viii
The next Wednesday after dinner, Lisa yelled up the stairs while I was finishing my Math homework. “Janie!! Phone!”
I opened the door and padded down to pick up. We had two phones, one at the base of the stairs near the den and living room, one in the middle of the hall upstairs where the bedrooms were. Neither had a long cord, so all conversations were in earshot of anyone who cared to listen.
“Hello?”
“Um, Janie? It’s Mike.” His voice cracked a little on my name. Only four words, but he sounded nervous.
He went on. “Can we go out and see a movie this Friday?”
Not “Will you?”, or “Do you want to go with me?”, but “Can we?” I don’t know why, but I took that as a happy sign. He was thinking of us together, like we ought to be going out. I responded without thinking, a shot of pure feeling as I said, “Sure! What do you wanna see?”
“What’s playing at the Esquire there?”
“It’s ‘A Thousand Clowns’. Have you seen that?” It had come out this past Christmas. It was so popular with the college kids, the Esquire had brought it back. “It’s the best movie. My sister now rates any movie by the number of clowns. Like, ‘That one was only 600 clowns’.”
“Well, OK,” he ventured, sounding hesitant.
“I really think you’ll like it. It’s funny.”
When he came over on Saturday afternoon, I showed him my room. The bedspread was white, with a border of little red flowers, kind of quilted. I’d had it since grade school. A built-in bookcase lined the entire wall below windows which looked out on the backyard. I’d cleared off my usually messy desk, filled with school work, by throwing all that into the closet. He sat on the desk chair, wooden with curving armrests, painted shiny white.
I stood by the window, pointing out past the yard. “See, Bobby’s house is right there.”
Mike did not look up, fascinated by the little tchotchkes still lined up along the back of my desk. A tiny bell, sans ringer. A well-worn dreidel. A picture of my infant niece. A random hair band, red with small green circles. I worried, Could he be using them to fill in the blanks he saw in me?
Lisa rambled around somewhere down the hall. Just then my mom came back from the cleaners.
“Girls, I have those skirts you wanted for tonight!” She came up and peeked through my open door. Mike got up, fumbling the dreidel. Quickly I said, “Mom, this is Michael, Mike Harrison.”
She put on her smoothest smile, nodded slightly, and, setting the skirt, hidden in its tissue paper, on the bed, said, “Hello, Michael.” I watched her eyes intently, wondering what she thought. She turned to me, and asked, “So, this is the boy you’ve been telling us about. Where are you two off to?”
“We’re going to see A Thousand Clowns, at the Esquire, get something to eat after.”
“Oh, you’ll love it, I’m sure,” she said to Mike. “Lisa, she’s the family movie critic, won’t shut up about it. Have fun, kids!” She breezed out of the room, to drop off the other skirt with my sister.
Once she’d left, I urged, “Why don’t you go downstairs, hang out a minute while I change? Don’t worry about my mother, she’s always friendly, I know she’ll like you.” Or at least pretend to, if she doesn’t, I thought to myself.
We walked down Clifton towards the theater, the leaves above unfolding into green. As sun filtered through the branches, the soft evening light made everything floating, buoyant. I thought about the movie, the story of a brainy New York kid, Nick, and his uncle, Murray, also smart, but a non-conformist who can’t hold a job. Nick’s mother, Murray’s sister, went out for cigarettes one day, and never came back, leaving her son in Murray’s care. Nick is the sane, stable member of the pair. Murray falls in love with a social worker – Sandra Markowitz – who comes around to assess the home environment, and threatens to take the boy away.
Watching a second time, I could burrow into it for new insights. Sure, I identified with the brainy kid, but he was only 13. I felt myself starting to understand and identify more with the flustered paper-dropping messy-haired Jewish child-care professional who finds herself wrapped around the little finger of the odd gentile guy.
Afterwards, we strolled into Skyline Chili. I had a Coke, Mike, a hot dog. As we sat across from each other in the harsh fluorescent light, I started fidgeting with my hands, a habit my mother had failed to break. I nervously twirled the little silver ring on my right hand. I didn’t wear much jewelry, ever, but this was something I’d bought a year ago with Lizzie, when we went through a phase of trying to look more like regular girls.
“What’s that?” he asked innocently.
“Want to see it?” I slipped it off and handed it to him. He turned it over between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, and then slipped it on the little finger on his right – that beautiful right hand!
“Look, it fits!” he announced, surprised. “I like it there. It feels good, having a ring. Never worn one before.”
“You want it?” I ventured. I thought we were having a simple little conversation, not one fraught with any meaning. “I don’t really wear jewelry.”
“Mmm, neither do I.” He took it off, cradling it in his hand. “Can I keep this?”
I didn’t know what that meant. The social girls, the ones in a sorority, exchanged pins with boys in the fraternities, so everyone would know they were going together. I didn’t want him to think I was one of them, so I tried to act blasé. Casually, I said, “Sure, I don’t wear it that much.” In truth, I had worn it everyday since Lizzie and I bought it. That ring had come to mean our friendship to me; with it, I knew I would always have someone I could feel comfortable with, someone who saw the world as I did.
On the way back home, I asked,“What did you think, about Murray and Nick and all?
“Nick was cool, almost like he was the adult, and Murray the child. I’d like to be as free as Jason Robards” – the actor who played Murray – “but I’m too focused. I’ll always be a frustrated underachiever. You know – that straight path towards college, and after.”
“What do you mean?”
He struggled with his next thought, as if divulging a secret he’d promised to keep. “Um, I want to be a doctor…”
“How…when…did you decide that?”
“See, one afternoon, last year, I was sitting on the diving board at our pool, looking in the water. It was spring. I thought I should decide ‘what I want to be when I grow up’. My mother’d always told me, ‘you can do anything you want.’ I believed her, ‘cause she’d given me a lot of tests when I was a kid, and told me I had an IQ of 138 or 140 or something, so I was smart enough to pick and choose. I thought about a lot of things, minister, engineer like my dad, teacher, writer maybe, but I realized I wanted a direct connection with people, go right to their primary core. What’s more important to someone than their body? It’s really all we are, right? Besides, doctors get a lot of respect in society. And they don’t ever have to worry about money, I figured.”
“What kind of doctor?”
“Don’t laugh, but I want to be a psychiatrist.”
“Why”
“I’m fascinated by why people do things, how they get along with other people, stuff like that. But it’s kids I really like. So a child psychiatrist.”
Cars occasionally rumbled by on our right, glistening under the street lamps. The asphalt sidewalk cracked with bumps and heaves from the roots of the old elm and oak trees crowding in on our left. I looked down, making sure I didn’t trip. I looked over; he was staring back, warm eyes and hopeful gaze. I felt an eerie shudder. My secret dream was to work with kids, to be a child psychologist. Ever since I’d spent a summer on the Vineyard with some younger cousins, when I was 14, I’d thought about working with kids. Under ten, they’re still so pure, so eager to be molded, so untouched by all the seeking and yearning we get as we grow up.
He took my right hand with his left – he was walking on the side facing traffic, such a gentleman. I felt his forearm brush mine, and couldn’t wait to get back home, home base where I’d be safe. He dropped my hand as we walked up the brick path to the door. I stopped, turned around, and looked up. All I saw were my own eyes, reflected back in his glasses, and wasn’t quite ready when he leaned forward, tilted his head, and touched his lips to mine. I liked it instantly, reaching up behind his neck and pulling him in while he tucked his right hand in the small of my back. He stroked my hair, we eased apart, caught each others’ eyes and smiles, and went back in for another try. It felt good. As I floated through the door, I thought, “I hope he hadn’t lost the ring anywhere.”
ix
Maybe I played Spin The Bottle when I was 11 or 12; maybe a pudgy boy with curly hair, a goofy smile and wrinkly nose pecked me on the cheek one night. I don’t know. If that happened, it so embarrassed me I never went to another boy-girl party. I rededicated myself to being the smartest kid in class. I hid my fears by always dressing nicely, kept my hair shiny and clean, scrubbed my face every day, polished my shoes, never letting anyone know that, inside, I didn’t feel like everyone else, scared a boy would take me from myself, would steal my soul and leave me weepy and limp and longing for love. I hid all that behind a suave, sophisticated demeanor, always ready to laugh, always ready to be the first to say something sharp, to be the girl who was more cultured than the rest, who’d been to New York City and who knew about Broadway and books and foreign movies.
But my facade had cracked. That weekend my thoughts whipsawed wildly. I could study for an hour, then I’d wonder why Mike had kissed me. And why I’d kissed him. Did that mean we were in love? Did that mean he was supposed to call me, and I should feel bad he hadn’t? Did that mean I should call him? I got so lost in daydreams, I almost didn’t hear Mom when she knocked on the door, asking quietly, “Janie? Honey? Are you OK? I’ve got lunch downstairs.” In the Stein household, meals were sacred, not eating the greatest sin.
“I’m OK. I’ll be right there. Just finishing up this history paper…”
There’s no way I could tell her about Mike, all my gyrating thoughts. Sure, he wanted to be a doctor, and that would be a big plus. But what would happen when she learned that not three years earlier, he’d been singing in the choir at All Saints’ Episcopal church? And she’d pry and prod to find out why I’d come back so late last week, or where we’d gone last night, or why my cheeks were a little streaked with tears. My mom was not a harridan; she was much more subtle in extracting the truth about her daughter’s social life. She used hugs and love, not guilt. I was her youngest, and no matter how mature and stable I pretended to be, I still felt like a little girl in her arms. I did not want to go there, because then I felt I’d never get to be in Michael’s embrace again.
My mood soared Sunday night when he called. Downstairs, reading for fun, not school, I got to the phone first, thank goodness.
“Janie? Janie…” Poor Mike, such a mixture of innocence and self-possession. I never knew which face he’d be wearing. “I’ve been thinking about you …about us…all weekend. I’ve got to see you, got to talk to you again. When can we do that?”
“Can’t we just say ‘Hi’ in school. We are in third period together, you know.”
“No, no, school’s too…I don’t know, there’s so many other people around. Can we go out again? Next weekend?”
Saturday night, we went downtown, to a real restaurant and a real movie theatre, what felt to me like a real date. Afterwards, we tried kissing again on the doorstop. This time, we knew what we were doing. We hung on a little longer, using both arms, our hands this time to explore each other. He came inside afterwards. We sat down on the couch, looking at each other, holding hands. I knew my mom and dad were still up, my dad reading and smoking in the den behind the glass-paneled French doors, partially hidden by the grand piano we’d bought for Charlie when he started showing some talent. Mom breezed in, her usual open smile broadening a bit when she saw us. She almost sat on the comfy chair next to us, the leather one with dark red fabric draped over the arms. She thought better of it, standing while she gently grilled Michael. He dropped my hand when she asked, “Janie says you’re going to John Calvin next fall?”
I was amazed at the tone Mike took on when he answered, “Yes, I fell in love with it there when I visited last October. The trees were turning, all the buildings still covered with that green ivy, the kids all seemed so busy and so…focused. Then I got interviewed by the admissions director, and felt at home right away.”
“But it’s so small. Don’t you want to go to a bigger school?”
“No… no, I learn best when I’m with a small group. The professors there, they actually teach the classes, you know, they don’t leave it to assistants or grad students. A few years ago, they sold their publishing house to IBM, and with that stock their endowment is getting bigger. That means higher salaries for good professors, more resources for student life, new buildings.” This was another side of Mike I hadn’t seen yet, an ambitious, almost adult view of things. My mother teased it out of him in less than a minute.
“And what do you intend to study when you get there?”
“Pre-med. But I have a lot of credits already, from AP classes, so I can take classes in things I want to learn about, like literature, philosophy, psychology.” I knew Mom was judging the qualities she valued most, drive, respect for academic work, stability. I hoped he passed the test.
“OK, then, you two stay quiet down here. If you watch TV, keep it low. I’m going to go get dad up to bed.” She knocked on the French doors of the den, crooked her finger, and pointed up stairs. That left us on the couch, with very clear instructions: You’ve got freedom, as long as you follow the rules. The problem was, I didn’t know what they were.
Once they’d gone upstairs, Mike snuggled a little closer. His left hand found both of mine, lying limp in my lap. He draped his right around my shoulder. He gave a little tug, and I dropped my head, resting it against his chest. I felt safe, protected there, against what I did not know.
x
School entered its annual climax in late April. Theater kids struggled to complete rehearsals for the annual play. The Avon Follies (featuring Lizzie in the dance line, of course) competed with them for practice time on the auditorium stage. Elections were held for next year’s Student Council. I lost my nerve to run for President; no girl had ever won, and I was so afraid of failure. I opted for Secretary instead, getting that spot with ease. Miss Mkrtchian asked the current Five Fingers to nominate the next year’s Senior Girls’ Council, and I got on as promised, Lizzie too. Miss M. told me, “Sarah Jane, you know you’ll be my Thumb.”
Spring final exams were coming up. Finals counted as much in our cumulative grade tallies as a “marking period”, of which there were six in a year. I could not afford to let up now, if I wanted to get the top spot. I had to ace them all. So I spent most nights and weekends reading, writing, making note cards, and thinking, worrying.
But also dreaming. Michael Harrison had my ring, he had kissed me, and he wanted me to come over to his house. He said he had some poems he’d been writing that he wanted to show me.
“Bring your swim suit. My father hooked up a heating system to the pool, it’s warm enough to go in now.”
Mike’s house snuggled in a little neighborhood, a mile from a street lined with one story buildings like a dime store, a drug store, a little clothing shop, not very cosmopolitan at all. Two stories, brick, surrounded by trees bursting with new leaves, the Harrisons’ place looked like a doll house someone had designed to be a southern colonial mansion. Friendly, but not stately, like the homes in Clifton.
Mike took me up to his room, which had a view out back not only to their pool, but across a valley wild with brush. “I can see all the way over to Section Road,” he said proudly.
“Why aren’t there any houses down there?” I asked, pointing to the little five acre-wood behind the diving board.
“That’s where we’d go to play as kids. Hide-’n-seek, war, tag, just run around.” Then, “There’s something I want to read to you…” He grabbed a pile of paper off his desk. The entire room appeared to be all hand made. The bed – actually a bunk bed – had a prow on front, like a little ship, complete with a wooden ladder to the top. A small bookcase filled the narrow wall beneath a window which looked out onto the garage roof. The entire wall opposite the bed was taken up by a desk and dresser combination.
“All the furniture looks…like, not from a store?”
“Yeah, my father made all this. He’s got a workshop downstairs, in the basement. Saw, drill, sanders, paint, everything. He loves to tinker. That’s why we can go swimming now, if we want.” Pointing out the window, he went on, “There, see that patch in the sidewalk down there? He had to dig that up to put in a pipe from the heater in the basement, so he could run the pool water through to warm it up.”
The pool itself looked sort of funny. I couldn’t put my finger on it. “Did he make the pool, too?”
“No, but he got it done as cheaply as he could. First, they dug up a hole, put the dirt on top of the yard. Then, they mashed sand down onto the bottom, shaped it like the bottom of a pool, with a deep end under the diving board and all. Put in concrete walls for the sides, and then dropped in a giant plastic thing instead of paint or cement. Filled it with water, that keeps the sand in place, I guess.”
All that would be fascinating, I guess, for some people. I only cared about the promised poetry, and looked down at the papers in his hand, covered with words I hoped he’d meant for me. I pointed, “Um…those the poems you wanted to…?”
He looked at the sheets covered with hand-written scribbles, as if seeing them for the first time. His face flushed, but he went on. “I don’t know; last December, I started writing this stuff, I don’t know where it came from. In February, it started coming out more and more.”
“Can I see?”
“Well, I don’t know if you can read them, I can barely make it out myself. Last year, when I was in AP American history” – Mike had been one of the few juniors allowed to take Advanced Placement classes- “taking a lot of notes from Mr. Melman, I found I couldn’t read my own handwriting. That’s when I started printing all my notes. But looking at this stuff, I see when I’ve got something that has to come out quick, I forget about the printing, and start that terrible scribbling. I got a “D” in hand-writing when I was in third grade.”
“And yet they skipped you ahead! Well, at least you’ll make a good doctor. Aren’t they supposed to have indecipherable writing?” We both smiled.
“It’s like someone else is putting the words together, I’m just the one holding the pen. I feel something, and then I see it on the paper. When I read it, it’s like I’m hearing it for the first time.”
“You’re stalling. Come on,” I urged, pulling at the motley collection in his hands, “let me have them.”
I sat down on the bed, hunching a little so I didn’t hit the upper bunk. There were white pages, green pages, lined and unlined pages, some three-hole punched, like from a school notebook, others with little ripped edges like he’d pulled them from a spiral notebook. Blue ink, black ink, pencil.
“I don’t know if I’m ready to yet.”
Exasperated, I almost shouted, “You bring me all the way out here, show me all that stuff, and now you’re not sure?”
He bit his lower lip, looking away towards the garage window. He seemed to decide. “Um, I can show you one or two now. But I want to type them up, clean them up, make them readable, make sure all the words are right. Then I could send them to you, you can look at them without me hovering around?”
“OK, one or two now, then, but you better let me see them by my birthday.”
“When’s that? I know it’s this month but I forgot.”
“The twenty-fifth.”
He rifled through the stack, and pulled out a couple from near the top. The first started out “#2 Middle February, 1966 (From ‘Yesterday’, Lennon-McCartney)” I did a quick mental calculation: that would have been about when Lizzie and I showed up with our time cards at Miss Foley’s. Instead of the sad lament of someone who’s lost his love, this one started, “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so near at hand/But now I’ve found someone who understands./I don’t need a yesterday.”
The other was “#22 May 6, 1966. 11:00 A.M.”, reading like a failed attempt at haiku: “No words escape the lips I long to own, Only Smiles, meaning what I do not know.”
Reluctantly, I handed them back. “OK, mister, I expect the rest as my birthday present.” Then, remembering, I asked, “What about my ring? You never gave that back to me.”
Smiling shyly, he raised his right hand, my slender silver band almost hidden at the base of the little finger.
“So you didn’t lose it.” I offered softly.
“No, never.” His neck flushed; his lips, pursed together, seemed to stammer a bit. “You know, I really like you, like being with you, like talking with you. This ring, your ring, it makes that real, it keeps you close to me. I don’t know, I feel…”
We both stood up, entwined our fingers down below our hips, and pulled each other close. Standing there, I stared out at the pool, imagining it drained, empty, then refilled with newer, fresher water.
xi
Two days after my 17th birthday, Mike and I went out Friday night to another Hollywood movie at the downtown RKO Palace theater. I wanted to see “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.” It starred Theodore Bikel, whom I’d seen on Broadway in The Sound of Music with Mary Martin. In it, a Russian submarine runs aground on “a New England island,” supposedly off the coast of Massachusetts. I wanted to see if they’d actually filmed it on Martha’s Vineyard.
While we ate at the Terrace Hilton cafeteria afterwards, I groused, “There’s no way that was a ‘New England island’. Did you see the trees? And the dunes? Nothing at all like the Vineyard.”
Sagely, Mike pointed out, “At the end, I saw the credits; it said ‘Thanks to Mendocino County Film Bureau’ or something.”
“Mendocino?”
“Yeah, that’s in California.”
“California! Hollywood,” I grumbled. “They never get the East Coast right. Too much sun. I can’t wait until we go back to the Vineyard, to the real New England.”
Mike raised his eyebrows in the middle, looking a little startled. “Going back? When? How long?”
“What, you forgot? I told you, right after school is over. We’ll probably be there until the end of July. Remember, I said Charlie’s coming with his wife and daughter for the whole month?”
“End of July…” Mike said, under his breath, almost to himself. He pulled something out of his sport coat inside pocket and handed it to me. “Here, I wrote this for you.”
I extracted and unfolded a shiny piece of onion-skin paper from the unsealed envelope. Typed this time.
TO JANIE, ON HER SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY
So.
You’re seventeen.
It doesn’t seem right,
Somehow;
For you to be seventeen,
I mean.
But it’s not the day that advances your age;
Everyone knows it’ll come with the sun,
In the summer:
You’ll be seventeen,
At last.
For you’ll have grown,
And I’ll have grown;
We’ll have grown
Apart.
xii
The first two weeks of June, Mike and I only got together once, on the Saturday before the end of school. He picked me up, and we drove to his house. His mother, whom I hadn’t met yet, came to the front door when she heard the car pull up. She grabbed my hand with both of hers, smiling as if with relief. “Janie? We’re glad you’re here.” She guided me into their small den as Mike raced upstairs, mumbling, “I’ve got to get my final paper for American History finished, Can you give me a few minutes while I type it out? It’s all done, but I’ve got another due for English tomorrow, so…”
I asked his mom, “Is this the room Mike sprayed Reddi-Whip all over?” He’d told me the first night his parents had gone out for the evening and left him and his sister alone, he emptied a whole can of pressurized whipped cream on the wallpaper of their den, trying to write something or other for his parents to see when they got back. They’d had to strip the paper off the walls, and paint the room to cover the stains.
She smiled forlornly, looking a little downcast. “Well, he’s always had his own mind. We didn’t like that, not at all. It was a big expense, but how do you get kids to grow up when they seem to want to raise themselves?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I studied her. Wavy, thick, black hair, short, but not frizzy like mine. Black glasses, white around the edges; dark eyes, firm cheeks and chin; trim, about my height. She walked with authority. Sitting down, she kept her back straight, her head turned expectantly towards me.
“Mike says he drives you to Rollman every day before he goes to school.”
“Yes, I’m doing the research for my dissertation there, to finish my Ph.D. in psychology at UC. I also do a little clinical training, that’s part of the doctoral program as well.” She paused, collecting her thoughts. “It’s taken me 10 years, since I started school again. I wanted to wait until the kids could take care of themselves after school. With Mike, that seemed to come earlier than his sister. By the time he was 7, after first grade, he was so independent, didn’t seem to want me around that much anyway.”
“How…um, why did you get interested in psychology?”
“I grew up on a farm, in Iowa. My father was a physician, but after he contracted tuberculosis, he wanted someplace that might be healthier than Massachusetts. He wasn’t a very good farmer, though, and it made him a little bit angry. Also, he was disappointed not having a son. My sister is older, so when I came along, he was all ready with boys’ names, but none for a girl, and he never let me forget that. He never made me act like a boy or anything, but he didn’t treat me, or my sister, with the respect I saw him give even the farm hands. My mother, it was the same thing. We, the three of us, talked about that a lot when he wasn’t around, about what made men act like they could lord it over women, that we couldn’t grow up, say, to be a doctor like he was. That’s what made me start wondering about why people do what they do, and about how to help people change themselves.”
This woman was not like the other moms I knew growing up. I got the sense she was proud of her son, and cared about where he was going in life, that he be a success in his life. But she also had an ambitious plan for her life, apart from her husband and her children.
“So how did you finally become a psychologist?”
“I went off to college at the state university in Iowa, and majored in Psychology. It was the depression, and I had to have money, so I went back to Omaha, across the river from where I grew up, and got a job in a bank. I met Mike’s father there, and then the war came. We got married right away. I can’t remember if it was because he went to the Naval Academy for two years before his eyes went bad, or his age, or his work as an engineer, but he didn’t have to serve. Instead, we went to Boston, to Lynn, where General Electric was starting to build jet engines in a factory there. Women were working those days, too, everybody had to work, and I got a job in a lab at Harvard where they were studying how the brain reacts to sounds, to try and prevent concussive injuries from all the bombs. The Harvard Acoustics Lab, they called it. The head man there saw my interest in psychology and suggested I enroll for a Master’s. Of course, women couldn’t get into Harvard, but you know about Radcliffe, don’t you? I was one of the first to be a graduate student at Harvard through their women’s college. I finished in 1946, and wanted to go on for a doctorate. But, kids came along, we moved here when GE built a new plant, so I had to wait ten years to start up again.”
I wanted to hear more. She had such a clear sense of who she was, a strong will, someone who would not give up, ever. But Mike came down, saying, “OK, done. Come on, let’s go.” He didn’t acknowledge his mother as he breezed through the kitchen to the garage.
Sternly, she called after him, “When are you going to be back, Michael?” He rolled his eyes, sighed through his nose and said, “Don’t worry about me. ” A couple of beats later, he begrudgingly added, “We’re gonna go to that new place, Tri-County. I’ll be back this evening.”
In the car, we headed north towards a new shopping mall by the interchange of I-75 and 275. As we started towards the expressway entrance, the light turned yellow. Mike slammed on the brakes and flung his right hand out across my chest. I was flying forward with some force, but he saved me from hitting the unpadded dashboard. As we waited for the light to turn green, I hauled up the seat belt, which was lying on the floor by the door, and pulled it over to buckle into its slot.
“That’s what my mother would always do to us kids when we were riding in the front seat. I guess it’s an unconscious habit.”
“Mine too.” I remembered my conversation with his mother. “Your mom talked to me a bit while you were upstairs. She’s …impressive. I don’t really understand what it must be like, for women, I mean, trying to get a doctorate. I keep getting told that the reason somebody like me goes to a girls’ school, a good one like Radcliffe or Mt. Holyoke or Smith, is so we can provide an enriching home environment for our family, to make sure the kids do as well as they can growing up. That feels pretty confining, limiting, to me. I love how your mother doesn’t want to fit that mold.”
“Hmmm…never thought about that. My mother’s always been that way. She’s not normal, you mean?”
I laughed drily, finally getting the seat belt clamped together. I brushed my skirt off. “You have no idea. It’s easy for you, being a boy. No one ever tells you stuff like that. You don’t have to think about what might happen if you get pregnant, or if you get married and your husband wants to live somewhere you don’t. Like, my mother, she says when they left the family business in Cleveland, she tried to get my dad to go to New York, where she could at least see all the museums and go to plays and things, even if she had to raise four kids. She says he never wanted to talk about it, just laughed at her. And your mother…I wonder how she felt, leaving Boston. She probably wanted to keep going to school there, but she had no choice, did she, when you father left for here?”
“I don’t know. I’m kinda lucky that way. I mean, I’ve been involved in sports a little bit, swimming and ice skating. They both seem to be pretty equal between men and women, not like the big ones, baseball and football. There’s only softball for girls, and no football at all. But in ice skating, they both do the same events, same in swimming.” He paused, slowing the car, and scanned around as if lost. “That reminds me. I think this is the spot where I had that car accident last summer. I was driving three girls, they were like 15, to a meet in Columbus.”
“What happened?”
“This was still under construction then. I didn’t pay attention to the signs to slow down. It was raining, wet. We spun around, slammed sideways into some metal barrier. The police came, said the car was OK, called my dad. He asked if I could still drive. I said, ‘Yes’, so he told me to keep on going. But I’m thinking – those girls never would talk about the kind of stuff you do.”
“What did they talk about?” I asked, interested in how other girls might treat him.
“Well, after worrying about their swimming and whether they would get new suits for the meet, they started laughing about all the other boys on the team, except for one guy they thought was ‘cute’. Then it was making catty comments about the girls they knew, and the boys they went out with. They laughed at me when I didn’t follow along. Called me ‘too serious’.”
We pulled off the highway, and headed for the mall’s brand new parking lot, asphalt still shiny and slick with tar. As we walked toward the entrance, he stopped, and looked at me, in that serious way of his. He said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do, when you’re gone. I really, really like being with you, talking with you. I’m afraid you’ll forget me, find somebody there who’s more fun, then come back and we’ll never see each other again.”
We stood there in the rising June sun. I wanted to grab his hands, pull him towards me, hug him. But with all the people around, that didn’t feel right. I looked down at my shoes, then, smiling, back up at him. “You can write. We can write. Letters. I’ll tell you what I’m doing, you tell me about everything. I’m not going to forget you, Michael Harrison. Not now, not ever.”
He pulled his lips up, then they quivered. I could see his eyes getting moist, saw a struggle there. Finally, “Janie, I…There’s something I’ve, I’ve…I think I have to say…” Quiet for a long time, me waiting. “I think I love you. Janie.”
I grabbed him, for a big, long hug, there in the parking lot in front of all those people I did not know. I didn’t have room in my thoughts for anyone but him.