CHAPTER TWO
Dreams Are Born Of Nature’s Yearnings
September, 1966
Lizzie and I met on the steps under the dome, first day of senior year. I’d crammed my notebook with paper, most of it blank, ready for note-taking in class. I never used a purse, putting everything I needed in a slender 3-holed pouch, zippered shut inside the blue-denim binder I took everywhere. Lizzie had only a purse slung over her right shoulder. She eyed the buses rolling around the circle, waiting for Leon’s. My stomach grumbled, not from hunger, more from anger at knowing she’d have his company all year. I’d tucked a small envelope into Mike’s shirt pocket as we separated after our last hug. Inside, the tiny note read, “You’ll have a great time. Don’t be scared, make new friends. Write me. Love, Sarah Jane.”
Sensing my distance, Lizzie asked, “When did Mike leave? When does he get to Calvin?”
“They drove there over the weekend. I went to his house the day before.”
“He’s not going to have a car at school? I thought he said they’d let him take that red Lancer.”
“His father decided, no, he had to show he was doing OK before he got it. He said he’d drive back at Thanksgiving.”
“So that’s the next time you’ll see him? But I guess you’ve been apart already, when you went to the Vineyard…”
“And when they drove out West, to pick up his sister, a couple of weeks in August.”
“What’s that like? I get to see Leon all the time, I can’t imagine not making plans for the next weekend and the next. Maybe you should let him go? There’s plenty of guys to see here, you know.”
As Leon’s bus pulled up and Lizzie flew down the steps to greet him, I checked my feelings, and started analyzing them one by one. All right, I said to myself, you can’t stop thinking about him. And whose fault is that? Or is that even a bad thing? It feels good to have a boyfriend away at college; that makes me more mature, I guess. And more protected. I don’t have to worry about getting a date, going out. I have more time to study. I remembered overhearing my sister’s friends a couple of years before talking about boys one night. One girl had a boyfriend who was a freshman at Yale. She seemed older, more assured and worldly-wise than the others. Lisa told her, “You’re so lucky. It’s like you’ve got a magic ring around you. The boys at school won’t touch you, they’re afraid they won’t measure up to him.” Most telling, I couldn’t completely quell the anxious feeling I got everyday, when I came home and looked at the pile of mail on the table in the front hall.
My life quickly overflowed. Advanced classes in English, History, and French, along with regular math and choir kept me busy all day and half the night. Every week, I had to write a piece for the Chatterbox. Lizzie, the Features editor, made sure of that.
“But you hardly ever use anything you assign to me.” I complained.
“Oh, it’s good for you, a little rejection now and then. Nobody should have such an easy life.”
“Can’t I have a regular column or something? Interviewing all these teachers and kids, and trying to do a 500 word biography, I don’t have time for that.”
“OK. Well. You are the Secretary of the Student Council. And the Student Court. And the Thumb of the Five Fingers. I’ve got it…every other week, you can do an update on that stuff, keep people apprised of what’s up with student government. All right?”
I felt relieved. I’ve always liked structure, I like to know what the rules are. Improvisation, making things up on the fly, that’s not me.
That wasn’t working with my college boyfriend. His letters came unbidden, at random. I’d write back, telling him about my life at school, my family, my thoughts, whatever came out. He’d respond to all that, then go on and on me about the newness all around him. I tried to imagine Rush Week, when he made the rounds of 12 fraternities, getting emotionally poked and prodded. In the end, he decided not to join at all. He felt too young, too different, not connected to social life at all. He whined about his English 101 class, “They don’t care about how you write, what it sounds or feels like. I guess I’m not going to major in English after all.” But Humanities: Plato, Greek plays, St. Augustine! A whole new world unfolding, and I was not there to share it with him.
Through letters, and a fleeting long-distance call once a month, we worked to keep the bridge between us intact. His third Saturday night away, he called at 9 PM. I wanted to sound cheerful, upbeat, even though hearing his voice sent longing through my chest. It’s hard to hug a telephone. I went for the familiar: “You’re going to join the swimming team?”
“Yeah, there’s a freshman team. The coach sent us a list of exercises he wants us to do, weight lifting and all that. Practice starts November 1st. I miss the pool, the smell of chlorine on my arms as I fall asleep, the burn in my eyes when I get out of the water.”
“What about your classes? Are you learning what you thought you would?”
“Some of the professors, sure. But the English guy – if you want to major in it, you have to go through that. He acts like freshmen are a chore, a burden. He says we write in ‘New York Times Gothic’. I don’t know what that means, but he doesn’t like it. My first paper, I got a C. We were supposed to do 500 words on a maxim from Francois La Rouschfaucauld, explain what we think about it. ‘We are so accustomed to adopting a mask before others that we end up being unable to recognize ourselves.’ I thought I had some good ideas, but apparently I can’t write proper sentences.”
“Prose hasn’t really been your thing, You’re more of a talker and a poet, right?”
“Ummm…” he grumbled. “How about you? Are you going to the football games?”
“What? Are you kidding?”
“I’m worried you’re going to change, you’re going to start doing all that high school stuff. Somebody will find out how cool you are, and you’ll stop thinking about me…” He trailed off wistfully. I loved the compliment, that he thought I was cool. And I loved his fear of losing me.
But I didn’t feel a need to build him up, to ease his mind. Breezily, I went on, “Lizzie goes out with Leon, and wanted me to go with them last night, said it would be good for me. She thinks I’m moping too much.”
“So…?”
“It’s Yom Kippur. We had to eat early, before sunset, then fast all day. I even went to synagogue. I’m sure I ate too much.”
“Yom Kippur?” he repeated, befuddled. “I mean, I know it’s a holiday or something. I thought it was a celebration.”
“No, it’s the day we ask forgiveness for our sins. Day of Atonement, it means.”
“Your sins?”
I didn’t have to be a part of Yom Kippur until I was 12 or 13, and besides, my family was more culturally than religiously Jewish. Even so, my father always made us fast on Yom Kippur, something about remembering what made us strong.
“The only sin I asked forgiveness for was falling in love with a goy,” I said with a smile I hoped he heard.
He may not have known much about Yom Kippur, but he knew that word. “Really? I’m someone bad for you?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, my father doesn’t care, as long as his daughter marries rich. My mother feels a little sad you’re not Jewish, but she likes you, and she sees I like you, that’s what’s important to her. Don’t worry, I’m mostly kidding.” I immediately regretted the “mostly”.
“Well, I don’t know…Look, this is call is starting to cost a lot. I’ll write to you, OK? Tell you more?”
“Write to me, I want to hear…” Feeling that wasn’t enough, I blurted, “I love you. Bye?”
“Bye.”
That night, at midnight, he wrote another poem, titled WE, YOU AND ME. It was his longest yet, two full pages typed double-spaced on that onion skin paper. It ended saying plans for the future “…matter little. It’s we we’re concerned with, We, you and me – Together.”
“Together”, I thought, when I read that. How can we be together when we’re apart?
ii
On Columbus Day, I bargained with my father for a 10 minute call to Connecticut. “It’s only two dollars today, it’s a holiday. I can pay you from my allowance.”
He looked up from his paper over his reading glasses at me, like he might at a puppy begging for a scratch behind the ears. “Who’s this again? That guy you stayed up all night with last May, the one you were mooning over on the beach this summer?”
“His name is Mike, dad. Michael Harrison. He’s lonely, he wants to hear from me.”
He shooed me away with the back of his hand. “Go ahead, don’t worry about it. But ten minutes, OK?”
I used the upstairs phone, less of a chance I could be overheard. I’d written him that I might be able to call at 5 PM, and hoped that he was waiting out in his hall as well. In that fishbowl environment, it was a struggle between sharing ourselves and hiding from others.
I started with the latest Janie Stein success. “I got National Merit Finalist!” Mike had been a finalist himself, a very big deal at our college-prep high school. That was what first caught my eye about him. Hardly anybody ever actually got a scholarship – there were only 2,000 in the whole country – but being a Finalist meant a lot on college applications. My junior year SAT scores were higher than Mike’s, and I liked to rub that in. But he’d soared his senior year, and that bothered me. I’d taken mine the week before, worried I wouldn’t beat his 760/720 Verbal/Math combination.
“Was there ever any doubt?” he asked.
“It’s kinda of funny. There were fifteen of us…”
“Anybody else I know? Lizzie?”
“No, not Liz. But Marc and Larry” – two guys from the debate team – “made it.’ I paused, thinking over the list. “You know what? I just realized I’m the only girl.”
“How’s that make you feel?”
“Well, my mother’s happy. She said, ‘It’ll look good on your resumé.’’
He laughed. “That’s what my mom says whenever she’s trying to get me to do something I don’t like!”
“Wait, I’ve only got ten minutes or my dad will come upstairs and start looking at me. What’s going on with you?”
“We went to Boston last weekend…”
“We?”
“Yeah, three of us, a guy name Rich, and one of his friends from Fairfield County. They knew somebody at Harvard, and thought we could sleep on their floor or something. But apparently there are rules about guests and everything, so we had to find a hotel. We went to one right at the Common, it was a lot of money, but with three of us, we made it. We hung out, went to their football game, and saw a play there Saturday night.”
I thought wistfully of Cambridge, Radcliffe. My parents weren’t taking me there for an interview or tour that fall; we’d done that our way home from the Vineyard the end of July. I wished I could be there when it was full of students, people going to classes. I couldn’t wait to go to college.
“Fun?” I wondered.
“Well, until we had to go home. We’d taken the train up there, but the hotel used up almost all our money, so we decided to hitch-hike back. We got as far as New London, but then no one picked us up for hours. It started to rain, snow almost, so Rich called his dad – he’s a doctor – to pick us up. Gave us hell for being stupid. Everything we did was stupid, he said. I can’t wait to get a car here.”
“How’s that going? Think your dad will let you?”
“I’m not worried. He gave one to my sister her first year, a turquoise-blue Corvair convertible, stick shift. If he trusts her with something like that, I should be able to take the Lancer.”
“How are you getting back? When?”
“Taking the train from New York. I’ll get a ride with Warren, a guy down the hall, to Queens, then the subway to Grand Central.”
It all sounded so adult, going to Boston, to Manhattan, exactly what I’d been wanting to do for years. “When?” I repeated.
“Let’s see, I get on the train around 9 o’clock, get home the next day at noon or something. Then classes start Monday morning, So, all I’ll be there is on Friday, We can go out on Friday, but I have to leave Saturday morning. OK?”
It wasn’t “OK”, but, “How much time do you have at Christmas, again?”
“Two weeks. Get home on Saturday, the 17th, then leave again before New Year’s”
It sounded bleak, desolate, trying to cram ourselves into so little time. I didn’t sense any fear in his voice though, over the long-distance line, so I tried to feel cheerful myself. “Well, I gotta go. Write me a letter soon, Mike. I need to hear from you. And if you’ve got another poem, send that along too. I love those.” Quieter, “I love you, too.”
“I love you. I want to see you, be with you.”
I stood by the phone for a long time, head down, wondering what I was doing, trying to keep a friend, a boyfriend, over all that time and distance. I went to my room, sat at my desk and picked up the last piece of onion-skin he’d sent. I opened a book I’d gotten from Lisa for my fifteenth birthday, about Origami. I turned to the page showing how to make a flower, and started folding. I began to feel safer, as I followed the intricate directions. Small things, like my tiny handwriting, like a little bird made out of paper, calm me down. Within ten minutes, I had a passable daisy in my hand. Not one I could pick the petals from, for sure, but in my mind, I pulled them off one-by-one. There were an odd number, so I made sure to start with “He loves me…”
iii
Thanksgiving came and went in a blur. Mike and I spent one afternoon and evening together, the Friday after. A drizzly mist greeted us downtown as we walked from store to store, circling Shillito’s to see the animated Christmas scenes: smartly dressed families with children, impeccably coiffed, opening presents; a sleigh stuck in North Pole snow, reindeer in front pulling hard while elves in back pushed to get Santa off the ground in time; finally, a live Santa in the window, greeting small children one-by-one on his knee while green-suited assistants took pictures.
I tolerated this; still I announced, “We don’t have a tree, or anything like that, you know. In our house, we don’t do Christmas. Some of our friends, they put up lights around the house. Never the multi-colored ones, though, always blue.”
“I notice that sometimes,” Mike replied. “What about that, does it mean anything?”
“I dunno, maybe like blood around the door? ‘There’s Jews inside.’ Could be a way to fit in and still say we’re special.”
After admiring the lights hanging from the top of the statue in the fountain on the square, we checked out the RKO Albee. The poster out front for The Professionals featured crossed bandoliers over rugged images of Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin, valiantly trying to wrest a busty Claudia Cardinale from the clutches of a Mexican bandit. I was relieved when Mike said, “No way. Let’s go back to your house, OK?”
Once home, we found mom and Lisa in the kitchen. I asked Mike, “Want to have a sandwich? We’re not going to eat until after 7, I think. Right, mom?”
She smiled, nodded, and wiped flour-dusted hands on her apron. Pointing to the cabinet, she announced, “Sweetie, I think all we have is peanut butter. That OK with you, Michael?”
“No problem.”
Absolutely no problem, I thought. Mike had told me all he ever ate as a kid were mashed potatoes and peanut butter sandwiches. Probably on white bread. He seemed clueless how to make them, though, so I went to work, starting with the whole wheat bread we always had around. I took down a jar of Peter Pan, and scooped out a slab with a knife.
“Wait a minute! What are you doing? What about the jelly? What about the butter?”
“Huh?”
“That’s the way my mom always makes ‘em. Butter first, helps the peanut butter slide down easier.”
Sighing, I acquiesced to this demand, thinking, “The things we do for love.” I handed it over, and watched as he smushed the slices together, causing the peanut butter to ooze out towards his palm.
“What a minute! Aren’t you going to freshen it up?”
His turn to say, “Huh?”
I looked up at mom, then Lisa, for some help. I grabbed his sandwich and licked the mess off the bread crusts. Lisa said, “Right, that’s the only way to eat it. Gotta keep your hands clean, Mike.” She was emptying the dishwasher, working on the silverware. My sister had a distinctive technique here. She called it her “symphony.” Each utensil went into the metal tray with a distinct note, higher for the forks, lower, almost basso for the knives. By altering the beat, she sometimes could make a simple melody out of it.
“What are you playing tonight, Lisa?” I asked.
“How much is that doggie in the window,” she came back, eyeing Mike all the time. He did look like a forlorn puppy just then, his hair flopping nearly to his glasses, eyebrows uplifted as he chomped down on his meal.
“Come on, buddy,” I urged him. “Finish that up and let’s go to my room.” I shut the door behind us. I was about to take his hand, but looking up, I saw his mouth smeared and sticky. “Wait a minute…” Then I got a tissue, moistened it with my tongue, and wiped him off, patting gently with my fingers. That produced one of his wan smiles, which kept growing, widening his eyes. Already standing close, it was natural to melt together. After an exploratory brief kiss, I rested my head in the crook of his shoulder, face inward, listening to his heart beat.
“I missed you. I love you,” he murmured as he stroked my hair. I felt a tear erupt and trace a slow descent down my cheek.
Monday afternoon, in the Chatterbox office, waiting for the editorial board to meet, Lizzie asked, “So how was it?”
“How was what?” I deadpanned.
“Don’t be shy. The only thing you’ve talked about the past two weeks was Mike coming home. What did you do? Where did you go? Is he still Mike, or has he changed a lot?”
I recited a blow-by-blow of our day and evening, leaving out a few minor intimate details. Lizzie and I were both pretty shy revealing things like that.
“Well, that all sounds like him, for sure. So you didn’t do anything, just talked, ate dinner with your family, that’s all?”
“It was enough. Enough to tide me over until Christmas, I think.” The rest of the board had filtered in.
“Enough what, Janie?” Will asked. William Bayer had moved to Hyde Park the previous year, and shown himself to be both a wit and a writer of note. He’d quickly impressed the Chatterbox faculty, who put him on the Board with me, Kit, and Phil Schwartz. Once again, I was the only girl on this team.
Lizzie eyed him, then looked back at me. “Did you hear from your early decision school, Will?” she asked, as if she knew the answer.
Smiling broadly, he proudly answered, “Sure did. I’m going to John Calvin, same as Mike Harrison.” Turning away, he shifted gears, “Hey, Kit, did Miss Foley say it was OK for me to come to the debate practice Thursday night?”
Kit, absorbed in editing some copy for the lead article, nodded and mumbled, “Sure.”
Will, still eager, looked at me and asked, “Are you guys, you and Liz, going to be the timers for the team again?”
I stared at him, wondering what he knew. “Never entered my mind, Will. That team’s moved on, you know.”
“You could help us out; come on, Janie, don’t desert us.”
“Us?” I thought. I wondered where this was leading. He wasn’t even officially on the team yet. He wasn’t going to dislodge Marc and Kit from their perch, so he’d have to pick one of the thespian categories. He didn’t seem very histrionic, although he did have a well developed ego, with a greatly inflated self-image. I turned away, relieved that Kit was calling us to order. Lizzie got up to attend to her Features page. On the way out, she threw me a quizzical look over her shoulder, tilting her head towards Will.
iv
Mike drove back for Christmas break. Saturday afternoon, he stopped at my house first before going home.
“How was it?” I asked. “Did it take long, did you drive all night?”
“No, I left at noon yesterday, drove Warren to Queens, spent the night there. Then I came the rest of the way on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It’s fun, driving all by myself. I get to think, listen to music, look at the countryside. It almost started snowing near Columbus, luckily we outran it.”
“We?”
He turned sheepish as he went on, “By that time, I was either getting lonely or crazy. I started imagining you in the seat next to me, and talked with you the rest of the way home.”
“What did we talk about?” I laughed.
“Well, first you told me how worried you were about college. I said you were the last person who needs to worry, you’re going to first of all get into Radcliffe, and then you can do and go wherever you want from there. You kept perseverating on how much everyone, your mother, your teachers, Lizzie, expect from you, how you didn’t think you were the person they thought you were. I said, ‘You’re the best possible Sarah Jane Stein there is.’ Then you gave me a box of fruit and disappeared.”
“A Thousand Clowns! Martin Balsam! I love that scene. So I was good company?”
“The best.”
We were downstairs between the den and living room. Mom was boxing up the last of the Chanukah stuff, carefully wrapping the menorah in tissue paper, saving those candles which were still long enough, and putting the blue lights in a separate bag, all to go up in the attic until next year.
He nodded over to her, turned back to me and asked, “What’d you get? Anything special?”
“Come on up to my room, I’ll show you.”
My mom must have overheard us, as she cautioned while we walked the stairs, “Honey, keep it down, your dad’s taking a nap.” I guessed she really meant, “No funny stuff.”
While Mike sat on the bed, I took a brown vinyl garment bagfrom my closet. I yanked the zipper down, and extracted a wool suit, dark tan. “Should I model it for you?” When he nodded yes, I went on, “Well, you’ll have to give me a couple of minutes to change, then.” He didn’t budge, so I added, “Um, wait in the hall, OK?”
After changing, I opened the door, let him in, and paraded around in a very clumsy imitation of a fashion model. I skipped the hair toss, knowing what it would do to my already unruly locks. “I’m sorry, but I’m not one of those girls who was taught to walk like she had a book on her head.”
“That looks good on you,” he said quickly. “Listen, next Sunday, we go to the conservatory, to look at the Christmas displays. It’s our one family tradition. Do you want to come?”
I started doing a very klutzy hora and sang, “Tradition! And who does Mama teach to mend and tend and fix, preparing me to marry whoever Papa picks?”
“Huh? What’s that?” Mike blurted.
“Fiddler! Fiddler on the Roof? We saw it a couple of summers back on Broadway.”
Mike’s smile looked a little sad. “You’re so lucky, you’ve got a family that does things like that. Four kids, it must be fun, when you’re all together.”
“Well, Charlie’s so much older, Henry never talks, Lisa’s always in her own world, daddy’s away working, I never thought of us as ‘fun’. More like together, but apart.”
That next week, the week before Christmas, we spent every day together exploring the city. We’d walk all afternoon around his neighborhood or mine. Sometimes we’d visit a department store, or go to one of the new shopping centers, and make fun of all the people rushing for presents, buying things they didn’t want or need, just because everyone else was doing it. One night, he drove me through Clifton to look at lights on houses. I’d never done that before, and almost became mesmerized driving through the fairyland, until I thought about the holiday behind it. Another night, we finally got to see Alfie, walking out talking like cockneys. Mike tried to hold a handkerchief over his arm, waiter-like, the same as Michael Caine. It kept falling to the ground because he couldn’t keep his arm still. He was always throwing it around to point at something or emphasize his thoughts. I started feeling warm and safe again, cocooned with Michael in our own special world, one where we alone knew what was right and wrong, where everyone else didn’t have a clue. Walking, we fit together perfectly, his arm around my shoulder, mine across his back, locked at the hips, legs moving in sync. I felt us becoming one person, one being, with two minds, merging closer. When he brought me home, we’d hug tighter than the night before, locking ourselves together for what seemed minutes, ending with kisses, fast and slow, never wanting to let go. Reluctantly, we’d separate, knowing we could start again tomorrow.
The night after Alfie, on my porch, we rubbed noses along with everything else. He started laughing, “Your nose is cold, so cold. Is this why Eskimos do it, to warm their noses?”
I felt the tip of my nose. It didn’t feel at all cold to me, but then, my hands weren’t all that warm. We had been walking around in almost freezing weather, and I was never one for gloves. I remembered what my mother said when I was little, and complained about feeling cold there, at the end of my nose. So I laughed along with him, saying, “Yeah, I guess I’d make a good dog, wouldn’t I?” He looked puzzled, so I went on, “Dogs. They always have cold noses, don’t they?” That became one of our little things. Whenever our faces would get close enough to touch noses, and he noticed mine was cold, he’d cup his hand over it, to warm it up.
I’d heard other girls talking about the boys they went out with, always being asked to “go farther”. I wondered why I never felt that sense of urgency from him, especially since he’d gone away to college, without parents or restraints. He seemed content, happy, even a little overwhelmed simply by what we were doing. I was very relieved by this unspoken attitude, as one of my biggest fears once I found myself growing physically from girl to woman, was having to submit to a boy’s physical advances to get his love. It seemed wrong, unfair. Every bit as smart and capable as any boy I knew at school, I didn’t want someone else to rule my life or desires. With Mike, I felt equal in every way.