, salty traces
of my sorrow
— Early February, 1966
PREFACE
In 1965, for my sixteenth birthday, I gave myself a diary. Pink, with a locking clasp, it represented my belief that I was almost grown, and should daily document the finishing touches. A five-year diary, as I was sure I’d become as old as I needed to be by twenty-one. I filled it with frequent jottings, my mundane and romantic hopes and dreams. Looking back, I see myself progressing from childish fantasies, opening up to people and the world. My memory isn’t what to be; I suppose I should write it all down, flesh it out while I can. What follows, guided by these fading signposts from my past, is a story of those five years.
Sarah Jane Stein, May 25, 1983
CHAPTER ONE
Every Broken Heart Begins With A Love Story.
November, 1965
At first, all I could see were his hands.
My junior year at Avondale High School, I sat kitty-corner from him in French class, one row back, hiding in my matching John Meyer sweaters and skirts. Languages came easy for me – I’d taught myself to read before kindergarten – so when I got bored I had a lot of time to pore over his appearance. His hair, though dark, had a blond-green sheen, from too much time in a chlorinated pool. Parted on the left, long enough to flop over his brow, but short enough to not yet curl. This was a year or so into the Beatles’ reign, and he appeared torn between letting a mop-top grow, and keeping it short for his swimming. Chiseled cheeks peaked through his still smooth, softly contoured skin. He wore those plastic glasses, translucent frames which would now be nerdy, but back then were the norm for our mid-western city. Later, in college, he’d go full John Lennon, hair over the ears, wire-rims, worn work jacket and jeans.
But his hands…he had good hands. Perfectly proportioned, in my estimation: fingers and back of equal length, nails with short white tips. Gently curled at rest, they moved gracefully when he gestured. I could see his right hand best, where veins on the back coursed sinuously from wrist to knuckle, curving thick ribbons within the skin. The hands of a doer, I thought.
I vaguely wondered if he knew I was there, but he never had any reason to look my way. For the first three months, when I got bored with declensions, I would fantasize about those hands, and pretend they showed his soul.
“He’s a senior?” Lizzie asked when I confessed my obsession in the lunch room one drizzly November day. We’d arrived late, and the Johnny Marzetti casserole had grown cold.
“I know he’s on the swim team. Debate team, too.”
“Debate? Is he the one who almost won the regionals, with Bobby Buchannon last year?”
“Don’t know. All I really do is stare at him when Mr. Eick starts doing his unintelligible Gallic thing in class.”
Lizabeth Upton and I were best friends. A dancer, she had dirty-blond hair and blue eyes, all innocence and smile. We sang together in choir, worked together on the school paper, and shared the same disdain for high school’s social games.
“Janie, it sounds to me you want to meet him somehow.”
An involuntary shudder hit deep inside my chest. I spent my time either studying or running from one school service task to another. Big Sister. Student Council. Our paper, the Chatterbox. I’d just come out of a prolonged early adolescent ugly ducking phase. Boys, scary to me, kept their distance. In our family, good grades and good schools were all my parents – well, my mother, really – cared about. No sports, no “make sure you find a good Jewish boy”. My oldest brother Charlie rebelled a bit. Already married, with a baby on the way, he could have gone to law school after Brown, or had a good job on Wall Street, Instead, he lived on a farm in Rhode Island with three other couples, eating a macrobiotic diet, sewing his own clothes. Middle brother Henry, still at Princeton – I don’t know if he was a monk, or what, but I’d never seen him on a date. My sister Lisa had been voted “Wittiest” her senior year, the quintessential class clown. She’d landed in a mid-tier college, already being written off by Mom. I was the family’s last hope. Trying so hard to be the Good Girl, I thought I had no time for boys. But, at sixteen, I did have feelings, stirrings, and found I couldn’t fight them off any longer.
Christmas was coming up. Lizzie and I were both in choir, and rehearsals started coming daily. We sang all the hymns, like “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” We’d march onto the stage in our blue robes with gold collars, carrying burning candles in the otherwise unlit auditorium. I couldn’t help giggling when that made everyone’s face look like some kind of dybbuk. During the solos, we shared various scenarios to get the debate team’s attention, come January.
Lizzie whispered, “These guys win all their meets. They’re sure better than our football or basketball teams.” Our college-prep high school, pulling all the smartest kids city-wide, had never made it out of team sport regionals in the five years we’d attended.
An idea flashed into my head. I started laughing, catching the stern glance of our choir director, Mr. Hammons. Sotto voce, I mouthed to Lizzie, “They’ve got cheerleaders at every game. That must be some consolation. And I bet it’s easier to get asked out by the players if you’re bouncing around in one of those short skirts.”
“You want us to wear mini-skirts and dance in the audience?” Not being part of the social crowd, we prided ourselves on making fun of what we saw as the debasing behaviour of even the smartest girls in our class, when it came to getting boys’ attention.
The next day I went to room 338 about ten minutes before the home room bell rang. Miss Foley she greeted me warmly. Glancing over her cat-eye glasses, her smile mellowed out the pock marks on her cheeks.
“Well, Janie, you lost?” she chortled.
“Miss Foley, you coach the debate team, right?”
“Yes…”
“Lizzie Upton and I, we were thinking, they could use some cheerleaders. They’re going to do well this year, right?”
“If we can get by Country Day, then, yes, they should win the regional and have a good shot at the State in Columbus.”
“Well, we’d like to help them out somehow. For starters, I’m on the features’ staff at the Chatterbox – I can get a good article published in it, talking about their upcoming tournaments.”
“That’d be great. I expect you’ll want to see them in action? There’s the Public High School League round robin at Hughes after the break.”
A month later on a cold January Saturday morning, there we were. I’d never seen a debate tournament before. An easel at the entrance featured a flood of forensic categories, such as thespian, oratory, declamation, humorous, and extemporaneous speaking. But we were there to see Beto and Mike.
Bobby Buchannon lived one street south of us. Bobby – Beto, his friends called him – was president of the Student Council, captain of the swimming team, and a National Merit Finalist. Smart, good-looking, and popular to boot. Everybody loved Beto.
But it was Michael I was there for. Mike, the boy in my French class, the one whose hands entranced me. I’d told Miss Foley we wanted to be incognito, sort of like restaurant critics, so they wouldn’t feel any performance anxiety. We tucked ourselves into the back of the room, hiding behind the judges and coaches filling the front row. Mike went first, giving a tight ten minute argument in favor of controlling nuclear weapons through a treaty among the five major powers. He had it memorized and well-rehearsed; it seemed that every hand gesture, hesitation and side-step was planned in advance for maximum effect.
Three things struck me about that performance. First, his voice. In French class, struggling with diphthongs, he sounded a little reedy, even cracking now and then as befitted a late-blooming teen-ager. On stage, he held his audience with a deep-throated baritone, smooth and confident. Second, his clothes. He and Beto made quite the dapper pair, with their sport coats and neatly pressed slacks. Beto’s were dark corduroy, while Mike had a smooth blue wool coat and pants to match. They wore starched white button down shirts. Most striking were their ties. The British Invasion had unleashed a Beau Brummell aesthetic, evidenced by their freely flapping paisleys. Darker blue than his coat, Mike’s featured eye-catching ameboid shapes. Their opponents looked like ragged street waifs in comparison. Michael walked back and forth, sometimes stopping to look directly at the judges when he wanted to emphasize a point. He kept returning to a lectern sitting by itself in the middle of the classroom desk. Every now and then, he pulled a little note card off it, snapping the 4 x 6 smartly or tapping it gently as he built his argument. Then, when his ten minutes ended, he folded the slanted top of the lectern, closing the contraption with a flourish using a small handle which screwed the whole thing shut, then served as the grip to carry it back to his seat.
Ten minutes later, after the first negative speaker gave his response to Mike’s soliloquy, Beto got up as the “second affirmative”. He gave me a twinkly-eyed smile, kind of an Elvis thing on the right side of his mouth. I panicked, met his eyes, shook my head, and put a finger to my mouth, miming “Shhh.” He gave a slight nod like he understood, and then proceeded to totally bury the other side’s rebuttals, using more 4×6 cards filled with quotes from newspapers and magazines to buttress his arguments. There was another half hour to go, but it was obvious the other team was over-matched, so Lizzie and I started exchanging notes.
“Did you see those ties?”
“And the box. I love it!”
“They are polished!”
We sat quietly while the head judge gave the critique and final score, Avondale in a rout. After everyone had filed out, we headed down the hall to watch some of the other AHS debaters, so I could in good conscience write a summary piece for the school paper. But I couldn’t get Michael Harrison out of my mind. At first glance, he seemed a bit of a nebbish. But watching him command that first affirmative slot, hearing his voice, seeing that tie, and the home-made lectern box, I noticed a subtle feeling right below my ribs. Almost like being in a scary movie. I knew I had to find a way into his hidden core.
ii
Mid-afternoon, after they’d walked off the stage with the first place trophy, Mike headed directly to his car for the drive home. Beto came back to us and said, “Hi, guys, what’s up?”
I volunteered, “I’m writing a story about you for next week’s Chatterbox. So we needed to see for ourselves, not rely on Miss Foley’s report. Impressive…You and Mike know your stuff.”
“Yeah, he’s a lot smarter than he looks, isn’t he?”
Lizzie piped up as I vainly tried to shush her, “Janie wants to know how to get him to pay attention to her.”
My dark Semitic face doesn’t blush easily, but I could feel the space below my neck warming up. I always kept the top button of my shirts closed, and I hoped no one saw. I noticed a wet feeling under my arms.
Beto gave another impish half-smile, offering, “Why don’t I drive you home, we can talk about that.” He casually put his arm around me. I turned around, nodded at Lizzie to follow, giving her the facial equivalent of a shoulder shrug.
As he backed out of the parking lot, he said, “Here’s what you gotta know about Mike: it takes a long time for him to let people in. But once he does, he’s totally comfortable, and cool, and funny. As well as being the smartest guy I know. Smart meaning he can take an idea, see right through to its center, then talk about it in a way that’s easy to understand.”
Lizzie piped up, “Does he ever go out on dates? Talk about girls?”
I glared at her.
Beto let out a single chortle. “Not as far as I can tell. He sure doesn’t say anything about it if he does, not like other guys do, you know?”
Well, that was encouraging. At least the part about his analytic brain. He might be a tough nut to crack, but worth the effort. Beto dropped us off, and Lizzie and I went into the kitchen, to help Mom get the Saturday night dinner ready.
A geode someone had bought on a trip to the Southwest sat on the counter. While Lizzie chopped vegetables, and Mom shredded potatoes and onions for the latkes, I picked up the heavy grey rock, turned it over, and stared inside for a long time. The outer shell was encrusted, as if layered with barnacles. Next came a white seam, looking soft as snow, glittering in the afternoon light. Finally, pale blue crystals jutted into the hollow core, pure and luminescent. At once, I knew the way into Michael Harrison’s secret center.
“Lizzie! We could be their timekeepers!” My mother, deep into chicken fat, couldn’t hide her interest, though her eyes never left the stove. I turned to her. “Mom, where’s that bolt of paisley fabric Lisa had to make her prom dress last year?” My sister, the clown, thought it would be funny to go to a dance in a hand-made outfit all covered with funny blotches. She was puzzling over the sewing machine one day when Mom ended that potential fiasco, and hauled her immediately to Pogue’s department store for a proper prom formal.
“Sweetie, I think it’s there in the den, behind your father’s chair, still all folded up…Say! I bet that’s where my pinking shears went. If you find them, let me know. What do you want it for, anyway?”
“Bobby asked me to the prom, and I want to make a dress he’ll be proud to show off.” Mom knew this was totally a joke; Beto and Bev Hanson, the coolest girl in our class, had been pinned for months now. Distracted, she forget to ask what I really wanted it for.
iii
Next Tuesday, we showed up at Miss Foley’s apartment, soon after debate practice started. “There’s a couple of girls here who’ve got something they want to ask you,” she announced, turning around to face the guys as we shadowed behind her. Miss Foley, known as a stickler in class, had a very informal attitude with the debate team. She half-smiled as she went on. “Is that OK?”
Mike sat at the kitchen table, leaning over to make a point with Marc and Kit, the junior-varsity debate team. He turned and started to get up, asking, “Who’s there?”
“Let’s see, Lizabeth Upton and Sarah Jane Stein,” she responded.
Mike stood there slack-jawed, face totally blank. Beto was right, he was a very slow starter when it came to anything or anyone new. I don’t remember which of us girls spoke first; Lizzie and I were joined at the hip in our little project.
“We noticed you guys have been doing so well, at the regional and state meets last year, and now at the PHSL. But nobody pays any attention.”
“You need support, like we have pep rallies for the football team.”
“So we want to be your cheerleaders.”
“What, like pompoms and chants? That won’t go over very well during a debate,” Beto noted, somewhat sardonically.
“No, we’ve got another idea. We’ve seen a couple of debates…You guys have to hold up those time cards for each other, when you should be thinking about what you’re going to say next round.” It was true. Each speaker had 10 minutes to first present arguments; then, 5 minutes for rebuttal. Going over the limit incurred a severe penalty from the judges, so instead of guessing, they timed each other with cards, counting the minutes down by 1, until the final 30 seconds, when another card flashed up.
“We could be your timekeepers,” I said. I used what I thought were my best physical assets. I ran my left hand through thick (but slightly frizzy) black hair, cut in bangs above the eyes, flowing down past my shoulders, held back with a paisley headband. True, my head is a bit large for my body, but I used every bit of that face to smile. Dark eyes, dark brows, with my best voice and diction, I felt so sure of myself.
“We made these cards to use.” We brought them out, fanning a set each, the numbers hand cut with pinking shears from paisley fabric glued to white paperboard.
Mike grabbed a set, looked at each one in turn, as if making sure all the numbers were there. He beamed, laughing when he saw the last one. Oriented horizontally, not vertically like the numbers, it read, “STOP!”
“Paisley – I guess that’s our thing, huh?” He turned to Beto, who just shrugged.
Miss Foley suggested, “Why don’t we give them a try? Mike, start your first affirmative, and Janie, you sit there” – she pointed to her couch about ten feet away from the kitchen table – “then ring this bell to start the clock.”
Mike, all business, laid his lectern next to the flower vase and coffee cup, and started to unscrew the handle. Lizzie plopped down next to me on the couch; Beto sat on the other side, smiled and patted my knee. I looked at Liz, pleading for help.
She piped up, “Where’d you get that box? How does it work?”
That’s all Mike needed. As he unscrewed the handle and lifted up the front, unfolding it to become a slanted resting place for his note card, he explained, “I made this with my father…See, on top all our articles, and underneath, we’ve got two drawers for our cards…”
“Yeah, Mike’s real proud of that, but I’ve gotta take my dog for a walk in an hour; let’s get this done,” Miss Foley said, nodding at me to start the clock.
I rang the little bell, held up the first card, “Start”, and studied Michael as he went into his spiel. I’d heard it before, and rather than follow the argument, I examined the boy as if framing him for a photograph. His face was long and goyish, smooth, like he wasn’t really shaving yet. He had full, dark eyebrows, slightly arched, which he used them to underscore and emphasize his facts. His arms were also long, fingers ending about six inches above his knees. Those hands! I couldn’t keep my eyes off them. They said as much as his words, implying a maturity of thought belying his tender visage. I felt that flutter, those jangly nerves down in my stomach again.
Beto jabbed me in the ribs. Startled, I looked over. He was tapping his watch and glaring at the cards. My reverie interrupted, I flipped to “5”, and got back to my task. The other guys – Kit and Marc, the B team, juniors prepping to take the mantle next year, and Tom, an extemporaneous speaker – had heard this all before, of course. Instead of listening, they pored over the latest Dylan record Kit had brought in, arguing for the full-length version of “Like A Rolling Stone”, instead of the shorter, A-side which had been released.
I wasn’t that into music, but my big brother, Charlie, was. He had indoctrinated me into the Gospel according to Zimmerman, our little Jewish hero from the North Country. That’s where my head was at when I flipped the last card to “Stop!”, just as Mike lowered his hands to indicate the end of his talk.
Miss Foley said, “Very good. I like the way you wove the Test Ban Treaty into it this time. I think we’ve got this where we want it. Bobby, comments?”
Beto looked thoughtful, then asserted, “No, Mike’s setting me up very well. We’re ready.”
“OK then Marc, why don’t you get up there as first negative, give Robert something to work with.”
I handed the cards to Lizzie, and followed Mike into the kitchen, where he was pouring a glass of water. Glancing my way, he raised those brows and asked, “Want some?”
Those were the first words Michael Harrison spoke to me.
iv
Beto was driving me to school that winter, after he finally got a car from his father. I viewed him as a mentor; he had the job I wanted the next year, Student Council president. While other girls got sidetracked over which boy might ask them out, and where they stood in the gossip pecking order, I tried hard to please my mother, getting elected class representative, and working on making sure my report card was all A’s. I wasn’t athletic, not at all, couldn’t even dance. Not like Lizzie, who’d taken ballet all her life, and lead the Pony Chorus dance troop in our class review, “Peanuts”.
I felt comfortable with Bobby. I’d known him since 7th grade, when we moved to Clifton, and saw him as sort of a brother, or worldly cousin. One who wasn’t Jewish, too. All that made him safe for me.
So it was easy to ask him one morning, “What more can you tell me about Mike Harrison?”
“Are you serious about this, Janie? ‘Cause you’re gonna have to do some work to get to know him.”
“Well, for starters, where does he live? How does he get to school?”
“He’s in Wilson Heights Village, or maybe Woodland Park.” This was a white-bread enclave at the very northeast corner of Cincinnati. Woodland Park, where Lizabeth lived. Why hadn’t she told me that? “He drives his mom to work every day, then comes and parks on the front drive. She’s getting her Ph.D. in psychology at UC. He says she got a Master’s at Radcliffe, right after the war.”
Radcliffe. That was number one on the list I’d made with the school counselor, Miss Mkrtchian. A crusty old lady, she decided long ago that women did not get a good deal in life, especially when it came to college. She’d find the “top” girls in each class, guiding them towards somewhere other than the kitchen or the nursery. Every year, she picked her five pets, calling them the Senior Girls’ Council, euphemistically known as her Five Fingers. It was a honor equal to cum laude or Quill and Scroll. When I’d met with her to talk about college applications, she sent me signals I would be one of the chosen. Which made sense, as I was on my way to being valedictorian. She said, “You know Janie, that half of all ‘Cliffies are either first or second in their high school class.”
His mother going to Radcliffe, and in Psychology at that, added to the intrigue. I had to find a way to him, to learn more about him and find out what that wrenching flutter inside was all about.
As we pulled into the football field lot – only seniors at the top of the social order dared park there – I asked Beto, “What about college? Do you know where he’s applied?”
Beto gave me his serious look, a downward nod as if peaking over reading glasses. “Oh, he’s already in. John Calvin U, early decision. Found out last year. He doesn’t have to worry about a thing.” Beto’s first choice was another one of the Little Three, Williams, so that made sense. The two paired up so well, intellectually at least. They weren’t friends, but they could at least hold their own with each other.
As we walked by the gym towards the back entrance under the dome, Beto continued, “Are you two serious about this timekeeper thing? We’ve got the Regionals coming up in two weeks.”
“We’ll be there. Lizzie’s got some dance recital that night, but you’re done by three or so, right?”