CHAPTER FOUR
A Slight Inability To Say Good-by
March, 1968
Mike and I took another trip to New York to see a play, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead. After opening at the Alvin in October, word of mouth forced a move to the Eugene O’Neill on Broadway, selling out every show. Intrigued by the buzz and rave reviews, Mike ordered tickets for March after his swimming season had ended.
The wordplay and mysterious comings-and-goings intrigued us from the start. Laughing throughout, I wondered why it had been billed as an absurdist existential tragicomedy.
“What did you think? Did you understand it?” I asked as we walked past Carnegie Hall towards the Park. I’d convinced Mike to ride the carousel before heading on back to Grand Central for the train to Connecticut.
“At first I wasn’t sure, but once they started all that confusion about who they were, I felt right at home. I like it when you have to work to keep up with the conversation. It seemed to make sense to me, nothing absurd about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s what I feel like, going through life sometimes. Everybody else appears to know where they’re going, what it is they’re supposed to do. Then I drift into their space, try to figure out how they see the world, and I never can.”
If Mike was confused about who he was, and where he was going, he sure hid it well. “No. I don’t believe you. That’s how I think I am, but you, you decided about being a doctor when you were fifteen, about where you’d go to school early decision, about everything, so easily and you’ve kept with it. How can you say you’re insecure?”
Slowing his pace, he dropped his head in thought. Placing one arm around me, giving a little squeeze to my shoulder, he answered, “When I’m with you, I do know who I am. What’s that song by The Supremes? ‘My World Is Empty Without You’? Ever since we went on that long walk the night of the party after the state debate tournament, I’ve known there was one place, one person, I could feel comfortable with, wouldn’t have to pretend who I am. Why do you think I keep coming back to you, every time I go away? When I’m with you I feel alive.” We’d crossed 59th, about to enter the Park. He stopped, turned to look at me, then at the skeletal trees, leaf buds barely sprouting, and recited, “Life is all around us, an eternity in every fragment.”
“Huh?”
“It’s a poem I’ve been working on. I don’t remember all of it, but, ‘For once, just once, I place my trust apart from me…I only want to live my heart, I merely want to be a part, of all that I can be.’ Something like that.”
“Sounds promising. I didn’t know you were still writing poems. You haven’t sent me any for a while now.”
“I spend so much time reading, writing papers, trying to memorize all those Organic Chem reactions. And I’m always going to swim practice, to a meet,writing you a letter, visiting you. No time any more for investigating that inner world. I’ve only written a couple, three this year, and they seem pretty repetitive. All about the ocean, sand and the beach, finding life in love, sappy stuff like that.”
That sappy stuff had first pulled me towards him. “Ever think we might have a different way of telling each other what we feel now?”
We’d come to the carousel, calliope music clouding our words, enameled horses exhorting us to ride.
“I don’t feel any different…” he mused.
“I do. Everybody at school, they’re always talking about ‘finding’ themselves.”
Mike helped me onto a coal black stallion, fiery eyes staring endlessly upward towards the brass ring. The ring I remembered Phoebe, in Catcher, kept trying to grab.
“Like when somebody says, “I’m going out to California, to find myself?”
“There are some people who do that, sure, but I’m thinking more about the conversations I’m having all the time, in the dorm, after class, at dinner.”
“Bull sessions?”
“That’s what boys call it, but with girls, I think there’s more sharing, more supporting, less seeing who can one up the other.”
“That’s like the play,” Mike offered. “Sometimes – a lot of the time – I feel like you have this whole other life I’m not a part of. I just get these little snatches it, when I come up to see you. That’s what I was saying, about feeling left out.”
“And you don’t think I feel that? When you tell me you’re writing a poem, how excited you are to go skiing? All these things you’re doing when I’m not around, I wish I could feel what you’re feeling when you do them.” Suddenly, I saw the secret, the mystery. “I think we have to be apart, to be together, you know.”
He said, mostly to himself, “How can we be together, apart? And how can we be apart, together?”
The music ended. I climbed down from the horse by myself, then stepped off the slowly moving platform.
ii
“Hey, Janie, here we are!” Jeanne waved me over to her table, where she was finishing dinner with Marcia and two other girls I didn’t know. “Oh, this is Bev and Leslie. Bev’s a year ahead of us, Les’s a junior. They’re both both pre-meds. Les said she could help us with our chemistry.”
Bev had one of those smiles, friendly at the mouth, but serious around the eyes, that I was coming to associate with Radcliffe girls. Straight black hair cut in a no-nonsense bob, she appeared all business, minimal maintenance required. “Pre-meds have to stick together,” she asserted, looking over at Leslie.
“No one else here is watching out for us. Seems everywhere we turn, all we’re getting is a pat on the head.” Leslie’s stringy blond hair fell past her shoulders. Tall and stocky, she wore a shapeless dress, white tights, and an odd-looking pair of earrings.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Janie, is it? Haven’t you noticed Harvard doesn’t care how smart you are, how smart we are? Don’t you feel like an adornment, or an after-thought? There’s only what, 5% of doctors who are women? We can’t afford to sit around and wait for men to change. We have to demand our place. Have you read Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir?”
“The Feminine Mystique? Sure. de Beauvoir…she’s French?”
She reached into her bag and took out a thick, well-worn paperback, The Second Sex, shaking it towards my face.
“Oh, yeah…isn’t she Sartre’s, what do they call it, ‘partner’?”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about!” she almost shouted. “See, someone like you, smart enough to get into Radcliffe, still thinks of a woman in terms of her relationship to a man.” She closed her eyes, sighed, then looked straight at me, asking, “Do you think of yourself as a feminist?”
I wasn’t sure what that word meant. People said it a lot, sometimes as an accusation, sometimes as a compliment. “You mean like the suffragists…?”
Leslie gave an exasperated sigh. Turning to Bev, she moaned, “See what I mean? We need a Women’s Studies program here. We need to assert ourselves, the same as the black students, the anti-war people are doing.” Looking back at me, she slapped the book down on the table, saying “Here. Read this. I’ve got another.” With that, Leslie got up, not waiting for any confirmation or thanks. “I’ve gotta go, get back to my apartment before they kick me out for not doing the dishes on my night.”
Bev stayed on, smiling more beatifically now. “She’s something, isn’t she?”
“What was that dress she was wearing?” I asked. Though shapeless, it nonetheless seemed fashionable, made from thick cotton, dyed blue with striking black markings scattered across the fabric.
“Um, yeah, that’s her style. Doesn’t call attention to her body, but still looks elegant. Ask her, she’ll make clear it’s a political statement. I think it’s called Marimekko. From Finland. There’s a store here in town if you want to get one.”
“Marimekko,” I murmured, making sure I remembered. Louder, “What about those earrings? They look like a snake, but they’re not metal, some kind of plastic.”
Bev, Jeanne, and Marcia all laughed, looking first at each other, then over at me. Marcia asked, “You know what an IUD is?”
“IUD? Isn’t that for contraception, Intra-Uterine Device?”
“Yup. Those are Lippes Loops.”
“But why for earrings? Is she trying to make a point?”
Bev ventured, “She never talks about them, but my idea is they are kind of a metaphor, a hidden statement to the men she encounters. ‘I don’t need you, don’t want you, stay away,’ I think she’s saying.”
“Like a cross for vampires?”
“There’s a good thought. Men are always trying to suck the life, the soul out of us, aren’t they?”
“Not all of them,” I countered, thinking of Mike.
“Where have you been cloistered?” Bev shot back. “I have yet to meet a guy who didn’t want to spend all his time talking about himself. Or if he did ‘care’ about me, it was only so he could get me into bed.”
I couldn’t respond. I didn’t want to appear naive, inexperienced, lacking in self-awareness. But I wondered if I were indeed under the spell of a juvenile infatuation, seeing myself as a princess in a fairy tale. On the other hand, I thought, maybe I had been lucky in finding Mike, someone who loved me, and whom I could love in return, without any fighting about who’s in charge.
iii
“I don’t know if this is the car I’d want to be seen in, Mike.” Driving west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Mike had the pale green Dodge Coronet working hard up the Appalachian hills. His beloved red Lancer was back in Cincinnati for the winter, replaced by this blocky, stodgy “old man’s car”, as he put it.
“My father gave my mom a choice – the racy red one, or this. I’m hoping she’ll change her mind after a winter sliding around in that little thing.” Six hours into our trip home on the last Friday in March, after skirting New York City and cutting across the top of New Jersey, we left the gentle Amish farmlands behind. Now aiming into the setting sun, the old Dodge labored up out of one of those hollows which define the landscape between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. “Why? What kind of a car would you like?”
“I don’t I’ll need one in Boston. The T is so good there, I can get anywhere.” Struggling to come up with an answer, I thought of riding along the dunes at the Vineyard a few years ago with Charlie, Henry and Lisa in a beach buggy Charlie had borrowed from a friend. Holding onto the roll bar above the rear seat, the top and sides fully open to the air, my hair streamed behind and above me, wild and free. The wind blew specks of sand against my face, like tiny darts of ice after a winter blizzard. We had nowhere to go, an endless afternoon in the filtered island sun, ocean breaking on our right, not another car in sight. I must have been fourteen then, the first time I felt like I was part of my older siblings’ group. They were all driving now, free to flee our parents’ eyes any time they liked. They talked about grown-up things, Charlie’s upcoming wedding, Henry’s classes at Princeton, even Lisa now going on dates and applying for college. I wanted to be older, I wanted to have fun, and for the first time, I felt I was doing both.
“A Jeep. I’d like a Jeep. One of those with the windshield you can put down in front, that can go anywhere, along the sand, the beach, up into the woods, away from the city.”
Mike nodded. “A Jeep. OK.” Waiting a moment, then deciding, he looked over at me, “I’ll buy you one, I promise. For a graduation present. I don’t know about college, but if you get a doctorate, for sure.”
“Are you serious?” I laughed.
“I mean it. I promise. What color do you want?”
“Red. No, wait, yellow.”
“Yellow? Red? They only come in that Army green color, right?”
“Doesn’t matter. You get me a Jeep, I wouldn’t care.”
A grinding crunch filtered back to us from the front. Worse than a knock, it came with a shudder, and loss of power. As the car sped back up, I asked, “What was that?”
“Dunno. Did we hit something?”
Nearing the top of the hill, the sounds from under the hood grew worse. Just before the summit, the engine shuddered with a ‘clunkety-clunk’ and we rolled to a stop.
“Now what?” I worried. “Will it start?”
Mike tried the key several times. “Nothing. Dead” he moaned. “I knew I should have paid attention when that oil pressure light came on last week.”
Within five minutes, a Pennsylvania State Trooper pulled up behind us, lights flashing. Mike got out, they conversed a bit, and he came back to say, “He’s calling a tow truck, take us into town, to the dealer there.”
We ended up in Shippensburg – pronounced, we learned, like “chip, not ship” – where the dealer, wearing a top coat against the chill, sat on a couch, ticking off a list of options with a customer buying a new Plymouth. He arranged for the mechanic to check our car, and came back with the bad news: a blown rod, or piston, or something like that, would take a week to fix, the parts would have to come from Hagerstown. Mike called his dad, who spoke with the dealer. We overheard him say, “It weren’t the boy’s fault, Mr. Harrison, these mountains are tough.” The conclusion was, we’d spend the night in town, at the only motel, and his father would drive the Buick over on Saturday, with a towing attachment to haul us and the car back to Cincinnati.
I’d like to say we enjoyed our stay in south central Pennsylvania, waiting for his dad, but it rained all day and we stayed inside, catching up on reading, and trying out the creaky motel bed. After dinner, I turned on the TV. Instead of “Saturday Night At The Movies, President Johnson smiled grimly, about to deliver a formal address on the progress of the war. I ground my teeth, growled, and said, “I guess we want to watch this, right?” It was not like we had any choice. All three channels had interrupted their programming to carry the speech.
I watched that man, whom so many people in Cambridge hated like a devil, as he tried to speak smoothly and rationally about the Tet offensive, the burden it had placed on the “noble” people of South Vietnam and its “allies”, by which I presumed he meant us. All about the on-going loss of life, for which he cried crocodile tears. Clenching my teeth, I looked over at Mike, who was almost smiling. “What do you think?” I asked.
“Every time I hear him talk, I what a guy from Texas told me. After Johnson became President, he said, ‘Finally, someone in the White House without an accent!’” Mike looked over at me. “I don’t know, how can he go from doing all the civil rights stuff, and Medicare, to this?”
“Well, why don’t you come with me this summer, to the SDS convention in Chicago? Instead of complaining, do something!”
“I…uh…I’ve got this job, at a swim club. Being a lifeguard, remember? I don’t know if I can get off.” He looked down from the black-and-white blurry screen, pursed his lips, furrowed his brow. Then glancing up at me, he went on, “Couldn’t it be dangerous? Those people are starting to talk about things like blowing up recruiting offices, fighting back. You could get hurt.”
Before I could answer, there was a knock on the door. Mike’s father Jack had arrived. “Oh good,” he said, looking up at the TV, “you’ve already got it on.”
I looked around the room, which only had a double bed. How was this going to work? He saw my darting eyes. “It’s OK, I got another room.” Mike and I sat on the bed while Jack pulled out the desk chair. “I sure hope he tells us he’s going to start withdrawing troops. That’s the only way we’ll keep Nixon from winning.”
We kept watching in silence for another half hour while Johnson droned on about “fake solutions”, and a “wider peace”.
When Johnson said, “One day, my friends, peace will come in Southeast Asia,” Jack muttered, “Peace in our time. We’ve heard that before, haven’t we?” Johnson started quoting Kennedy’s “Bear any burden” bit from the inaugural address. As he waxed philosophical about his commitment to peace and the American people, I couldn’t take any more, I got up to turn off the set. Mike, said, “Wait! I think he’s saying he’s gonna quit!” Johnson was now quoting Lincoln, preaching the gospel of a united America, that a ‘House divided against itself cannot stand.”
“Seems like he’s just pulling on our heartstrings” I countered.
“No, look!”
Johnson wiped his temple as the heat from the TV lights and the pressure of the moment overpowered his Texas cool. He announced, “Accordingly, I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
We all sat there, stunned. I was the first to speak, “Looks like getting clean for Eugene worked.”
Jack glanced over at me. “Jane, I think he’s more afraid of Robert Kennedy.”