xiii
A week and a half later, the mailbox outside our beach-side rental in Menemsha on the Vineyard finally held, not a letter, but a thick manilla envelope addressed to me. I’d written Mike as soon as we got there, just a short letter telling him we were all fine, about walking on the beach and finding shells, little daily small talk really. But I’d ended with a paragraph about how I thought of him every day, and missed him not being there with me, telling me things and making me laugh. I finished, “Love, Janie”, hoping he’d know I meant it.
I ripped it open right there on the sandy road, leaving the mailbox door hanging open. He’d sent all his poems, numbered 1-46, typed on that crinkly onion skin paper, each dated and timed. I started reading the first page, walking around the house down towards the beach. Under a grey sky, the air felt heavy with on-coming rain. The cover letter read, in part:
What you are about to read, if you have the courage, is a compilation of everything important I have written since December, 1965. I didn’t plan a bit of it, as I’ve told you a thousand times. My muse arrived sometime in March, and mysteriously departed at 11 AM, June 2nd, 1966, only to return more mysteriously in this introduction. There’s so many things I want to say, but no explanations of meaning will be offered for any of the pieces, because: (a) I didn’t know myself what they meant when I first wrote them; (b) the meaning keeps changing for me; and (c) it’s either there for you or it isn’t…
I hope you understand what’s behind the proffering of this gift. (I don’t.) This is an attempt (I guess) to pierce a suffocating layer of superficial profundity which surrounds all we do. I mean, look at who knows you, and those who think they do, and notice the difference between them in relation to you…Some people are so sure they know you so well, just from the surface contact they have with you. They have you all figured out, and placed where they feel you belong. Take Five Fingers, for example. How well do any of them (the seniors) or Mkrtchian know you? Not at all, really, I suppose. And yet, you’re chosen, not for the You you know you are, but for the superficial, uncomplicated You they have you figured out to be. And yet, you still got appointed, on the basis of the unreal (to you, and those who know you) You. Now take those who know you. There’s Lizzie and Leon, and me. We get to see the real You, even as it gets more mysterious and seems to fade away, But we still feel so close to the full picture. And yet the kids of Avondale have made you the queen of their school, without ever knowing (or caring) who Janie Stein is.
I looked up, and found myself at the water’s edge. I tucked all the poems back into the envelope, and slid it under my shirt. “Close to my heart”, I thought. The coming storm was whipping the Atlantic into a froth as I zig-zagged along the sand, trying to avoid the encroaching surf. A faint cry pierced over the broiling waves. On the porch, I saw Lisa cupping her hands around her mouth, and faintly heard, “Janie! Janie.”
Reluctantly, I headed back up the dune. “Charlie’s here. They’ve got Denise – She’s so cute!” My big brother, his wife Arlene and their 18-month old, Denise, must have arrived from Rhode Island. I skipped and ran the rest of the way inside, holding tight to Mike’s poems to keep them from slipping down my blouse.
Charlie was the one person I looked up to in our family. Out on his own, making a family, he lived by his own rules, not our mom’s. They lived in what he called a commune, “growing our own food, making our own clothes, raising our baby right.” As I entered, he took off his pea coat and waved around a record album, still fresh in its plastic wrap. “You guys have got to listen to this. We saw him last year in Newport, and it blew our minds. He’s not a folk singer anymore, he had this band, drums, guitars, the whole rock and roll thing. Makes his music more immediate, punchier.” He took two records out of the double sleeve, Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, checked the labels, and slipped both over the spindle of the old console player lining one wall of the living room. Arlene went off into the kitchen, but not before she handed Denise to Charlie. “Here, she’s yours for a while.”
While the toddler roamed around, finding the baby and dog toys all mixed up in a corner basket, we three plopped down facing each other, Charlie cross-legged, Lisa on both knees in her college-girl Levi’s, and me more demurely, resting on one hip with my knees in front, feet off to one side. The carpet scratched my calves below my khaki shorts. I pulled on the sweater I’d tied around my shoulders, almost getting stuck as it tried to pass the mess the wind had made of my hair. The speakers erupted with what sounded like a drunken high school marching band, followed by Dylan laughing his way through a prolonged recitation that “Everybody must get stoned.” I didn’t follow much of what he sang that morning, wishing I could put on a Barbra Streisand record instead.
Denise tottered over to me. She loved my hair, and could easily spend an hour fluffing and pulling it. I remember thinking, “I wish she knew how to braid it.” I shifted to a knees-up, legs-open position, supported her with my thighs, and smiled into her eyes as Charlie said, “Aren’t you angry about the war, Lisa? What are you doing up there in Wisconsin?
“I’m having fun, Charlie. I’ve got my choice of guys there, the ratio is like two to one. You’ve already got your family. I’m just starting to look, you know. And learn.” She winked at me as she said this.
“Really, where have you been the last five years? School, colleges, they’re just another way the culture gets you to think like them, gets you to do their work. It’s no better than television, bad for your brain. They’ve got you already, girl. Look at you. Out on the prowl for a man, then where will you be? An independent woman, or a slave to corporate greed, buying more washing machines and soap?”
Lisa laughed. She usually thought most everything was either funny or absurd. “OK, Mr. Hippie. You keep growing your own anemic vegetables, eating that macropsychotic diet or whatever it us you guys have there on the farm. I’m gonna enjoy being young while I still am.”
Exasperated, Charlie got up as the second record had finished. He flipped them over, and while Dylan moaned through some dirge about a sad-eyed lady, he turned to me as he sat back down. “What about you, Janie? What are they saying at Avondale now? About the war.”
Denise was pulling her tiny palm along my cheek, sticking her finger into the corner of my mouth. I gently tugged her hand down, turned her around, and put her on my knee. I felt more like playing at her level than having an adult conversation with my older brother. Kids are simple, I thought, they don’t ask for anything but love, and new things to learn and explore.
“I don’t want a war, but I don’t know how to stop it,” I found myself saying.
“Well, then you should come out to Iowa with us, to the SDS convention. They’re gonna talk about, plan how to get more demonstrations on campus, like in Michigan last year. Shut things down until we stop the war, and all the other stuff those clowns are using to keep us in our place. They use us, the folks in charge. They don’t care about people, only lining their own pockets, and holding on to their power.” Charlie was getting worked up. I was looking at Denise, marveling at how none of this meant anything to her. “Janie, are you listening?”
I thought about Mike going away to Calvin, about me staying in Cincinnati another year, working away at getting all A’s, at the SATs I’d have to take, applying to colleges, finally a senior, after six years of being the good girl, the one who didn’t make waves, who followed the rules.
“Let me get into a good school first, then I can think about saving the world. You’re older, you’ve already gone to Brown, you’ve got a wife and a kid, you’re ready. I don’t know, Charlie, I just don’t know.”
Dylan was singing more softly now, a slower, more melodic tune. With a slow cadence, something about “she aches, just like a woman, but she breaks just like a little girl.”
Charlie sighed, with a touch of menace, and came over to pick up Denise. “Come on, little one, let’s go out and see the water.” She squealed, kicking her legs as he raised her up, up, and over his head. He gave her a little toss. She howled, and then laughed as she fell into his arms and he hugged her to his chest.
After the screen door slammed shut, Lisa turned to me, saying, “You just need to get laid, sister.”
xiv
Mornings are chilly in Menemsha, near the sea. A sweater, my summer shorts, and knee-high socks sometimes weren’t enough protection against the fog floating in off the Gulf stream. Every day, I’d walk down to the water’s edge, and search for flotsam kicked up by the generous ocean over night. After the sun burned through, sometimes by ten, sometimes after noon, I could lose my shoes and socks and let my toes curl into the bubbling sand, digging, excavating little ponds to trap the water as it fell back again. The end of June, all July, Mike and I exchanged letters. My handwriting was so tiny, I only could fill both sides of one sheet, a small one at that. Mike would send back massive missives in bulging envelopes, six or seven pages usually, in his disjointed half-printed, half written scrawl. He wrote with dark blue ink then, a blue which matched the water’s color out past the waves. I’d build a little perch in the sand, sit and listen to those waves, unfold his latest, and lose myself in memories of a boy who claimed to ache for me.
All those letters are gone now, I burned them years ago. The poems, though, remained with me, all I have left to remember him (and myself) in the times we were apart. Oh, I know in general he’d tell me about his swimming jobs, first as a lifeguard sixty miles away at a park in Kentucky, then later as a swim teacher at the Norwood YMCA, three miles down Montgomery Pike from his home. He loved watching the kids get better, he said, all the kicking and splashing becoming more and more synchronized until, all at once, swimming happened. He’d respond to whatever melancholic or ecstatic feeling I’d poured out about my family, the summer days in paradise, the evening visits to music shows at the Community Center. He’d share his own emerging emotions, not just about me, but about his own fumbling attempts to understand himself better.
If he included a poem, sometimes written, sometimes typed, I’d set it aside in rapidly bulging folder. He sent several each time. Two I remember, one by heart. He’d been trying so hard that spring to write haikus, but always came up one or two syllables short, or long. This one, he hit the bull’s eye:
Your hair:
The falling graces
Of its beauty
Cascading to my soul.
The other pretty much sums up what I felt that first summer we spent apart:
Do you know
What happiness is?
Have you felt
The joy to forgive?
Can you taste
The nectar of love?
Life is not
A search for eternal pleasure,
Or a pain to be endured.
Life is/What you make it;
The fullness which you lead yourself
In a striving to be free:
Free to feel a fear,
Free to cry a tear;/Free –
To make of yourself
What you can
Or accept a helping hand.
But only if you need it.
Seek out life
And you’ll see its beauty;
Meditate alone,
And your soul grows rusty,
Rusted by the waters of your isolation,
Rusted ’til you can’t accept
What others have to offer.
Looking back, I see myself stretching beyond the bounds of what my mother had planned out for me, stretching towards a future I still couldn’t see. Something pulled me towards a partner to fill the spaces a friend like Lizzie couldn’t.
If I wasn’t on the beach, I’d be in a little cove nearby, in a Sunfish sailboat on the calmer waters there. Totally alone, I could drift and bob, making sure the sail leaned with the wind, and daydream about going back home. I ticked off the reasons I was drawing closer and closer to this boy. He was fun, as well as funny. He saw the world with the same dry and jaundiced eye as me, a sceptic’s intolerance and disdain for the ordinary beat of life. Yet he came from a different world, one of Boy Scouts and church choirs, of swimming teams and ice skating. One of suburban calm, of woods behind the house, where you could play in the dirt and not care about getting your dress messy. With him I felt a fullness, and knew, just knew, he wanted the best of me, and the best for me.
The end of July, Charlie headed back to Rhode Island with Arlene and Denise. My father arrived, spent a few days helping close up the house, then drove us back to Ohio. August’s end-of-summer dryness had arrived, turning the grass inside the new clover-leaf intersection leading up to Clifton to brittle straw. The first thing I did when I got inside was call Mike.
“Hi, it’s Janie.”
“Oh, you’re home!” He sounded genuinely pleased.
“Do you want to come over? I’ve still got to unpack, but we can talk, then walk over to the park?”
“I’ll be there in half an hour…” He made it in twenty minutes.
He paced back and forth while I took my clothes out of the suitcase, throwing most in the laundry hamper, and folding the sweaters into the chest at the foot of my bed.
“I got my room assignment from Calvin,” he announced.
“What kind of rooms do you get?”
“It’s a double room, with two beds and built-in dressers in one, and then a study room with two desks in the other. Bathrooms are down the hall, for 30 guys on a floor.”
“Do you know what classes you’re going to take yet?”
“Well, everybody has to take Humanities…”
“What’s that?” I interjected.
“We read all the great books. Plato, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Newton in the first semester, then it gets more modern next year. Sounds like fun to me. That’s what I want to do, read things I never got to at Avondale.”
He’d been upset when he didn’t get into AP English. Most of his other classes were advanced placement, and he’d gotten just about the highest SAT Verbal score in his class, certainly higher than I did, but somehow he hadn’t impressed the teachers with his language skills.
“And foreign language, they’ve got a requirement you need two years’ college equivalent in high school. But they have a test, an interview, and if you pass, you can get out of it. That’d be great, it would free up time for other stuff I want to take, like psychology and literature classes. Then there’s math. Even though I got a 4 on the Calculus AP test, I have to take it again there. But I get credits for both histories, and biology. So I take Cell Biology right away.”
“What do you need to get into med school?”
“I started looking into that. There’s only five things you have to have: Biology, Inorganic and Organic Chemistry, Calculus, and Physics. So I’m doing three of those this year, get them done right away, ‘cause I want to have time for things that make you think, not all that hard science, before I get slammed with it in medical school.” He went on. “If I take five classes each semester, instead of four, with those AP’s, I could finish in three years…”
“Sounds like you’ve got a plan.”
He frowned, and stared out my window, then glanced back at me as I shut the suitcase and stuffed it under my bed. “They say everybody who applies for medical school from Calvin always gets in. But that’s if you follow the requirements and don’t mess up.”
“I feel the same way, about colleges.”
“Where are you going to apply. You decided yet?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s going to be mostly Seven Sisters schools. I don’t want to stay in the Midwest, so I’ve crossed Oberlin and Carleton off the list. For sure I don’t want to go someplace big like UC. And I know I want to be in a city, like New York or Boston. So for now, it’s Barnard, Radcliffe, Wellesley, and I don’t know, Vassar.”
He thought about this a bit. “Before I got in early decision, I was going to apply to Stanford.”
“Why?”
“My grandmother and aunt live near there, so I’ve seen it a couple of times. The weather is so perfect, in California, no rain or snow. And you know,” he raised an eyebrow, “Harvard is the Stanford of the East.”
“I can’t imagine going to California. It’s so far away. The cities are so new, no history or culture there.”
He pursed his lips, looking a little disappointed. “What about Lizzie?” he asked
“She’s more of a small town girl right now. Smith and Mt. Holyoke seem to be what she’s talking about.”
“Well, either way you go, New York and Boston are both about 2 hours away from Calvin. We can see each other weekends, I suppose.”
I kept my face blank, but inside, I wondered, “What, he’s looking that far ahead?” Here I am, getting ready to be maudlin over missing him and losing my first boyfriend going off to college, leaving me forever, and he’s assuming we’ll still like each other after a year of that?
I kept it to myself though, and suggested, “I’ve got to go outside, take a walk. Want to go to the Zoo? We could see some animals, and listen to the opera for free later on.”
The Cincinnati Zoo was a couple of miles from my house. In the summer, operas played some evenings, famous for the hyenas trying to keep pace with soprano arias. As we walked down Clifton, he put his arm around my shoulder, and pulled me close. It felt warm and friendly there, locking hips with him as we strode in step. In that cocoon, I didn’t have to think about September.
xv
The second weekend in August epitomized those Dog Days in the midwest, hot, muggy, with oppressive heavy air. A perfect day to hide my hair. Mike and his parents picked me up on their way to the University, where Mrs. Harrison – Grace – would receive her, Ph.D. twenty years after getting her Master’s. She must have been sweltering in the long black robe, but the smile never left her face. After the ceremony, we sought shade walking under massive oaks and maples. Doffing her cap and tassel, she pulled the gown with its blue hood over her head and took my elbow, holding me back while Mike and his father, Jack, talked about the on-going decline of UC’s basketball fortunes after Oscar Robertson had left for the Royals.
“Did you enjoy your time on Martha’s Vineyard? How is your mother?” She smiled expectantly.
“She’s fine; she said to say ‘hi’.” I marveled at the warm intimacy I felt with her. “I had a lot of time to think, walking along the beach, around the island. And my little niece was there. I’m thinking more and more that’s what I want to do, something with children.”
“You have so much potential. Where do you think that will lead you? The world needs smart women to change its course.”
Why was she telling me this, I wondered. What did she see in me?
She went on: “Don’t ever set your sights lower than the highest rung, Janie. Don’t let anyone, ever, tell you what you can’t do.” I thought of Lisa, not caring where she went. My mother, who had settled for a very comfortable life with my father. Miss Mkrtchian and Miss Foley, spinsters both, trying gamely every day to bring their charges to flower. I understood suddenly that all these women, whom I had I looked up to, who seemed to want the best for me, might not know the heights I could achieve.
A rush of fear and wonder coursed through me. I needed to find a worthy goal, I knew, but didn’t yet know where to look.
Mike’s mother brought me back. She was saying, “…Radcliffe?”
“I’m sorry, I was…”
“I was saying, have you thought more about college? Is Radcliffe still your first choice?”
I had begun receiving application packets that week. I discovered that most schools wanted not only recommendations from teachers, but from one or more “individuals who know you personally, but not a family member.” Someone outside of the narrow group I’d been trying to impress all these years. Someone whose opinion might carry some weight, like a Rabbi or minister. Someone like…a Radcliffe alumna with a Ph.D.?
xvi
Michael was due in Connecticut on Labor Day. Friday, the day before he was to leave, I came over to his house. We sat at the shallow end of his pool, kicking our feet in the water, absorbing the still radiant late-summer sunshine. A few small clouds puffed idly overhead, hiding amongst the leaves of the giant oak tree ruling one corner of their yard. I wore a blue swim suit, made of a crinkly elastic kind of fabric, certainly not intended for actual swimming. Rather than the usual modest high neck I preferred, this was low cut.
I needled him. “Show me how to swim, OK?”
“I’m a terrible swimmer, and I don’t know how to teach, that’s for sure. I’m actually the worst one on the team.”
“But you got a letter sweater?!” I asked incredulously.
“I showed up every day, I swam in the meets, and I earned some points coming in second or third a couple of times, that’s all it takes. You don’t have to actually be good.”
“Don’t you wasn’t to impress your girlfriend?” I mocked. We were still unsure if that’s what we were, boyfriend and girlfriend. His hesitance to say, “I love you”, as if it would somehow lead to pain, came through in the several poems he shared with me that August. And I still had trouble finding room in my life for the distractions of emotion, fearing it would blunt my sense of purpose, hide me from myself.
He splashed me, taking care not to wet my hair; he knew what a chore drying it would be. Submerging quickly, he pushed off the wall, and shot ahead underwater, pulling, then kicking almost the full length of the pool in a rapid breaststroke start. Hitting the other end, he rose up, gasped for air, and headed back my way. This time, he did an ungainly freestyle, punctuated by a vicious flip turn, drenching me as his legs slapped down before he pushed off again. So much for keeping my hair dry…
Hauling himself out of the deep end, he hollered back, “Lemme show you what I learned, after I taught it to the kids at the Y.”
He crawled up on the diving board, walked out to the end, and turned around. “See, in the advanced class, I had to teach them how to do a reverse dive. You know, where you jump back, then lean forward towards the board and dive in. I didn’t know how to do that, but we have this book which gives instructions on how to teach. It said something like, ‘Start by making sure the student jumps up and away from the board. His momentum will carry him away from the diving board. He should then pull his shoulders down and throw his feet up, diving in head first.’ I said all that to the kids, and they actually could do the dive! I figured, if they could do it, so could I. I realised, from physics, that as long as as I jumped back away from the board, I could not hit it. Vectors and all, you know.”
I hadn’t taken physics yet, but I understood the concept. “Impressive courage and coordination, Mike,” I said as he swam back to me in the shallow end. He got out, sat on the edge, and stared down at me. His eyes wandered from my face to the top of my breasts. I felt flustered, wanting, and not wanting, to have my body desired by him. Hoping to distract him, I asked, “When did Shelly get back?” His sister had spent the summer in Idaho, Sun Valley, working at the lodge there and skating in the ice show chorus line.
“A couple of days ago. She says she’s going back this Christmas, to work again and learn to ski. She won’t tell our parents, but there’s a guy there she’s going to see, is the main thing.” Like me and Lisa, Shelly was two years older than Mike. She seemed a lot like Lizzie – a dancer, kind of smart, always perky, someone a boy might like.
We were smiling, laughing, that afternoon under the sun, but I couldn’t lose the dread I felt, at losing to college this boy I had just begun to see as mine. He was the first person, ever, who had broken through my veneer. Or maybe the first one I had let break in. It didn’t matter. I’d gone after him, I wanted him, I didn’t want to lose him, but keeping him in my life seemed frightful as well. It was scary, any way I looked. “He’s going away to college, he’ll forget about me, he’ll find another girl, I’ll lose him forever,” went one fantasy. “He loves me, he completes me, I’ll lose me,” went the other. I didn’t know how much I should let him see either side, see me clinging or see me pushing away. I had to let it out.
“We’re not going to see each other for almost three months, Mike. What’s going to happen?”
Matter-of-factly, he said, “We’re going to write each other, like we did this summer. And then we’ll see each other at Thanksgiving,” His voice sounded confident, but I could see his eyes tear up. He turned away, lifted himself up to the deck, and draped a huge towel over his shoulders. “I’m going inside to change. You can too, in that room downstairs. I’ll see you out here, on the patio? Something I want to show you, give you.”
As we sat on the lounge chairs his father had built, under a dogwood tree, he handed me another onion skin paper. “I don’t know, this came out this morning. I read it, it helped me.”
He’d stopped numbering the poems. The last one had been #66 August 31, 1966. This one had only a date at the bottom, 9-2-66. M.H.
TO JANIE, ON MY DEPARTURE
I’m leaving;
I’ll be back, we know that is true;
But when I return will you still be you?
You’ve changed before, you’ll change again,
But you’ll always remain what you’ve always been
To me:
my love.
Into my lines I’ve injected my life,
The tear-bought joy you’ve carried my way
On the wings of your smiles
To me.
Smiling again?
Showing your rareness of spirit.
Leaving.
But returning I am in the midst
Of the brown-golden leaves that fall
On the snow, newly-planted by unknown foes
Of our sorrow.
Stay with me then, in spirit and soul,
For without you I’ll never be whole.
Hear me, S. Jane: Don’t feel small;
Whatever you do, search for yourself
And see me.
I return (to you), but now I must go.
I thought of the Fantasticks song, “Much More”, especially the part about “I’d like to be worldly wise, to be the kind of girl designed to be kissed upon the eyes.” I’d sung that for Michael, said it was my fantasy. And a few days later, he had kissed me on the eyes. It felt a bit odd, and now I know, that what I really want, what I really am, is a girl designed to be wooed by words. Michael Harrison had them, he shared them with me, and all I wanted was more of that. From him.