Triblog

viii

Mike showed up Friday afternoon, carrying Dylan’s new album, Nashville Skyline. On my little suitcase record player, the understated instruments and Dylan’s softened voice were right at home.

“This came out on my birthday. When you told me not to come up after all that stuff happened here, the strike, I thought this might have been the present you would have gotten me. Have you heard it yet?”

“Not really. I’ve been all worried – consumed – trying to catch up on the classes I missed. What’s with his voice, anyway? It’s not scratchy like before.”

“I read, after he had the bike accident, he had to stop smoking when he was in the hospital, the doctors wouldn’t let him, or something. This is what he sounds like without cigarettes, I guess.”

“It’s almost … sweet.” I offered.

We listened to it straight through together, both ostensibly reading, but, as it turned out, intensely focused on what, if anything, the songs could tell us about us. The album was filled with love songs which, oddly for Dylan, were unambiguous and straightforward. During those concentrated 26 minutes, we heard about new love, lost love, men wronged, women scorned, couples reunited. Not a minute into the album, Bob was joined by Johnny Cash warbling in a baritone drawl, “See for me that her hair’s hanging down, it curls and falls all down her breast…that’s the way I remember her best.” Mike walked up behind me, lifting my own tumbling black locks off my shoulders, sighing, “That is the way I remember you best.”

I held a book open on my desk, reading nothing, saying nothing. He returned to the edge of my bed. Five songs, including “I Threw It All Away”, quickly played on the tinny speaker. Mike flipped the record over, and on the other side we heard, “Lay, lady, lay; lay across my big brass bed.” He lay on his side, on my narrow dorm bed, also pretending to read. I couldn’t meet his eyes. By the time Dylan sang the final line, “Tonight I’ll be staying here with you” (after urging his love to “tell me that it isn’t true,”) neither of us spoke for a good five minutes.

Finally, I stood up and went to my closet. “No, that’s not the present I was going to give you. Actually, I didn’t have anything at all in mind, things were so crazy here.” He gave another sigh, sat up, and started to speak.

“But I did make this,” I blurted, reaching for my satchel on the closet shelf. I pulled out the sweater, still with a few strands of yarn hanging out, waiting to be tied off and cut. “It’s way too big on me, so it should fit you.”

He didn’t smile, looking from the sweater to my face, and back again. I was not smiling either. The air seemed leaden, stifling. Mike held the sweater out in front, then pulled the shoulders up to his. “It’s perfect.” He beamed. “I don’t know what…I never had anybody do anything so good for me, so …loving. Thank you.” He sat back down on the bed clutching at the sweater, like a cat softly fondling a fuzzy pillow. “You know that philosophy class I took this year? Phenomenology and Existentialism?”

“The one you thought would give you the answer to all life’s questions? Did you find the grail?”

He laughed drily. “No. It got pretty esoteric there towards the end. But they sneaked in this guy, Alain Badiou. It really got to me, this one thing he wrote, this past month since we’ve been…since we’ve not been…” He frowned, then went on, “Anyway, his point was, love is not all about the first encounter, that ecstatic initial bloom. He says, ‘Love is a tenacious adventure.’ Tenacious, because it doesn’t fully flower if you give up at the first sign of trouble. I really like his thought, that real love triumphs, often painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space, and the world.” He left that hanging in the air between us.

“I’ve been cooped up here, for weeks, it seems. Let’s go out, walk around, feel fresh air. Want to come with me, down to the Square or something?”

He looked thoughtful. “No, you go ahead. I’m tired from driving up. And I want to write something. Is that OK?”

I nodded, touching his cheek with my fingers, drawing them slowly away as I headed for the door. Out on Walker Street, a rhododendron bush flowered over the picket fence in front of a three-story white clapboard house. I’d watched the buds burst into pale pink splendor over the past two weeks. The slowest were only now beginning to open, while the earliest blooms spread majestically, bigger than my two hands cupped together. I cradled one, sniffed, and leaned back, looking up at some high thin clouds. Their feathery edges glowed faintly with the setting sun’s fading light. I drew my hands away, and as I did, first one, then a second petal broke off from the center, each softly, languidly falling, slowly arcing away from each other, towards the earth below. I thought how they’d start to melt, disintegrate, becoming part of the soil, fertilizing the plant, renewing its beauty for another season.

After nine, I returned, finding Mike asleep on his side, fully clothed, facing the wall. On the desk, he’d left his spiral notebook open to a poem, written in blue ball-point on the white, lined paper. Titled “To Janie, on Her Twentieth Birthday”

Twenty

seems a bit too much

For your newly slender cheeks to carry 

  without dropping.

As old you are, as old you get, 

and yet,

To cap my slight remembrance and call back

a bright and sunny

Weekend,

    so long ago,

    when the only time we lost the sun

Was in our sleepy fog, 

who whipped in and back

Across the beach, as if he were a wave.

And clinging to the island roads, cavorting through the

Forest,

was a machine

who felt our joy

And she was happy.

But I kept from you a little girl, whose spell

had warped my heart, and made me weep

when I should laugh.

And now you keep yourself from me,

and through my

anger and my joy at summer’s toys

I might hide me too.

But I don’t want to,

        I can’t bear

to share another summer

    far away

without our forest island fog

and crowded summer house or beach

beyond the lobster boats.

But I must wait, and when your full day comes,

When you must grow alone,

          far from

any house or hope of home,

          think of me

and what will be,

as our love becomes a separate being,

which, like a child

born too early, must be nurtured separate for a while.

I looked over at Mike, hands curled under his cheek resting on the pillow, shoulders rising and falling evenly with each breath. I marveled at how he got…everything I was feeling. The special times together on the Vineyard, riding around in that converted VW dune buggy. My unformed fear of who or what he was going back to in the summer. The fight between his hold on me, and my struggle to be free. Our love, like a premie in a nursery away from its parents, struggling to survive, every breath an adventure, a tenuous hold on life. Beyond tired, exhausted not only from studying, from the relentless strike, tired simply from life, from trying to understand how to live my life with love, or without it. I lay down on the bed next to Mike, back-to-back, each of us fully clothed, and tried to sleep. A dreamless sleep, I hoped.

ix

Saturday evening, my studies finally done, we walked for several hours along the river. A single sculler, his evening row finished, hoisted his shell into the boathouse. Looking up, he waved. Walking silently hand in hand in the still, warm air, to him I’m sure we seemed lost in love. Mike waved back. Then, closing his eyes, he breathed  in deeply.

“This feels so right…we’re supposed to be together,” he vowed. He looked over at me, frowning slightly. “Aren’t we? Shouldn’t we…?”

Tentatively, I agreed. “Let’s just take what we have now, Mike. Let’s not put so much on the future. I don’t know, you don’t know where you’re going after next year. And I’ll be here, I want to stay here, for grad school, working here.” I left that hanging.

“How can we do that? I don’t want us to be over,” he answered plaintively.

“We’ve been doing this long-distance thing for … years now. I’m meeting people here, feeling like this is my home, and you drop in for a weekend or a week, you’re not part of that.” His tried to pull his hand away; I held on tight. “I love you now. Can’t that be good enough?”

Back in my room, the night before I turned twenty, we made love for the first time in several months. Tucked tight together in that single bed, I woke at dawn with his hand cradling my head, fingers entwined in my hair. I made a vow, that however long we had, how ever much or little we might be together, I would remember – would celebrate – his warm skin holding fast against me.

We started our drive back. Away from Cambridge, not yet in Ohio, we re-explored past adventures, secure in our private world. Martha’s Vineyard helped a lot, with scraggly trees growing up against the dunes, a constant sea breeze blowing fresh across our faces. Everything was for us, could be about us, once again. In Pennsylvania, along the Turnpike where the car broke down that night a year ago in March, Mike’s little red Lancer started to sputter. He found a garage, pulled in, and asked for help.

“Let me take a look. You two go into the coffee shop there, I’ll let you know what I find.” The mechanic was young, under thirty, with long greasy hair, and a friendly smile. He wiped his hands on a stained red rag, and leaned under the hood to look.

When we came back, he smiled broadly. “Easy! See,” he said, pointing at the unfathomable tangle surrounding the engine, “you’ve got a fan belt here that’s starting to shred.” He lifted up a thick rubber band, frayed and cracked, running between two solid discs. “It’s slipping, so you don’t get a consistent spark. You need that spark to come precisely at the right time, to keep the engine running smoothly. You know, from the spark plugs?” He shoved his hand vaguely into the dark depths.

“Is that it?” Mike asked. “What do we need to do?”

The mechanic pulled a wrench from a loop on his overalls, loosened something, pulled off the belt, and threw a new one on. As he worked he announced, “Should just be a minute. Fifteen bucks is all. Plus the belt, another seven ninety-nine. There!” A final hard pull on the wrench. “You’re good to go!”

Back on the road, Mike fiddled with the radio, finding nothing but static in the endless Appalachian hollows. He asked, “How far do you want to go? We should get out of these hills, stay in Pittsburgh at a cheap motel.”

I nodded, “Mmm hum.” I thought about the worn belt, and how a little preventive maintenance saved our trip this year from ending up like the last one. Out loud, I continued, “It’s funny, isn’t it, how a little work like that can keep things going? There ought to be mechanics for people, shouldn’t there, to diagnose and treat us…fix us up in 30 minutes for under $25.”

Mike interrupted, “But isn’t that what a doctor, what a psychologist or psychiatrist is? Somebody who keeps you running, somebody who can help…”

My turn to interrupt. “You and me, us, we need a regular spark to keep us going. Maybe our belt’s gotten frayed, not running smooth?”

“That’s something we can fix ourselves, should fix ourselves. If we need somebody outside of us, to make us better, to make us whole, then what’s the point of…us?”

By the time we reached Cincinnati, we were whole again, wholly present with each other. For a week or two, we had that cocoon back around us, as we took advantage while his parents were at work to lounge by the pool, or hide away in his bed. We didn’t talk about our summers, his at the swim club, mine back in the Harvard psych lab. I wondered, could our chrysalis stay in suspended animation, would anything at all emerge come fall?

Saturday night before I left, June 7th, Mike and I ate dinner at home with my parents. Afterwards, we headed to the den for the premiere of Johnny Cash on TV. Of course, it was Dylan we really wanted to see.

Henry and Miriam followed us in. I tried explaining to them why this was special, that Bob Dylan never appeared on TV, that somehow he and Cash had become musical buddies, were going to sing together. My father thought it odd, off-putting, that a country singer from the Ozarks should cozy up with a radical ex-folkie from northern Minnesota by way of Greenwich Village. A Jewish one at that.

“Hmm. It might be that musicians, singers, have more in common, more mutual respect over their songs, their authenticity, than they have differences in attitude, accent, where they’re from?” Mike offered.

My dad grunted.

While we waited for Dylan, a tall blonde appeared with a guitar, singing, “I’ve looked at life from both sides now…I really don’t know life at all.” I almost started crying listening to that voice, so clean and pure, the words so sincere.

My dad said, “She sounds Canadian, hear how she said ‘about’ like it’s ‘a boot’?”
Mike asked, “Who’s that?”

I sighed. My older siblings had long ago introduced me to folk music. “Joni Mitchell. She’s really good.”

“Yeah,” was all Mike said.

After she and Johnny sang “Girl From Saskatoon” together, a lean, disjointed fiddle player  appeared in a velour suit and ruffled shirt, his chin sticking out almost as far as his nose, chanting “Diggy diggy do.” As he played, singing with a continual catch in his voice, the audience clapped along with his yodels, smiles, and wild eyes.

Finally, after the second commercial, Dylan came on, starting with, “If you find some one who gives you all of her love, take it to your heart, don’t let it stray. One thing’s for certain, you will surely be a-hurtin’ if you throw it all away.” Inwardly, I started to cry, and hoped I could hide it from everyone.

Mom wondered, “He’s not much of a performer, sweetie. What do you see in him? He can’t even look at the audience.”
I walked Mike out to his car. Silently, we hugged as he sat on the hood, pulling me closer, squeezing as if he’d never let me go. Finally, we eased apart, and locked eyes. He looked down, sighed, shook his head, and clasped his hands together in front of his face, pressing the tips of his nose with his index finger. He dropped his fingers to his lips, then reached forward to touch mine. Sighing once more, he said simply, “I hate to say good-bye.”

x

I’d been back in Cambridge a week when Bev and I finally had a chance to sit down and eat dinner together. She experimented with an eggplant-and-broccoli concoction, laden with lentils and rice and her usual eclectic mix of spices.

“You’re looking almost gaunt, Jane, what happened?”

I had never paid much attention to my body size or shape. There was no bathroom scale in the Stein house; George and Charlie had stayed pretty much the same weight into their twenties, and Lisa’s constant motion kept her slim. Then I remembered Mike’s birthday poem, my “newly slender cheeks.”

“I don’t know, I haven’t been much interested in eating the past few months.”

“Maybe you’ve had a lot on your mind?” Bev probed.

I stopped chewing, trying to get some inner perspective. A wave of awareness flooded my thoughts. “I think you’re right. First, there’s Mike, he’s in my mind half the time, but never around. I pushed him away, pulled him back, and don’t know what I want from him, with him.”

Bev nodded, holding her fork up for emphasis. “Boys’ll do that to you.”

“Then, the strike, that night at Uni, when the cops pulled everybody out. I’m not sure why, but that got to me more than when I got kicked outside the Hilton in Chicago last summer. It just went on and on, everyone so righteous in their anger, the Harvard admin so…establishment… in their response.” I took another bite. “The broccoli might not have been the right idea? Maybe tomatoes instead next time?”

“Noted.”

“Right now, I know I’m anxious about this thing I’m doing at the Cognitive Studies Center that Kagan got me into. I’m working in a group with Barry Brazelton.”

“The pediatrician?”

“Yeah. Where does Harvard get all these super-smart charismatic guys? I love his drawl. It’s so completely what I want to do, studying and learning about how kids develop.” I frowned. “They really don’t have me doing much of anything. I’m getting coffee and collating papers, like a secretary even though I’m called a ‘research assistant’. The whole thing makes me super-nervous.”

“Why? They wanted you. You have to start somewhere.”

“I know. But there’s a couple of things. I feel like I don’t really belong. I’m the only undergrad, everybody knows so much more than me, can talk so much more intelligently about child psychology. I wish it didn’t take so long to get good at something.”

We sat silently awhile. I tried some home-made salad dressing, hoping to hide the slight bitterness of the broccoli.

Bev prodded, “You said ‘there’s a couple of things’?”

I sighed. “Oh, yeah. This other thing, that’s probably the worst. The Center had a lot of grants from all over. There’s a big one from the NIH that funds my job. We heard yesterday that Nixon decided not to renew it after July 1st.”

“Oh Jesus, why? What are they going to do?”

“Well, it was such short notice, they said they could move some money around and keep me through July, but that’s it. I’m gonna have to find something else, or go back home, I guess.” I put my fork down, done eating even though the plate remained half full. “People are saying this is some kind of retaliation. Nixon sees places like Harvard as the enemy, the eggheads out to get him, so he had the HEW secretary look for any funding he could pull right away. I mean, I knew he was a bad guy, but this is simply evil. We’re studying mothers and babies! How is that dangerous to ‘law and order’?”

Of course I wrote to Mike about the change in plans, that I’d be coming home. I expected he might call right away, but it was ten days before I got a letter back. He rhapsodized about the kids on his swimming team, how they were going to win their league championship for the second year in a row. At the end, even when he did acknowledge how my summer was not going as planned, he talked about how that meant we could be together again. Not a sympathetic word or inkling that he understood how devastated I was.

Sunday,  July 20th, the team at the Center held a good-bye party for those of us cut from the staff. Someone brought in a small back-and-white TV so we could watch the moon landing. One of the post-doc fellows went on and on about the dissonance between those billions of dollars spent on the ‘frivolous Flash Gordon adventure’ and Nixon’s callous cutting of a few hundred thousand from our lab.

“Hell, we’re just an accounting error in the Apollo program!” he harangued.

Mike wrote the next day. He started with one of his usual trenchant observations, “We send those guys all the way to the moon, and the first thing they do is trash the place, leave a flag and lander behind, like litter on a highway.” Then, a page and a half about his team, how they’d won the regional Junior Olympics, and how great that had made him feel. He closed by describing his drive home afterwards, alone, feeling almost depressed, having left the party of celebrating parents and swimmers, then having no one to share his joy. “It’s funny how, the happier you are, the worse it feels when it’s all over.”

xi

I took the train home at the end of July. I needed time to myself, no crowds, no rush. On the way, I stopped in Rhode Island to see Charlie, Arlene, and Denise, hoping for a shot of their calm domesticity. Once there, we all packed up for a weekend visit to the Vineyard.

“We’ll look at some houses, see if we can find one to buy. They all turn over the weekend between July and August, most of them should be empty,” Charlie explained.

“Are you guys going to move there?”

“Not right away. We like it here, it’s cheap, it’s easier to find work at the hospital for Arlene. No, we want someplace small, near the shore in Edgartown, something I can fix up during the off-season. Then rent it out for a few years, put a little in the bank. Move there permanently in, I don’t know, three to five years.”

“What would you do, could you find a job there?”

“Arlene’s a nurse, if we come at the start of summer, it should be easy to get on at the hospital. Me, I want to find a little hole-in-the-wall downtown, set up a shop where people can bring things they make, sell to the tourists. A lot better for Denise than growing up in a city, all crowded, noisy. If we’re lucky, we can find something with a little yard, grow some of our food.”

While Charlie and Arlene scouted the real estate market, I got to escort Denise, now four and a half, on her own miniature adventures.

“Auntie Yane” – she was still having trouble with her “J’s” – “can we get some shells?”

“What would we do with them?”

“Pick them up. Then we throw them. They break on rocks.”

The high tide line was easy to spot, a mix of glistening brown seaweed, small white clam shells, and tiny black and grey rocks. Towards the ocean, the sand was firm, newly dried, filled will little holes bubbling air from the receding surf. Above, dry sand quickly faded into dune grass, the breeze rolling it along, tickling our legs at ankle level.

“Auntie Yane, are you a mommy too?”

I laughed nervously. “Not yet, Denise. Why?”

“Do you wanna be?”

From the mouths of babes, I thought. When I didn’t answer right away, she added, “Do you like babies? Do you?”

“What babies do you know?”

“A friend of mommy, she has a baby. Mommy says babies are fun, I was her little baby doll. But this baby, he can’t walk, he can’t talk, I can’t play with him, he’s no fun at all.”

“Sometimes you have to let a baby just be himself. When that happens, you can learn who they are, what they like, that’s how they’re fun. To Mommies.”

“Mommy says she can’t wait ‘til I go to kinnergarter. Did you go to kinnergarter? what’s that like?”

“It’s where you’ll meet a lot of kids, a lot of friends. You’ll learn to how to go to school.”

“What happens at school?”

“You learn how to read, to write, how to grow up.”

“I can’t wait to grow up.” She put on a serious face. “I wanna be bigger. I don’t wanna be a baby, I don’t want to be little. I want to be big like you.” She sat down, crumbling a shell between her pudgy little hands. “You never told me, do you wanna be a mommy?”

“If I had a little girl like you, I would so much want to be a mother.”

“Well, why don’t you then.”

“Why don’t I what?”

“Be a mother. Get a little girl like me, someone who could be my friend.”

“It’s not that easy.” Uh-oh, I thought, shouldn’t have said that. “What I mean is, the best babies also have daddies.” I was digging a bigger and bigger hole.

“Like Arlene and Charlie?”

Relieved, I quickly said, “Yes. Exactly like Arlene and Charlie.”

“Daddy says you have a boy friend. He says he hopes you know what you’re doing. What’s he mean? Can a boy friend be a daddy, too?”

“Well…” 

Luckily, Charlie and Arlene came up from behind. Charlie picked up Denise, spinning her around full circle. He tossed her in the air as she laughed and screamed, then tucked her under his arm like a giant football.

“Did you find anything?” I asked.

“A couple of places. Now’s not the time to buy anything, we’ll come back after the season, see what’s what then.” Looking down at Denise, he went on, “You two get along?”

“She’s such a perfect little girl. Are you going to have another, someday?”

Charlie looked at Arlene, who was busy with Denise’s shoes and socks, trying to put them on while she wiggled in her father’s grip. She stopped, let out an exasperated sigh, then said, “Your brother’s going to have to learn how to share the load a little more, Janie.”

Charlie started to complain, but Arlene stopped him with a quick, sharp look.

After the weekend, I spent three more days with them, helping corral Denise while Arlene was at work. Charlie took that as a signal he could sail with some friends on Narragansett Bay. Denise was fun at first. Managing a kid all day exhausted me. In the psych lab, all I did was observe them, and sometimes play a little before or after with the older ones. But their mothers were always there for the real work. I realised what they meant about being the primary caregiver.

I got home on Thursday. Mike’s first free evening was Saturday. He said he’d leave the swim club about 6:30. With the new freeway, he should be in Clifton before 7. I went out to the front porch about 6:45, hoping to see him pull up. The air shimmered, almost electric. Thunder rumbled to the north, while a breeze rustled, then turned into a gust which bent the hardwood trees all along the street. Rain began to fall, at first dainty little drops, than bigger and bigger plops, quickly soaking my hair before I could run back inside. I wandered into the kitchen, where Mom was getting the food into serving bowls and onto platters.

“Where’s Mike, honey? I thought you said he’d be here for dinner.”

With a sour look on my face, I grumbled, “Maybe something was more interesting at the club.” Or someone, I said under my breath. The rain grew stronger still, beating against the windows like a snare drum and cymbals.

I ate dinner without him, sullenly picking at the lamb chop mom had dressed up for us. Finally, a little before 8, I heard Mike’s car outside. The rain had stopped, the wind was gone, but I was not going to greet him, I decided.

Dad got the door, let him in. Mike seemed shaken, nervously glancing from side-to-side. 

“What happened? That was some storm,” Dad asked.

Mike sat down. “I think there was a tornado,” he asserted.

“What!” my mother exclaimed. “Where? When?”

Once inside, seated at the dining room table, eating the plate mom had warmed up for him, he relaxed, launching into the story. “I was coming down Reading. It started raining, that thunderstorm rain where you can’t even see though the wipers are going double-time. I thought I should slow down, got down to 25, but the wind kept getting worse. Then the car started to shake, quiver like it was being jiggled by the Jolly Green Giant. I had to stop. Right then, this big old wall, a grey curtain, swept across in front of me, I don’t know, 400 yards away. Everybody, all the other cars had stopped, kinda like waiting for a train to pass. It took less than a minute, then it was gone, so I thought it was OK to start up again. After a couple hundred yards, it was impossible. Power lines down, truck camper tops from that lot there near Galbraith, branches, trees even, all across the road. I had to go forever to get past it, almost all the way to Colerain to get around. There was junk all over the roads. But, I finally made it, here I am.”

“Sounds like a tornado,” Dad said. “Car’s OK? You OK?”

Mike nodded, then silently finished his dinner.

xii

After Mike finished eating, we sat on the front porch, staring at the leaves and branches flung down by the storm. One arm around his shoulder, my other resting on his leg, I asked, “You sure you’re OK? It must have been scary.”

“I thought the car was going to leave the ground…”

“Really?”

“Really. My parents told me when I was a baby, a hurricane came through when we lived in the apartment on Lynn Shore Drive. I’m starting to rack up disasters. Next, I suppose it’ll be an earthquake? But, that’s not the worst thing that happened to me this week.”

I took my hands back, got up and started walking down to the street. Mike followed, continuing, “We have the swim meets every Thursday, this time was at home. This late in the summer, it starts to get dark before we’re done, so they have these light poles they stick in the concrete deck. The electricity comes underneath, they’re supposed to turn it off after the meet. But yesterday morning, I was working with the kids, yelling at one of them – you gotta yell, ‘cause it’s hard to hear under water – yelling at Lisa, the anchor of our relay. She was dogging it, and that’s a bad example when your best swimmer isn’t working. Anyway, I grabbed onto one of the poles so I could lean down, get closer to her.” He stopped, smiling ruefully.

“What happened?” I prodded.

“It must have still been live, they told me I started dancing around the pole, holding on with both hands. It felt like when you stick your finger into a socket, but going all over and through my body. They said I was screaming, but the only thing in my head was a loud buzzing, drowning out everything and everyone. The head coach was on the other side of the pool, he dove in, swam over. By the time he got out, I must have spun myself off. The coach said, “Great! I don’t know how I was going to get you free, maybe a running tackle…’ So I guess I got electrocuted, right? And everything from now on is a bonus, like I should have died but didn’t?”

“How do you feel now?”

“I was tired all day, slept 10 hours last night, I’m still a little tingly, but I’m OK. A spiritual afterglow, like I should be dead but I’m not.”

I thought that was a little much, too dramatic a reaction. I decided to play along, though. “So what do you think you were saved for?”

“You know, I wondered about that after the tornado passed in front of me. Two lives down – no three, with the hurricane? – six to go, that sort of thing. Funny, my first thoughts were about kids.”

“The ones at the pool?”

“No, just kids…and families…in general. At the club, there are all these big families, four, five, even eight. And you – you’ve got three brothers and sisters.”

“Sister, singular,” I interrupted.

“Right, sister. Anyway, I realised, I like the idea of a bigger family. I think that’s what I’m here for, to keep the chain alive.”

“How many would you want?”

“At least three, maybe four. The chances for interaction increase geometrically as the group size increases arithmetically, right? So adding one or two makes a big difference in how many opportunities you get to learn from other people, other kids, when you’re real young. Like you, you had three older sibs, maybe that’s why you’re so much more sociable than I am?”

I gave that some thought. Lisa, always using my naïveté to get me in trouble. George, quiet George, immersed in books and his fantasy world, never any help at all. Only Charlie, almost a decade older, seemed to be on my side, caring about me, helping me learn and grow. “Not really. It might work the other way. The more there are in a family, the more chances for dissension and dysfunction.” I thought of my time cut short that summer in the psych lab. “For really little kids, infants, mothers are most important. That’s what I can’t get out of my mind.”

Two weeks later, on his day off, we drove up to Columbus, to the Ohio State Fair. “It’s supposed to be the biggest one in the country,” Mike said.

I didn’t really want to go. During two years in Boston I had become indoctrinated in the belief that the Midwest was a backwater, full of farms and auto plants, but not a haven for intellectuals or high achievers. The State Fair, no matter how big or famous, was that whole ethos writ large.

Mike was enthralled. Without a hint of irony, he reveled in the animal barns, the 4-H competitions, the cotton candy, and the blue-jeaned crowds. By the evening, he was ready for the midway.
“Look, there’s a ring-toss. I wanna try it!”

He missed badly the first time, which only spurred him on. “I can do this,” he growled, putting up another dollar for three more rubber gaskets. Circling one bottle, he won a rabbit’s foot key ring. 

“You know those things are weighted, it’s rigged so you can’t really aim or win,” I whispered as he pulled another dollar out.

“Watch. I’m gonna win a big prize. I’ve got the feel for it now.”

He adjusted his feet, bent a little at the waist, shook the first ring to test its balance, then flicked it out with a little push from his right index finger.

“One!” he said firmly.

Repeating the ritual twice more with the same success, he hollered, “Yow! Got ‘em!” Looking over at me, he pointed at the top row, where the big fuzzy animals hung. “Which one do you want?”

I scanned the options – teddy bear, lion, pony. My eyes lit on a lower row, where a small bald baby doll in a gingham checked t-shirt waited. “That one. The baby.”

Walking towards the rides, cradling our prize, I decided, “I didn’t think this was going to be any fun. I’m glad we came. It makes me see, we can be us again.”

Mike gave me a squeeze around my waist, then guided me into a Ferris wheel car. While we ratcheted our way to the top, one car at a time, he pulled a yellow paper from his back pocket, unfolded it, producing a short, handwritten poem. Offering it to me, he said, “It’s not much, but the more I read this, the more I like it.”

Let’s not demand so much of every

single moment; 

in each fragment we’re

alive, a different herald trumpets in

a newer, fresher life and home for us.

Don’t expect that every heartbeat holds

its promise all fulfilled,

each breath

an intake filled with laughter, carried

in on waves of something deeper than we see.

Look out from life, not in at living;

The things I share, 

      so filled with giving

Are handed over freshly carved from the

Chisel of my joy – 

If I stop smiling, I might never know I’m happy.

iv

Wednesday was Mike’s birthday. I had planned on calling him that evening, in anticipation of a weekend together in Cambridge. Coming out of psych lab, I daydreamed about what I’d say, what kind of card I’d make for him. Entering the Yard, I found it filled with people shouting at each other. From an upper story window in Weld Hall boomed the Moog synthesizer version of a Brandenburg Concerto. Students interspersed with a few faculty filled the space between Widener Library and Memorial Church, their attention trained westward to Uni. Several kids had bull horns, leading competing chants of “Rotcy must go” and  “Out, out, out”. One of the deans had been allowed to speak, pleading, “Be terribly careful of what you’re doing, because this is a collision course. I’m not sure Harvard can survive this type of thing, and I’m sure that many of you can’t.”

I found Howard at the statue, and asked him, “What’s going on? What happened?”

“Some of the SDS bolted into Uni Hall, kicked all the deans and secretaries out.” He pointed up at the second floor windows, where crude hand-lettered signs spelled out “ROTC Must Go.” A red flag, with “SDS” in a black circle, hung nearby. “They’ve chained the doors, only students are being allowed in. If we’re gonna be a part of this, we’ve got to go now. Sarah – Janie – are you coming in?”

I felt a strange calm tinged with fear. I remembered that day in Chicago, when I lost Charlie and almost got trampled in a mob. I looked inside Uni, where kids leaned out windows, urging, “Join us! Join us!” Mike’s face floated into my mind’s eye, and I wondered what he would think, what he would say. I looked over at Howard, feverish with anger and anticipation. He reached for my hand when I felt a tap on the other shoulder. Turning, I saw Jeanne, a look of bemused wonder on her face.

Howard quickly filled her in on the status of the demonstration, finishing with another exhortation to join him up the steps into Uni.

Jeanne, thinking precisely as always, immediately answered, “No, Howard, this is not something you just walk away from, just go back to class after. Besides, nothing will change. They had their vote on ROTC last month, Harvard’s not going back on that decision. You may think you’re fighting for workers’ rights, but you’re just play acting. I don’t see any of those workers here. You think they’ll show up when the students when get pulled out, taken to jail? I want things to change as much as you do. But I can do that best by being a part of, not apart from, society. We’re supposed to be the leaders of tomorrow, and I want to do that right, not lose that chance.”

“Leaders of tomorrow”, Howard snorted. “Right. Follow their rules, play their game, become a part of them. Think you’ll change anything, Jeanne? They’re just gonna change you…” He shook his head violently, turning back to me. “Sarah…?” he almost pleaded. 

I looked at Jeanne, seeking her strength and self-assurance. She linked arms with me at the elbow, and softly said, “It’s all right, Janie.” I hoped she wouldn’t let go. I watched as Howard ran inside.

All afternoon, people kept going up the steps, in twos and threes and tens, to be let in by those inside while the chains were unlocked, then locked behind them. Shortly after four, Dean Glimp arrived, and began addressing those of us assembled in the Yard, as well as the occupiers inside. First, he said the Yard was now “closed”, open only to the Freshman who lived in the surrounding Houses. Next, he invited everyone to an open meeting at Lowell, to “discuss the situation”. He ended by saying, “all persons now present in University Hall must depart therefrom, so that it may be restored to its proper use. Anyone failing to observe this warning  within fifteen minutes  will be subject to prosecution for criminal trespass.”

From inside Uni came a competing announcement. “We advise our friends and brothers not to leave the yard. It’s our yard, not their yard!” High up in Weld Hall, the massive stereo speakers aimed outward, throttling the Beatles’ “Revolution” (the hard, not the acoustic version) down upon us. The crowd, filling every space by now, cheered.

A few left for the meeting in Lowell, while those who stayed learned that Freshman were opening their rooms to anyone who needed a place to crash.  Jeanne and I found one of her friends from St. Louis, making arrangements to eat and hang out with him in his room.

After dinner, I called Mike and told him what was happening. He responded by describing the takeover, by black students, of Fisk Hall at Calvin, six weeks earlier. “Remember, my year was the first they tried to get a lot of black students here. Thirty, out of 350 in our class. Something about wanting John Calvin U to ‘reflect America in every way’. But just admitting different people doesn’t do it; they have to change what they teach, how they teach, as well. Those guys, when they took over the hall, had decided it was their duty to help improve the institution which was giving them a chance. They wanted us to be better.”

“That’s what’s going on here, Mike. It’s all about how Harvard operates, who it’s for. Is it supposed to be a feeder into the highest parts of the establishment, in Washington, in New York? Is it supposed to grow ever bigger, taking over the places where people, who don’t get the chance to go to Harvard, where they live? Is it supposed to be for us, the students, so we can become the best version of ourselves? And what about the faculty, they seem to think it’s all about them and their careers, being famous, getting grants, winning Nobel prizes.”

“It’s all those things, isn’t it?” he said with finality. “What about this weekend? What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know, Mike.” I paused, sighing deeply. He didn’t seem to hear how important this was, for me, for my friends. “I don’t know. It’s like I can’t think that far ahead. Let’s just wait and see, OK?”

After hanging up, I turned to Jeanne with my lower lip quivering. Not usually a hugger, she sat next to me on the couch and, saying nothing, let me cry on her shoulder.

Once composed, I began, “He’s not here. He doesn’t know.”

“What’s wrong, Janie?”

“It’s been three years now. I feel like we’ve grown up together, but a lot of the time, we’ve been apart. I always thought it was a cliché, but what I really feel is… this is so scary … I need some space, some time to find out who I am without him.”

Jeanne said, “There’s time for that later, Janie. Right now, we’ve got to get some sleep. They’re saying the Cambridge police are at the firehouse over on Quincy.  And the kids inside Uni, they’ve said they’re staying all night, asking people to form a picket line around the building.”

I looked outside, and did see a few students walking slowly back and forth just below University Hall’s front steps. I turned back to Jeanne and nodded. “Sleep…Here?”

I took the cushions off the couch, giving them to Jeanne while I tried lying down on the sagging springs. If I did get any sleep, I don’t remember it.

At 4 AM, fire alarms started going off all over the yard. Kids were running through the halls, shouting, “Wake up, wake up!” One burst into our room, announcing quickly, “They’re coming! They’re here, the cops are here!”

Hundreds of cops spilled down the steps from Memorial Hall. Police from Cambridge, Boston, Somerville, and the smaller towns around began forming lines, listening to instructions through several bullhorns. State troopers appeared in helmets, with long thick coats, shiny black boots and jodhpurs. I saw shields, night sticks and guns on many of the others. The sound of buses idling came from the Tercentenary theater. I remembered Chicago, the fearful chaos, and hoped the kids in Uni would leave when asked, this time.

v

“Hello?”

As soon as I heard Mike’s voice on the other end, I broke down. “They came marching up the steps…pounding on the door…it was awful…dragging them out…handcuffed, by the hair, down the steps. I saw…I saw the clubs swinging. It was like…it was like…I don’t know, I don’t know what it was like!” Sniffling, shaking, exhausted from only 4 hours sleep the past two nights, I fell silent, hoping he’d make some sense where I couldn’t.

“Wait, what? Janie, is that you? What happened?”

My breath came in spasms. I looked at the clothes I’d had on for the past three days, now wrinkled beyond recognition. My hair, not brushed the whole time, had tangled into a black rat’s nest. A thought flashed by, he can’t see me like this. That brought me back, provided enough stability to muster a few rational words, trying to overcome the chaos.

“The kids in Uni hall – they sent the police in after them this morning. Early this morning. Dragged them all off to jail, I guess, in buses. There was blood on their clothes, blood streaming down the steps. They didn’t do anything, the kids, they didn’t hurt anybody. Pusey doesn’t care, he just sent the pigs in after them, no warning, hundreds of cops.” I paused. Mike said nothing.

“Are you still there?” Still silence on the other end. “I don’t know what’s going to happen now. No one’s going to class, they’re talking about a strike, at least ‘til Monday. And Harvard’s saying, like a cornered corporation, ‘You can’t strike, we’ll lock you out.’ I don’t think it’s a good idea to come up this weekend.”

“What? Of course I should…you sound, um, scared.”

Now under control, I felt the words come out unbidden, “No. You can’t. I don’t need, don’t want you here right now.”

“What do you mean?” he almost pleaded. “It’s my birthday. We were going downtown, walk along the river, then spend the night. Why not?”

Seeing all those SDS kids, first taking over University Hall, then getting dragged out and hauled away, must have built a new courage in me, another layer in my sense of self. “No, Mike. I’m having trouble being with you now.” I bit my lip, then forged on. “I’ve been meeting people here, in the SDS and others, and I need some time to find out more about who I am. I need to – have to – do that by myself, without you. I need some time for that.”

Sounding hollow, he said in a monotone, “You need time…”

“There’s so much happening here, so many people saying so many things, not just the strike, but every day all around me. In classes, the professors. In the dorm, in the dining hall. At meetings. I’m not letting myself grow. I tell myself, ‘I have a boyfriend, I don’t have to worry about this stuff.’ And that was good – that’s still good – but it’s not where I need to be right now. I need to be here, without you, and find out what’s going on, who I am without you.”

As soon as those last words came out, I could sense his pain, his confusion, through his silence. I was lucky I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t reach out for his hands, his arms. If I had, I never would have said, “I think we need to be apart for a while, Mike, I need to be apart from us. Not you…not you, apart from us.”

He didn’t fight, he didn’t argue. He didn’t try to win me over with charm or self-pity. He simply sighed and said, “OK,” and then hung up.

I slept through most of Thursday, while the campus boiled around me. In the evening, I tore up four or five letters to Mike, trying to explain, first of all, what was going on at Harvard, and then, what I meant when I’d said, “I need time apart from us.” Every time I tried to sound rational, analytic, realistic, I’d think of him, spending the night with him, and wonder what that meant. If we lived together, if we weren’t always coming back after being apart, what would it be like? Would we feel – would I feel – as if we had to make love every time we got together? I realized “making love” meant, not just physical love, but our whole relationship, almost as if we had to re-create it every time we got together. If I stayed apart from him for a while, we’d have some time and space to build something wider, deeper than we seemed to have.

I tried writing one more time. “You have been – you still are – my best friend. And, yes, you are still my boyfriend. But I’m not sure I know what that means anymore, Mike. I’ve been with you so much, I want to be with you so much, I’m not sure I know who I am by myself, anymore. And I don’t know who we are, apart or together. I’ve got to think about all that, got to find out about being apart, so we can be together. That’s what I was trying to say on the phone, that’s what I’ve got to do here for a while. Please don’t hate me, please try to understand.”

The next two weeks were indeed confusing, both for me and for our University. The feeling of a General Strike dissipated within a week or two. Some faculty held classes, others didn’t. Some returned to their curriculum, others held intense discussions about the nature of a University, whom it ultimately served, and the “meaning of Harvard”. Several mass meetings filled the stadium, and the Faculty issued solemn pronouncements. Eventually, Pusey endorsed their proposal reducing ROTC to “extra-curricular” status. The College gave Black students a voice in the new African-American Studies program. The SDS remained splintered between those who wanted to fight more broadly, for workers’ rights and against the war, and those who looked inward, at reforming the institution. Outside the organized activists, other students, while supportive, became fatigued with constant turmoil, and returned to classes and their ambitions.

Mike wrote me several letters, at first supporting my “search”, and later, reverting to describing his own life and dreams. He vividly described his ski trip to Colorado over spring break. I seized on that as a way to keep him around without actually having to deal with him. I started knitting a sweater. Blue and white, with a pattern meant to evoke winter, something you might see in a European ski village. At first knitting calmed me, giving my hands something to do while I read. Gradually, I saw the sweater as a belated birthday present, handiwork from me that would last no matter what. Sometimes while knitting, my mind would wander from the book or paper I’d be reading, and light on Mike, his hair, his arms, his stomach, his smells, the sheer physicality of him. That sweater brought me back to him, and him to me. With each twist of my wrist, each flick of the yarn, I stitched over whatever was pushing us apart. 

vi

Bev and Leslie planned another dinner party on Friday, two weeks after the strike. Jeanne wanted to bring Larry, the guy from her high school who’d loaned us his couch the night before the Uni Hall occupation, and his roommate Sam, as a thank-you gesture. We walked over to the Yard to pick them up, show them the way to the Oxford Street house. After crossing Mass Ave, we cut through the Law school, and immediately ran into Howard Lehrman, still sporting a band-aid on his forehead where a billy club had cracked him the morning of the raid.

He didn’t see us, and I hoped to avoid him, but Jeanne called out, “Howard! Hey!”

He squinted our way, then brightened when he saw us. “Jeanne…Sarah Jane! Well, Les told me you were coming to her place tonight. I guess we should go there together, no?”

He still refused to call me by my name, or at least the one I preferred. I had let it go on too long to start correcting him now, but it was irksome. Instead, I said, “Yes, that’s where we’re going. First a little detour, though. Jeanne wants to thank those guys who let us stay in their room that night, take them to Les and Bev’s.”

“I’ve got time. OK if I go with you?”

Larry and Sam were sitting on the steps outside their house, laughing – no, giggling – uncontrollably. As we came up, they tried without success to completely suppress whatever was amusing, ending up snorting through their noses while shaking their shoulders. 

Howard was onto them right away. “Are you guys high?”

They looked at each other, and started full-on laughter. Sam reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small plastic bag half full of greenish brown leaves and sticks. “Sure. Want some?”

“What? No, put that away!” Howard urged. “Wait until we get inside, if it’s OK with Les and Bev, all right?”

Larry abruptly stopped laughing. “Whoa, man, what happened to you?” he asked, pointed at the bandage on Howard’s forehead.

“That?” Howard snorted. “Some pig thought he could get me out of Uni Hall. I kicked his legs out from under him, and he went ape-shit on me.”

Sam’e eyes bulged. “Wow. Must have been some fight, uh?”

Howard wryly chuckled. “It was a lot easier than trying to get the Corporation to make any changes, that’s for sure. I haven’t slept more than three or four hours a night since. I could really do with some of that dope myself right now.”

Turning to me, Howard asked, “Where’s that guy, Mike? I thought he came up here every weekend from Jock U. Or have you dumped him finally?”

I had no interest in getting into that with Howard, so I turned to Jeanne and asked, “Did you hear yet about this summer? Did you get that thing at Mass General?” Today, the last Friday in April, she was supposed to learn whether they’d accepted her as an aide in the psych clinic.

“No, too many seniors and med students ahead of me. I’m going to have to go back to St. Louis, work in my dad’s hospital there.”

Larry asked, “Barnes?” Jeanne nodded.

Once inside, Howard cornered Bev, and pointing at Larry and Sam, said, “These guys have some grass. OK if we roll a joint and smoke it here?”

Bev wrinkled her nose. “Hmm. Landlord’s out of town, Ought to be all right.” She flicked her head towards the kitchen. “Go over there, the window by the fire escape. Keep the smell out of here, please?” Then she added, “Let me see it.”

Sam pulled out his baggie. Bev shook her head and twisted her mouth in disgust. “Yuck! It’s half seeds and stems. Looks kind of dead to boot. Sure it’s any good?”

“Well, these guys think so. They haven’t said one thing that makes sense the whole walk over here,” Howard noted.

Bev looked at me, although why she thought I could give an expert opinion was a mystery. She knew I’d never tried marijuana, having as much a fear of losing control that way as I did with alcohol. I put on an innocent, surprised face that said, You’re asking me?

With the boys gone, Bev turned to me and asked, “You still knitting that sweater? Any closer to figuring out what to do with your on-again, off-again boy friend?” I pulled the needles, yarn, and half-finished sweater from my satchel in response. She went on, “Didn’t you tell me you thought he had a fling last summer, at that swim club? And he’s going back?”

I reminded her, “That’s not exactly it. He had a crush or something on a girl there, but didn’t do anything about it.”

“But didn’t he write a poem to her?”

“Not to her. About her.”

“What’s the difference? If he’s thinking about her, that’s the same thing. Worse, actually, because he can deny anything’s going on, but she’s still taking up space in his head which belongs to you, right?”

Howard sidled up to Bev, holding the smoldering joint gingerly with the nails of his thumb and middle finger. “This stuff is surprisingly fresh, despite its appearance. You really should try it.”

Forgetting her proscription against smoke inside the apartment, Bev shrugged her shoulders, closed her eyes, grabbed the joint, and inhaled deeply, sucking in more air several times without exhaling as she handed it over to me, gesturing with her nose and hand to take it.

I looked at Howard for help. “How does this work? I’ve never even smoked a cigarette.”

He made a small “O” with his lips, then instructed, “Hold it right next to your mouth, and make sure you breathe in a lot of air around it, don’t just suck at the end. Then hold your breath as long as you can, let the smoke stay in your lungs.”

Larry and Sam had looked juvenile, silly, when high, but Howard was already in law school, and Bev about to be a senior. To me, they were old enough to be role models. If an occasional fling with grass hadn’t harmed them, maybe I could handle it, too.

I did as instructed, suppressing a strong urge to cough it all out as soon as the harsh vapor seared the back of my throat. Bev finally let out her breathe, chortling, “All right, Janie!” She reached to take the joint back for another hit. She handed it to Howard, who returned to the kitchen fire escape window, where Larry and Sam were intent on stacking the plastic wine cups into a three-dimensional pyramid.

She resumed the cross examination. “Let me get this straight: Mike’s thinking about this girl, but you’re OK with it because he’s too scared to do anything about it.”

“Mike’s not like that,” I whined. “He wouldn’t…”

Leslie barged in and asserted, “I keep telling you, Janie, after a point, there’s nothing special about any man. Sure, you want someone as smart as you, someone who’s not a loser or a psycho. I say, you won’t know what you’ve got, unless you find someone to compare him to. It’s only fair – if he’s thinking about looking around, shouldn’t you be too?”

Bev chimed in, “Of course it’s fair. Even if you get back together with him, I say you have to find out what else is possible in a relationship. You’ve already told him you need time, space, right? The next step is yours, not his.”

I felt cornered, double-teamed by these two older friends. I stood still, my neck tight, my hands cupped together at my waist. I found myself saying, “I like being loved by him. I like everything we do with and to each other.” My head was filled with poems, with our walks and the endless observations we shared. I didn’t know how to put that into words, so I simply said, “I care about what he does and says with me, not who he thinks about.”

vii

Next morning, I found one of those bulging envelopes from Mike. I ripped it open, reading it right there in one of dorm lounge comfy chairs. This one was five pages long, titled “Seeking An Unknown Master, I Had Some Friends Over For Dinner”. It read more as a lyrical story than poetry:

I seek an unknown master; I sit patiently at my writing table, waiting for his arrival. How then do I seek, while I must wait? A high chair is not the best for waiting, but an easy, cushioned soft and sinking one is what I wait in.

I thought that while I waited, I’d have some friends over for dinner. They weren’t very tasty. Not only that, they couldn’t understand the candle in my window. I tried to explain.

“Look,” I said. “See that candle; its flame will soon expire, but not the hope that my waiting will wake into seeking. Not by sleeping, but by trusting, here with you, our after-dinner chatter. Like, ‘How is Margaret’s daughter, can she still hide her belly? And the butcher, does he still cut off too much fat? The important things we do are not resting on that mantle with my candle; they are hiding here with us – let’s go and find them, please.”

My neighbor raised her nose, and the rest of her head followed. She appeared to be ready to speak. While I waited for her favour, I remembered it was her son who’d helped young Margaret with her hidden bulge. “But why a green candle?” she fairly shouted. “Don’t you know that nothing can be representative anymore? There’s always been something slightly fertile about green, as far as I’m concerned.”

People hushed and then agreed, all gabbing at once, each explaining why every color of the rainbow was best suited for my candle.

“But!” I screamed, But But But I shouted at them ‘till they heard that I had said, “My candle does not wait, it only shows the way.”

“For whom? Or what” they asked, at last intrigued.

“For whoever wants to come, that’s who. All of you were able to find, to follow, to come to here to me by its wavering, dying light, weren’t you?” They all had to agree.

And then one, more clever than the rest (a postman, I think) looked thoughtful, and hushed the crowd. He said, “Was it we you were waiting for? Could it be perhaps that all you seek is us”

“Perhaps,” I granted, “But you’re not an unknown master. I know all of you very well, don’t I? I mean, once you’ve sat down to dinner with someone, and shared what’s really important, Well, you can’t help but end up knowing them.”

“And liking them, a whole lot,” a slightly flighty little lady gurgled.

We all agreed with a warm, comradely mutual laugh.

“Well, it certainly is pleasant to spend an evening with one’s friends, discovering who they really are, now isn’t it, one said. And we all sort of nodded and looked down at our half-eaten pies, smiling, shaking our heads, and clicking our tongues. We were privy to our lives, privileged to be privy.

But now they’ve gone. I’ve cleared away the dishes, fed the scraps to the dog and cats, and brushed away the clouded air of too many laughs and too many pithy observations. I’d vainly I sought with them; I now must wait, here in my easy chair.

“It’s time for musing, not amusing,” I murmured under my beard. “I’m not as lonely as I was yesterday, I’ll be more lonely tomorrow. I guess I can say, with a quiver and a break in my voice, constricted in my throat, welling in my eye, that I’ve never been so lonely in my life. Not just feeling, but being, Lonely.” That made me slightly melancholy, so I went on – 

My unknown master, I wonder what he’ll wear –

A rainbow-colored Joseph cloak,

        and a tassel made of silk

He’ll look like everyone I’ve ever known, 

and most of all like me.

        He’ll be so wise,

and I’ll read in his eyes

        any story, any preaching

I’ll ever need to know.

      Oh, he’ll mean so much

to me,

        he’ll feel so much for me,

He’ll be my own, my very private, privy

Unknown knowing Master – 

He’ll be me!

Under the final line he’d drawn, with the Rapidograph I’d given him, a curving arrow down to the words, “I think he’s also you, Janie; But then you are so very much me.”

Maybe it was the lingering effects of my experiment with marijuana, but I felt he’d been with me at the party the night before. Or perhaps he had foreseen it somehow, for surely he’d written this some days earlier. And, it was obvious he was missing me – “never been so lonely in my life. Not just feeling, but being. Lonely.”

Damn that boy, I thought. Why can’t he let me be? Hadn’t he heard what I’d said? This story, filled with pride and loneliness, said he was not going to simply let me go. I spent the weekend flipping between imagining a life without him, one in which I was the master of myself, free from expectations of the past, free to create the person I should become; and aching for more time with him, to give him another chance to come along with me, on my path, our path.

The next two weeks, that battle in my head consumed me. I couldn’t eat, took hours to get to sleep, and drifted off in classes. Finally, I realised I could not purge the memory of Michael Harrison from my mind. I knew I needed him as a friend. He knew me better than anyone on Earth. And, worse, it seemed, I could not drive him away from my heart. Each time I imagined myself without him, I felt an aching, a stabbing, through my gut, a fear I might never find anyone else like him. That fear grew to anger; I did not want to be so dependent on anybody, but did not yet know how to depend solely on myself.

He didn’t write or call after sending that story-poem, during the two weeks I was driving myself crazy futilely trying to wrest my thoughts and feelings away from him. I stayed inside, spending most days at a hidden carrel in Hilles Library during reading period, writing, studying, intent that at least my grades not suffer, even as my sanity, my very sense of self, dissolved.

Mid-May, final papers written, confident I’d studied enough for my last two exams, I called him up.

“Hello?” His familiar baritone, smooth and questioning, sounded impersonal. Until I spoke, I could be any one, I knew. I froze.

“Yeah? Hello? Who is this?”

“Mike, it’s me, it’s Janie.”

Now it was his turn to be silent.

“Mike? Mike?” This was going nowhere fast. Or maybe ending fast. I flashed that if neither of us spoke, our dream surely would be over. He must have come to the same conclusion, because we both spoke at once.

“Janie, it’s you!” Eagerness enveloped his voice.

“Mike, Mike, we’ve got to see each other…” I wanted to say more, something like, It’s not over, but I still didn’t know it wasn’t.

We talked awkwardly for five more minutes, each testing the other’s resolve to stay on the line, probing our feelings, finding our rhythm again.

Mike eventually pointed out that, “I’m done here this week. Should I come see you? I’ve got another birthday poem for you, I can get a present, I guess, or…”

“No, I need to study this last weekend, my final exam’s on Monday. But, I’m gonna go home after that. We can drive back together, stop at the Vineyard one more time. Who knows, we might break down on the turnpike again!”

His familiar laugh meant yes, I hoped. “Uh…OK, sure. I guess I can find something to do on the weekend…”

The tug inside my heart won the battle with my head. “No, it’s OK, come up this weekend. Stay with me, just stay out of my way if I need to study. Maybe we can go out Saturday night, go to Boston, eat somewhere.”

“Um, yeah, great.” A pause. “Oh, I forgot. Did you hear that Bob Dylan’s gonna be on TV?”

“What? He never does anything like that.”

“Yup, that country singer,  Johnny Cash, has a summer TV show, and Dylan is his first guest.” Then, “I thought you were staying in Cambridge, to work this summer.”

“That’s still happening, but my parents said I had to come home for a week, so I go back on Sunday, the 8th.”

“Great! He’s on the 7th, we can watch it together then!”

With that, Mike and I carved out a three week island for ourselves.

CHAPTER FIVE 

Let’s Not Demand So Much Of Every Single Moment

March, 1969

Priscilla said, “Boom!” every time her daughter, Kimberly, knocked down the blocks. After only three tries Kimmie started giggling as she mouthed, “Bmm-m-m”, crashing the three-high stack with a wild sweep of her right arm. Priscilla sitting cross-legged, Kimmie on her haunches, they smiled with eyes engaged and looked ready to continue the exercise all afternoon. While Dr. Kagan spoke into the mike, “Thanks, Priscilla, that’s enough for now!” I noticed there was no column on my recording sheet for “Smiles”.

“Uh, Dr. Kagan, in these mother-baby pairs, when they smile at each other, the baby seems to understand the task sooner. How do I record that?”

“Good observation, … Miss Stein, is it? Why don’t you design a new recording tool, one you can use with your next iteration of this project?”

With that, I felt I had been ushered through a narrow gate into a special garden, one where truth grew like flowers, watered by our questions, our eyes the sun. In high school, reading about science, with hypotheses generating research, followed by recording observations, had felt arid, barren, compared to the lushness of planning, then finally doing an experiment. At Avondale, science had been off-putting and rote. I found no passion in Chemistry, with its mixing and heating, odors and stains, or Biology, our noses curled against formaldehyde as we dissected frogs. But here in Kagan’s psych lab, I found a richness while exploring the foundations of personality. At last, I knew I had a calling. Not to be a research scientist, that was too confining. But to learn about, understand, and help guide the path of these little unformed minds.

Feeling effervescent as I explained all this to Mike, I bubbled as we walked through the Square down to the river in early March. “Spring! It’s almost here!” I swept my arms around, encompassing the spiny trees arrayed along the shore, tiny buds on every branch seeking sun. Raising both arms, I twirled around, almost dancing, leaning my head back to face that sun. I hugged myself, laughed, and headed for a bench where we could sit, and talk.

“What got into you, Sarah Jane?” Mike wondered. Brows twisted, a half-smile growing on his face, he looked a little lost.

“I know what I’m going to do this summer. Kagan’s lab – those kids. I’m going to be part of a new study, right from the beginning. They’re already starting to design it.” Mike cocked his head, asking for more.

“I don’t know yet exactly what it will be, the research protocol I mean. I don’t care, it doesn’t matter what, I get to be with Kagan all summer! He’s so gentle with those moms, doesn’t ever tell them what to do, just lets the action happen, then we observe, tally it up, and see what we can learn.”
Mike gave a little smile, eyes flat, almost sad. “That’s good. It’s what you want, what you’ve always wanted, I know. So you’re really on your way. Do you get to stay in the dorm over summer?”

“No, it’s closed, but I will be here, in Cambridge. Bev’ll be in town working at Mass General, but Leslie’s graduating, so there’s a room at their place. I can stay on next year, maybe with Jeanne or Marcia too, and go off-off.” As I said this, Mike looked thoughtful, down at the grass, where he studied the few green shoots nurtured by recently melted snow. I considered how our summer lives were similar, but so different. Me, in the Ivy Tower, studying children and how they grew; Mike in a lifeguard chair, watching them bounce and splash, trying to keep them safe. And those swimmers he’d help train.

Apparently ready to talk, he started by looking back. “A long time ago, when Kennedy announced the moon-shot program, they were talking on the news about how many scientists they’d need to get there, get there by this year. I’ll never forget, they said something like ‘Half of all scientists who have ever lived are working now.’ I saw a graph about that.” Using his hands to demonstrate the upward slope, he explained, “Starting way back with Aristotle, thru the Dark Ages and the Muslims and the Chinese, up to Newton, the number of people doing ‘science’ was always very small. But then, like we learned in history, in the enlightenment, the number started going up. Not very fast, but up and up through the 16, the 17, the 1800s, and then it started to take off with the world wars. They said the number of scientists in the world had doubled between 1942 and 1957, then doubled again by 1964” His hand curved faster and steeper upwards towards to sky. “If it keeps increasing at that rate, it would reach its asymptote at the end of this year.”

He seemed satisfied with his argument, but I suspected there was more. “So what happens then? After we get to the moon, and we’ve got all those scientists?”

“After that, who knows? Knowledge will be spinning out of control. We’ve never been there before, had so many people studying so many things, finding new knowledge all the time, every day. There’ll be too much for any one person to make sense of. It’s kinda scary, like the world’s gonna change and we won’t be in charge any more.”

“Aren’t you one of them, a scientist? You’re going to med school to be a doctor, right?”

Frowning, he gripped his mouth, squeezing his cheeks, ring and little fingers tucked under his chin. Dropping his hand, he replied, “I remember the seventh-grade science teacher, Mr. Webb, wrote in my year-book, ‘When one has much, much is expected.’ And in the eighth-grade, Miss Brueggeman wrote, ‘Science in your future? You can handle it!’ But just because it was easy for me, just because I took AP Biology, Math, and Physics, that still doesn’t mean it’s what I’m supposed to do. I want to be a doctor because you get to deal with people at their very core, their true essence. They talk about the ‘Art and Science’ of medicine, don’t they? I can’t shake the feeling I’m an artist, somewhere inside, someone who sees the beauty, and wants to talk with people about it.”

“Isn’t that what being a psychiatrist is all about, talking to people? Using inter-personal interaction to help them?”

“That’s not what I saw on the psych ward. Everybody there was on some kind of medication, for depression or schizophrenia, even the sociopaths. Watching them all sit around in a group therapy session was a joke. They were either nodding off, or in their own little world. If that’s what a psychiatrist does, I don’t know…”

“So are you don’t want to be a doctor anymore? You wouldn’t really become a truck driver, would you? Don’t you have to start applying to schools soon? Which ones are on your list?”

“It’s funny, when we first got to Calvin, they gave us an aptitude test, to see what professions, careers, our interests were most compatible with. My top five were psychiatrist, YMCA physical education director, musician, writer, and minister. Now I look at myself, and I see I am interested in all those things. I can’t play guitar or sing very well, but I’ve got more records than most guys on our floor. I’ve started taking religion classes. So there’s even a little minister in me, I guess. But yeah, no, I’m still applying to med schools. Ten…” He started to tick them off: Boston, New Haven, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Michigan, Ohio.

I scanned a mental map of the US. I could see California, the East, Cincinnati as a “safe school”, Michigan as well. “Denver? Why Colorado?”

“Every time I’ve gone there, in the summer, and now to ski in the winter, it’s felt like home to me. When we went over Christmas, every day was a rush. Each time my sister and I would go down the hill, it was like stopping time, stopping my mind. All I could do was try and keep my body upright. We’d fall, get up, try again.” He shook his head, raised his eyes to the ceiling as if recalling a deep felt wonder. “I can see myself living there, so why not? If I was there, I could ski every weekend!”

“A ‘YMCA physical education director’. That’s the same as being a swim coach, in your mind? Working with kids, organizing things?” I asked. “I guess it kinda makes sense you’d want to spend your summer, again, at that pool, with those kids. I don’t know, though, Mike. Why would you want to go back there? Shouldn’t you be doing something like the psych ward again, put more experience on your applications? It won’t be like going to college from Avondale, where we all knew we’d get in somewhere. Not everybody gets into medical school, you know.” Was he getting side-tracked, first with swimming, and now an infatuation with skiing? Three years earlier, I’d fallen in love with a debater, a boy who used both his mind and his hands, who wanted to spin words into beauty, as well as play at life.  He’d seemed so sure of his direction, who he was. And now that I had decided on mine, had become clear on who I should become, he’d grown hesitant, reluctant to grow up.

He grew pensive, resting his elbows on his knees as he stared again at the scraggly new green grass.

I pressed once more, “You could do something here, stay with us at Bev’s place on Oxford. Why do you have to go back, what’s keeping you there?”

He said quietly, as if to himself, “I wish I knew, I wish I knew.” Then louder, stronger, “I get to be free there, to be in charge. The rules are simple, I always know what to do. Being in the sun, all summer, so warm…and the kids are fun, they look up to me.”

I remembered the poem that had fallen out of his pea coat, Molly, a girl, “still a child” with an “unformed mind.”

Without thinking, I blurted out, “Like Molly? Is she one of the kids who looks up to you?”

Instantly, his face grew firm, a mask to hide behind. “She’s one of the good swimmers, on the big AAU team.” Then he must have wondered, had we talked about her before? His eyes narrowed. “What do you know about her? What did I say?”

I could have lied; he had talked about her before, and he’d accept it if I innocently reminded him. While I may have left some things unsaid at times, for three years with him, I had followed his dictum, ‘Always Be Honest’, and feared the consequences if I wasn’t.

“I saw a poem about her, it fell out of your pocket that night you showed up in the snowstorm.”

He scratched his head as if trying to remember. Maybe the same thought about honesty was racing in his mind. He kept looking at the ground, afraid to meet my eyes. Finally, “She’s just a kid.”

“Just a kid? How old is she, Mike?”

Still not looking up, his cheeks now red. “She’s in the oldest age group, so, I don’t know, sixteen? Seventeen?”

My heart was pounding, but I couldn’t stop asking, “So why did she get a poem? When’s her birthday, are you gonna write her another one for that?”

Finally, he looked up, solemnly, then with the bare hint of a smile. “You’re the only one I’ll ever do that for. Don’t worry about her.”

Still, that night, in bed with Michael, I’d never felt so alone, apart.

ii

Mike stayed over that Sunday, going with Jeanne and me to Leslie’s for brunch. She and Bev had upgraded their place settings, or maybe someone’s parents had bought them a matching set, after experiencing the mismatched plates, cups and utensils. Bev brought in bagels, lox, cream cheese, and blintzes, along with fruit slices and cheese. Coffee came in a shiny chrome carafe, with orange juice and some champagne – “For mimosas!” Les noted. I could see myself having people over during the summer, taking off an apron as I finished bringing in a steaming bowl of vegetables – broccoli, asparagus, carrots, a regular smorgasbord to go with the bread and salad we’d already be enjoying.

Les crashed my fantasy by loudly asking, “Janie! You never went back to Hillel. I thought you were Jewish! You said you didn’t have a bat mitzvah, right?” As usual, she didn’t wait for an answer. “I remember mine. I was twelve. I felt like I was all of a sudden grown-up. One day I’m a kid, riding bikes, getting skinned knees, playing hide-and-seek. Then, Bam! There’s this solemn ritual, everybody humming in Hebrew and – poof! – I’m a woman. I know it didn’t happen all at once, still it seems like right then I had my period, got my first real bra, began to think about what I really wanted to be when I ‘grew-up.’ It’s like I was two different people, before and after. I remember things that happened, people I knew, from before, but they don’t seem to be the memories that make me, me.” She tailed off pensively.

Jeanne jumped into the rare break in a Leslie monologue. “There are things that happen, in our brain, that make those earlier memories less stable, less forceful in a conscious way. Something about myelination of the neurons. What’s happening to us now, from when we go through puberty until our brain stops developing, makes us who we’re going to be.” She sounded so authoritative, so rational. Still, I wasn’t convinced.

“I think there’s more,’ I countered, “not just our thoughts and memories, that determines how we act. I see those moms and their kids, in my psych lab, they can’t talk to each other yet, but they can communicate. And Freud, yes, he was more a philosopher than a scientist, still, he was onto something when he talked about how our earliest childhood experiences, with our mothers especially, set a pattern, a template, for everything we become. I mean, we’re not insects or frogs, we’re not one thing before, and then something totally different after we go through puberty, or a bat mitzvah or whatever. We’re more like snakes, getting bigger and bigger each time we shed our skins, but still recognizable as the same person, growing, evolving.” Thinking of getting hit on the head in Chicago, I went on. “Even when something suddenly makes us see the world in a different way, we still carry all our old memories with us, our previous ways of doing things. We get more complex, life gets more complicated.”

Mike and Bev sat quietly in one corner, a gentile minority to the three of us contemplating our spiritual and temporal growth. I noticed they were making a big dent in the bagels and lox, though.

Wiping some cream cheese off his upper lip, Mike started, “This stuff is really good. Where did you say you got it, Bev?”

“There’s this little deli down on the Square. Sunday morning you have to get there early if you want it soft and warm like this.” She smiled contentedly, sipping on her mimosa.

Mike plowed on, looking first at Leslie, then Jeanne, finally resting his gaze on me. Inwardly, I prepared for a lecture. Instead he looked up, then warmly back to me. Without pontificating, he started, “You’re right. There’s a continuity, at least if we’re sane, from when we’re born, and probably even before, an unbroken chain of fundamental personality.” He turned to Leslie, then Jeanne. “I wonder, do you feel the same as when you were ten? You may not act the same, or have the same beliefs. Even so, you are, deep down, one person your whole life, aren’t you?”

Jeanne nodded, but I knew she would not let him off so easily. “OK, yeah, I get it, I’m the same, but I’m always growing, like Janie says. I still think the things that count, that feed our growth, they come when we’re ready, after our brains are ready to absorb them. What is it, Janie, there’s a time when a kid starts to get a sense of self? Before that, they can’t tell the difference between themselves and the outside world? Well, that doesn’t happen all at once.”

Mike put in, “You said ‘Our brains stop developing.’ When does that happen?”

“Supposedly, around 25, 26, 27.”

“And so we’re very volatile then, between puberty and when our brain has grown?” He pursed his lips in thought. “Hmm, I got to thinking, when I worked on the psych ward, that no one should see a shrink between the ages of 15 and 25, ‘cause we’re all crazy then anyway. It’s hard work, being young. And some of us, I guess, don’t make it.” He spread his arms wide, as if to ask everyone at the table, “Are we adults yet? It feels like it, kind of, sitting here at ‘brunch’, no one older serving us or telling us how to act. But what…how will we know when we’re adults, when we’re officially grown up? When I start a career? When we have kids, get married, vote? What?”

Leslie snickered, “When you have a checkbook and start paying all your bills yourself.” She turned serious. “No, you’re an adult when you start thinking for yourself, when you’ve done enough, seen enough, to know what’s right for you. You stop letting the world tell you what to do, who you should be.” She stood up, grabbing dishes, empty or not, and took them back to the kitchen. Water sloshed, pots clanged as she washed and dried in there.

Mike took up the thread. “In that case, I think we’re always as grown up as we’re going to be, each moment in time. Right now, I’m as old as I’ve ever been, right? When we were sixteen,” he said, looking over at me, “you acted like – or at least you seemed to me like – you knew exactly who you were, and where you were going. That’s changed a bit, gotten broader, fuller, but you’re still the same you, the same Sarah Jane Stein I first knew. Do you remember?”

I answered, “I remember then, but I remember so much more now, everything that’s happened since. Every memory builds on the one before, making you richer. You can see more, hear more, learn more. There’s just more to you. And it never stops, does it?”

“Memories are all we are, then, is that what you mean?” Mike asked.

Jeanne and Bev munched on the cookies Leslie had brought in, staring out the bay window, when Mike pointed out, “I’ve got to get back sometime this evening. We ought to go back to your dorm.”

Walking back to Radcliffe, Mike picked up on memories again. “That all made me think…there is a split that happens, right around puberty. It could be that our brain does change, physically, like Jeanne was saying. But you know better than any of us, babies have a real personality even before birth. Their mothers and others they come into contact with react to that personality, and babies react in turn, building memories right from the start, about the world, about people, mostly about emotions, ‘cause they don’t have any words.”

I just nodded, didn’t want to stop wherever he was going. Times like this, when he was teasing through his thoughts, sifting, rejecting, accepting, trying to analyze, synthesize, were when I liked him best.

“I feel like I’m a different person since I was in eighth grade, about thirteen. After that, I stopped living in the moment, using my past only for casual entertainment. When somebody asked me, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I stopped saying something childish like ‘baseball player’ or ‘mountain climber’. I took the question seriously. How much of who I am now comes from the times I can’t remember?”

He wasn’t asking rhetorically, so I offered, “The thing I see between those babies and their mothers is love. Moms, most of them anyway, love their kids without any thought or hesitation. It’s the first thing most of us experience. And babies eat it up. We all want to be loved, it’s like we’re born that way. Everything flows from that.” I thought of the unlucky ones who came through the study room, age ten or twelve and already at war with the world. “If you don’t get it the right way, or enough of it, you can get stunted, shunted down a path it’s hard to find your way back from. Then there’s all the kids you play with, you learn how to be with people, but in the end, you find your way back, to love, spiraling up from your mother, to friends, to just one person, and then renew the cycle with your own kids.”

Mike stopped, took his hands out of his pockets, and spread them apart, first close together, then gradually wider and wider, a fisherman telling about the big one that got away. “My memories, the older I get, the less time any one moment represents in my whole life. When I’m fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, with so very few of them, they all seem outsized, laden in importance. Now, I’m doubled in age since then, compared to turning thirteen, so each thing that happens, each memory in the past and each one I create today, becomes, little by little, less and less meaningful, in the overall scheme of things.”

I added, “And the earliest ones, the ones we’ve had the longest, those are the easiest to remember, to come back to, and the last to leave us, I’ve heard. I can recite the words to so many songs I heard in the car when I was fourteen riding with my sister, singing along.” Mike nodded vigorously, smiling in agreement. “I bet when I’m senile, in an old folks’ home, I’ll still be able to sing ‘It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to’…”

Mike chimed in, “…you would cry too if it happened to you.” We both laughed, acknowledging that silly as the song was, it apparently made a big impact on both of us.

“Our memories are who we are,” Mike pronounced.

“Memories are who we are,” I murmured in assent.

Back in my room, I picked up a book, hoping to get a little studying in before dinner. Mike lay back on the bed, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. His eyes fluttered as he breathed softly, evenly. Then, his leg kicked suddenly, and he asked, “Ever wonder where we go when we sleep?”

Sighing, I pointed at my book, then acquiesced with, “What’s that Hamlet said, ‘To sleep, perchance to dream’? I don’t think we go anywhere, we just stop making memories. We’re in suspended animation, with a few random thoughts and emotions in our dreams to confuse us when we wake up.”

“But if memories are who we are, then don’t we cease to exist when we’re asleep? And when you’re dead, are your memories gone, too?”

“Maybe not, as long as the last person who knew you is still alive, making memories about you.” As I said this, I came over to the bed, pushing him towards the wall, trying to stop this endless sophomoric philosophizing. It didn’t work. For the next fifteen or twenty minutes, we made a few more memories together. What stuck with me was the electric quivering inside my legs, flowing up through my curling fingers, into my skull, a small explosion moving from the back of my neck, then shooting forward and out my temples. I lay back, satisfied, ignoring his intensity.

“Why’d you stop,” he moaned.

All I could do was breathe deeply and smile. When I’d calmed down, I pulled him back towards me. Once again, his words had captured me, torn away my sense of self. I wanted to envelop him, pull everything I could out of him. He obliged.

After we’d dressed, he gathered his books, ready to leave. “What was that all about?” I asked, shaking my head with a small rattle of a laugh.

“I think,” he said, “that was a double dip ice cream cone we shared.” I cocked my head quizzically. In response, he went on, “You got your flavor, I got mine, but we each got to taste them both.”

I wondered what it would be like if we had some extended time together, if Mike weren’t always coming and going, spending a night or a weekend with me, then going away for a week, or a month, only writing letters, not talking to each other. I saved up my feelings all that time, they took over when he came back. We weren’t growing together, were singing the same song over and over, not writing any new ones. He always talked about dreams, the future, building a life together. But we weren’t together, not this way, not in two college towns a two hour drive apart. And he wouldn’t try and build that life with me, wouldn’t make the effort to spend the summer here, with me.

iii

Spring break that year, I stayed at Bev and Leslie’s place, thankful for the solitude. So much riled my brain that week. Women’s literature, with Dr. Shulmeister, opened a new arena of intrigue, providing a sense of mystery and power. She loved little vignettes, forgotten stories of women taking control of their own destiny, forging new rules to follow. The best combined tragedy and strength, like Franceska Mann. A Polish-Jewish ballerina, in the fall of 1943 she arrived by train at Auschwitz, stuffed into cattle cars with 1700 other women. Told at first they must undress for disinfection before moving on to Switzerland, in exchange for 600 German POWs held by the Allies farther south, they soon realised what was on the other side of the doors. Franceska, so the story goes, mesmerized the SS officers with a slow strip-tease. Down to her shoes, she removed one, stabbed the nearest Nazi with its stiletto heel and, grabbing his gun, proceeded to kill another. This led all the other women to attack their captors, clawing and ripping at their clothes, tearing noses and ears, and generally creating havoc. Soldiers rushed in from all over the camp, mowing down the women with machine gun fire.

In March she introduced us to Anais Nin, her diaries and novels. That week by myself, I had time to read A Spy In The House of Love. The main character, Sabina, fascinated and frightened me. Married to Alan, a stable, stolid, patient man, she seeks excitement in serial assignations with exotic men. Lyrical and episodic, this tale of erotic heights and guilt-filled home life forced me to think about my own needs and desires. Sabina reveled in the pleasure she found with men, but did not feel a need to stay with them. She seemed to say, “I did not choose to love, love chose me.”

Love and sex for me had so far been tightly bound together; either without the other seemed wrong, stunted, denying the value of both. On the one hand, there were girls who claimed to be in love, but were saving “it” for marriage.I’d known others who managed the separation without a care, or at least not one they would admit – girls who thought nothing of a one-night stand, knowing only someone’s first name, then never seeing him again. I’d already foreclosed the first option, and was glad I had. I wondered if that were a slippery slope to the second, if I could be someone who could love more freely. Or was I a serial monogamist: would I need to let go of Mike before allowing another man so fully into my life?

Strange posters appeared that week across the deserted campus. The upraised fists, bright red and angry, reminded me the SDS had vowed to bring Harvard to its knees in April. The College still offered ROTC, Reserve Officers Training Corps, as a credit class. With college deferments in question and, despite the assurances of newly-elected Richard Nixon, no end in sight to the war, more men were taking this option to avoid the draft and gain some control over their terms of service. In addition, the Harvard Corporation was gobbling up land all around the campus, threatening to throw out the low-income workers who called it home. The SDS seized on these two issues, planning demonstrations against the University itself, no longer content with objecting to the government and corporations. Rumors of building take-overs dominated conversations among the few of us still in town.

Sunday evening before classes would start again on April 7, Bev and Leslie returned. Les had been admitted to Harvard Law the coming fall, and she brought Howard Lehrman along for dinner.

“Sarah, are you going to join us, when the SDS takes action?” he asked. “Keep your eyes open, something big is going to happen. We’re all going to have to choose, do we stand with peace and freedom, or do we cow-tow to Harvard?”

I thought of Mike and his roommate Rich, singing Desolation Row over and over again. “Dylan’s right, as usual. ‘Everybody’s asking, which side are you on?’ What are the issues? I’ve heard people want to take over a building, call Pusey’s bluff on ROTC.”

Les and Howard filled us in on the grievances. The punishment of nine students who had led the sit-in at Paine Hall in December against ROTC; Harvard President Nathan Pusey’s unwillingness to go all the way in abolishing ROTC; the aggressive incursion of the University into the neighboring communities; the increasing lack of relevance in college classes, the watering  down of black and women’s studies. Bev and I stayed silent while Leslie and Howard became more and more agitated.

“Tomorrow, Les, tomorrow, we’re going to University Hall, give them an ultimatum. Six points.” Howard ticked them off on his fingers.  “Abolish ROTC, give Harvard scholarships instead, restore the Paine Hall demonstrators’ rights, roll back rents in Harvard buildings to January 1968, don’t knock down the University Road apartments for that Kennedy school, and let those 200 black workers in Roxbury keep their homes. Simple enough.”

“And if they don’t agree?” Les asked.

“Like I said, be ready. Be in the Yard, outside Uni Hall, see what happens. We all need to support this.”

But they didn’t go to Uni Hall on Monday. Classes resumed, and it seemed all might return to normal. I’d be in Dr. Shulmeister’s class on Wednesday, talking about Anais Nin’s erotic vision, then sitting behind the one-way mirror in Child Development, recording mother-baby interactions. The war would go on forever, ROTC graduates would eagerly join the fight, Harvard would buy up more and more land, expelling their own workers. 

Tuesday, Howard found me on the Widener steps after morning classes. Head exposed to the biting April wind, his hair a black flag across his forehead, he furiously wound a camel-hair muffler around his neck with one hand, while the other struggled to retain control of a large batch of paper, fluttering dangerously close to premature dispersal.

“Jane – Hey! Come and help me!” he exhorted, waving the papers above his head. One fell from the rest; I grabbed it before it could fly away.

“STOP HARVARD EXPANSION!” ran across the top. It continued, “What is Harvardization? Harvardization is the transformation of Cambridge into a concentrated center for private and government research – the creation of an insulated city for developing weapons and programs to oppress people here and overseas…” Complaints about the “upper-middle class”, “federal government”, and “the Harvard Corporation” followed.

“Take some over to Radcliffe, will ya? Hand them out to everyone you see, a few in each dorm lounge, go into Hilles, drop some off there.” Howard thrust the whole bunch at me, then dug into his satchel for more. I looked up at Widener, torn between studying for those classes on Wednesday with Shulmeister and Kagan, and following Howard’s passion, wrapping myself into the SDS cocoon of anger and action.

I grabbed the papers, and said, “What’s next?”

“Read it, hand them out, then come to the meeting tonight. We’re going to decide what to do, when to strike, and how. Lowell hall, after dinner, OK?”

Lowell’s lecture hall was massive, could hold hundreds. Students filled most seats, but I found Howard’s wiry mop-top and scooted into the empty chair beside him. He was buzzing, turning around on all sides, engaging allies it seemed. At the lectern, two guys huddled, checking their watches.

Howard dropped his voice, leaned over to me, and pointed, “See that guy on the left? That’s Kazin. He’s a junior, he’s really smart, knows how to lead a mob like this.” Tall and lean, with a slight stoop, he had deep set eyes and a gentle smile. “Chaos all around him, there he is, coasting above it. He’ll get us somewhere, I bet.” Howard then explained the dilemma facing SDS leadership: two factions, the Worker Student Alliance and the New Left Caucus, saw different routes forward. The WSA was for immediate action, an occupation of Harvard’s administrative nerve center, University Hall. The NLC, Howard’s group, favored a more measured approach, “educate” the campus first, expand the engagement outside of those in Lowell, find strength in numbers. Arguments, some raging, some quiet, see-sawed for several hours. They took three votes, straw, “final”, and, when that didn’t go the way WSA wanted, another, “binding”, all with the total 180-140, to march that night to Pusey’s house, present him with demands, then spend five days in campus-wide discussion, returning on Monday for an occupation if Pusey would not relent.

Even though it was past midnight, those of us who’d stayed filed out, and marched to Pusey’s house on Quincy Street. A few campus police stood guard at the outside gate, but swiftly stepped aside when they saw the size of the crowd. Kazin knocked vigorously for several minutes on the solid wooden door. He loudly, but politely, announced our presence. Finally, like Luther with his theses, he tacked our six demands below the knocker, and we all turned back, heading home at last.

A powerful energy filled my head, as I walked through the Yard with Howard. I should have been exhausted, but felt exhilarated. “Something’s really going to happen, isn’t it? I don’t know what, but this many people, they can’t ignore it any longer.”

Howard stayed silent, walking slowly. Finally, he said, “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

When he didn’t elaborate, I asked, “What don’t you know?”

“Everything. Will they listen? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure a few hundred kids tacking paper on his door isn’t going to make Pusey do anything. And if he doesn’t, I know those guys in the WSA aren’t going to just talk and wait. Something’s going to happen tomorrow – today by now, huh? We’re going to have to decide how much we’re willing to risk, to get some movement here.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked with some trepidation.

“I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet. I heard some people talking about taking over a building tomor…today. At noon, or something.”

“Where? Which one?”

“All I heard was ‘Be at Mem Church before noon.’ I’ll go there, listen to what people are saying. Are you going to your classes?”

I hesitated. I could feel Howard’s excitement, but I knew these two, Women’s Lit and Psych Lab, were what I really wanted out of Harvard, not another noisy demonstration. “No, I can’t drop them. I’ll be out at noon. Where will you be?”

“Let’s see, why don’t I say I’ll be at John Harvard’s statue between noon and 12:30. Find me there if you want.”

I realized I’d better get some sleep.

xi

That languid week after Labor Day, Mike and I spent most afternoons at his house or mine. Walking around my neighborhood, sitting on the edge of his pool, packing for school, we caught each other up on our summers.

One day, lying in the sun on lounge chairs in his back yard, we listened to a small radio playing softly, something about “I fought the law, and the law won”. I showed him the hair they’d taken off in the ER, a swirling mass of black lying at the bottom of a paper bag. I imagined a robin swooping down to grab the mess for its nest.

“Can I have that?”

“Why, what would you do with it?”

“I’m always reading how people keep a strand of hair in a locket, a necklace, a reminder.”

I countered, “No, I think people did that when someone close died. That’s a little morbid, Mike.”

“Well, didn’t you almost die?”

“No, not even close. I just got shoved down when the fence fell over. Somebody kicked me there,” I said, pointing at the bandage on my temple. Anger flared inside. “You could have been there, you know. We stayed at this family’s apartment, a big place, people were lying everywhere on couches, on the floor. I got to listen to them planning, I got to see how dedicated they were.”

He got up, sat at the edge of the pool, and rhythmically kicked his feet in the water.

“Who’s place was it again?” he innocently asked.

“Howard Lehrman. His parents had left town. He knows Charlie from the SDS before. He went Williams, going to Harvard Law this fall.”

Mike looked back at me, raising his left eyebrow inquisitively.

I couldn’t seem to stop myself from saying more. “He’s so intense. Says he wants to be a lawyer, not so he can join some big Wall Street firm. He wants to form a group to help inner city people, tenants against landlords, fight back against companies who don’t treat their workers right. You’d like him – we could meet up when we can get back to Cambridge.”

Mike nodded, still kicking, soft semi-circular waves radiating from his calves. Unlike before, when he’d write about, say, Martin Luther King’s killing, or how the mind might work, his letters to me that summer had been filled with stories of the swim club where he’d worked. He wrote all about the little kids and the young teen-agers who raced on the team, names I couldn’t connect with faces, but which had been his world that summer. Even the music he mentioned was, I thought, frivolous, childish, what they were calling bubble-gum pop. Blond streaks ran through his hair, shiny like his nut-brown skin from days sitting in a lifeguard chair.

“You really liked being at that pool, didn’t you?”

He patted the concrete walk with his right hand. “Here, sit with me.” As I dropped down, he lifted up my hair, pulled back the dark band covering the small cotton bandage, touching gently, then kissing it lightly. “I wish I could make it better.” Silently, I thought, if you’d been there…Anger at his absence that day still boiled inside, fighting with the power of his presence now, the warmth radiating from his skin, the sweetness of his comforting gestures. “Well, you can’t, so let’s forget about it, OK?” Quietly, that little radio now aired what I called the Paranoia Song – “there’s battle lines being drawn, nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.”

He looked down at the pool, and reflected, “I heard Dick Gregory was there, the comedian, leading the marchers one afternoon.” I nodded. He went on, “You know, he came to Calvin last winter, doing a college tour. Talked about his hunger strikes – he did look frail. Anyway, I’ll never forget one bit he did.” Mike hunched over a little, a fire flared in his face, as he imitated Gregory’s punch line. “He said, ‘Here’s what I want y’all to do, next summer when you’re sitting with your parents, watching the people marching, rioting, the cities burning. I want you to grab a copy of the Declaration of Independence, stand up on top of that TV, and shout down at your folks, I want you to shout as loud as you can, drown out that TV, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” That’s why those folks be flooding the streets, they want delivery on that promise.’ Funny…true…powerful.”

I took his hand from my head, squeezed his fingers while placing them firmly on his thigh, and drew my own hand away. I thought, You felt that way, and you didn’t go with us to Chicago? Out loud I said, “I want to hear about those kids, which ones did you say you like so much?”

He sighed, then brightened as he launched into one of his non-stop stories. “You mean Molly? She’s such a good swimmer, so fast. She and the other kids, they’d all take their bikes to the club, stay there for the day, then they’d go back home to get ready for their evening swim practice with the big team. Anyway, they kind of adopted me as a mascot or something. I was the youngest lifeguard there, so they saw me almost as one of them. I let them sit in my car, it was always a treat to get into the bucket seats. I’d ride my bike with them sometimes, on the gravel roads in the woods around the club. Evenings when they didn’t practice, and I got off early, we’d all sit around, looking at fireflies, making fun of people. Not like school at all, where everything’s so serious. People always talking about the war, or whether women should be allowed in, or what grad school they’re trying to get into.

“And then the littler kids, under ten, I got to coach them. The coach gave me the “eight-and-unders” to work with. Everybody else sees them as impossible, they don’t want to listen, just play around in practice. For some reason, they paid attention to me, actually did the work in practice. Of all the age groups, they were the best on the team this year.”

That evening at the Harrison house, we we ate our dinners in front of TV. They were getting ready for the Miss America Pageant, apparently a family tradition. Shelly and Mike talked eagerly about Bert Parks, his smile, and the nuances of the talent competition. First, though, the local newsman tut-tutted about some protesters in Atlantic City. On the screen we watched flickering images of women of all ages throwing undergarments into a metal barrel, then setting them afire.

Jack snickered through his nose, Shelly laughed, and Grace quietly said, “Good for them.”

Mike asked, “Why would they want to do that, burn their bras? Wouldn’t it be uncomfortable?”

“It’s symbolic, Mike,” I tried. “Throw off the trappings of societal oppression, and all that.”

His eyes lit up. “Oh, like burning draft cards, huh?”

xii

That semester, Bev and Leslie moved into an off-off campus apartment. Once a single family home, each of the three stories had been carved into a separate unit with tiny bedrooms, kitchen, bath, and a dining/living area flowing out to a bay window overlooking Oxford Street. They started holding Friday evening dinner parties, experimenting with macrobiotic recipes featuring chickpeas, rice and lentils.

“But no sugar, milk, or butter?” Jeanne asked, the first time she and Marcia and I went over. “Isn’t it a little bland?”

Bev smiled, “I’m learning a lot about spices now. Besides, I’ve lost 15 pounds since June. You might consider it, Jeanne. It’s one of the best reasons to go off-campus, cooking for ourselves. None of that heavy dorm food any more.”

They looked so adult, so grown-up, Bev and Leslie, managing an entire sit-down meal for themselves and the three of us. White linen covered the scarred wooden desk they’d converted into a dining table. Mismatched plates, stemware, and utensils from a thrift store proudly sat arrayed in front of wobbly straight-backed chairs. Marcia, Jeanne, and I caught up on our summers while Bev and Les made several trips bringing all the platters in.

With a slight giggle, Marcia confided, “Well, I decided that ‘everything but…’ vow isn’t worth it.”

Jeanne looked puzzled, then seemed to remember, “Oh…oh! Who?”

“Some guy from high school, we met each other one night by accident on line for a movie. We were both there alone, ended up sitting together. It was The Thomas Crowne Affair. After Bonnie & Clyde,  I wanted to see Faye Dunaway again. She was so elegant! Anyway, in the dark, he looked a little like Steve McQueen, so one thing led to another, I guess.”

Jeanne looked worried. “It was…OK? Fun?”

“We kept it up all summer, so I guess I’d have to say, ‘Yes’. But he goes to Stanford, so that’s over now.” Marcia turned to me. “You still with Mike?”

A simple enough question, I thought. I scratched my forehead where the new hair bristled and itched. Even with these friends, I wasn’t ready to verbalize the nagging little worries forming like the first fluff of cloud on the horizon of a glorious, sunny summer afternoon. “We didn’t spend all that much time together, me going to the Vineyard and Chicago, him to Colorado. We both had jobs, too. We did manage to get together some, so I have to say, yeah, I’m still with Mike.”

Leslie entered  with a bowl of hummus and a plate of floppy pita bread. “You still love him, Janie?” she sneered sarcastically. My scar under that itchy hair throbbed. Why did I always feel like I was defending something evil when I talked about Mike with Leslie? My consternation must have shown, as she went on, “I’m just kidding. He’s a good guy. A little young, maybe, but a good guy.”

I realised Leslie’s chest jiggled as she turned back to the kitchen. I leaned over and whispered, “Is she not wearing a bra?”

Jeanne said, “Walking around school this past week, I noticed, everybody came back dressed…differently.”

It was true. I may have been one of the few girls still wearing John Meyer skirts. Almost everyone else had a different uniform. Some wore Army surplus chic, baggy pants and wrinkled khaki jackets, the urban revolutionary look. Others, the ones who’d been in California that summer, had on shimmery flowing floor length dresses and tinkling jewelry. Some would take a silky Indian bedspread with paisley patterns, wrap it around their waist, and call it good. Incense wafted down the dorm halls that fall, with sitar or gamelan music replacing raspy Dylan or warbling folk tunes.

I wasn’t ready for any of that. The jeans I’d worn in Chicago lay at the bottom of a dresser drawer. Mike and I were planning on seeing Funny Girl the next evening when he came up from Calvin. Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice still seemed to me the epitome of every Jewish girl’s dreams.

On the way back from the movie, I asked him, “What did you think?”

He hesitated. “I like the way she sings. She’s so…strong, emotional. Passionate, puts everything she has into the music, the way she builds to the end of a song.” He paused, looked away. “But then, Janis Joplin’s like that, too. And she screeches howls, lets it all come out.”

Intellectually, I couldn’t deny that. I could see why people liked her. But emotionally, she was too raw, all id and anger. No hope, no dreams, just the agony of the blues. Afraid to argue over music, I switched to, “What classes did you finally sign up for?”

Relieved, he announced, “Philosophy, Religion, and Psych, that stuff. I also liked the German Literature in Translation class I took last year.”

“Because…”

“I like Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, so much.”

“Why”

“He combined that rational, analytic, structured German thing with passion and emotion. Then there’s Gunter Grass, Herman Hesse. That’s the kind of stuff I like in books, I think. I’m done with most of the med school requirements now. So I’m switching to stuff that’s fun.”

“Like?”

“The Divine Comedy.”

Puzzled, I raised my eyebrows.

He laughed, “After last year’s first semester fiasco – I got ‘C’s’ in Organic Chem and English Lit, remember? – I want to take it easier this year. This one’s a gut. Everybody gets an ‘A’, I heard, it’s mostly for the football players. All we have to do is read, not the whole thing, even  the first part, about Hell. Then, I’m taking Contemporary Theology of India, as a Pass/Fail. Physics, that’s the last thing I need for med school. And, another Pass/Fail, Analysis of Interpersonal Behavior.”

“What’s that?”

“Have you ever heard of a ’T-Group’? Training Group? It’s what they do out on the west coast, where people sit in a circle and talk to each other, then analyze the group dynamics.”

“Still headed for psychiatry,” I mused.

“Yeah. And I’m realising that if I take five classes each semester, not four, I could finish in three years.”

“Then you’d go right to med school?”

“Probably not. Some of them, like Harvard, have an age requirement, you have to be 21 to enroll. I’d only be 20. So I’m only taking four courses this semester, then five the next two. I’ll get the last semester senior year free”

“What would you do?”

“I don’t know. Go somewhere? Work somewhere? I don’t have to figure that out yet. What about you?”

“Oh, the usual. English, and Contemporary Cinema. Then there’s this new class they started this year, part of the Women’s Studies program. Leslie told me about it, it’s with a new professor they hired, Dr. Shulmeister. The first books are ones I’ve already read, Freidan and de Beauvoir. After that, it’s supposed to get more into literature and philosophy. I think I’m really going to like it. Finally, I liked Jerome Kagan so much, that professor in my Psych Intro class, I’m going to take his Child Development this year.”

“It’s still kids and psych, right?”

“Still kids and psych.”

xiii

A few weeks later, on a Friday afternoon, Leslie found me in Hilles Library, indiscriminately underlining Kagan’s Birth to Maturity. With her usual abruptness, she asked, “Janie, know where Jeanne and Marcia are?”

I pointed my head behind me, where they sat at an imposing blonde-wood table surrounded by stacks of Genetics periodicals. She gathered us up, demanding, “Come on, ladies, we’re going to crash the party.”

Jeanne tried putting up a fight, but Marcia and I knew better.  We left our books behind, and followed her out to Shepard Street. She led us east, explaining as we went.

“You guys ever heard of Hillel?”

“Sure, aren’t they Jewish student groups?” I offered.

“Yeah, but do you know about the one here? There’s a guy there, Rabbi Gold, I saw in the Crimson he’s having these services, calls them ‘Worship and Study Congregations’. Says they’re ‘open to all’, men and women. I don’t know anybody from Radcliffe who goes there. We ought to call his bluff.”

Marcia countered, “Come on, Les, that’s not a place to pick a fight, not at a service.”

Leslie ignored her. Turning to me, she asked, “Jane, you have a couple of brothers, did they get a bar mitzvah?”

I hesitated, wondering how to show my family’s version of Jewish ritual in the best light. For my father, those coming-of-age parties were mostly about how much money could be collected for their college funds. “Sure,” was all I said.

“And did you get anything like that?”

“No.” I found my voice. “But I didn’t want to. I don’t really think too much about being Jewish, or even about God. Where we grew up, we were more concerned about trying to fit in, to not stand out, than about going to temple or following any rules. That was my mother, mostly.”

Jeanne chimed in, “I’ve heard about this Rabbi. He’s from Poland, was even at Auschwitz, somehow escaped, and got to Philadelphia.”

“Escaped from Auschwitz, huh? Wow…” Leslie mused.

We passed the Divinity School, and found the Hillel at the corner of Francis and Bryant. Entering, I saw Howard Lehrman talking to a short, smiling older man with thinning hair and scholarly glasses. Howard glanced over, and, seeing me, smiled and broadly waved us in. He introduced us to Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold, then pulled me aside, “Sarah, I didn’t know you were interested in Shabbat?”

“Not really, Leslie dragged us over. She’s on a feminist mission or something.”

“Hmm…Rabbi Gold’s past worrying about whether women and men should do this together. Even if there’s more than ten guys here, you’ll still get a chance to read and talk, don’t worry.”

Despite his assurances, I still felt awkward, uncomfortable. Leslie was full-throated in her participation, determined to prove herself as knowledgeable as anyone there. I remained silent, like someone tone-deaf at a party, afraid to sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ I didn’t go back for a long time.

xiv

In December, Mike unexpectedly came up to Cambridge on a snowy Friday evening. I got the call from our house mother as I sat studying for Child Development, cozy in my flannel nightgown and crocheted quilt, a hand-me down from my sister.

“There’s someone here to see you, a Michael Harrison. Shall I send him up?” Mother sounded bemused, as if an orphan had arrived, lost and looking for his family. “He looks pretty cold.”

“No, I’ll come down.”

He did look a bit bedraggled, snow still melting in his hair. He wore a massive navy blue wool coat, suffering from too-many dry cleanings, wrinkled and flattened as if stored too long at the bottom of a chest.

“Can we s-s-s-sit over there?” he asked, indicating the dormant fireplace centered in the lounge.

I glanced at Mother, asking, “OK if we …?” She waddled around her desk, leaned down and fiddled with a switch. The gas flame burst up with that familiar odor.

“It was snowing all the way from Sturbridge on the turnpike,” Mike complained. “Every time I tried to pass a truck the slush spattered and smeared the windshield. I almost got blown off the road a couple of times.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked, a little irritated. I wanted to finish the chapter tonight, and doubted that would happen once we got up to my room.

“The Coach told me I wasn’t going to swim in the meet tomorrow, against Coast Guard,” he started.

“That’s at home, or in New London?”

“Home, so I don’t have to be back until noon.” Meaning he didn’t have to leave until the next morning. I inwardly groaned, then felt a familiar thrill flowing down the inside of my legs.

Sighing, I smiled and said, “I’ve really got to finish got to finish this chapter tonight, but I am glad you’re here. Let’s get warm and talk a bit, then can we study down here?” He only had a slim volume of the Divine Comedy with him, along with one of those composition books, the one with abstract black and white splotches on the cover. “It’s Kagan. I’ve got to learn more about newborns, and the first year.”

“How’s that going? There’s a lab with that class, right?”

“Uh-huh. Three hours, every other week. We watch through a one-way mirror, then talk about what we’re seeing in small groups.” I looked over at the fire, and shifted my sister’s blanket so it covered his legs as well. I went on. “It’s so amazing, to watch what they’re doing, mothers and their babies. He’s studying the smallest interactions, has us looking at where the moms’ eyes go and what the babies are doing, every little movement. He gives the mom a task, telling her, ‘Help your baby build something with these blocks. Don’t worry about us, you won’t even know we’re here.’ Then we’re supposed to fill in these charts, tables with lists of behaviors, trying to see which things the moms do are most successful in getting the babies to cooperate.”

“How old are they?”

“The babies? They’re about a year old. It’s fascinating, watching them with their moms.”

“What do you see? What are you learning?”

“Well, we’re supposed to be very analytical about it all, and I try and fill the charts in like he said. But all the time, I’m feeling, this is what love is, how it starts. It always starts with ‘mother-baby pair bonding.’ Trying to analyze, codify what love is, that takes all the mystery out, no?”

“Sometimes, I feel cursed,” Mike mused. I waited, wondering what he meant. “I …feel things, they come from somewhere inside my head. Instead of letting them flow on out, I have to analyze them, make sense of what I’m feeling, turn emotion into logical thought. I can’t stop thinking, sometimes I wish I could turn it off.” I mussed his hair, getting a thin smile and nose-laugh in return. He added, “She’s having us read Freud now, Introduction To Psychoanalysis.” “She” was the professor we called “Katy Winters” after the star of a long-running series of commercials for Secret Deodorant. She and her husband had gone from Harvard grad school to teach at Calvin, after a two year hiatus in India. There they’d studied micro-finance, he from the perspective of an economist, she as a psychologist interested in how impoverished women became empowered when given small loans to start a home-based business. We became fascinated with her for two other reasons. A short story appeared about them in the New Yorker, billed as fiction, with different names, but everything else from physical descriptions to their Harvard and India connections, matched them perfectly. When Mike pointed this out to her, she shyly admitted a friend had used them a springboard to get his writing career launched. And, probably more important, she was pregnant, almost full term, yet leading his Training-Group  class.

“She’s still teaching, hasn’t delivered yet?” 

“No…funny story. Amazing, really. You know, we have the group Monday and Wednesday, three hours each afternoon. Couple of days ago, she seemed a little antsy, kept going out to the bathroom, Turns out she was going into labor. Apparently, she went to the hospital right after class, had the baby in two hours, and left the next morning. I bet she comes back to the group next week.”

“Her first baby, right? That sounds quick.”
“Well, she is tall, you know, taller than me. That’s supposed to make it easier.”

“It’d be really cool, if she brought the baby to class.”

“We’ve already talked about that. She’s planning to, even told us to expect her to breast-feed.”

I tried opening my book again, pretending to read.  But the thought of Katy and her new baby, along with Mike’s immediate presence, short-circuited my attention. I rubbed his sleeve of his pea-coat, finding the fabric scratchy and thick.

“Where’d you get this? I haven’t seen it before. It looks warm.”

“It was my dad’s. He got it at the Naval Academy. He only wore it one year, when he went on his first cruise. Remember, that was also his last. He left there, always told us they let him go because his eyes turned bad, he got near-sighted or something. But I’ve always thought it was because he gets sea-sick. Real bad, can hardly fly in an airplane, one of those people who can’t sit in the back seat of a car. My sister’s the same way. Anyway, he was opening his old Navy footlocker, pulling out stuff to throw away or give away. He and Grace, now that they have a place to retire, they’re deciding what to take and leave behind. So it’s mine. A real Navy pea-coat. Not one of those fake surplus store ones, that only comes down part-way, This one keeps you warm and dry in the North Atlantic in the winter, ought to work great for days like this, right?”

I nodded, tried to seem impressed.

He went on, “My father wants to get started on building their house in Snowmass. He’s going back there over the break, to find an architect and builder. He’s rented one of the condos in the village, wants us all to go and ski. Maybe do it again in spring?” One of the girls had put the Beatles’ White Album on the dorm record player. “Rocky Raccoon” was playing, Paul warbling about the “Black Hills of Dakota”. Images of foreboding mountains simmered in my head.

“Are you going to go?”

“Shelly is, I will, too. I want to try skiing again, see how good I can get at it.”

“But won’t you miss swimming, won’t have a chance to practice?” I found myself asking. What I really meant was, Won’t you miss me, miss our special talks? How can we remain together, apart?

“OK if we go upstairs now?” I asked. Nodding assent, he got up, shaking the coat off. A small rectangle on onion skin paper fell from a pocket. Already headed for the stairs, he didn’t notice. I picked it up. A few typed lines read:

Molly, I

Molly turns her eyes toward mine

and sinks a gaze in me that shatters

every fibre that I live by.

I do not know her, scarcely love her, yet she

owns me,

With her eyes, so blue, and hair, so

brown and golden from the sun

I am stunned by her quiet face and smile.

And so she holds me.

And then she speaks, her unformed mind

asserts itself on mine, taunts my openness;

apprehensive, where no incisive, perceptive glance

would care to go – 

She lives as still a child, though

I treat her as full-grown.

Sometime in July, 1968

Back in my room, I managed to slip the re-folded onion skin back into his pea-coat, draped over my desk chair, without him knowing.

vii

Avondale had been a way station to college for its student body. At Radcliffe, everyone expected to continue on to graduate school. Medicine, law, humanities – we all saw an academic career path unfolding before us. My freshman year had convinced me psychology was the right major; clinical psychology became my goal. I spent many evenings alone on my bed, flipping through the course catalogue for 1968/69. I kept coming back to Developmental Psychology, with Jerome Kagan again. I sensed a need to start from the beginning, to learn how children developed from infancy through adolescence, to understand how people create their emotions and build their inner lives. I could see myself spending years at Cambridge, absorbing all I could.

But first, our family would have one more summer on the Vineyard together. With school ending on the 24th, Mike and I decided to celebrate my birthday the next day in Menemsha, then we’d drive home so he could help clean out the swim club right after Memorial Day, ready for the  June 1st opening. On the way down, we talked about school.

“So how do you do this year? Still trying to be number one?” Mike teased.

I saw nothing funny about working hard to get good grades. “Half the school was number one in high school. I just want to do my best, learn as much as I can.”

“I’ve heard it said, they don’t award a valedictorian here at graduation, ‘cause no one’s smart enough to be number one at Harvard. I guess that goes double for Radcliffe?”

“Phi Beta Kappa, Cum Laude, Magna and Summa, those are all a big deal here. I see it as competing with, not against, the other people at school, like we’re all in it together, trying to help each other. There’s so much work, I don’t have time to worry about what somebody else is doing.”

Mike smiled and added, “They also say Harvard deliberately admits a ‘happy bottom quarter’. You’re right, everyone there is so smart, so driven, so accomplished, but still, if they’re going to give grades and rank people, somebody’s got to be at the bottom.”

I thought about this, then said, “You might be right. The kids who have to worry about rank and test scores, those who want to go to med or law or B-school, and some science programs, they seem the most competitive. Then there’s these guys whose parents have had money forever, live in the Hamptons or somewhere, went to prep school. They know they’ve got a job sewn up. Some of them will never have to work a day in their lives. But they’ve got to get that degree, because grandad or their father did. So they do enough to stay in school, meet the requirements, and that’s all they need.”

“The gentlemen’s ‘C’,” Mike replied.

“At Radcliffe, though, there’s very little legacy. Everyone seems to know where she’s going, what she’s aiming for. It’s a top-heavy place, no loiterers at the bottom.”

As we pulled up to the ferry line, Mike looked over at me and asked, “What are you doing after you get home from here?”

I decided to try one last time. “I’ve asked you this before, I know. I really want you to go with me to Chicago. Charlie, and some guys from the SDS at Harvard, are going to the convention there. I’m joining them. It’s important, Mike! You sure you can’t take some time off that week?” I looked back at him, his tanning face, his graceful arms. I felt that pull I always got being around him. I couldn’t shake another feeling, though, that we didn’t make a seamless picture, that we weren’t like those optical illusions my mother and I had talked about at Christmas break.

Mike sighed. “I’d like to go. I don’t know if I can get time off. I haven’t even started work there yet.” That was the best I was going to get from him, so I let it drop.

On the island, we headed for our beach between the Bight and the Sound, the one where we’d capsized the Sunfish the year before. We took off our shoes and socks, rolled our pants up to our knees, and walked together past the dunes. Looking west towards the setting sun, we leaned back against the sand, where Mike pulled a folded page of lined green paper from his rear pocket, opened it up, and said, “Remember those daffodils you got me for my birthday? And those golden raisins we had at breakfast the next morning? With Bleu cheese on the bagel? I don’t know if I have anything like that for you, not even Hector Protector, but I do have this.”

He handed me the sheet, and I read these lines, written in green ink on the pale green page:

To Janie, On Her Nineteenth Birthday

All green and full and dark from night,

Our day’s first light now strokes our sight

And rising, grey and bleu above our eyes;

We vow our lives

Together.

A special time, a special year is here and

Gone and yet to come; but we must mark one

          off from the rest

and pause, and rest, quite blest and

Tender smiling.

Your special day, our special life, no fear no fight

Against our time together.

We are but one

who lives in ever-present rolling love;

And I present my present for your day –

My present: wishful presence, for a day,

All days and every day

And night

Which slips up into dawn

As dark to blue lights up

The green, and you

And me.

As we walk, your yellow wrap will crinkle

in my arms.

As close we walk,

As close we talk

As close we are – 

    forever.

5-23-68

I watched the sun sink below the shoreline across the Bight. Every day that happens, I mused. Every day could be an ending. We rest at night, and start again in day’s first light. “Oh Geez,” I thought. “I’m beginning to think like him.”

viii

Back in Cincinnati, we spent every evening we could together before I returned to the Vineyard. Days when he worked early, Mike would come to my house, and watch the TV news with us, before we ate. Some nights we’d go to a movie, or walk outside in the warm spring evenings. By that time, my parents had acquiesced to his spending the night with me. He’d worked late that Wednesday night, closing the club, so we just fell asleep together on my little girl’s bed. Coming down to breakfast, an unnatural hush engulfed the kitchen. Dad was still there, seated at the table watching the little TV mom had recently installed.

“Is he going to be all right?” he asked.

“They don’t know,” Mom answered. “They took him to a hospital there in LA, no one’s saying anything. But it doesn’t look very good.”

“What happened, what’s going on?” I sensed fear and anger in equal measures from my parents.

“Robert Kennedy. He’s been shot.”

Mike seemed to breathe in all the air in the kitchen, then sighed while sitting down, shaking his head. He looked about to cry. “Why now, why now,” he kept mumbling. “Wasn’t one enough? First Martin Luther King, now this…”

All my questions came pouring out. “Do they know who did it? Where did it happen? When? What does it mean? Did they catch the guy?”

My Dad calmly went through the details reported on TV. The last thing he said was “Sirhan Sirhan.”

“Sirhan Sirhan, his first name is the same as his last? What does that mean? Where is he from?”

“They say he’s from Palestine.” my mother answered.

Mike looked at each of us in turn. A year ago, he’d asked me about the Six Day War, about Palestine and Israel, and why they couldn’t get along. He thought it was not a recent thing, but a feud going back thousands of years between two tribes over the same land. I told him what my family said about it, which was very little, that Jews had wanted a homeland after the Holocaust, and they got it after the war, like reparations. He’d seemed skeptical then, and looked ready to raise that question once more.

“So has he said anything?” Mike asked.

Dad replied in a monotone. “Somebody heard him saying afterwards, ‘I did it for my country.’ He didn’t get a chance to talk, that Olympic guy Rafer Johnson and Rosie Grier, the big football player, were right by Kennedy, and they wrestled him to the ground. I’m surprised they didn’t kill him right there.”

“No more Lee Harvey Oswalds, I guess,” I said. Dad let out a hollow laugh. Dad and Mike both had to leave for work. Mom and I began to sort out our feelings.

“Sweetie, are you OK?” she asked. “Everything will be all right.”

“How can you say that?” I almost screamed. “Bobby Kennedy was perfect, he was going to stop the war, help so many people, make us whole again. I don’t know if I want to live in a world like this, where anybody who says…who does something good, they get killed!” I started crying, Mom held me close, softly  saying, “There, there, I know, I know,” as we rocked back and forth in each other’s arms.

I pulled myself together, pushed away from her, and firmly announced, “That’s it. I’ve decided, I am going to Chicago with Charlie this summer. He’s right, we can’t let it go on anymore, all this has to stop.”

“Oh, honey, are you sure?” Mom looked worried.

That weekend, we left for Martha’s Vineyard. Charlie had told me earlier that spring, “Janie, I this could be the last summer we’re all going to be there together, you know. Henry has that job in New York, Lisa’s going to graduate next year, and Dad is getting tired of paying for a place he only gets to spend a few days in each summer.” If that were true, I was going to enjoy my final weeks there doing everything, going everywhere. Each morning, I took the Sunfish out on the Pond. Denise was big enough for Arlene to let her come with me. She looked so cute, bundled up in her orange life vest. Afternoons, Lisa and I, and sometimes Mom, would bike over to the towns, to Vineyard Haven or Oak Bluffs, and shop. Mom must have come back home with a dozen new scarves. Evenings featured sunsets, the Community Center, or a fire on the beach and a jigsaw puzzle after dark.

Throughout it all, Mike and I kept writing. Our letters seemed to center those days on kids. Mine featured Denise, and the playtimes I’d supervise with her and a few neighbor children, toddlers to school age. Even with only three or four of them, keeping them all safe at the edge of the water was a full time job. I watched each one, looking closely for signs of age-appropriate behavior. When I got a a chance, I started to read Kagan’s book on childhood development, comparing what he wrote to what I was seeing every day.

Mike seemed to have his hands full, as a lifeguard, and a volunteer coach for their swimming team. All he talked about in his letters was the joy he got from seeing them play, and playing with them. Their screams in the water, jumping and splashing on each other, their endless energy, their laughter. He seemed fascinated with the big Catholic families who used the pool and its lifeguards as a baby sitter. “Four, six, even eight! It might be hard work for the moms, but those kids look like they get to have so much fun with everyone at home. Each family a clan to themselves, I guess.”

One day, in late July, he wrote about a thunderstorm which emptied the pool. He was sent home, and told, “Looks like we’re done for the day.” Half way to Woodland Park, he saw a band of cerulean sky to the northwest butting up against the shimmering rain clouds overhead, heralding an end to the lightening threat. “I just had to go back to the club, to see those kids again.” The way he wrote it made it seem like he wasn’t talking about the younger ones. I wondered why I felt jealous, as I read between the lines.

ix

My parents insisted I find something, anything, that would “look good on my resume” during August. “Honey, don’t mope around here all day. Your friends from school, Lizzie, Jerry, Phil, all of them, have jobs. Mike – we never see Mike anymore, he’s off working at that swim club. Why don’t you call up the hospital, see if you can volunteer, something that would help when you apply to grad school.” My mother had never stopped telling me what to do, even when I showed I could get good grades and avoid trouble in high school. I thought getting into Radcliffe would end all that, but apparently not. Dad, usually willing to let his baby girl do what she pleased, stayed silent.

While I didn’t wear a white-and-red smock, they still called me a “candy-striper” at Cincinnati General Hospital. The campus sprawled over several blocks, full of ancient stone buildings, sweltering in the middle of summer. I spent the day pushing patients down to X-Ray, up to a ward from admitting, sometimes delivering charts or equipment. Occasionally, I got to take kids to the pre-op ward for a tonsillectomy. Listening to the little ones chatter, I marveled at how a five-year old simply takes life as it comes, without fear or worry. My heart sank whenever I heard a parent chase away non-existent demons. I wished they’d let the kid be a kid; they’re perfect just the way they are.

The last weekend of August, Charlie and I drove his old VW beetle through Indiana to Chicago. Along the way, he told me what to expect.

“We’re staying with someone I met last year at the SDS convention, Howard Lehrman. I think you’ll like him – he went to Williams, is headed to Harvard Law this fall. His parents have a place along the lake, in one of those apartments north of the city. They’ve left town during the convention. Free room and board, easy in, easy out. We can take the “L” from there downtown to the Hilton, where the Democrats are staying.”

At first sight, Howard resembled a Russian revolutionary. Wild wiry hair sprouted above his eyes, made smaller by thick, square wire-rim glasses. A mustache and goatee framed thin lips, atop which perched a flaring hawk nose, He wore baggy, wrinkled khakis, a faded thin denim shirt and red bandana around his neck, but still couldn’t hide his patrician North Side roots. His hands, thick veined on the back, uncalloused on the palms, emphasized his never-ending observations and pronouncements. Velvet toned, methodical and persuasive, he already possessed an assurance his views were right.

Not waiting for an introduction, he looked at me, smiled, and said, “Sarah Jane, is it? Charlie’s little sister, right? You don’t look like a Janie. What should I call you? Jane doesn’t sound right, you don’t look like my stodgy old aunt. Can I call you Sarah?”

Charlie cautioned, “Howie, I already told you, she’s got a boyfriend, at Calvin.”

Howard snorted, “Jock U.” I sensed his eyes rove up and down my profile, assessing, judging. I tried to catch them, hold him steady on my face. Sitting down, he went on, “Psych major, huh? Where are you going with that?” Not waiting for an answer, he got up again, started pacing, and finally told us, “Right, let’s meet up with some people, figure out our plan.’

Soon, the apartment filled with cigarette smoking sloppily-clothed young men, and a few languid girls, stringy long hair hiding their sullen faces. They talked only of “strategy” and “tactics”, what phrases they might chant, posters they would hold, their expectations of tear gas and arrests.

Monday, the first day of the convention, we reconnoitered the lake-shore park across from the hotel. Helmeted police set up steel fencing across the streets, creating a pen between the hotel and the lake. Others on horseback kept onlookers away. I noticed with apprehension the slick long black clubs dangling from their belts.

“They sure look ready for a fight,” Howard observed.

That evening, our little clan of protesters attempted consensus. Some, including all the women, asserted we should stand with the other protesters, resolute but non-violent. Others, the majority led most vocally by Howard, advocated for a more aggressive posture. My brother, Charlie, was oddly quiet during all the talk.

“The time is long past to play Gandhi. We have to push back, bring the fight home to them. Our brothers are dying in Vietnam. What are we afraid of?” Howard boomed.

The talk turned to self protection. Bandanas moistened against tear gas, which could also be used to cover our heads, so the pigs couldn’t drag us by our hair. No belts or pens, as those would be taken away at the jail. Sneakers, not loafers, to make running easier. Tuesday would be a practice run, feints and taunts, but trying to avoid direct confrontation. I stayed close to Charlie, feeling out-of-place in my cotton blouse and skirt. Charlie must have noticed, as we stopped to buy a pair of jeans for me on the way back to Howard’s place. I’d never felt right in them; to fit my hips and shorter legs, they ballooned around my thighs.  But I didn’t want to stand out, so I went along.

On Wednesday, the day Eugene McCarthy would finally be denied the nomination, we joined the massed crowd outside, ready to confront the delegates as they headed to the convention. More and more people came, filling the confined space cordoned off by the steel fence, our designated protest area. A low murmur built from near the lake, at first indistinct but forceful, rhythmic. Large TV cameras, some on platforms, panned across the crowd. Finally, those of us near the front heard the chant and joined in: “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!” We all seemed to move, to speak as one. Charlie and I drifted apart as everyone tried moved closer to the edge, where the temporary chainlink fence kept us from the street.

Suddenly, some of the bigger guys clambered up and over, while others repeatedly shook the barrier and finally pulled it down. I felt people all around me surge, moving towards freedom. I tried to stay, to swim against them, afraid of the police rushing at us with raised billy clubs and shields. Horses neighed on hind legs, snorting and spitting. Cops grabbed people indiscriminately from the leading edge of our group, yanking their limbs, pulling their hair. Dark blue armoured police vans awaited with open doors in the grassy area across the street. Some willingly went in as cops more forcibly tossed the stragglers. I lost sight of Charlie in the melee. I screamed his name, feeling terrified and alone.

I spun around, looking for my brother, who should have stood out in the crowd, wiry Jewish Afro atop his lanky frame. As I floundered, the mob pushed, shoved, and pulled in all directions. I finally fell down amongst the rampaging feet. A sharp clang reverberated in my skull, followed by bright flashes, and then darkness engulfed me.

I don’t know how long I lay there, but when I was aware again, Charlie, seated on the asphalt, was holding my head in his lap, rocking back and forth while holding his bloody shirt across my forehead. “Oh, my God, Janie, oh my God! Miriam’s gonna kill me, she’s just gonna kill me.”

I wanted to reassure him I was OK, not to worry about mom, she’d understand, but the pounding in my head overpowered that attempt. I let him pick me up, hold me steady as we slowly walked away.

x

In the ER, they shaved my temple before sewing up the two-inch long gash left by someone who must not have been wearing sneakers. The nurses were thoughtful enough to collect the hair after they cut it off, so I got to carry it back home in a paper bag.

“It doesn’t look that bad, with your head band over it,” Charlie observed when we stopped for lunch in Indianapolis. He was still dreading the return to Clifton, rehearsing possible cover stories. “Maybe we could say you fell down the stairs outside the convention or something?”

“Charlie, there’s no way around it. It’s really my fault, I should have taken better care of myself, watched what was happening and gone with the crowd, instead of trying to fight my way out.” Charlie needn’t have worried. I’d already called, given them the news about my head, keeping quiet when they sounded angry, telling me to be careful, simply saying, “Yes. mom, yes. Uh huh, all right, I will.”

Mom and Dad had of course watched the news, seen the beatings by the police that night, and knew we had been outside when the riot erupted. Any anger or blame they might have felt was overwhelmed by their relief we were both basically all right. I got hugs, and all Charlie got was a soundless reprimand, a click of the tongue and shake of the head from Dad. Charlie went up stairs to wash up, call Arlene.

Mom was first to speak. “Janie, was it worth it? I know how deeply kids feel things, how it all seems so important. When I was your age, in Cleveland, the depression was just starting. We didn’t have any time, didn’t have the luxury of complaining, that wouldn’t put food on the table.”

I started to object. She held up her hand. “No, wait. Hear me out. I don’t want to see you lose the chance you’ve got. You are a special person, Sarah Jane. Lisa’s still, probably always will be, a flighty self-centered play-girl. Henry, he doesn’t seem to have any real ambition. Charlie – Charlie’s very smart, and he’s got a beautiful family, he’s such a wonderful person. But I don’t see him changing, he is what he is. You…you, sweetie, have always had your eyes forward, always knew what you wanted in life. Even when you were five, we couldn’t tell you what to do. And you’ve made me – made us,” she added, glancing over at Henry, “so very proud, the choices you’ve made, the things you’ve done. I don’t want to see you throw that away, don’t want to lose you to people who only want to use you…to use you, I don’t know, as cannon fodder.”

“Well, what should I do? There’s so many things wrong with the world…”

“You can’t fix them all,” Dad interjected. “What was it that French guy said, in the book you told me about last year. What was his name, Vult-something?”

“Voltaire.”

“Yeah, that guy. What did he say?”

“‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin.’ We’ve got to tend our own garden.”

“Well, maybe that’s what you should keep doing. A little more topsoil, don’t forget to water, and fertilize.”

That night, as I tried to avoid laying the left side of my head on the pillow, I couldn’t sleep, partly from the pain, the headache, but partly from wondering what my garden was. My head was spinning, and not only from those pulsating stitches above my ear. Feeling like Dorothy, watching the tornado whirl outside her window, I saw my mother, my friends at school, Professor Kagan and his lectures about child development. I saw laughing kids, angry marchers, dying leaders. I saw a boy with beautiful hands who seemed so sure of where he was going, who said he loved me, and whom I knew I loved. Over and over, I thought, “I don’t know…I just don’t know…who’s going to tell me?”

I don’t know when I finally dozed off. I was still asleep at noon when Mom knocked on the door.

“Janie? Janie, you got a letter. From Mike.”

Janie – The most amazing thing happened. Here’s the story…

My father grew up in Miles City, on the windy high plains of Eastern Montana. He told us of skating on the frozen Yellowstone River in the winters, riding horses through the draws, and watching his father work as a deputy sheriff, banker, and rancher. His career took him and my mother first to Boston, then to Cincinnati, neither of which is much like Montana, or Grace’s Iowa, for that matter. I’ve told you about the long car trips we take each summer, to Seattle or California, where their families had ended up after WWII. On the way, whenever we drive through the Rockies, my father lights up, seems more alive.

After that trip to Sun Valley last Christmas, when we got hooked on skiing, he and Grace decided to go to Colorado this summer, to look for a retirement spot. They’d decided they wanted some place with land, where they could see and be in the mountains, where people would come and visit them, not the other way around. We looked outside of Boulder, in Vail, and along the continental divide near Dillon. We’ve spent several summer vacations in Aspen, hiking the mountains, trying to fish, admiring the scenery. So Jack took us back through there over Independence Pass on the way to Glenwood Springs. As we drove down into town, we heard on the radio a real estate ad pitching Snowmass, a new ski resort going up at the base of a mountain eight miles outside of town, still very much under construction.

We parked in the middle of the beginner ski slope, amidst the debris and dirt. Jack left us in the car, saying “Wait here, I’ll be right back. I just want to see what this is all about.”

Excited as that first morning skiing in Sun Valley, he comes back about an hour and a half later, saying “I want to take you to this lot we’re going to buy.”

Our jaws drop to the car floor. My father the engineer NEVER buys anything without thinking for two months, comparing a thousand prices, and making sure he isn’t being swayed by the emotion of the moment. Now he wanted us to see what he was so excited about.

We got there after 15 bone-cracking minutes in the jeep, and stopped on a ridge looking over a mountain valley five miles wide and long. To the south, an unimpeded view of all four Aspen ski mountains. Snowmass, the closest, spread out before us covering half the sky, rising from the valley floor of 8000′ to 13,400’ at the top. To the east are several Colorado Rockies of the granite sky-scraping variety, still with a little snow in clefts and shaded gullies. To the west, thirty miles away,, the continental divide, with Mounts Massive and Elbert, the highest points in the state, peaking over the ridge line. Red and Smuggler mountains, rising 3000 feet out of Aspen, dominate the middle view. A ridge to the north fills the foreground, horses grazing in the ranch meadow below. We saw at once what had entranced him.

Imagine an English spring day, shimmering green after a shower; clouds building to thunderheads like fuzzy-bottomed anvils; blue so deep (less air up there to lighten the sun) you think you’re looking into a mountain lake; and scrubby little man-sized oaks everywhere,with leaves like hands. Quiet and rustling wind, through the little aspen grove down the gully to the south. A perfect place for my parents to rebuild their life, I think. – Love, Mike

iv

As Jack hitched the derelict Dodge to the Buick, he launched into a story. “Mike, did I ever tell you about the time my brother and I had to drive down to Colorado to rescue my sister?” Not waiting for an answer, he went on. “She had gone off to meet this guy, someone my mother did not approve of. Afraid he was going to take her away to the city, Denver or Omaha. Your grandpa Mike” – they both had the same name – “he told me and your uncle Mike” – again that name! – “to go down there and get her. It was summer, blazing hot. We drove through eastern Wyoming, nobody on the road at all. I’ll never forget, we came across this rancher stuck on the side of the road in his tractor in that scorching heat. We stopped to see if he was OK. He said, ‘No, I’m not, boys. Been stuck here four, five hours now, can’t get up out of the ditch. You get me out of here, there’s some beer in the back there for you.’ We had a towing rig on the back of our old Model T, got him right out. He had a carton full of beer bottles behind the seat, one of those with the springs visible underneath. We thought they’d be all fizzy and warm, sitting out there in the sun like that for so long. But darned of those weren’t the coldest beers I’d ever had. ‘Course, they were the first beer I ever had, so what did I know?”

“How old were you?” Mike asked.

“Let’s see, I must have been fourteen or fifteen.” After hooking up the Dodge, he got in the Buick, and motioned us to sit in back. As we drove away, he did not resume the story.

Intrigued, I asked, “So what happened, to your sister? Did you find her, get her back?”

“Oh, right. We got to Denver, went right to the Brown Hotel, where she’d said she was supposed to meet that guy. There she was, sitting in one of those leather arm chairs, looked like she’d been crying. ‘He ain’t here, Jack, he ain’t here. He never showed.’ She sure was glad we’d come to get her.” Jack shook his head and chuckled as he reminisced. Then, “So, Jane, I heard Martin Luther King is going to be the commencement speaker at Harvard next month. Do you get to go to that?”

Battles in the south, with dogs and fire hoses turned on freedom marchers, half a million listening to a speech in Washington – images from five years earlier filled my head. Before I could answer, Mike piped up, “I saw him a few weeks ago, at Calvin.” I stared at him. He hadn’t told me about that.

“Oh?” Jack prompted.

“Yeah, it wasn’t a speech or anything. It was a special service at the Chapel, Sunday night  this February.”

“You don’t go to church…” I started.

“Right, but this was by invitation only. He’s good friends with one of my Religion professors, Dr. Klaassen. He got a whole pew reserved for our seminar. There were only about 60 people there. It’s not a big cathedral or anything.”

“Religion?” Jack wondered.

“You know; I’ve been taking a Religion class every semester, kind of like a minor to Biology? It’s not the same as going to church, more like philosophy. Anyway, he basically did a whole service, with hymns, lesson, and a sermon. I could see why he’s such an inspiring leader. His words, his cadence, his fire, his sincerity – it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Made me glad I got to go to JCU, to hear someone like that.”

We got home late Monday evening. Three days later, Mike came over to my house for dinner. Dad had left the TV on in the den. Coming from the kitchen to the dining table with the roast beef platter, mom could see the screen. She let out a howl of pain, dropped the platter and roast on the rug, put her hand to her mouth, and started shaking. Turning to the TV, I saw the bulletin flickering madly: “Martin Luther King shot in Memphis this evening, rushed to hospital in critical condition.”

Stuttering to make sense of the words, my mind ricocheted back to 1963 again, this time November, the principle’s short, neutral announcement early in 4th period, that Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. There’d been a sense shared grief which lasted for months. I wondered if we could mourn a black man as we had a white.

Without a car, Mike took the train back to school, while I flew into Logan that weekend. Tuesday after we got back was his birthday, so I called him. Our conversation seemed off, somehow. Maybe it was the assassination, and the riots that followed in Avondale that Sunday after I left. Only a couple of miles from my home, mom reported soldiers patrolling the streets, guarding stores, preventing any more deaths. 

Or maybe it was the books I was reading, the ones by Friedan and de Beauvoir. And the conversations I had with my new friends at school, the ones who told me what I ought to feel about a boy, which was different than what I thought I felt about Mike. We agreed to meet that weekend in Cambridge.

He wrote me a letter, about seeing King at Calvin, how that made him feel, about his sorrow and anger at King’s murder, and the riots that followed. I remember he said, seeing those troops, in all their gear, arrayed out along the Capitol steps – that’s not right, that doesn’t happen here. Something must be really wrong if that’s going on…He included along a poem:

A VOICE ACROSS THE MOUNTAIN TOP

A grey-toned man approached me and

  unasked

I answered, Yes, I would, Yes

Yes

I’d follow him

To the bus in the back

of a team of mules

He rides now

covered with kisses

And other near misses

and the one that found him

Will not confound him

But hopefully raise his wishes

that covered with kisses we all might love

as he felt we could and should and

Would

someday

When he’d gone away

To his promised land

      where his dreams have dawned

on the mountain top

He spoke to us

unasked

He answered, Yes I will, Yes

Yes

4-10-68

That Friday, I wrapped his present, a children’s book, and wrote a note to go with it:

Mike – at the moment I’m fantastically happy somehow – it’s spring & Phil Ochs & you & me and a lot of other things and not very stable – but one thing that should last is the happy that has to last until/through tomorrow – Sat. Yes, it’s strange to save up “happy” for 1 day – but what is the alternative (Not that it’s saved up – but Sat. is different) Like, after we talked Tues. I was kinda upset, really, – I hate feeling that we are insipid ‘cause maybe then what we feel is insipid too – and upset for seeing you, too. But I didn’t write or scream or crack-up – and I realize I’ve got to figure things out, but they can be figured (I don’t mean to sound mystical – this is what happy-sad bubbling is). And the worst thing to do would be to blow what we have together in bitching and biting – I’d rather run around and be crazy with you.

Besides being basically neat and interesting – your letter about Martin Luther King – it was more, for I had been thinking ‘way before how I couldn’t talk about it with anyone it seemed for the emotion was more than would fit words without sounding dilettantish or silly. Somehow your letter was a vindication of something. I sat in the Memorial Service here realizing that comments how he wasn’t a Harvard man weren’t so horrible for they were primarily trying somehow to find some personal meaning out of something hugely shattering; it’s got to come down to personal terms somehow. Also, I guess that’s the first time I realized that somehow his death was about something much bigger & simpler than death or black & white; I’m not exactly sure of what it is – I’m not wise or old (?) enough to know, but maybe Henry Wald is right – the conflict is between a man who loved and one who hated. I’m sorry, I don’t want to sound like Sally College, nor am I responding in any form – but somehow I wanted to write to you about this.

This isn’t really much of a birthday card – but what can I say but what comes to me, right?  And there’s too much to say to make anything beyond “Happy Birthday” and “I love you” meaningful – 

Love, 

        Janie

   Why should anyone give someone who’s really 19 years old Hector Protector? No overtones, no suggestions – but just that I love it – & maybe it’s me & because it’s also from kids – and because I love you. No, it’s not all the same thing – just related. Maybe I’ve regressed from F. Scott Fitzgerald – but then maybe I’ve gotten sublimely beyond him (well, it’s a mystic possibility). Anyway if it’s all happy – and me – the book & the kids & you & me – it’s got to be related.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY – 

Love – 

        Janie

v

Saturday morning, Mike arrived jittery, his usual calm replaced with a pensive anxiety. I held off on the present and birthday “card” while he explained. “There were people all over the bridge, I could barely get onto Mem. Drive, cars backed up the whole way to the square. Finally I had to turn onto Brattle Street. What’s going on?”

“You haven’t heard? They’re not doing it down there at Jock U? The SDS, the Student Mobe Committee, ten days of resistance? They’re calling for a nation-wide, one-day strike next Thursday. I don’t know if I’m going to the big rally in the yard. I’d like to, but my classes…”

A knock, and before I could say anything the door opened revealing Marcia and Leslie. Marcia pulled up short when she saw Mike, and looked about to apologize. Leslie acted like he wasn’t there.

“Janie. We’ve got to get down to the Square. Get that yellow thing you wear, it’s drizzling a little.” She finally realized a boy was in my room. “Who’s this?” she demanded.

“Mike Harrison, from Calvin,” I answered in as neutral a tone as possible.

“Janie’s boyfriend,” Marcia added softly.

Leslie glared at Mike, then looked at me with a bit of pity. “So he’s coming too?” she sniffed.

Outside on Walker Street, Leslie warmed up to her lecture. “There’re these Harvard guys, the local SDS group, who are planning the rally on Thursday. They invited some of us from Radcliffe, but when we tried to say anything, it was like, ‘That’s nice sweetie, why don’t you bring us more beers?’ I’m not going back there. Even the men you’d think would understand about women’s lib, they don’t get it. They’re not going to help us. That war, it’s just men fighting men, I don’t know if I care any more, let them all kill each other. It’d make life a lot easier for us.”

Marcia countered, “You don’t really mean that, Les?”

Leslie’s steely silence and razor glare confirmed that she did, indeed, at that moment want to live in a male-free world. I let the two of them walk a bit ahead while I asked Mike, “So what’s been happening? What did you do last night?”

“I memorized Desolation Row.”

“That old Dylan song? It’s long, right, eleven minutes?”

“Mmm hmm,” he affirmed. “Rich wanted to perform it, but he claims he can’t sing, so he asked me to.”

I laughed, “You can’t either!”

“Well, apparently I can growl like Dylan, and better than Rich. He’s pretty good on the guitar, so he played and played while I read the lyrics off the album. First few times through, we did it with the record, then took off on our own. Wanna hear it?” He smiled a little, lifting his left eyebrow.

The rain picked up a bit. Mike was wearing a blue hard hat he’d snatched from the hockey rink construction site. Along with his scruffy faded tan leather jacket, he blended right in with the crowd on Mass Ave. “Everyone is making love, or else expecting rain.” he syncopated. “Or something like that.” He switched gears. “I got that job for the summer, at the swimming club. I’ll be a lifeguard, and they said I could help out with the swim team as well.”

“All summer? Can you get any time off, like a long weekend?”

“What do you mean?”

“I told you, I want to go to the SDS convention in Chicago after the Vineyard. The convention, it’s very important. They’re going to work on the Democrats to get real about making change, the war, civil rights, blacks, women, everything.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know if you can get time off or you don’t know if you want to go. I really want to go. You should too.” 

“I guess … both…?”

We shuffled along in silence for a while behind Marcia and Leslie. Mike usually followed my lead when I chose to push it. Now, I sensed some hesitation, some pull in a different direction. Last summer, he’d worked in the psych ward, this summer, all he wanted to do was play, at being a kid, with more kids all around him. I wondered, is he afraid of being older, of dealing with the real issues in our world? 

“Why not? Why don’t you want to go?” I pushed again, “I’d really like you to be there with me.”

“It seems a little…dangerous. You sure that’s what you want to do?”

His reluctance made me more sure I had to be there. But I wouldn’t let it become a line in the sand between us. I needed him as much as he needed me, I knew. And wasn’t love about dealing with, learning from the differences between two people, building a new common ground?

That evening, Mike unwrapped his birthday present. His eyes widened, and he broke into a smile when he saw Hector Protector and As I went Over The Water, by Maurice Sendak. “You sure like this guy, don’t you? Yeah, I remember, Where The Wild Things Are. And his pictures, not fairy tale stuff, more like an adult perspective on nursery rhymes.”

“Sendak, he writes kids’ books, sure, but they get to me where I am now. If I ever have kids, this is the kind of stuff I’ll show them, I’ll read to them, not those ‘Dick and Jane’ things we had in first grade.”
“Yeah, those were kind of worthless. You were like me, I guess, you could read those things easily, and knew they weren’t actual stories, just an excuse to show us new words. But we already knew them, right, so it got real boring real fast.” He paused, then continued. “Hmm, kids…It would be fun to have kids, show them things, watch them grow. Wouldn’t it?”

I was thinking about families then, but not about making one. I knew that Sendak was a Polish Jew, like my great-great grandparents. Even though he was born in Brooklyn, his family had lost everyone they knew who still lived in Europe during the Holocaust. I thought that might be why his pictures seemed so dark, so real. For some reason, I didn’t want to talk with Michael about this, that family means different things to different people. He could trace himself back to 1620 in this country, but my people, I thought, go back over 3,000 years, through slavery and pogroms and ghettos. My parents, each in their own way, had downplayed all that in our life, not hiding it, but never bringing it up either. It might be time to explore that, to come to terms with another part of who I am, I mused.

I pulled up suddenly. While the rain dripped from the brim of my yellow vinyl hat, I said, “I just remembered!”

“What?”

“Today’s Pesach.”

vi

“I remember…some smells of you, of us.”

Lying on my bed, side-by-side, we had invented a new game: “What do I remember?” The idea was to come up with something we’d done, somewhere we’d been, together, which the other did not remember. We’d been miserable failures up to this point, as everything I said, he nodded vigorously with, and added to. He couldn’t find any gaps in my recollections either. 

“Events, words, they’re easy to share. Sounds and sights, even. But what about aromas? I bet they’re more private, personal. What about these?” Staring out the window, he drifted into his poet’s voice. “Your hair in a graveyard, an un-washed tent, Italian ambrosia, ambergris and wine – and love.”

“What am I supposed to do with those?”

“For starters, you could say when I sniffed them. The hard part, of course, would be to prove that you and I each got the same sensation from them.”

“The first one’s easy – that day you came up in October, Columbus Day weekend, we went to the graveyards downtown. You kept putting your nose in my hair, telling me how much you’d missed the smell. Un-washed tent? I guess that’s the time last year, when we went camping with Phil and Jerry, Lizzie and Leon and everybody, up by the lake in Hueston Woods. I thought we were so adult, going off on our own, some of us celebrating the graduation, the boys wondering what they could get away with.” I repeated, “Italian ambrosia, ambergris and wine…and love.” I was pretty sure I knew what he meant. That first time, after I’d gotten the pills, I had worn some Roman perfume. I decided to show him, not tell him. I felt a softly pealing rhapsody start inside me, a symphony we could play together – the harmony of love.

Soft caresses, not quite gestures began between us, falling, streaming, cascading upward and around. We enclosed each other, trembling, then shattering and finally stopping, with nothing coming of it but the pleasure of itself, appealing, soft forever. We seemed outside of time, beyond our lives, above our minds, a soft refrain we sang together with all our movements. It was a fairy structure, only a dream-wrought castle, more fragile than a turreted masterpiece built from sand.

But it was ours, our wishes for ourselves, come to full fruition apart from the world outside. Our presence, our presents, our present eternal presence in and out of the rapture of our life together. I thought, at last, this once, I place my trust outside of me. I was slightly sleepy, vaguely gliding towards his warm translucent flesh that pulled me over, met with mine, is mine.

Mike was first to speak. “OK, I think you win.”

“No, we both won, buddy.”

Next morning, Mike got up first. He padded over to the window, raised the shade, and said, “I love this time of day, this time of year. It’s still early spring, the sun’s trying to wake up. The night’s melting, there’s a dull blue glow in the sky, not too bright, just enough to light the lawn down there. Everything’s still so new, that light green everywhere in the grass, the trees, the buds.” He paused, moving his hands as if conducting, painting, or writing on a blackboard. “Wow, there’s something there.” He recited, “All I see is green and blue and all that’s new and you, my love and you.” He turned and smiled

“I I hear a poem in that,” I offered.

Rushing to my desk, he grabbed some paper and started scribbling. Soon, he read out loud, “You speak so clearly, gently wave the words across my ears, calm my fears…” Smiling again, he announced, “That feels good. But I like living life with you better than writing about it.”

That afternoon, I sat with Jeanne, Leslie, and Marcia on Cabot’s second floor balcony, facing the sun. With the brick building to our back blocking the wind and reflecting the radiance towards us, I almost felt comfortable in the cool April air. Below us, a red-haired girl sitting on the steps practiced with her guitar, singing folk songs. Stopping, she fiddled with the tuning pegs, put a green glass cylinder over her left middle finger, and shifted into a driving blues riff.

Jeanne leaned over, then turned back towards us. “Who’s that? What’s she doing with that glass on her finger? Is that some giant ring?”

Marcia looked down. “Oh, I know her. That’s Bonnie. She lives down in Bertram. From California, LA.”

Leslie added, “She’s doing bottleneck blues. You guys know what that is?” Seeing our blank stares, she went on. “Back before the depression, down in Mississippi, they started cutting the tops off beer bottles, using them with a guitar tuned so all the strings played one chord. You slide it up and down, get that twangy sound, like someone moaning. Lots of people are doing it now, kind of mixing up country music with rock ’n roll. She’s good, she knows what she’s doing.”

She turned to me. “Jane, where’d you go yesterday, after we went to the square. That boy you were with, he’s gone now?” She tilted her head, furrowing her eyes accusatorially.

Flustered, I said, “What have you got against him? You hardly know him.”

“I don’t need to know him. He’s a guy, they’re all the same. If they’re not trying to get into our pants, they’re busy ignoring us or putting us down. You don’t need him.”

Anger rose in me. “First of all, he’s not like that…”

Jeanne chimed in, “Yeah, it took them, what Janie, 18 months to go all the way?”

Leslie sneered back at me. “Was it worth it? Where do you think this is going, anyway?”

I looked to Marcia for help. She was leaning over the balcony, nodding her head with Bonnie’s syncopating blues. Jeanne studiously examined her fingernails.

I thought carefully, then said, “It might be true, I’m using him, he’s using me. But neither of us cares” – here I hesitated, afraid of being seen as innocent, naive – “it doesn’t matter, because…we love each other.”

Leslie snorted. “Aww, that’s sweet. ‘You love each other.’ What’s that mean, anyway? Girls say that because they want to be wanted, and boys say that so they can get what they want. Then they ignore you, or worse.”

“He says I complete him, I make him a better person. And he sees a part of me no one else knows is there.” My analytic head sidled up next to the emotional tugs inside my heart, trying for an understanding, a merger. “OK, here’s the way I see it… love is not a simple, isolated thing to me. It may have started with feelings, a desire to have someone to fawn over. But that’s not enough, at least not for me. I can share what I’m thinking, what I’m seeing, where I want to go, in a way that’s deeper, fuller, different than I get with anyone else.” I glanced at Marcia and Jeanne. “Not my best friends. Not my family. Not anybody. With Michael, he’s all those things, and more.”

Incredulous, Leslie asked, “There’s more?”

“The way he views the world, how he moves through it. He told me once, he has two rules that guide him, ‘Always be honest. And never do anything for the sole reason it’s expected of you.’ That makes it hard, sometimes, I know. In the end, though, it’s his authenticity I cherish most.”

Leslie looked about to explode, then sighed, “You’re a lost cause, a hopeless romantic. That stuff’s not real. You’re better off getting what you can from someone like him, and moving on to the next one. Or keep him around in reserve, while you find out what the rest of the world is like.”

I wondered if Leslie had ever felt love the way I had, or if she’d been hurt, abandoned. I’d had good luck, to stumble onto Michael Harrison. I wanted to say, “I know what it’s like to be loved, and that’s a feeling I don’t ever want to lose.”

CHAPTER FOUR

A Slight Inability To Say Good-by

March, 1968

Mike and I took another trip to New York to see a play, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead. After opening at the Alvin in October, word of mouth forced a move to the Eugene O’Neill on Broadway, selling out every show. Intrigued by the buzz and rave reviews, Mike ordered tickets for March after his swimming season had ended.

The wordplay and mysterious comings-and-goings intrigued us from the start. Laughing throughout, I wondered why it had been billed as an absurdist existential tragicomedy.

“What did you think? Did you understand it?” I asked as we walked past Carnegie Hall towards the Park. I’d convinced Mike to ride the carousel before heading on back to Grand Central for the train to Connecticut.

“At first I wasn’t sure, but once they started all that confusion about who they were, I felt right at home. I like it when you have to work to keep up with the conversation. It seemed to make sense to me, nothing absurd about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s what I feel like, going through life sometimes. Everybody else appears to know where they’re going, what it is they’re supposed to do. Then I drift into their space, try to figure out how they see the world, and I never can.”

If Mike was confused about who he was, and where he was going, he sure hid it well. “No. I don’t believe you. That’s how I think I am, but you, you decided about being a doctor when you were fifteen, about where you’d go to school early decision, about everything, so easily and you’ve kept with it. How can you say you’re insecure?”

Slowing his pace, he dropped his head in thought. Placing one arm around me, giving a little squeeze to my shoulder, he answered, “When I’m with you, I do know who I am. What’s that song by The Supremes? ‘My World Is Empty Without You’? Ever since we went on that long walk the night of the party after the state debate tournament, I’ve known there was one place, one person, I could feel comfortable with, wouldn’t have to pretend who I am. Why do you think I keep coming back to you, every time I go away? When I’m with you I feel alive.” We’d crossed 59th, about to enter the Park. He stopped, turned to look at me, then at the skeletal trees, leaf buds barely sprouting, and recited, “Life is all around us, an eternity in every fragment.”

“Huh?”

“It’s a poem I’ve been working on. I don’t remember all of it, but, ‘For once, just once, I place my trust apart from me…I only want to live my heart, I merely want to be a part, of all that I can be.’ Something like that.”

“Sounds promising. I didn’t know you were still writing poems. You haven’t sent me any for a while now.”

“I spend so much time reading, writing papers, trying to memorize all those Organic Chem reactions. And I’m always going to swim practice, to a meet,writing you a letter, visiting you. No time any more for investigating that inner world. I’ve only written a couple, three this year, and they seem pretty repetitive. All about the ocean, sand and the beach, finding life in love, sappy stuff like that.”

That sappy stuff had first pulled me towards him. “Ever think we might have a different way of telling each other what we feel now?”

We’d come to the carousel, calliope music clouding our words, enameled horses exhorting us to ride.

“I don’t feel any different…” he mused.

“I do. Everybody at school, they’re always talking about ‘finding’ themselves.”

Mike helped me onto a coal black stallion, fiery eyes staring endlessly upward towards the brass ring. The ring I remembered Phoebe, in Catcher, kept trying to grab.

“Like when somebody says, “I’m going out to California, to find myself?”

“There are some people who do that, sure, but I’m thinking more about the conversations I’m having all the time, in the dorm, after class, at dinner.”

“Bull sessions?”

“That’s what boys call it, but with girls, I think there’s more sharing, more supporting, less seeing who can one up the other.”

“That’s like the play,” Mike offered. “Sometimes – a lot of the time – I feel like you have this whole other life I’m not a part of. I just get these little snatches it, when I come up to see you. That’s what I was saying, about feeling left out.”

“And you don’t think I feel that? When you tell me you’re writing a poem, how excited you are to go skiing? All these things you’re doing when I’m not around, I wish I could feel what you’re feeling when you do them.” Suddenly, I saw the secret, the mystery. “I think we have to be apart, to be together, you know.”

He said, mostly to himself, “How can we be together, apart? And how can we be apart, together?”

The music ended. I climbed down from the horse by myself, then stepped off the slowly moving platform.

ii

“Hey, Janie, here we are!” Jeanne waved me over to her table, where she was finishing dinner with Marcia and two other girls I didn’t know. “Oh, this is Bev and Leslie. Bev’s a year ahead of us, Les’s a junior. They’re both both pre-meds. Les said she could help us with our chemistry.”

Bev had one of those smiles, friendly at the mouth, but serious around the eyes, that I was coming to associate with Radcliffe girls. Straight black hair cut in a no-nonsense bob, she appeared all business, minimal maintenance required. “Pre-meds have to stick together,” she asserted, looking over at Leslie.

“No one else here is watching out for us. Seems everywhere we turn, all we’re getting is a pat on the head.” Leslie’s stringy blond hair fell past her shoulders. Tall and stocky, she wore a shapeless dress, white tights, and an odd-looking pair of earrings.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Janie, is it? Haven’t you noticed Harvard doesn’t care how smart you are, how smart we are? Don’t you feel like an adornment, or an after-thought? There’s only what, 5% of doctors who are women? We can’t afford to sit around and wait for men to change. We have to demand our place. Have you read Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir?”

“The Feminine Mystique? Sure. de Beauvoir…she’s French?”

She reached into her bag and took out a thick, well-worn paperback, The Second Sex, shaking it towards my face.

“Oh, yeah…isn’t she Sartre’s, what do they call it, ‘partner’?”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about!” she almost shouted. “See, someone like you, smart enough to get into Radcliffe, still thinks of a woman in terms of her relationship to a man.” She closed her eyes, sighed, then looked straight at me, asking, “Do you think of yourself as a feminist?”

I wasn’t sure what that word meant. People said it a lot, sometimes as an accusation, sometimes as a compliment. “You mean like the suffragists…?”

Leslie gave an exasperated sigh. Turning to Bev, she moaned, “See what I mean? We need a Women’s Studies program here. We need to assert ourselves, the same as the black students, the anti-war people are doing.” Looking back at me, she slapped the book down on the table, saying “Here. Read this. I’ve got another.” With that, Leslie got up, not waiting for any confirmation or thanks. “I’ve gotta go, get back to my apartment before they kick me out for not doing the dishes on my night.”

Bev stayed on, smiling more beatifically now. “She’s something, isn’t she?”

“What was that dress she was wearing?” I asked. Though shapeless, it nonetheless seemed fashionable, made from thick cotton, dyed blue with striking black markings scattered across the fabric.

“Um, yeah, that’s her style. Doesn’t call attention to her body, but still looks elegant. Ask her, she’ll make clear it’s a political statement. I think it’s called Marimekko. From Finland. There’s a store here in town if you want to get one.”

“Marimekko,” I murmured, making sure I remembered. Louder, “What about those earrings? They look like a snake, but they’re not metal, some kind of plastic.”

Bev, Jeanne, and Marcia all laughed, looking first at each other, then over at me. Marcia asked, “You know what an IUD is?”

“IUD? Isn’t that for contraception, Intra-Uterine Device?”

“Yup. Those are Lippes Loops.”

“But why for earrings? Is she trying to make a point?”

Bev ventured, “She never talks about them, but my idea is they are kind of a metaphor, a hidden statement to the men she encounters. ‘I don’t need you, don’t want you, stay away,’ I think she’s saying.”

“Like a cross for vampires?”

“There’s a good thought. Men are always trying to suck the life, the soul out of us, aren’t they?”

“Not all of them,” I countered, thinking of Mike.

“Where have you been cloistered?” Bev shot back. “I have yet to meet a guy who didn’t want to spend all his time talking about himself. Or if he did ‘care’ about me, it was only so he could get me into bed.”

I couldn’t respond. I didn’t want to appear naive, inexperienced, lacking in self-awareness. But I wondered if I were indeed under the spell of a juvenile infatuation, seeing myself as a princess in a fairy tale. On the other hand, I thought, maybe I had been lucky in finding Mike, someone who loved me, and whom I could love in return, without any fighting about who’s in charge. 

iii

“I don’t know if this is the car I’d want to be seen in, Mike.” Driving west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Mike had the pale green Dodge Coronet working hard up the Appalachian hills. His beloved red Lancer was back in Cincinnati for the winter, replaced by this blocky, stodgy “old man’s car”, as he put it.

“My father gave my mom a choice – the racy red one, or this. I’m hoping she’ll change her mind after a winter sliding around in that little thing.” Six hours into our trip home on the last Friday in March, after skirting New York City and cutting across the top of New Jersey, we left the gentle Amish farmlands behind. Now aiming into the setting sun, the old Dodge labored up out of one of those hollows which define the landscape between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. “Why? What kind of a car would you like?”

“I don’t I’ll need one in Boston. The T is so good there, I can get anywhere.” Struggling to come up with an answer, I thought of riding along the dunes at the Vineyard a few years ago with Charlie, Henry and Lisa in a beach buggy Charlie had borrowed from a friend. Holding onto the roll bar above the rear seat, the top and sides fully open to the air, my hair streamed behind and above me, wild and free. The wind blew specks of sand against my face, like tiny darts of ice after a winter blizzard. We had nowhere to go, an endless afternoon in the filtered island sun, ocean breaking on our right, not another car in sight. I must have been fourteen then, the first time I felt like I was part of my older siblings’ group. They were all driving now, free to flee our parents’ eyes any time they liked. They talked about grown-up things, Charlie’s upcoming wedding, Henry’s classes at Princeton, even Lisa now going on dates and applying for college. I wanted to be older, I wanted to have fun, and for the first time, I felt I was doing both.

“A Jeep. I’d like a Jeep. One of those with the windshield you can put down in front, that can go anywhere, along the sand, the beach, up into the woods, away from the city.”

Mike nodded. “A Jeep. OK.” Waiting a moment, then deciding, he looked over at me, “I’ll buy you one, I promise. For a graduation present. I don’t know about college, but if you get a doctorate, for sure.”

“Are you serious?” I laughed.

“I mean it. I promise. What color do you want?”

“Red. No, wait, yellow.”

“Yellow? Red? They only come in that Army green color, right?”

“Doesn’t matter. You get me a Jeep, I wouldn’t care.”

A grinding crunch filtered back to us from the front. Worse than a knock, it came with a shudder, and loss of power. As the car sped back up, I asked, “What was that?”

“Dunno. Did we hit something?”

Nearing the top of the hill, the sounds from under the hood grew worse. Just before the summit, the engine shuddered with a ‘clunkety-clunk’ and we rolled to a stop.

“Now what?” I worried. “Will it start?”

Mike tried the key several times. “Nothing. Dead” he moaned. “I knew I should have paid attention when that oil pressure light came on last week.”

Within five minutes, a Pennsylvania State Trooper pulled up behind us, lights flashing. Mike got out, they conversed a bit, and he came back to say, “He’s calling a tow truck, take us into town, to the dealer there.”

We ended up in Shippensburg – pronounced, we learned, like “chip, not ship” – where the dealer, wearing a top coat against the chill, sat on a couch, ticking off a list of options with a customer buying a new Plymouth. He arranged for the mechanic to check our car, and came back with the bad news: a blown rod, or piston, or something like that, would take a week to fix, the parts would have to come from Hagerstown. Mike called his dad, who spoke with the dealer. We overheard him say, “It weren’t the boy’s fault, Mr. Harrison, these mountains are tough.” The conclusion was, we’d spend the night in town, at the only motel, and his father would drive the Buick over on Saturday, with a towing attachment to haul us and the car back to Cincinnati.

I’d like to say we enjoyed our stay in south central Pennsylvania, waiting for his dad, but it rained all day and we stayed inside, catching up on reading, and trying out the creaky motel bed. After dinner, I turned on the TV. Instead of “Saturday Night At The Movies, President Johnson smiled grimly, about to deliver a formal address on the progress of the war. I ground my teeth, growled, and said, “I guess we want to watch this, right?” It was not like we had any choice. All three channels had interrupted their programming to carry the speech.

I watched that man, whom so many people in Cambridge hated like a devil, as he tried to speak smoothly and rationally about the Tet offensive, the burden it had placed on the “noble” people of South Vietnam and its “allies”, by which I presumed he meant us. All about the on-going loss of life, for which he cried crocodile tears. Clenching my teeth, I looked over at Mike, who was almost smiling. “What do you think?” I asked.

“Every time I hear him talk, I what a guy from Texas told me. After Johnson became President, he said, ‘Finally, someone in the White House without an accent!’” Mike looked over at me. “I don’t know, how can he go from doing all the civil rights stuff, and Medicare, to this?”

“Well, why don’t you come with me this summer, to the SDS convention in Chicago? Instead of complaining, do something!”

“I…uh…I’ve got this job, at a swim club. Being a lifeguard, remember? I don’t know if I can get off.” He looked down from the black-and-white blurry screen, pursed his lips, furrowed his brow. Then glancing up at me, he went on, “Couldn’t it be dangerous? Those people are starting to talk about things like blowing up recruiting offices, fighting back. You could get hurt.”

Before I could answer, there was a knock on the door. Mike’s father Jack had arrived. “Oh good,” he said, looking up at the TV, “you’ve already got it on.”

I looked around the room, which only had a double bed. How was this going to work? He saw my darting eyes. “It’s OK, I got another room.” Mike and I sat on the bed while Jack pulled out the desk chair. “I sure hope he tells us he’s going to start withdrawing troops. That’s the only way we’ll keep Nixon from winning.”

We kept watching in silence for another half hour while Johnson droned on about “fake solutions”, and a “wider peace”.

When Johnson said, “One day, my friends, peace will come in Southeast Asia,” Jack muttered, “Peace in our time. We’ve heard that before, haven’t we?” Johnson started quoting Kennedy’s “Bear any burden” bit from the inaugural address. As he waxed philosophical about his commitment to peace and the American people, I couldn’t take any more, I got up to turn off the set. Mike, said, “Wait! I think he’s saying he’s gonna quit!” Johnson was now quoting Lincoln, preaching the gospel of a united America, that a ‘House divided against itself cannot stand.”

“Seems like he’s just pulling on our heartstrings” I countered.

“No, look!” 

Johnson wiped his temple as the heat from the TV lights and the pressure of the moment overpowered his Texas cool. He announced, “Accordingly, I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

We all sat there, stunned. I was the first to speak, “Looks like getting clean for Eugene worked.”

Jack glanced over at me. “Jane, I think he’s more afraid of Robert Kennedy.”

ix

The morning after what Esther called our “consciousness raising session”, I remembered that Mike had told me his first varsity swim meet would be at Brandeis that afternoon. We couldn’t see each other, he said.  The team would ride up together on a bus, eat lunch as a group, swam, then head back to Connecticut right away. But Brandeis was on the Fitchburg train line, so I could go see the meet anyway, even if I couldn’t talk with him. I’d never seen a swim meet before.

The first thing I noticed, all the guys on the team sat around in their swim suits, which were tiny little things, slung low under the belly button, barely covering their butts. They constantly shook their arms and legs, a jangly dance of muscle and bone. Mike had a little thing he did with a partner, where he locked his fingers behind his back, straightened his arms, and the other guy pushed Mike’s hands up towards his shoulders. This pressed his upper arms against his sides, making them appear large, smooth, and powerful.

He only had one race, towards the end of the meet. I knew the idea was to finish ahead of the other boys in the pool, but each time, it was different. Different strokes, from the undulating butterfly to the more relaxed backstroke. Different distances, from the explosive two length freestyle to a seemingly endless one which took almost 20 minutes. And then there were the divers. Running forward, jumping up from the end of a teal colored springboard, then twisting, flipping, and finally spearing through the water, some with floppy splashes, others, the better ones, straight and clean. They looked like dynamic sculpture, making art with their bodies.

Finally, Mike stepped onto a starting block at end of the pool. He’d told me, “I’m the worst swimmer on the team. There’s another guy in my year who’s the designated breaststroker. I’m there to fill out the lanes. If I get a third place, I’ll be doing well.”

The white suited starter, holding his pistol straight overhead, shouted “To your marks!!” Everyone walked forward, curled their toes over the edge, reached down, and grabbed the block. After the gun went off with a puff of smoke, Mike exploded forward, arms outstretched, head extended then tucked between his shoulders. With a slight bend at his waist, he sliced into the water. Underneath, he pulled his arms back and kicked hard while bringing his hands forward. He lunged his head up into the air, took a sharp breath I could hear from the stands, then launched into a rhythm of stroke – breathe – kick, pushing a foot-high swirling bow wave out in front. Eight of those cycles, then he touched and turned at the wall, pushing off hard, repeating the whole thing three more times. When he finished – he’d come in fourth – he stood at the edge, heaving, spitting, coughing, until he hauled himself out. He dragged himself back to the team bench, slung a black and red striped towel over his shoulders, and sat slumping head down. The coach was talking earnestly with his winning teammate, surrounded by half the team, pounding his back in congratulations. Apparently his win gave them enough points to secure victory for the day. Off to the side, one other guy came over to Mike, leaned over, smiled, and seemed to say, “Strong work.”

Thanksgiving was the following Thursday. Mike and I were both staying at school, ostensibly to study and write papers. He planned to drive up Friday morning, we’d spend the day in Cambridge and Boston, go to Lynn Shore Drive where he was born. I realised we hadn’t talked about what to do after that.

Radcliffe had closed the dorm food service for the weekend, but they did provide a turkey dinner for those few girls who’d gotten permission to stay on campus. I’d secreted leftovers in the lounge ‘fridge, so we wouldn’t have to buy dinner. We ate up in my room, where I told him about my secret trip to Brandeis.

“What?” he asked. “You were there and didn’t come over to talk to me?”

“I was up in that balcony, where the stands are. What was I supposed to do, holler at you? You’d probably say I was embarrassing you.”

“Probably right.” He took a contemplative bite from his turkey sandwich. “What’d you think?”

“This might sound a little funny, but I’d never seen you like that before.” He raised his eyebrows, so I went on. “That’s a side of you I haven’t paid attention to before, the guy who likes to swim, who can swim well enough to be on his college team…”

“I told you, I’m the worst one there. I’m not sure why they let me on.”

“Even so, it’s different. It’s not something you do with words, like a poem, or talking with me. It’s something you do with your body. What do you think about when you’re swimming in a race?”

Typical of Mike, he pondered that seriously. Satisfied he understood, he said, “I’m not thinking of anything other than how hard my body is working, making sure my arms and legs are doing what they’re supposed to.”

“What’s that like?”

He chuckled. “It’s about the only chance I get to have my brain shut up.”

I stroked his arm, feeling, probing a little, trying to remember what he’d looked like when he was stretching before the meet. Once more, we spent the night together, in my bed this time.

The next Friday, Esther had us over again. The other girls she’d invited last time must have gotten scared off by the mirrors, as only Jeanne and Marcia showed up. I’d been anxious all week, holding inside a nagging worry I’d carried since Mike and I spent the night together in Cabot.

Esther sensed right away I needed to unload. After serving us some tea, and chatting about the snowstorm that day, she looked at me and said, “Janie, you seem quiet tonight. I haven’t even seen you smile yet.”

I’d been able to hide my fear all week, going to class, studying, joking in the dining room. But here, where the subject was our bodies, where we knew we’d come to talk about sex, it all came flooding out.

Before I knew what was happening, I blurted, “Can you get pregnant if he doesn’t come inside you?” Jeanne and Marcia stopped rattling their tea cups, frozen on my words.

“What happened,  Janie?” Esther asked. Her face was full of sympathy and concern. “Did he go in and pull out before…?”

“No.” I shivered. “No. We were in bed together, mostly naked. We almost feel asleep, but there isn’t really room for two of us there, so we kept waking each other up. It was like I lost my mind or something, remembering seeing him at the swim meet on Saturday, then feeling his skin, warm, and smooth. I pulled him over on top of me. I kept my legs closed, but let him push down between them. He started moving – we both stated moving – and next thing I know, he’s quivering, shaking, almost, and moaning. Then I felt wet down there, I don’t know if it was him or me, or both of us.”

The room was quiet, a steady ticking of the kitchen clock the only sound. Jeanne broke the silence. “Do you think he…”

Feeling stronger, I completed her thought. “…penetrated me? No, I checked after he left, with my mirror. It’s still intact, and there was no blood. Just a goopy spot on the sheet.”
“Ewww,” Marcia whispered, shaking her head.

Esther firmly said, “Janie, you’ve got a health service here, right, at the college? Go see the doctor first thing, talk to him, ask about birth control, OK?”

Reluctantly, I answered, “Really? Even if we don’t ever do that again?”

Esther said, “Oh, you’re going to do that again. Believe me, you’re going to want to do that again.”

x

Esther, older married Esther, was right of course. First thing Monday morning, I called for an appointment at the campus health center, telling them I wanted to get my ears pierced. I didn’t have the nerve to give the real reason; I decided I could bring it up when the doctor was punching holes in my lobes. I walked out with a stud on each side and a prescription for Enovid, thinking to myself, “Well, Sarah Jane Stein, you’re officially grown up now.”

I waited with some trepidation for my period, so I could start the pills and get this whole thing over with. Finally, on Pearl Harbor Day, it came. The next Thursday, I opened the little pack, popped out the first pill, and contemplated where I was going with this. I had not told Michael anything yet, so this was all on me. Was it what I wanted? I put the pill down on the copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions I was reviewing for the term paper I’d write that night. I went across the hall to Jeanne’s room, finding her with Marcia, reviewing flash cards for their biology final the next day.

“Uh, can I talk to you guys?” I asked, closing the door behind me.

Jeanne seemed a bit put off. “Better be important. This Bio test is the difference between an A and a B for me.”

Marcia knew I’d gotten the pills, and had my period, so she jumped in. “Is today the day? Did you take it yet?”

I slumped down on the bed next to her, leaned over, and started sniffling, feeling like I was ready to cry. I rested my head on her shoulder. She patted it, stroking my hair. Shaking, crying, I couldn’t say anything.

“I know, I know. It is a big deal. You want it to be right.” Marcia kept up a quiet reassuring patter while my sobbing came to an end. “Have you talked with him about it?”

Collected again, I sat up and said, “Mike’s coming up next Friday. He’s flying out of Logan on Saturday, going to Idaho with his family for Christmas. He’s going to stay with me the night before.”

“You’re sure this is what you want?”
The past two years slammed around in my head. Seeing him, his beautiful hands, his softly glistening hair in French class. Pursuing him through debate team timekeeping. Talking endlessly with him so many days and nights. Sharing our thoughts, our dreams, our selves in letters, reading his poems, knowing his ideals and fears. All I felt was a rush of love, of being loved, and knowing there was still something missing in all of that.

I tried explaining that to her. “It’s like I’m – we’re – putting together a jigsaw puzzle. One piece is love…but there’s more, the picture’s not complete.”

Jeanne looked puzzled. I couldn’t tell if it was what I’d said, or her frustration with the flash card she was staring at. Marcia simply nodded, saying, “He’s beautiful, you two look so…so perfect together. No one’s going to say this is anything but good for you, for the two of you.”

“OK, I’m going to take it now. Want to watch?”

Jeanne finally asked, “What are you two talking about? What’s the matter, Janie?”

I went back to my room, grabbed the pill and the pack it came from, returning holding both aloft. Marcia must have filled Jeanne in while I was gone, as she said, “Ooooh…the Pill.” They cheered as I swallowed it with a glass of water.

After Mike arrived, we had dinner celebrating the end of my first semester at college. After Christmas break, of course, I’d be back for “reading period”, and a few more final exams, but the real work was over.

Back in my room, Mike started talking about his family’s trip to Sun Valley. “My father wants to try skiing there, with Shelly. He’s always finding some new sport.”

“Are you going to ski, learn how?”

“I don’t want to. It feels like something rich people do, to go and show off in their clothes,  act pompous and entitled. I’m going to sit in the Inn while they go out. A chance to study for that Organic Chem final. I have to get at least a B, if I want to get a C for the semester.”

“C! Don’t you need that class for medical school?”

“Yeah, if I keep that up, guess I’ll be finding another career.”

“What would that be?”

“I’ve thought about that. I like to drive, sit in my car going across the country, hours on end. Maybe I’ll be a long-distance truck driver.”

As usual, he seemed serious, so I didn’t make fun of that. But I really couldn’t see him eating at truck stops, talking with guys in overalls and baseball caps.

Sitting next to him on the bed, I realised, ‘Now or never”. Taking what I hoped was a quiet deep breath, I put my hand on his shoulder. “Listen, there’s something I want to talk about.” Lifting my hand away, I pulled back my hair, tilting my head towards him. “What do you see?”

“A new hair band?”

Frustrated, I chastised him. “No. I went to the doctor last week, got my ears pierced!”

“Why?”

“It’s something girls do at this age.”

“Sure, but you? I mean, you don’t wear lipstick or make-up, why did you want to do that?”

“I just wanted to.” I hesitated, wondering if I had the courage to go on. “But there’s another thing. While I was at the doctor, I asked him about …about what we did a couple of weeks ago. He said, you can get pregnant even from something like that.”

Mike’s face went blank, but I could sense him stiffen up, getting anxious. I went on, “So I got some birth control pills.” The wind, which had been rattling against the windows, fell still. “Mike, I don’t want to stop what we were doing, but I don’t want to get pregnant either.” He stayed quiet. I blurted, “Say something!”

“Well, that’s good. That’s good, yeah, that’ll be better.” We were looking straight at each other, not smiling, but not turning away either. Inside, I was a little mad that I had to do all the work here, getting the pills, having my body changed by them. But I didn’t want to scare him off, so I kept that to myself, for now. Instead, I reached out and stroked his cheek.

He finally got the idea, and started to kiss me, unbuttoning my blouse while I undid his belt. The bed beckoned.

After we finished, I sat up. Lifting the sheet, looking at its underside, then at the one below me, I observed, somewhat analytically, “Look. I bled a little. Not much, but there it is.”

xi

Chanukah came late that year, after Christmas.The whole first week at home, I tried to keep busy, buying and wrapping presents for my parents, brothers, and sister, cooking with mom, and spending some time with Lizzie. Over at her house one evening, we started talking about the differences between high school and college.

I noticed she had a mess of literature books spread over her desktop. Poetry, classics, even some foreign works like Gunter Grass and Dostoyevsky. “That’s a lot to read!” I observed. “All for class, or are you just bored?”

“When you’re an English major, you can never read too much, whether it’s assigned or not. The only problem is, I don’t have any time to write, which is what I really want to do.”

“What about outside of class? Are you on the paper? Is there a literary magazine?”

“Well, yeah, but there are so many girls there who want to do it, unless you’re already a published writer, or a senior, there’s no chance.”

“So, are you doing anything outside of class, anything formal, like we used to do at Avondale?”

“No. No time. Oh, I talk with people a lot, I go to dances, I even have a boyfriend, Clark, at Amherst. But nothing like school, no extracurriculars. You?”

“It’s more like the whole world is our extracurriculars now, right?” I wanted to know more about her boyfriend. “What’s he like, Clark?”

“I hate to say this, I know we always used to make fun of girls who went by looks alone, but he’s …dreamy. Thick blond hair, like straw. He’s kinda tall, five inches more than me. He plays guitar, and he’s on the crew.”

“Not like Leon, huh?”

“He’s a WASP through and through, went to prep school in New Jersey, doesn’t ever say a word in Yiddish.”

“He sounds, uh, perfect? Is there any edginess to him at all?”

“He does wear a bead necklace. And he’s started saying ‘Peace’ whenever he gets anxious. What about Mike? He still a Boy Scout?”

“I don’t think he’ll ever stop being Mike.” I didn’t want to go into any details about us, so I tried to keep things simple. “I saw him at a swim meet finally. All they do is go up and back a few times, it looks pretty simple, but they get so tired out!”

“Where is he now?”

“He’s in Idaho, Sun Valley again, with his family, not learning how to ski.”

“Not learning?”

“No, he says he doesn’t want to get sucked into a social, jet set scene. You know Mike, always trying to be above, outside of, whatever might be popular.”

“You guys have been together, what, almost two years now?” Eyes widened, brows arched, head tilted, she seemed to mime the question, Have you finally done it, Janie Stein?

Sighing, I felt myself flush from the neck up to my cheeks and ears. I dodged her unasked query. “I’ve been thinking, about us, Mike and me. I really am lucky we are together.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I’m with him, I feel alive, in a different way. He doesn’t tell me what to do, he listens to me about things.”

“Like?”

“Like, he started subscribing to the New Yorker. He goes to plays and movies I suggest. He thinks Martha’s Vineyard is a special place. But he’s not a schlump. He’s got his own mind. Boy, does he have his own mind. When he thinks he’s right, there is no arguing with him. When he decides he has to do something, nothing, nothing can stop him. He’s this strange mixture of fear and hesitation on the one hand, and brilliant headstrong ambition on the other.”

“Hmm. That does sound like Mike, now that I think about it. Someone you can hold your own with, who doesn’t put you down, and who you can lead around a little, when he’s not leading himself.”

A couple of days later, Lisa was getting ready to go to a party with some kids from Avondale, home from college. While she sat at her mirror, plucking a few stray hairs from her eyebrows, I asked her, “Lisa, what do you know about birth control pills?”

She put down her tweezers, turned three quarters round on the stool, pointed to the nearby desk chair, and said, “Sit.” Putting her hand on my knee, she brought her face uncomfortably close to mine. “Are you thinking about starting them, or are you already…”

“We’ve already,” I answered, hoping I wasn’t being too cryptic.

She patted my knee and picking up the tweezers, resumed her eyebrow excavations. “Good. Good. Finally. Pills. Yeah, they’re bad. Good, but bad. Good, of course, ‘cause you don’t get pregnant, but bad, cause they’ve got all those hormones. Your breasts swell and hurt.” She turned again and looked at my chest. “Well, maybe that wouldn’t hurt you. Sorry. And you gain weight. Not fat, but you kinda swell, retain water I think. There’s the nausea, too. But overall, I’d say it’s a good thing.”

“Why?”

“Why!? Haven’t you started having fun yet?” Apparently satisfied with the arch of each brow, she slammed down the tweezers with finality and turned fully around. “Come on, sister. Do you need an anatomy lesson?” What followed was one of the very few times I actually got some value out of having crazy Lisa as my big sister.

Christmas eve, Mom was making us a special “spiritually uplifting” dinner, with as little help from me as I could get away with. It seemed to be be the same old steak, peas and potatoes. Maybe the matzo ball soup was the secret sauce?

Innocently, I asked her, “Mom, do you love Daddy?”

She turned off the mixer, satisfied with the fluff of the mashed potatoes. Checking the oven temperature, she set a pan of water to boil. I put some bread into a basket, tucking it under a soft damask cover. “Well, of course I do. You know that.”

“But why? You guys…you’ve been together forever, I see you kiss every night when he comes home. But what is it, really? Love.”

Her eyes clouded over, then cleared. “I think, Janie, it might be, we’re different, Henry and I. He’s so rough and ready, always finding fun in everything. He doesn’t care about books and reading, or going to shows or anything like that.” A pause for reflection, then, “I’ve thought about this many times, over the years, 30 or so, we’ve been together. Have you ever seen that drawing where you look at it one way, it’s a vase, and another, it’s two people looking at each other in silhouette?”

“Right, we saw those in psych class this year. There’s another where, one way it’s a young woman, look at it again, you see an old lady.”

“Exactly. Well, that’s your father and I. We…complement each other, fill in the gaps, the missing parts. You look at us, you think you see one thing, but there are two of us there, hiding in plain sight. You wouldn’t see either of us, without the other. Does that make sense?”

It did make sense, and it got me to thinking. What if Mike and I were too much like each other? What if, instead of complementing, we clashed? That evening, I picked at my meal, barely touching the steak, mostly stirring the potatoes, and tried reading the peas as if they were tea leaves.

xii

Mike came to Cambridge during reading period, spending the first three weekends in January with me. Mornings, after I had sneaked breakfast up to him, we went over to Widener Library for three hours of study and review, seated facing each other at a little table in the stacks. Afternoons we spent writing papers and walking along the snow-crusted pathways criss-crossing the Yard. Evenings, he could safely join me in the Cabot dining hall, then up to my room for more study and writing. Each night, we enjoyed the new pleasures we’d found together in bed.

I discovered his secret for falling asleep in the strange environs of a woman’s college dorm. During World War II, his mother worked at the Harvard acoustic lab, where they developed an ear plug to protect the hearing of artillery gunners. She had bequeathed what appeared to be a lifetime supply of the pale red stoppers to him. Each night, he would open the clear plastic case protecting them, roll his tongue around one to moisten it, pull up on his ear – “to straighten out the canal” – and pop it firmly in. He looked so intent, yet silly, I couldn’t help but needle him every time I saw that. My first try fell flat. Using an insult common at the time, I said, “Oh, stick it in your ear!” He wrinkled his nose, shaking his head, but didn’t see the need for a comeback.

Next weekend, I tried imitating him. Every move he made, I mimed. “Some of us don’t need no stinking ear plugs!” I smiled at him. This irritated him enough, he pulled the plug out, pressed me down, and faked plunging it into my ear. That of course led to a complete breakdown in our night time protocol, leaving us exhausted on our backs, term papers abandoned until the morning.

He leaned over, nuzzling my neck. Looking up, he asked with surprise, “Why do you have holes in your ears?”

“Holes?”

“Yeah, right here,” he said, rubbing my lobe between thumb and forefinger. As usual, I’d taken my dangly earrings out before bed. “Won’t they grow over?”

“Are you serious?” Someday, I thought, I might figure out when he’s kidding and not.

On our last night together, we must have been fully satiated, sitting cross-legged on that narrow bed, just talking.

I wanted to know what happened in Idaho, if he had indeed resisted trying to ski. “You haven’t talked about Sun Valley. How’d it go?”

His face came alive, fully smiling, even a small chuckle as he started, “I love it there. It’s like a little gingerbread town. Nothing is real, it’s all fake chalets trying to look like a Swiss village. We stayed in a room right by the Opera House. That’s a cool place where they show movies, have concerts, meetings. Kind of like a fantasy community center.”

“That sounds like the theatre on the Vineyard.”

“Yeah?”
“Yes, a place where everybody goes, sees plays or shows, listens to music.”

“Right.”

“I remember, a couple of summers ago, this guy Jamie Taylor – his father’s the dean at North Carolina medical school or something – started coming every week, to play his guitar and do his songs. He was so good, everybody loved him. Very shy though.”

“Did I tell you about my father, when he went skiing?”

“Not yet.”

“You know, he’s an engineer, always plans everything out methodically. I’ve never seen him get emotional or charged up about anything, always seems controlled. Well, he was determined to try skiing, even though he’s what, 53? He thinks he can do anything if he reads about it and then tries it out. He signed up for a lesson, rented skis, went out to this little hill where they teach, Dollar Mountain. He comes back that afternoon bubbling. I’ve never seen him so excited. He was going on about what you’re supposed to do when you ski, talking very fast, ‘See, if you want to turn to the left, you make a “V” with your skis, then step, put your weight on your right ski, lean a little, and around you go. Same thing turning right, step on the left ski. It’s different than ice skating, so much more stable, no thin little blade to trip you up. You don’t have to push off like in ice skating – going downhill, gravity does all that work for you. It’s all about controlling your speed, so you don’t go too fast! That’s what’s fun about it.’ He never talks like that, about having fun.”

“What did you do?”

“He kept going on, ‘Come on, Mike, you’ve got to do this, try it for half a day, see what you think.’ He was so enthusiastic, so persuasive, I went ahead and signed up for lessons the next day. Learning how to ride the lift was … interesting, but I didn’t fall off, so I guess they thought I was coordinated enough to try going down the hill. I did what my father said, made a ‘V’, put my weight on the outside ski, and turned across the hill before I got going too fast. He was right, it’s the most exhilarating feeling, speed like you’re almost going too fast, but still in control.”

I hadn’t seen him this animated since I spied on him at the swim meet. I must have appeared confused, as he went on, “It’s hard to describe, sitting here thinking about it.”

I tried, “What if you were writing about it, what would you say.”

He took a deep breath, looked down at my lap, then out the window. Returning his gaze to me, he explained more calmly, “Remember, last year, when we were at the Vineyard, and were riding bikes around? That day we came back from Chilmark along the beach road?”

I nodded, “Uh huh.”

“I felt so…free on the bike that day, and then we saw those kids, two girls and a boy, on their own bikes, going over the bumps by the dunes. They had those streamers coming out of their handlebars, and they were hollering, screeching, not saying anything, letting out what they felt inside. I didn’t tell you then, but riding that bike, I got a flash back to when I was 10 or so, riding around the neighborhood, not caring about anything except moving fast. The bike carried me, I didn’t have to think. That’s what skiing feels like.”

After he was gone, that Sunday, I found a poem chicken scratched in black ink tucked amongst the pages of my final draft for the English 101 term paper.

SERANADE

These are what sang me to sleep last night:

Ephemeral imagery wafting soundlessly

    across

My sight,

    leaves no tracks

Bears no weight and knows no

  boundary,

Bother or burden.

Buffeted, soft and restful as a 

Feather

Easing down upon a crackling bed of leaves,

Herald of some now flown drifter,

Seeking warmer shelter.

Or else some cloistered curls, now unfurled,

Drifting, wafting, fading

    across

The undraped softness of two still young shoulders,

Cloaked in raiment

Finer than purest silk or gentlest

Tears,

warm and liquid,

Cried for love.

The shoulders

soft and young

and warm and

Slightly freckled

Transform into a vastness

Softness

Vastness,

And out pours

Yellow

Mounds and mounds of

    yellow

Daffodils and raisins, kissed by the

yellow

Sun and

  yellow brighter

still

Than daffodils – –

and raisins

Are the clouds and grains of dune-

Grass, 

growing from the sand

On which a drifter bird

Has landed, 

        near two

Bronzed shoulders,

        hidden by

Voluptuous hair, revealing a misty,

        shrouded

Silk-shrouded form

Of tears of love

Weightless

      boundless

Endless

1-20-68

v

Charlie called me a few days later from Providence. “I’m going down to D.C. this weekend for the Mobe. You want to come with me? This war has to end, we have to raise the stakes, make it impossible for Johnson to keep sending troops there.”

“How does that work, Charlie? How does a march, even if it’s thousands of people, make a difference?”

“It’s not any one thing, Janie. It’s a single drum beating, that gets joined by another and another and another, until they get so loud those people have to listen.”

“I’m so overwhelmed at college. I feel like Alice through the looking glass – I have to run twice as fast simply to stay in the same place. So much reading, so much writing, everyone’s so smart, knows more than me, has more insight than I do.”

“Sure, I get it, you’ve got to study. I know how hard that is. I went to Brown, remember? There is something you can do for me, for us, then. Arlene wants to go too, so we’d have to take Denise, but it’s no place for a kid, so she’s going to stay home with Denise. Want to come down here for the weekend and baby-sit? Then the two of us could go together. We’d be back early Sunday. You could take the train down here. She still naps every day, sleeps ten, eleven hours at night. You can do lots of studying with her, and on the train. Whaddya say?”

I did want to see Denise, see what she’d be doing, how she’d be talking now. And I hadn’t left Cambridge, had hardly left the campus at all, except for that one day with Mike. Impulsively, I blurted out, “Sure. Pick me up at the station Friday around dinner, I guess?”

Denise kept me busy all Saturday. I read one page in my psych text, but otherwise I catered to her whims, trying to keep her from running out into the street, or getting caught half-way up the jungle gym at the playground. Even so, I felt relieved to be free of Harvard stress, to be reminded that real life wasn’t always an intense discussion of endless new ideas. A little kid grounds you real fast, I decided.

Charlie and Arlene came back around noon. I drove Denise down to the station to meet them. The idea was to take that same train on into Boston, while they drove back home. We had ten minutes to talk.

As soon as Denise saw Arlene, she ran to her and jumped in her arms. Hauling her little girl up, up, kissing her all over, then resting her on one hip, Arlene asked “Was she any trouble? Did she eat like she’s supposed to? What about a nap?” Not waiting for an answer, she turned away and walked over to the car, leaving me with Charlie.

He looked a bit bedraggled, baggy eyes, wrinkled shirt and twisted pants. He must have slept on the train. Still full of energy, though, he excitedly  described the day. After a few speeches at the monument – “None as dramatic or inspiring as Martin Luther King” – 50,000 people walked across the river to the Pentagon. There, things seemed to get a little wild.

“There were a lot of cops, thousands of them. Army, too. MPs, Marshalls. It was chaos. There was one guy, he had a bunch of flowers, going along sticking them in the barrels of the Army guns. Another group of guys, I think one of them was Abbie Hoffman, acted like a bunch of hippies, saying crazy things, trying to get people naked. At one point, they chanted and waved their arms up and down. Said they were going to levitate the Pentagon, bring the whole war machine tumbling down. People broke through the fences set up all around. Sometimes, the MPs would grab them, by the hair or the collar, hit them with nightsticks. People kept saying the time for protest is over, it’s time for resistance. Hundreds – hundreds, Janie – of people got hauled off, got arrested. There was blood all over the steps. I don’t know where it’s all going to end, I don’t know how they can keep fighting when so many of us are against it.”

“That sounds scary, Charlie. Are you OK?”

“Arlene was with me. I’m not going to let the mother of our child get in any trouble. We stayed out of all that, didn’t even burned by any tear gas.” He almost laughed, but turned serious. “Dow Chemical is coming to Harvard this week. I heard at the march there’s going to be protests. Same thing at every campus when they show up, recruiting science majors for the war machine.”

“Why Dow Chemical? What’s so bad about them?

“Napalm. You’ve heard of napalm, haven’t you”

I knew the word, but nothing about what it was, or why it might be bad. I shook my head.

“Napalm. It’s like liquid fire. They shower it down from airplanes, to burn the jungle, so they can see the Viet Cong hiding there. Only problem, once it leaves the plane, you can’t control where it goes. It burns people, Janie, burns women, kids. It’s evil, it’s wrong, and Dow makes it. We need to starve them of new talent coming in from good schools, Harvard, places like that.”

The next Tuesday, hundreds of people gathered in the Yard, to protest the war. The SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society, called for an action the next day against Dow Chemical recruiters. Wednesday morning, after my morning class, I found a mass of students with a sprinkling of faculty between Mallinckrodt Hall and the Conant chemistry building. The SDS leaders soon realized the recruiter in Conant had no interviews scheduled, that the real action was over in Mallinckrodt, so they urged the crowd to block that building. The Dean of the College came out with the real recruiter, hoping to sneak him away from the protesters. Once he saw the crowd, they darted back inside. Dean Glimp then spent most of the next seven hours attempting to negotiate his “release”. Scores of students gave their Bursar’s cards in a thick packet to him, calling his bluff when he said he would sever their relationship with Harvard if they didn’t disperse and allow the recruiter to leave. It was a heated confrontation, but without any of the violence Charlie had described in Washington. Even so, I felt things could erupt at any moment. My legs were wobbly, my mind raced, as I walked back home to Cabot, grabbed a few more books, and headed to Hilles for some pre-dinner studying.

That evening, I was still jittery from the scene in the yard. Jeanne and Marcia were both engrossed in writing papers due that week, so I chanced a call to Mike. He now shared a top-floor suite with two sophomores. He occupied half the living room, while the others each had a single room intended as a double. They even had their own telephone, so Mike answered right away.

Looking for some relief from the tension permeating campus, I asked, “Mike, can we go to New York next weekend?”

“Uh, I’ve got this Organic Chemistry test on Monday, and I’m not doing so well there. I haven’t figured it out yet. I got a C minus on the first test last week.”

“I really need to get away. They had an anti-war rally here today, and I’m feeling so tense. I want to see a play, walk around in Central Park.”

“How would that work, anyway?”

“I could take the train down to Meriden Saturday morning, you meet me there, then we go into the City, find a student rush matinee, it doesn’t matter which one, anything with tickets. I’ll look in the New Yorker, see what’s happening. OK? Please?”

He was quiet for several seconds, thinking. “Right. I can study tonight, tomorrow, Friday. What time does that train get in?”

Of course, I’d already figured this out. “The schedule says if I take the first one, I’m in Meriden at 9:12, we get to New York by 11:45.”

vi

Only The Birthday Party, by Harold Pinter, had open rush tickets. I didn’t tell Mike, but the New Yorker critic had panned it. It involved a lot of word play, scary confrontations, with an occasional blackout during the worst of the spats. Mike thought much of it was funny, and sported a jolly mood as we left the Booth theatre into a chilly drizzle. We found a small deli near Central Park, glad to spend more time out of the rain.

Still a little energized from his first Broadway play, Mike enthused, “That was fun. I like it when you almost can’t figure out what they’re talking about.”

“He’s English, you know. British.”

“Who?”

“Pinter, the writer. All those actors are American, but the play opened in London ten years ago. Maybe that’s why it seemed a little odd.”

“Mmm…” was all he said. Then, “I didn’t tell you yet, but my father wants to take us out to Sun Valley this Christmas, to see Shelly. He wants to learn how to ski, he says. He’s a real jock, you know.”

“A jock?”

“Yeah, he was a triple letterman at the Naval Academy. He’s always learning some new sport. First, golf, when he got to Cincinnati. He’s got a little trophy from a tournament he won. Then he started ice skating, pulled my sister and I into it, remember? And he built that pool in the backyard, so he could swim half the year. Put in a basketball hoop, coached a Knothole team, and all that.”

“Knothole?”

“It’s baseball for kids. I played when I, what, was 8, 10, 11 ?”

“Were you any good?”

“Well, not so much when I started out in the third grade, But then I got glasses, and I could actually see the ball, so I could get some hits. I got spiked once, playing second base, when somebody slid into me. Wanna see?” he enthused, starting to pull up his left pant leg.

“No! No, not here.”

“Oh” he rubbed his left shin, as if remembering. “It was weird. I had a big gash in my skin half way down my leg, but it didn’t hurt at all. My father took me to the doctor after the game ‘cause there was this thing hanging out, and he thought I might need stitches. We got there, the doctor took a quick look, said, “Oh, that’s just a little piece of fat. Don’t worry, this won’t hurt a bit.’ He grabbed a pair of scissors, and cut it right off. He was right, I didn’t feel anything. I guess there’s no nerves in fat? He only put on a little band-aid. You sure you don’t want to see the scar?”

I scruchned up my nose, and wondered how he could find all that so fascinating, playing baseball, his father’s sport, getting injured. I worked on my corned beef sandwich and thought,  that’s one of the things intriguing, attractive, about him, that’s he’s so at home in his body. He has a hidden grace when he moves, doesn’t have to worry that he might accidentally knock over a glass of water when he’s reaching for his hot pastrami sandwich. That and his little boy eagerness, in such contrast to his poems and his late-night thoughts when we talked about who we were and wanted to be, made him hard to resist.

Outside, the rain had stopped. Cars, buses, taxis, people, the whole panoply of New York Street life assaulted us as we left the deli. Soon we found ourselves outside the Plaza Hotel, looking across to the park.

“You need to – we need to – go in the park and walk, show you what’s here,” I insisted.

“This is Central Park? It’s so big. And hilly. I thought it was all flat, Manhattan.”

Darting across 59th street, we skirted the pond and soon arrived at the bridge spanning its northern end. Fall colors were in full, defiant beauty, as if holding back the coming winter. A riot of flaming red ivy covered the stonework arch. Iridescent orange, sun-like yellow, and fading green flanked the upward curving piers on each side. Above, grey clouds lightened to white, a smattering of blue fighting to push through. Birds were everywhere, flying, flitting, alighting on the branches above, knocking leaves free to float like swinging hammocks to the water below.

“It’s so much…quieter in here, “ Mike marveled.

“Come on. I want to show you something.”

“What? Where?”

We passed the zoo, where animals paced in the wrought-iron cages, looking out-of-place and desolate. To our left, Wollman Rink appeared to be opening for winter skating. A Zamboni turned tight circles. leaving a freezing sheen of wetness behind. Families with ear muffs and scarves laced up, waiting to slip and slide. Children’s cries pierced the quiet, anticipating excitements to come. I turned to Mike, saying, “Wait, OK? You’ll like it. It’s up near the Met.”

Soon, we turned off the road, heading east past the statue of Hans Christian Anderson sitting by an oval lake. Tiny sailboats, remotely controlled from the far edge of the pond, motored along its surface. Off to one side, the Mad Hatter smiled at a mouse, sitting on its haunches atop a bronze toadstool, while the White Rabbit checked his watch. Alice, Dinah in her lap, stretched her hands out towards the edges of her own, much larger mushroom, as if deciding which side to eat.

“Yeah, wow, I love Alice in Wonderland.” Mike exalted. “In seventh grade, we read that, and then had to write a story based on it. I made up an encounter she had with a unihorn, that’s a unicorn who could play music through its horn! And before, when I was three or four, I told my mother I wanted to be Alice for Halloween.”

“How’d that go?”

“I remember getting a lot of candy that year, and wearing a blue skirt with a white blouse.”

“It doesn’t seem to have affected you too much. I mean, you don’t still want to be a girl. Or is there something you’re not telling me?”

He took the question seriously. “Humm…I guess not. The next year, kindergarten, I had a crush on a girl in class, then every year at Woodland Park, it was another girl, until Kathy – you remember Kathy?”

Kathy. The girl with the curly black hair. Miss Cincinnati. A little gruffly, I said, “Sure, she got you into South Pacific, right?”

“You never forget anything, do you?”

“Yeah, it’s a curse. But it did come in handy on the SATs, and It’s Academic.”

We kept walking towards the Met. Mike continued, “I feel sometimes like there are two of you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, there’s one part of you that’s all serious and adult. No-nonsense, intense. The other side, you love little kids, love to laugh and have silly fun. Maybe even love me?”

“I don’t think that’s so surprising. We all – or at least you and me, and the friends we have – we’re not so far from when we were little, and it’s not that long until we have a family of our own, more kids. But to get from one to the other, we have to, for want of a better word, grow up. We have to find a life, create it from a vague dream, build it, and that takes work, serious work.”

“I know, I know, but I don’t want to change. That’s like Alice, she was always changing, and she got very confused. I want to always be having fun, to play at life, not have life play with me. Even when I’m older, I don’t see myself losing that, becoming too serious about anything. I never want to forget the little kid who made me what I am today…” He trailed off wistfully.

We’d come to the Met, it’s stolid granite walls rising menacingly above us. “You’re sounding like Holden Caulfield, now that you’ve come to Manhattan.” I looked at my watch. “Think we should get back to Grand Central? It’s almost 5.”

“How do we do that?”

“We go out here, take the subway. Should only take 15 minutes.” I didn’t want to lose the thoughts I was getting, so I went on. “I’m not as sure of who I am as you seem to be. I get all mixed up with what’s expected of me, and what I feel inside about myself. And that’s all wrapped up with being a girl, I think. At Avondale, and now at Harvard, I’ve always felt a little on the outside looking in.”

“You?” He sounded incredulous. “You were the queen of your class. And you got into the best college in the country!”

“Sure, but being at Radcliffe, as smart as we all are supposed to be, we’re second-class citizens. Harvard was there first, it’s their professors and classes. We’re still fighting to be considered an equal part of it. They all think it’s a finishing school for very ambitious women.” I wanted to say, “You’ll never get what it’s like being a woman, no matter how hard you try, Michael Harrison,” but I held back. I felt a pull inside fighting to rule me, a need to have, to possess, and be possessed by him.

We made it back to Meriden by nine, got to his room in Clark Hall by 9:30. No one was home. Stuck to the temporary wall, a maroon burlap curtain actually, which cordoned off Mike’s space from the living room, a note from his roommate read, “Larry and I are off to Fairfield this weekend. Back for dinner Sunday night.”

vii

We must have forgotten, that day, about me going back to Cambridge. The topic never came up, not on the way to New York, not in the deli, or walking through the Park, or on the train ride back. I had a round trip ticket, Boston-to-Grand Central. I was a bit surprised to find myself getting off with him in Meriden. I thought, “We’ll have a kiss good-bye, then I’ll get back on.”

He held on so tight, so long, though, it seemed natural, as conductors whistled stragglers into the cars and lifted the stairs inside, finally pushing the doors closed, for me to simply stay with him. I had no plan, just a slight inability to say good-bye.

Pulling the note off the door, Mike mused, “I guess Rich and Larry aren’t coming back tonight. He said something about going away this weekend.”

“You know why?”

“Larry’s such a wonk. He wants to be a lawyer, a judge someday. He studies even more than you do. Finally he got restless, asked Rich to take him somewhere. I thought they were going down to a mixer at Conn. College, would get back late tonight.”

I looked around his suite. He had divided the large common area in half with a few two-by-fours hauled in from the nearby hockey rink construction site. Burlap curtains, nailed to the superstructure, covered most of this make-shift wall, leaving a flapping fabric door in the middle. A shelf resembling a little bar.perched half-way up. No liquor was in evidence  though, only a green bulbous Chianti bottle holding a half-melted candle covered with waxy drippings. His bed, originally the bottom of a bunk set, sat underneath two windows in his jerry-rigged bedroom. Out in the truncated living room was the top bunk, covered with a thin-ribbed faded red cotton blanket and a long vinyl back pillow.

I plopped down on this make-shift couch and perused the contents of the bookshelf to my right. Without thinking, I pulled out The Abnormal Personality by Robert White, opened it up and said as I randomly flipped through the pages, “White. You know, he’s a famous guy in Cambridge. Everybody talks about him in the psych department.” I noticed Mike’s meticulous green highlighting, on nearly every page though Chapter 4, “The Integration of Personality.” One part had been furiously underlined and starred. I read aloud, “Hey! Listen to this. ‘There is a certain restricted portion of the total range of intelligence which is most favorable to the development of a successful and well-rounded personality, somewhere between 125 and 155 I.Q.’ What did you say your mother tested you at?”

“138, I think.”

I went on, “He says, ‘Adolescents in this range are enough brighter than average to win the confidence of others, bringing about leadership, and a superior efficiency in managing their own lives. And, there are enough of them to afford mutual esteem and understanding.’ Reminds me of being at Avondale, and now in Cambridge. I feel at home here, not estranged.”

Mike reflected, “OK, but there is more to you, to us, than being smart. You know how to have fun, you can smile about your life. I think that’s why…that’s why I like being with you so much.”

I put the book back on the shelf. Time to deal with the elephant in the room, I decided. “I’m staying here tonight, right? Can I use the bathroom down the hall?”

Only a little flustered, Mike hesitated briefly, eyes darting back and forth, then said, “Uh…OK. I’ll stand outside, make sure it’s safe.”

Back in the living room, seated on the couch with Mike, we fell together. One kiss, then two, and I leaned back, gently pulling him down next to me. The pillow left little room for both of us. Mike sat up, tugging at my arm, and guided me through the burlap curtain to the bed beneath the windows. I was thinking about the “mutual esteem and understanding” phrase in White’s textbook. I knew we loved each other, we said as much all the time. I knew that meant more than respect for each other’s minds, dreams, hopes, and ideals. I knew it also led to this, towards getting into bed together at night. We both lay down, fully clothed.

“This is stupid,” I observed. I took off my blouse and skirt, slipped down my hose, and tugged at his pants. He finally got the idea, and pulled those off. We both worked on his pullover, getting it caught on his glasses, which he laid on the window ledge. Now what, I wondered, as we pulled the sheets over us. I certainly had no idea, and was pretty sure he didn’t either. Tentatively, I laid my hand on his stomach, rubbing up and down across his belly-button. He felt so soft, so warm, I had to let him know.

“I like the way you feel, your stomach, here.”

“Why?”

Are you kidding, I thought. Now is not the time for analysis. It’s time to explore, to find and feed the feelings we each were hiding. “Shush,” I whispered. “Lie here with me, OK? Let’s just touch each other a while.” With that, he turned on his side to face me, started kissing my lips and cheeks, neck and shoulders. He stroked my head, my hair, and rested there, lost in those locks he professed to love so much. Then his hands roamed across my back, down my arms, feeling my hips, questioning, wondering as he went. I started to lose myself, began to open up to him, trying to meld my mind with his. I closed my eyes and saw a glistening, glowing tunnel, easy to enter, easier to slide down and through. One last gate stood in our way.

He stayed silent, still questioning with his arms around me. They slowly relaxed as he sighed and gently rolled me away from him. He fumbled briefly with my bra clasps, until I helped release them, slinging the straps across my shoulders. He pulled me closer, my back caressing his chest, my legs cupped and curved against his.

Two fingers tracing down from my ribs past my hips, he whispered, “I like the way you’re soft and round here.”

Flippantly, I came back with, “We’re built like that so we can bear our young.”

Sounding puzzled, he said, “What, you mean, like rest a baby on your hip?”

I thought of a baby growing inside, enough room for a seven pound kid. I wondered why I’d said that. “No. We have to carry babies, inside, we’re made for that…” This was so weird. I hoped he wasn’t taking it the wrong way. “Women, I mean. Not me. No way I’m ready for that.”

“Yeah. That’s scary.” He reached around, found one breast, and cupped it in his hand. Quietly, he asked, “Does that feel good?,”

It did, I couldn’t deny it, not to myself or him. “Mmm hmm,” I murmured, slowly snuggling my body closer to him.

“You’re just the right size, we fit together perfectly.”

We fell asleep like that, huddled peacefully against the late October chill.

viii

Tuesday night, Jeanne showed up at dinner in a shimmery black cape, tall conical hat, wand, and black mask. “Where’s your costume? Aren’t you going to the Yard, protect the little kids knocking on doors?”

I was not a fan of Halloween. “I have a hard enough time being me, much less dressing up as someone else. I’ll go and keep you company, OK?” I looked at Jeanne in her witch’s outfit, and Marcia, dressed as a cheerleader, letter sweater on top, short pleated skirt over tights below. She jiggled pompoms in my face. “Where’d you get that?” I asked.

“Didn’t I tell you? Junior year, I was actually a cheerleader. Of course, with no football team, it was more of an honorary position, I guess.” She threw one arm up, the other down, stuck one hip out, and, pirouetting around, danced out the door.

Outside, Jeanne asked, “So you went to New York on Saturday. But you didn’t come home until Sunday afternoon. Um, what did you guys do? Where did you stay?”

Marcia added, “Jeanne and I decided, while you were gone, we need to make a pact together. About boys. And sex.”

“Everything but…” Jeanne explained.

“Everything but?” I wondered.

Marcia went on. “In high school, boys were always looking at me, taking me out, expecting me to … do things. The school was Catholic, and some of the girls, we vowed, ‘Never”, we’re not going to let our lives get messed up because some boy wants to, how do I say it, “experiment” on us. But we didn’t want to be seen as prudes, so we drew up some ground rules, and all swore to each other. I’m starting to feel the need for that again.” She paused as we came to Mass. Ave, the traffic halting us as we crossed over to Harvard. “The TA in my child development class, Esther, she’s married. I asked her about it, about how she handled it when she was in school. She’s really cool, she said she’d show us some things.”

That Friday, we went to Esther’s apartment. She’d convinced her husband Nathan to have a boys’ night out. Esther was short, wiry, almost hyperkinetic. Large black glasses framed her face under short black hair, giving her an owlish appearance. She turned to the television, switching off Walter Cronkite in mid-sentence while khakied GIs slogged through a swamp, rifles held high over their heads.

“Men…” she whispered, more to herself than us. Louder, she went on. “You all want to be shrinks, right? What was it Socrates said, ‘Know thyself’? You may think he means, your mind, who you are.” Esther was about 5 years older than us, married, graduated the previous year from Brandeis. She exuded worldly self assurance. “When I was your age, high school and starting college, I didn’t know much. About myself. About my body, what it wanted, what it could do. I found out a lot, by making a lot of mistakes, stupid things. No reason you should have to make the same ones. Let’s see what we can learn together.”

That night, we talked about what we’d done, or really hadn’t done, with boys. What we’d learned, or really hadn’t learned in high school health class. We shared our knowledge, or really our lack of it. Esther let us talk, looking around our little group, eyebrows raised, a human talking stick keeping the conversation moving.

Jeanne: “At school, in class, it all sounded so mechanical, so anatomical. “Penis’, ‘Vagina’, “Spermatozoa’, ‘Ovaries, tubes’.”

Me: “I know. Never anything about what to do with physical feelings, just vague talk about love and responsibility.”

Marcia: “And why did we have to be separate, boys and girls? Wouldn’t it be better to talk about this with them, rather than talk about them?”

Me: “Yeah, the same’s true when we do try to learn from each other. Anybody ever had a conversation about sex, a serious conversation, I mean, with boys and girls – women – together? And don’t start about mothers, or sisters…they either clam up, or make jokes. At least mine did.”

Jeanne: “Have any of you ever looked at yourself? Or someone else? Down there, I mean.  I’m gonna be a doctor, and I’ve looked at those anatomy books and drawings. But that’s isolated, and two dimensional. I wish I knew more, and I don’t even have a boyfriend, not like Janie.”

Esther looked back at me, raising an eyebrow and cocking her head to one side. “Well…?”

I considered her unasked question. Mike and I never did talk about what we were doing, kissing, feeling, lying together. “It almost seems a cliche, but I want him to love me…I think…I feel the way to do that is hold him close, have him feel that without me asking or telling him. Does that make any sense?”

“Has he asked you to do anything you don’t want to?”

“Nooo. He’s unsure, I think, a little frightened of scaring me away.”

Esther nodded. I couldn’t think of what else to say, so she turned to Jeanne. “Why don’t you all bring a mirror when we meet again. There’s something I’ve been wanting to try with a group, see how it works.”

Two weeks later, Nathan away at a Celtics’ game, seven of us were gathered in a circle. We each had a mirror – compacts, handheld, round, square, all kinds. Esther brought out two flashlights, and trained her floor lamps into the center.

“Is anybody going to feel uncomfortable if we take our clothes off, and look at ourselves? Has anyone tried to do that before?”

Marcia giggled nervously. “Playing doctor?”

“No, I mean since you grew up, got bigger, filled out, started having periods, all that.”

Another girl nervously said, “How would you do that? We’re not dogs, we can’t, like, lick ourselves.”

Jeanne lifted her hand mirror and waved it a bit. “I get it. That’s what this is for, right?”

It felt a little funny – no it felt a lot funny – but we all took off our pants or skirts, shed our underwear, drew up our knees, and held the mirrors between them. Gasps, laughs, and sighs emanated softly from the circle.

Esther was speaking. “Now, if you’ve ever put a tampon in, you have a general idea. Uh, nobody’s on her period now, right?” No response. She went on. “You probably never stopped to look, you just wanted to get it out and in, didn’t pay any attention to anything else down there. So. Take your hand, your free hand, and make a ‘V’ with the first two fingers, pointing down. You see those wrinkly things in the middle?”

“Labia?” someone said.

“Right. Labia. Means lips. Let’s call ‘em that, OK? Try to push them apart gently, slowly, with your two fingers, push them wider.”

It was a little tricky for me, someone without a lot of hand/eye coordination, to navigate that maneuver looking through a mirror, but I soon got it. “My hair keeps getting in the way!” I groused. 

One of the new girls, a blond with thin wispy locks, grumbled, “At least you’ve got some.”

“Ah, there it is!” I exclaimed.

Next to me, Jeanne turned her head. “What is?”

“My hymen!”

That same blond, a bit more dejectedly this time, said, “At least you’ve got one…” Giggles all around.

Pale pink inside the darker crescent of those lips, a few ragged tags surrounded a narrow dark abyss. It looked so small, so vulnerable, so … lonely? “No way anything fits through there, Esther.” I whined.

“You mean a new born baby’s head?” 

The girl next to me let out a shuddered, “Eew! No way”.

Esther went on. “We can’t see it well, ‘cause we’re not looking all the way inside, but the vagina, that whole area, is pretty elastic. Think of one of those little drink umbrellas, or a fan. It’s all compact when folded. But open it up, see how big it is.”

Jeanne blurted out, “Where’s my clitoris?”

Marcia snickered, “You sure you’ve got one?”

One of the other girls said, “Clit..Clit-us? That’s not something they told us about in Health. They named it, pointed to it in those drawings,  but didn’t seem to say much about it.”

“OK, the clitoris,” Esther declaimed. “To me, this is where the magic happens. Anatomically, it’s the same thing as a penis on a boy.”

“But it never grows or gets big?” someone asked.

“Oh, it can grow, can get bigger. But that’s not the point. You know how sometimes boys seem to be focussed on nothing but their dick?” More laughs. “Well, we’ve got all those same nerves they have there, but all compressed, compacted into that little spot. So much more sensitive, so much more…powerful…when it comes to feeling sex.”

On the way back to Cabot, Jeanne wondered, “I don’t know if that helped or not. I’m still afraid of doing anything with a boy, even more afraid now, they might hurt me there. Marcia, Janie…?”

Marcia slowed, looked away, and, keeping her head down, said, “There was this guy, senior year. He took me to the prom, in his parents’ station wagon. Somebody must have put something in the punch, or maybe he did it to my drink. I was so tired, I couldn’t fight, after he folded the seat down in the back of the car. I don’t know if he did anything or not, I was so out of it. It didn’t feel like it afterwards, my clothes were still clean, I wasn’t sore or bleeding or anything. But he still bragged about it to his friends the next week. Nobody said anything to me, but they all gave me looks, like, ‘Oh, the great Marcia Levine, she’s not so smart after all’…”

CHAPTER THREE

I Place My Trust Apart From Me

August, 1967

“Hey look! See what’s at the Playhouse in the Park?”

Mike rustled through the morning paper after we’d eaten lunch at my house, while I organized what I’d be taking to Cambridge in a couple of weeks. He threw the entertainment section of the Enquirer onto the bed where my suitcases splayed open. Picking it up, I saw a small ad for The Fantasticks, opening that evening at the Eden Park theatre for a two week run.

“Would be nice to see it, but I bet it’s sold out,” he observed.

“You have your Calvin ID, don’t you? We could do a student rush…”

“Student…what’s that?”

I wondered how he managed to remain so insulated amidst all those New Yorkers he went to school with. “Student rush…they open up the box office about 45 minutes before each   show, and sell any unused tickets at a cut rate to impoverished students like us. All you have to do is wait in line. No guarantee we’d get seats together, or even any seats at all, but it’s worth a try sometimes. Wanna go?”

“That play was all you ever talked about last year. You made it sound so dreamy. Sure, what else are we going to do?”

As we drove by the swing sets in the park, I thought of our trip to the conservatory at Christmas. I felt a wave of nostalgia, remembered feeling like a little girl, slowly swinging there while Mike soared like a ski jumper high above me. Throughout the play that night, more memories flooded back, of seeing the show as a fourteen year old, and identifying with the girl, only two years older, who dreamed of becoming worldly-wise, all while being swept away by love for a boy who might someday kiss her upon the eyes. Since then, I’d found a boy, and was about to live my dreams within the world, seeing it through older eyes.

“What did you think, second time around?” Mike asked as we drove back to Clifton.

“Not the same. Not like Dylan says, though.”
Mike thought a moment. “Oh. ‘I was so much younger then, I’m older than that now’?” he said, transposing that line from My Back Pages.

“Right. I’m feeling ready for Radcliffe, can’t wait to leave. I’m tired of fantasy, of expectation. I want my feet on the ground, ready to be an adult.”

“What’s that mean, ‘be an adult’? Like getting married, having children?”

“No,” I came back, a touch of anger in my voice. “I love kids, I loved being a kid. I know you do too, those swim classes you taught, your little cousins you told me about. But that’s not all you want, is it? You are heading straight towards medical school, being a doctor. You are not going to let anything get in the way of that, ever, are you? You think trying to have a family, right after college, might be a problem?”

He didn’t respond, so I went on. “I’m not going to college to find a man, a husband. I’m going on to graduate school after.”

“In what?”

“Psychology, probably. At least I want to learn a lot more about it there, see if that’s what I really want. But no matter what, I want something more than getting married, having children. That’s wrong.”

“Uh-huh. I get it. Radcliffe’s the place for that.”

I wasn’t sure he did get it. Everything had been – would be – so easy for him. Smart, a WASP from the Mayflower, not bad-looking, self-confident behind his shy exterior, I could see him gliding ever forward, friction-less, towards his goals, already staked out for him. It would be easy to get dragged along in his wake, let him break the path for me. I felt instead a strange and powerful ambition, that I had to find out and become the me I did not yet know myself to be. Those last few weeks before I left for school, I sensed a sudden, final break. Even though I would come back, holidays and summers, I’d never truly live here again. My dreams led me east, towards a denser, richer world.

Mike and I would walk forever most afternoons, as he stopped by our house on his way home from the hospital. He didn’t talk much about the psych ward, except to say, “It’s depressing, to be around such sullen, sad and lonely people all the time. They’re locked in there, like prison, and have to wear a uniform, white hospital clothes, with drugs that keep them sleepy, or jittery. The doctors play at treating them, following a book or some rules. But everyone knows no one’s getting better.”

“Do you still think that’s what you want to do?”

“I’m still interested in why people do what they do, what makes us tick. Maybe I want to be one of those psychiatrists who sits and talks with people who aren’t crazy enough to be locked away. That might be better.”

Late one afternoon, we walked down to Lafayette, a few blocks south, where the largest yards and houses sat at the edge of the hill, looking north to the Mill Creek Valley below, humming with the milling machine factory and Kroger store. The Rosen’s lived there, in two homes on lots which filled the entire block. Cousins Phil and Jerry, former classmates of Mike, were home from college. Seeing them out front, we waved, walked over, while Phil weakly smiled, waving back. He asked, “What are you two doing here? Shouldn’t you be saying your last goodbyes?”

The grass felt dry beneath my shorts, prickly against my calves’ bare skin as I sat down on the expansive Rosen compound lawn. Crickets hummed in the bushes nearby; fireflies began to spark around us. The day had been hot and muggy, that moist enveloping midwest blanket which has no cooling evening breeze. The air smelled of straw and flowers.

“My father still refuses to get an air conditioner, so we decided to take a walk down here, see if there’d be a breeze,” I observed.

“We got ours a couple of years ago, for the upstairs bedrooms,” said Jerry.

Mike reflected, “My dad put in this whole house thing, the size of a car almost, in the basement, pumping air through the heating ducts. I dunno, it almost makes things too cold. I miss it when my mother would come in on hot nights like this one, and sprinkle water on my sheets, make them all cold and damp. I like falling asleep that way…”

He lay down, his head resting on my feet. Craning back toward Phil and Jerry,  he said, “Any of you ever been to Aspen?” Without waiting for an answer, he went on, “My dad took us out there this summer, on the way to California. The air feels so different. At night, it doesn’t stay hot, like this, it cools off right away, chilly even, ‘cause the air’s so thin, it can’t hold any heat. And the trees – not like here, no oaks or chestnuts. Dry pines in the mountains, and aspen trees lower down. Their bark so white, and the leaves make little whistling sounds, even with the slightest breeze.”

Jerry spoke up, “I like it here, the wilderness scares me.” He was the only one of us staying at home for school, at UC.

Phil “What about you, Janie, where would you rather be right now?”

“It makes me nervous, but I can’t wait to get to Cambridge, find out who’s in my class, what the professors are like, what a real, old city is.”

“Do you have to live on campus? Turns out, we don’t have to at Antioch, not anymore. They changed the rule this year. I’ve already got an apartment and some roommates. Next week, I’ll be driving up there, to Yellow Springs, to get all set.”

“No; yeah…we all live in dorms on the quad. There’s three houses, each one is like a house at Harvard, except this is all women. I’ll be in a single room, Cabot house. It’s run kind of like a boarding house. You have to sign in and out and all that.”

“Visitors?”

“Um, they seem real strict. Up until this year, they had a rule, ‘If you’ve got a man in your room, the door must be open, and both of you must have at least one foot on the floor at all times’.”

“Really?”

“Really. But they had a strike or something, a hunger strike, last spring, so they did away with that one.”

Mike chimed in, “Yeah, same thing, kind of, at Calvin.All the freshmen ate in one dining hall. Last year, everyone had to wear ties at dinner. That’s gone now, you can come in flip-flops and sweatpants if you want, I guess. And they’re talking about admitting women in a year or two. They all are, all those colleges in New England.”

“Lizzie says that’s not going to happen at Smith or Mt. Holyoke, because they have Amherst and U Mass right there. But Radcliffe and Harvard, they take classes together already, so I don’t know if anything’s going to change there,” I noted.

No one talked for a time, the humid air a narcotic.

Mike broke the silence. “Hey…Clifton Meadows is down there, right? At the bottom of the hill?” He pointed north, towards the unseen but seething expressway.

“Yeah. Why?” Phil answered flatly.

“That’s one of the places we’d go to have swim meets. The private pool swim club league. They weren’t very good, we always beat them pretty easily.”

The three of us, Phil, Jerry, and I, stayed silent. That was another place we weren’t allowed; we had our own country club, Losantiville. The fault lines between Jews and gentiles may have been melting elsewhere, but not in summer-time leisure. Mike seemed oblivious to how this made us feel, as he went on, “I miss swimming this summer. Early morning, the fog over the pool, water warmer than the air. Then afternoon practice, blazing sun on my skin. Working hard, feeling tired. I miss that.”

Getting no response, Mike shut up at last.

We walked back home, where I had to help mom get dinner ready. Mike wanted to get back to his house, but he asked, “Can I go upstairs for a minute? Something I want to write.” He didn’t stay long. Popping into the kitchen, he left with no kiss, no smile, only one of those deep-dish thinking expressions on his face as he waved at my mom and mumbled, “Good-bye.”

After dinner, upstairs in my room, I noticed my Avondale HS math pad open, his distinctive scribble covering most of one page. I read:

SUMMER…

…is a time to reconnoiter, redirect

one’s self;

Lazy, mindless days,

drifting like the sun, unhindered,

across the widest skies of August. 

Horizons stretching, reaching, grabbing for the orb

     of gold – 

It slowly makes its journey, heedless to the passions

     it engenders.

8-11-67

ii

Two weeks after Labor Day, we headed off to New England, me with my parents, Mike in his red Lancer. We’d agreed to meet a few weeks later after school started, Columbus Day weekend, for a day together in Cambridge. I needed some time to settle in, get oriented to my dorm, classes, the whole adventure of coming to Radcliffe, of watching summer turn to fall in Boston.

Tuesday afternoon, the day before registration for the semester, we arrived at Cabot house, one of nine freshman dorms. On the east side of the quad, it rose five stories above the somewhat ratty green lawn, topped by a cupola, above which a weather vane drifted with the changing autumn breeze. Built of red brick with white stone trim, it resembled my early grade school in Cleveland, but much larger, and without an asphalt playground in front. We walked up five wide stone steps, through a small portico flanked by two columns supporting a second floor balcony protected by iron railing. Inside, confused and eager incoming freshman, most shepherded by one or two parents, milled around a large reception cubicle built into the far wall. There, a calm and studious grey-haired woman, whom I would come to call “Mother”, methodically checked each girl against a list on the desk in front of her. To most, she proffered keys and a paper, pointing them to the stairs. A few were in the wrong house, and those she directed back out to the quad, sending them to the proper dorm.

Off to one side, I saw a slightly chubby girl with short dark hair sitting in one of the over-stuffed leather armchairs, surrounded by a professorial-looking man on one side, and an East Asian woman on the other. I eased over to her, drawing my own parents in my wake. I stared down at the instruction card I’d been mailed, looked up, and asked her, “Is there any order to all this?”

She looked up, shook her head, and said, “Not that I can see.” She smiled as she spoke, but I noticed her eyes retained a downward tilt which, without the upturned lips, might be interpreted as sad, or resigned. She stood up, offered her hand, and said, “I’m Jeanne. Jeanne Heldman.”

In the weeks before I left home, I’d thought about adopting my first name, Sarah, here at college, but never came to a conclusion. Instinctively, I said, “Jane. Janie, really.” Looking back at my card, I asked, “Um…what room are you in?”

“212”

“I think we might be neighbors! I’m in 221.”

“That’s right across the hall. How did you know?”

“I didn’t. I was just looking around for a friendly face, you were the first person I saw.” We both laughed, a hint of childish giggle underneath. My mother, ever forward and friendly, turned to the couple and said, “We’re Henry and Miriam. Stein. Janie’s parents.”

The ice broken, we quickly learned he was a physician, she a housewife who had been a nurse, they were from St. Louis where he was on the Internal Medicine faculty of Washington University Medical School, and that Jeanne was an only child. We all approached the desk together, receiving a smile when Mother learned she could check two boxes off at once, and give only one set of directions.

Eagerly,  Jeanne and I trooped up one flight to the second floor, our parents left behind to organize the transport of our belongings without the aid of an elevator. 212 and 221 were indeed across the hall from each other, hers right next to the bathroom, mine opposite. That was our first stop, to discover the intricacies of communal living. Two bathrooms on each floor, 3 sinks, 3 toilets, 3 showers in each, for 24 freshman girls.

“My mom bought me a new bathroom kit. I’m glad she did. Looks like there’s no room anyway to keep anything. Not even towel shelves.” Jeanne observed. I nodded, sniffing the air, which smelled of disinfectant.

Back in her room, which faced the quad – mine had a window looking out on Walker Street – we sat down, she on her bed, me on the straight-backed wooden chair tucked under a spartan desk. Next to that was a fading dresser, two small drawers on the top, three more below. That, plus the bed, desk and chair, constituted the entirety of the furniture in our rooms. A small closet opened next to the entry door, sporting a single bar with no hangers or hooks and a shelf I could barely reach. Jeanne, three inches shorter than I, might need a foot stool. Simultaneously we sighed, looked around, and laughed. I remembered visiting the school in the summer over a year ago, peeking into the unadorned rooms, and fantasizing about how I might decorate one. I had brought a cover for my bed, a few books, my favorite pen, and a cloth wall hanging. Besides my clothes, the only other connection to my life before Radcliffe were two small framed photographs, one of my family at the Vineyard, the other of Michael.

Suddenly, three boys stomped in, carrying Jeanne’s luggage. A similar troop dropped my stuff off across the hall. The dads gave each of them a few bills, and the gaggle raced back downstairs to find another load. Apparently, every fall townies took advantage of the lack of mechanical lifts here to collect some extra cash. I said to Jeanne, “See you in a bit, OK?” and walked over to join my parents. My mother had laid the suitcases out on the bed and begun opening the dresser drawers. She’d already noticed the lack of hangers. “I’ll send dad out to get some. Anything else you want?”

In less than thirty minutes, everything I’d brought had found a place, and my parents were looking adrift. My mom ventured, “Honey, we were talking with Jeanne’s parents and think we’ll go out for lunch, before we start back home. Do you two want to come along?”

It seemed awkward, saying goodbye in a restaurant. I shook my head, no, and tears began to well. I grabbed her, squeezed hard, and pulled back, wiping my eyes, sniffing a little. “Mom, I think I want to get used to things a bit. Let’s say good-bye here, OK?” She and dad didn’t seem nearly as distraught as I felt, but they had been through this three times before.

Jeanne, seeing that I was sending my own parents off, raised to her full height, and smartly announced, “Right, Janie and I are going to take a walk outside, look at the campus, go to the Coop and get a few things. We’ll be all right.” Her mother smiled, relieved, while her father checked his watch. With that, we sent them off to their empty nests, heedless of how they might be feeling. We had our own portal to pass through, into the next four years.

iii

Conversation was easy with Jeanne. I started with that college staple, “Know what you’re majoring in?”

With what I would come to know as her characteristic self-assurance, she said, “I’m going to be a doctor, so I guess it’s got to be biology, right?”

“A doctor? What kind?”

“Probably a pediatrician. I like working with kids, watching them grow, helping them. But I’m also thinking about psychiatry.”

“Medical school? Aren’t you anxious it’s hard to get into? And what about being a women there?”

“My father knows a little bit about admissions, he says things are changing. Like at his school in St. Louis, there were only five women admitted two years ago, they’re over ten now, and it keeps rising. He says, “I’d rather you become a doctor, than marry one.’ It’s funny, I know, turning the cliche around. It does feel like we’ve got more of a chance now, don’t you think? What about you?”

Inwardly, I was jealous she was aiming so high, and a little in awe she did not seem perturbed that almost everyone in medical school would be male.

“I like psychology, that’ll probably be my major,” I said

“Well, why aren’t you thinking about medical school, too, about psychiatry?”

That was a tough question. Despite my valedictory status at high school, my stellar test scores, all the support I’d received from teachers for academic success, no one had ever suggested, “Sarah Jane, you should be a doctor.” When I joined the “Health Careers Club” at Avondale, sophomore year, all I heard about were the opportunities in nursing. Then I met Michael. Somehow, when I learned of his ambition to be a psychiatrist, I didn’t want to be competing with him, or people as smart as him, in college or medical school. I saw “Psychologist” as a more holistic path to follow, one which opened up the breadth of the human mind and spirit. Medicine required a narrow science track, limited to only what could be observed and counted, measured and treated with drugs. But I didn’t know how to tell her all that, so I said, “Funny, that’s what my boyfriend wants to do, be a psychiatrist.”

Massachusetts Avenue loomed ahead, our route to Harvard Square and the Coop. Under one of the elm trees,  Jeanne pulled up short and demanded, “What? What do you mean, ‘boyfriend’?”

It might have been the warmth of the afternoon sun, but I could feel my forehead start to sweat. I thought, “That’s what an aristocrat would say, ‘sweat’.  ‘Perspiration’, that’s a peasant talking.” I gave a nervous giggle, and stepped into the shade. “Uh, yeah, he’s a sophomore at John Calvin University now. He’s coming up here on Columbus day weekend.”

“Why? Why do you want to be tied down with someone, now, when you’re starting college? Do you think you’ll have time for that?” When I didn’t answer right away, she went on, “What’s he like?”

Words started tumbling out. “He swims. He’s always moving around, can’t sit still. Doesn’t like people, but get him out of his shell, and he turns on the charm switch. Then, when he starts talking, he won’t shut up. He knows everything, or at least thinks he does. He’s like me in that way, but we’re really not the same at all…”

She interrupted, “What’s the best part of being with him?”

“He’s funny. He writes poems. He doesn’t push me. Mostly, he calms me down, like I don’t have to be somebody I’m not. I feel like the real me with him.”

No-nonsense, she asserted, “Well, don’t let him walk over you. Don’t let him get in the way of where you want to go, who you want to be. There was a boy last year, in high school, I guess he was my boyfriend for a while. We went to the prom. We were both a little out of it, socially, it was our one chance to feel normal, going to that dance. I never felt close to him, though, didn’t feel anything magic or sparkly going on, like other girls seem to talk about. And then he started acting like he owned me, telling me what to wear, how to do my hair, I didn’t know how to drive, stuff like that.” She looked at me expectantly.

“Mike’s not like that, I don’t think. He knows exactly where he’s going, what he wants to do most of the time. But he listens to me, like I’m the one in charge, sometimes.”

“Like?”

“Well, like, I showed him about the New Yorker. He thought it was all about the cartoons, but after reading it a few times at my house, he went out and got a subscription, to go along with the Sports Illustrated he gets every week. I take him to plays. And movies. His family is so midwest, his mother came from Iowa, his dad Montana. Not big city people at all. So I get to teach him all these things he hasn’t really been exposed to. I get to be the smart one, the sophisticated girl.”

“Sounds like you might be too good for him.”

“I don’t think so. He’s the first guy – the first person – I’ve ever known who could hold his own with me. He was on the debate team, it’s impossible to win an argument with him. Best you can hope for is a grudging draw. And, he writes. He’s so good with words, talking and writing.”

By this time, we’d been walking down a crowded Mass. Ave. a while, almost to the Common. Hundreds of people, many of them young, were heading in all directions, disgorged every few minutes from the underground “T” station a few blocks ahead. Across the street we saw the Coop, and headed over. We both had our lists for the classes we planned on taking, and gravitated towards the psych section. We’d be in Psych 101 together. As we pawed through the stacks, a taller raven-haired girl joined us. Seeing the lists in our hands, she asked, “You two in psych as well?”

I nodded, so she went on, “Hi! I’m Marcia, Levine. I guess we’re all freshman?”

She seemed as nervous as I felt. In what sounded like my mother’s voice, I introduced myself. “Janie. Janie Stein. I – we” – indicating Jeanne – “ we’re both in Cabot, and taking psych 101.”

“Me too!” Her smile drained all the fear and awkwardness from our encounter. She had a little bit of Boston in her words, not like the flat mid-western speech I knew from back home. “I’m up on the fifth floor. It’s a long climb, but I like the exercise.” Lean and graceful, Marcia moved easily between us and grabbed a thick textbook, holding it up triumphantly. “Found it! Here, one for each of you.”

Leaving the Coop together, our little band aimed south, past the law school, curved east with the Ave, and found ourselves at the edge of Harvard proper, at Brooks House. Walking past the red-brick walls, I asked jokingly, “Where’s all the ivy, then?”

Jeanne took me literally, explaining they had to tear much of it off, so it wouldn’t eat the stone, making it crumble. Marcia laughed, and pointed ahead.

“There’s the Yard. Come on, I want to see Widener Library.”

We spent the next 30 minutes exploring our academic home for the next four years, pointing out the various classroom buildings, the Houses where the Harvard men lived, the massive library where so much knowledge in the world was stored.

Exiting to the south, we found ourselves back on Massachusetts Avenue, near the Square. Spying a small theatre, I raced across the street to examine the posters for upcoming movies.

Once Marcia and Jeanne arrived, I pointed at it, and asked, “‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’ What’s that?”

“I think it’s one of those sci-fi things from the ‘50s. When’s it going to be here?” Marcia said.

“Looks like the week of October 12-18. Columbus Day is a holiday, isn’t it. Want to go see it? We could probably use a break, some laughs, by then, I bet,” Jeanne said.

iv

It drizzled the evening of Columbus Day as we headed to the musty theatre. I wore a shiny yellow vinyl raincoat my mother insisted I bring to Radcliffe, a matching hat covering my hair. Jeanne sported an umbrella, while Marcia clomped along, bare-headed, rain dripping down her nose onto her tennis shoes. In her jeans, she seemed in tune with the crowds around us.

We’d misjudged the time it took to walk the few blocks to the Square. Marcia saw the line waiting to get in, observed, “I don’t want to stand out here getting wet. Let’s go buy our tickets, then wait in the coffee shop there next door?” Maybe you should have worn a hat, I thought to myself.

Inside the little cafe, Marcia seemed at ease ordering a “cup, black,” while Jeanne had no trouble with “cream and some sugar, please.” I’d never been a coffee drinker, never even tried it before, but I didn’t want them to know that. I rummaged in my brain for the safest way to try the stuff for the first time, and said, “Same,” while pointing to Jeanne. The waitress was back in no time, carrying three mugs covered with the Harvard Ve-ri-tas shield, steaming and smelling…well  it was enticing. I demurely tried a sip. A little harsh, mellowed by the cream. I added another dollop of sugar to staunch the taste.

“Anything special this weekend?” I asked

“I’m going home. It’s Yom Kippur, my parents want me back. Besides, I’ve got a bunch of laundry piling up, it’s starting to smell.” Marcia lived an hour away in Rhode Island and could get there on the train to Providence.

“I’m going to hole up and finally learn about DNA and RNA and ribosomes and proteins. They’re just starting to figure it all out, and they expect us to understand it? You?”

Mike was driving up Saturday morning. We’d have all day and evening, then he’d go back when the dorm closed. I explained all this to Marcia’s intense interest. Jeanne seemed a little distracted. I went on. “Have you heard anything about changing the dorm rules?”

Marcia seemed up on the rumors. “After that strike last year, about living off-campus, they put together a group, faculty, staff, and some students, to look at housing. A girl I went to high school with knows one of the student reps. She says they’re talking about doing away with sign out, with rules about guests, everything. The idea is, they want to encourage us to stay on-campus, to not go off-off.”

Jeanne perked up and repeated, “‘Off-off’? What’s that?”

“We already have the ‘off-campus’ living option. When you get to be a junior, you can pick a room in one of the apartments right next to campus, which the school owns. It’s not much different than being in Cabot, but it’s more like home than a dorm. ‘Off-off’ means you pay rent for an apartment not owned by the school. You still have to pay student activity fees, though. That’s already happening, and they don’t want everybody to do it, so making dorms less cloistered is supposed to …”

I interrupted. “When? When are they going to change those rules. Not that I mind, really, I like the quiet after ten, like knowing that I won’t run into a stranger in the bathroom, that I can walk around in whatever.”

“I don’t know. Next semester? Anyway, I heard that with all this being planned, the RAs and the house mothers are already starting to kind of look the other way on all that.”

It was time to get in line for the movie. I’d drunk the full cup, and noticed I was starting to feel a little funny, more alive, almost like I had an electric charge buzzing around me. I hoped it wouldn’t keep me up half the night.

Mike arrived two days later, a little after ten. I was waiting for him in the downstairs lounge, reading a book our RA had told me about, The Feminine Mystique, by a woman named Betty Friedan. I slammed it shut and tucked it tight against my side when Mike strode in.

“What’s that?”, he asked, pointing at the book. No “Hi”, no “How are you?”, no “I missed you.” I’d gotten used to his direct, to-the-point greetings. I knew he’d eventually smile, listen, and maybe even melt in front of me. Still, it was jarring.

“Nothing. Something for class. Let’s go upstairs, show you my room, OK? How was the drive, any trouble?”

“It’s freeway all the way. On Saturday morning not too many trucks on the Turnpike. Even driving here over the bridge, no problem. I parked right outside on Walker Street.” Then, he remembered Yom Kippur a year ago. “Any sins you’re going to atone for this year? Yahweh still OK with you seeing a goy?”

I should have known, he never forgets anything. “He’s got his eye on us, I’m sure. But I think we’re doing OK.”

We spent the day in Boston, walking through the theatre district and by the Old North Church downtown off the Commons. The old cemeteries salted amongst the buildings fascinated him.

“Look at those gravestones! The oldest ones, they have that devil face. Then later, mid 1700s, it starts to soften a bit, like a Jolly Roger with wings. Maybe death was getting less frightening?” 

Boston, especially on a weekend, is filled with college and university students, 50-60,000 of us. Mike and I felt at home in some ways. The wave of dressing down, outfitting yourself at the surplus store, had started. Our clothes, though, stood out a bit. We still sported slacks and skirts, button down cotton shirts, clean overcoats.

After dinner at Durgin Park, slabs of roast beef all around, we took the T back to Cambridge, for my second viewing of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Mike was quickly drawn in to the fast-paced black and white sci-fi fantasy in which a middle-aged man in small-town California finds everyone around him acting strange, numb, slow. He discovers that giant pea pods are being laid next to his sleeping neighbors, replacing them with perfect replicas who act like unfeeling robots. Near the end, as he goes a little crazy, he tries to stop a truck load of pods from heading out of town, towards Los Angeles. A policeman, actually one of the pod people, hauls him off the truck and begins to beat him with a night stick. With that, the crowd in the theatre starts booing, hissing, even throwing wadded up paper at the screen.

Befuddled, Mike asked, “What are they doing? What’s that all about?”

I was beginning to learn it was my job to bring Mike out of the ‘50s into the ‘60s. He seemed stuck in a backwater, oblivious to changes happening around him. “The police – pigs,” I whispered. “We had a demonstration here last week at the Square, against the war. Cops started beating some kids, making them all bloody, arresting them. Didn’t you hear about that? Isn’t anything like happening in Connecticut?” The movie had ended, credits rolled, and I went on, normal voice now. “Nobody likes the cops here. They’re the bad guys.” Mike looked puzzled. “Didn’t you hear about the Mobe?” Mike’s befuddled expression grew wider. “That’s the National Mobilization Committee. To end the war. All the anti-war groups, all over the country, set it up this spring. Don’t you remember, in April, the march in New York to the UN? Dr. Spock, Martin Luther King, the SDS set it up, and now they’re going to Washington, to keep it all going.. A bunch of people are going to march on the Pentagon, from the Lincoln Memorial. Phil Ochs is going to sing. Dr. Spock, that pediatrician, he’s going to speak. I’d like to go, but I’ve got so much stuff I have to study for.”

Mike was pensive the whole way back to Cabot, saying nothing. I walked beside him. As we left the Ave, he laid his arm around my waist, squeezed me a little, and finally said, “Yeah. I guess the war’s not right. But what can we do? We can’t vote, not yet. We – I – want to stay in school, need to get good grades to get into med school.”

“But people are dying. Not just us, all those people who live there, too. And the ones from here, the ones who have to go, they don’t have a chance like you do, no college deferral. The poorest people, the ones who live in the ghettos, the blacks – they’re the ones who are dying, and for what? For what, Mike?”

“I know, I know. I always thought the police were the good guys, though. Every little kid wants to be a fireman, or a policeman, right? Why did they have to sound so hateful, those people at the movie? Are you turning into one of them, one of the protesters?”

“I don’t like the war. Like you say, it’s not right. But at some point, we have to act on what we think, what we feel, don’t we?”

Mike stayed quiet, as if he were mulling two sides of an argument over and over in his mind, as he would for a debate, trying to find the answers, the right things to say, on both sides. It was nearly ten, and he had to leave. I patted his cheek, he rubbed my nose, and off he went, down the stairs and back out on the road.