Triblog

v

This time, I felt centered enough to write back. I’d stopped making copies of my letters to Mike, so all I remember is congratulating him on finding someone with whom to share this part of his life. Then I went on to describe my own journey, leaving out any hint of other men. Not that there were any then.

At Beth Israel I started up with guided therapy, seeing a few clients in the clinic there. At first, listening to their sad tales of rejection, remorse, and general confusion, I felt awkward, inadequate, and a bit of a fraud. After each session, I’d de-brief with my instructor, Dr. Theobald.

“I’m not sure I have my own head together. What right do I have to help someone else?” I asked after my first independent clinical encounter.

“You must remember, these sessions are not about you. You are not sharing your life, your own feelings, with these people. You are first of all reflecting back to them a dispassionate picture of what you hear, then guiding their thoughts toward a constructive solution to whatever is troubling them.”

The rules for that were simple to say, but hard to apply. “Listen. Reflect (repeat). Question non-directively. Guide towards positivity.” Confining myself to those tasks, I gradually learned to stay alert, attentive.

Looking back at that first month, I realize I learned everything I needed to become a therapist. The remainder of my training, and beyond, have been devoted to refining those insights.

“How do I know what her problem is, how do I decide on her diagnosis?” I asked my instructor.

“They tell you, they always tell you,” he replied with a courteous smile.

“What do you mean, how can they know?”

“I start by asking, ‘How can I help you today?’ Almost always, the first thing they talk about is your answer. Let them guide you to their problems, their concerns, don’t try to second guess them. What did she tell you today?”

“She can’t work, take care of her kids, and get enough sleep. It’s ‘making her crazy.’ Doesn’t seem like a mental health problem.”

“It is if she says it’s making her crazy. Where did you go next?”

I tried to remember the conversation, thinking I should have taken notes. “Um, I asked about her work, what kind of work she did.” Dr. Theobald frowned almost imperceptibly. “That wasn’t right?”

He smiled again. “Well, it probably would have gotten you there eventually. But I like to reflect back to them what they’ve said, see if they can expand on it, fill it out a bit more.”

“How do you do that?”

“A little trick I use, is just repeat back to them what I hear as their key thought. That’ll trigger a deeper response. In this case, I might ask, ‘It’s making you crazy?’ Recognize, acknowledge what’s hurting, why they came to you for help.”

That year, I finished up my work with Dr. Brazelton at the CDU. Once we’d submitted our paper on regional anesthesia and newborn behavior, and finished the data gathering for early mother-infant reciprocity, Barry had an evening meeting at his home one weekend to discuss the next project.

“I feel confident we’ve shown that even two-week old infants have a built-in understanding of social interaction. They may not be able to talk, but it’s obvious they have feelings about their caregiver, usually their mother. They not only feel and respond, they also attempt to guide and control the relationship. How they move, vocalize, where they look, their facial expressions – all of these seem hard-wired from the very start, meant to capture and retain the attention of other people. Probably because those who don’t have this capacity were selected against. They can’t get any food, water, anything, unless someone else gets it for them.”

Lauren looked around the group, nodded at me, and asserted, “It works both ways, doesn’t it Barry? Mothers must have the same feelings, the same orientation, right from the start. I remember my own babies…labor hurt so much, first the contractions that never seemed to end, then the pushing and pushing and pushing, and stretching – it was so exhausting, after it was over, you’d think all I’d want to do is lie back and sleep.”

“Sleep?” I reflected.

“No, all I wanted was to look at, to hold, to feel them, right from the start. I wanted them to look at me, to smile at me, so I smiled, and laughed, and…” she misted over with the memories. “Sorry…I’m sorry. It’s just so…”

Barry smiled, saying, “No, thank you, Lauren. You gave me an idea where we ought to go next.”

Where we went next was to upend the reciprocity study. We brought in seven more mother-baby pairs to our little curtain-lined dual video tape set-up. Two we saw six times, for longitudinal data. Three we saw twice, and two more only once. Each time, we recorded two 3-minute interactions, separated by 30 seconds. One of those was as before, simply letting the mother and baby interact as they normally would. The other, we asked the mom to sit still, stone-faced, and observed the baby’s actions.

The differences were striking. One of my little essays for an “entrapment” session felt like I was writing a horror movie script:

“…He arches forward, slumps over, tucks his chin down on one shoulder, but he looks up at her face under lowered eyebrows. This position lasts for over a minute, with brief checking looks at the mother occurring almost every 10 seconds. He grimaces briefly and his facial expression becomes more serious, his eyebrows furrowing. Finally, he completely withdraws, his body curled over, his head down, He does not look again at his mother…rocking his head. He looks wary, helpless, and withdrawn. As the mother exits, he looks halfway up in her direction, but his sober facial expression and his curled body position do not change.”

The differences were striking. The infants smiled less, spent less time oriented towards their mothers, looking at them much less often, ending up slumped down in their seats, withdrawn and, I surmised, filled with existential dread.

Barry was more upbeat about the results. “This confirms infants are active participants in their most early relationships. They alter their behavior depending on how they are treated, They understand the rules of social interaction from the time they are born, maybe even before. They don’t yet have words, but they most definitely have a language, one they can speak and understand. They use those ‘words’ to manipulate their environment, specifically their relationships.”

I found myself saying, “It’s not only words, Barry. It’s feelings, too. They have them, express them, and understand them in their mothers, no? Feelings come before words.”

vi

January, 1976

Bruce Springsteen Plays Santa Barbara

“Geez, do I have the tickets!?” Somewhere past Malibu, I realised I’d left them back in our sun room, keeping company with the philodendrons and African violets.

“It’s a good thing you remembered now – it’s a long way back to LA from Robertson Gymnasium”, April reminded me. Her new-found wonder at the Springsteen phenomenon had propelled me into Wherehouse records to buy tickets for the only Southern California show he’d play on his 1975 tour. The night before, he’d been at the Roxy, a hip club down the Strip from the Whiskey-a-Go-Go, singing to invited industry heavies, trying to build on the nationwide buzz generated by the twin Newsweek and Time cover stories on “the future of rock and roll”.

We’d bought the “Born to Run” album on the strength of a Rolling Stone rave and one listen to the title cut. Eleven years earlier, I’d heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, full of florid cymbals, driving harmonies, and chugging guitar beats. It was so new and different, fuller and more vibrant than anything else on the radio. I felt right through my solar plexus exactly why young girls were screaming and fainting all over northern Europe about these guys. Their bushy-haired head wiggles the next week on Ed Sullivan, full of smiles and knowing humor, confirmed the archetypal definition they provided to our generation. “Born to Run” had the same effect on me – and apparently on April as well. She went out the next day and bought his two earlier records, “Asbury Park”, and “E Street Shuffle”.

“Roy Orbison … ‘Only the Lonely’. That song was everything to me. The beach, the music … I don’t know; ‘Thunder Road’ just did something for me.” She was quite inarticulate trying to justify her extravagance.

We listened to Bruce constantly over the next few weeks, lying on the floor in front of the tinny stereo I’d brought from college. No way it could pick up all the power of the bass, or the fullness of the sax, or even help decipher his muddy singing. But the emotional surge and fullness had the same message for me as the Beatles – this guy was singing to me. And I liked what he had to say. Clearly a poet, he sketched a few quick images into an iconic picture of cars and angst and hope for the future, a potent mix for one still mired in the artificial adolescence of medical training.

We devoured the cover where Bruce leaned, smiling, emoting with great joy, Fender guitar slung over his back, leather jacket hung open, ear ring shining above his dark beard, leaning on the giant sax player, openly loving his life.

In the six weeks between the newsmagazine covers and the concert in Santa Barbara, he went from “the next Dylan” to the current big thing – this year’s boy for the rock and roll cognoscenti in Tinsel Town. And we had tickets to his only show for 400 miles. At the Robertson Gym, no less.

“It’s really a little place”, April told me. She’d gone to school at UC Santa Barbara, whose basketball and intramural teams played in Robertson. “It’s more like a high school gym, you know.” No, I didn’t know, but I’d soon find out.

We left Venice three hours ahead of the start time for the show, knowing we might have trouble parking, so going back to get the tickets didn’t faze me too much; we’d still get there before he started. But I had to rev the Dodge Charger 402 cc up to full bore to slam into the parking lot by 8 PM.

We raced up to the door, and entered the foyer. I could feel the energy, the zoom emanating from that room. The gym was packed. Folding chairs filled the basketball court, stretching to the walls along the sidelines. Above the court, a horseshoe balcony provided about five rows of backless seats from which to look down on the stage, set under the far basket. This room was about 100 feet by 60 feet, and jam full of buzzing 20-something’s, all new to this East Coast myth, talking about his “epic three hour shows”. Bruce never had an opening act. He wanted all your energy for his music.

We hiked upstairs, looking for an empty seat, but found nothing. Wedged under the railing along the balcony’s edge, people dangled their feet into thin air, wedged against the legs of those in the front row behind them. Squatters occupied every aisle, a fire marshal’s nightmare.

Back downstairs, we caucused about what to do. Right in front of us, the sound guys sat by a control board, looking like high tech organists about to program Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The equipment and their three chairs rested on a pair of wooden pallets, raised about a foot off the hardwood floor. I asked the nearest sound guy, “Can we sit here on the edge of this?”

“Hey, it’s OK, but don’t get in our way – we gotta get the sound the way the Boss wants it.” Jerking his head toward the stage, his big grin told me who the Boss was. He got nudged by his buddy. They both looked up at the stage, where a scruffy emcee waddled out, watched the lights dim a bit, leaned down to the mike, and announced, “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN — BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND THE E STREET BAND!!!”

The lights thunked off, a lone figure walked out facing the rear of the stage, while a white spot slammed onto his varnished classic Fender slung over that shiny leather jacket. Hunched over a mike, harmonica up to his mouth, he started to blow the intro to “Thunder Road”. The crowd went nuts. The sound guys pulled their toggles all the way up to ten. The crowd noise hushed into a cobra-tense energy pushing Bruce through the first eight bars of his harmonica solo. April and I had found our song.

By the time Roy Bittan started trilling his piano, everyone was jumping up on their chairs. When Danny Federici hit the organ, we all clapped our hands or stamped our feet. And when Clarence Clemons brought in his alto sax, we screamed, applauded, and generally went berserk. Those of us who could, whistled.

I myself have a very intense, literally ear-splitting whistle. You do not want to sit next to me at a basketball game. I learned the whistle from Peter Horton, who lived behind us when I was reaching puberty. Two years older than me, he was the coolest kid in the world. One of those natural athletes who make the rest of us feel foolish, he had sandy hair, a killer smile, and a knack for making everything look easy. My sister was in love with him; I merely worshipped him. He accepted it all as his due, or maybe he didn’t even notice it. He showed me how to make a loop out of my thumb and forefinger, press their tips against my curled up tongue, purse my lips, and blow like crazy. Moving the tongue back and forth produces pitch alterations sufficient to drive away the meanest junkyard hound.

I perfected my whistle while coaching little kids on a swim team, the summers between my years at college. It was the only thing they could hear while churning underwater. In the summer of ’69, at the apogee of the age of Aquarius, I had charge of the eight-and-unders. The girls were simply awesome. Each one was a little package of dynamite. We had a magical summer, that year. While the Mets marched to the World Series, the hippies marched on Yasgar’s Farm at Woodstock, the Beatles peppered us with Abbey Road, and Richard Nixon began his own long dark march to ultimate paranoid ignominy, my little girls swept over every team which came against us.

Two moments stand out in my memory. First, in late July, they won the Junior Olympics the same day Neil Armstrong took a small step out onto the stony sterile silent moon dust. I cradled the trophy we won all the way home, and learned for the first time about the depression which hits when you’ve reached a pinnacle, celebrated with everyone, and then, as has to happen, you find yourself all alone with no more heights to scale. And second, at our league championship in August, those little girls won every single race. The final event for us was the freestyle relay – four kids each going 25 meters. A grown woman can do this in under a minute; my girls were only ten seconds slower than that. They were so much better than any of the other teams, our last girl finished her leg when the other teams’ third swimmers were still flailing away at the other end of the pool.

As I watched our anchor, Linda Christian, churning up a wave down that final lap, and heard the crowd, and especially our kids’ parents, going nuts in the background (this was being held at our own pool), I felt time stop. I looked up at the light blue evening sky, a hint of Fall’s coolness in the air. The crowd noise faded away, and Linda’s arms moved into a slow motion windmill. I thought of how much they’d worked, every morning, every day. How they’d actually followed instructions, swum all the laps, improved their strokes, finished each race hard, just like I’d said. How I’d guided them, but couldn’t swim for them. How, in fact, I had very little to do with their success, only making the opportunity available to them. I realised, at that one slight scratch in time, I was transcendently happy, living in a Perfect Moment, where athletic endeavor merged into artistic self-expression. The only way I knew how to capture and celebrate such a feeling was to whistle, putting my every fiber into the shrillness from my lungs.

Bruce standing up there, back to the audience, right hip thrust out, left knee and leg pumping up and down, guiding his band into “Thunder Road” – I saw that, and felt another Perfect Moment, one I would like to live in forever but knew I never could. I jumped up on the sound guys’ platform, threw my left arm into the air, and whistled as loud as I could. It was barely a whisper amidst the amps and cheers.

April and I turned towards each other, smiles shared in pure harmonic joy. “Darlin’, you know just what I’m here for. So you’re scared and you’re thinking we ain’t that young anymore.” Raising our chins up high, two hound dogs howling at the moon, we shouted, “Show a little faith! There’s magic in the night…” We’d found our song.

The evening went on like that for three hours more. Towards the end, Bruce launched into “Twist and Shout” by saying “My doctor told me if I played this song one more time, I was gonna have a heart attack! But I don’t care – you guys deserve it!” Some people, like Peter Horton, are simply nice guys loaded with talent, people it’s impossible to hate. They seem to have such fun, and want to share it with you. That’s what everyone saw in Bruce Springsteen, when they went to his show. It was as if he were looking at and singing to each of us, personally. He and Clarence launched into “Twist and Shout”, the Big Man pumping his sax back and forth in front of the speakers, Bruce jumping up on top of an amp, duck walking across the stage, sliding on one knee, falling down exhausted, still playing and singing. Then, he jumps up, and launches into “Rosalita”.

This precipitated a mass rush towards the stage. Everyone on the main floor left their assigned area (no one had been sitting the whole night), and filled the aisles. The bolder balcony dwellers dropped down from the edge onto the main floor. The whole place was a mass of swaying, singing sybarites, arms overhead, clapping, sweating, almost swooning.

After the third encore, half of us started filing out, still buzzing, while the less exhausted remained inside, clapping, stomping, “Bruuuuce”-ing. And back he came, one more time, pounding out some timeless fifties rock and roll instrumental, ’cause he loved it all so much.

Oh, the strength and endless optimism at age twenty-six, of those of us in the natal class of ’49. I don’t remember driving the two hours back to LA. But I do remember trying to explain it all the next morning to my fellow residents while we whiled away the call day on Gyn. They smiled, but they Just. Didn’t. Get It. 

vii

By the end of my first clinical year at Beth Israel, I felt I’d mastered the basics of therapy. I no longer dreaded meeting a client for the first time, armed as I was with the tools Dr. Theobald had given me. Whatever self-doubts lay within, on the surface I projected confidence, assurance, and unforced interest. As with every academic challenge I’d faced, I read voluminously, took endless notes in my tiny handwriting, and followed the rules I learned  without deviation. I fell asleep dreaming of how to direct someone else’s thoughts and emotions simply by the questions I asked.

“Sarah, you may be the quickest, brightest doctoral student I’ve supervised.” Dr. Theobald paused, smiling. He went on, “You display all the outward signs of caring and concern, the body language, facial expressions, the words…”

I tensed up, knowing he’d found my biggest fear, that it was all a fraud, done by rote. I stammered, “It’s…it’s…so much to remember…I know, I know, it feels like I’m following some rules, not the client’s stories.”

“That’s interesting to hear. What I see, or, more precisely, don’t see, is a spark of real connection. You might as well be exchanging letters with your client, inserting adverbs every now and then to show your feelings.”

I sighed. “I do feel, I feel I want to help them.”

“Hmm…” he said. “You’ve spent the last three years in research labs, studying isolated behavior, narrowing your focus to specific experimental questions. Have you thought about that, research, as your career?”

His words stung me like an electrical shock.

“Look. You’re almost always the smartest, quickest person in any room. But your clients aren’t coming to you for your intelligence; they expect that of you, that’s not what will impress them about you, make you special for them. For them, you’re not a scientist, a researcher. You are first and foremost another person, who shares the trauma and the drama of simply being human. Without that connection, all your knowledge can’t begin to help them.”

I realized at that moment it was helping people, directly, face-to-face, that had drawn me to psychology. I’d always known that, but never seen it defined so starkly before. “I’ve never thought of myself as a dispassionate researcher. I’m always getting emotionally involved with our subjects,” I said.

“You have to make your clients believe that, your deep and complete sincerity, even if it seems artificial to you.”

I frowned and shook my head. “I don’t know what more I can do.”

He looked towards the ceiling, resting his left elbow on the arm of his chair, chin cradled in his hand, index fingers pressed to pursed lips. Finally, he offered, “What I do, is slow things down. Usually, I know what I want to say, to ask, right away. But when I sense the client has broached an emotional whirlpool, I force myself to pause, and name what I’m sensing to myself. Let her know, by that brief silence, that I’m affected by what she said.”

I nodded. I felt my lower lip quiver, in fear and self-recognition.

“Sarah, you have never failed in anything you’ve put your mind to. You already have that capacity for connection within you, bred by every friendship, every one you’ve ever loved. Start there, use those familiar emotional touchstones as your home base, and you won’t fail here.”

A few weeks later, I met with Dr. Klein, ostensibly to review my initial dissertation proposal. I had something else on my mind.

“Julia, how did you know you wanted to work with kids?”

“It came naturally,” she said. “Never really thought about it, I guess. Why, are you having second thoughts about your topic?”

“No, no, it’s not that. It’s…I’ve been thinking, about whether I should go into children’s therapy.”

“You’ve always said how much you love kids, how they filled your heart.”

“Right, my heart, not my head,” I countered. Her raised eyebrows drove me on. “I think…I think I love kids, little kids, even teen-agers, too much to see them when they’re hurting. I don’t know if I could be a child’s therapist. The emotion, dealing with their problems, the damage that can be done, I can’t think clearly with them, about them.”

“Are you saying your want to change your thesis topic, the one we’ve been talking about?”

“No, I want to press on with that, looking at teen-age moms and how they interact with their newborns, their infants. I can handle that, as long as it’s cloaked in research, and I’m not expected to solve their problems. I always want to have kids around me, I know that. But – and maybe this is selfish – I want them to be healthy, I don’t want to be responsible for fixing the world for them. Just be with them, feel their laughter, their promise.”

“That’s good, Sarah, I’m glad to hear that. So you’ll be re-directing yourself to adult therapy?”

“I’m learning the complexities there. Dr. Theobald tells me I don’t seem as involved with adult clients.” That didn’t sound quite right, so I tried again. “What I mean is, I can be clinical with them, my emotions don’t get in the way so much. I’ve just got to learn how to tap into theirs better. Is it the right decision, for me to be an adult therapist?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think. What’s important is that you think it’s the right decision. You’re the only one who can, who should, say what’s right for you.”

viii

November, 1977

THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE

From the glassy waters of the bay, Jandee’s looked like a turquoise mirage. With no wind, the smog filtered west over the beach out to the ocean, and the heat waves curling up from the sand threatened to hide the place altogether.

Bobbing aimlessly on the Hobie Cat, April and I looked up from our seasick torpor as we drifted by the pizza place at the end of Wavecrest. Set amidst the tan and brown stucco of the neighboring buildings, Jandee’s blue-green vibrance seemed not so much out-of-place, as ruling the place. The waters of the bay, though flat, had just enough swell, and the Hobie Cat little enough ballast, to set the inner workings of my stomach on a search and destroy mission into the upper reaches of my esophagus.

It was all I could do to raise my head; seeing Jandee’s, I mumbled out my hallucination: “Look at Jandee’s. That’s the Center of the Universe. We gotta get back there.” With that, I threw up over the side, and waited for a breeze which never came.

We’d bought the catamaran with Rick, used, a year or two ago. When he left, we had to buy him out, and that meant we had to go sailing twice as much to make it seem worth the $1500 we spent. Cats get moored at the far end of a slip, all the way against the concrete walls enclosing the marina. Easily maneuvered, they’re the only vessels capable of making the sharp turn into that tight space. Sort of like the VW beetles of the sailing world. Actually, a Hobie Cat is more like a Fiat Spyder – small and swift, and finicky. With no keel, and large sails, you could actually tip over the buggers, which we’ve done several times in the middle of the main Marina Del Rey channel. The instruction manual said, quite authoritatively, that, with a total weight of 350 pounds, the craft “is easily righted by turning it cross-wise with the mast pointing into the wind.” Then the two sailors pull down on ropes tied to the pontoon rising out of the water. In theory, once the mast rises out of the water, the sail will catch a breeze, and drop the upper pontoon back down flat. It never worked that way for us. Either we couldn’t pull the boat down at all, or we pulled too hard, and flipped the mast back down the other way on top of us. Two or three such efforts usually exhausted us, and we would have to call on a friendly passing power boat captain (there’s always one churning up or down the channel, day or night) to gently tip the mast up towards us.

Once upright, the Hobie has no peer among the sailing craft here in the world’s largest small boat harbor. Once past the jetty, and into the usually reliable afternoon southwesterly onshore wind breezing across Santa Monica Bay, the main and the jib can vault us up over 25 knots with ease. Flying parallel to shore (we never want to lose sight of land, as we have no clue how to tell distance, direction, or speed), we’ve gotten to know the landmarks from Hermosa Beach to Malibu very, very well. Chief among them, from our point of view, is Jandee’s, the turquoise painted pizza house at the end of our “street”, Wavecrest.

Though blessed with street signs, and even stop signs at the intersections with Speedway, the “streets” of Venice west of Pacific Ave are actually pedestrian-only walkways, two sidewalks wide. At the end of Wavecrest, Nick the Greek has his corner store, selling daily papers, Thunderbird wine, and condiments to the locals, and apartments in the three stories above to the affluhip. Across a wide asphalt turn around, Jandee bakes his pizzas and provides a landmark bright as any light house. In the evenings, walking down to the beach, we stop by Jandee’s, and pick up our first whiff of the sandy salty ocean air. The asphalt we stand on has been patched many times in the past eight decades. The police installed squat metal posts to prevent cars from entering Ocean Front Walk via Speedway. They pulled one out some time back to allow emergency access, and the hole has been haphazardly filled over. The blacktop keeps spilling into the void, making a ragged entrance into whatever lies below.

On one particularly dreamy night, we never quite made it down to the water for our nightly walk along the sand. As a matter of fact, we became becalmed right there by Jandee’s, April watching the Venice street life parading in front of us, and me barely conscious, wondering why there was a hole in the middle of the street.

“Here it is!” I mumbled ecstatically. My eyes got wide, and I felt a little dizzy as I peered into the post hole by my feet.

“It’s always here, every night,” April replied. “They come down here every night. Did you ever wonder why they come here, why they walk along the beach every night? Look at them! I wish I had my camera.”

I paused for thought, trying to connect what I saw below me with what she was saying. I knew she was trying to tell me something, but the epiphany clouding my brain only intermittently let in random, disjointed snatches of consciousness. So I let my mouth do the talking. “Well of course they’re here. This is the Center of the Universe, isn’t it? They feel the power, even if they don’t know it’s here. We’re so lucky, to live so close to the epicenter.”

“What are you talking about!?”

“Right here!” I pointed down. “This is it; that spot, that hole, right there … that’s it, that’s the Center of the Universe.”

April laughed, like she was humoring a drunk. “Really? Why?”

I didn’t know. “Can’t you feel it? This is the place we always come to, where we feel most … I don’t know… connected!”

“Huh?”

“Look.” I suddenly felt lucid. “Right here, this place, this spot, can’t you feel it? It’s the place we see from the water, when we’re on the Hobie Cat. This is how we know where home is, when we see Jandee’s. It’s so … purple! Remember, when we look to shore, we always say, ‘There’s Jandee’s’. It’s home! This is where we live!”

“Yeah?” April’s question asked for more explanation. She thought I was nuts, I could tell.

I didn’t know what to say – I couldn’t even think it. But looking back, I know what I felt. We’d become a pair, and built all the things that make a couple’s life. We have jobs, we have a house, we have dogs, we have friends, but most of all, we have a place and a present history. Venice is where we’d become us, and this hole in the street felt like the vortex center, a whirling black hole yanking us into the street life along the Boardwalk, into the surf life along the littoral. Like strings on a Maypole, the pieces of our lives – of our life – play out around the ground surrounding Jandee’s, at the end of Wavecrest.

Out on the Hobie Cat, I felt a little better. We were still becalmed, but, by looking straight at Jandee’s, I found I could overcome the wretched feeling of nothingness which is the hell of mal de mer. I started to sing. “City girls just seem to find out early,/ How to open doors with just a smile/ A rich old man, and she won’t have to worry/ She’ll dress up all in lace, and go in style”. By the time we got to the chorus, April had gotten over her laughter at my totally tone deaf singing voice, and came in with harmony to make Emmylou Harris jealous.

“You can’t hiiiide your lyin’ eyes/ And your smiiiile is a thin disguise/ I thought by now you’d realize/ There ain’t no way to hide your lyin’ eyes”. Our voices, at least to my untuned ear, made a perfect fit for the Henley/Frey song. April, from up on the hill north of Sunset, had always been my little rich girl. But she’d never had lying eyes; I only saw the truth in her. The breeze picked up a bit, just enough to take the edge off the swell, but not enough to take us home. Yet.

“What should we sing next?” I asked.

“Remember Meat Loaf? Remember when we saw him at the Civic?” April looked dreamy, leaning back against the pontoon, legs resting on the stretched mesh platform which served as our deck.

“Oh, that guy was something else. But I can’t sing like him.”

“You can’t sing like the Eagles, either, but that didn’t stop you.”

“I know. We sound pretty good together, I think.”

“Yeah, we do. But remember Meat Loaf? Remember what he did at the end of the show? His a cappella?”

“Oh, yeah! That!”

Meat, of course, is a very big guy, with a very big hit record – “Bat Out of Hell’. The critics hated it, but for some reason, the thing sold 9,000,000 copies. Jim Steinman had written anthems of unrequited teen-age lust, sort of Beach Boys meet Phil Spector, as penned by Bruce Springsteen. Funny, poetic, and loud. And only Meat Loaf, all 300 pounds of him, was up to the challenge of bringing it across with the right amount of vocal power, seriousness of purpose, and just a hint of humor. That night, we watched his theatrical renditions of songs like “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”, complete with lascivious tongue kissing and hip thrusting while Phil Rizzuto’s play-by-play staccato’d in the background. For his encore, he came out and did one of his slow-dance numbers, “Heaven Can Wait”. For this piece, he was all alone – no bass, drums, piano, organ or guitar behind him. He started singing quietly, like some Texas-sized tenor trying to win a Tuscan love. He crescendo’d toward the song’s final verse, and then, as if disgusted with the artificial qualities it transmitted, he flung the microphone down on the stage, and finished the number not only a cappella, but sans any amplification whatsoever.

 We were near the back of the 3,600 seat Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, and we didn’t miss a note. The big guy went deep inside himself, found his center, and sang it back at us, warbling on about never letting the angels slip away. When he finished, bowing with his long hair scraping the light sconce at the front of the proscenium, the whole audience sat stunned for a minute – awed silence seemed the best response to his performance. Then, applause, whistles, and chants of “Meat!Meat!Meat”. We wandered out into the night, and down to the beach for the walk home after the show.

The moon was rising early that night, coming towards full a few days later. Silvered wavelets barely rose above the bay, calm with the evening’s coolness. Distinctly quiet between each break, the waters sounded less like an LA freeway at full bore, and more like some hidden cove on the Sea of Cortez. We could almost imagine ourselves alone under the South California sky. To our left, the moonlight bounced off the buildings along Ocean Front. The bums were gone, even the drunk guys’ gazebo was vacant. The low-slung Venice skyline stood silhouetted against the LA lights from farther inland. Jandee’s turquoise beacon caught the fragrance from the moon, and called us home. 

ix

“Have you polished up those hypotheses for us?” Dr. Klein asked. “We’ve got to start selecting the girls for subjects soon.”

Julia had been pushing me for the better part of a year to finish up the background reading and research I needed for my thesis. Books like On Adolescence: A psychoanalytic Interpretation; Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman; Maternal Emotions; and Unmarried Mothers. Articles with titles like “The real world of the teen-age Negro mother”, “The ego in adolescence”, and “The second individuation process of adolescence”. Correspondence with other doctoral students who were doing similar research, such as “The Human Newborn and His Mother”, “Infant Rearing Myths of Adolescent Mothers”. My cubby-hole office in the psych library at B.U. was beginning to overflow like a proper academic’s, papers piled on every horizontal surface, books, filled with torn slips marking key pages, stacked haphazardly, and steno pads filled with thoughts, asides, plans for organization. Dr. Klein and I had met twice a month for several years, and I finally had a vision for what I wanted to study, and what form it would take.

I recited from memory the five questions I hoped to answer. “First, ‘Adolescents who are more separate from their families adjust more easily to motherhood’. Second, ‘Those with firmer feminine identities adjust more easily to motherhood’. ‘Stronger relationships with babies’ fathers and peers correlates with easier adjustment to motherhood.’ Then there’s the Freudian one we’re slipping in, ‘Those with greater ego strength adapt to motherhood better’. And, finally, “Infants whose behavior is less worrisome will have more satisfactory interactions with the mothers’.” I breathed deeply, proud that I had honed my inchoate feelings about a teen-age mother’s relationship to her infant into five hypotheses amenable to study and analysis.

“That fourth one, Sarah, how do you define ‘ego strength’?”

“That’s by accommodation to pregnancy.”

“Meaning?”

“We’ll use the Newborn Projective test that Heidi designed a few years ago in Barry’s lab at the CDU.”

Julia nodded. “All right, sounds like you’re ready to start recruiting at the teen clinics over at Women’s and Beth Israel!”

Every week from June through September, I spent an hour at each hospital, interviewing young mothers about 28 weeks into her first pregnancy. By the time I met with my 30th subject, I had the questions memorized. I was able to look into Doreen’s tired eyes, and smile warmly as she rubbed the top of her belly.

“Hello, Doreen. I’m Sarah Stein. I’m doing research on teen-age mothers, trying to find out how they feel about and take care of their babies. Thanks for agreeing to help me with our study. Did they explain a little bit about what we’re going to do?”

“Yeah, you wanna know about me and my baby, how we get along after she’s born?”

“Right. I’m going to ask you some questions. If you feel uncomfortable at any time, you don’t want to answer, or don’t want to continue, just let me know. We’re not going to do anything except talk. Then after the baby’s born, I’ll do a little exam in the hospital before you leave, then meet you again six weeks later. OK?”

She nodded impersonally. “Awright. Let’s go.”

Doreen was Black, nearly 17, living with her mother who worked as a nurse’s aide at Brigham and Women’s. She’d known the baby’s father since the start of her sophomore year. He didn’t come to the clinic visit, but she said they were ‘still together’, and he planned to ‘stay around’ after the baby was born, even though they both thought she was too young to get married. Her friends thought the pregnancy was ‘cool’, and a couple of them had babies of their own.

I gave her ten pictures to look at, babies smiling, sleeping, scowling, crying, and asked for her reaction to each. Then, we talked about three more pictures. The first showed a woman holding a book, in front of a farm where a man and woman accompanied a horse plowing the field. The second showed a woman looking through a door she’s just opened into a room, where flowers sat on a small table. The last featured a woman reading to a girl holding a doll in her lap. I asked Doreen to tell a story about what led up to the picture, what was happening in it, what the people are feeling and thinking, and how the story ends. Julia and I had designed this part of the interview to give us some idea about my second hypothesis, the effect of a teen-ager’s sense of feminine identity on her interactions with her newborn. Early on in the process, I began to regret that these pictures were wildly inappropriate for my study subjects, all the characters being white, and located in environments foreign to these inner city girls. But Julia wouldn’t let me change after we’d started.

Once I’d finished with Doreen, I went to the hospital for a postpartum interview with another new mom, followed by my favorite part of the study, examining the baby. I floated back to my days in Barry’s lab and all those infants I’d played with under the guise of gathering data for our reciprocity study.

Julia, who accompanied me on several of these visits, observed one day, “Now I see why you wanted to do this study.” She winked both eyes, then said, “I guess it’s OK to like them – the babies, I mean. You don’t want to influence your subject moms with your emotions, but the babies – go ahead, enjoy them.”

Two days after her delivery, I found Doreen’s room. She looked up from the wrinkled little baby cradled in her arms, saying dreamily, “Oh, hi, Missus…uh?”

“Stein – I’m Sarah, remember me?”

“Yeah, you’re the lady who showed me those funny pictures.”

I smiled, looking down at the tiny bundle in her arms. A thin pink cotton cap partly covered curly black hair. “She is … lovely, Doreen. Does she have a name yet?”

“Shalice, that’s what I call her,” she said without looking up.

“I think she’ll love that.” I wondered, “Is it after someone?”

Doreen looked up, beaming. “No. I made it up all myself. It means ‘Precious’ ‘cause that’s what she is. So precious.” Shalice cooed at her mother’s voice.

“Can I touch her?”

“Here, you can hold her, Miss,” Doreen said, handing me the swaddled infant.

My chest tightened as I carefully wrapped both arms around her tiny body. I used the opportunity to start the newborn exam, testing her Moro reflex. “OK if I do a little check on her here?” I asked as I laid her gently, slowly down into the rolling bassinet. I felt the room go distant as I carefully unwrapped the blanket, covered with ducklings endlessly following their mother. I marveled at her sudden startle when the cool air hit her skin. Only Shalice and I were left, her so helpless and I in awe at her miniature fingernails, her long thick lashes, her squinting dark brown eyes. As I’d felt so many times before, being in the presence of a baby, still curled from her journey in the womb, I wondered if this was what a mother does, forget everything else except her own, her precious child.

Wrapping her up after I’d finished, I discovered Doreen had slipped into the bathroom. This meant I could hold Shalice a few minutes more. I thought, this, this makes all those books, all those papers, all those crumpled outlines, all that planning, everything I’d done to get ready – this is what I really wanted.

“She’s pretty, ain’t she, Miss?” Doreen asked as she eased herself back into bed, careful not to sit down too hard.

“She is…she is. So pretty,” I said quietly.

“Pardon?” Doreen said.

“Sorry. Here. Such a lovely, lovely baby. You are so lucky. Don’t forget, I’ll be coming to see you two, again, at home next month.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Center of The Universe

May, 1974

Over the next three months, I had no time to dream about the future, or worry over the past. I spent many days at the CDU endlessly viewing and re-viewing tapes of the 12 mother-infant pairs as they performed in front of our dual-camera setup. I got to know each of them intimately, not only from the 3-minute controlled sessions, but also before and after, chatting with them each time they came in, helping them relax and prepare. Ed had told me to remain “clinically detached” from the subjects, to remain objective in the descriptions I wrote. Looking back on them now, I remember the dissonance of cramming the joy and love I saw into the dry prose of a research study. A typical report of the first few seconds of the interaction might go like this:

“… As his mother comes in, saying, ‘Hello’ in a high-pitched but gentle voice, he follows her with his head and eyes as she approaches him. His body builds up with tension, his face and eyes open up with a real greeting which ends with a smile. His mouth opens wide and his whole body orients towards her. He subsides, mouths his tongue twice, his smile dies and he looks down briefly, while she continues to talk in an increasingly eliciting voice. During this, his voice and face are still but all parts of his body point toward her. After he looks down, she reaches for and begins to move his hips and legs in a gentle, containing movement…”

During Spring and early Summer, I watched 50 tapes, producing a novella of 60,000 words for Ed and Barry to read and turn into a clinical description of the process mothers and their infants went through: “initiation, mutual orientation, greetings, cyclical  exchange of affective information in dialogue and games, disengagement.”

“Why do we have to make it all sound detached?” I asked Barry at the end of one particularly tiring day. “I don’t understand why we have to do it this way.”

“How would you rather do it, Sarah?” he asked. He offered the chair in his cluttered office. “You can put those on the floor,” he said, indicating the papers piled on the one other place to sit in his cramped quarters.

“The moms – and the babies, too – they’re obviously feeling something. The smiles,  the laughs, the coos, and the touching. Especially the touching. That affective sub-text seems to me the core of the interaction. Everything else flows from that, right?”

With an avuncular tilt of his head, he smiled and said, “I know what you must be feeling as you watch them. It is beautiful, isn’t it? It’s what we all want for every child. But if we’re to help families, mothers, who are having problems with their babies, help them give their kids a better start, then we have to know what it’s like when it’s working well. Nobody has defined what is ‘normal’ for a warm and caring maternal-infant relationship. You’re doing the sort of field work that scientists did 100, 200 years ago, when they started describing and categorizing the natural world. All those observations about geology, plants, and animals, all that had to be done before someone like Darwin could come up with evolution. You are doing important work here, Sarah, important basic science.”

I thought about that, and said, “Hmm. It would be good if we got beyond the speculations of Freud, and could understand what’s really going on between them, mothers and babies.” I frowned, then said, “But what am I supposed to do with all the feelings I’m getting from this? It’s impossible to suppress, to ignore them. Sometimes, all I can think about is sitting with, holding a baby myself, my own baby, and how I would act with her…”

He looked out the window, then back at me, saying, “Don’t ever lose that, Sarah. That’s exactly what I’d like to see happening from this research, but for thousands, millions of mothers.”

At the end of July, I flew out to Seattle, where Linda had promised me I could have her car, a 1970 VW Beetle. The evening before I left, she treated me to a dinner at the top of the Space Needle.
“Watch out when you step across here,” the hostess said as we moved from the stationary center core to the rotating platform where diners slowly revolved through a 360-degree view of the entire Puget Sound, Olympic mountains and Cascade range. While the Olympics faded behind us, and Mt. Rainier glowed white and blue in the setting summer sun, Linda decided I might need some sisterly advice.

“Howard’s gone for good? How does that feel?”

I’d already rehearsed this many time with my therapist, and felt little as I said, “I’m beginning to wonder if I can hold onto a man.”

“What you ought to wonder is, if it’s worth it.” She turned to the window, staring down at the remains of the World’s Fair arrayed below us. “I mean, I’ve decided I don’t want to hold on to someone who cares so much more about himself than me or us.”

“I know what you’re saying. What’s hard, is…I don’t seem to be someone who can have, who wants, a casual relationship. I was lucky. I fell into one or two good ones. Most men , I’m finding are either too rushed, or too distant. Wrapped up in themselves. And I don’t want one just to have a warm body, you know.”

She nodded, poking at her crab salad.

I went on, “I’m so engaged in these studies I’m doing at Barry’s lab, along with trying to keep up at B.U., I don’t have the time, the mental or emotional energy to get involved with anyone new.”

“Maybe you need to get clear?” she suggested.

“Don’t start, Linda. Don’t start. My engrams are fine.” I winced, then added, “I’m sorry.”

She sighed, them smiled. “Your loss…”

“For now, I’m thinking I may end up like Howard’s aunt, Jane, the one who got married, then found out he was really gay, a closet homosexual. They got divorced when she was in her early 30’s, she must have soured on men, she’s lived like a spinster ever since.”

“How’s that work for her?”

I said, “She seems fine with it, she says she gets to create, to have her own life. But to me, it seems a little sad, like she’s missing something.”

“What?”

I was surprised when I said, “Kids. She doesn’t have any kids. That just feels…wrong.”

Linda smirked. “I thought you were a feminist, sister. Never knew you wanted to be a suburban housewife.”

I frowned, shook my head, and picked the bones out of my salmon filet.

I left the next day for British Columbia, spending a night at the farm Howard and I had visited on our epic road trip two years earlier. I had planned to spend a few days there, but the memories were still too poignant, too confusing, to hang out for long, so I pushed the chattering, quivering little Beetle on through the Canadian Rockies towards the plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan. The mountains looked different than in Colorado or Idaho or Montana, great walls of granite without the curves and peaks further south. After spending the night in Banff, I rushed past Calgary, on through wheat fields and past endless lakes. Since leaving Linda, I had not seen a newspaper nor heard an American radio station, I felt myself encysting, enclosed in the little car, responsible to no one for anything. Finally, I thought, a road trip for myself. Somewhere past Regina, the local station came through with a static-marred “Me and Bobby McGee”, by Janis Joplin. Listening to the power of her scratchy singing, I was oddly reminded of the Barbra Streisand of my teen-age years. I vaguely remembered Mike observing that, though totally different in their styles and sound, each poured a crescendo of pure emotion into her music. That led me to the tragedy of her death, and the sadness of that particular song. I could barely see the road through the tears.

As I pulled off, an announcer intoned, “CBC interrupts this program with a special bulletin from Washington, DC, already in progress.”

A man was saying a sonorous, somber tone, “…And now, President Nixon is walking towards the helicopter. He steps up the ladder. Now, he turns around, smiles and waves one arm over his head. He enters the helicopter, ducking his head while he places his arm around Pat. Down on the South Lawn, President Ford is heading to the podium…”

My head exploded. Why are they interrupting my music with a routine departure from the White House? And what is this about “President Ford?”

By the time I got to Niagara Falls, I had read enough to realize that, as some were saying, “Our great national nightmare is over.” I was too much a child of the ‘60s to believe that for a second.

ii

A fat envelope awaited me on my return, postmarked “Los Angeles”. Inside, I found a sheaf of onion-skin secured with a paper clip. The attached card read, in it’s entirety, “Janie – I’m writing stories now, not poems. – Mike” 

THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDER THE HOUSE

“I’d like to move out here to the beach,” I ventured. I was staring out the window of April’s second-floor efficiency apartment (complete with a Murphy bed), straining to see the ocean beyond the houses crammed along the boardwalk.

“Why? It’s so far away from the hospital.” (Of course, she worked at the same hospital.) I’d have to be careful answering. I couldn’t come right out and tell her I wanted to move in together, not yet. She still seemed like she might be scared away by signs of clinging permanence.

“You’re on the edge here. Los Angeles is so big and over-built. Where I am, it’s sixty miles in any direction until you get away from concrete and people. But here – I can walk down to the water, and there’s nothing out there for thousands of miles. Gives me a feeling of freedom, of space, of being alone in the big city.” I’d always liked space and aloneness, I figured. So why did I want to move in with someone else for the rest of my life?

“But what about Rick? You can’t just abandon him, can you?” I shared a house in Alhambra with another intern. We were the sole survivors of our medical school house of five; the other three had dispersed across the country seeking the grail of perfect knowledge in post-graduate training.

“I can talk him into coming out here – he’s always liked the beach.” I didn’t tell her he would be leaving after this year to take a residency somewhere else. My plan was to bait and switch – get a house for Rick and I, then, when he left, entice April to move in.

A few days later, she came up to me at the hospital. “There’s a house for rent over on Wavecrest.”

Aha! She’s not scared off after all; she’s actually interested in having me close by! “What’s it like?”

“It’s really neat. It’s two houses in from the street” – meaning Pacific; all the houses between Pacific and the beach were on walkways perpendicular to the ocean, with alleys behind – “and it’s got this sunroom in front, all glass and light.”

Wow, this was serious. She’d been over to see it and size it up, I thought. I let her continue, which was what I did best.

“It’s got three bedrooms, a refrigerator and stove. And it’s $450 a month” This was three times what she was paying now, more even then Rick and I paid in Alhambra for a suburban tract house.

“You wanna go look at it sometime?”

The house was a salt box, probably forty or fifty years old. One story, 20 by 50 feet. A white, slanted roof covered a tiny attic, with the main portion painted a faded deep blue. A concrete set of stairs marched up from the postage stamp-sized dirt front yard to a lead glass door opening into the main room. A glassed-in porch took up the remainder of the front. Windows on three sides captured the morning light in spring and summer, and evening sunsets most of the year. Three bedrooms and two baths took up one side of the house, the main room and kitchen/dinette the other.

We creaked through the cramped spaces, imagining what it would be like to be in a complete house, near the beach, with beds that stayed on the floor, a bathroom you could turn around in, and room for more than one in the kitchen.

I turned to April. “You know, I bet I could talk Rick into moving in here. Then we could afford it.”

April seemed a little disappointed. “Why would you want to do that?”

“Well, we are sharing a house together. I wouldn’t want to leave him high and dry. Just for a while, until he decides he can get somewhere on his own. Besides, I think he wants to live near the beach.” Actually, Rick had no desire to leave Alhambra. Even more practical than I, he liked the 15 minute drive to work, and would balk, I knew, at the traffic heading into town along the Santa Monica. But, quiet as he was, he wouldn’t want to be marooned. He’d move, and we’d hardly see him anyway.

April set me up with the landlady. What she mainly wanted was $900 and proof of permanent employment. She seemed pleased she was getting two doctors in her house.

“The last ones who were here – complete slobs! Didn’t work a lick; just parked their motor cycles here in the living room, and in the front yard.” I looked down at the dark grease stains in the carpet. No wonder there was no grass out front. The landlady narrowed her eyes at me. “You really a doctor? Your hair’s so long! They let you look like that at the hospital?” Slight pause. She went on, “You’re an intern, huh? I guess you work, what, 80 hours a week? You got a motor cycle?”

“No, just a bike. I ride it down the beach sometimes.”

“Well, don’t fix it inside!” she snapped. “Here’s my address, and phone. Mail the checks before the end of the month. If you have any problems, give me a call.” She looked out the window at the house next door. “You ought to meet those folks there. Regular family. He’s an engineer, she writes plays. They’ve got a kid. If you have any problems, maybe they can help you.” It was clear maintenance was going to be a do-it-yourself sort of thing. “When’re you going to move in?”

“Probably this weekend. I’m on call Fri-“

“Huh!?”

“On call, have to stay at the hospital all night, get the next day off.”

“You do this often, stay at the hospital?”

“Every third night …”

Her eyes lit up. She glanced at me up and down, at my tie and slacks. “Great! Just keep it neat when you move your stuff in. Oh, and no waterbeds. The last folks had a water bed; it broke the floor in there” – she threw her chin at the front bedroom, where I was going to put my waterbed – “and we had to patch it up underneath, give it a little support.”

“Underneath?”

“Yeah, there’s a crawl space under there with trusses and such. We put a new one in, so the floor wouldn’t cave in.”

“Oh”

“Well, don’t forget the rent. Call if you need me.” She waddled down the back steps into her car, and drove out the alley to Pacific.

When I left college, everything I owned fit in my car. That’s the way I kept it until I moved into my first unfurnished house, near MacArthur Park (the one that melted in the dark in that old song). The house was two stories, with four bedrooms upstairs, and one down. I built a dining room “table” out of two by sixes, and a waterbed frame made from four 2 by twelve’s, stained and nailed together. The table was too heavy to move, so I left it. The bed frame knocked apart, and fit into my car, a ’66 Dodge Charger, with the back seats folded down. It must have taken at least two car loads to move my stuff the forty miles from Alhambra to the beach.

It could have been the pounding that woke him up, I don’t know. But after that second load, I started putting the bed together, simply pounding the nails back into their old slots. I had draped the liner (an old waterbed sliced open) onto the floor and up over the side boards, and was about to put the $10 mattress on top, when the knock came on the door. April answered it while I tried to plug the hose fitting into the bath tub outlet.

“Mike, there’s somebody here who wants to talk with us.” April had a little question mark in her voice, indicating she didn’t know quite what to make of him and wanted my help. She’d been in Venice for more than nine months, and had gotten a good feel for how crazy, stupid, or weird some of the inhabitants could be. So I perked up when she signaled her distress.

When I got to the door, I saw confusion, not concern in her eyes. We both knew crazy people, and this guy was clearly a marginally functional schizophrenic. He had the Thorazine shakes, or the Prolixin hop. His clothes were there, but he’d stopped being aware of them some time ago. Somebody had talked him into a hair cut a while back, but couldn’t get him to follow through with a comb. Or a razor. He was dark blond, average sized, Hollywood good-looking, and on the street.

“See, the last people who lived here let me keep my stuff under the house,” he was saying.

“The last people?” I tried. Three summers on a psych ward had taught me that repeating their words back to them was a good way to help schizophrenics make a little sense. It keeps them on track, as long as you want to go there with them.

“Yeah … uh … they said … I could put … you know, I would keep my stuff under there, I wouldn’t bother you at all. I’d be very quiet coming in and out. Those last people, they said they never even knew I was there. I had a lock I’d put on that little door, to keep my stuff safe..” He was trying to make it seem like he came with the house. But he had no leverage, so he was being cautious, trying desperately to size me up through his psychotic fog.

“Now why would I want to let you do that? What would I get out of it?” I figured I could bargain with him, try to inject some level of rationality in what was obviously, to both of us, an absurd situation – a crazy street bum asking for a handout, not of money, but of space.

“Well, you’d have a place to keep your stuff. I’d let you know the combination.”

Schizophrenics have a kind of ESP. They know what other people are feeling, and aren’t afraid to feed it back to them. It also works the other way around. I could sense that he wanted to reassure me he was normal, in some ways, and wouldn’t want to hide anything from me.

“How do I know it’s safe? What if you’re keeping something illegal there, like drugs? Do you have any drugs?” I thought I’d start being directive with him, see how far I could push this.

” No, I don’t have any … the only drugs I have are, you know, prescription drugs, medicines I take.” I didn’t doubt that.

This guy appeared the same age as me, about 25. We’d been through the sixties together, and learned the same lesson – it’s us against them, the young folks against The Man. We had to stick together, and if your brother was a little down, and you had some to share, then you’d do your best to help. This guy was not dangerous. He had such a tenuous hold on himself, he could never put one on anybody else.

April’s brother had been in and out of the mental hospital at Camarillo since he was a kid. She knew every bum had a mother, a sister or brother, who’d tried to have a real life with them. She’d knew folks so far on the edge, they couldn’t see back towards the center. She didn’t want to live there herself, but if someone was marginal because they were crazy, or dull, she’d give them the benefit of the doubt. It seemed like a Karmic thing: if she was kind to other schizophrenics, someone would look out for her brother. She’d purged whatever demons had infested her, but she knew others never made it past purgatory, where this guy clearly was going to spend the rest of his life. We both wanted to ease his passage to wherever he would stumble next. Somehow he knew that about us.

Besides, I figured in his state, he was making all this up – an elaborate story hoping to get us to tell him he could crash in our house that night. But I played it straight, and told him, “OK man, but listen: We don’t want you staying here. You can leave your stuff under there, if it’s already there. Just don’t bother us – we don’t want to hear you or see you. OK?”

“Yeah, thanks, that’s great, man. You won’t be sorry. You won’t see me, I won’t be here except to get at my stuff now and then. I live at a house up in Santa Monica.”

After that, we didn’t see him again, and we began to worry. So one day, we walked around to the side of the house, and found the door into the crawl space underneath the front porch. It was a small, sorry collection of stuff we found there: discarded clothing, some canned food, a few prescription bottles, almost nothing of value or personal interest. For the past fifteen years, I’d lived in special environments, academic havens where the smart and rich were pampered, prodded, and prepared to propagate more smart, rich, successful progeny. It was one thing to read a magazine, or watch a film about down-and-out folks on the margin. I could even see and touch them when they came into the ER, psych ward, or medical clinics. But to live in the same neighborhood with the underclass, to share a house with someone who used a crawl space for a closet, and the street for a living room – this quite literally brought home a three-dimensional picture of another way to live. For the first time in my life, I knew how lucky I was, how fragile comfort can be, and the value of dogged persistence in building some protection, some shelter from the chaotic spasms of a world that didn’t care about me, no matter how nice it seemed on the surface.

iii

My therapist returned from her August vacation just in time to save me from complete collapse before I started classes again my second year at B.U. As usual, we did not discuss her time off. I so wanted to ask her whether she, like many other Boston and New York analysts, spent that time on Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket. A great source of fantasy for me, but she assiduously avoided any possibility of transference on that topic.

“What did you think, when you read Mike has found someone else to move in with? Do you still have conflict over whether that should have been you?”

Having dealt with my feelings alone for two weeks, I was ready with an answer. “It’s his life, isn’t it? That particular ship of dreams sailed a long time ago for me. I know I’m happy for him, on the intellectual plane. It’s what he’d been looking for, all these years, I suspect, someone to play on the beach with.”

“You never wish that could have been you?”

“Apart from me loving it here in Boston, and him being enraptured with California life, yes, I do think about that now and then.” I didn’t want to open up any further about that, so I stayed silent, staring at the picture of a storm-tossed clipper ship on the wall next to her diplomas.

On cue, she persisted, “When you do, what do you feel?”

I sighed, knowing she would not let this go. “Sadness. Faded love. I wonder what he’s like, what she’s like, what they are like together. But not enough to find out. I’m ready to leave that behind completely. I don’t have time for memories, for the could-have-beens in the past. It’s hard enough working on a doctorate. Maybe it’s sublimation, turning things like that, like Howard leaving, into energy for, say, coming up with a thesis topic. I’m 25 now. They are part of me, always will be, and I’m grateful for that. But I don’t need them for me to be who I want to be. I’m getting there on my own”

To my amazement, she seemed satisfied. “And what about that thesis, Sarah?”

I smiled, and said, “I have the first meeting with my advisor next week.”

Julia Klein was one of the few female psychologists in the department at B.U. After getting her Ph.D. from Yale 10 years earlier, she had stayed in New Haven until offered a tenure track in Boston in 1969. I asked for her after discovering her interest in childhood trauma, its effects and prevention. I thought she could help me use my experiences in the Childhood Development Unit to find a suitable study topic for my dissertation.

“It’s a hidden truth, Sarah,” she told me at our first meeting. “The men in our profession don’t see it, or won’t admit it, but millions of women know, abuse of children leaves scars that often get hidden.” I nodded, not knowing where she might be going with this. “It’s the source, the fount of so many problems which bring people to a therapist.”

“What do you mean, ‘abuse’? People hitting their kids? Getting angry at them, emotional trauma?”

“Well that certainly does happen, but those things have not been kept in the shadows. I’m not talking about getting yelled at, or spanked or beaten.” She paused, blinked her eyes rapidly, and went on. “Girls suffering at the hands of the men in their lives, young girls, teenagers, who are used by their fathers, brothers, uncles, neighbors. Then made to feel ashamed, as if it was their fault for being born female.”

I’d certainly heard about this, but never connected it before to the study of psychology. Freud certainly didn’t give it much credence. “I see,” was all I could say.

“Sexual abuse. Childhood sexual abuse. It can be so traumatizing, disorganizing a young woman’s relationship with her body, leading her to look for love in, say, risky sexual encounters. Damaging her ability to care for and raise her child if she does get pregnant. Since we don’t talk about it very much, it hasn’t been studied well. If we don’t study it, we can never know how to help those who suffer from it, or help create a better environment so it doesn’t happen, break the cycle, so to speak.”

Not knowing how to respond, I looked over at a painting on the wall to my left. A blue-jay, caught in raucous mid caw, its beak open, head tilted back, sat on a dark evergreen surrounded by impressionist yellow sun-splotches. “That’s an interesting painting,” I ventured.

“Oh, thank you. It’s one of mine, my hobby. So relaxing, to paint pure nature, after spending all day in the often dark corridors of the human mind.”

“Beautiful,” I murmured.

As if to herself, she said, “Art labors to make whole what is incomplete, to supplement by an act of imagination the fragments and scraps of life.”

I pulled out my pen, asking, “Wow, can you say that again?”

“Not mine,” Julia said. “I heard it last summer, in England, talking with a woman named Briggs, a Virginia Woolf scholar.”

All that Fall, we discussed possible thesis topics. Our bi-weekly sessions were the highlight of that year, as we talked about combining what interested me – mothers and their new babies – with what might be valuable for the future of our science.

“Young women – girls – who get pregnant. Is there anything we can do to help them get on the right path with their babies? What makes some of them more resilient, better able to love and nurture their child, instead of ignoring, rejecting, or otherwise inhibiting, harming their growth?” Julia mused one December morning. “That’s something which would draw together all the threads of your interests, all your passion, Sarah.”

iv

Early Spring, another fat envelope from LA, another of what Mike called his “Venice Stories”.

OUR DOG HAS MORE FRIENDS THAN WE DO

“Go get it, Buff. Come on boy, you’ve got it! OK, now bring it back!” April and I watched our 8 week-old Golden Retriever puppy, “Great White Buffalo”, pad into the water on giant paws, snatch a stick from the foam, and waddle hyper-kinetically back up the sloping sand to our feet. He smiled crazily, having retrieved from water at his master’s command for the first time in his life.

“Geez, these guys must be bred for this – they do it naturally.”

“You’ve never done this before?”

“Well, just in the living room, you know, throwing that sock. But we’ve never trained him or anything, never given him a reward for fetching.” I marveled at the Darwinian strength of his instincts.

“Look at him,” April pointed. “He’s trying to swim!” This little guy had bug eyes as he tasted salt water. Madly dog paddling, he stayed one stroke ahead of a breaker with a stick the size of his leg clamped in his mouth. 

Buff lives in our front yard, with his step-mother Tasha, a Collie/Shepherd mix saved from the pound a year or two before we bought Buff purebred from a breeder in Diamond Bar. She’s smart and cautious where Buff is quick and reactive. They spend their days rooting amidst the weeds in the 10′ by 20′ patch of turf in front of our house, lazing on the porch when the sun gets too hot. They live for our morning and evening walks down to the beach.

Our own little patch of sand stretches between two piles of rocks, one anchoring a storm drain outlet, the other a T-shaped jetty protecting the beach from northbound waves. Evenings, I open the gate to our little yard, and let the dogs trot down the sidewalk, tugging at leashes, to the open sand past the boardwalk. There, I free them from restraint, and Buff whips away towards the water like some alcohol-fueled funny car whose drag chute has failed to open. His tongue lurching out to one side, he rockets straight over the sand, front and rear paws working like horizontal pistons – first spread out in front and far behind, then rammed all four together underneath. Tasha, the lady, has a more stately entrance to the water. While Buff bounds first on his front feet, and then his rear, she works each side in tandem. I almost expect her to prance along with her tail in the air like some Disney poodle or Aristocat.

Buff never has figured out that he can’t chase a stick until I get there. To kill time and cool his jets while waiting for me to catch up, he’ll hit the water and do a quick 180, catching his tail in the languid pools left over from the waves. He’ll throw his snout down into the wet sand, and jump up like a bare back bronc trying to buck a rodeo cowboy. Finally, Tasha and I amble up and I heft the stick I’d brought along.

Living in Venice, and spending the rest of my time in a hospital or on the freeway, I don’t have easy access to trees, alive or dead. So I had grabbed a scrap of two by two one day from a construction site, about two feet long, and saved it by the door as Buff’s fetching stick. I’d skim it over the water, trying to land it past the breakers’ peaks. As soon as my arm goes back for the fling, Buff runs until the water hits his chest. Then he  jumps up a bit, and paddles out to sea, hoping to spy the flying stick over his head while keeping spray out of his eyes. (He’s so eager to fetch, I can easily fool him four or five times in a row with a fake toss, if I want some cheap amusement.) No matter where I throw, he’ll reach the stick within a second or two after it leaves my hand; turning as he grabs, he swims, then runs back to my side, simultaneously dropping the stick at my feet and soaking my legs with his shake. Then he’ll sit down, tongue lolling, and give me that Golden idiot grin while panting heavily, waiting for me to throw again.

He’s tireless. My arm will give out long before he ever does. Ten, twenty, thirty times in a row – he never quits, always wants more. A regular canine boomerang.

Tasha is more genteel, of course. While Buff is swimming himself to exhaustion, she taps along the edge of the foam, taking care never to let the water get above her ankles. She’ll race in and out as the waves break and fall, running a zig-zag along the squishy waterlogged sand, barking encouragingly while Buff does all the work.

When I get tired, April and I walk from one rock wall to the other and back. We link arms behind each other’s back, lock hips side-by-side, and synchronize our steps to sway together. If we time it right, and the wind and smog cooperate, we hit my favorite time of night, that magic light a half hour before sunset.

When the sun angles low over the northwest, and the air is scooped clean by a passing winter storm, the beach becomes electric. Each facet of the cups in the choppy water shows a different side to the light, yet a rhythmic regularity comes out of the bobbing wavelets. Not yet the dullness of sunset, and no longer the harshness of the fading afternoon, the light is both softened and sharpened. In the distance, the horizon shimmers at its jagged junction with the sky. The sun is changing from white to yellow. Reflections coming off the serrated surface of the sea hit the eye like a thousand crystal prisms shining in my face. And the sand, now starting to dampen from the invading evening fog, catches each and every aspect of the light show, transforming into a purely psychedelic backdrop for the whole affair.

The sand, shimmering back at us, gives up its heat absorbed throughout the day. Lazy waves, their washing sounds surrounding us like a silk headdress, a swaying walk with April, dogs lapping at our sides, light coming at us like a fireworks show seen through closed eyelids, cocooning warmth of sand contrasting with the cool wet mush beneath our bare feet – evenings like that with my little family on the beach at Venice seem the center of the world, a place from which all life could emanate.

And a place you’d never want to leave. But the secret of Southern California nights, even in the summer, is the air gets cool as the sun goes down. Unlike the Midwest, a thousand miles from any cooling ocean, the beach at night can turn downright chilly. Forget your sweater, ignore your jacket, insist on shorts, and goose bumps crawl up your legs like an army of pinching spiders, pulling your skin tight before the shakes start up. So we’d tramp back home, pull up the latch on our front gate, pet the dogs one last time on the porch steps, and move inside for an evening of home life.

Sometimes we’ll go down to the boardwalk without the dogs, and they’ll moan a bit, jumping up to get their front paws on the five foot high edge of the solid wood fence surrounding our yard. We give them a pet or two, and turn away. Coming back, we might see walk a stranger talking softly and petting Buff, or saying “hi” to Tasha (she was more reserved, and wouldn’t come to the fence for just anyone). This gave us the idea to announce Buff’s birthday to his friends. We put up a little sign, saying “Wish Buff Happy Birthday (He’s 1 today!).”

“This dog is so cool! He’s the friendliest pup. I always bring him something when I come by. He seems to love biscuits.” A lanky long-hair smiled up at me when I came out on the porch to gather the morning sunshine before going to work. He leaned over the fence and scratched Buff, who was standing on his hind legs, leaning against the top rail of the fence. He clearly knew this guy. “Yep, this feller’s my friend. He and I talk every day. Maybe I should get him a present or something. What’s he like?”

“Well, he probably likes being petted as much as anything.”

All day, April said, people stopped by and said “Hi” to Buff. Street people, suited people, sandaled people, hippies, surfers, guys, gals, old folks, kids, cops and robbers. Hardly anybody we knew, though. Buff had a secret life he carried on while we were away at work. We only got him for those morning and evening walks down to the beach, but his fans got him all the rest of the time. He had so much love, though, we never knew the difference. He’s very easy to share.

xiv

Friday, the traditional end of a ski week, found us taking the Big Burn lift all the way to the top of the mountain. It was my graduation day, when I would finally stretch my wings away from the easier green slopes, and try a blue run, Upper Powderhorn. The Burn lift took 15 minutes, featuring foot rests with an arm bar for the air-starved and weary. The late March Colorado sun beat harshly on the snow, quickly melting the surface, frozen from last night’s cold. We hoped to hit that magic moment, mid-morning to noon, before the softness turns to slush. Or, as Mike asserted, “Before the corn snow melts to mashed potatoes.”

During the week, I had quashed my fears, and found a hidden confidence following Mike’s directions. Advancing from snowplow to a stem turn, I tried to keep my skis locked together, the way he did. Lingering anxiety, however, held me in a three-point stance.

“It doesn’t matter how you look, as long as you’re having fun,” Mike insisted whenever I complained.

“But I want to do this with you, share your skiing!”

“I’ve been here, what, forty, fifty days now? And I can barely go down a black diamond without feeling like a klutz. It’s not easy, it takes time. Let’s have fun where we can.”

The higher we went, the brighter the sun, the sharper the shadows and shorter the trees. Alpine peaks came into view as we crested the final ridge. Sliding off the chair, we headed right, easing to a stop near tree-line. Three thousand feet below, a V-shaped valley separated us from a higher mountain. Seen from his house, this peak caught the morning light, the shadow descending across its face signifying the new day’s start. Up here, almost close enough to touch, it dominated our vision, challenging my perception of proportion.

Upper Powderhorn proved easier than I’d feared. Cut towards the left while the slope fell off to the right, I could ski mostly on my stronger right leg. At the bottom, the trail forked left, to Lower Powderhorn, gentle yet uncrowded as far as I could see. Max Park meandered down to the right, filled with nervous skiers, many slower and more awkward than I imagined myself to be. I pointed left, “Can we go there?”

He tapped the black diamond sign twice with his ski pole, saying, “Too hard for me – it ends up in a gully, then something called ‘Belly-Grabber Pitch.’ Let’s go this way, Max Park. It’s a green.”

Mike seemed so confident, composed, in control, as he skied with me that I couldn’t imagine him hesitant with shaky legs, the way I felt on skis. We tried a few more “blues” on the lower slopes. At noon, Mike suggested, “Should we quit? I’ve got to be at Guido’s by 2:30 today.”

I didn’t want to leave, not when I was beginning to get my ski legs. I knew I’d miss these easy days, without professors droning on or papers to write, no friends challenging my every move. I needed to capture this sanctuary, this hidden time we both had shared, keep it in a snow globe, ready to shake any time I felt bereft. Mike left, off to peel potatoes and zucchini, fill the Hobart with tray after tray of half-empty plates, scour pots and pans, and (his favorite) make desserts. I scrounged through the desk drawers, finally finding a few blank pages in a notebook, some magazines, glue, and scissors.

Sitting at the writing table, glancing up to watch the alpenglow fade across the Divide, showering Mt. Elbert with bright pink, than faded purple, and finally greying shadow, I methodically began a collage. First, from Ski Magazine, I extracted a face shot of America’s current ski hero, Billy Kidd. Next, feeling like a kidnapper creating a ransom note, I cut and then pasted individual letters and numbers spelling out “21 – I Love yoU – MiKe”, and pasted them across Billy’s face. An ad for skis produced “being happy…” which went above his lanky blond hair. I stuffed this into the inner pocket of my suitcase, intending to finish Mike’s 21st birthday card at home. Then I took a post card of Aspen Mountain and wrote to my parents, sharing my wonder at the mountain beauty, the massive piles of snow on Loveland Pass, and assuring them the searing sun had not burned me.

On the flight back to Cincinnati, I took a window seat, marveling at how Kansas was even flatter seen from the air as driving through it. Once home, I took out the collage, and set to work adding a final remembrance. I meticulously covered the entire surface of a 5 inch by 8 inch piece of construction paper with any and everything that popped into my mind about Mike and I at the present moment.

[Should this section be distilled and re-ordered to provide a flavor, not a complete map of the card…?]

In the upper left corner, I started with a palm tree, then mouse ears and balloons. Below that, “Disneyland” with a little mine train chugging up a miniature hill. To the east, “Los Angeles”, the sun surrounded by swirls of smog, and, for emphasis, the word itself repeated three times. Across one side, the geography of his future – and our recent life: “Colorado – Aspen – Snowmass – Los Angeles – Cincinnati?

Given my tiny handwriting, I had lots of space left. Next, a rendition of his “JC” letter sweater, surrounded by other icons of the sport: Molly, names from his little kids’ team, teammates and coach from college, and, incongruously,  “Katy Winters”. A maze, leading from “Psychiatrist” to “Doctor” to “Medical School” to “Why”, until, finally, at the center, “Shrink”. Across the bottom, “Loving – Beauty – To – Love – Lovely – Love. I dredged up Jason Robards’ line from 1,000 Clowns, “Why weren’t you born a chair?”. Above that, hints from three songs: “Let it be”, “Like a bird on the wire, I have tried to be free ~ “ and “Sooner or Later, one of us must know that I really did try to get close to you”.

At the top, an homage to our ski week: “Schuss-boomer”, “Chair lifts”, “Snowplow”. His now dead car,  Judy Be Good, and a reminder to “Fasten Seat Belts”. In the middle, Mt. Albert, 14,431’

I grabbed some crayons, putting in a topsy turvy rendition of the Birthday Song, ending “Happy Birthday Dearest Mike, Happy Birthday To You.” I placed random green (his favorite color) squiggles, added some orange ones near Los Angeles, and discovered there was still room for a few more tokens. Random words and phrases came to mind: “The only way to grow is to grow together”, Learning, Sharing, Honesty, Outside, Inside, Love, “together apart”, “apart together”, Trying, Love, the first lines to our high school Alma Mater, and in the few remaining spaces, “Mountains and Oceans”, “Oceans and Mountains” repeated several times. 

I pasted it on the brown paper with Billy Kidd, and found one remaining blank spot. I grabbed the postcard I’d mailed to my parents, the one with Aspen Mountain on the front, cut off the sides with pinking shears, and glued it down.

Finally, at the top, middle and bottom, I wrote, “Happy Birthday Mike – I Love You Very Much – Sarah Jane”, “Happy Birthday to Mike”, and, finally, “May It Be a Good 21”, his age underlined six times. Pleased with my handiwork, I leaned back, grabbed my father’s 35 mm camera and took a snapshot, before sealing it in a manilla envelope, addressed to West Village, Colorado.

xv

Visiting Mike in Colorado, then creating his 21st birthday card shifted my internal compass. In January and February, as I tentatively explored what being with another man might feel like, my own futurehad become my True North. Dreams of independence crystallized, as I sought active engagement with the problems of the world, and a life devoted to helping young children and their families. Then ten days with Mike, together in that safe and happy isolation we so easily fell into, spun the needle wildly. I felt his pull, the pull of us once more, and poured that through my pen into an accompanying letter.

“…We are just so good together, Mike, you raise me up. We can’t keep it up, not across the country, not forever. But for now, I want to be us again. Are you coming back, to get your diploma? Let me know…”

He called the night after the lifts closed for the season – Patriots’ Day in Boston.

“Janie?” he rasped. “I don’t feel so good. Last night, I had to sit in front of the window, shivering and sweating. I put on my sister’s cheerleader cape, that didn’t do any good. It’s back again. I wish you were here, you could make me better.”

“They said a flu’s been going around. You must have caught it. When are you coming back?”

“I’ll be home the end of this week…” He stopped, coughed, caught his breath, then went on, “…end of the week, get the car fixed up, then drive out to Connecticut the first week in May.”

We both stayed quiet for a while. I was feeling, He should be here, I could have him here with me. I was thinking, That’s not a good idea, he’ll have nothing to do, I’ll have to study, I might get sucked into his world again, the one I need to escape.

His breathing sounded heavy, labored, as if even a whisper would be too much. I said, “They’re talking about another strike here, on the 15th. The Moratorium against the war wants to shut down every campus in the country, do it every month until Nixon finally gets us out.” Still I hesitated, until, finally, my heart won its struggle with my mind. I persisted, “Are you coming back to get your diploma? You said something about trying to get a job in LA.”

Weakly, Mike replied, “They didn’t have anything, not for someone in college. Later, they said, when I’m actually in school there.”

“So are you going to come back here, or not?”

“Yeah,” was all he could manage before a coughing fit overcame him, followed by the sound of shivering, a susurration through his lips and teeth.

Deep in my head, I heard a voice urging, Don’t do it! But instead, I said, “You could stay up here with me, in May, then go down to Calvin for Commencement.” I wondered why that came out. I went on, “. It’s getting scary, and I have to…” I stopped, feeling my own body start to shiver.

“OK…OK, I’ll do that. Thanks. See you then. Have fun.”

A week later, Howard and Bev were sitting by her little black and white TV when I came in the apartment.

“God-damn him!” Howard cursed. Seeing my startled look, he announced, “Cambodia! The evil bastard’s now bombing Cambodia!”

“I thought he said he was going to end it,” I asked rhetorically.

“No way he gets away with this. We have to shut the country down!” he almost hollered.

All weekend, students gathered spontaneously in the yard. On Sunday, we marched to the Square, then across the river, joining throngs from MIT, Boston University, everywhere, it seemed. Thousands of us, drawing in shoppers along the way, overflowed the sidewalks onto Commonwealth, finally spilling through the Garden into the Commons. People talked of another march down in Washington.

The next day, classes still disrupted, it seemed the entire Harvard community – workers, students, faculty, even  the administration – broiled in anger. Early in the afternoon, word began to filter out, that National Guardsmen had killed some kids at Kent State. Since I was from Ohio, everyone assumed I knew all about the place. I’d never heard of it before.

The deaths had a chilling effect. I sat with Jeanne, Marcia, and Bev that evening, numb in front of the TV. We talked about the march to Washington.

“Are you going this time, Janie?” Jeanne asked. “You went before, last fall.”

I shook my head. “That did a lot of good, now, didn’t it?” I said sarcastically. “Besides, Mike’s coming this Thursday.”

“What!” Bev erupted. “I thought that was over! What are you thinking, letting him come back here?”

“I’m not thinking,” I admitted. “For one thing, he’s got nowhere to go.”

“And…?”

“And, yeah, I don’t see why I can’t enjoy him, while I still can.”

“You think that’s fair to him?” Jeanne questioned.

“He doesn’t seem to mind,” I responded quietly.

Three days later, there he was, driving a little blue Dodge Dart now, still with bucket seats. “Not quite as sexy as the Lancer,” he noted. That Friday was the last day of classes, with the two-week reading period to follow. If I kept my grades where they were, I had a good chance of graduating the next year Magna cum Laude, which, as my mother might say, would look good on my resumé.  My frenzied studies, and Mike’s apparent dislocation after six months of nomadic life, had us both walking on eggshells around each other in the cramped apartment. After about ten days of this, with Mike out on his usual one hour afternoon walk to “get some air”, I sneaked a look at his journal, finding the latest entry, Monday, May 18, 1970:

…Before coming back here to Janie, my letters to her, which of necessity are much more sketchy and less organized than this trash, skipped around from politics to weather, to Janie, and me, and so on. What occupies me now? This is not intended to be a repository of day dreams, or might have beens, or punctured romantic illusions. What it can be, and should do for me, is become the permanent remains of past and immediate concerns and events surrounding us.

Although the present moment doesn’t really qualify as a vantage point, or lend itself to stopping the action and replaying it, some scenes in slow motion, others skipped entirely. Rather, Now is like the middle of the sudden drop on a roller coaster – I know that ahead lies a manageable, spine-tingling, fun and frantic ride, and I’ll love it all when it’s over. But at the moment, my heart is two feet above my head, my stomach’s inside out, and total blackout is much preferred to continuation of the ride.

Janie lies asleep now, resting on her bed. She sleeps a lot lately; whether from lethargy or actual exhaustion, I don’t know. A bit of both I’m sure. But I don’t wake her up anymore. In her mind, I have disorganized her enough up to now, and I should just leave her alone when she wants it. She is so ambiguous in her feelings about me. I brought her to Aspen from Denver, and we were very glad to be together, glad to sleep and rest, and nest next to her body. And we walked and skied, and cooked, and sulked, and loved. And led our quiet, almost silent life together. I didn’t try then, but now I do, try to talk to, with, at, about her, and to have fun, to make at least some moments enjoyable. We still like it when each other smiles.

I want her with me, but all of our past has at last taught me how to accept the tyranny of our individual wishes for and paths of independence. She must finish here, I must become a doctor in Los Angeles. What would the summer have done for us anyway? Our plans would have prolonged the period of waiting. I can still imagine us spending our lives together, once everything about us is settled. She loves me, and I love her, and that’s the type of affection, respect and secret longing that will never really have an end.

I, as usual, am far more willing to accept our present cramped living quarters, not to be oppressed by our continual time together. Or is this only a long, protracted weekend?…

On the next page, a short poem:

Smiling

Was never quite what I had in mind,

But

after a while,

it all seemed so easy – 

A fluid, drifting, friendly dinner,

two beds arranged as one,

and the fun

of seeing life

from down below the Roller Coaster.

Stretched out and smiling

Was all I had left in me

To be.

No questions.

Finally, my last birthday poem…

Sarah

and your hair;

Your footprints trace a glowing moment in my memory.

Lightly stepping, traipsing through a sweetened patch of 

city,

your ears close out the hurried sounds,

as you smell and dream the river.

At last you’re living twenty-one,

    at last we mark

the region of the clock that goes around

    at first

then sweeps back again.

You stop, track back, and try to live each year as different

from the rest.

One year

is all you’ve known me, one year

is all you ever will.

Each year, in time, becomes the last,

is drowned in past, 

      always only one before.

They all emerge as one, these years,

and you know two;

        the one you live

and the one you’ve left, as

All your years have gone before.

But Sarah – 

        Janie – 

Don’t forget to live within the years you’ve lived before,

the years I’ve given, taken love, 

  and

Grown

with you,

    to grow again.

I hear you say (I say to me)

“My life is lived from me – I’m the one who celebrates

Today.”

But celebrate with me, 

as I celebrate my life

with you,

    no matter how you hurt me.

5-11-70

xvi

Schools fell like dominos that spring, after the Kent State and Jackson State killings. All the colleges in the country, it seemed, closed their doors. At the time, I thought it was in response to the angry demonstrations clogging every campus large and small, but now I see it might have been fear that more deaths would ensue.

“So, I’m not going to walk on June 7th, won’t get to dress up and get my diploma,” Mike observed, waving the John Calvin University commencement program. He opened it up, “See, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Young – they won’t be getting their honorary degrees.” He flipped a few pages. “And here, right here” – he jabbed his finger angrily – “they won’t announce me as cum laude. Or my roommates as magna…”

He looked ready to rant for quite some time. I tried, “Wouldn’t you really rather go home early? Didn’t you say the pool opens May 31? Now you’ll get to see all your friends there, instead of showing up ten days into the season.”

His fists balled up, then gradually opened as he calmed down. “OK. I just thought, that week after you’re done, we could go somewhere, like we always did.”

We’d been so day-to-day, first cooped up together, then flung wildly to the streets, we hadn’t looked that far ahead. Now that I was free, my only thought was going home. My mother would know what to do.

The first night back, she and I were alone in the kitchen, drying the pots and pans, putting them away with a clatter that Lisa would have set to music.

I asked, “Mom, where did I come from? How did I get here?”

She shook her head and laughed, saying, “Sweetie, isn’t it a little late for this conversation? I mean, haven’t you and Mike…”

Quickly I inserted, “No, no. I mean, where did our family, your’s and dad’s, come from. I know where you two were born and all, and your parents. But at some point, somebody left Europe, right? Why, and from where?”

“What do you want to know, Janie?”

“I’ve been going to Hillel at Harvard now and then, and I’m thinking more, about being Jewish, what that means, the history and all.”

She put down the dish towel, folding it neatly then draping it across the oven handle. Her apron went back on the hook inside the closet door. She sat down in the kitchen nook and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, Kools.

“Mom, please don’t,” I asked quietly.

With a soft sigh of regret, she put the pack back in her sweater pocket. “Talking about my family makes me sad. It’s been ten years since your Grandpa Reuben died, and it still hurts every day. And Grammy Sylvia, out there in California with your Uncle Carl, only five years ago…”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bring it up, I didn’t know…”

“No, Janie, it’s OK. It’s good to talk about it. It helps…” She paused, frowning while she thought. “I’m sure I’ve told you this before? Let’s see, my dad’s folks, Grandpa Issac and his wife Sarah – remember, we named you after her? – they were both from Lithuania, I forget what little village it was. They spoke Russian, I’ll never forget when he would tell me, ‘Nyet!’, every time I did something wrong. Then on mother’s side, her grandparents were from…uh, Poland?” She fell silent, lost in thought and memory. I waited for her to continue.

“Then on Dad’s side, his grandparents, Henry and Amelia, they both came from Germany, from Bavaria…no, wait, it was Baden, like bath, a spa town, and he made beer. At least, that’s what he started doing when he got to Cincinnati. They had ten kids, you know. Ten! Your Grandpa George ended up in Boston, the rest spread all over the midwest, Cleveland, Buffalo…Anyway, I never heard about any shetls or pogroms in our past, and they got out long before things went bad, there in Germany and Poland and all over.”

She’d grown quiet, slumped over a bit. With her forehead wrinkled, her dark hair half gone to grey, I felt she’d aged ten years in the months since I’d last been home.

The talk of family reminded me, “Mom? Aunt Helen and Uncle Carl? Toby and Sylvia? They still live out in San Francisco, the Bay Area, right?”

At the mention of her brother and my cousins, and especially feisty Helen, she straightened up, a smile returning as she said, “Of course, they’re still out there. Did you know, your cousin Syl decided to go to law school, and she talked Helen into joining her? They’re both in the first year now, at somewhere called Golden Gate. Why?”

“I’d like to go visit them, later this summer. I haven’t seen them in years, not since they spent the summer with us on the Vineyard. I ought to get to know them again, Syl especially.”

“Oh, sure, sweetie, that’s a good idea. How would you get there? When?”

“I don’t know, right before I go back to school? Don’t worry, I’ll figure something out, fly probably.”

Mom’s eyes brightened as she returned to the present. “How about Mike? Would you see him when you’re out there?”

“He’s not going until the fall. He didn’t find a job in LA, so he’s back at the swim club this summer,” I said brightly, as if reporting some neighborhood gossip.

She appeared skeptical. “So you two are still…?”

“No, mom, I’m pretty sure I’ve moved on. We’ve moved on.”

“Are you going to see him anymore, with him still in town?”

“I suppose so, I mean we’re still friends, we still like to do things together, like go to movies and stuff.”

“Janie, honey, are you sure that’s such a good idea?” It was rare indeed, now that I’d turned twenty-one, that my mother chose to interject herself into my life, my dreams and feelings. “You know I’ve been worried about you and Mike, how things might not work between you. Just because you can, you know, doesn’t mean you should.”

Despite her warning, Mike and I did return to each other on occasion. I had seen M*A*S*H a few months earlier, when it first showed up in Boston. The disjointed cadences of that episodic film, the cavalier cynicism of Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland,  the sneaky anti-war messaging, tinged with cannabis-inflected in-jokes stayed with me through the spring. When the film returned to the Esquire, I called up Mike, and asked him out.

“What, like on a date?” was his response. “I thought…”

“I still like you, buddy. Besides, you’ve got to see this movie.”

“OK, how about Friday? That’s my next night free. And afterwards…?”

Afterwards, with my parents gone for the weekend, playing once more in my little bed came easily, naturally to us. Two weeks later, we repeated the experiment in de-escalation, this time at Mike’s insistence.

“I read this book, I don’t know, at least a dozen times, back in 8th, 9th grade. I’ve been waiting for this movie for years.”

“Who’s in it again?”

“Art Garfunkel and Alan Arkin. It had better be funny. Even better than M*A*S*H, I bet.”

So we went to see Catch-22, at the brand-new suburban triplex theater near Mike’s swim club. He had built up such impossible expectations for the film version that it could never match his own internal images, honed through those endless adolescent day-dreams engendered by all his time with Heller’s book.

Sitting next to him as we drove back to his house, I felt his mood as if it were my own. I reflected on our current summer fling, a nostalgic re-creation of earlier, more innocent times together. While he was willing to come when I called, I sensed he no longer needed or wanted me like before. I wondered how much of that was due to my own repeated spurnings of him, my own confusion. I still felt love for him, I knew that would always be a part of me. I enjoyed the physical closeness of him as much as ever, yet I knew that couldn’t hold us fast together across the miles, across the years. I wondered if friendship were possible, if in the future, we might be like those parents of my friends, who still exchanged Christmas letters with old roommates, decades after college. “Is it him? Could I share my life with him?” I asked myself. Yes, I answered. “Can I do that now?” No, I thought. “Can I wait for our lives to re-intersect, in space, in time?” 

Before I could decide, Mike had stopped, waiting to turn left. Cars rolled by, just often enough to keep us stuck at the intersection.

“There’s no one here from yesterday,” I whispered.

xvii

We continued, that sultry muggy summer, to engage and disengage, sharing desultory days and nights, both of us afraid, I guess, to be the first to say good-bye for good. One evening, Mike brought out the slides he’d finally developed from the Moratorium march on Washington. That October weekend now seemed so long ago. The crowd, the optimism, those two eternal flames for the Kennedy brothers – scenes from another life, I thought. Until he showed me the one I took, that profile, looking wistful and serene in his father’s tattered leather jacket. Then I almost cried, my heart literally skipping a beat inside my chest. Why couldn’t he just go away, why did it have to end this way?

One night, driving to another movie, he talked about his dorm, there at USC. “We each get to have our own room, bathrooms in between. Right on the campus, hardly have to walk at all to class. Once I get my bearings, second semester, I’ll find a place to live, in the city. Los Angeles!” He started humming, then singing in his scratchy off-key way, “Surfin’ Safari”. “Huntington and Malibu, they’re shooting the pier, at Rincon they’re walking the nose…they’re angling in Laguna, and in Doheny too…I’ll get to see all those places, get to swim off the pier at Santa Monica,” he enthused.

“Don’t forget San Onofre,” I grumbled. It turned out I had fallen in love with someone whose highest ambition apparently was to be a beach boy. I tried another way to bring that up, through something – someone – he’d been avoiding telling me about all summer. “What’s her name, that swimmer? Molly? What’s she doing now?”

His smile vanished for a second, then he brightened. “She’s off at college, Michigan.” 

Surprised at my lack of trepidation, I wondered, “Are you seeing her this summer?”

He pulled his lips into a thin line. “Only at meets. I love to watch her swim”

“How’s she doing?”

“I bet she makes the Olympics in a couple of years.”

Inside, I felt a little guilty, hoping she might become one more dead end for him.

I forget the movie we saw that night. All I remember is thinking, once again, that love, and friendship, spiritual and physical, had felt all-fulfilling so long ago, in the spring of our sixteenth years. But now, I needed more, and he was going, almost gone, taking my heart, but thankfully, not my soul.

Mid-August, I realised I had not yet made plans for that trip to Marin, to see Uncle Carl and Helen, Toby and cousin Syl.

“The prices go up, you know, the longer you wait to make a reservation,” my father said when I told him the fare to fly out there.

“But I’ve only got enough for one-way now. How am I going to get back?”

“Maybe that’s a sign you don’t really want to go?” Mom ventured. I went back upstairs, and leafed once more through the fare book. With a cheap shuttle between LA and San Francisco, then a direct flight home, I could cover it with my savings from the summer. I called up Mike.

“Um, say, I’ve been thinking. I’d like to go out with you, when you drive to California next week, say good-bye to you there?” It was a long shot, and I was asking over the phone, not in person where I could use what little charm I had left with him.

Surprisingly, he said, though in a pretty neutral tone, “Sure, OK. That’d be fun, I guess. If that’s what you want.”

One more chance to let it go. No, I decided, I didn’t want to leave him hating me. I wanted us to be friends, I wanted him to know he had, indeed, meant – still meant – so very much to me. My words, after all the times I’d turned away from us, could never say that. Only sharing his new adventure, at least its start, could let him know…what? What was I trying to say with this, that I cared for him, or maybe that I just wanted to lie in bed with him, if only for a few more nights? He’d make a proper story out of it, but all I felt was muddled.

“Yes, let’s do that, Mike. One more road trip, our Greatest Hits Tour, OK?”

“Okay-aay,” he answered, sounding more than a little skeptical.

In the end, that’s all it was, a farewell tour for Sarah Jane Stein and Michael Harrison. We rolled across the plains of Kansas, fell asleep in Snowmass, the cosmic uncaring stars still playing up above, then drove through the piñon forests of New Mexico, new terrain for us.

Mike swept his hand across the horizon when we stopped for gas in Gallup. “Easy Rider, remember when Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper stopped here? And he makes sure to keep the last drop from spilling with his black leather glove? Whenever I drive these roads out west, that’s what I see – two guys setting off, with all that money hidden in the gas tank, their future fortune still ahead. That’s what I really want, you know, to enjoy the beauty all around me, tell some stories along the way.”

I wished I had his camera once again, to capture that look in his eyes, the romantic lure of his future in this land.

As we dropped down into the LA basin, heading west from San Bernardino into the afternoon heat, I felt over-dressed, even in a short-sleeved pink cotton shirt. “This must be the deodorant capital of the world!” I observed. Mike snorted, “Sorry, no air-conditioning.”

We spent our last night together in another narrow dorm bed, making love not in a frenzy, but with a friendly slow caress. As we started, I murmured to him, “This is just for you.” In the morning, I called a cab and left before he woke, leaving behind a note, written on the back of a memo titled “To: Freshman Students/Re: Introduction to Clinical Medicine (ICM)”. I wrote, in his favorite green ink, using the largest cursive I had ever attempted:

Good-by – 

  have a good life —— be happy ——

Love

Sarah Jane

don’t be scared – you’re

going to be a good doctor – 

 – you’re a good person —

please write sometimes —

viii

During October, 1969, I felt calmer, more sedate. The campus had settled down, everyone back to work it seemed. The Faculty finally voted to condemn the war. Bev,  Jeanne, and  I found a domestic rhythm at 119 Oxford Street. Mike came to Cambridge nearly every weekend, while I went down to Connecticut once, to his plush four-man suite complete with individual rooms, spacious living room, and kitchen. We kept our talk focused on the present, nothing about where, or when our individual futures might diverge. Our biggest worry was whether to cut our hair. Swim season started November 1, so Mike was planning on getting shorn.

“More hydrodynamic,” he insisted. “You should try it.”

“Have you forgotten how big my head is, buddy? I’d look like that mascot on the baseball team back home, what’s his name?”

“Mr. Red. Besides, wouldn’t it be easier to take care of?”

“Right, him. I complain about it, but I’m secretly proud of my hair. And I know you like it, too.”

“The first thing I noticed about you.”

“Your hands, my hair. If nothing else, we’ve always got that.”

Early in November, at another Hillel meeting, I ran into Howard.

“Janie!” He didn’t seem the least bit anxious about how we’d parted. In fact, he had a girl on his arm. “This is Rachel.” They seemed attached, almost affectionate. I knew Rachel, another Radcliffe junior. We each said, “Hi” demurely.

Then, remembering she ostensibly had a boyfriend, James, I said, somewhat obliquely, “Oh, I saw James had a poem published in the New Yorker. Pretty amazing for him, right?”

Not rattled at all, she admitted, “Big deal, for sure. We’re all so proud of him.”

Howard, oblivious to all this, piped up, “Look, we’re going down to DC next week, the Moratorium. Do you want to come? You and Mike?”

I frowned, remembering Chicago the summer before, and Uni Hall that spring. Howard said reassuringly, “This is going to be big. Half a million people, they’re saying. Big names, too – Gene McCarthy, McGovern, Peter, Paul, and Mary. Pete Seeger. They can’t put us all in jail, can they?”

“How are you getting there?”

“My old Volvo station wagon. We’ve got room. There’s five of us so far, you and Mike can have the back all to your selves.”

“The back” meant that, while Howard drove all night, we spent six hours cuddling, in a space meant for a couple of suit cases.

We piled out somewhere in the middle of the city. Howard, as usual, knew somebody who would let us all sleep that night on their floor. In anticipation of the chaos, I had first covered my hair with a stylish blue bandana, a thick knit watch cap over that. Mike wore blue jeans, a work shirt, wire rim glasses, and a fit-for-the-occasion vintage leather jacket sporting authentic signs of wear and tear.

“That is some jacket, Mike,” Howard observed.

“My father bought it at a fire sale in Omaha 1938, when he started going out with my mom. Gave it to me last year.” Switching gears, he said, “Are we going to do anything before the march?”

“Like what?” Howard came back.

“Well, I’d like to see Kennedy’s grave, the Eternal Flame.”

“That’s kind of far away, across the river. We’ve got to head over to the Monument now, all these people, it’ll take forever to get anywhere. How about we do that tomorrow, on our way home?”

We’d landed on the edge of consular district. All around us, a sea of people moved forward, aiming towards the Washington Monument. The streets were free of traffic, the entire downtown cordoned off to accommodate the throng.

Howard swept his arms around. “Look, everybody’s here!” Men in suits, women with prim handbags, permed hair and hats held down with pins, children in strollers, even young men in wheel chairs. Many carried signs, not of protest, but of expectation. To the left, passing a muted Tudor house, I saw inside a group of grey-haired men and women gathered around a poster, as if discussing how best to emphasize the message. It read “The silent majority speaks!” Laughing, I pointed at them, asking Mike, “Are they going to crash this party? What are they thinking?”

“I bet they’re opposed to the war, too, and want to let Nixon, Agnew, Mitchell, all of them, know that even Republicans, even the establishment, wants out now.”

The crowd moved as one down Constitution Avenue, slower and slower the closer we got to the Washington Monument. A few exhausted marchers sat at the curb. Police lined the route, officiously resplendent in their long, double-breasted blue coats. No guns, no shields, no horses or armored wagons in sight. Instead of helmets, they wore peaked caps with narrow plastic brims. Whenever I looked at them, they smiled and waved back.

I felt hopeful that a peaceful march was possible, that it was no longer us against them, but simply, finally, everyone. A sense of unity, of positive change coursed through my mind.

Mike asked Howard, “What happened to the Young Turks, man? Looks like no more turmoil, just a peaceful protest today.”

Howard shot back, “All these people, like they suddenly woke up. ‘Oh! We’re aware now! Let’s change things!’ Well, I don’t buy it. All this energy, these people, it’ll fade away, like it always has before.”

At some point near the towering obelisk, we came to a stop, along with everyone else. Although we were more than a mile from the podiums at the Lincoln Memorial,  the massive speakers were powerful enough to reach us up on our little hill. We cheered lustily for Eugene McCarthy, as he thanked us for what we’d done the year before, ending the Johnson reign. He told us we could do the same with Nixon, when it came to the war. Peter, Paul, and Mary led us in a sing-along of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Mike had brought along his 35 mm Pentax camera, hoping for candid pictures of the scene. I offered to hold it while he cheered the trio, quickly snapping one of him.

Somewhere far in front, the mass started swaying. A wave of raised arms flowed towards us, not fists today, but first and second fingers in a “V”, the peace sign. The crowd around us caught the movement, and finally I heard a mumble, then a distinct melodic chant. “All we are saying, is give peace a chance.” Over and over, not to be denied. I snapped Mike’s picture, head back, his face beatific, his hair, still long at my insistence, golden against that ragged jacket.

ix

Howard insisted on driving back to Boston. “This car is on its last legs, it’s got all these little quirks, I’m the only one who can keep it going.” After he’d drifted across the freeway again, almost hitting a delivery truck this time, Rachel, sitting next to him, said, “Enough! You haven’t slept more than two hours the past two nights. Time to let someone else take over. Come on, let’s trade places with Jane and Mike, you can fall asleep in the back.”

Howard, eyes drooping, reluctantly pulled over, took out the keys, and started to hand them to Mike. I looked down at the three pedals up front, and asked, “Uh, Mike, do you know how to drive a stick?” He said nothing, so I went on, “You’re always telling me how to drive, and you don’t even know how to shift gears manually?” I glared at him. “All those summers with Charlie’s VW, on the island? Give me the keys.” He made a big show of dropping them into my outstretched hand, looking ready to loose a smart aleck remark. “Don’t even think about it, buddy. Watch and learn for once, OK?”

He must have thought being in the shotgun seat gave him free license to pontificate. “Remember I told you, when I was eight, I decided that scientists’ technological advances were spiraling out of control?”

“Uh-huh,” I nodded.

“…doubling at an exponential rate, and the end of 1969 was the tipping point? Well, here we are. The apocalypse has arrived.”

“Isn’t that a little melodramatic? It was almost like a giant picnic.”

“No, listen, it’s not just the march. It’s everything. Hippies, do your own thing. Landing on the moon. Johnson passing all those civil rights laws, women getting more and more respect. I read even the earth is getting its own day next year, people are starting to care about how we’re messing things up with dams and cars and nuclear plants and stuff.”

“OK, but an apocalypse?” I laughed, “Like Hair? ‘The dawning of the Age of Aquarius’? This better be good…”

He cleared his throat. “An apocalypse is an outside event which forces us to re-orient our lives in relation to its sheer existence. Sure, there can be minor apocalypses, natural disasters like a flood, a tornado, hurricanes, an earthquake, which have an effect for a limited time on the limited few to whom it occurs. President Kennedy’s death had an apocalyptic tinge, as did, in a juvenile sort of way, the advent of the Beatles, Bob Dylan. World War Two was a more galvanizing, more complete apocalypse, though time-limited. And of course, there is the archetypal one in western civilization, which all of the last two millennia stems from, the Jesus story.”

“So how do you know this is the time for something like Jesus, or the war. I still think you’re making too big a deal out of all this.” I worried about concentrating on the road, while I absorbed this sudden epiphany he shared. I wished he’d take a nap, even if it meant he started snoring in unison with Howard in the back. Poor Rachel.

“Well, I’ve been looking for the signs, and in this decade we’ve had many. JFK heralding our generation as the one which will face a great assault on freedom – it’s ironic that assault is coming from within the very structure he was trying to reform. Nixon resurrected, a creep like Agnew elected – all this reflects a dissatisfaction with life in general. Everyone feels it. The middle class has an undefined awareness that the course of the country is not consistent with what they were told it should be. The radicals and drop-outs express a more conscious dissatisfaction with a life they see themselves being thrust into. This march, this weekend, showed me that this idealism, the dissatisfaction with establishment repression is coalescing into a clash which will be played out in our adult lifetimes. By 1980, I bet, all the strategic timetables for corporations and government will be out the window. It’s the dawn of a new age, and we saw the first recruits here in DC. For every ten of us going back to our colleges, there are a hundred in the high schools, a thousand in the nursery schools, to whom resistance will become a matter of course.”

He sounded so earnest, so idealistic, I couldn’t help getting into the spirit. “I get it. In 30, or 40 years, we’ll have a complete, sudden – at least in historical terms – turn-about to some new, as yet unknown society? And we have to act, to live with this in mind, that we can’t know, much less control, what the major forces in our future will be.”

“But you can shape the course your responses will take…”

Totally caught up in it now, I sped on. “I’m going to be a psychologist. If what you say is true, the future will be more and more uncertain, more people will feel unmoored. They’ll need help in setting their own directions. I can help them do that.”

“How?”

“I don’t know that yet. Personal therapy, encounter groups, psychodrama, love – it’s all possible, all useful.” The freedom of the unknown seemed a guiding beacon now. “I can accept it, going through the looking glass, not knowing what’s on the other side. It gives me hope my life will have some meaning.”

Back home at Oxford Street, Bev met me with a surprise as I walked up the porch steps. She pointed to the second floor bay window. “Some guys came here yesterday, said they were movie scouts. Wanted to look inside, asked if the rooms below were still for rent. The landlord wasn’t around, so I showed them in.”

“So?”

“So-ooo, they want to film a movie here.”

“A movie? A real movie, like Hollywood and everything?”

“Yeah, it’s about a couple of kids who meet at Harvard, and they need a ‘starving student’ apartment for a few scenes. Both outside and inside. Said this place was perfect.”

“That’s us, starving students…Jeanne and Marcia both here?”

“Upstairs. How did it go in DC, with Howard and Mike? Was that weird?”

“Not at all. Rachel was distracting him. And Mike was so much more…Mike, this weekend. First, he really got into the march, the idea of resistance, of change. He wanted to see and do everything, he even looked the part for once.”

“And…?”

“And, he reminded me how much, exactly why I love and need him.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, he’s my friend and lover, Bev, and I just have to admit it, have to accept it. Even if it all ends, I love being with him, talking with him, cuddling with him, looking at him, and I’m going to enjoy that, take advantage of it while I can.”

x

Mike arrived in Cambridge the Friday after the Moratorium march, looking completely drained. “My father called this morning, I’m going back to Cincinnati tomorrow evening.”

“Wait, What? You have to go back now? Can’t you wait until Thanksgiving?” 

He slouched down in the director’s chair Bev had appropriated from the movie shoot on the second floor, the one with “Ryan O’Neal” boldly silk screened on the back rest. “It’s my mother. She found a lump under her tongue, got it biopsied on Monday. It’s cancer, some kind of skin cancer.”

“Oh my God! What’s going to happen? Not Grace! That’s…that’s…I don’t know, it’s scary.” I plopped down on my bed, wondering if I should reach out and stroke his leg. He looked numb.

“Surgery. She’s having surgery first thing Monday. My father wants me there, he thinks I should be there.”

“Shelly?”

“She drove out to Idaho with her friend. She’s going to live in Sun Valley, at least this winter. There’s a guy there…”

I interrupted, “What kind of surgery, where? Oh, Mike, I hope she’s going to be all right!”

“Christ Hospital. He said they have to cut off part of her tongue, make a skin flap from her neck to rebuild the floor of her mouth, dissect the lymph nodes. She’ll have to learn how to talk again, he says.”

My mind whirred with anxiety. Grace had been a calming, encouraging force for me the past three years, a beacon showing what I could become. The thought of her brought low like this at the start of her career as a clinical psychologist unmoored me. I shunted that worry aside, knowing Mike needed support, not fear, from me.

“My mother’s strong, she’s the strongest person I know. She says this will not stop her, she has grandchildren to harass.” He sniffed, shook his head with a half-hearted smile.

Two weeks later, Mike drove back up. I met him on the porch, saying, “We have to be quiet, they came back for some re-takes up there. Take your shoes off going up the stairs.”

“Are they here, now?”

“The crew, they’re working on the lighting now. We’ll be gone when they start filming.”

I showed him the book review Rachel’s erstwhile boyfriend James had written about Anais Nin’s latest diary installment, Volume III, 1939-1944. “She’s speaking tonight, after they show a Henry Miller documentary. We’ve got to go, I have to see her, to hear her.” I bubbled with excitement, forgetting to ask about his mother. “Listen to what he wrote, ‘After a terse notation of atrocities (“Bali invaded. Java invaded. Paris bombarded by the English, India rebelling against the English”) Nin wrote: “And what can one do but preserve some semblance of human life, to seek the not-savage, not-barbaric forms of life.” I’ve been reading her stuff ever since that class with Shulmeister last year. She’s so smart, so willful, doing what she wants, holds her own with men.”

Mike, distracted, nodded, “Sure.” Then, “What about after? I need to get some sleep tonight.”

I’d forgotten about the MIT swim meet tomorrow. Somehow he had cajoled the coach into letting him drive up by himself, not on the team bus. “I told him I was a senior, wasn’t coming back after January, what difference did it make. And that I had to see my girlfriend, could stay with her. I guess he thinks I’m a lost cause anyway, so why not?” He looked a bit sheepish as he said this.

Suddenly, I remembered his mother, her surgery. “Anything new about your mom? How’s she doing.”

“She looked pretty weak when I left, that neck tube thing is…weird. She gets it taken out in two weeks. Then my father wants to take her out to Snowmass for Christmas. Doctor said she had to wait six weeks before she could ‘resume’ her normal activities. It’ll only be four or five when we drive out. Jack insisted she had to go, said he would carry her everywhere if he had to.”

“Sounds like he needs her as much as she needs him,” I mused.

On the way to Lowell Hall to see the film, I said to Mike, “I saw the lottery the other night. You did well, right?”

“Yeah, it was surreal. Everybody crammed into the lounge, watching the TV, all those guys in suits, so solemn about sending us off to get killed. I was 219, so I’m safe until I get into med school. Other guys, the ones with the low numbers, they were talking about Canada”

I sighed. One reason, at least, to be glad I’m a girl.

Nin looked smaller than I’d imagined. With her braided hair coiled high in back, she exuded an intriguing air of prim, elegant sensuality. We arrived just as The Henry Miller Odyssey began screening, and had to stand in the back of the overflowing crowd. Afterwards, asked about publishing her private diaries now, she replied, “ I felt there was an affinity , a connection between the thirties and the sixties, and that the past can often inform the present.” She sounded suspicious of dogma as a solution for one’s problems, saying “Self-knowledge and self discipline result in freedom.”

In response to a question about her role as a woman in the salons of the thirties, surrounded by Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, and Otto Rank, she asserted, “Women must be every bit as independent as men. In their art, in their life. You know, we do have sexual feelings apart from love. I like the Dionysian movement, it’s a recognition of expression through the senses and the joyfulness of relationships.”

Energized by seeing her, hearing her speak of women’s freedom to choose and direct our lives, our loves, our futures, I took control of Mike that night in bed. At first reluctant, perhaps remembering his swim meet the next day, he soon caught the spirit, coming back for a second, slower coupling. Finally we slept, huddled close in my narrow bed, but I soon found him on top of me, waking me once more with undiminished fervor. Exhausted, we both slept until the winter sun weakly sparkled through the naked branches outside my window. We shared a smile, wordlessly shaking our heads in satisfaction, which led to one final effort, in which we both succeeded.

“I hope you can still swim today. Don’t you have to get at least a third place for your letter this year?”

“Haven’t you read about what opera singers do before a performance?”

“I haven’t, but I can imagine.” I felt fulfilled and free, knowing I was in control of me, at last. 

xi

Chanukah started the following Friday. Jeanne brought out her menorah, and for the first time, I had a family in Cambridge to share the holiday with. Howard showed up with Rachel, Marcia invited her boyfriend, even Bev joined in, giggling at the unfamiliar rituals. I retreived my childhood dreidel, still occupying place of pride on my desk, and everyone gave it a few spins. Best of all, Charlie and his family came up from Providence, and Mike arrived mid-party, carrying a gift-wrapped record album.

“Last time I was here, I noticed you guys didn’t have this yet,” he said as I unwrapped his present, the Beatles’ Abbey Road.

Bev grabbed it, saying, “Great! We’ve needed this,” as she tore off the cellophane and slipped out the disc. We now had an upgrade to my suitcase player, a small turntable with built-in radio and separate speakers. Not much power, but enough that we all could hear the opening “Shoop…shoop” as Paul sang, “Here come old flat-top, he come groovin’ up slowly…” Within minutes, Mike had closed his eyes, swaying back and forth, softly singing along with his hero,  John Lennon: “Something in the way she moves, attracts me like no other lover…I don’t want to leave her now, you know I believe and how…You’re asking me will my love grow, I don’t know, I don’t know…” As the final chord faded, he opened his eyes, looking straight at me with a faint, almost questioning smile.

When Paul started the next song’s bouncy beat, Mike said, “Funny, when I first heard this, I kind of identified with it.” Seeing my raised eyebrows, he went on, “You know, ‘Maxwell Edison, studying in medicine…’ But then, he turns out to be a little sociopath, so, no.”

The last song on the first side began with George dirging his guitar through minor chords. Charlie produced another album wrapped up for gifting, and presented it to me. “That song, it’s about him and the artist he took up with, Yoko Ono. We should put this on next, before we hear the other side?”

“Is this the one they wore no clothes for the cover photos, but the record company wouldn’t sell it that way?” I asked.

“Right,” Charlie responded. “Two Virgins. Supposed to represent how we’re all naked and innocent in this world, or something, according to her.”

“She’s kind of weird,” Mike observed, as Yoko warbled, almost screeching while John tape looped all sorts of instruments together atonally.

Charlie leaned conspiratorially over to Mike and asked, while jerking his head first towards Arlene, then towards me, “Would you let your wife do something like that, and try to sell it?” Then, with a full body laugh, he went on, “OK, you guys aren’t ready for this I guess.” He whisked the record off, replacing it with the second side of Abbey Road.

An upbeat acoustic guitar opened into Paul’s homage to sun worship. “Little darlin’, it’s been a long cold lonely winter…it feels like years since it’s been here – here comes the sun…it’s all right…the smiles returning to the faces…it’s all right.” I remembered Mike would soon be leaving school for good, first over Christmas to Snowmass with his family, then after a return for reading period, heading back to the mountains, for his ski bum winter.

While George droned on about all the reasons he loved the world, I pulled Mike away, offering him the “Arthur Miller” chair as I sat in my O’Neal. He looked at his, saying, “This is Bev’s? How come she got the Jewish director’s one, and yours is the WASP lead?” Over in the corner, Denise picked up one of the little speakers, holding it by her ear as she bobbed to Paul singing, “Out of college, money spent, see no future, pay no rent…”

Earnestly, I took his hands, and asked, “You’re sure that’s what you’re doing, going to Aspen next month?” As I spoke, I felt a sense of relief, a hope he’d say, “Yes”, so I could finally say, “No” to him. I was a bit shocked to realize I relished the prospect of him not showing up every week or two, enticing me with his alluring sense of fun and warm, soothing skin.

Head nodding up and down, he flipped Charlie’s present over and over, finally saying with a little grin, “Two Virgins? That was us, right?”

I hesitated. Damn, I thought, He’s doing it again. Sighing, I reassured him, “Mike, that’s one thing we will always have, will never go away.” He looked confused, so I went on. “We lost our virginity together, buddy. That will always be special to me, that it was you.” As I spoke, my stomach tightened, as if trying to grab my heart, keep it close inside.

Ringo staccato’d his drums as Paul and John harmonized over George’s driving chords, “Oh yeah, all right, oh, you gonna be in my dreams tonight…love you, love you” the last repeated over and over until, finally, “And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make.”

The room hushed for half a minute, then Paul finished the record with a little ditty about “Her Majesty”, “Some day I’m gonna make her mine.”

Mike turned to Charlie and asked, “I heard that’s their last album, they’re breaking up.”

“No!” Bev shrieked. “There’s supposed to be another one, right?”

“Well, yes…and no,” Charlie said. “We will hear from them again, supposedly, but it’s stuff they’ve already done, they did before this one. Nope, Yoko took him away. No more Beatles.”

Mike looked back at me, saying, “It’s time, Janie, it’s time. I know I have to do this, to have this empty time. Two months, three months, who knows, nine months in front of me, I see them totally unfilled. I’m not apprehensive, though, or expectant about it. For the first time, I’m not worried what new school it will be in the fall, it’ll be somewhere good, I’m sure. I’m really not worried about anything.”

The next day, Saturday, the day before his departure, I went to William James Hall to study. Overhead, the regular rotary sound of fan blades brought a calm and quieting force into the fluorescent-lit study room. One would think, at the end of the semester, this place would be much more crowded, but less than half the chairs were occupied by students looking at books, taking notes, preparing for exams or papers. I found a nook in the balcony, looking down on one side at the stacks and tables below, on the other at the dark, chilly, windy night outside. The quiet lack of intensity reassured me. For the first time in quite a while, I was without that constant, gnawing sense of urgency which drove me every day. In here, we had much to do, and lots of time in which to do it.

xii

Next morning, an hour or so after he had left to drive back home, Mike called. “It’s the car. It just stopped.”

“Where are you?”

“At a gas station, near the Pru.” He sounded resigned, confused.

“What are you going to do? Come back here? How would you get home? Can you get the car fixed?”

“I called my dad. When I told him the mechanic said it would cost a couple thousand to fix, and they offered me $500 for it as is, he said, ‘Leave it there. Fly home.’ He sounded distracted, like my mother’s thing has taken all his energy, his ability to make plans about anything else. So I’m taking the train to Logan now.”

“You’re going to leave the car here, abandon it? You love that car, Mike. How can you let it go like that?”

I heard a deep sigh, and could almost see him, his eyes closed, mouth screwed up. Finally, “No, I’m sad. Mad. Angry. I don’t know what. I don’t want to leave it behind…but I’ve got to get back, go to Aspen. What am I supposed to do?”

“Are you still planning on coming in January?”

“For a week or ten days, to hand in papers and take a couple of exams. Hopefully, I’ll get another car, so I can still go out to Snowmass, find a job there, live in the house, figure out how to ski.”

Apparently, nothing was going to deter him from this path he’d charted. A goulash of anger, fear, sadness, and, finally, hope, swept through me. I wondered, would I ever get my heart back? Instead of sharing this, I laughed and said, “Well, see you next year!”

Three weeks later, he returned, all excited about the paper he’d written for his Film Studies class.

“It’s about using the documentary form in otherwise fictional movies. Like Easy Rider, where they show Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper wandering through the actual Mardi Gras, interacting with strangers.”

I remembered a darker example. “Medium Cool.  I hope you used that. I was there, remember. I saw Haskell Wexler on the other side of the fence where they’d trapped us. You may have seen one thing when we saw that movie last month, but I kept looking for me and Charlie in the background.”

“Yes, I put that in there. Not about you, but the technique, I mean.”

“What about Aspen? Did you find a job there?”

“I’m gonna be a dishwasher! I think I got the job a little bit ‘cause of swimming,” he exclaimed.

“Swimming? What’s that got to do with skiing?” I asked, although in my mind, they were one and the same thing – silly sports which had entrapped an otherwise ambitious man.

“It’s at ‘Guido’s Swiss Inn.’ See, he came over after the war. He has these Old World attitudes, got a sign in his window, ‘Hippies and longhairs not allowed.’ I walk in with my head nearly shaved for swimming, so I guess I’m OK.”

“But you’re not, are you? I mean, we don’t like the war, we want to think for ourselves, not be told how to act, right?”

“Never do anything for the sole reason it’s expected of you, that’s me. But dishwashing’s great. Start work after 3 PM, so I can ski most days. I bought a season pass, at the student rate.”

February and March, I gave in to several Harvard boys who wanted the cachet, or maybe the ease, of a date with a ‘Cliffie. I found it was easy to spot someone in class who might have his eye on me, then turn a brief conversation about homework into an offer of a movie, or even dinner. As with Howard, though, I didn’t feel a spark from any of them, no hidden electricity as I had with Michael Harrison.

After another depressing night out I returned to 119 Walker, and found Bev, Jeanne, and Marcia still up, sharing a bottle of wine and stories of their own romantic woes.

Marcia was saying, “…is he the man I want to have a family with? He’s got some growing up to do.”

“They all do,” I found myself saying acerbically.

Bev’s raised eyebrows urged me on. I said, “This guy tonight, he must have thought getting me into bed was the way to a lasting friendship.”

“Did you?” questioned Jeanne, offering, then withdrawing her glass. “Oh, wait, that’s right, you still don’t drink.”

“Sometimes I wish I could, or should, or…I don’t know!” Exasperated, I reached for the Chardonnay. One sip, and I remembered why I didn’t like it. I put it down, disgustedly. “Yuck. No, I must be a serial monogamist.”

“Meaning?” Bev questioned.

“Meaning, I still love that boy…”

“Mike,” Jeanne added.

“Mike,” I went on. “I’ll always love him, I just don’t know if I’ll love the man he’s becoming. Like you said, ‘He’s got some growing up to do’.”

“What, his quitting school?” Marcia chimed in.

“That’s actually a sign of maturity to me, wanting to get out into the real world. No, there’s this girl he met last summer, they’ve been writing letters every month or so.”

“So it’s OK for him, but not for you?” Jeanne asked incredulously.

“It’s not like that, really. She’s still in high school. The way he talks about it, she’s got a crush on him, and he enjoys that. Nothing more.”

“And you believe him?” Bev put in.

“One thing I’ve learned about Michael, he’s such a Boy Scout, he can’t help but tell the truth. Yes, I believe him. He’s so juvenile about the whole thing, though.”

Marcia wondered, “What is it about him that keeps you coming back?”

I tried to explain. “His mind. We have such an…affinity with each other. I love our talks, he makes everything we do an exploration, an entrancing story. I don’t know why, but I want to… I’m always doing little things for him. Like making that sweater, cooking a Boston Cream pie, his favorite. And the birthday cards I make by hand. I know that seems submissive, but it works both ways, he’s always doing stuff for me, writing poems, giving presents, keeping me safe. He makes me feel…lovable, I’m somebody who can be loved. I’ve never felt that from anybody else, outside my family. It’s hard, so hard to let that go.” I paused, feeling a warm flush start up my neck.

“And…?” Marcia prodded.

“And…OK, there’s our time in bed. Sex. It’s a mystery to me, so simple, so strong. I want to be a free and independent woman, not depend on any man. But, damn, that feels so good sometimes. To trust somebody that completely, to be loved in return.”

Silence enveloped us.

Mike called the next morning. “I’ve finally got it, I’m finally getting somewhere.”

He meant skiing, of course. He gushed over the smell, the feel, the chill, the softness of the snow. How he could now turn with his feet together, down the steepest slopes. I understood his excitement, but had no clue how that actually might feel, inside his body. Maybe that’s why I agreed when he said, “You’ve got to come out here, spring break, see what it’s like in the winter, try skiing. I know you’ll love it!”

I pictured myself in shiny, skin tight ski clothes, feeling a biting chill on my cheeks beneath a crystalline sun. Mike’s enthusiasm wormed through my head, worked its way further down, and brought out a gushing, “You’re right – I want to get away from here, the drippy weather, the drab days and endless evenings.” 

I could almost hear him smile as he bubbled, “That’s great. I’m having fun, but it would be so much better with you.” A brief silence then, “Oh, I almost forgot, I got into another med school!”

“Where?” I asked in a monotone. I almost didn’t want to know. What if it were Boston, or New York?

“LA. USC. California.” He sounded so chipper. “If I end up there, I’ll try and get a job in their psych clinic this summer, no more kids’ swim teams.”

xiii

Mike was waiting for me as I walked off the plane into Stapleton airport. Once again the mile-high air in Denver had me breathless, almost panting, my cheeks flushed. He stood hesitantly, gauging my mood. Then, a soft hint of a smile from him, one raised eyebrow, and I remembered my vow after agreeing on the phone to come. Enjoy ourselves, together. Now is all that matters for this next week or so. I smiled back, he hugged me from the side with an extra little squeeze, and we walked down towards baggage claim.

“I almost didn’t get here,” Mike said as he grabbed my suitcase.

“Oh?” was all I could manage, thinking, That’s not much of a start.

“In Glenwood, an hour down the road from Aspen, it was, what, 6 this morning? The speed limit’s 25, no one’s around at all, it’s Saturday, so I’m going 40. Cop pulls me over. He said, ‘You’d better have a good excuse for this, when you see the judge,’ as he pulled out his little ticket book.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“I told him the truth, said I was going to pick up my girlfriend in Denver at the airport, I hadn’t seen her in over two months. He smiled, put the book away, then looked stern and shook his finger at me.”

“Well, at least I’m good for something,” I murmured, almost too soft for him to hear.

Mike gave a little laugh, then added, “He said he’s going to be watching for us when I come back through, I’d better be going under the speed limit.”

Jack had been busy over Christmas, as the main room upstairs and our downstairs bedroom were now wood-paneled, hiding that friendly sparkling insulation as we lay in the wide old rosewood bed. No curtains on the windows, which meant a massive light show twinkled right outside, more brilliant than any planetarium.

“Is that…the Milky Way?” I marveled.

Mike leaned over, looked out and up, and said, “Yup. It’s unreal here right now. See, no moon, it’s already set behind us. So few houses, lights, in this valley, the air so thin, the stars are much brighter here.” He eased back down, resting on his elbow as he brushed my hair back across the pillow. “Your face…your hair…” He smiled and shook his head, nuzzling down into my neck,  then my face, my lips, finally drawing back to say, “And your smell, I’ve missed that smell.” With that, we fell together, enacting once again the dance we’d rehearsed so many times before.

By the time he crawled upstairs, I’d been awake two hours. “East coast time, you know,” I said, answering his puzzled look. He’d always been the early riser in our couple, me the night owl. I felt a step ahead of him for once. Finding the coffee, making pancakes for him, I saw how easy falling into domesticity might be. My anxiety increased when I remembered, today we were going skiing.

He’d already dressed in blue jeans and that sweater I’d given him the year before. We found some of Grace’s long underwear which fit me, covered that with one of her fluffy sweaters and those jeans Charlie bought me in Chicago. A long down parka and dark green wool cap completed my alpine ensemble. Rental skis and boots were next, then out to try my luck.

“OK, watch these people getting on,” Mike instructed as we waited by the chair lift. It seemed to whip around the bull wheel impossibly fast, but an attendant grabbed and held it for the next pair to ease down on the wooden seat. “You stand there, put your poles in one hand, turn back and grab that pole in the middle. Then, sit down. Watch a couple more.”

I tried to reassure myself by thinking, even if I don’t spend my life with Mike, if I never ski with him again, knowing how to get up and down a mountain will be a good skill to learn. Broaden my horizons, and all that. When it was our turn, Mike went first, then I quickly followed. As we each looked toward the center, he let me grab the pole first, then reached above my hand while we both sat down. He threw his right arm out to hold me back, and off we went. Three minutes to the top of this baby lift – “Fanny Hill”, they called it – during which he repeated over and over, “At the top, lean forward a little, stand up, and let yourself slide forward. Do not walk, keep your feet and legs together.”

I did all that, and safely made it off. But he’d neglected the little part about stopping. When I found myself still sliding, not knowing what to do, I simply fell down. He walked over, reaching down to pull me up.

I shook him away. Irritated, I said, “I’ll do it myself, all right?” But of course I couldn’t, not with those six-foot long planks on my feet getting in the way. I let him help me up, then dutifully followed his instructions about “making a ‘V’, a snowplow, then put your weight on that uphill ski as you let yourself slide down and around.”

Amazed when it worked, I zig-zagged all the way down that bunny slope, not falling once and turned back into the line of waiting skiers, ready to go again.

Mike hockey-stopped right above me, spraying snow nearly to my face, shook his head in disbelief, then said, “See, I told you you’d like it.”

Each day, we came back out, in the sun, in the snow, and kept that yo-yo rhythm, first ride up, then slide down. On the second day, I graduated to a longer lift, half way up the lower part of the mountain, the part we couldn’t see from his house, and discovered “Wipe-out Hill”, which certainly deserved its nickname. After our third time down, I began to shiver, my blue jeans caked with freezing snow, rapidly growing stiff and crackly. Mike noticed, and suggested we go inside, to thaw out and rest a bit.

“But first, let me stop in at the post office, see if there’s any mail.” He deposited me by a cozy fire in the slope-sideTimber Mill Bar, where I could warm up and look out at the other beginning skiers trying to stay upright.

He returned, frowning, waving several envelopes across his face.

“I heard that each week, the medical schools send out a list of everyone they’ve accepted to all the other schools. That way, supposedly, they know who’s in and who’s not, and unless they really, really want someone, they can feel better rejecting an applicant who’s good enough, knowing they’ll have a place somewhere else.”

I had my doubts. This story sounded apocryphal, designed to make the applicants feel better about being rejected over and over. After all, hadn’t Mike already gotten into two schools?

The letters that day, in their thin envelopes, told us he wasn’t going to Harvard or Colorado. Columbia, Michigan, St. Louis and Yale soon followed. By the time San Francisco, Stanford, and Washington came through, we’d gotten used to the idea Mike would be headed to Los Angeles next fall. “About as far as you can get from Boston,” I noted.

Mike had always been the most upbeat person I knew, able to find a silver lining in the darkest news. He speculated, “If I’ve got to be inside 8, 10 hours a day in class, and then study, it’s good to know that when I do get out, it’ll be sunny, the weather will be nice.” Then, “And I should write to the admissions director, see if he can help me get a summer job there.” He never mentioned the yawning continental chasm opening up between us. He knew, he finally knew, our days on Martha’s Vineyard, his weekend drives to Cambridge in the little red Lancer, cozy walks along the Charles, all that was gone forever. I stayed silent, too.

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.”

CHAPTER SIX

If I Could Only Stop My Mind

August, 1969

Mike’s parents went out to Snowmass the last two weeks of August to inspect their newly-built retirement cabin, which meant he and I had his house to ourselves when we returned from the fair. Squeezed onto his narrow twin bed one night, we discussed our plans for the next two weeks. Jeanne had invited me to St. Louis.

“I’ve never been to St. Louis, so she wants to show me all the sights.”

“Sights? In St. Louis?”

I laughed sardonically. “She’s my best friend at school, I want to see where she comes from. And she wrote me, she’s got a boyfriend now, I want to meet him, too.”

“How long would you stay there?”

“Probably the last week of August, then come back here. You said you wanted to go to that swim meet in Louisville, so I thought…” 

Mike was excited because the swimming national championships would be just a two hour drive away, had even suggested I go with him to see all the “big races, those famous people I’ve been reading about.”

“When you wrote about that last month, you only described what was going to happen. Not getting into what you feel about it, what it all means, like you usually do.” I decided to push him more, get him talking about the significance to him of all this swimming, all those people. “You are so wrapped up in this sport, as a participant, as a spectator. I never imagined you having friends like that.”

Mike’s face grew serious, a sign he was giving my question some thought. “I suppose going to Louisville does mean something to me. It’s the … apex of my association with swimming. For years, since I was eleven, I’ve been on swim teams. I’ve never been very good, but I’m getting to know more and more about it. This meet, it’s about as high as you can go, except for the Olympics, I guess, and they come along only every four years.” He talked about the “big names” and the races they’d be doing. He included Molly O’Donohue in that group; she had qualified for the long-distance events.

“She’s in the 1500?” I repeated. I remembered that long race when I’d gone to see him swim at Brandeis. “Is that the one where they use timing cards to tell the swimmer how far they’ve gone.” I didn’t add my thought, like when I first met you, timing your debates.

“Lap counters, not timing cards,” he retorted. “Swimming’s a small-time sport, insular, and over the years now, I’ve been at all levels. Little high school team, teaching beginners at the Y, then going to Jock U where we had guys who went to the big NCAA meet. Two of them even won there. I was on the team with them, and now I’m seeing swimmers who could be the best in the country. I’ve been a part of it all, traveled the complete circuit of something for the first time.”

“So this is a culmination for you, a valedictory?”

“Well, I could go on and get more and more immersed, become an expert in one aspect, like coaching, make it my life. But, no.”

“And the people? You said it was about people, too.”

Again he paused, then, “Probably hundreds of them, over the years. It’s not like being with people in school, talking about stuff, bull sessions, or serious discussions with profs. It comes down, simply, to having fun. Simple rules, go as fast as you can to the other end, maybe get a ribbon, goof off while you’re waiting for your next race. No anxiety about knowing stuff, being right or wrong. Simply using your body, watching other people do it too.”

“Not much stress on your brain, though…”

“I wish people could understand that our brain, our mind, is not all there is to us. We are, each of us is, one complete being, a body that moves through space and deals with the physical world. The mind, the brain is part of that body, doesn’t exist separate from it. Intellectuals are always disparaging athletes, calling them ‘jocks’, when they don’t understand how much the brain controls what the body does, and how much it learns from physical effort.”

Feeling hurt, I said, “Intellectuals? Like Radcliffe girls?”

Quickly, he came back, “I don’t mean you; you understand this, understand me and what it’s all about.”

But I didn’t, not really. I knew I never would. I thought he was wasting his time, wasting his mind, his more important talents. I couldn’t tell him that, not if I wanted to keep the good parts of him close to me.

Luckily, he sat up suddenly, saying, “Hey, I know! After Louisville, I’m going to Colorado, to Snowmass.” He pulled me up beside him, looking imploringly into my eyes. “I could pick you up in St. Louis, we could go on out there together, take a real road trip. Listen to the radio, stay in a motel on the way. Then you could see the mountains, see the view from our house, walk in the forest, a real forest with creeks and beaver and elk.”

“What about your parents? Are they still going to be there?”

“My father wants to show me how things work in the house, and help him a bit with the furniture they’re setting up. So we’d see them that Sunday night, and Monday before they leave. OK?”

He was doing it again, that enthusiasm thing, making life with him seem an adventure. An exploration of someplace novel and different, with my best friend and lover, might well be the best way to re-build our lives together.

I flew into St. Louis’ Lambert Field, and was surprised to see the terminal as I walked down the stairs out of the plane. Crossing the short distance to the entrance, I stopped to gape at three soaring arches, soft yellow light streaming from the windows extending all the way across their face. Inside, the ceiling mirrored the exterior, rising overhead, our footsteps echoing off the high curved inverted concrete bowl above.

I needled Jeanne as she helped put my suitcases in the trunk. “OK, your airport is more modern than I expected.”

“Oh, you spend one summer in Cambridge, and all of a sudden you’re an east-coast sophisticate. Forgetting all your Ohio roots?” She shook her head with mock sadness.

“This guy you wrote me about – what’s his name? – what’s he like?”

“Ben. Benjamin. My aunt’s happy, at least. He’s a good Jewish boy, going to Columbia.”

“What’s he like?” I repeated.

“Of course, he wants to be a doctor. I met him when he was working at my father’s clinic, at Barnes. Or more precisely, my father set me up with him. He had a bunch of them over one night, had me sit next to this guy. But it’s OK, I like him, he’s…fun, when he’s not worrying about what residency we’re going to when we get out of…”

“You’re not even in medical school yet, so that’s like six years he’s looking ahead? Is it that serious?”

“No, not at all. We’ve gone out to see a few movies, taken a trip on the river boat one night, that sort of stuff. It’s kind of sad, he’s so clingy.”

Three days at her home on a flat, tree-lined street a few blocks from the park, and I quickly fell into the oppressive practiced conviviality of the Heldman household. Lunch was always outside by the gazebo, on a slate terrace next to a bird bath continually gurgling water into a small fish pond below. I dutifully made the rounds in Forest Park, gaining mostly a mild sunburn on my cheeks, which I hoped would turn to tan by the time Mike showed up on Friday.

Jeanne helped me prepare for his arrival. “You ought to do something different with you hair. It’s so gorgeous, I’ve always been jealous. But you hide it under a head band, put it in a loose pony tail or let it flop any which way.” She studied me with the intensity of a painter evaluating a half-finished canvas. Her eyes brightened as she chirped, “I know! Braids!”

I moaned. “I’ve tried that. I look like a Shetland pony or something. You know that line you get between them, my scalp’s so white, I’m afraid to have people see that.”

“OK, no pigtails, then, or two pony tails either – you’d look like a Girl Scout, or a Brownie.”

A new voice asserted, “One braid.” 

Jeanne said, “Oh this is my aunt, Ruth. She’s back from Israel. How was that kibbutz you visited.”

Ruth waved her hand dismissively. “Later, Bubala. Let’s get this one ready for her mensch, no?” With that, she abruptly turned me around, separated my hair into three clumps, and swiftly wove them into a loose plait, flowing from the nape of my neck.

“Yours is so thick, you don’t need anything to keep it in place. It stays there all by itself! Lucky. Oh, you should lose that shapeless dress. A woman in pants, she’s looks more independent than this smock you wear. You want this boy to know you’re every bit as capable as he is. On the farm, the women work as hard as the men, that makes us more attractive to them. It also keeps them in their place a bit as well.”

ii

Mike and I left St. Louis after lunch, traveling through rolling hills, farms, and open woodland, a wider vista then crowded New England and Ohio. He fiddled with the radio, trying to find the clearest AM radio stations, which featured Paul Harvey news, stock reports, and twangy country music. He grumbled, “It’s better at night when the big ones, like KOMA and KOA, come in. They play songs I…we…want to hear, not this stuff.” He lifted his right foot off the accelerator, and started driving with his left.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked, pointing at his foot resting near mine on the transmission hump between our seats.

“It feels better. I don’t get as tired. Maybe I’m left footed?”

“I can drive, you know.”

“Uh, great! OK, there’s a Stucky’s before we get to Columbia. You can take over there.” He glanced over, eyeing my Marimekko shift, and asked, “What was it like there at Jeanne’s? What did you do?”

“I met Ruth, her aunt. She’s living part-time in Israel, spends her spring and summer on a kibbutz there. Told me any time I want to go, I should get in touch.”

“Are you thinking about it?”

“Well, not now, of course. But after I graduate, I want to travel, I want to see other parts of the world. It’s so cliché, everyone goes to Europe. I’d like to do something different.”

“Why Israel?”

I looked over at him, trying to decide if he were serious. No hint of a smile on his face or sarcasm in his voice, so I went on, “I feel a pull there. It’s where Jews go now. We’ve even got dual citizenship if we want it.” I wasn’t sure myself why the idea intrigued me. Was it tribal, or religious?

He ventured, “That hasn’t been a thing for you, I thought, being Jewish.”

“Ruth said it feels different, being Jewish there. She says she’s not always wondering how, or if she fits in, that it feels good being more like everybody else.”

“I thought there was a war, or bombs all the time.”

“Apparently everybody’s in the army, even the women, when they’re young. The country may be surrounded, but the people don’t think about that all the time, they know they can protect themselves, not like when they lived in Europe.”

Mike nodded, saying, “Yeah, I get it. A home in the homeland.”

Stucky’s specialized in pecan log rolls and kitsch. While the attendant filled our gas tank, we strolled the aisles, looking at small plaques with home-spun sayings and heavily sugared confections.

“They should have a dentist’s office next door,” I whispered. “Make a fortune.”

Mike took over driving again just outside of Independence. “You know there’s a tabernacle here, like the one in Salt Lake City.”

“A Mormon one?”

“Well, kind of, but, no.” He explained, “After Joseph Smith was killed, back in Nauvoo, and Brigham Young took them out to Utah, some others stayed behind, following Joseph Smith’s son. They continued using the Book of Mormon, and the Doctrine of Covenants…”

“What’s that?”

“They believe God speaks through modern day prophets, gives them divine knowledge about how to live. ‘Don’t use tobacco, it’s for sick cows’, stuff like that.”

“And blacks aren’t allowed to be priests?”

“Yeah, that’s in there.”

“How do you know so much about this?”

Mike launched into a short dissertation. “My grandmother, Grace’s mother, was in that church. Grace’s sister kept it up, always sent me stuff about it for Christmas, even took me to a church camp on an island near Seattle, the year I went there for the Worlds’s Fair. ‘Stories From the Book of Mormon, Stories From the Bible,’ things like that.”

“I thought your mom is an atheist. So your aunt you got you interested in religion?”

“I guess so. But not from a practicing perspective. I like seeing how people explain the world. Philosophy, good novels, religions, they’re all trying to answer the same questions.”

The interstate turned into a turnpike once we got to Kansas, and Mike sped up to 80 miles an hour. The car started to wobble a bit, as if the tires were loose. “What’s that, that shaking?” I asked.

“My dad said something about getting the wheels aligned? This car’s getting old, over 90,000 miles it says on the thing here,” he said, pointing at the odometer. We hit the outskirts of Topeka. “There’s supposed to be a motel here that doesn’t cost too much, I remember from when we’ve driven out here before. Motel 6, costs $6 a night…Oh, damn!” He shouted and pounded the steering wheel, then pointed out the window. “We missed it, hope we don’t end up in Wichita!”

“It’s OK, Mike, don’t get so upset. Just get off at the next exit, turn around, we have plenty of time.” He did that, grumbling all way.

Next morning, we left the gentle hills of eastern Kansas behind, entering the totally foreign terrain of what Mike called, “The West.”

“It starts right about here, where it rains less, there aren’t any trees, you can see forever. Look, must be twenty miles, hasn’t been one curve in the road!”

“I thought the West was mountains, not this.”

He shook his head. “It’s more a feeling of wide spaces, room enough for everyone.”

“Too much room…” I observed.

He replied, “Yeah, not much here, is there? No music. Boring scenery. What do you want to talk about?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I know, let’s try a little pop philosophy.’ He paused, then pulled out a topic. “What does it mean, friendship? What’s a friend, why do we have them?”

“Huh?”

“You. You and me, for example. We’re friends, aren’t we? What’s that mean?” he repeated.

We had an all day drive ahead, nothing to look at until Denver, so I let the question hang while I reached back, trying to name all my friends, why I felt good with them. Finally, “Hmm…I feel like I get to live lives through friends that I wouldn’t be able to otherwise. We reciprocate the wish fulfillment of each other. The closer we are to someone, the more we can grow through…and with…them. Like Leslie. I wouldn’t want to be Leslie, but I’m glad I know her, she helps me  think about things I might otherwise avoid. But you have to give, as well as get. Having a friend helps me be a better me. I want to have them see me as my best possible self, even serve as a role model for them sometimes. That means I have to be a strong enough person, with enough of my own life, before I can have a friendship like that. Like I said, friends help each grow, they support each other that way.”

“What about us?” he persisted. “I look around at who I know, who I spend time with. And I’d rather be with you than anybody. So I wonder, does that make you my best friend?”

The bristly sere wheat stubble, a monochrome yellow fading to dark brown near the fallow loam, spread in all directions. I wondered how anyone could live here, nothing changing in the landscape save for occasional summer storms rolling down from the still hidden mountains. I looked over at Mike, intent on the road, empty to the horizon. The vastness filled me with anxiety, tempered by Mike’s presence. I’d always felt safe with him, psychically and physically. I’d never told him that; I wondered how to put it.

“Last night, in that motel? We got to sleep in a double bed,” I started.

“Yeah, that was different, wasn’t it?” The road still held his gaze.

I went on, trying, “When I was little, I always felt nudgy if I had to sleep in the same bed with someone else. Didn’t matter the size of bed or who it was, even my sister. With you, last night, I fell right asleep. With you, I’m comfortable, can forget I’m with another person.”

He glanced over, enough time for a quick smile. “Me, too. I remember, it was like no time had passed, we could fall right back together.”

Stroking his thigh, I concurred, “That’s it. Safe and snuggly.” I struggled as my thoughts fought with my feelings. I closed my eyes, sighed, and plowed on. “It makes me scared, too.”

“Scared?”

“I don’t want to feel like anybody else… like you…has that control, can make me feel that way.” This wasn’t sounding right, I knew. “Anais Nin – remember her? – says a woman should be as independent as a man, able to chose who she’s with, and how she’s with him. That a woman’s life should not be tied to a man’s success.” I paused, awaiting a reaction. “And it’s all tied up in love. And sex. The pill has made it different for us now. We really can choose who, and when, and be the independent woman earlier feminists dreamed about.” Still silence from Mike, behind the wheel. A final thought bubbled out. “I’ve got to learn how to be with a man, without being dependent on a man. Can you understand that?” I wished he’d stop the car, so I could shake him by the shoulders, make him understand.

He pursed his lips, seemed to shrink forward towards the wheel, then suddenly sat bolt upright. “There they are!” He pointed at what appeared to be a dark cloud low on the  flat horizon.

Bewildered, I said, “What? Who’s there?”

“The mountains! The Rockies!”

iii

The sudden change from flat to vertical had become routine by the time we passed through Denver. Fir trees, precipitous drop-offs, and thin air replaced the endless wheat fields. I’d driven through the city, but Mike took over once the Interstate ended.

“Why’d they stop here?” I wondered.

Mike answered with a sweep of his arm. “It must take more than one run with a Caterpillar to bulldoze a road through all this.”

We kept going up, and up, and up. Sixty, then fifty, then forty-five was all the little car could do as the two-lane highway wound sinuously into the treeless rocks and hidden snow near the Continental Divide. At every turn, a new vista opened, shocking in its depth, inspiring in its breadth. For once, we both we quiet.

Finally we creeped around a curve, with nothing but sky above, the road finally swooping down. “Loveland Pass,” Mike announced. “We came here in the winter, could only go fifteen-twenty miles an hour, it was snowing so hard. My father grew up in eastern Montana, hard winters there, and he says, ‘You can go as fast as you want on snow or ice, as long as you don’t have to turn or stop.’ Getting stuck going up is no joke; once you stop, you can’t get going again.”

On this sunny afternoon we saw only a few small white clouds, sailboats floating above the peaks, playing with the sun. In their shadow, the wind brought a biting chill, raising goose bumps on my calves and shoulders; without their shade, the sun nearly singed my skin.

“Can we stop? Get out, get some of those?” I asked, pointing at the dull red flowers lining the ditch between the road and rocky cliff.

“They don’t last long – people pick them, then put them out to dry, press them in a book or picture frame. Besides, they’re better up at Independence Pass, it’s higher there.”

There’s another pass? How long could this go on?

We stopped at a gas station near a lake with boats motoring towards the town. Mike asked the mechanic there to “adjust the carburetor for the altitude”, explaining to me how thin air meant the engine didn’t fire right, it needed more oxygen for each spark to make the pistons work. “This way we won’t be so sluggish up the pass,” he speculated.

“My pistons aren’t working so well either,’ I gasped. Just walking from the car to the restroom left me tired, light-headed. “Is this normal?” I asked.

He grinned. “You get used to it. Go a little slower, breathe deeper, you won’t notice after a couple of days.”

Back in the car, I wondered, “Isn’t skiing hard work? How can you do it if you can’t get any air?”

He smiled, threw back his head, and laughed. “Gravity does all the work. If you try and fight it then,yeah, it’s hard. When you do it right, skiing is mostly standing up, letting the mountain carry you down.”

“But they go so fast, how can they stop?”

“That’s the secret, I guess. Your use your strength to keep you stable. I don’t know how to do it right yet, so I don’t know how to describe it. But I’m going to learn.”

“Learn? I thought you already were an expert.”

Mike snorted. “No way. I’ve got to spend a winter here to get any better.”

“Sounds like a pipe dream.”

He paused, pulled his lips to one side. “You remember, I had those three AP credits for history and math. I skated out of the language requirement somehow in that French interview. And I’ve been taking five classes each semester, instead of four, except for this last one. So I’ll have more than enough credits to graduate after this semester. I’ve been thinking, as we’re driving up here, I should come back in January, find a job, be a ski bum, stay at my parents’ house, get some money for med school, and ski a lot.”

He paused, biting his finger as he looked over at me. I thought about the fall, at Radcliffe. I’d be moving in with Bev at Walker Street, settling in to what I hoped would be my home for the next two years. After that, I knew I didn’t want to leave, couldn’t ever leave the place that had quickly become more like home to me than Cleveland or Cincinnati ever had. Two more years there, then graduate school for who knows how long, and after that, a life, a real life. Mike and I had a life now, in his car, headed to Aspen. I wondered if it were real, if we were headed anywhere, if our ideas of home would ever mesh. Looking at his bronze face, his sun-tanned arm hanging out the window, hearing his visions, dreams for the future, the immediate future, I decided, better not to look too far ahead, enjoy this while I can. Pay attention to the present, let the future take care of itself.

“…could come up here in March at spring break, learn how to ski with me, what do you think?” Mike had been talking all the time I’d been lost in thought. What was he saying?

“Janie? What do you think? Come out here and see me during spring break?”

“I don’t know, Mike. We aren’t even in Aspen yet, can’t I just be here now? Do we have to talk about the future? Let’s have fun while we’re here, this time.”

“This time” seemed to satisfy him.

We drove through a town, one street wide, all the buildings holdovers from an earlier, richer era.

“This is Leadville,” Mike explained. “It’s the highest incorporated place in the country. Twice as high as Denver, two miles high. Big mining center, before we went off the silver standard, about 75 years ago.”

“Looks like time passed it by,” I observed. “What do they do here, besides gasp for breath?” I hoped he wouldn’t stop. I doubted I could stand up without feeling dizzy or keeling over.

“No mountains to ski here. It’s high, but mostly flat. And the mountains they do have, they’re putting all of them into wilderness areas, where you can’t do anything except walk around. No machines. And, there isn’t much of a summer, so I don’t know if they can get any tourists to stay here.”

We turned right at a sign which read “SR 82 – Aspen”, where we passed two more lakes. He went on, “That’s where Denver gets its water, they take it through those mountains up ahead from the other side, store it here.” 

No houses, nothing but sagebrush and pine trees greeted us on the way up to Independence Pass. The puffy white clouds had morphed into massing grey brigantines, arming  for battle with cold rain, hail, and thunder. At the top, Mike stopped, headed for the trunk, and pulled something out of his suitcase. I braved an exit, pulling on a red and white wool beanie, wondering if I’d brought anything warm enough.

“Here,” he said, offering his puffy blue down jacket.

“What about you?”

He wriggled into a sweater, my blue and white ski sweater, saying, “I love this thing. It’s the nicest – the best – present I ever got. The smell…” He closed his eyes, inhaling deeply through his nose. Opening his eyes, sighing, he went on. “Your smell is in it. Every time I put it on, it’s like I’m back with you.”

Outside, a broad expanse of patchy yellow grass greeted me, tempering the biting wind following us up the narrow road. A few dirty snow patches still resisted summer’s sun in shaded gullies. To each side, gentle granite slopes, devoid of all life, rose towards the ominous clouds, so close I could smell the lightning intermittently illuminating their undersides. Muted thunder grumbled down the other side, towards Aspen. I shivered, in awe as much as from the chill.

I turned to Mike, wondering, “Is it always like this here?”

“Cold, yeah. But the thunderstorms usually don’t show up until after noon. Come on, we’d better get going before it starts to hail.”

Back in the car, a ravenous clatter pelted the roof as small white pellets bounced off the pavement. I stuck my hand out the window, closed my fist, and brought back a slushy mess, cold  as any sno-cone. Mike glanced over, smiling as I shrieked with childish glee.

Half way down, the two-lane road narrowed and lost its pavement. A sheer white wall of rock rose on one side, an endless drop careened down the other. Shrubs gave way to fir trees, which led to white aspen groves, their small flat leaves shimmering in the late afternoon sun. Finally, we arrived in town.

“Well, here it is…Aspen,” Mike announced. A ragged mountain spilled directly into town, its face scarred with ski runs and mine detritus. Across the street, a three story red stone building ruled the surrounding ramshackle houses, some painted bright blue, others faded red, one or two a cheery yellow. Turrets, dormers, and wrap-around porches signified them as left-overs from the 1890’s, when luckier miners spent their new-found fortune on Victorian houses.

Leaving town, Mike asked, “Notice anything different here?”

Looking around, all I saw was a flat valley floor, filled with sagebrush, the jutting snow-capped peaks snuggling close by. “No, what am I supposed to see?”

“In town, no neon signs. On the highway, no billboards. They outlawed ‘em a few years ago, wanted this place to be a fantasy-land for tourists. In summer, they have a music school, concerts every night. Lectures, seminars, a place for body, mind and spirit was the vision.”