viii
Mike showed up Friday afternoon, carrying Dylan’s new album, Nashville Skyline. On my little suitcase record player, the understated instruments and Dylan’s softened voice were right at home.
“This came out on my birthday. When you told me not to come up after all that stuff happened here, the strike, I thought this might have been the present you would have gotten me. Have you heard it yet?”
“Not really. I’ve been all worried – consumed – trying to catch up on the classes I missed. What’s with his voice, anyway? It’s not scratchy like before.”
“I read, after he had the bike accident, he had to stop smoking when he was in the hospital, the doctors wouldn’t let him, or something. This is what he sounds like without cigarettes, I guess.”
“It’s almost … sweet.” I offered.
We listened to it straight through together, both ostensibly reading, but, as it turned out, intensely focused on what, if anything, the songs could tell us about us. The album was filled with love songs which, oddly for Dylan, were unambiguous and straightforward. During those concentrated 26 minutes, we heard about new love, lost love, men wronged, women scorned, couples reunited. Not a minute into the album, Bob was joined by Johnny Cash warbling in a baritone drawl, “See for me that her hair’s hanging down, it curls and falls all down her breast…that’s the way I remember her best.” Mike walked up behind me, lifting my own tumbling black locks off my shoulders, sighing, “That is the way I remember you best.”
I held a book open on my desk, reading nothing, saying nothing. He returned to the edge of my bed. Five songs, including “I Threw It All Away”, quickly played on the tinny speaker. Mike flipped the record over, and on the other side we heard, “Lay, lady, lay; lay across my big brass bed.” He lay on his side, on my narrow dorm bed, also pretending to read. I couldn’t meet his eyes. By the time Dylan sang the final line, “Tonight I’ll be staying here with you” (after urging his love to “tell me that it isn’t true,”) neither of us spoke for a good five minutes.
Finally, I stood up and went to my closet. “No, that’s not the present I was going to give you. Actually, I didn’t have anything at all in mind, things were so crazy here.” He gave another sigh, sat up, and started to speak.
“But I did make this,” I blurted, reaching for my satchel on the closet shelf. I pulled out the sweater, still with a few strands of yarn hanging out, waiting to be tied off and cut. “It’s way too big on me, so it should fit you.”
He didn’t smile, looking from the sweater to my face, and back again. I was not smiling either. The air seemed leaden, stifling. Mike held the sweater out in front, then pulled the shoulders up to his. “It’s perfect.” He beamed. “I don’t know what…I never had anybody do anything so good for me, so …loving. Thank you.” He sat back down on the bed clutching at the sweater, like a cat softly fondling a fuzzy pillow. “You know that philosophy class I took this year? Phenomenology and Existentialism?”
“The one you thought would give you the answer to all life’s questions? Did you find the grail?”
He laughed drily. “No. It got pretty esoteric there towards the end. But they sneaked in this guy, Alain Badiou. It really got to me, this one thing he wrote, this past month since we’ve been…since we’ve not been…” He frowned, then went on, “Anyway, his point was, love is not all about the first encounter, that ecstatic initial bloom. He says, ‘Love is a tenacious adventure.’ Tenacious, because it doesn’t fully flower if you give up at the first sign of trouble. I really like his thought, that real love triumphs, often painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space, and the world.” He left that hanging in the air between us.
“I’ve been cooped up here, for weeks, it seems. Let’s go out, walk around, feel fresh air. Want to come with me, down to the Square or something?”
He looked thoughtful. “No, you go ahead. I’m tired from driving up. And I want to write something. Is that OK?”
I nodded, touching his cheek with my fingers, drawing them slowly away as I headed for the door. Out on Walker Street, a rhododendron bush flowered over the picket fence in front of a three-story white clapboard house. I’d watched the buds burst into pale pink splendor over the past two weeks. The slowest were only now beginning to open, while the earliest blooms spread majestically, bigger than my two hands cupped together. I cradled one, sniffed, and leaned back, looking up at some high thin clouds. Their feathery edges glowed faintly with the setting sun’s fading light. I drew my hands away, and as I did, first one, then a second petal broke off from the center, each softly, languidly falling, slowly arcing away from each other, towards the earth below. I thought how they’d start to melt, disintegrate, becoming part of the soil, fertilizing the plant, renewing its beauty for another season.
After nine, I returned, finding Mike asleep on his side, fully clothed, facing the wall. On the desk, he’d left his spiral notebook open to a poem, written in blue ball-point on the white, lined paper. Titled “To Janie, on Her Twentieth Birthday”
Twenty
seems a bit too much
For your newly slender cheeks to carry
without dropping.
As old you are, as old you get,
and yet,
To cap my slight remembrance and call back
a bright and sunny
Weekend,
so long ago,
when the only time we lost the sun
Was in our sleepy fog,
who whipped in and back
Across the beach, as if he were a wave.
And clinging to the island roads, cavorting through the
Forest,
was a machine
who felt our joy
And she was happy.
But I kept from you a little girl, whose spell
had warped my heart, and made me weep
when I should laugh.
And now you keep yourself from me,
and through my
anger and my joy at summer’s toys
I might hide me too.
But I don’t want to,
I can’t bear
to share another summer
far away
without our forest island fog
and crowded summer house or beach
beyond the lobster boats.
But I must wait, and when your full day comes,
When you must grow alone,
far from
any house or hope of home,
think of me
and what will be,
as our love becomes a separate being,
which, like a child
born too early, must be nurtured separate for a while.
I looked over at Mike, hands curled under his cheek resting on the pillow, shoulders rising and falling evenly with each breath. I marveled at how he got…everything I was feeling. The special times together on the Vineyard, riding around in that converted VW dune buggy. My unformed fear of who or what he was going back to in the summer. The fight between his hold on me, and my struggle to be free. Our love, like a premie in a nursery away from its parents, struggling to survive, every breath an adventure, a tenuous hold on life. Beyond tired, exhausted not only from studying, from the relentless strike, tired simply from life, from trying to understand how to live my life with love, or without it. I lay down on the bed next to Mike, back-to-back, each of us fully clothed, and tried to sleep. A dreamless sleep, I hoped.
ix
Saturday evening, my studies finally done, we walked for several hours along the river. A single sculler, his evening row finished, hoisted his shell into the boathouse. Looking up, he waved. Walking silently hand in hand in the still, warm air, to him I’m sure we seemed lost in love. Mike waved back. Then, closing his eyes, he breathed in deeply.
“This feels so right…we’re supposed to be together,” he vowed. He looked over at me, frowning slightly. “Aren’t we? Shouldn’t we…?”
Tentatively, I agreed. “Let’s just take what we have now, Mike. Let’s not put so much on the future. I don’t know, you don’t know where you’re going after next year. And I’ll be here, I want to stay here, for grad school, working here.” I left that hanging.
“How can we do that? I don’t want us to be over,” he answered plaintively.
“We’ve been doing this long-distance thing for … years now. I’m meeting people here, feeling like this is my home, and you drop in for a weekend or a week, you’re not part of that.” His tried to pull his hand away; I held on tight. “I love you now. Can’t that be good enough?”
Back in my room, the night before I turned twenty, we made love for the first time in several months. Tucked tight together in that single bed, I woke at dawn with his hand cradling my head, fingers entwined in my hair. I made a vow, that however long we had, how ever much or little we might be together, I would remember – would celebrate – his warm skin holding fast against me.
We started our drive back. Away from Cambridge, not yet in Ohio, we re-explored past adventures, secure in our private world. Martha’s Vineyard helped a lot, with scraggly trees growing up against the dunes, a constant sea breeze blowing fresh across our faces. Everything was for us, could be about us, once again. In Pennsylvania, along the Turnpike where the car broke down that night a year ago in March, Mike’s little red Lancer started to sputter. He found a garage, pulled in, and asked for help.
“Let me take a look. You two go into the coffee shop there, I’ll let you know what I find.” The mechanic was young, under thirty, with long greasy hair, and a friendly smile. He wiped his hands on a stained red rag, and leaned under the hood to look.
When we came back, he smiled broadly. “Easy! See,” he said, pointing at the unfathomable tangle surrounding the engine, “you’ve got a fan belt here that’s starting to shred.” He lifted up a thick rubber band, frayed and cracked, running between two solid discs. “It’s slipping, so you don’t get a consistent spark. You need that spark to come precisely at the right time, to keep the engine running smoothly. You know, from the spark plugs?” He shoved his hand vaguely into the dark depths.
“Is that it?” Mike asked. “What do we need to do?”
The mechanic pulled a wrench from a loop on his overalls, loosened something, pulled off the belt, and threw a new one on. As he worked he announced, “Should just be a minute. Fifteen bucks is all. Plus the belt, another seven ninety-nine. There!” A final hard pull on the wrench. “You’re good to go!”
Back on the road, Mike fiddled with the radio, finding nothing but static in the endless Appalachian hollows. He asked, “How far do you want to go? We should get out of these hills, stay in Pittsburgh at a cheap motel.”
I nodded, “Mmm hum.” I thought about the worn belt, and how a little preventive maintenance saved our trip this year from ending up like the last one. Out loud, I continued, “It’s funny, isn’t it, how a little work like that can keep things going? There ought to be mechanics for people, shouldn’t there, to diagnose and treat us…fix us up in 30 minutes for under $25.”
Mike interrupted, “But isn’t that what a doctor, what a psychologist or psychiatrist is? Somebody who keeps you running, somebody who can help…”
My turn to interrupt. “You and me, us, we need a regular spark to keep us going. Maybe our belt’s gotten frayed, not running smooth?”
“That’s something we can fix ourselves, should fix ourselves. If we need somebody outside of us, to make us better, to make us whole, then what’s the point of…us?”
By the time we reached Cincinnati, we were whole again, wholly present with each other. For a week or two, we had that cocoon back around us, as we took advantage while his parents were at work to lounge by the pool, or hide away in his bed. We didn’t talk about our summers, his at the swim club, mine back in the Harvard psych lab. I wondered, could our chrysalis stay in suspended animation, would anything at all emerge come fall?
Saturday night before I left, June 7th, Mike and I ate dinner at home with my parents. Afterwards, we headed to the den for the premiere of Johnny Cash on TV. Of course, it was Dylan we really wanted to see.
Henry and Miriam followed us in. I tried explaining to them why this was special, that Bob Dylan never appeared on TV, that somehow he and Cash had become musical buddies, were going to sing together. My father thought it odd, off-putting, that a country singer from the Ozarks should cozy up with a radical ex-folkie from northern Minnesota by way of Greenwich Village. A Jewish one at that.
“Hmm. It might be that musicians, singers, have more in common, more mutual respect over their songs, their authenticity, than they have differences in attitude, accent, where they’re from?” Mike offered.
My dad grunted.
While we waited for Dylan, a tall blonde appeared with a guitar, singing, “I’ve looked at life from both sides now…I really don’t know life at all.” I almost started crying listening to that voice, so clean and pure, the words so sincere.
My dad said, “She sounds Canadian, hear how she said ‘about’ like it’s ‘a boot’?”
Mike asked, “Who’s that?”
I sighed. My older siblings had long ago introduced me to folk music. “Joni Mitchell. She’s really good.”
“Yeah,” was all Mike said.
After she and Johnny sang “Girl From Saskatoon” together, a lean, disjointed fiddle player appeared in a velour suit and ruffled shirt, his chin sticking out almost as far as his nose, chanting “Diggy diggy do.” As he played, singing with a continual catch in his voice, the audience clapped along with his yodels, smiles, and wild eyes.
Finally, after the second commercial, Dylan came on, starting with, “If you find some one who gives you all of her love, take it to your heart, don’t let it stray. One thing’s for certain, you will surely be a-hurtin’ if you throw it all away.” Inwardly, I started to cry, and hoped I could hide it from everyone.
Mom wondered, “He’s not much of a performer, sweetie. What do you see in him? He can’t even look at the audience.”
I walked Mike out to his car. Silently, we hugged as he sat on the hood, pulling me closer, squeezing as if he’d never let me go. Finally, we eased apart, and locked eyes. He looked down, sighed, shook his head, and clasped his hands together in front of his face, pressing the tips of his nose with his index finger. He dropped his fingers to his lips, then reached forward to touch mine. Sighing once more, he said simply, “I hate to say good-bye.”
x
I’d been back in Cambridge a week when Bev and I finally had a chance to sit down and eat dinner together. She experimented with an eggplant-and-broccoli concoction, laden with lentils and rice and her usual eclectic mix of spices.
“You’re looking almost gaunt, Jane, what happened?”
I had never paid much attention to my body size or shape. There was no bathroom scale in the Stein house; George and Charlie had stayed pretty much the same weight into their twenties, and Lisa’s constant motion kept her slim. Then I remembered Mike’s birthday poem, my “newly slender cheeks.”
“I don’t know, I haven’t been much interested in eating the past few months.”
“Maybe you’ve had a lot on your mind?” Bev probed.
I stopped chewing, trying to get some inner perspective. A wave of awareness flooded my thoughts. “I think you’re right. First, there’s Mike, he’s in my mind half the time, but never around. I pushed him away, pulled him back, and don’t know what I want from him, with him.”
Bev nodded, holding her fork up for emphasis. “Boys’ll do that to you.”
“Then, the strike, that night at Uni, when the cops pulled everybody out. I’m not sure why, but that got to me more than when I got kicked outside the Hilton in Chicago last summer. It just went on and on, everyone so righteous in their anger, the Harvard admin so…establishment… in their response.” I took another bite. “The broccoli might not have been the right idea? Maybe tomatoes instead next time?”
“Noted.”
“Right now, I know I’m anxious about this thing I’m doing at the Cognitive Studies Center that Kagan got me into. I’m working in a group with Barry Brazelton.”
“The pediatrician?”
“Yeah. Where does Harvard get all these super-smart charismatic guys? I love his drawl. It’s so completely what I want to do, studying and learning about how kids develop.” I frowned. “They really don’t have me doing much of anything. I’m getting coffee and collating papers, like a secretary even though I’m called a ‘research assistant’. The whole thing makes me super-nervous.”
“Why? They wanted you. You have to start somewhere.”
“I know. But there’s a couple of things. I feel like I don’t really belong. I’m the only undergrad, everybody knows so much more than me, can talk so much more intelligently about child psychology. I wish it didn’t take so long to get good at something.”
We sat silently awhile. I tried some home-made salad dressing, hoping to hide the slight bitterness of the broccoli.
Bev prodded, “You said ‘there’s a couple of things’?”
I sighed. “Oh, yeah. This other thing, that’s probably the worst. The Center had a lot of grants from all over. There’s a big one from the NIH that funds my job. We heard yesterday that Nixon decided not to renew it after July 1st.”
“Oh Jesus, why? What are they going to do?”
“Well, it was such short notice, they said they could move some money around and keep me through July, but that’s it. I’m gonna have to find something else, or go back home, I guess.” I put my fork down, done eating even though the plate remained half full. “People are saying this is some kind of retaliation. Nixon sees places like Harvard as the enemy, the eggheads out to get him, so he had the HEW secretary look for any funding he could pull right away. I mean, I knew he was a bad guy, but this is simply evil. We’re studying mothers and babies! How is that dangerous to ‘law and order’?”
Of course I wrote to Mike about the change in plans, that I’d be coming home. I expected he might call right away, but it was ten days before I got a letter back. He rhapsodized about the kids on his swimming team, how they were going to win their league championship for the second year in a row. At the end, even when he did acknowledge how my summer was not going as planned, he talked about how that meant we could be together again. Not a sympathetic word or inkling that he understood how devastated I was.
Sunday, July 20th, the team at the Center held a good-bye party for those of us cut from the staff. Someone brought in a small back-and-white TV so we could watch the moon landing. One of the post-doc fellows went on and on about the dissonance between those billions of dollars spent on the ‘frivolous Flash Gordon adventure’ and Nixon’s callous cutting of a few hundred thousand from our lab.
“Hell, we’re just an accounting error in the Apollo program!” he harangued.
Mike wrote the next day. He started with one of his usual trenchant observations, “We send those guys all the way to the moon, and the first thing they do is trash the place, leave a flag and lander behind, like litter on a highway.” Then, a page and a half about his team, how they’d won the regional Junior Olympics, and how great that had made him feel. He closed by describing his drive home afterwards, alone, feeling almost depressed, having left the party of celebrating parents and swimmers, then having no one to share his joy. “It’s funny how, the happier you are, the worse it feels when it’s all over.”
xi
I took the train home at the end of July. I needed time to myself, no crowds, no rush. On the way, I stopped in Rhode Island to see Charlie, Arlene, and Denise, hoping for a shot of their calm domesticity. Once there, we all packed up for a weekend visit to the Vineyard.
“We’ll look at some houses, see if we can find one to buy. They all turn over the weekend between July and August, most of them should be empty,” Charlie explained.
“Are you guys going to move there?”
“Not right away. We like it here, it’s cheap, it’s easier to find work at the hospital for Arlene. No, we want someplace small, near the shore in Edgartown, something I can fix up during the off-season. Then rent it out for a few years, put a little in the bank. Move there permanently in, I don’t know, three to five years.”
“What would you do, could you find a job there?”
“Arlene’s a nurse, if we come at the start of summer, it should be easy to get on at the hospital. Me, I want to find a little hole-in-the-wall downtown, set up a shop where people can bring things they make, sell to the tourists. A lot better for Denise than growing up in a city, all crowded, noisy. If we’re lucky, we can find something with a little yard, grow some of our food.”
While Charlie and Arlene scouted the real estate market, I got to escort Denise, now four and a half, on her own miniature adventures.
“Auntie Yane” – she was still having trouble with her “J’s” – “can we get some shells?”
“What would we do with them?”
“Pick them up. Then we throw them. They break on rocks.”
The high tide line was easy to spot, a mix of glistening brown seaweed, small white clam shells, and tiny black and grey rocks. Towards the ocean, the sand was firm, newly dried, filled will little holes bubbling air from the receding surf. Above, dry sand quickly faded into dune grass, the breeze rolling it along, tickling our legs at ankle level.
“Auntie Yane, are you a mommy too?”
I laughed nervously. “Not yet, Denise. Why?”
“Do you wanna be?”
From the mouths of babes, I thought. When I didn’t answer right away, she added, “Do you like babies? Do you?”
“What babies do you know?”
“A friend of mommy, she has a baby. Mommy says babies are fun, I was her little baby doll. But this baby, he can’t walk, he can’t talk, I can’t play with him, he’s no fun at all.”
“Sometimes you have to let a baby just be himself. When that happens, you can learn who they are, what they like, that’s how they’re fun. To Mommies.”
“Mommy says she can’t wait ‘til I go to kinnergarter. Did you go to kinnergarter? what’s that like?”
“It’s where you’ll meet a lot of kids, a lot of friends. You’ll learn to how to go to school.”
“What happens at school?”
“You learn how to read, to write, how to grow up.”
“I can’t wait to grow up.” She put on a serious face. “I wanna be bigger. I don’t wanna be a baby, I don’t want to be little. I want to be big like you.” She sat down, crumbling a shell between her pudgy little hands. “You never told me, do you wanna be a mommy?”
“If I had a little girl like you, I would so much want to be a mother.”
“Well, why don’t you then.”
“Why don’t I what?”
“Be a mother. Get a little girl like me, someone who could be my friend.”
“It’s not that easy.” Uh-oh, I thought, shouldn’t have said that. “What I mean is, the best babies also have daddies.” I was digging a bigger and bigger hole.
“Like Arlene and Charlie?”
Relieved, I quickly said, “Yes. Exactly like Arlene and Charlie.”
“Daddy says you have a boy friend. He says he hopes you know what you’re doing. What’s he mean? Can a boy friend be a daddy, too?”
“Well…”
Luckily, Charlie and Arlene came up from behind. Charlie picked up Denise, spinning her around full circle. He tossed her in the air as she laughed and screamed, then tucked her under his arm like a giant football.
“Did you find anything?” I asked.
“A couple of places. Now’s not the time to buy anything, we’ll come back after the season, see what’s what then.” Looking down at Denise, he went on, “You two get along?”
“She’s such a perfect little girl. Are you going to have another, someday?”
Charlie looked at Arlene, who was busy with Denise’s shoes and socks, trying to put them on while she wiggled in her father’s grip. She stopped, let out an exasperated sigh, then said, “Your brother’s going to have to learn how to share the load a little more, Janie.”
Charlie started to complain, but Arlene stopped him with a quick, sharp look.
After the weekend, I spent three more days with them, helping corral Denise while Arlene was at work. Charlie took that as a signal he could sail with some friends on Narragansett Bay. Denise was fun at first. Managing a kid all day exhausted me. In the psych lab, all I did was observe them, and sometimes play a little before or after with the older ones. But their mothers were always there for the real work. I realised what they meant about being the primary caregiver.
I got home on Thursday. Mike’s first free evening was Saturday. He said he’d leave the swim club about 6:30. With the new freeway, he should be in Clifton before 7. I went out to the front porch about 6:45, hoping to see him pull up. The air shimmered, almost electric. Thunder rumbled to the north, while a breeze rustled, then turned into a gust which bent the hardwood trees all along the street. Rain began to fall, at first dainty little drops, than bigger and bigger plops, quickly soaking my hair before I could run back inside. I wandered into the kitchen, where Mom was getting the food into serving bowls and onto platters.
“Where’s Mike, honey? I thought you said he’d be here for dinner.”
With a sour look on my face, I grumbled, “Maybe something was more interesting at the club.” Or someone, I said under my breath. The rain grew stronger still, beating against the windows like a snare drum and cymbals.
I ate dinner without him, sullenly picking at the lamb chop mom had dressed up for us. Finally, a little before 8, I heard Mike’s car outside. The rain had stopped, the wind was gone, but I was not going to greet him, I decided.
Dad got the door, let him in. Mike seemed shaken, nervously glancing from side-to-side.
“What happened? That was some storm,” Dad asked.
Mike sat down. “I think there was a tornado,” he asserted.
“What!” my mother exclaimed. “Where? When?”
Once inside, seated at the dining room table, eating the plate mom had warmed up for him, he relaxed, launching into the story. “I was coming down Reading. It started raining, that thunderstorm rain where you can’t even see though the wipers are going double-time. I thought I should slow down, got down to 25, but the wind kept getting worse. Then the car started to shake, quiver like it was being jiggled by the Jolly Green Giant. I had to stop. Right then, this big old wall, a grey curtain, swept across in front of me, I don’t know, 400 yards away. Everybody, all the other cars had stopped, kinda like waiting for a train to pass. It took less than a minute, then it was gone, so I thought it was OK to start up again. After a couple hundred yards, it was impossible. Power lines down, truck camper tops from that lot there near Galbraith, branches, trees even, all across the road. I had to go forever to get past it, almost all the way to Colerain to get around. There was junk all over the roads. But, I finally made it, here I am.”
“Sounds like a tornado,” Dad said. “Car’s OK? You OK?”
Mike nodded, then silently finished his dinner.
xii
After Mike finished eating, we sat on the front porch, staring at the leaves and branches flung down by the storm. One arm around his shoulder, my other resting on his leg, I asked, “You sure you’re OK? It must have been scary.”
“I thought the car was going to leave the ground…”
“Really?”
“Really. My parents told me when I was a baby, a hurricane came through when we lived in the apartment on Lynn Shore Drive. I’m starting to rack up disasters. Next, I suppose it’ll be an earthquake? But, that’s not the worst thing that happened to me this week.”
I took my hands back, got up and started walking down to the street. Mike followed, continuing, “We have the swim meets every Thursday, this time was at home. This late in the summer, it starts to get dark before we’re done, so they have these light poles they stick in the concrete deck. The electricity comes underneath, they’re supposed to turn it off after the meet. But yesterday morning, I was working with the kids, yelling at one of them – you gotta yell, ‘cause it’s hard to hear under water – yelling at Lisa, the anchor of our relay. She was dogging it, and that’s a bad example when your best swimmer isn’t working. Anyway, I grabbed onto one of the poles so I could lean down, get closer to her.” He stopped, smiling ruefully.
“What happened?” I prodded.
“It must have still been live, they told me I started dancing around the pole, holding on with both hands. It felt like when you stick your finger into a socket, but going all over and through my body. They said I was screaming, but the only thing in my head was a loud buzzing, drowning out everything and everyone. The head coach was on the other side of the pool, he dove in, swam over. By the time he got out, I must have spun myself off. The coach said, “Great! I don’t know how I was going to get you free, maybe a running tackle…’ So I guess I got electrocuted, right? And everything from now on is a bonus, like I should have died but didn’t?”
“How do you feel now?”
“I was tired all day, slept 10 hours last night, I’m still a little tingly, but I’m OK. A spiritual afterglow, like I should be dead but I’m not.”
I thought that was a little much, too dramatic a reaction. I decided to play along, though. “So what do you think you were saved for?”
“You know, I wondered about that after the tornado passed in front of me. Two lives down – no three, with the hurricane? – six to go, that sort of thing. Funny, my first thoughts were about kids.”
“The ones at the pool?”
“No, just kids…and families…in general. At the club, there are all these big families, four, five, even eight. And you – you’ve got three brothers and sisters.”
“Sister, singular,” I interrupted.
“Right, sister. Anyway, I realised, I like the idea of a bigger family. I think that’s what I’m here for, to keep the chain alive.”
“How many would you want?”
“At least three, maybe four. The chances for interaction increase geometrically as the group size increases arithmetically, right? So adding one or two makes a big difference in how many opportunities you get to learn from other people, other kids, when you’re real young. Like you, you had three older sibs, maybe that’s why you’re so much more sociable than I am?”
I gave that some thought. Lisa, always using my naïveté to get me in trouble. George, quiet George, immersed in books and his fantasy world, never any help at all. Only Charlie, almost a decade older, seemed to be on my side, caring about me, helping me learn and grow. “Not really. It might work the other way. The more there are in a family, the more chances for dissension and dysfunction.” I thought of my time cut short that summer in the psych lab. “For really little kids, infants, mothers are most important. That’s what I can’t get out of my mind.”
Two weeks later, on his day off, we drove up to Columbus, to the Ohio State Fair. “It’s supposed to be the biggest one in the country,” Mike said.
I didn’t really want to go. During two years in Boston I had become indoctrinated in the belief that the Midwest was a backwater, full of farms and auto plants, but not a haven for intellectuals or high achievers. The State Fair, no matter how big or famous, was that whole ethos writ large.
Mike was enthralled. Without a hint of irony, he reveled in the animal barns, the 4-H competitions, the cotton candy, and the blue-jeaned crowds. By the evening, he was ready for the midway.
“Look, there’s a ring-toss. I wanna try it!”
He missed badly the first time, which only spurred him on. “I can do this,” he growled, putting up another dollar for three more rubber gaskets. Circling one bottle, he won a rabbit’s foot key ring.
“You know those things are weighted, it’s rigged so you can’t really aim or win,” I whispered as he pulled another dollar out.
“Watch. I’m gonna win a big prize. I’ve got the feel for it now.”
He adjusted his feet, bent a little at the waist, shook the first ring to test its balance, then flicked it out with a little push from his right index finger.
“One!” he said firmly.
Repeating the ritual twice more with the same success, he hollered, “Yow! Got ‘em!” Looking over at me, he pointed at the top row, where the big fuzzy animals hung. “Which one do you want?”
I scanned the options – teddy bear, lion, pony. My eyes lit on a lower row, where a small bald baby doll in a gingham checked t-shirt waited. “That one. The baby.”
Walking towards the rides, cradling our prize, I decided, “I didn’t think this was going to be any fun. I’m glad we came. It makes me see, we can be us again.”
Mike gave me a squeeze around my waist, then guided me into a Ferris wheel car. While we ratcheted our way to the top, one car at a time, he pulled a yellow paper from his back pocket, unfolded it, producing a short, handwritten poem. Offering it to me, he said, “It’s not much, but the more I read this, the more I like it.”
Let’s not demand so much of every
single moment;
in each fragment we’re
alive, a different herald trumpets in
a newer, fresher life and home for us.
Don’t expect that every heartbeat holds
its promise all fulfilled,
each breath
an intake filled with laughter, carried
in on waves of something deeper than we see.
Look out from life, not in at living;
The things I share,
so filled with giving
Are handed over freshly carved from the
Chisel of my joy –
If I stop smiling, I might never know I’m happy.