v
Howard finished law school that spring, then attempted to study for his boards. But over the summer, while he volunteered at the Cambridge law clinic, we involuntarily passed from being occasional companions to true friends. I still saw my therapist most weeks, so I no longer needed a boy – a man – to listen to my confused feelings. With Mike, the combination of first love, innocent love, progressing to friendship, through intimacy, then butting up against our inability to fully say good-bye, had tortured us on the downslope of our relationship, in the end preventing any hope of breaking through to a life together.
Finally, one day that fall, I woke up and realised, Howard and I are now a couple, and that feels safe and warm. But not the same, it never could be the same, as before. A full employment guarantee for my therapist, I suppose.
Early November, she asked, seemingly out of the blue, “Why do you suppose we so often refer to sex euphemistically as ‘sleeping together’?” Almost as if she herself were struggling with the idea, and wanted help in understanding.
“Trust” floated through my head. Out loud, I ventured, “At work, I see all these people asleep. It’s my job to study them, to observe and record. Sometimes I wonder, ‘How can they trust us, strangers really?’
“Trust?” she repeated.
“They look so…vulnerable. Unmoving, peaceful, but helpless as a newborn baby. We could do anything to them, before they knew it.”
“Babies. Hmm…”
“Yeah, so when we’re – when I’m – having sex, I am, I feel completely open, totally at risk. I have to trust my partner, in so many ways, before, during and after.”
She speculated, “And might a partner feel the same way?”
Inwardly, I startled, realising I’d always been so wrapped up in my own feelings, of vulnerability and anxiety, that I’d never considered he – whoever he might be – could have anxieties of his own. “It’s hard, thinking about this. Sex, in the end, is all about babies, and there we are, usually naked, dependent, almost babies ourselves.”
“What else?”
I wondered what she meant, where she might be pointing me. “Love. It’s all wrapped up in love, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
Once again I started, as I compared my feelings about those two very different men. Those feelings weren’t the same, for sure. With Howard, we worked well together, but the innocent romantic passion I’d had with Mike simply wasn’t there.
vi
Dear Mike,
It wasn’t that I didn’t try to answer you before (this summer), it was simply that I was congenitally unable. I started to write, but couldn’t finish it. But I shall try again.I guess my first feeling on reading your letter, after all the emotion, was something like —after waiting for you to express emotion for a year, all of a sudden there it was – and a bit overwhelming. But
Where I am is still in Cambridge – for a while more. Looking for a job now – I was working as a research assistant at a Sleep & Dream lab but it was incredibly boring. I suppose the main reason I am staying here [is] because of someone I am going out with, or whatever the right expression is. It’s a bit strange sounding, I imagine, to hear that – me, so proud of my independence – but it is the way it is. My relationship with Howard is very different than my relationship with you—I suppose I really resented your comparing Lizzie & me, but it’s also true that it’s very different though I’m not sure how to compare it. And a lot of the difference has to do with my being out of school & us both being in Cambridge. I suppose I feel a lot more that I am on my own terms & stronger. And that probably has to do with therapy as well, which is now very intense & beneficial I think.Working things out about parents & emotions – I think what I want most is some way of figuring out trusting my feelings & living my own life — familiar themes to you I imagine. I suppose a good example would be — I knew perfectly well that it was upsetting that you were living with Liz this summer, but I really didn’t even know what I felt about it — all the feelings were much too “intellectualized”. I don’t have any firmer grasp on what “happened” between us, why we moved apart, and every once in a while I wake up late at night and remember things between us & get very sad and wonder what it all might have meant. And of course I don’t know. I suppose I still believe some of those things of being my own person—talking to my shrink, I suppose, that we could have done that together, I could have done it with you—like seeing other people that spring in Cambridge – but we were never strong enough, I never worked hard enough to do it together.
Sorry this is so garbled. I suppose what it is now is having a firmer sense of myself as a woman – both sexually and in terms of being adult. I don’t know how to talk to you about sex, I don’t think we ever did enough [talking about that], but for me it has been taken out of that ethereal, I-want-to-have-your-babies plane to a more real one, of letting sex be real & enjoyable simply for what it is. I was always too scared with you to ever let myself enjoy sleeping with you — that is not to discount it, but my joy was always at the removed place of “I’m so happy doing this with Mike” instead of “this feels so wonderful for me.” And I suppose that comes as much from unpleasant experiences & just growing up as from anything else. And But by now it certainly makes me feel better about myself, just as feeling more responsible for my self does — I pay my own bills & cook dinner for 6 & and all those kind of things you do too.
Is any of this coming through? You certainly still know me – the longing & insecurities – but there’s more too, I suppose. Maybe if we wrote we could get a better sense of each other – I would try. My mother said your mother had a stroke this fall – is she all right? I suppose I was pretty hurt you didn’t tell me, but it isn’t major. But please tell me about her. And how is Lizzie, & you&Liz? In other words, write. If you can call for free, call. My number here is 617 – 491 – ——, but most night’s I sleep at Howard’s & that is most likely where I am if my roommates say I’m not home; you can call me there, but I suppose that depends largely on your feelings. Anyway, the number there is 491 – ——. And I’ll be at 119 Oxford at least for awhile. And tell me about you & [I] shall try more, again.
Love,
Sarah
I feel this is very inadequate – there are many things to say, about first loves & what they mean and the feeling that maybe someday it will always work out – I guess I want you to know I still think about these things — and wondering if I’ll ever come to LA & see you again – but I’ll try to write about that again –
Janie
20 November 1971
vii
Howard failed his boards the first time out.
“That’s not unusual, is it?” I asked
“I’ve heard it depends on the state. California’s tough, less than half pass the first time. Here, 55-60%”
“You’d think someone from Harvard would sail right through.”
“You’d think,” Howards sighed. “But I spent the summer not studying, remember. I’ve been more wrapped up in you…”
“Are you going to try again? I still want go to Israel, work on a kibbutz with you.”
“I don’t know. Could be, what I need is some time to clear my head, take a break, then come back and knuckle down.”
“Take a break?”
“Yeah, take the summer off, go see the country. We’ve got friends all over now, we could drive out west, see National Parks and stuff. And you could look at schools along the way?”
The job in the sleep lab had been boring, not somewhere I wanted to spend my life, so I looked back in the Harvard Psych department for another. I started writing to all my friends dispersed across the states, including Michael Harrison.
DEAR MIKE,
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
How are you doing? I am coming West in about a month – Southwest and then up the coast to Seattle & Vancouver. I should be in S. California between the middle of May & the beginning of June – will you be there? I’d like to come see you if you will so write & let me know – OK?
I am very well – now working for Jerome Kagan: the science is a little bit more offensive & the politics more dubious than with Bruner, but Kagan is on sabbatical & that makes it easier. I’m generally happy about my life & about therapy & about my relationship with Howard; I’m planning to apply for school in Sept., 1973. How are you & Elizabeth? and school? and your family? It’s hard for me to write but I’d love to hear from you.
Happy Birthday —
Love,
Sarah
7 April 1972
viii
Howard dropped me off a few blocks south of MacArthur Park on Westlake. The imposing two-story white house featured an expansive front yard gone to seed, yet sporting a flourishing avocado tree. Incongruous amongst the surrounding apartment complexes, it seemed air-lifted from another time and place.
“Are you sure about this, Sarah?” he asked for the fifth time.
I nodded. “Come back here at 3, OK? I’ll be fine.” The late May LA sun had already seared through the morning fog, and I blinked rapidly trying to adjust as I climbed the porch steps.
Mike waited at the door, that Elvis-half smile flickering through his face. Impossibly tan, his sun-bleached hair now meandered in waves and curls half-way down his neck, almost covering his ears.
“Your hair…” we both said together, chuckling nervously.
“I didn’t think I’d like it short on you, but, it looks OK. Really,” he said, while opening the door, and ushering me through a foyer, walls splotched with grease marks on the fading white paint, the floor covered by a threadbare carpet needing a good vacuuming.
“How many of you here?” I asked. He gave me quick tour: two bedrooms on the first floor, four upstairs. The dining room housed two nursing students, sisters. Across from them, another med student and his live-in girl-friend. Upstairs, Mike sported the largest room – “I found the house, so I took first choice” – with three other med students, one woman, two men, up there with him.
“Wow, eight people,” I noted. “It doesn’t look that crowded.”
“Well, we don’t have much furniture.”
“Like my place now – four men, four women. How’s that working out here?”
“The girls all hold their own,” was his response. He pointed out the main feature of his room, a “bed” consisting of four planks, stained light brown, nailed together, holding in a waterbed mattress. He pushed on it lightly, setting off concentric rippling waves. “Come on, let’s go out, walk up to the park, we can talk along the way. How long did you say you’d be here?”
“He’s picking me up at 3.”
“Good. There’s a deli up on Alvarado, we can eat lunch there. Langer’s.”
Three or four blocks later, we’d arrived.
“Look at all the people!” I exclaimed. “I thought nobody walked here.”
“Yup, LA’s a real city, not an endless suburb.” Entering the park, we immediately encountered a large lake, home to honking geese and some of those human-powered pedal boats. Mike steered us to a bench along the shore, shaded by several palms.
I hadn’t felt awkward at all, and Mike seemed equally at ease. I wondered what might be broiling beneath the surface, in both of us.
“How’s your mother?” I ventured.
He smiled. “She’s amazing. Back at work.”
“You mean she’s seeing patients? Didn’t she have to learn how to talk again?”
He nodded. “They cut off half her tongue in surgery. Then she had that stroke last fall…”
“Lizzie told me about that. She was with you?”
“Yeah we were all in the car, my parents, and came around a corner on the way up to the house – remember that road?” I nodded. “All of a sudden she sounded garbled, and by the time we got up the hill, she had trouble walking, and told us she thought she’d had a stroke. So calm, almost in charge.”
“A lady with an iron will,” I added. I wanted to ask him about Elizabeth, but was afraid to open that up.
He made it easy. “You know, Elizabeth decided last winter, ‘We’re not right together,’ or something like that.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Remember Vanessa, the girl in our house back there? She had a friend, called him her boyfriend, in grad school at Oregon. Arranged for Lizzie to take a room in his house. She never told me directly, but I think they took up together, and that’s why she called it off with me.”
“How’d that make you feel, Mike?”
“Boy, you really are going to be a psychologist, aren’t you, asking how I feel.”
“Maybe it’s because I started seeing a therapist when I got back to school , after we…broke up? Whatever it was we did?”
He looked down at his sandals, frowned, then said, “I thought I was the one who got messed up by that, not you. You seemed so self-assured, like you knew exactly what, who you needed, what we each should do.”
“And you?” I stopped, not sure if I was ready to go there yet. “I asked you about Lizzie, and how you felt about her.”
“It’s funny. I like – liked? – her as a friend, first of all, of course. Then we moved in together, and that was so easy, like a roommate, but a girl. Just a good companion, I thought.”
“But you only had one bedroom?”
“Yeah, she was sleeping on the couch in the living room, and I don’t know, one night I found her there in bed with me, and you probably know where that led.”
Now my turn to frown, I gritted my teeth and simply nodded.
“Funny, though we were friends, companions, then sharing a bed all summer. But I never felt I loved her, ever.” He paused, sucked his teeth, then said, “I mean, I was hurt when she said we were done, but I think it was my pride, not my heart being hurt, you know? Still, I was a little angry at her.”
“How could you get mad at Lizzie? She’s so sweet, or at least she was.”
“Oh, she still is. Apparently, she thought I wasn’t worth her time.”
“Come on, Mike, she’s up there in Eugene, you’re down here, about to start years of the grind in med school. What’s she supposed to do, wait for you forever? Give up her life to come live with you?” As I spoke, I realised what I was really trying to say, who I was really talking about. I decided, two years of therapy, I can go there. I thought of taking his hands; instead, I tried to capture his gaze. “Mike, you do know, don’t you, that I didn’t want to, I tried very hard not to, hurt you.”
Grinding his teeth, staring hard right back at me, he said, “Janie, you did. You…I was…I am…so angry, mad at you.” He didn’t shout, he didn’t even sound all that perturbed. Resignation was what I felt from him. Relaxing his shoulders, his eyes filled up with tears.
While he sniffed, trying to hold it in, I said, “Mike, I was angry, too. Not about us, I mean, we can talk more about that. I was angry at you. And Lizzie. For getting together, for…I don’t know for what. I know you two weren’t trying to hurt me, you were just being yourselves.” I took a deep breath, hoping I could help him. “My therapist, she finally got me to see, it was not you, or Lizzie. I was the one choosing to be mad, to be angry at you. That helped me so much, once I understood that. It’s the main reason why I’m able to be here with you now. I don’t want to tell you what to do, what to feel. Lord knows I’m not a shrink, and certainly don’t ever want to be yours. But think about that, please?” I pleaded.
He nodded, still with a sad, almost sullen aura in his face. I waited.
Finally, slowly, he came out with, “I can’t just call you up, the way I do, say, my sister. I can’t keep in contact, fraternally, like that, because…because we’ve been in love. Caring about what happens, in an abstract way, to you – I can’t, I don’t want to, I don’t know how to do that. I’m not willing – able, maybe – to begin doing that, to expose myself again to the same dependency, that intimacy, that…affection we had.” He fell silent again. Geese honked and flapped out on the lake. The sun reflected mercilessly off the asphalt by our feet.
At last, he concluded “I guess you’d say, if I can’t have everything, I’d rather have nothing at all.”
I couldn’t leave him, leave us like that. “Mike, we can’t resurrect the past. You know that.” He nodded. “But we can learn – I can learn – not only about what I did with you, but about what I’ll do, where I’ll go. We both can have good lives, will have good lives.”
“But not with each other,” he said, almost inaudibly.
“Not, not with each other, not any more.” After he sighed deeply, I tried, light-heartedly, “So how is you love life now? Anyone new?”
“Sure. I mean, no. A few dates, but…I think you spoiled me.”
“Meaning…?”
“Meaning, I guess, I’m learning that not everyone likes me the way you did. You made it all so easy.”
I steered us back to future plans. “You said this is your last free summer for six years…”
Brightening as bit, he said, “Next Fall, we star clinical, the last two years of school. It’s like being an intern, rotations on all the services for sixteen months. First the required ones, then, the fourth year, some electives, finally get a start on real doctor training. Then, of course, four years of residency.”
“What’s your first rotation?”
“Pediatrics, then Ob-Gyn. Internal Medicine, and Surgery.”
“Psych?”
“I don’t know, Janie. The times I’ve done the clinic here, it’s been…underwhelming. Not what I expected. All drugs and confusion. The patients never seem to get better, the doctors don’t have a solid understanding of why they do what they, what works, what doesn’t. All guesswork.”
“Are you going to work anywhere this summer, then?”
“No. I’m planning on driving up the coast, see my aunt and cousins in Fremont, near Oakland. Keep on going to Seattle, my mother’s sister lives there. Sun Valley, with Shelly, Snowmass, on to Chicago.”
“Chicago?”
“The Olympic Trials for swimming are there, I want to see Molly swim, see if she makes the team.”
“By yourself? Where are you going to stay?”
“My dad gave me another Dodge, a Charger. It’s got a huge engine, goes real fast. The back seats fold down, there’s room enough for me to sleep. I’ll just pull over anywhere, I guess.”
We had our lunch at Langer’s. walked and talked around the park, then drifted back to his house, where Howard waited in the driveway.
“How’d it go?” he asked as I got in.
“OK, I answered. “Not bad. Kind of weird, but good, you know?”
ix
During our summer-long road trip, Howard decided to go after a degree in Public Administration, rather than put his life on hold any longer while he tried again at the law boards. In order to qualify for a Master’s program, he needed several courses in statistics and political science he’d neglected as an undergrad, which he found at the University of Massachusetts in Park Square near the Commons.
He grumbled a bit about having to attend the state school. “I don’t mind at all that it’s not Harvard or even BU. It’s the monstrosity they’re building out at Columbia Point. That whole area was supposed to be subsidized housing, now it’s being taken over by the Boston educational-industrial complex. At least I’ll be done by the time they move – that would be a long trip every day.”
By the time Kagan returned from his sabbatical, I had linked up once again with Barry Brazelton, who had formed his own Child Development Unit at Children’s hospital.
“Sarah, we need someone exactly like you for a couple of research studies we’re starting.” His twinkling smile and Texas drawl, softer now after all his years mixing with Yankees in Boston, welcomed me into a routine I’d been missing since graduation. “The one I think you’ll find most interesting is our follow-up to the work we did on newborn reactions to medication during labor. Ed Wernick’s leading that one, I’ll get you set up with him right away.”
Ed got right down to business. “Barry’s been interested in this for years now. He decided the tools he’d used for that first study, back when you were an undergrad, didn’t capture the full range of an infant’s neuro-behavior, and that standard neonatal neuro exams are not probing enough to capture subtle changes. So he came up with his own tool, his Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale.”
I’d read about that while in Kagan’s lab. Covering a couple dozen separate items, it produced a complete picture of the motor skills of these little people, as well as their response to things like pinpricks, light flashes, and sound.
Ed went on. “I think you’d be perfect at performing and recording all those exams…”
Over the next six months I had a crash course, a post-graduate trial by fire, as I got up to speed on all the facets of the study Barry and Ed had so blithely outlined. First, I had to learn about the drugs used in labor: Nisentil and Phenergan as narcotic pain relievers, lidocaine as a local for episiotomies; spinals before forceps delivery, Marcaine for epidurals – my head spun as I absorbed pharmacology texts and the PDR, the Physicians’ Desk Reference on drugs. Once Ed discovered I actually had some charm, unlike the others on the team, scientists who hid behind data so they could avoid people, he assigned me as the liaison to gain the cooperation of the obstetricians and anesthesiologists we’d need at Brigham and Women’s. And then there were the endless meetings to hone the study design.
“The problem with those previous studies, why they had trouble finding any pattern, was they were mixing up all sorts of Ob patients.” Lauren was the only other non-doctoral level person on the team, a graduate nursing student hoping to specialize in pediatric ICU care.
“Why so?” asked Ed.
“Labor is a stressful time, and there are so many different ways it can go, so many combinations of drugs and management strategies. Then there’s the difference in the length of labor, and mothers who have other medical problems, like diabetes. You mix up all those categories, the results we’re looking for can get lost in all the noise.”
“So if we reduce the confounding stressors, limit the study to a few simple drug regimens, you’re saying we might actually find some differences when it comes to, say, epidurals compared to that short-acting narcotic…what’s it called again, John?”
Dr. Stanton, the only MD on our team, responded succinctly, “Nisentil.”
“Right, Nisentil. Sarah, how long did you say that worked?”
I still got nervous, when these serious and experienced researchers treated me as an equal, but I had the information immediately available. “One hour, Ed, more or less. It works great, but it doesn’t last long at all. Studies show if they give only one or two doses, before a woman starts pushing, then it’s barely detectable…”
Ed cut me off. “One hour, right, it’s the one we need for the minimal drug group.”
We worried each element of our study in such meticulous detail, I feared we’d never actually get around to collecting the data, much less subject it to the analysis by Heidi, the CDU’s Ph.D. statistician, from which any answers must eventually emerge. Nonetheless, Ed had me begin writing a first draft of the introduction and procedures.
“Shouldn’t that be called ‘Materials and Methods?” I asked, reflecting all the papers I’d been plowing through. “That’s what they call it in…”
“Procedure – that’s what Barry wants, Sarah. Just do it his way, OK?”
So I outlined the subjects, grouped by the drugs to which they’d be exposed. I explained the behavioral assessment we’d be doing, and noted how we would eliminate all the confounding elements we’d agreed on, to ensure no extraordinary stresses on the mothers. “Beyond the stress of labor itself,” Lauren, a mother of two, said sardonically to me in one of the meetings. In the end, we had about as normal a group of 54 moms as possible: average age 27 (none younger than 18 or older than 35), no C-sections, length of labor 8 hours, gestational age 39 weeks, six days. No toxemia or diabetes. The babies all had to be normal, too: weight 7 pounds 8 ounces, Apgars all over 7, no congenital anomalies, no premies or post-dates, no admission to the pediatric units after delivery.
“Sarah, wow, where did you learn to write like this?” Ed exclaimed when I handed over my first draft.
I wanted to say, “Uhh, Radcliffe?”, but instead, I said, “Thanks, this was helpful for me to understand what we’re doing. I just followed the standard formula.”
“Well, you picked it up a faster than any of our other research assistants.”
‘Research Assistant.’ There I was again, the lowest title in the group. So why did it seem like I was doing all the work?