iv
A few miles out of town, we meandered up a valley road, then drove along a hillside to a rutted dirt double track. Mike eased the car to a stop at a boxy house covered with vertical honey-colored cedar slats, parking next to his parents’ Buick station wagon. Once inside, I froze, mesmerized by the view filling windows on three sides. The ceiling rose up behind, to five more windows letting in the last of the evening light. On the left, clouds, cherry melting into orange, hugged the divide we’d crossed, thirty miles away. In front of us rose the hill outside of Aspen, its ski runs all we could see. To the right, a massive ridge, so close and high I had to tilt back my head to see its treeless top, grey and granite with snow-filled crevices. Ski trails ran down its face, trimmed with dark green firs, a rocky halo at the tree line. As I walked through the open room, each step brought a new perspective of this bulky natural sculpture. I could feel the pull this view had on Mike and his father.
Jack smiled and waved me in, sweeping his hand around while saying, “We only had the house studded in this summer. Right now, I’m finishing wiring all the electrical, and I’ve put up the insulation in the bedroom walls downstairs.” He turned to Mike, continuing, “Shelly’s old bed is in that big room down there, the one with folding doors.” He went over to a table cluttered with tools, picking up a wire cutter and some screwdrivers. “Why don’t you help me with the last few outlets, Mike?”
With that, Grace came out. Smiling, she took me by the elbow, guiding me to a couch and chairs. The entire floor was open, with a kitchen towards the rear, and a dining/living area filling the rest. “I want to hear all about Radcliffe, your studies, what you’re doing. Mike says you’re taking classes with Jerome Kagan?”
“He’s such a wise and curious man, I want to learn everything from him.”
“Such as…?”
“About how people grow, starting with babies, all the way to…the end. How they create their inner world, and how that personality engages with the rest of life.”
Grace nodded, silently encouraging me. I told her of my plans for graduate school, a Ph.D in psychology, then studying and working with children. I told her about Cambridge, how it had become my home, how Boston was a special place. As I talked, her eyes seemed to mist over, perhaps recalling a life she too had dreamed about, but left behind. Then she asked, “And Mike, you and Mike, how are you getting along?”
Her eyebrows raised expectantly, her lips and cheeks a gentle smile, without a word she tugged out of me all the things I wanted to tell her son, but felt too stifled to try. How he sometimes wouldn’t wait for me to figure things out on my own. “His mind’s so quick, he can’t wait for me to do something like adjust the mirrors in the car. He knows I’m as smart as he is, why does he have to be so impatient?”
While she listened, Grace opened her mouth, her lower lip across her teeth, and explored the back of them with her tongue. Slightly embarrassed, she apologized, “Sorry. I’ve got something under here, feels like food caught, but it’s inside, like a cyst or swollen gland. Go on.”
“How do you do it, you and Jack. Stay together for thirty years, without driving each other insane?”
With a rueful smile, she replied, “Companionship is different from love, or friendship for that matter. Learning how to live with someone is a life-long proposition.”
“But how do you do it?” I almost pleaded. “Where do you begin?”
“It’s never easy. People are particular, they each have their own thoughts, ideas, emotions, and ways of doing things. We can change a little to make someone else happy, but in the end, each of us is trying to make herself, himself happy. That’s a good place to start. Then, to live with someone else, day-in, day-out, you have to really…” She struggled as if finding the right words to express her thought. “The other person has to be so important to you, that you simply can’t live without him. It helps a lot if he feels the same way.”
“How do you know that?”
Mike and Jack came back upstairs, my question hanging, unanswered.
Next morning, Jack and Grace left for Cincinnati, leaving Mike and I to explore on our own. We drove 10 miles up from town alongside a rock-filled creek, rounded a bend, and came to a mile-long valley ending abruptly at a mountain resembling a massive, off-kilter cathedral, complete with two towers. Small mounds of branches and mud plugged the meandering creek, interrupted several times by piles of bleached-white logs, backing up the sluggish water into a series of small ponds.
“That would be a great place for a golf course,” I observed cheerily.
“I don’t think the beaver would like it,” Mike laughed.
“Beaver?”
“See their homes there, the mounds of dirt? And their dams, all those white piles of trees they cut down.”
“Beaver?” I repeated. “I thought they were all gone, like the buffalo. Trappers killed them off, or something.”
“Well, not around here, apparently.”
Mike turned off the pavement onto an irregular path, parked, and announced, “We’re here. Ashcroft.”
Expecting a town, all I saw were a few grey buildings, devoid of any adornment, wind snaking though the holes created by missing slats. Behind me, dogs howled incessantly. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing across the road.
“Oh, Toklat Lodge. They keep huskies there, tourists come up in the winter for dog sled rides, and cross-country skiing. Remember ‘Sgt. Preston of the Mounties’? These dogs were in that show. Come on, let’s take a little hike.”
Mike’s idea of a “little hike” meant three miles up a dusty steep trail filled with roots and rocks, which quickly made me regret my choice of footwear. “I can’t do this, Mike. My shoes, they slip on the rocks, and my feet hurt.” My legs had quickly tired as well, but I dared not mention that.
“We’re not at the top yet, not at the lake,” he whined.
I stood firm. “No, I’m not going on another hike unless I can get some sturdier shoes.”
Reluctantly, Mike turned around and started back, but not before he found a branch under one of the trees. Pounding its end onto a rock, he said, “Here, use this as a hiking stick on the way down.”
The next day, new boots on my feet, my hair in its plump single braid, wearing a stylish cotton red-striped oxford shirt with khaki shorts for comfort, I agreed to accompany him once again on a walk to what Mike touted as “the best mountains you’ll see anywhere.” Another narrow road rising steeply next to another fast-flowing creek, another mountain sharply peaking towards the clouds, this one uncannily like an Egyptian pyramid.
Passing a small corral where several horses waited with saddles, Mike pointed, “Look! When I was ten or twelve, we took a ride out of here, from this ranch, up to the backside of that ski area. Not Aspen,” he said, motioning to the left, “but the Highlands, over there,” gesturing to the right. “Wanna try?”
I could not imagine what it might feel like, to sit legs splayed wide while tilting back and forth, side-to-side at the whims of a nervous equine. “I thought we were going to do this hike…”
“Right. Maybe some other time.”
A few minutes farther, as we got closer and closer to that jaw-dropping Pyramid Peak (its actual name, according to Mike), we rounded a corner to the right. Twin slabs resembling gargantuan bells emerged suddenly in front of us, their faces etched with layer upon layer of grey granite. They looked like no mountain I had ever seen, certainly not like New England’s rounded slopes, tree-covered all the way to the top. I kept staring.
Finally, “Is that where we’re going? Can we walk up to their base? What are they?”
“Those,” Mike slowly announced, “are the Bells, the Maroon Bells. And, yes, that’s where we’re going, walking right up to them.”
“How far?”
“About a mile and a half. Two lakes, then we turn around, unless we want to camp out over night.”
With my new boots, and my crooked hiking stick, I had an easier time. Each step, each corkscrew in the trail, brought another exhilarating vista. Used to the thin air now, I felt more invigorated than exhausted by the effort, willing to give Mike a hug when we reached the silvery lake set amongst the boulders at the bottom of the Bells. He smiled, shook his head, and said, “See. I knew you’d like this.”
That night, as we lay in Shelly’s old bed, I looked around at the shiny insulation between the wooden studs lining the bedroom walls. “This is such a friendly room,” I observed.
“Friendly? What do you mean?”
“These walls – they’re sparkling at us, almost like they’re winking. I feel a little bit happy here,” I tried, hoping I could convince myself. Mike smiled with a short, contented close-mouth laugh. As he squeezed my shoulder, we fell asleep in the luxurious expansive confines of that 19th-century four-poster.
v
“I’m going to try the ‘Introduction to Psychoanalysis’ course with Katy Winters,” Mike said as we traveled east along that unending stretch of western Kansas which, if anything, had gotten flatter since the trip out. “You studied Freud last year, right? What should I know about it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for one thing, why are analysts in movies always asking, ‘How does that make you feel?’ What is it about feelings, why are they so concerned with that?”
I’d been thinking about this for months, both formally in class, and in life, talking with friends. “It’s pretty simple, really. Emotions drive what we think, what we believe, how we behave.” I struggled for an example. “When I saw the war on TV, or civil rights protestors getting fire-hosed, my immediate sensation was, ‘That’s wrong!’ I felt anger. Then, I started to come up with, formulate reasons why it’s wrong, using words to describe that emotion. Or take your reaction to another person. First, it’s a feeling, ‘I like him,’ or ‘Ugh! He’s a creep.’ After that we begin to figure out why we feel that way, and start to explain the feeling.”
Mike stared at the unbending four-lane ahead. I couldn’t tell if he was listening. I turned the radio on, trying to find some music hiding within the static.
“What are you doing? I can’t think with that noise!” He looked over at me. “I still don’t get it. How can talking about feelings help anyone change what they think much less what they do?”
“Are you sure you want to be a psychiatrist? I’ll try again. First, you feel something, you have an attitude about a person or an idea. Then, you come up with a rationale to describe why you think that way, or why you did something. If you want to change what you are thinking or doing, you must start with the feeling that is driving the thought or behavior.”
Mike frowned. “OK, so…Love. Fear. Anger. Sadness. Joy. Gratitude. Those emotions are what we really are, and words are just attempts by the verbal part of our brain to describe, to share those feelings with others, or make sense of them to ourselves?” He waited a beat, then went on. “So, can it be a two-way street? Emotions drive thoughts and actions, but can words change the emotions?”
Exasperated, I replied, “Listen, buddy, where have you been the past three years? Don’t you remember all those poems you wrote? And showed to me, sent to me?”
Shrugging his shoulder, he softly said, “Yeah?”
With a heavy heart, I slowly told him, “Those poems, those words, they’re part of why I fell in love with you.”
We both fell silent, wind coursing through the open windows the only sound.
Finally, Mike decided, “I think I get it…you don’t love my words, you love the images they create. In you.”
“And you’ve always said, you don’t know what’s in you, until after you read what you’ve written. The feeling creates the poem, then reading the poem tells you what you feel.”
Mike found the Motel 6 in Topeka without a hitch this time. Driving up, he pointed excitedly, “Look! A drive-in! It’s a Paul Newman movie – wanna see it?”
Being with someone all the time, talking and sharing the same space, is quite difficult. An isolated couple is an anomaly. Activity, friends, even a crowd of strangers, any outside influence will smooth the ennui of habit and routine. Movies had always helped.
Afterwards, shuffling towards bed in the cramped motel room, I found myself saying, “After they robbed that train, and the sheriff…”
“Pinkertons”
Exasperated, I agreed, “OK, Pinkerton!” He couldn’t leave it alone, he always had to be right. “The Pinkertons followed them all day, and they came to that cliff. The only thing they could do was jump…”
“One of them, Robert Redford, didn’t want to…”
Closing my eyes in frustration, I went on, “He couldn’t swim, but he took the leap anyway. Then they hit the water, and it broiled and pounded all around them, taking them down the river, totally out of their control.”
“Yeah, that was the highlight of the movie for me, too. Funny, dramatic…” He was falling asleep.
“That’s the way I feel with you.” He probably couldn’t hear me when I said, “You and I, we didn’t want to, but we jumped off the cliff together, not knowing what would happen. Now, we’re down in the river, it’s all around us, it’s bigger and stronger than us, and we don’t know where it’s going.” Hearing Mike’s slow and sonorous breathing, I knew he was sound asleep. “I can’t be buddies with you all the way to Bolivia, to the end. I need to wash up on shore, and soon.”
vi
Back in Cambridge, I found myself pulled once again to Hillel. In the year since I’d attended the worship and study congregation with Les, Rabbi Gold had added two or three meetings every day, where reading from the Torah was not on the agenda. Women’s participation in weekly services, book discussions on works by authors such as Bellow and Roth, study groups on Harvard’s role in the community, and anti-war advocacy – we analyzed it all in fevered fine detail. In late September, at a meeting reviewing the impending vote by Harvard’s Faculty to condemn the war, Howard Lehrman plopped down next to me.
“I thought you were afraid of admitting to your roots, Janie.”
“Howard! Hi!” Now he’s calling me ‘Janie’? “You know how I like to argue and discuss. I feel comfortable here. Maybe these are my people, after all. Anything that’s lasted so long must have something going for it, no? I’d like to learn what that is, since it’s a part of me. Find out what that power is, I mean.”
Meeting ended, walking through the Divinity School on the way to Oxford Street, Howard fell in step with me. His hair seemed neater, his clothes less flamboyant. “How’s second year in law?” I asked.
“A lot of work. Reading, writing, arguing in my study group.”
“What about SDS – they still fired up?”
“Not so much here anymore. It looks like being against the war is now the norm on campus, and everyone, after the strike, is on the workers’ side. But I am going to Washington next month.”
“Washington? What’s that?”
“Another march, to show Nixon he’s got to end it. We may not like the man, but he’s in charge, so he’s the key to finally getting us out. And then there’s the draft lottery. Law school won’t protect me, not like college did the last four years. I’m worried about that.”
“Draft lottery?” I felt like a grind, studying so much I didn’t know the simplest things about what was going on in the world.
“Oh, yeah, you’re not a guy. December 1st, they’re going to pull ping-pong balls out of a machine or something, like a Bingo game. 366 numbers, assign each one to a date, then draft people based on that. I’m trying not to think about it.”
“Bummer”
“Yeah, bummer.”
We arrived at the steps up to 119. The vacant lot next door had gone to seed, patchy clumps of dying grass and weeds reminding me I was not in Clifton, or the manicured Radcliffe quad anymore. Howard asked, “Say, you want to go see a movie this weekend?”
Mike was coming up for the first time that fall on Saturday, for an overnight weekend at Martha’s Vineyard. Without thinking, I replied, “Friday night OK?”
Trudging up three flights to our apartment, I walked in on what appeared to be a witches’ coven. Jeanne and Bev, both dressed in black, hovered over a steaming pot on the stained and weary stove.
“What’s cooking?” I asked.
“Toil and trouble,” came the reply from Bev. “How was Hillel?”
“Fine. The Faculty’s going to vote in a couple of weeks, whether to formally object to government policy on the war, asking them to end it. We’re supposed to ‘engage’ with our professors, get a feel for where they stand.”
“Mmm,” Bev hummed, raising her head and closing her eyes while sniffing the simmering brew.
Jeanne looked up, smiling, and said, “I saw Howard Lehrman down there with you.”
I felt myself flush a little, below my collar bones. Before it could reach my neck, I turned away, dropped my bag, saying quickly, “Yeah he was there.”
“Anything new?”
“We decided to go see a movie tomorrow night.”
Bev and Jeanne both froze, then turned towards me as I sat on the threadbare couch installed underneath the bay window.
“So what’s up? I thought Mike was coming this weekend, you were going to the Vineyard?” Bev queried.
I frowned and sighed, saying, “Yeah, I’m not sure what I’m thinking.” I stopped, trying to put my feelings into words. “It’s like, with Mike, the newness of us has gotten old. I feel I haven’t lived, I don’t know how to handle life and other people.” I remembered talking with my mother, with Mike’s mom Grace, about their relationships. Hoping for clarity from Jeanne and Bev, I plowed on. “What is love, anyway? I get so confused, thinking about it with Mike.”
“Oh, ‘love’. That’s a tough one, isn’t it? What do you see, when he’s on your mind? How did it all start, and grow?” Bev tried.
I went back to the beginning, telling them how I first thought he had the hands of a doer, not just a thinker. And now I saw him hiking, skiing, swimming, and wondered if I could do all that with him. “And then it gets all jumbled with his body. We write these letters, he woos me with his words. But also his body. I see him, I feel him, and those words go out the window, it’s all about touch and warmth and…”
“And sleeping together,” said Bev.
“Yes, and that. Call it what you want, it feels right and good, but I don’t know if that is love. Is it? What is love?” I repeated.
Bev tried again. “It’s like art, right? I know it when I see it. It’s so obvious to me that you two are in love. He idolizes you, and you fawn over him like you’ve lost your mind.”
Now I felt even more embarrassed. The last thing I wanted, the last thing I needed, was to lose my mind, my ability to think clearly, to read and write and learn. I knew Bev was right. I knew I loved Mike, that was the start of our relationship. “I guess you’re right, yes, I do love him, I’ve always loved him and that’s what confuses me.”
“Do you ever say no to him? You’ve got to say no to him, if you want to get him to act like you want towards you.”
I thought about this during an uncomfortable silence. Jeanne frowned slightly, her analytic mind whirring like a slot machine. “I can’t when we’re together.” Another scary hesitation. “The attraction when we’re together is so strong, we have so much fun together.”
Bev sighed. “Then it sounds like the only way to say no to him is to not have him around at all.” That made me almost shiver with fear.
Jeanne was ready to speak. “Here’s the way I see it, Janie. You started out feeling love for him, when you were, what, sixteen? Then you two became friends, all those walks and talks, those letters you’re always writing. At some point, your two created a new component, went from kissing to hugging to sleeping together, the whole sex thing. And now, last summer, you tried out being companions, on that long trip after you saw me in St. Louis. That’s the next step, you have to learn how to be, see if you can be, companions.”
vii
“What did you think?” Howard asked as we walked out of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
He had been so eager to see the film, even though I’d seen it before, I couldn’t deny him, not on our first official date. I replayed the scene with Butch, Paul Newman, riding Etta Place around on a bicycle while her real boyfriend, the Sundance Kid, lay sleeping in her cabin, recovering from their relentless pursuers. “The bicycle was kind of fun,” I offered.
“Bicycle?”
“Sure, when he rides around to that song, Raindrops Falling On My Head, then pushes it away and says, what is it, ‘You can have the future’.”
He seemed puzzled. It hit me: that perky schoolteacher, arms around another man, seeing the horses in her barn give way to a new-fangled machine. Howard was friendly, smiling, but I vaguely wondered if he might lead me to a dead end, somewhere like La Paz. I had to re-direct our attention.
“After law school, you have plans?”
Howard hesitated, then revealed, “I’ve been going to a few meetings at Hillel, where they talk about Israel. First, after I pass the boards, I want to go there, see what a kibbutz is like for a few months,. Then come back, go work at the legal Clinic in Somerville.”
Seeing my own puzzled look, he explained, “I’ve been volunteering there last spring and summer. They have so much trouble fighting landlords, employers. No one will help them, no real lawyers, I mean. All anybody wants to know is how much money is in it for them. We could get a whole network going, provide them with proper representation.”
As he walked me back to Oxford Street, I scrunched up against the evening chill. He tentatively put an arm around my shoulder, gave a squeeze and asked, “Maybe I can warm you up?” My silence and tense reaction stopped him short as he pulled away, saying, “Here you are,” Questioning with his eyes, he asked “Plans for this weekend?”
With Michael Harrison arriving the next morning, a strong surge of honesty made me say, “Mike’s coming up. We’re going down to Martha’s Vineyard for the weekend.”
Howard’s face lost all animation. He didn’t frown, simply went blank. “Oh,” was all he said. I walked inside, feeling defeated.
Next morning, I heard Mike’s Lancer a block away, now in need of a new muffler. I hurried downstairs with my bag to meet him outside. I didn’t want to risk Jeanne or Bev revealing anything about my evening with Howard. Seeing me, Mike’s grin grew even broader as he waved an envelope overhead. “First one!” he shouted.
“First what?”
“Cincinnati. I got into UC med school!”
“You don’t really want to go there, do you?” I asked, genuinely worried he might say yes.
“Of course not! Why would I want to go back there? But now I don’t have to worry I won’t get in anywhere. It’s is a relief to know they want me. I mean, I only sent in the application two weeks ago. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”
That simple acceptance, the reassurance his future was assured, gave Mike a boost the whole way down the coast. “For the first time – I guess I haven’t told you this, but I’ve been worried I wouldn’t get in anywhere – for the first time, I can see the future. I don’t know where I’m going next fall, not yet. But it’ll be somewhere good, I’m sure.”
As we drove along under canopies of trees, their leaves showing the first hints of autumn’s orange, red and yellow, the placid bay gently shimmering in the mid-day sun, I reflected on Jeanne’s idea of companionship.
“Mike? What do you think it means, to be a companion?”
“What, like somebody who helps out an old person in a retirement home?”
“No, as a stage in a relationship. You know, two people can be lovers, they can be friends. But they can do that without being…together. Without living together.”
“Hmm…you mean, sleeping together is easier than living together?”
I hadn’t thought of it that way, that making love is not permanent. The act never lasts very long, although the memory might. Out loud, I said, “Making a home, a life; that lasts a lot longer than a night in bed.”
I could see him smiling a bit sheepishly as he stared dutifully at the road ahead. Sucking air through his lips and teeth, he struggled to say, “Kids, though. Sleeping together, in the end, that’s all about kids, that’s where it all comes from. And kids, that’s about as permanent as it gets.” He sighed again.
“What?” I demanded.
“I’m thinking about the little kids, the ones I coach, the eight-and-unders. I mean, I don’t want to spend my life doing that, but I do know I want a family, want to have little kids around who grow up, into teen-agers, then adults. That feels so right, so true, what I’m supposed to do, what I want to do.”
“Kids? How many, like a lot?”
“What’s ‘a lot’?”
I had never thought of my family as too big. I said, “Six or seven. That would be too many.”
“Three of four, no more. But more than two. Fifty percent more fun, with just one more…”
Next morning, in a little Edgartown hotel room, we awoke to the familiar clanging of cables against masts on the boats in the marina below our window. After breakfast, we rented bikes and moseyed along the northern coast road, headed for our favorite spots near Menemsha. It was late on a sunny Sunday morning, and a gaggle of youngsters in their church clothes pedaled madly by us, free for at least a half a day. As they whizzed along, Mike stopped, got off and leaned against his bike. Bending down, he pulled a long, drying blade of grass, pale as straw, from a patch near a wooden fence post. He stuck it in his mouth, wiggling it up and down, staring north at the glassy waters of the sound.
He pulled it out, pointing at the bikers quickly disappearing up ahead. He cleared his throat for one of his poetic pronouncements. “Kids. They’re the ultimate expression of the permanence and value of the universe. An unmeltable glue between the two folks who make one.”