Triblog

ix

Two weeks later, I joined Mom in the kitchen where she’d begun initial preparations for Seder. She interrupted work on her shopping list, looking up at me over her reading glasses. “Honey, your school ends on May 20, right? Lisa will be home by then, and Henry is having his graduation at Princeton that weekend. Dad thinks we should go back east a little early, for commencement in New Jersey, then all off us go to the house on the island. What do you think?”

I froze, then panicked. I’d been counting on Mike coming home a week later than that, after his finals, and at least spending the weekend with him before I left for the summer. “Uh, I don’t know. Let me think about it, OK?” She went back to her list, and I raced upstairs, hoping to get in a quick phone call to Connecticut before the Sunday night rates went up.

“Hi, Janie,” he answered, “Everything OK?”

I explained the looming predicament, receiving a full five seconds of silence from him on other end. Finally, “OK, try this: I come down there to the Vineyard Friday after my last exam. Should be done by noon, it’s, what, three hours to the ferry? I know it’s a day after your birthday, but at least I can give you a present – presents – in person. And my presence, right?” Here a quiet laugh. “You could meet me at Woods’ Hole, we could hang out a while on the Cape, then go over to island that evening. I don’t have to start work until June 5th, so I could stay with you guys for a few days?”

“Work? You got a job?”

“Yeah, at the hospital, Cincinnati General. The psych ward, as an intern. It’ll look good when I apply to medical school, right?”

So at least he’d be in town all summer. We’d have six weeks together before we left for school. “Um, let me ask my mom, she’s downstairs working on the Seder. Can I call you right back?”

“Make it quick, the rates go up after 6 you know.”

Back in the kitchen, I explained Mike’s idea. “That sounds wonderful, Janie. I’m sure we can find a bed for him.” I waited while she put down her glasses. I knew that meant she had more to say. “I like Mike, and I know how you must feel about him. Believe me, I do. We have had four children, you know. All I want is for you to be happy.” She made a show of drying of her hands. “You’re going to the best school in the country, and I don’t want to see you waste that opportunity. So I worry sometimes, is he going to get in the way of that?”

“He’s a good person, mom, I know he is. And he…he…we like being together.” I thought, funny how I can’t tell my mother, the first person who ever loved me, who loves me still, how I really feel about someone who might love me even more, certainly in a new and different way.

“I know, sweetie. It’s just…boys, and girls.” She paused, opening the oven for a quick brisket check. “Well, sometimes the feelings they have can seem so overpowering, that you forget everything else. I don’t want you to miss your chance, going to Radcliffe, I mean. Go on, go up and call him back, tell him it’s OK.”

A few weeks later, Mike sent a bulging packet, so big it carried several stamps. The letter spoke of eager anticipation to see me, to walk on the beach together. Two poems fell out, each folded over three times to fit in the little envelope. The first was titled ON A VERNAL AFTERNOON:

There’s a distinctive smell

of a storm approaching – 

Thunder in summer;

You can always tell,

even if it’s only spring – 

the air seems to shimmer,

heavy-laden new formed clouds

come to cleanse.

The other, titled LYING HERE BESIDE ME was three pages, his longest yet. A little note attached read, “What I imagine being at the Vineyard with you will be like.” It started off, “How soft it is to lie here, quiet/backs against the wind-grit sand, grains of time…” Images of waves, seagulls, warm sand and dune grass “engulf us in a fortress …of dreams” asking the sun to “stay the pace, hold back the earth from turning” and ended with that title, Lying here beside me. Even though he’d never been with me on that island, on that beach, I must have described it to him so many times that he could faithfully conjure up not only how it looked, how it sounded, how it felt and smelled, but what it might be like to walk and talk, and lie there together.

Friday, May 26th, Charlie drove me to catch the 3 o’clock Woods’ Hole ferry. I cradled Denise in my lap the whole way. She squirmed and whined, wanting to climb over into the back seat, where she usually rode. I tried playing “Pat-a-Cake” with her, tried to count the other cars we passed, anything to distract her.

“Is she always like this?” I wondered aloud.

Charlie shook with laughter. “Janie, kids are, as you can see, a literal handful. All you can do sometimes is just let them explore what they want, and help them learn along the way.”

“What’s she learning, being cooped up in this little Volkswagen?”

“She’s not learning, you are, little sister. She’s showing you what it’s like to be a mother.”

Charlie pulled into the ferry line, which was starting to crawl towards the white steamer. We eased on, coming to a stop under the passenger deck. Reaching over he said, “Here, let me take her.”

“Can I have her a little while longer? You’re going back to Providence, I won’t get to see her all weekend.” He and Arlene were headed home for the weekend, would come back on Monday. He shrugged, dropped his hands, and said, “Knock yourself out.” Then, “Oh,I  just remembered. The Beatles’ new album is coming out today. Gotta be sure I pick that up while I’m over there, we can listen to it when I get back, OK?”

The last two years, the insatiable demand for Beatles’ records meant a new album every three or four months. But nothing new had come out since last August’s Revolver, and they’d announced they’d stop touring as well. So people wondered, is that the end? And now, finally, we’d get more music to swoon over, more songs to analyze.

The afternoon was sunny, almost enough to overcome the chilly Atlantic breeze during the 45 minute trip to the mainland. I looked behind me, at the low-slung island, my summer home for the past five years. The weathered clapboard buildings next to the ferry dock receded quickly, and I put Denise down, holding her hand as she tipsied along the metal walkway. I stared ahead at the Cape Cod coastline, imagining I would come down here, along the Massachusetts coast, in the fall, and winter, and spring to see the Vineyard without the summer tourists. This cradle of our country could become my home.

Denise broke my reverie. “Wanna see! Wanna see!” she whined as she pulled me forward, towards the railing at the front. I picked her up, holding tight, as we stood at the railing over the cars crammed in below. Looking up towards the on-rushing shore, I strained to find a small red car there, with Michael leaning against the driver door.

“I wanna see too, honey,” I softly answered. “Wave”, I said. “Wave, there’s Michael.”

“Micha?” she wondered.

Uncle Michael? I wondered to myself.

Back at Charlie’s VW, I handed Denise over, saying, “I think I want to walk off. I can see his car over there, is that OK?”

“Sure thing. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

I’m not much of a runner, and my shoes had those slick leather soles, but run I did up the metal ramp, then over the his car. From behind his back, he pulled out a handful of yellow roses, thorns removed, and stuck one in my hair. The others I gave a quick sniff to, then threw them in the car, while we tried an exploratory hug. Too soon, he gently pushed me back, still holding on at my waist, smiling widely as he looked me over.

“Everything there?” I asked.

“Still the same. I like looking at you.” Somehow that seemed better than “I love you.” I guess the flowers helped a bit.

In the car, we drove for half an hour up 28, then across the Canal, finally over to Scusset Beach, stopping at a sandy parking lot. Grabbing a bag from the trunk, he said, “Come on, I’ve been wanting to do this with you for, I don’t know, since last summer, I guess.” Hand-in-hand, we walked (it felt like skipping to me) down to the sand, where he spread out a blanket and laid down the bag.

“I’ve got some surprises for you here. A couple of birthday presents, I guess.” First was a poem, which he read aloud to me from a green-lined spiral notebook page.

To Janie, On Her Eighteenth Birthday

[He gave me a typed copy, on onion skin, to follow along]

What?

Again?

You don’t mean to tell me

That you’re really that much older,

That you deserve a recognition, 

Cognition of the flow of time,

Segmented just for you.

I could write

the trite,

unknowing phrases,

Wishing you much joy

and other

mindless babblings.

You deserve much more

Beyond that imposition.

So here’s a proposition:

I remember another

Marking-day

(A day outside of past or future).

Is there a way I could make yours as you made mine?

So: pick a day (any day)

And for you a genie I will play – 

Three free wishes

(And three soft kisses)

Are yours from me

With Love.

Seagulls arced overhead, as if guarding the depths below. Sharp-eyed, one dove seaward, tucking silver wings tight to its body, aiming for supper wriggling beneath the surface. Snagging a struggling fish, it rose with wings furiously flapping, orange feet pedaling madly underneath, then tucked against its breast. Swells crashed against hidden shoals, and small, even waves rolled towards our plot of sand, silky and warm. Overhead, the half-domed sky glowed blue and light, while motionless clouds sent lacy tendrils towards the birds below. The gulls winged on, some in full cry, hugging the shoreline.

The dunes rose high behind us, a shield fortressing our little drama from the world beyond. I looked over at Mike, and back in time, wondering how we could just lie here, staring at the sun. I felt lost in a dream, afraid to wake up, yet wanting more.

“Anything you want, those three wishes. It’s your birthday. Was, I guess, yesterday.”

“Does it have to be now? Can’t we stay here a little bit more? Let’s enjoy the sun.” On the water, rainbow colors filtered through the spray, orange, red, green, now yellow on the blue below.

“You said you had another present for me,” I whispered.

x

On the drive back to Woods’ Hole, Mike turned on his motor-mouth. “That place we were, that’s the bay where the Pilgrims landed, right?”

Not waiting for an answer, he went on. “My mother, she says she’s got an ancestor, Francis Eaton, who came over on the Mayflower. Francis and Sarah Eaton. And they had a little boy with them, too, Samuel. Sarah died right away, but Samuel was rugged, he grew up and had a family. ‘Good stock,’ my mother says. I’ve always felt connected to this place, this coast, from the north shore of Boston on down to Cape Cod. I was born there, remember?’

“In Salem, right?” I quickly interjected, but he gave me no space to go on.

“I get tired of jokes about witches. so I always add we lived in Lynn, right across the street from the ocean. It feels like home here…” He stopped to take a breath.

I wanted to ask if he was thinking of staying in New England after college, but before I could, he blurted, “Oh! That other present! I was driving out of town, there’s a record store on the strip, I saw a big poster on the window – The Beatles! I bought their new album. It’s there in the bag. Sorry, I didn’t get a chance to wrap it or anything, or make a cute little card, like you always do.”

He seemed ready to go on forever, so I reached around and found the album. Pulling it out, I felt almost blinded by the cover, filled with people in so many different costumes. And in the front, four boys from Liverpool, dressed in old-time marching band uniforms, all hair and mustaches, John with his wire-rims.

“…I want to get glasses like that. My lenses are so thick, I bet they’d weigh less, those frames, less pressure here on my nose.” He looked over at me as we pulled into the ferry line-up. “I remember the first time I heard them. It was in a parking lot at the shopping center by our house, Saturday morning. My sister was driving, she must have been almost 17 then, so we had the radio on, and I Want To Hold Your Hand came on. It was so different than anything I’d ever heard before. I was only 14, of course, so what did I know. But those cymbals, the harmony, the chugging guitars. I could get why girls all over Europe and England were screaming and fainting. Not that I ever did myself, but I understood the emotion.” He looked carefully at me again, and asked, “What about you? Were you one of those screamers?”

I screwed up my eyes, trying to remember. The Beatles were another thing which had scared me. Charlie and Lisa were always talking about them, that February of 1964. When I got the chance, the music I liked was softer, folk music, quieter musicals, and Barbra Streisand. Every Jewish girl wanted to be her, I thought. I was a freshman then, still trying to figure out where I fit in school and with all the girls there. They seemed to have lost their minds sometimes, about the Beatles. I felt so anxious around those girls with their unchecked emotions and loss of control.

“I don’t know. It was hard to understand. I mean, I like their music, they’re very melodic, their harmonies are entrancing. You can’t deny the impact they’ve had on how some people view the world. I never felt a crush on any of them, but when there’s a bunch of fourteen year-old girls in a car, and their song comes on, and all the other girls are shrieking, it’s kind of hard not to. So, yeah, I guess I screamed over them, but maybe it was more I was being a part of some other girls’ fantasies. Does that make sense?”

“We’re so much older, now, huh? We’re aristocrats, not peasants, and we don’t let emotion sway us so much anymore, is that it?”

“What’s that mean?”

“Well, to me a peasant is someone that life happens to. They follow the crowd, and try to sound smart, but really they’re putting on airs. Aristocrats don’t have to show off, they already know who they are.”

The ferry arrived, disgorged its load of vehicles. He eased the Lancer onto the lower car deck. I wasn’t sure I knew what he meant, so I tried, “Maybe it’s in the words they use, that’s the difference? An aristocrat would simply say “sofa’, while a peasant might use “davenport’?”

All the way across the Sound, we tried out various pairs of words, deciding which might be aristocratic. “Car”, I’d say. “Automobile,” he’d counter.

“Refrigerator”

“Icebox”

“Purchase”

“Buy”

“Walk”

“Perambulate,” I tried.

“Wait. Who would ever say perambulate?”

We began laughing, fogging up the windows in that little red car. By the time we got to “bicycle” and “velocipede”, he cried, “I quit, you’re right. It’s stupid, either way. Say what you want to say, the way you want to say it. As long as the word feels right.” He caught his breath, his face slowly falling from near hysteria to a quiet smile. Then, “That reminds me. Did you know I got a bike?”

“A motorbike?”

“No, a regular clunker. I went to the police auction they have every April, and bought a rusty old maroon Schwinn for $20. Now it’s easier getting from my dorm to class to practice and all around than walking everywhere. Once the snow melted, I was itching to try that out when I saw some other guys with them. I’ve got a little basket in front, put my books there, it’s real easy.”

I looked around the car. “Where is it now?”

“We can store our stuff in the basement of the dorm for next year. We all have a little square space, so I don’t have to take everything home.”

I reminisced. “When I was in the sixth grade, my parents gave me a bike, a real bike with big wheels and everything. I rode it to school in the spring and fall that year. But then somebody took it from the front yard that summer, and dad wouldn’t get me another one.”

“Me, too! Kind of, I mean. In fifth grade, my father started giving us $5 a week allowance. Said we had to buy everything we wanted, clothes, snacks, baseball cards. So I saved it all up, didn’t buy anything for three months. I went out and bought a three-speed Raleigh, rode it everyday to school. There was a big swing set there, they’d taken all the seats out, and that’s where we parked our bikes. It feels so free and flowing to go around JCU now, like that again. Reminds me of when I used to ride my bike to swim practice in the summers.”

“We have bikes at our summer house. That used to be fun, riding with Lisa into town, looking at the boats come in.” He just nodded his head, so I went on, “What about swimming? Are you going to be able to do that this summer, with your job?”

“Nah, age-group swimming only goes to 17, so I’m not on a team anymore. What about your birthday wishes, you thought of one yet?”

It didn’t seem like the time to get too deep into anything, so I said, “OK, here’s one. Why don’t we take a bike ride on the island tomorrow. Go into town, then down to the beach, feel like kids again.”

The ferry’s horn blared our arrival at the island, so he simply nodded while starting the engine. He pointed to the seat belt down on the floor. We slowly climbed up the ramp off the boat, and immediately I felt at home. Halyards clanged against sailboats’ metal masts. Water lapped softly under the ferry dock pilings. The grey weathered storefronts lining State Street displayed their crafts and tourist treasures. The evening sun hung low in our eyes as we headed towards Menemsha. I didn’t want my time alone with him to end, so I used another of my wishes. “Let’s not go to the house first thing. Pull off here to the right, we can go down to the beach, talk a walk and watch the sunset, all right?”

As we left the car parked by the fence lining the dune, I had to tease him into taking his shoes off and leave them behind.

“But my feet will get wet! I don’t have a towel. Then what about the sand? It’ll stick between my toes, and get in the sheets all night.”

He was serious, I saw. “Wait a minute. You spend every day, all summer, walking around a swimming pool, no shoes on, and you can’t stand walking on the beach barefoot?” I threw my sandals onto the red leather vinyl seats as he was closing my door, then ran through the gate and down to the water’s edge. I raised my sweater overhead, swinging it like a signal flag. “Come on in, the water’s fine!”

He appeared to sigh, shook his head, removed his shoes and socks, rolled up his pant legs, and slowly walked, head down, until he was two steps away from me. Then, he pounced, secured me in a bear hug, and pulled us onto the sand. We sprawled together, chest-to-chest, and lay there laughing for a bit. Getting up, we walked to the still-wet part of the beach, where the water was gently receding, leave little flecks of foam and bubbles in the sand.

He asked, “Have you got the catalogue yet? Do you know what courses you want to take?”

I had seen the thick soft-covered Harvard course catalogue for the 1967-68 academic year, with that shield and “Veritas” on the cover. Too intimidated to explore it, I day-dreamed about being in Cambridge, in the Radcliffe quad, then going to Widener library to study, or into a class in one of the red brick or sandstone buildings. I wondered what the other girls would be like, if I’d make friends. I wasn’t ready yet to return to student life. I wanted a summer of sun, and sand, and quiet. Mike and I had only a week here, together, before we’d be apart again. I wanted to block that off in time and space, not let the urgent pull of the future intervene.

xi

Two days later, Dad went back to oversee the tobacco business in Cincinnati. Mom and Lisa drove him up to Logan Field in Boston, so they would be gone all day. I don’t know if Lisa had something to do with assuring mom it was all right, leaving us alone, but mom loaded up the car and announced the day-long excursion at breakfast without ever mentioning me. I thought nothing of it at the time. When she asked if it were OK for us to stay there alone  – “Honey, there isn’t enough room in the car for five of us and Dad’s luggage”  – I explained that Mike and I had planned a short sail in the morning, with a bike ride along the southern coast through Chilmark to Edgartown and back. With a kiss on my cheek, and “OK, sweetie, be careful, you two”, as well as a knowing look from Lisa, they were off. 

Mike and I slid the Sunfish into the pond around ten in the morning. Despite the warming sun, I couldn’t find any wind to get us away from the dock.

“Well, Barnacle Bess, the sailing lass, what’s up? I thought you knew how to get us going.”

“If you’ve got so much to do you can’t be a little patient, why don’t you go jump in the lake, swim back home?”

With that he stripped off his shirt, left his sandals  behind, and dove in. The twelve-foot hull wobbled suddenly, catching me of guard, and I fell in too. Luckily, it didn’t tip over, and I managed to grab onto the gunwale before it drifted away. “Hey! Mike!” I shouted with more than a little fear. I could swim, sure, and the Pond was protected from the swell in the open Bight to the north, but I did have a cotton blouse and shorts on over my swim suit, and the water was about the same temperature as the air, 64 degrees. “Hey! Come back here and get me!” Luckily he was swimming breaststroke, with his head out of the water. He turned around, saw me hanging on to the boat, and started back.

“What happened? Are you OK?”

“No I’m not! My clothes are all wet, I’m cold, and you knocked me in when you dove off.”

He started to haul himself up, but we were both on the same side, and I hollered, “No! You’ll tip the thing over! There’s no keel.” I wasn’t sure he knew what a keel was, or the risk of tipping the boat without that ballast, but he did fall back into the water.

“You go over to the other side, hang on – pull down if you can – and I’ll climb up here. Then we can figure out how to get back.” The tide was going out, and we’d drifted quite a way from the dock, heading toward the small inlet leading to the Bight, and the Sound beyond. The wind was still calm, but I was getting worried about where we might end up. Not sharing all this with Mike, I managed to struggle into the boat, where I started to shiver from both anxiety and cold. I tried the sail again, but it just luffed without catching wind, no matter where I pulled the boom. I glanced at Mike, who appeared to be having fun drifting in the water.

“Uh, I don’t know if we can get back.” Mike said nothing, bobbing while he looked up at the sail. “Mike?”

“Lemme see if I can push us in. Can you aim us toward the dock?”

I pushed on the tiller while he inched his way to the stern. Once there, he started kicking,  that breaststroke whip kick he’d perfected during his years as a swimmer. Amazingly, we began to move. Not very fast, but at least away from open water. After fifteen minutes, we’d covered the two hundred yards back to shore. I jumped out, pulled the Sunfish onto the beach, tied it up, and flopped down, still shivering. Mike wandered over after grabbing his shirt and sandals from under the seat where he’d stashed them. He kneeled down beside me, saying, “Come on. We’ve gotta  get back to the house, take a shower, get some dry clothes on.” Always the practical one, Mike. No, “How are you?” or “I’m sorry.”

Once inside, I rushed to the upstairs shower, while he rinsed off with the hose outside. As I pulled open the screen door, he said, “After I dry off, I’m going to go lie down. I’m a little tired.”

I stood under the water for a full ten minutes before I began to warm up. Then of course I had to get my hair dry, always a chore. I wrapped a towel around my waist, another under my shoulders, and used to third to fluff and dry that mess on my head. After snagging a brush through it to gain a fighting chance it might not end up in a permanent rat’s nest, I wrapped our last dry towel like a turban around my hair.

“Mike? Mike, where are you?” Nothing. Then I remembered, he said he was going to lie down. I guessed he was in the boys’ room, the one Charlie and Henry would use when they were both here. I peeked through the half-open door, and saw him lying on his right side, facing away, on the far bed, no covers, wearing a dry lifeguard’s swim suit. “Mike?” I tried again, this time whispering. Still no answer.
Without thinking, I walked over to the bed and lay beside him, facing his back. He felt so warm, I reached my left arm over to his chest, then his stomach. It felt smooth, and a funny combination of soft and firm. He stirred a bit, then mumbled encouragingly, “Mmmm …” Jerking a bit, he then said, “Janie? What are you doing?”

“Your stomach. I like the way it feels.”

He turned over, facing me now, and rested his right hand on my cheek. Without his glasses, I knew he could barely see me. His eyes had that fuzzy, far-away myopic look of near-blindness. We inched closer, and started exploring, his hands underneath the towels, mine along his  bronzing skin. Slowly, luxuriantly, as if finding a new feature in every depression, mound, and declivity of the geography of our bodies. In stereo, competing messages clanged inside me, alarm bells and fireworks. Eyes closed, I felt “Yes”; seeing him again, I heard “No”. Somebody had to say something, I knew, and he wasn’t talking, just pulling urgently at my lower back.

“No. We can’t. I’m not ready. Don’t hate me,” all came out at once. We both fell back, my hand still on his soft stomach, his resting on my cheek, a few wet strands of hair caught between his fingers.

He broke the silence. “You never asked for your third wish yesterday…”

“I wish…I wish we could get that right some day, just not now. There’s babies to consider, you know, and meaning, and, oh, I don’t know what I’m saying.”

After getting dressed and eating lunch, we took that bike ride, to Edgartown and back. All week, the weather held, and each day was a fantasy of riding, walking, swimming, sailing, and seeing the Vineyard through a new set of eyes. Not Michael’s, but ours together. Evenings, we’d listen with Charlie, and sometimes Lisa, to Sgt. Pepper’s.

Charlie already had the whole thing figured out. When Mike wondered about Lucy, and her kaleidoscope eyes, those plasticine porters with their looking-glass ties, my older, worldly hippie brother said, “What a protected world you’ve been living in. ‘Lucy. Sky. Diamonds.’ Get it?”

A blank expression on Mike’s face set my mind whirling, trying to solve the riddle before he could.

“LSD!” I shouted. “Timothy Leary. Don’t you see? They’re having, talking about an acid trip.”

Embarrassed, Mike blinked rapidly, as if seeing the world through a kaleidoscope for the first time. “Sheesh. OK. Then, what about A Day In The Life? What’s that about? ‘Holes in Lancashire…going to work’…it sounds like nothing.”

Charlie recited, “I went outside, and had a smoke, somebody spoke, and I went into a dream… Then the music goes swirling off. That’s pretty obvious – his work is so boring, he can only tolerate it with a doobie.”

“A doobie?”
“Marijuana. A hand-rolled cigarette.” Charlie looked at me. “Janie, where’d you get this guy.”

I could see Mike drawing within himself, so I pulled him to me, stroked his face, and said, “He may be out of it, but he’s my guy.”

Fixing A Hole, Mr Kite, Lovely Rita, Within You Without You, Getting Better, When I’m Sixty-Four, we analyzed it all playing them over and over under the stars invading our nighttime reveries. The night before Michael headed back to Cincinnati, I hummed myself to sleep with “Send me a postcard, drop me a line…if you say the word, I could stay with you.’

xii

In his first letter that summer, Mike sent another poem, DREAMS OF A LIFE:

On the moorish banks of a sandy isle,

Flung from the mainland’s breast

Lies a glimmering, grass-covered haven,

Where dreams may come to rest.

Dreams are born of nature’s yearnings,

But birth is never enough

To satisfy the life in you;

Living requires the stuff

Of being, a tangible barrier

Which makes you human,

And time a god, 

Begging the present’s promise

Of a dream to create our future.

Set as a jewel, deep in velvet

As red as a storm-day’s morning,

Your secret cove will keep your yearnings

Till the time you’ve grown

        to need them.

But now, to live at now

Is begged of you

And dreams are only meant

for dreaming,

Not living, 

      not yet.

CHAPTER TWO

Dreams Are Born Of Nature’s Yearnings

September, 1966

Lizzie and I met on the steps under the dome, first day of senior year. I’d crammed  my notebook with paper, most of it blank, ready for note-taking in class. I never used a purse, putting everything I needed in a slender 3-holed pouch, zippered shut inside the blue-denim binder I took everywhere. Lizzie had only a purse slung over her right shoulder. She eyed the buses rolling around the circle, waiting for Leon’s. My stomach grumbled, not from hunger, more from anger at knowing she’d have his company all year. I’d tucked a small envelope into Mike’s shirt pocket as we separated after our last hug. Inside, the tiny note read, “You’ll have a great time. Don’t be scared, make new friends. Write me. Love, Sarah Jane.”

Sensing my distance, Lizzie asked, “When did Mike leave? When does he get to Calvin?”

“They drove there over the weekend. I went to his house the day before.”

“He’s not going to have a car at school? I thought he said they’d let him take that red Lancer.”

“His father decided, no, he had to show he was doing OK before he got it. He said he’d drive back at Thanksgiving.”

“So that’s the next time you’ll see him? But I guess you’ve been apart already, when you went to the Vineyard…”

“And when they drove out West, to pick up his sister, a couple of weeks in August.”

“What’s that like? I get to see Leon all the time, I can’t imagine not making plans for the next weekend and the next. Maybe you should let him go? There’s plenty of guys to see here, you know.”

As Leon’s bus pulled up and Lizzie flew down the steps to greet him, I checked my feelings, and started analyzing them one by one. All right, I said to myself, you can’t stop thinking about him. And whose fault is that? Or is that even a bad thing? It feels good to have a boyfriend away at college; that makes me more mature, I guess. And more protected. I don’t have to worry about getting a date, going out. I have more time to study. I remembered overhearing my sister’s friends a couple of years before talking about boys one night. One girl had a boyfriend who was a freshman at Yale. She seemed older, more assured and worldly-wise than the others. Lisa told her, “You’re so lucky. It’s like you’ve got a magic ring around you. The boys at school won’t touch you, they’re afraid they won’t measure up to him.” Most telling, I couldn’t completely quell the anxious feeling I got everyday, when I came home and looked at the pile of mail on the table in the front hall.

My life quickly overflowed. Advanced classes in English, History, and French, along with regular math and choir kept me busy all day and half the night. Every week, I had to write a piece for the Chatterbox. Lizzie, the Features editor, made sure of that.

“But you hardly ever use anything you assign to me.” I complained.

“Oh, it’s good for you, a little rejection now and then. Nobody should have such an easy life.”

“Can’t I have a regular column or something? Interviewing all these teachers and kids, and trying to do a 500 word biography, I don’t have time for that.”

“OK. Well. You are the Secretary of the Student Council. And the Student Court. And the Thumb of the Five Fingers. I’ve got it…every other week, you can do an update on that stuff, keep people apprised of what’s up with student government. All right?”

I felt relieved. I’ve always liked structure, I like to know what the rules are. Improvisation, making things up on the fly, that’s not me.

That wasn’t working with my college boyfriend. His letters came unbidden, at random. I’d write back, telling him about my life at school, my family, my thoughts, whatever came out. He’d respond to all that, then go on and on me about the newness all around him. I tried to imagine Rush Week, when he made the rounds of 12 fraternities, getting emotionally poked and prodded. In the end, he decided not to join at all. He felt too young, too different, not connected to social life at all. He whined about his English 101 class, “They don’t care about how you write, what it sounds or feels like. I guess I’m not going to major in English after all.” But Humanities: Plato, Greek plays, St. Augustine! A whole new world unfolding, and I was not there to share it with him.

Through letters, and a fleeting long-distance call once a month, we worked to keep the bridge between us intact. His third Saturday night away, he called at 9 PM. I wanted to sound cheerful, upbeat, even though hearing his voice sent longing through my chest. It’s hard to hug a telephone. I went for the familiar: “You’re going to join the swimming team?”

“Yeah, there’s a freshman team. The coach sent us a list of exercises he wants us to do, weight lifting and all that. Practice starts November 1st. I miss the pool, the smell of chlorine on my arms as I fall asleep, the burn in my eyes when I get out of the water.”

“What about your classes? Are you learning what you thought you would?”

“Some of the professors, sure. But the English guy – if you want to major in it, you have to go through that. He acts like freshmen are a chore, a burden. He says we write in ‘New York Times Gothic’. I don’t know what that means, but he doesn’t like it. My first paper, I got a C. We were supposed to do 500 words on a maxim from Francois La Rouschfaucauld, explain what we think about it. ‘We are so accustomed to adopting a mask before others that we end up being unable to recognize ourselves.’ I thought I had some good ideas, but apparently I can’t write proper sentences.”

“Prose hasn’t really been your thing, You’re more of a talker and a poet, right?”

“Ummm…” he grumbled. “How about you? Are you going to the football games?”

“What? Are you kidding?”

“I’m worried you’re going to change, you’re going to start doing all that high school stuff. Somebody will find out how cool you are, and you’ll stop thinking about me…” He trailed off wistfully. I loved the compliment, that he thought I was cool. And I loved his fear of losing me.

But I didn’t feel a need to build him up, to ease his mind. Breezily, I went on, “Lizzie goes out with Leon, and wanted me to go with them last night, said it would be good for me. She thinks I’m moping too much.”

“So…?”

“It’s Yom Kippur. We had to eat early, before sunset, then fast all day. I even went to synagogue. I’m sure I ate too much.”

“Yom Kippur?” he repeated, befuddled. “I mean, I know it’s a holiday or something. I thought it was a celebration.”

“No, it’s the day we ask forgiveness for our sins. Day of Atonement, it means.”

“Your sins?”

I didn’t have to be a part of Yom Kippur until I was 12 or 13, and besides, my family was more culturally than religiously Jewish. Even so, my father always made us fast on Yom Kippur, something about remembering what made us strong.

“The only sin I asked forgiveness for was falling in love with a goy,” I said with a smile I hoped he heard.

He may not have known much about Yom Kippur, but he knew that word. “Really? I’m someone bad for you?”

“I don’t think so. I mean, my father doesn’t care, as long as his daughter marries rich. My mother feels a little sad you’re not Jewish, but she likes you, and she sees I like you, that’s what’s important to her. Don’t worry, I’m mostly kidding.” I immediately regretted the “mostly”.

“Well, I don’t know…Look, this is call is starting to cost a lot. I’ll write to you, OK? Tell you more?”

“Write to me, I want to hear…” Feeling that wasn’t enough, I blurted, “I love you. Bye?”

“Bye.”

That night, at midnight, he wrote another poem, titled WE, YOU AND ME. It was his longest yet, two full pages typed double-spaced on that onion skin paper. It ended saying plans for the future “…matter little. It’s we we’re concerned with, We, you and me – Together.”

“Together”, I thought, when I read that. How can we be together when we’re apart?

ii

On Columbus Day, I bargained with my father for a 10 minute call to Connecticut. “It’s only two dollars today, it’s a holiday. I can pay you from my allowance.”

He looked up from his paper over his reading glasses at me, like he might at a puppy begging for a scratch behind the ears. “Who’s this again? That guy you stayed up all night with last May, the one you were mooning over on the beach this summer?”

“His name is Mike, dad. Michael Harrison. He’s lonely, he wants to hear from me.”

He shooed me away with the back of his hand. “Go ahead, don’t worry about it. But ten minutes, OK?”

I used the upstairs phone, less of a chance I could be overheard. I’d written him that I might be able to call at 5 PM, and hoped that he was waiting out in his hall as well. In that fishbowl environment, it was a struggle between sharing ourselves and hiding from others.

I started with the latest Janie Stein success. “I got National Merit Finalist!” Mike had been a finalist himself, a very big deal at our college-prep high school. That was what first caught my eye about him. Hardly anybody ever actually got a scholarship – there were only 2,000 in the whole country – but being a Finalist meant a lot on college applications. My junior year SAT scores were higher than Mike’s, and I liked to rub that in. But he’d soared his senior year, and that bothered me. I’d taken mine the week before, worried I wouldn’t beat his 760/720 Verbal/Math combination.

“Was there ever any doubt?” he asked.

“It’s kinda of funny. There were fifteen of us…”

“Anybody else I know? Lizzie?”

“No, not Liz. But Marc and Larry” – two guys from the debate team – “made it.’ I paused, thinking over the list. “You know what? I just realized I’m the only girl.”

“How’s that make you feel?”

“Well, my mother’s happy. She said, ‘It’ll look good on your resumé.’’

He laughed. “That’s what my mom says whenever she’s trying to get me to do something I don’t like!”

“Wait, I’ve only got ten minutes or my dad will come upstairs and start looking at me. What’s going on with you?” 

“We went to Boston last weekend…”

“We?”

“Yeah, three of us, a guy name Rich, and one of his friends from Fairfield County. They knew somebody at Harvard, and thought we could sleep on their floor or something. But apparently there are rules about guests and everything, so we had to find a hotel. We went to one right at the Common, it was a lot of money, but with three of us, we made it. We hung out, went to their football game, and saw a play there Saturday night.”

I thought wistfully of Cambridge, Radcliffe. My parents weren’t taking me there for an interview or tour that fall; we’d done that our way home from the Vineyard the end of July. I wished I could be there when it was full of students, people going to classes. I couldn’t wait to go to college.

“Fun?” I wondered.

“Well, until we had to go home. We’d taken the train up there, but the hotel used up almost all our money, so we decided to hitch-hike back. We got as far as New London, but then no one picked us up for hours. It started to rain, snow almost, so Rich called his dad – he’s a doctor – to pick us up. Gave us hell for being stupid. Everything we did was stupid, he said. I can’t wait to get a car here.”

“How’s that going? Think your dad will let you?”

“I’m not worried. He gave one to my sister her first year, a turquoise-blue Corvair convertible, stick shift. If he trusts her with something like that, I should be able to take the Lancer.”

“How are you getting back? When?”

“Taking the train from New York. I’ll get a ride with Warren, a guy down the hall, to Queens, then the subway to Grand Central.”

It all sounded so adult, going to Boston, to Manhattan, exactly what I’d been wanting to do for years. “When?” I repeated.

“Let’s see, I get on the train around 9 o’clock, get home the next day at noon or something. Then classes start Monday morning, So, all I’ll be there is on Friday, We can go out on Friday, but I have to leave Saturday morning. OK?”

It wasn’t “OK”, but, “How much time do you have at Christmas, again?”

“Two weeks. Get home on Saturday, the 17th, then leave again before New Year’s”

It sounded bleak, desolate, trying to cram ourselves into so little time. I didn’t sense any fear in his voice though, over the long-distance line, so I tried to feel cheerful myself. “Well, I gotta go. Write me a letter soon, Mike. I need to hear from you. And if you’ve got another poem, send that along  too. I love those.” Quieter, “I love you, too.”

“I love you. I want to see you, be with you.”

I stood by the phone for a long time, head down, wondering what I was doing, trying to keep a friend, a boyfriend, over all that time and distance. I went to my room, sat at my desk and picked up the last piece of onion-skin he’d sent. I opened a book I’d gotten from Lisa for my fifteenth birthday, about Origami. I turned to the page showing how to make a flower, and started folding. I began to feel safer, as I followed the intricate directions. Small things, like my tiny handwriting, like a little bird made out of paper, calm me down. Within ten minutes, I had a passable daisy in my hand. Not one I could pick the petals from, for sure, but in my mind, I pulled them off one-by-one. There were an odd number, so I made sure to start with “He loves me…”

iii

Thanksgiving came and went in a blur. Mike and I spent one afternoon and evening together, the Friday after. A drizzly mist greeted us downtown as we walked from store to store, circling Shillito’s to see the animated Christmas scenes: smartly dressed families with children, impeccably coiffed, opening presents; a sleigh stuck in North Pole snow, reindeer in front pulling hard while elves in back pushed to get Santa off the ground in time; finally, a live Santa in the window, greeting small children one-by-one on his knee while green-suited assistants took pictures.

I tolerated this; still I announced, “We don’t have a tree, or anything like that, you know. In our house, we don’t do Christmas. Some of our friends, they put up lights around the house. Never the multi-colored ones, though, always blue.”

“I notice that sometimes,” Mike replied. “What about that, does it mean anything?”

“I dunno, maybe like blood around the door? ‘There’s Jews inside.’ Could be a way to fit in and still say we’re special.”

After admiring the lights hanging from the top of the statue in the fountain on the square, we checked out the RKO Albee. The poster out front for The Professionals featured crossed bandoliers over rugged images of Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin, valiantly trying to wrest a busty Claudia Cardinale from the clutches of a Mexican bandit. I was relieved when Mike said, “No way. Let’s go back to your house, OK?”

Once home, we found mom and Lisa in the kitchen. I asked Mike,  “Want to have a sandwich? We’re not going to eat until after 7, I think. Right, mom?”

She smiled, nodded, and  wiped flour-dusted hands on her apron. Pointing to the cabinet, she announced, “Sweetie, I think all we have is peanut butter. That OK with you, Michael?”

“No problem.” 

Absolutely no problem, I thought. Mike had told me all he ever ate as a kid were mashed potatoes and peanut butter sandwiches. Probably on white bread. He seemed clueless how to make them, though, so I went to work, starting with the whole wheat bread we always had around. I took down a jar of Peter Pan, and scooped out a slab with a knife.

“Wait a minute! What are you doing? What about the jelly? What about the butter?”

“Huh?”

“That’s the way my mom always makes ‘em. Butter first, helps the peanut butter slide down easier.”

Sighing, I acquiesced to this demand, thinking, “The things we do for love.” I handed it over, and watched as he smushed the slices together, causing the peanut butter to ooze out towards his palm.

“What a minute! Aren’t you going to freshen it up?”

His turn to say, “Huh?”

I looked up at mom, then Lisa, for some help. I grabbed his sandwich and licked the mess off the bread crusts. Lisa said, “Right, that’s the only way to eat it. Gotta keep your hands clean, Mike.” She was emptying the dishwasher, working on the silverware. My sister had a distinctive technique here. She called it her “symphony.” Each utensil went into the metal tray with a distinct note, higher for the forks, lower, almost basso for the knives. By altering the beat, she sometimes could make a simple melody out of it.

“What are you playing tonight, Lisa?” I asked.

“How much is that doggie in the window,” she came back, eyeing Mike all the time. He did look like a forlorn puppy just then, his hair flopping nearly to his glasses, eyebrows uplifted as he chomped down on his meal.

“Come on, buddy,” I urged him. “Finish that up and let’s go to my room.” I shut the door behind us. I was about to take his hand, but looking up, I saw his mouth smeared and sticky. “Wait a minute…” Then I got a tissue, moistened it with my tongue, and wiped him off, patting gently with my fingers. That produced one of his wan smiles, which kept growing, widening his eyes. Already standing close, it was natural to melt together. After an exploratory brief kiss, I rested my head in the crook of his shoulder, face inward, listening to his heart beat.

“I missed you. I love you,” he murmured as he stroked my hair. I felt a tear erupt and trace a slow descent down my cheek.

Monday afternoon, in the Chatterbox office, waiting for the editorial board to meet, Lizzie asked, “So how was it?”

“How was what?” I deadpanned.

“Don’t be shy. The only thing you’ve talked about the past two weeks was Mike coming home. What did you do? Where did you go? Is he still Mike, or has he changed a lot?”

I recited a blow-by-blow of our day and evening, leaving out a few minor intimate details. Lizzie and I were both pretty shy revealing things like that.

“Well, that all sounds like him, for sure. So you didn’t do anything, just talked, ate dinner with your family, that’s all?”

“It was enough. Enough to tide me over until Christmas, I think.” The rest of the board had filtered in.

“Enough what,  Janie?” Will asked. William Bayer had moved to Hyde Park the previous year, and shown himself to be both a wit and a writer of note. He’d quickly impressed the Chatterbox faculty, who put him on the Board with me, Kit, and Phil Schwartz. Once again, I was the only girl on this team.

Lizzie eyed him, then looked back at me. “Did you hear from your early decision school, Will?” she asked, as if she knew the answer.

Smiling broadly, he proudly answered, “Sure did. I’m going to John Calvin, same as Mike Harrison.” Turning away, he shifted gears, “Hey, Kit, did Miss Foley say it was OK for me to come to the debate practice Thursday night?”

Kit, absorbed in editing some copy for the lead article, nodded and mumbled, “Sure.”

Will, still eager, looked at me and asked, “Are you guys, you and Liz, going to be the timers for the team again?”

I stared at him, wondering what he knew. “Never entered my mind, Will. That team’s moved on, you know.”

“You could help us out; come on, Janie, don’t desert us.”

“Us?” I thought. I wondered where this was leading. He wasn’t even officially on the team yet. He wasn’t going to dislodge Marc and Kit from their perch, so he’d have to pick one of the thespian categories. He didn’t seem very histrionic, although he did have a well developed ego, with a greatly inflated self-image. I turned away, relieved that Kit was calling us to order. Lizzie got up to attend to her Features page. On the way out, she threw me a quizzical look over her shoulder, tilting her head towards Will.

iv

Mike drove back for Christmas break. Saturday afternoon, he stopped at my house first before going home.

“How was it?” I asked. “Did it take long, did you drive all night?”

“No, I left at noon yesterday, drove Warren to Queens, spent the night there. Then I came the rest of the way on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It’s fun, driving all by myself. I get to think, listen to music, look at the countryside. It almost started snowing near Columbus, luckily we outran it.”

“We?”

He turned sheepish as he went on, “By that time, I was either getting lonely or crazy. I started imagining you in the seat next to me, and talked with you the rest of the way home.”

“What did we talk about?” I laughed.

“Well, first you told me how worried you were about college. I said you were the last person who needs to worry, you’re going to first of all get into Radcliffe, and then you can do and go wherever you want from there. You kept perseverating on how much everyone, your mother, your teachers, Lizzie, expect from you, how you didn’t think you were the person they thought you were. I said, ‘You’re the best possible Sarah Jane Stein there is.’ Then you gave me a box of fruit and disappeared.”

“A Thousand Clowns! Martin Balsam! I love that scene. So I was good company?”

“The best.”

We were downstairs between the den and living room. Mom was boxing up the last of the Chanukah stuff, carefully wrapping the menorah in tissue paper, saving those candles which were still long enough, and putting the blue lights in a separate bag, all to go up in the attic until next year.

He nodded over to her, turned back to me and asked, “What’d you get? Anything special?”

“Come on up to my room, I’ll show you.”

My mom must have overheard us, as she cautioned while we walked the stairs, “Honey, keep it down, your dad’s taking a nap.” I guessed she really meant, “No funny stuff.”

While Mike sat on the bed, I took a brown vinyl garment bagfrom my closet. I yanked the zipper down, and extracted a wool suit, dark tan. “Should I model it for you?” When he nodded yes, I went on, “Well, you’ll have to give me a couple of minutes to change, then.” He didn’t budge, so I added, “Um, wait in the hall, OK?”

After changing, I opened the door, let him in, and paraded around in a very clumsy imitation of a fashion model. I skipped the hair toss, knowing what it would do to my already unruly locks. “I’m sorry, but I’m not one of those girls who was taught to walk like she had a book on her head.”

“That looks good on you,” he said quickly. “Listen, next Sunday, we go to the conservatory, to look at the Christmas displays. It’s our one family tradition. Do you want to come?”

I started doing a very klutzy hora and sang, “Tradition! And who does Mama teach to mend and tend and fix, preparing me to marry whoever Papa picks?”

“Huh? What’s that?” Mike blurted.

“Fiddler! Fiddler on the Roof? We saw it a couple of summers back on Broadway.”

Mike’s smile looked a little sad. “You’re so lucky, you’ve got a family that does things like that. Four kids, it must be fun, when you’re all together.”

“Well, Charlie’s so much older, Henry never talks, Lisa’s always in her own world, daddy’s away working, I never thought of us as ‘fun’. More like together, but apart.”

That next week, the week before Christmas, we spent every day together exploring the city. We’d walk all afternoon around his neighborhood or mine. Sometimes we’d visit a department store, or go to one of the new shopping centers, and make fun of all the people rushing for presents, buying things they didn’t want or need, just because everyone else was doing it. One night, he drove me through Clifton to look at lights on houses. I’d never done that before, and almost became mesmerized driving through the fairyland, until I thought about the holiday behind it. Another night, we finally got to see Alfie, walking out talking like cockneys. Mike tried to hold a handkerchief over his arm, waiter-like, the same as Michael Caine. It kept falling to the ground because he couldn’t keep his arm still. He was always throwing it around to point at something or emphasize his thoughts. I started feeling warm and safe again, cocooned with Michael in our own special world, one where we alone knew what was right and wrong, where everyone else didn’t have a clue. Walking, we fit together perfectly, his arm around my shoulder, mine across his back, locked at the hips, legs moving in sync. I felt us becoming one person, one being, with two minds, merging closer. When he brought me home, we’d hug tighter than the night before, locking ourselves together for what seemed minutes, ending with kisses, fast and slow, never wanting to let go. Reluctantly, we’d separate, knowing we could start again tomorrow.

The night after Alfie, on my porch, we rubbed noses along with everything else. He started laughing, “Your nose is cold, so cold. Is this why Eskimos do it, to warm their noses?”

I felt the tip of my nose. It didn’t feel at all cold to me, but then, my hands weren’t all that warm. We had been walking around in almost freezing weather, and I was never one for gloves. I remembered what my mother said when I was little, and complained about feeling cold there, at the end of my nose. So I laughed along with him, saying, “Yeah, I guess I’d make a good dog, wouldn’t I?” He looked puzzled, so I went on, “Dogs. They always have cold noses, don’t they?” That became one of our little things. Whenever our faces would get close enough to touch noses, and he noticed mine was cold, he’d cup his hand over it, to warm it up.

I’d heard other girls talking about the boys they went out with, always being asked to “go farther”. I wondered why I never felt that sense of urgency from him, especially since he’d gone away to college, without parents or restraints. He seemed content, happy, even a little overwhelmed simply by what we were doing. I was very relieved by this unspoken attitude, as one of my biggest fears once I found myself growing physically from girl to woman, was having to submit to a boy’s physical advances to get his love. It seemed wrong, unfair. Every bit as smart and capable as any boy I knew at school, I didn’t want someone else to rule my life or desires. With Mike, I felt equal in every way.

xiii

A week and a half later, the mailbox outside our beach-side rental in Menemsha on the Vineyard finally held, not a letter, but a thick manilla envelope addressed to me. I’d written Mike as soon as we got there, just a short letter telling him we were all fine, about walking on the beach and finding shells, little daily small talk really. But I’d ended with a paragraph about how I thought of him every day, and missed him not being there with me, telling me things and making me laugh. I finished, “Love, Janie”, hoping he’d know I meant it.

I ripped it open right there on the sandy road, leaving the mailbox door hanging open. He’d sent all his poems, numbered 1-46, typed on that crinkly onion skin paper, each dated and timed. I started reading the first page, walking around the house down towards the beach. Under a grey sky, the air felt heavy with on-coming rain. The cover letter read, in part:

What you are about to read, if you have the courage, is a compilation of everything important I have written since December, 1965. I didn’t plan a bit of it, as I’ve told you a thousand times. My muse arrived sometime in March, and mysteriously departed at 11 AM,  June 2nd, 1966, only to return more mysteriously in this introduction. There’s so many things I want to say, but no explanations of meaning will be offered for any of the pieces, because: (a) I didn’t know myself what they meant when I first wrote them; (b) the meaning keeps changing for me; and (c) it’s either there for you or it isn’t…

I hope you understand what’s behind the proffering of this gift. (I don’t.) This is an attempt (I guess) to pierce a suffocating layer of superficial profundity which surrounds all we do. I mean, look at who knows you, and those who think they do, and notice the difference between them in relation to you…Some people are so sure they know you so well, just from the surface contact they have with you. They have you all figured out, and placed where they feel you belong. Take Five Fingers, for example. How well do any of them (the seniors) or Mkrtchian know you? Not at all, really, I suppose. And yet, you’re chosen, not for the You you know you are, but for the superficial, uncomplicated You they have you figured out to be. And yet, you still got appointed, on the basis of the unreal (to you, and those who know you) You. Now take those who know you. There’s Lizzie and Leon, and me. We get to see the real You, even as it gets more mysterious and seems to fade away, But we still feel so close to the full picture. And yet the kids of Avondale have made you the queen of their school, without ever knowing (or caring) who Janie Stein is.

I looked up, and found myself at the water’s edge. I tucked all the poems back into the envelope, and slid it under my shirt. “Close to my heart”, I thought. The coming storm was whipping the Atlantic into a froth as I zig-zagged along the sand, trying to avoid the encroaching surf. A faint cry pierced over the broiling waves. On the porch, I saw Lisa cupping her hands around her mouth, and faintly heard, “Janie! Janie.”

Reluctantly, I headed back up the dune. “Charlie’s here. They’ve got Denise – She’s so cute!” My big brother, his wife Arlene and their 18-month old, Denise, must have arrived from Rhode Island. I skipped and ran the rest of the way inside, holding tight to Mike’s poems to keep them from slipping down my blouse.

Charlie was the one person I looked up to in our family. Out on his own, making a family, he lived by his own rules, not our mom’s. They lived in what he called a commune, “growing our own food, making our own clothes, raising our baby right.” As I entered, he took off his pea coat and waved around a record album, still fresh in its plastic wrap. “You guys have got to listen to this. We saw him last year in Newport, and it blew our minds. He’s not a folk singer anymore, he had this band, drums, guitars, the whole rock and roll thing. Makes his music more immediate, punchier.” He took two records out of the double sleeve, Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, checked the labels, and slipped both over the spindle of the old console player lining one wall of the living room. Arlene went off into the kitchen, but not before she handed Denise to Charlie. “Here, she’s yours for a while.”

While the toddler roamed around, finding the baby and dog toys all mixed up in a corner basket, we three plopped down facing each other, Charlie cross-legged, Lisa on both knees in her college-girl Levi’s, and me more demurely, resting on one hip with my knees in front, feet off to one side. The carpet scratched my calves below my khaki shorts. I pulled on the sweater I’d tied around my shoulders, almost getting stuck as it tried to pass the mess the wind had made of my hair. The speakers erupted with what sounded like a drunken high school marching band, followed by Dylan laughing his way through a prolonged recitation that “Everybody must get stoned.” I didn’t follow much of what he sang that morning, wishing I could put on a Barbra Streisand record instead.

Denise tottered over to me. She loved my hair, and could easily spend an hour fluffing and pulling it. I remember thinking, “I wish she knew how to braid it.” I shifted to a knees-up, legs-open position, supported her with my thighs, and smiled into her eyes as Charlie said, “Aren’t you angry about the war, Lisa? What are you doing up there in Wisconsin?

“I’m having fun, Charlie. I’ve got my choice of guys there, the ratio is like two to one. You’ve already got your family. I’m just starting to look, you know. And learn.” She winked at me as she said this.

“Really, where have you been the last five years? School, colleges, they’re just another way the culture gets you to think like them, gets you to do their work. It’s no better than television, bad for your brain. They’ve got you already, girl. Look at you. Out on the prowl for a man, then where will you be? An independent woman, or a slave to corporate greed, buying more washing machines and soap?”

Lisa laughed. She usually thought most everything was either funny or absurd. “OK, Mr. Hippie. You keep growing your own anemic vegetables, eating that macropsychotic diet or whatever it us you guys have there on the farm. I’m gonna enjoy being young while I still am.”

Exasperated, Charlie got up as the second record had finished. He flipped them over, and while Dylan moaned through some dirge about a sad-eyed lady, he turned to me as he sat back down. “What about you, Janie? What are they saying at Avondale now? About the war.”

Denise was pulling her tiny palm along my cheek, sticking her finger into the corner of my mouth. I gently tugged her hand down, turned her around, and put her on my knee. I felt more like playing at her level than having an adult conversation with my older brother. Kids are simple, I thought, they don’t ask for anything but love, and new things to learn and explore. 

“I don’t want a war, but I don’t know how to stop it,” I found myself saying.

“Well, then you should come out to Iowa with us, to the SDS convention. They’re gonna talk about, plan how to get more demonstrations on campus, like in Michigan last year. Shut things down until we stop the war, and all the other stuff those clowns are using to keep us in our place. They use us, the folks in charge. They don’t care about people, only lining their own pockets, and holding on to their power.” Charlie was getting worked up. I was looking at Denise, marveling at how none of this meant anything to her. “Janie, are you listening?”

I thought about Mike going away to Calvin, about me staying in Cincinnati another year, working away at getting all A’s, at the SATs I’d have to take, applying to colleges, finally a senior, after six years of being the good girl, the one who didn’t make waves, who followed the rules.

“Let me get into a good school first, then I can think about saving the world. You’re older, you’ve already gone to Brown, you’ve got a wife and a kid, you’re ready. I don’t know, Charlie, I just don’t know.”

Dylan was singing more softly now, a slower, more melodic tune. With a slow cadence, something about “she aches, just like a woman, but she breaks just like a little girl.”

Charlie sighed, with a touch of menace, and came over to pick up Denise. “Come on, little one, let’s go out and see the water.” She squealed, kicking her legs as he raised her up, up, and over his head. He gave her a little toss. She howled, and then laughed as she fell into his arms and he hugged her to his chest.

After the screen door slammed shut, Lisa turned to me, saying, “You just need to get laid, sister.”

xiv

Mornings are chilly in Menemsha, near the sea. A sweater, my summer shorts, and knee-high socks sometimes weren’t enough protection against the fog floating in off the Gulf stream. Every day, I’d walk down to the water’s edge, and search for flotsam kicked up by the generous ocean over night. After the sun burned through, sometimes by ten, sometimes after noon, I could lose my shoes and socks and let my toes curl into the bubbling sand, digging, excavating little ponds to trap the water as it fell back again. The end of June, all July, Mike and I exchanged letters. My handwriting was so tiny, I only could fill both sides of one sheet, a small one at that. Mike would send back massive missives in bulging envelopes, six or seven pages usually, in his disjointed half-printed, half written scrawl. He wrote with dark blue ink then, a blue which matched the water’s color out past the waves. I’d build a little perch in the sand, sit and listen to those waves, unfold his latest, and lose myself in memories of a boy who claimed to ache for me.

All those letters are gone now, I burned them years ago. The poems, though, remained with me, all I have left to remember him (and myself) in the times we were apart. Oh, I know in general he’d tell me about his swimming jobs, first as a lifeguard sixty miles away at a park in Kentucky, then later as a swim teacher at the Norwood YMCA, three miles down Montgomery Pike from his home. He loved watching the kids get better, he said, all the kicking and splashing becoming more and more synchronized until, all at once, swimming happened. He’d respond to whatever melancholic or ecstatic feeling I’d poured out about my family, the summer days in paradise, the evening visits to music shows at the Community Center. He’d share his own emerging emotions, not just about me, but about his own fumbling attempts to understand himself better.

If he included a poem, sometimes written, sometimes typed, I’d set it aside in rapidly bulging folder. He sent several each time. Two I remember, one by heart. He’d been trying so hard that spring to write haikus, but always came up one or two syllables short, or long. This one, he hit the bull’s eye:

Your hair:

The falling graces

Of its beauty

Cascading to my soul.

The other pretty much sums up what I felt that first summer we spent apart:

Do you know

What happiness is?

Have you felt

The joy to forgive?

Can you taste

The nectar of love?

Life is not

A search for eternal pleasure,

Or a pain to be endured.

Life is/What you make it;

The fullness which you lead yourself

In a striving to be free:

Free to feel a fear,

Free to cry a tear;/Free – 

To make of yourself

What you can

Or accept a helping hand.

But only if you need it.

Seek out life

And you’ll see its beauty;

Meditate alone,

And your soul grows rusty,

Rusted by the waters of your isolation,

Rusted ’til you can’t accept

What others have to offer.

Looking back, I see myself stretching beyond the bounds of what my mother had planned out for me, stretching towards a future I still couldn’t see. Something pulled me towards a partner to fill the spaces a friend like Lizzie couldn’t.

If I wasn’t on the beach, I’d be in a little cove nearby, in a Sunfish sailboat on the calmer waters there. Totally alone, I could drift and bob, making sure the sail leaned with the wind, and daydream about going back home. I ticked off the reasons I was drawing closer and closer to this boy. He was fun, as well as funny. He saw the world with the same dry and jaundiced eye as me, a sceptic’s intolerance and disdain for the ordinary beat of life. Yet he came from a different world, one of Boy Scouts and church choirs, of swimming teams and ice skating. One of suburban calm, of woods behind the house, where you could play in the dirt and not care about getting your dress messy. With him I felt a fullness, and knew, just knew, he wanted the best of me, and the best for me.

The end of July, Charlie headed back to Rhode Island with Arlene and Denise. My father arrived, spent a few days helping close up the house, then drove us back to Ohio. August’s end-of-summer dryness had arrived, turning the grass inside the new clover-leaf intersection leading up to Clifton to brittle straw. The first thing I did when I got inside was call Mike.

“Hi, it’s Janie.”

“Oh, you’re home!” He sounded genuinely pleased.

“Do you want to come over? I’ve still got to unpack, but we can talk, then walk over to the park?”

“I’ll be there in half an hour…” He made it in twenty minutes.

He paced back and forth while I took my clothes out of the suitcase, throwing most in the laundry hamper, and folding the sweaters into the chest at the foot of my bed.

“I got my room assignment from Calvin,” he announced.

“What kind of rooms do you get?” 

“It’s a double room, with two beds and built-in dressers in one, and then a study room with two desks in the other. Bathrooms are down the hall, for 30 guys on a floor.”

“Do you know what classes you’re going to take yet?”

“Well, everybody has to take Humanities…”

“What’s that?” I interjected.

“We read all the great books. Plato, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Newton in the first semester, then it gets more modern next year. Sounds like fun to me. That’s what I want to do, read things I never got to at Avondale.”

He’d been upset when he didn’t get into AP English. Most of his other classes were advanced placement, and he’d gotten just about the highest SAT Verbal score in his class, certainly higher than I did, but somehow he hadn’t impressed the teachers with his language skills.

“And foreign language, they’ve got a requirement you need two years’ college equivalent in high school. But they have a test, an interview, and if you pass, you can get out of it. That’d be great, it would free up time for other stuff I want to take, like psychology and literature classes. Then there’s math. Even though I got a 4 on the Calculus AP test, I have to take it again there. But I get credits for both histories, and biology. So I take Cell Biology right away.”

“What do you need to get into med school?”

“I started looking into that. There’s only five things you have to have: Biology, Inorganic and Organic Chemistry, Calculus, and Physics. So I’m doing three of those this year, get them done right away, ‘cause I want to have time for things that make you think, not all that hard science, before I get slammed with it in medical school.” He went on. “If I take five classes each semester, instead of four, with those AP’s, I could finish in three years…”

“Sounds like you’ve got a plan.”

He frowned, and stared out my window, then glanced back at me as I shut the suitcase and stuffed it under my bed. “They say everybody who applies for medical school from Calvin always gets in. But that’s if you follow the requirements and don’t mess up.”

“I  feel the same way, about colleges.”

“Where are you going to apply. You decided yet?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s going to be mostly Seven Sisters schools. I don’t want to stay in the Midwest, so I’ve crossed Oberlin and Carleton off the list. For sure I don’t want to go someplace big like UC. And I know I want to be in a city, like New York or Boston. So for now, it’s Barnard, Radcliffe, Wellesley, and I don’t know, Vassar.”

He thought about this a bit. “Before I got in early decision, I was going to apply to Stanford.”

“Why?”

“My grandmother and aunt live near there, so I’ve seen it a couple of times. The weather is so perfect, in California, no rain or snow. And you know,” he raised an eyebrow, “Harvard is the Stanford of the East.”

“I can’t imagine going to California. It’s so far away. The cities are so new, no history or culture there.”

He pursed his lips, looking a little disappointed. “What about Lizzie?” he asked

“She’s more of a small town girl right now. Smith and Mt. Holyoke seem to be what she’s talking about.”

“Well, either way you go, New York and Boston are both about 2 hours away from Calvin. We can see each other weekends, I suppose.”

I kept my face blank, but inside, I wondered, “What, he’s looking that far ahead?” Here I am, getting ready to be maudlin over missing him and losing my first boyfriend going off to college, leaving me forever, and he’s assuming we’ll still like each other after a year of that?

I kept it to myself though, and suggested, “I’ve got to go outside, take a walk. Want to go to the Zoo? We could see some animals, and listen to the opera for free later on.”

The Cincinnati Zoo was a couple of miles from my house. In the summer, operas played some evenings, famous for the hyenas trying to keep pace with soprano arias. As we walked down Clifton, he put his arm around my shoulder, and pulled me close. It felt warm and friendly there, locking hips with him as we strode in step. In that cocoon, I didn’t have to think about September.

xv

The second weekend in August epitomized those Dog Days in the midwest, hot, muggy, with oppressive heavy air. A perfect day to hide my hair. Mike and his parents picked me up on their way to the University, where Mrs. Harrison – Grace – would receive her, Ph.D. twenty years after getting her Master’s. She must have been sweltering in the long black robe, but the smile never left her face. After the ceremony, we sought shade walking under massive oaks and maples. Doffing her cap and tassel, she pulled the gown with its blue hood over her head and took my elbow, holding me back while Mike and his father, Jack, talked about the on-going decline of UC’s basketball fortunes after Oscar Robertson had left for the Royals.

“Did you enjoy your time on Martha’s Vineyard? How is your mother?” She smiled expectantly.

“She’s fine; she said to say ‘hi’.” I marveled at the warm intimacy I felt with her. “I had a lot of time to think, walking along the beach, around the island. And my little niece was there. I’m thinking more and more that’s what I want to do, something with children.”

“You have so much potential. Where do you think that will lead you? The world needs smart women to change its course.”

Why was she telling me this, I wondered. What did she see in me?

She went on: “Don’t ever set your sights lower than the highest rung, Janie. Don’t let anyone, ever, tell you what you can’t do.” I thought of Lisa, not caring where she went. My mother, who had settled for a very comfortable life with my father. Miss Mkrtchian and Miss Foley, spinsters both, trying gamely every day to bring their charges to flower. I understood suddenly that all these women, whom I had I looked up to, who seemed to want the best for me, might not know the heights I could achieve.

A rush of fear and wonder coursed through me. I needed to find a worthy goal, I knew, but didn’t yet know where to look.

Mike’s mother brought me back. She was saying, “…Radcliffe?”

“I’m sorry, I was…”

“I was saying, have you thought more about college? Is Radcliffe still your first choice?”

I had begun receiving application packets that week. I discovered that most schools wanted not only recommendations from teachers, but from one or more “individuals who know you personally, but not a family member.” Someone outside of the narrow group I’d been trying to impress all these years. Someone whose opinion might carry some weight, like a Rabbi or minister. Someone like…a Radcliffe alumna with a Ph.D.?

xvi

Michael was due in Connecticut on Labor Day. Friday, the day before he was to leave, I came over to his house. We sat at the shallow end of his pool, kicking our feet in the water, absorbing the still radiant late-summer sunshine. A few small clouds puffed idly overhead, hiding amongst the leaves of the giant oak tree ruling one corner of their yard. I wore a blue swim suit, made of a crinkly elastic kind of fabric, certainly not intended for actual swimming. Rather than the usual modest high neck I preferred, this was low cut.

I needled him. “Show me how to swim, OK?”

“I’m a terrible swimmer, and I don’t know how to teach, that’s for sure. I’m actually the worst one on the team.”

“But you got a letter sweater?!” I asked incredulously.

“I showed up every day, I swam in the meets, and I earned some points coming in second or third a couple of times, that’s all it takes. You don’t have to actually be good.”

“Don’t you wasn’t to impress your girlfriend?” I mocked. We were still unsure if that’s what we were, boyfriend and girlfriend. His hesitance to say, “I love you”, as if it would somehow lead to pain, came through in the several poems he shared with me that August. And I still had trouble finding room in my life for the distractions of emotion, fearing it would blunt my sense of purpose, hide me from myself.

He splashed me, taking care not to wet my hair; he knew what a chore drying it would be. Submerging quickly, he pushed off the wall, and shot ahead underwater, pulling, then kicking almost the full length of the pool in a rapid breaststroke start. Hitting the other end, he rose up, gasped for air, and headed back my way. This time, he did an ungainly freestyle, punctuated by a vicious flip turn, drenching me as his legs slapped down before he pushed off again. So much for keeping my hair dry…

Hauling himself out of the deep end, he hollered back, “Lemme show you what I learned, after I taught it to the kids at the Y.”

He crawled up on the diving board, walked out to the end, and turned around. “See, in the advanced class, I had to teach them how to do a reverse dive. You know, where you jump back, then lean forward towards the board and dive in. I didn’t know how to do that, but we have this book which gives instructions on how to teach. It said something like, ‘Start by making sure the student jumps up and away from the board. His momentum will carry him away from the diving board. He should then pull his shoulders down and throw his feet up, diving in head first.’ I said all that to the kids, and they actually could do the dive! I figured, if they could do it, so could I. I realised, from physics, that as long as as I jumped back away from the board, I could not hit it. Vectors and all, you know.”

I hadn’t taken physics yet, but I understood the concept. “Impressive courage and coordination, Mike,” I said as he swam back to me in the shallow end. He got out, sat on the edge, and stared down at me. His eyes wandered from my face to the top of my breasts. I felt flustered, wanting, and not wanting, to have my body desired by him. Hoping to distract him, I asked, “When did Shelly get back?” His sister had spent the summer in Idaho, Sun Valley, working at the lodge there and skating in the ice show chorus line.

“A couple of days ago. She says she’s going back this Christmas, to work again and learn to ski. She won’t tell our parents, but there’s a guy there she’s going to see, is the main thing.” Like me and Lisa, Shelly was two years older than Mike. She seemed a lot like Lizzie – a dancer, kind of smart, always perky, someone a boy might like.

We were smiling, laughing, that afternoon under the sun, but I couldn’t lose the dread I felt, at losing to college this boy I had just begun to see as mine. He was the first person, ever, who had broken through my veneer. Or maybe the first one I had let break in. It didn’t matter. I’d gone after him, I wanted him, I didn’t want to lose him, but keeping him in my life seemed frightful as well. It was scary, any way I looked. “He’s going away to college, he’ll forget about me, he’ll find another girl, I’ll lose him forever,” went one fantasy. “He loves me, he completes me, I’ll lose me,” went the other. I didn’t know how much I should let him see either side, see me clinging or see me pushing away. I had to let it out.

“We’re not going to see each other for almost three months, Mike. What’s going to happen?”

Matter-of-factly, he said, “We’re going to write each other, like we did this summer. And then we’ll see each other at Thanksgiving,” His voice sounded confident, but I could see his eyes tear up. He turned away, lifted himself up to the deck, and draped a huge towel over his shoulders. “I’m going inside to change. You can too, in that room downstairs. I’ll see you out here, on the patio? Something I want to show you, give you.”

As we sat on the lounge chairs his father had built, under a dogwood tree, he handed me another onion skin paper. “I don’t know, this came out this morning. I read it, it helped me.”

He’d stopped numbering the poems. The last one had been #66 August 31, 1966. This one had only a date at the bottom, 9-2-66. M.H.

TO JANIE, ON MY DEPARTURE

I’m leaving;

I’ll be back, we know that is true;

But when I return will you still be you?

You’ve changed before, you’ll change again,

But you’ll always remain what you’ve always been

To me:

my love.

Into my lines I’ve injected my life,

The tear-bought joy you’ve carried my way

On the wings of your smiles

To me.

Smiling again? 

Showing your rareness of spirit.

Leaving.

But returning I am in the midst

Of the brown-golden leaves that fall

On the snow, newly-planted by unknown foes

Of our sorrow.

Stay with me then, in spirit and soul,

For without you I’ll never be whole.

Hear me, S. Jane: Don’t feel small;

Whatever you do, search for yourself

And see me.

I return (to you), but now I must go.

I thought of the Fantasticks song, “Much More”, especially the part about “I’d like to be worldly wise, to be the kind of girl designed to be kissed upon the eyes.” I’d sung that for Michael, said it was my fantasy. And a few days later, he had kissed me on the eyes. It felt a bit odd, and now I know, that what I really want, what I really am, is a girl designed to be wooed by words. Michael Harrison had them, he shared them with me, and all I wanted was more of that. From him.

viii

The next Wednesday after dinner, Lisa yelled up the stairs while I was finishing my Math homework. “Janie!! Phone!”

I opened the door and padded down to pick up. We had two phones, one at the base of the stairs near the den and living room, one in the middle of the hall upstairs where the bedrooms were. Neither had a long cord, so all conversations were in earshot of anyone who cared to listen.

“Hello?”

“Um, Janie? It’s Mike.” His voice cracked a little on my name. Only four words, but he sounded nervous.

He went on. “Can we go out and see a movie this Friday?”

Not “Will you?”, or “Do you want to go with me?”, but “Can we?” I don’t know why, but I took that as a happy sign. He was thinking of us together, like we ought to be going out. I responded without thinking, a shot of pure feeling as I said, “Sure! What do you wanna see?”

“What’s playing at the Esquire there?”

“It’s ‘A Thousand Clowns’. Have you seen that?” It had come out this past Christmas. It was so popular with the college kids, the Esquire had brought it back. “It’s the best movie. My sister now rates any movie by the number of clowns. Like, ‘That one was only 600 clowns’.”

“Well, OK,” he ventured, sounding hesitant.

“I really think you’ll like it. It’s funny.”

When he came over on Saturday afternoon, I showed him my room. The bedspread was white, with a border of little red flowers, kind of quilted. I’d had it since grade school. A built-in bookcase lined the entire wall below windows which looked out on the backyard. I’d cleared off my usually messy desk, filled with school work, by throwing all that into the closet. He sat on the desk chair, wooden with curving armrests, painted shiny white.

I stood by the window, pointing out past the yard. “See, Bobby’s house is right there.”

Mike did not look up, fascinated by the little tchotchkes still lined up along the back of my desk. A tiny bell, sans ringer. A well-worn dreidel. A picture of my infant niece. A random hair band, red with small green circles. I worried, Could he be using them to fill in the blanks he saw in me?

Lisa rambled around somewhere down the hall. Just then my mom came back from the cleaners.

“Girls, I have those skirts you wanted for tonight!” She came up and peeked through my open door. Mike got up, fumbling the dreidel. Quickly I said, “Mom, this is Michael, Mike Harrison.”

She put on her smoothest smile, nodded slightly, and, setting the skirt, hidden in its tissue paper, on the bed, said, “Hello, Michael.” I watched her eyes intently, wondering what she thought. She turned to me, and asked, “So, this is the boy you’ve been telling us about. Where are you two off to?”

“We’re going to see A Thousand Clowns, at the Esquire, get something to eat after.”

“Oh, you’ll love it, I’m sure,” she said to Mike. “Lisa, she’s the family movie critic, won’t shut up about it. Have fun, kids!” She breezed out of the room, to drop off the other skirt with my sister.

Once she’d left, I urged, “Why don’t you go downstairs, hang out a minute while I change? Don’t worry about my mother, she’s always friendly, I know she’ll like you.” Or at least pretend to, if she doesn’t, I thought to myself.

We walked down Clifton towards the theater, the leaves above unfolding into green. As sun filtered through the branches, the soft evening light made everything floating, buoyant.  I thought about the movie, the story of a brainy New York kid, Nick, and his uncle, Murray, also smart, but a non-conformist who can’t hold a job. Nick’s mother, Murray’s sister, went out for cigarettes one day, and never came back, leaving her son in Murray’s care. Nick is the sane, stable member of the pair. Murray falls in love with a social worker – Sandra Markowitz – who comes around to assess the home environment, and threatens to take the boy away.

Watching a second time, I could burrow into it for new insights. Sure, I identified with the brainy kid, but he was only 13. I felt myself starting to understand and identify more with the flustered paper-dropping messy-haired Jewish child-care professional who finds herself wrapped around the little finger of the odd gentile guy.

Afterwards, we strolled into Skyline Chili. I had a Coke, Mike, a hot dog. As we sat across from each other in the harsh fluorescent light, I started fidgeting with my hands, a habit my mother had failed to break. I nervously twirled  the little silver ring on my right hand. I didn’t wear much jewelry, ever, but this was something I’d bought a year ago with Lizzie, when we went through a phase of trying to look more like regular girls.

“What’s that?” he asked innocently.

“Want to see it?” I slipped it off and handed it to him. He turned it over between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, and then slipped it on the little finger on his right – that beautiful right hand!

“Look, it fits!” he announced, surprised. “I like it there. It feels good, having a ring. Never worn one before.”

“You want it?” I ventured. I thought we were having a simple little conversation, not one fraught with any meaning. “I don’t really wear jewelry.”

“Mmm, neither do I.” He took it off, cradling it in his hand. “Can I keep this?”

I didn’t know what that meant. The social girls, the ones in a sorority, exchanged pins with boys in the fraternities, so everyone would know they were going together. I didn’t want him to think I was one of them, so I tried to act blasé. Casually, I said, “Sure, I don’t wear it that much.” In truth, I had worn it everyday since Lizzie and I bought it. That ring had come to mean our friendship to me; with it, I knew I would always have someone I could feel comfortable with, someone who saw the world as I did.

On the way back home, I asked,“What did you think, about Murray and Nick and all?
“Nick was cool, almost like he was the adult, and Murray the child. I’d like to be as free as Jason Robards” – the actor who played Murray – “but I’m too focused. I’ll always be a frustrated underachiever. You know – that straight path towards college, and after.”

“What do you mean?”

He struggled with his next thought, as if divulging a secret he’d promised to keep. “Um, I want to be a doctor…”

“How…when…did you decide that?”

“See, one afternoon, last year, I was sitting on the diving board at our pool, looking in the water. It was spring. I thought I should decide ‘what I want to be when I grow up’. My mother’d always told me, ‘you can do anything you want.’ I believed her, ‘cause she’d given me a lot of tests when I was a kid, and told me I had an IQ of 138 or 140 or something, so I was smart enough to pick and choose. I thought about a lot of things, minister, engineer like my dad, teacher, writer maybe, but I realized I wanted a direct connection with people, go right to their primary core. What’s more important to someone than their body? It’s really all we are, right? Besides, doctors get a lot of respect in society. And they don’t ever have to worry about money, I figured.”

“What kind of doctor?”

“Don’t laugh, but I want to be a psychiatrist.”

“Why”

“I’m fascinated by why people do things, how they get along with other people, stuff like that. But it’s kids I really like. So a child psychiatrist.”

Cars occasionally rumbled by on our right, glistening under the street lamps. The asphalt sidewalk cracked with bumps and heaves from the roots of the old elm and oak trees crowding in on our left. I looked down, making sure I didn’t trip. I looked over; he was staring back, warm eyes and hopeful gaze. I felt an eerie shudder. My secret dream was to work with kids, to be a child psychologist. Ever since I’d spent a summer on the Vineyard with some younger cousins, when I was 14, I’d thought about working with kids. Under ten, they’re still so pure, so eager to be molded, so untouched by all the seeking and yearning we get as we grow up.

He took my right hand with his left – he was walking on the side facing traffic, such a gentleman. I felt his forearm brush mine, and couldn’t wait to get back home, home base where I’d be safe. He dropped my hand as we walked up the brick path to the door. I stopped, turned around, and looked up. All I saw were my own eyes, reflected back in his glasses, and wasn’t quite ready when he leaned forward, tilted his head, and touched his lips to mine. I liked it instantly, reaching up behind his neck and pulling him in while he tucked his right hand in the small of my back. He stroked my hair, we eased apart, caught each others’ eyes and smiles, and went back in for another try. It felt good. As I floated through the door, I thought, “I hope he hadn’t lost the ring anywhere.”

ix

Maybe I played Spin The Bottle when I was 11 or 12; maybe a pudgy boy with curly hair, a goofy smile and wrinkly nose pecked me on the cheek one night. I don’t know. If that happened, it so embarrassed me I never went to another boy-girl party. I rededicated myself to being the smartest kid in class. I hid my fears by always dressing nicely, kept my hair shiny and clean, scrubbed my face every day, polished my shoes, never letting anyone know that, inside, I didn’t feel like everyone else, scared a boy would take me from myself, would steal my soul and leave me weepy and limp and longing for love. I hid all that behind a suave, sophisticated demeanor, always ready to laugh, always ready to be the first to say something sharp, to be the girl who was more cultured than the rest, who’d been to New York City and who knew about Broadway and books and foreign movies.

But my facade had cracked. That weekend my thoughts whipsawed wildly. I could study for an hour, then I’d wonder why Mike had kissed me. And why I’d kissed him. Did that mean we were in love? Did that mean he was supposed to call me, and I should feel bad he hadn’t? Did that mean I should call him? I got so lost in daydreams, I almost didn’t hear Mom when she knocked on the door, asking quietly, “Janie? Honey? Are you OK? I’ve got lunch downstairs.” In the Stein household, meals were sacred, not eating the greatest sin.

“I’m OK. I’ll be right there. Just finishing up this history paper…”

There’s no way I could tell her about Mike, all my gyrating thoughts. Sure, he wanted to be a doctor, and that would be a big plus. But what would happen when she learned that not three years earlier, he’d been singing in the choir at All Saints’ Episcopal church? And she’d pry and prod to find out why I’d come back so late last week, or where we’d gone last night, or why my cheeks were a little streaked with tears. My mom was not a harridan; she was much more subtle in extracting the truth about her daughter’s social life. She used hugs and love, not guilt. I was her youngest, and no matter how mature and stable I pretended to be, I still felt like a little girl in her arms. I did not want to go there, because then I felt I’d never get to be in Michael’s embrace again.

My mood soared Sunday night when he called. Downstairs, reading for fun, not school, I got to the phone first, thank goodness.

“Janie? Janie…” Poor Mike, such a mixture of innocence and self-possession. I never knew which face he’d be wearing. “I’ve been thinking about you …about us…all weekend. I’ve got to see you, got to talk to you again. When can we do that?”

“Can’t we just say ‘Hi’ in school. We are in third period together, you know.”

“No, no, school’s too…I don’t know, there’s so many other people around. Can we go out again? Next weekend?”

Saturday night, we went downtown, to a real restaurant and a real movie theatre, what felt to me like a real date. Afterwards, we tried kissing again on the doorstop. This time, we knew what we were doing. We hung on a little longer, using both arms, our hands this time to explore each other. He came inside afterwards. We sat down on the couch, looking at each other, holding hands. I knew my mom and dad were still up, my dad reading and smoking in the den behind the glass-paneled French doors, partially hidden by the grand piano we’d bought for Charlie when he started showing some talent. Mom breezed in, her usual open smile broadening a bit when she saw us. She almost sat on the comfy chair next to us, the leather one with dark red fabric draped over the arms. She thought better of it, standing while she gently grilled Michael. He dropped my hand when she asked, “Janie says you’re going to John Calvin next fall?”

I was amazed at the tone Mike took on when he answered, “Yes, I fell in love with it there when I visited last October. The trees were turning, all the buildings still covered with that green ivy, the kids all seemed so busy and so…focused. Then I got interviewed by the admissions director, and felt at home right away.”

“But it’s so small. Don’t you want to go to a bigger school?”

“No… no, I learn best when I’m with a small group. The professors there, they actually teach the classes, you know, they don’t leave it to assistants or grad students. A few years ago, they sold their publishing house to IBM, and with that stock their endowment is getting bigger. That means higher salaries for good professors, more resources for student life, new buildings.” This was another side of Mike I hadn’t seen yet, an ambitious, almost adult view of things. My mother teased it out of him in less than a minute.

“And what do you intend to study when you get there?”

“Pre-med. But I have a lot of credits already, from AP classes, so I can take classes in things I want to learn about, like literature, philosophy, psychology.” I knew Mom was judging the qualities she valued most, drive, respect for academic work, stability. I hoped he passed the test.

“OK, then, you two stay quiet down here. If you watch TV, keep it low. I’m going to go get dad up to bed.” She knocked on the French doors of the den, crooked her finger, and pointed up stairs. That left us on the couch, with very clear instructions: You’ve got freedom, as long as you follow the rules. The problem was, I didn’t know what they were.

Once they’d gone upstairs, Mike snuggled a little closer. His left hand found both of mine, lying limp in my lap. He draped his right around my shoulder. He gave a little tug, and I dropped my head, resting it against his chest. I felt safe, protected there, against what I did not know.

x

School entered its annual climax in late April. Theater kids struggled to complete rehearsals for the annual play. The Avon Follies (featuring Lizzie in the dance line, of course) competed with them for practice time on the auditorium stage. Elections were held for next year’s Student Council. I lost my nerve to run for President; no girl had ever won, and I was so afraid of failure. I opted for Secretary instead, getting that spot with ease. Miss Mkrtchian asked the current Five Fingers to nominate the next year’s Senior Girls’ Council, and I got on as promised, Lizzie too. Miss M. told me, “Sarah Jane, you know you’ll be my Thumb.”

Spring final exams were coming up. Finals counted as much in our cumulative grade tallies as a “marking period”, of which there were six in a year. I could not afford to let up now, if I wanted to get the top spot. I had to ace them all. So I spent most nights and weekends reading, writing, making note cards, and thinking, worrying.

But also dreaming. Michael Harrison had my ring, he had kissed me, and he wanted me to come over to his house. He said he had some poems he’d been writing that he wanted to show me.

“Bring your swim suit. My father hooked up a heating system to the pool, it’s warm enough to go in now.”

Mike’s house snuggled in a little neighborhood, a mile from a street lined with one story buildings like a dime store, a drug store, a little clothing shop, not very cosmopolitan at all. Two stories, brick, surrounded by trees bursting with new leaves, the Harrisons’ place looked like a doll house someone had designed to be a southern colonial mansion. Friendly, but not stately, like the homes in Clifton.

Mike took me up to his room, which had a view out back not only to their pool, but across a valley wild with brush. “I can see all the way over to Section Road,” he said proudly.

“Why aren’t there any houses down there?” I asked, pointing to the little five acre-wood behind the diving board.

“That’s where we’d go to play as kids. Hide-’n-seek, war, tag, just run around.” Then, “There’s something I want to read to you…” He grabbed a pile of paper off his desk. The entire room appeared to be all hand made. The bed – actually a bunk bed – had a prow on front, like a little ship, complete with a wooden ladder to the top. A small bookcase filled the narrow wall beneath a window which looked out onto the garage roof. The entire wall opposite the bed was taken up by a desk and dresser combination.

“All the furniture looks…like, not from a store?”

“Yeah, my father made all this. He’s got a workshop downstairs, in the basement. Saw, drill, sanders, paint, everything. He loves to tinker. That’s why we can go swimming now, if we want.” Pointing out the window, he went on, “There, see that patch in the sidewalk down there? He had to dig that up to put in a pipe from the heater in the basement, so he could run the pool water through to warm it up.”

The pool itself looked sort of funny. I couldn’t put my finger on it. “Did he make the pool, too?”

“No, but he got it done as cheaply as he could. First, they dug up a hole, put the dirt on top of the yard. Then, they mashed sand down onto the bottom, shaped it like the bottom of a pool, with a deep end under the diving board and all. Put in concrete walls for the sides, and then dropped in a giant plastic thing instead of paint or cement. Filled it with water, that keeps the sand in place, I guess.”

All that would be fascinating, I guess, for some people. I only cared about the promised poetry, and looked down at the papers in his hand, covered with words I hoped he’d meant for me. I pointed, “Um…those the poems you wanted to…?”

He looked at the sheets covered with hand-written scribbles, as if seeing them for the first time. His face flushed, but he went on. “I don’t know; last December, I started writing this stuff, I don’t know where it came from. In February, it started coming out more and more.”

“Can I see?”

“Well, I don’t know if you can read them, I can barely make it out myself. Last year, when I was in AP American history” – Mike had been one of the few juniors allowed to take Advanced Placement classes- “taking a lot of notes from Mr. Melman, I found I couldn’t read my own handwriting. That’s when I started printing all my notes. But looking at this stuff, I see when I’ve got something that has to come out quick, I forget about the printing, and start that terrible scribbling. I got a “D” in hand-writing when I was in third grade.”

“And yet they skipped you ahead! Well, at least you’ll make a good doctor. Aren’t they supposed to have indecipherable writing?” We both smiled.

“It’s like someone else is putting the words together, I’m just the one holding the pen. I feel something, and then I see it on the paper. When I read it, it’s like I’m hearing it for the first time.”

“You’re stalling. Come on,” I urged, pulling at the motley collection in his hands, “let me have them.”

I sat down on the bed, hunching a little so I didn’t hit the upper bunk. There were white pages, green pages, lined and unlined pages, some three-hole punched, like from a school notebook, others with little ripped edges like he’d pulled them from a spiral notebook. Blue ink, black ink, pencil.

“I don’t know if I’m ready to yet.”

Exasperated, I almost shouted, “You bring me all the way out here, show me all that stuff, and now you’re not sure?”

He bit his lower lip, looking away towards the garage window. He seemed to decide. “Um, I can show you one or two now. But I want to type them up, clean them up, make them readable, make sure all the words are right. Then I could send them to you, you can look at them without me hovering around?”

“OK, one or two now, then, but you better let me see them by my birthday.”

“When’s that? I know it’s this month but I forgot.”

“The twenty-fifth.”

He rifled through the stack, and pulled out a couple from near the top. The first started out “#2 Middle February, 1966 (From ‘Yesterday’, Lennon-McCartney)” I did a quick mental calculation: that would have been about when Lizzie and I showed up with our time cards at Miss Foley’s. Instead of the sad lament of someone who’s lost his love, this one started, “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so near at hand/But now I’ve found someone who understands./I don’t need a yesterday.”

The other was “#22 May 6, 1966. 11:00 A.M.”, reading like a failed attempt at haiku: “No words escape the lips I long to own, Only Smiles, meaning what I do not know.”

Reluctantly, I handed them back. “OK, mister, I expect the rest as my birthday present.” Then, remembering, I asked, “What about my ring? You never gave that back to me.”

Smiling shyly, he raised his right hand, my slender silver band almost hidden at the base of the little finger.

“So you didn’t lose it.” I offered softly.

“No, never.” His neck flushed;  his lips, pursed together, seemed to stammer a bit. “You know, I really like you, like being with you, like talking with you. This ring, your ring, it makes that real, it keeps you close to me. I don’t know, I feel…”

We both stood up, entwined our fingers down below our hips, and pulled each other close. Standing there, I stared out at the pool, imagining it drained, empty, then refilled with newer, fresher water.

xi

Two days after my 17th birthday, Mike and I went out Friday night to another Hollywood movie at the downtown RKO Palace theater. I wanted to see “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.” It starred Theodore Bikel, whom I’d seen on Broadway in The Sound of Music with Mary Martin. In it, a Russian submarine runs aground on “a New England island,” supposedly off the coast of Massachusetts. I wanted to see if they’d actually filmed it on Martha’s Vineyard.

While we ate at the Terrace Hilton cafeteria afterwards, I groused, “There’s no way that was a ‘New England island’. Did you see the trees? And the dunes? Nothing at all like the Vineyard.”

Sagely, Mike pointed out, “At the end, I saw the credits; it said ‘Thanks to Mendocino County Film Bureau’ or something.”

“Mendocino?”

“Yeah, that’s in California.”

“California! Hollywood,” I grumbled. “They never get the East Coast right. Too much sun. I can’t wait until we go back to the Vineyard, to the real New England.”

Mike raised his eyebrows in the middle, looking a little startled. “Going back? When? How long?” 

“What, you forgot? I told you, right after school is over. We’ll probably be there until the end of July. Remember, I said Charlie’s coming with his wife and daughter for the whole month?”

“End of July…” Mike said, under his breath, almost to himself. He pulled something out of his sport coat inside pocket and handed it to me. “Here, I wrote this for you.”

I extracted and unfolded a shiny piece of onion-skin paper from the unsealed envelope. Typed this time.

TO JANIE, ON HER SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY

So.

You’re seventeen.

It doesn’t seem right,

Somehow;

For you to be seventeen,

I mean.

But it’s not the day that advances your age;

Everyone knows it’ll come with the sun,

In the summer:

You’ll be seventeen,

At last.

For you’ll have grown,

And I’ll have grown;

We’ll have grown

Apart.

xii

The first two weeks of June, Mike and I only got together once, on the Saturday before the end of school. He picked me up, and we drove to his house. His mother, whom I hadn’t met yet, came to the front door when she heard the car pull up. She grabbed my hand with both of hers, smiling as if with relief. “Janie? We’re glad you’re here.” She guided me into their small den as Mike raced upstairs, mumbling, “I’ve got to get my final paper for American History finished, Can you give me a few minutes while I type it out? It’s all done, but I’ve got another due for English tomorrow, so…”

I asked his mom, “Is this the room Mike sprayed Reddi-Whip all over?” He’d told me the first night his parents had gone out for the evening and left him and his sister alone, he emptied a whole can of pressurized whipped cream on the wallpaper of their den, trying to write something or other for his parents to see when they got back. They’d had to strip the paper off the walls, and paint the room to cover the stains.

She smiled forlornly, looking a little downcast. “Well, he’s always had his own mind. We didn’t like that, not at all. It was a big expense, but how do you get kids to grow up when they seem to want to raise themselves?” 

I didn’t know what to say, so I studied her. Wavy, thick, black hair, short, but not frizzy like mine. Black glasses, white around the edges; dark eyes, firm cheeks and chin; trim, about my height. She walked with authority. Sitting down, she kept her back straight, her head turned expectantly towards me.

“Mike says he drives you to Rollman every day before he goes to school.”

“Yes, I’m doing the research for my dissertation there, to finish my Ph.D. in psychology at UC. I also do a little clinical training, that’s part of the doctoral program as well.” She paused, collecting her thoughts. “It’s taken me 10 years, since I started school again. I wanted to wait until the kids could take care of themselves after school. With Mike, that seemed to come earlier than his sister. By the time he was 7, after first grade, he was so independent, didn’t seem to want me around that much anyway.”

“How…um, why did you get interested in psychology?”

“I grew up on a farm, in Iowa. My father was a physician, but after he contracted tuberculosis, he wanted someplace that might be healthier than Massachusetts. He wasn’t a very good farmer, though, and it made him a little bit angry. Also, he was disappointed not having a son. My sister is older, so when I came along, he was all ready with boys’ names, but none for a girl, and he never let me forget that. He never made me act like a boy or anything, but he didn’t treat me, or my sister, with the respect I saw him give even the farm hands. My mother, it was the same thing. We, the three of us, talked about that a lot when he wasn’t around, about what made men act like they could lord it over women, that we couldn’t grow up, say, to be a doctor like he was. That’s what made me start wondering about why people do what they do, and about how to help people change themselves.”

This woman was not like the other moms I knew growing up. I got the sense she was proud of her son, and cared about where he was going in life, that he be a success in his life. But she also had an ambitious plan for her life, apart from her husband and her children.

“So how did you finally become a psychologist?”

“I went off to college at the state university in Iowa, and majored in Psychology. It was the depression, and I had to have money, so I went back to Omaha, across the river from where I grew up, and got a job in a bank. I met Mike’s father there, and then the war came. We got married right away. I can’t remember if it was because he went to the Naval Academy for two years before his eyes went bad, or his age, or his work as an engineer, but he didn’t have to serve. Instead, we went to Boston, to Lynn, where General Electric was starting to build jet engines in a factory there.  Women were working those days, too, everybody had to work, and I got a job in a lab at Harvard where they were studying how the brain reacts to sounds, to try and prevent concussive injuries from all the bombs. The Harvard Acoustics Lab, they called it. The head man there saw my interest in psychology and suggested I enroll for a Master’s. Of course, women couldn’t get into Harvard, but you know about Radcliffe, don’t you? I was one of the first to be a graduate student at Harvard through their women’s college. I finished in 1946, and wanted to go on for a doctorate. But, kids came along, we moved here when GE built a new plant, so I had to wait ten years to start up again.”

I wanted to hear more. She had such a clear sense of who she was, a strong will, someone who would not give up, ever. But Mike came down, saying, “OK, done. Come on, let’s go.” He didn’t acknowledge his mother as he breezed through the kitchen to the garage.

Sternly, she called after him, “When are you going to be back, Michael?” He rolled his eyes, sighed through his nose and said, “Don’t worry about me. ” A couple of beats later, he begrudgingly added, “We’re gonna go to that new place, Tri-County. I’ll be back this evening.”

In the car, we headed north towards a new shopping mall by the interchange of I-75 and 275. As we started towards the expressway entrance, the light turned yellow. Mike slammed on the brakes and flung his right hand out across my chest. I was flying forward with some force, but he saved me from hitting the unpadded dashboard. As we waited for the light to turn green, I hauled up the seat belt, which was lying on the floor by the door, and pulled it over to buckle into its slot.

“That’s what my mother would always do to us kids when we were riding in the front seat. I guess it’s an unconscious habit.”

“Mine too.” I remembered my conversation with his mother. “Your mom talked to me a bit while you were upstairs. She’s …impressive. I don’t really understand what it must be like, for women, I mean, trying to get a doctorate. I keep getting told that the reason somebody like me goes to a girls’ school, a good one like Radcliffe or Mt. Holyoke or Smith, is so we can provide an enriching home environment for our family, to make sure the kids do as well as they can growing up. That feels pretty confining, limiting, to me. I love how your mother doesn’t want to fit that mold.”

“Hmmm…never thought about that. My mother’s always been that way. She’s not normal, you mean?”

I laughed drily, finally getting the seat belt clamped together. I brushed my skirt off. “You have no idea. It’s easy for you, being a boy. No one ever tells you stuff like that. You don’t have to think about what might happen if you get pregnant, or if you get married and your husband wants to live somewhere you don’t. Like, my mother, she says when they left the family business in Cleveland, she tried to get my dad to go to New York, where she could at least see all the museums and go to plays and things, even if she had to raise four kids. She says he never wanted to talk about it, just laughed at her. And your mother…I wonder how she felt, leaving Boston. She probably wanted to keep going to school there, but she had no choice, did she, when you father left for here?”

“I don’t know. I’m kinda lucky that way. I mean, I’ve been involved in sports a little bit, swimming and ice skating. They both seem to be pretty equal between men and women, not like the big ones, baseball and football. There’s only softball for girls, and no football at all. But in ice skating, they both do the same events, same in swimming.” He paused, slowing the car, and scanned around as if lost. “That reminds me. I think this is the spot where I had that car accident last summer. I was driving three girls, they were like 15, to a meet in Columbus.”

“What happened?”

“This was still under construction then. I didn’t pay attention to the signs to slow down. It was raining, wet. We spun around, slammed sideways into some metal barrier. The police came, said the car was OK, called my dad. He asked if I could still drive. I said, ‘Yes’,  so he told me to keep on going. But I’m thinking – those girls never would talk about the kind of stuff you do.”

“What did they talk about?” I asked, interested in how other girls might treat him.

“Well, after worrying about their swimming and whether they would get new suits for the meet, they started laughing about all the other boys on the team, except for one guy they thought was ‘cute’. Then it was making catty comments about the girls they knew, and the boys they went out with. They laughed at me when I didn’t follow along. Called me ‘too serious’.”

We pulled off the highway, and headed for the mall’s brand new parking lot, asphalt still shiny and slick with tar. As we walked toward the entrance, he stopped, and looked at me, in that serious way of his.  He said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do, when you’re gone. I really, really like being with you, talking with you. I’m afraid you’ll forget me, find somebody there who’s more fun, then come back and we’ll never see each other again.”

We stood there in the rising  June sun. I wanted to grab his hands, pull him towards me, hug him. But with all the people around, that didn’t feel right. I looked down at my shoes, then, smiling, back up at him. “You can write. We can write. Letters. I’ll tell you what I’m doing, you tell me about everything. I’m not going to forget you, Michael Harrison. Not now, not ever.”

He pulled his lips up, then they quivered. I could see his eyes getting moist, saw a struggle there. Finally, “Janie, I…There’s something I’ve, I’ve…I think I have to say…” Quiet for a long time, me waiting. “I think I love you. Janie.”

I grabbed him, for a big, long hug, there in the parking lot in front of all those people I did not know. I didn’t have room in my thoughts for anyone but him.

v

That Friday, the basketball team headed off to its usual drubbing at the regional tournament – two losses, and they’d be out. Probably by Saturday night. The band and cheerleaders had gathered a crowd on the steps outside the auditorium for a short pep rally before the start of school. I saw Lizzie at the edge, and wandered over. She was standing next to Mike, who had three or four textbooks on top of a blue fabric notebook slung down his right side, gripped by the more beautiful of his hands.

He was saying, “…well, yeah, I guess I could drive you there.”

They lived about a mile apart in Woodland Park, but had never met before that night at Miss Foley’s. And now, here they are talking about getting together, driving somewhere. I started to inwardly grumble when she turned around and smiled, “Hey Janie, Mike’s gonna take us to the Regionals. That OK?” She sounded so innocent, but I knew she’d gotten tired of my hesitance, ready to push Mike and I together if we couldn’t do the work ourselves. But something in me worried she was there, ready to take over if I faltered.

Mike looked over his left shoulder at me with a smile that melted my heart. “We really need – like – the support. You’re right – look at what the basketball team gets, and they’re only 4th in the league, barely in the regionals.”

That smile! The first crack in the geode! Now’s the time to look inside, I told myself. “Are you going to the game tonight?”

“Uh…I hadn’t…”

“I’m going. I have to,” I improvised. “Chatterbox wants a second photographer there, and I got drafted.” I didn’t know a thing about basketball, and wasn’t sure if he cared about it either. But I thought, swim team, basketball, what’s the difference? 

“OK, yeah, I’ll go.” He looked away from us, up at the sky, then down at the steps. He pulled his lips together, then pushed them out. “Uh, you think I could pick you up, and maybe we can go out before or after, get something to eat?”

Lizzie’s eyebrows shot up her forehead. I thought, My God, is he asking me out? Has he been thinking of me, too, but afraid to do anything about it? Doesn’t matter, I told myself, the ball’s bouncing now, and let’s hope one of us can put it in the basket.

All day, during every class, I came back to one big worry…what would we talk about? It would be easy at the game itself, we could just watch, or comment on the quality (or lack thereof) of our team. If I were a normal girl, and he were a normal guy, I could play dumb and ask things like, “Why did they blow that whistle?” or “How come they’re all lined up in front of the basket?” These were things that confused me whenever Charlie would come home and watch the Royals on TV. Unlike the rest of our family, Charlie was tall, and quick like a cat, actually coordinated. He got to play a little basketball in junior high and intramurals. Somehow he’d missed the Stein klutz gene. All the rest of us were short people. Lisa, my mother and I were all around five foot three or four, my dad and Henry more like five-six or seven. But Charlie, first-born, during the war at that, grew to six-one.

I felt Michael would have zero interest in a girl who wasn’t true to herself. He seemed to value authenticity and didn’t follow the crowd. I decided to start with a simple question, and follow my instinct from there.

He drove up in a bright red compact car, a Dodge Lancer, one of the first with a sloping hatchback and bucket seats. Bucket seats! I wouldn’t have to worry about whether to sit next to him, in the middle of the front bench, knees hunched up from the transmission bulge on the floor. And I wouldn’t have to worry about him parking, sidling over to me, and trying anything I wasn’t ready for.

I got in – he actually held the door for me! – and rubbed my hands along the smooth and supple faux red leather of the seat. I noticed a white vinyl cover over a slim aluminum box in the middle. He plopped down, started the engine, and headed off towards Clifton Avenue.

“What’s this?” I asked, patting the white cover. It was clearly not part of the original equipment. That seemed a simple enough question.

He glanced down briefly. “Uh, that…I made that in shop, back in 8th grade, when we first got the car.”

I lifted the lid. Inside were the usual odds and ends of car travel: a  small fuse box, little packets of Kleenex, random change, and paper clips. “You like boxes and places to put things like that lectern thing you use in your debates?”

We’d come to the stop sign. Early evening on a Friday night, a seemingly endless stream of cars headed north, down the hill to the new expressway. He grew frustrated, and said, “We’re never gonna get out of here!”

“Sure we will. There’s no one here from yesterday, is there?”

“What?”

“That’s what my mother always says, when my father complains about the traffic. ‘There’s no one here from yesterday.’ It’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but I still wanna get out of here, and these cars are in my way!”

Back then, teen magazines featured articles like, “How To Win Him Over On The First Date.” As if it were some kind of game, in which a girl should only be concerned about whether a boy liked her enough to ask her out again. While I was jealous of those girls who went out and had fun on dates, I also didn’t want to try and be somebody else. If somebody didn’t like me for me, I figured, he wasn’t worth my time. If I’d been following those rules, I probably would have tried to assuage his ego. Instead, I told him, with a slight edge in my voice, “Just be patient. We’ll get there.”

“Yeah, OK,” he mumbled as he turned left. Then, louder, back to conversation, “So, what does your father do?”

I never knew how to answer that. We’d always had enough money since we’d come to Cincinnati, after my parents left a family business – never explained to me – in Cleveland back in the ‘50s. Now, he had another business, something to do with tobacco, and a little storefront downtown a block from Fountain Square, near the Planter’s Peanut shop. I explained all this to Mike.

“Hmm…” was all he said.

I guess I should have asked about his father then. Instead I queried, “Your mother, does she work?”

“Well, yeah, kinda, I guess. I drive her most days to UC, she’s working on her Ph.D. there. And a couple days a week, we go to Rollman instead, where she has an office.” Rollman was the local mental hospital.

“So her Ph.D. is in Psychology?”

“Yeah, right after the war she got a Master’s in Boston, then we moved out here when General Electric built a new jet engine plant up in Evendale. That’s where my dad works. She had kids, my sister and I, and when we got old enough, she wanted to go back and get her doctorate. Been working on it for ten years now. She’s supposed to finally graduate this year.”

The evening went on like that, sharing little details about our lives. It felt easy, getting to know each other. We talked about his swimming, the car crash he’d had the year before while driving three girls to a meet in Columbus, his classes, getting into Calvin, the upcoming debate tournament, whatever came out of his mind. He needed very little prodding, once we got going. Of course, we didn’t have to look at each other too much, being in the car, or sitting on the bleachers, watching the game. I told him about making the time cards, the kids in my neighborhood, my mother’s cooking, not going to Hebrew school like my brothers, writing for the Chatterbox. That was me, a little chatterbox. He didn’t seem to mind, though. I wondered, Is this what it’s like to be adult friends with a boy?

When we got home, he opened the Lancer’s door for me again, and walked me up the curving brick steps to our little open porch.

“That was fun, thanks,” he said softly. Our eyes met. I saw a glow there, but no urging. He wasn’t trying to touch me or reach for me. His feet moved like he was heading back down to the car. “See you next week? I’ll pick you guys up at 7:30 for the Regionals.”

Grateful that he didn’t seem like he wanted to grab me, I told him what I felt. “Me too, I like talking with you. It’s easy, friendly.” My mother appeared, opening the door. I turned around and walked inside.

vi

Next Friday, I went home with Lizzie for a sleep-over. Michael would pick us up early the next morning. We sat cross-legged on her bed, pretending to read The Catcher in the Rye. Reports were due Monday morning. I was already a big Salinger fan, but had come to him kind of backwards, through his later stories.

My mother, trying so hard to fit into a culture she wasn’t born to, had subscribed to the New Yorker ever since I could remember. By age eight, I had graduated from the cartoons and “Goings On About Town” to “Talk of the Town” and the short stories. In early May, I read one titled, “Zooey”. In it, Franny and her brother have this long conversation about life and everything, and I began to see her as a spiritual mentor. Back then, the magazine had no table of contents, and the author was not named until the end of the story. Once I saw “J.D. Salinger” there, I knew I had to read everything written by him, so Catcher became my new best friend. I felt more than ready to whip off a 500 word report Sunday night. I’d much rather share my anxiety about the debate tomorrow than read it again.

“You know, I told you about talking with Mike Harrison last week?”

“Um hummm…” Lizzie mumbled, still trying to follow Holden Caulfield on his nocturnal Manhattan peregrinations.

“I don’t get him, really. I mean, it was easy to talk with him and all, and he seems pretty deep and very quick. But I don’t know if I got any feelings from him, you know what I mean?”

“Well, maybe he’s not a phony…”

“No, I’m talking about Michael, not…”

“Look,  Janie, you may be the smartest girl in school, and you’ve read this book a zillion times, but I’m trying to get into AP English next year, so I have to get an “A” on this report. I can’t fake it like you can.”

That hurt a little bit. I didn’t think I “faked’ anything. School may have been easy for me,  but I still had to actually do all the work. I spoke up in class, I thought a lot about what I wanted to say and write. But I decided to keep my feelings to myself, both about Lizzie’s jealousy and my anxiety over Michael.

On the way to the regionals, Mike seemed distracted, so Lizzie and I, both in the back, kept quiet. We parked in silence, and he bolted out of the car. Carrying his lectern, he cruised on ahead towards the school doors. No gentlemanly opening of the door this time.

Lizzie hollered, “Hey, wait! Where are we going?” This seemed to wake him up a bit. He stopped at the double doors, looking puzzled.

“I think we go in here…oh, there they are,” he answered.

Miss Foley, Beto, and the rest of the boys huddled in the foyer, right next to a trophy case under a school banner.

She smiled at us, “You ready? You have your cards? Bobby and Mike are in Room 218 for the first round.”

The day blurred into sitting, timing, waiting, and cheering when each of their three wins was announced. But I never got a chance to be alone with Mike, always up in front performing, leaning over in deep conversation with Beto, or getting instructions and a pep talk from Miss Foley. Only on the way back did he seem to open up. Or at least he listened to me open things up.

“So you guys won! That means you’ll be kind of like the favorites in Columbus next week?”

A bit sheepishly, he said “We’re going up Friday night. We’ll be staying at some hotel, close to Ohio State – that’s where they’re having the debates.” He hesitated, almost embarrassed, and went on in a softer tone, “Miss Foley said they don’t allow spectators, so I guess that means no time keepers?”

I felt crushed, almost rejected by him. I didn’t know what to say. Back at Lizzie’s, I brought this up. “I am so … I don’t know … disappointed doesn’t have enough emotion in it…mad that we don’t get to go to state. It’s like I’m losing a very big chance to spend more time with him. We deserve to be there, too!”

We talked about this on and off all the next week. By Wednesday, we had a plan, to write them a “Good Luck” telegram the night before. For the next two days, I mulled over how to word it just the right way, using the time-honored syntax of telegram-ese. As it came out of the teletype, mistakes and all, here is how it read:

MISS HARRISET FOLEY, FT HAYES HOTEL

COLUMBUS OHIO

DOESNATIONAL ALLOW TIMERS? WEC LOVE YOU

JANIE AND LIZABETH

In my mind, this was code for: It’s from me (my name came first), I want to see you again, and I’ve got feelings for you. The message must have gotten through. Although addressed to Miss Foley, Mike ended up keeping the telegram, which he showed me 4 years later as he was packing for his move from Cincinnati to med school.

vii

Tuesday morning at the start of French class I leaned forward and, touching Mike’s elbow, mouthed “Sorry.” They’d finished 4th, losing their last two debates in the semi finals and consolation round. While Mr. Eick rambled on about “oiseaux et printemps”, I doodled along the outer edges of the paper where I was ostensibly taking notes. My handwriting is very small, almost illegible without a magnifying glass. Using my favorite Rapidograph, with the finest point available, I made a swirling portrait of Mike’s head, complete with glasses and slight receding chin. Instead of making a simple line sketch, I used his initials “MAH” endlessly repeated to outline his face and represent the strands of his hair. A little speech balloon rose above, still empty. I didn’t know what he felt about the weekend: was he dejected, relieved, defiant, or something else entirely? As usual when he wasn’t talking, his face gave away nothing about what might lie inside.

Leaving class, I brushed up against him and blurted, “So what’s next for the debate team?”

He looked over, a bit startled. “Oh. Janie. Um, we’re all going to Kit’s house this weekend for a final party. Tom got third, and our 4th, well that’s better than anyone’s done since Miss Foley started coaching. So the juniors, they think we ought to celebrate. Are you gonna come? You’re the timekeepers, you’re part of the team, too.”

This was the first I’d heard of it. Immediately I wanted to go, but was too unsure of what Mike thought about me to maneuver him into another invitation. I had hoped the telegram would trigger something in him. Instead, I finagled a ride with Beto and Bev. Friday night, we drove up to the end of a treeless cul-de-sac on the edge of town, in a new development filled with curving sidewalks and two story houses. I wore my Bobbie Brooks penny loafers, a gift from my mother once my feet stopped growing. Even though it wasn’t in the same fashion league as the clothes she usually bought for us, she seemed to have a fixed attraction to this particular brand. And the shoes were surprisingly comfortable without looking stodgy.

Inside, about twenty kids milled around. Kit greeted me, leaning down with a broad smile while he guided us to the drink cart. I saw his parents’ liquor bottles there, and knew that somehow I’d have to find a way to avoid the alcohol without seeming to be a prude. “Maybe later,” I murmured. “I’m going to hang out over there with Lizzie and Leon.”

“Sure thing”, he answered. “Enjoy yourself.”

Lizzie had a crush on little Leon, about two inches shorter than her. With his red hair, chipmunk cheeks and Buddy Holly glasses, he reminded me of Howdy Doody as they sat together on a sofa. I plopped down next to Liz. Just as I was about to interrupt what seemed to be their staring contest, Mike and Marc strolled over.

“I’ve got two rules that cover most of how I try to act. First, ‘Always be honest’. And second, ‘Never do anything for the sole reason it’s expected of you’,” Mike pronounced.

As the first affirmative on the second-string debate team and the heir apparent to Mike,  Marc idolized Mike. He stood stock still, eyes upward while he digested this philosophy. “OK, honesty, that’s easy, we should all be authentic, otherwise, how can you trust anybody? Now the other – I really like that. It means you’ve got to have good reasons for what you do, you’re not just following the crowd?”

Mike seemed pleased with his acolyte’s acceptance of this nascent world view. They sat down in the chairs positioned at either side of the sofa, making a three-quarter square around a small glass coffee table, Marc closest to Leon, leaving Mike the one on my right. I felt warmth, either from him or inside me, I’m not sure which, start to build in the space between us.

“OK, then let’s go see ‘Alfie’ tomorrow night,” Leon was saying to Liz.

“Alfie, what’s that?” Mike wondered.

I turned to him and said, “It’s this English thing that’s playing at the Esquire. My sister said it’s really sweet.”

“How do you know about it? I never heard of it,” Mike wondered.

The Esquire was an artsy movie theater, about a mile down Clifton Avenue from me. It ran foreign films, with subtitles, or American films that didn’t come from Hollywood. The college kids went there all the time. I was beginning to see the difference between growing up in Woodland Park and Clifton, an inner-city enclave near the University, hard by the art museum, Zoo, and theaters, where the upper crust lived. “Maybe we should go with them?” I ventured. The words simply popped out of me with no fore-thought at all.

Mike looked down at his shoes, scruffy lace-tie things. Finding no solace there, he looked up at Liz, then Leon, who were back to staring at each other. His understudy Marc looked around the room, hoping he could find someone else to latch onto. Finally Michael Harrison turned back to me. “You want to go outside for a minute, take a walk or something?”

We snuck out the front door into an early spring evening. Although the day had been warm and humid, the night had turned a little foggy, enough to make me glad I’d brought a sweater. Mike had on one of his sport coats, this time with a blue cotton twill shirt. He buttoned it up as we walked together down to the empty sidewalk.

“This is the kind of night Jewish girls always hate,” I started. Mike seemed puzzled, his hair glistening a bit from the moisture in the air. “I mean, our hair gets all frizzy and everything – it’s much harder to deal with.”

He turned to look at me, reached out and ran two fingers of his left hand through the thick thatch falling from my headband down past my shoulders. “I like your hair. When I was in the fifth grade, a girl sat in front of me, Kathie. She had dark wavy hair like yours, and I would play with it in class. One time, we rode on the bus together on a field trip, can’t remember where. On the way back, we started talking, and she became my girlfriend that year. I had a girlfriend every year in grade school. We stayed together into the sixth grade as well. But then I came to Avondale, and that stopped happening.”

“She didn’t get into Avondale?” Our high school was city-wide, all college preparatory. To get in, you took a test in the sixth grade. If you were in the top 20% in your school, you could go to AHS.

“She did, but her parents didn’t want her to. She’s an only child, her parents live in Wilson Heights, and they were afraid of her going on the bus everyday so far away into Avondale.”

It was true, our school was smack in the center of one of the scarier parts of town, what people were calling a “ghetto” then. We never used that term in our house, for obvious reasons, but the neighborhood around AHS was home to that great diaspora of great-great-grandchildren of slaves which occurred during and after the war. “Do you know what happened to her?” I asked.

“Well, she went to the local junior high. Funny thing, I read in the Enquirer she won the Miss Cincinnati contest and so she goes to Columbus next week for Miss Ohio.”

“What was her talent?”

“She played violin when I knew her, so that might have been it. I never took her for one of those girls who would be all excited about something like Miss America. I don’t think we’d be together now, the way I am and the way she is. Besides, she’s a year older than me, and probably would have dropped me long ago.”

“A year older? Did she get held back?”

“No, I skipped a year.”

That was news. Here I’d thought Michael Harrison a worldly senior, driving a car and going to college next year, almost an adult. Instead, he was sixteen, like me, as much a boy as a man.

He added, “Well, not really skipped a year…See, in the second grade, I was a real whiz. Well, I’d been a whiz kid since before I got to Kindergarten. I taught myself how to read from a hymnal when I was four. By the time I got to first grade, all the kids were asking me for help. I’ve always thought it’s kind of a curse to be smarter than everyone else. Anyway, in second grade, I never missed a day. Second grade! I mean, everybody gets colds all the time when they’re a kid, but I liked school so much, and my teacher, Mrs. Grimes, liked me, so I never wanted to miss a day. By the time I got to third grade, school was so easy that I stopped paying attention, and began to get bad grades. One day in February or March, my mother kept me home after feeling my forehead, she said I’d probably would be out for a whole week, even though I felt fine. After a couple of days, my mom and dad sat down with me and said, ‘When you go back, you’re going to be in the 4th grade.’ I remember feeling kind of weird. The year before, a girl in my class, Leona Block, had been moved from second to third grade, and I’d been a little jealous, ‘cause I thought I was at least as smart as she was.”

“Wait a minute, Leona who’s a senior now?” Leona Block, like me, inhabited the newspaper staff, Student Council, Big Sister, Choir, all the things good Jewish girls did to fit in. Not that we ever really did; the gentiles tolerated us, even went out with us, but seemed to know that the world was their oyster, that they didn’t have be twice as good just to get half as much. “So you’re like her, huh?”

“Leona? No way. She’s always seemed awkward to me, not someone I want to spend any time with. Anyway, I got to go to the 4th grade, in the middle of the year. I didn’t know anyone, and we had to start going to four classes a day, instead of being in the same room with the same teacher and kids all the time. I was still the smartest kid in all my classes, but I was smaller than most everyone, and the girls of course were even older in some ways. Still, a lot of people saw me as a brain, and that felt good. I remember soon after I got there, in arithmetic class, they had this game called “Baseball”. We were on teams, and the teacher asked math questions. If you got the answer right, you got a hit, harder questions were worth more, like a double or home run. The teacher picked captains, who got to choose their teammates, like on the playground. Everybody wanted me on their team, so I felt recognized as good for something. That was the class where I first met Kathie. We sat in alphabetical order, and for some reason, when I was in her class, she always ended up in front of me. She liked it when I stroked her hair, told me to keep doing it.”

This was almost too much to take in. The boy could talk when he got wound up. Mostly about himself, true, but at this point, I was hungry for everything I could find out about him. First off, Leona. I had seen her as, if not a role model, at least an example of what I might be. And he’s saying he doesn’t like her. What does that mean for me, I worried. Next, he’d actually enjoyed being smart all his life. I could see him reading books under the covers at night with a flashlight, same as me. And what’s this story about learning to read from a hymnal? Must remember to get back to that, I thought. That connection, our mutual genius status, was starting to pull at me. Finally, this Kathie girl he had a crush on, or maybe she had one on him. Another shiksa, like Lizzie, probably decent enough, but pretty clueless when it came to appreciating what really matters in the world. I decided it was time to talk about me, whatever the cost.

“I saw something about Alfie in The New Yorker,” I began. “They’ve got this little section in the front where they list all the movies playing in Manhattan, ‘Goings on About Town.’ It’s about some English guy who has a messed-up life.”

“Well, that sounds promising, doesn’t it,” he responded sarcastically. “I’ve only ever seen the cartoons in that magazine. My orthodontist has it in his waiting room. It all seemed like too much.”

“That magazine taught me how to read. Early on, my sister and I would look at the cartoons together. She’d read them, and we’d both laugh, me not really understanding the jokes, but Lisa always had a sharp sense of humor. The big thing, though, was I began to link the squiggles below the pictures with the words she was saying. I don’t know exactly how, but one week, I started to read the captions to her. Or at least tried. She was in first grade by then, and brought out one of her ‘Dick and Jane’ readers, to see what I could do with that. I breezed through it in five minutes. I don’t know, I’ve always loved to read – what happens in my head, it’s like I’m a sponge and everything stays there, and I go wherever it is the words take me.”

I went on. “I love it that the New Yorker doesn’t have any table of contents, or that you don’t know the author until the end of an article. You can be reading something, and then at the end, you find out it was by someone like J.D. Salinger, or Pearl Buck, or John Hersey. I read a lot of things that later become books.”

“Huh…Yeah, I was like that, too. Except, it was in church. See, they’d post the hymns they’d sing, the number of the song, beside the pulpit. I’d pick up the hymnal – it said, ‘Hymnal 1940’ on the blue cover – and I could hear what everyone was singing. They’d be looking at the book, I guess that was my clue that the little marks were telling them what to sing. I asked my mother, and she told me, ‘Those circles are the notes people sing, and here, down between these lines, those are the words’.”

Words. So very important to me, and to Michael Harrison as well. I felt a rising in my chest. Reading had been how I grew up, what taught me about the world, and people, and what to expect in life. Books, magazines, newspapers (we took the Sunday New York Times as well as Cincinnati’s, both morning and afternoon), anything at all. I always had something handy to look at, to keep my attention. It made me feel awkward sometimes, because I didn’t watch much TV, so I couldn’t talk about the shows everyone else liked.

“I bet,” I ventured, “you were one of those kids who read under the covers with a flashlight, after your parents told you to go to sleep”

“Yeah! That was me…”

He hesitated, so I pressed on. “It made me feel a little illicit, like I was breaking some sort of rule, defying my parents. A little rebel.”

“Hmm – yeah, I guess I never got scolded about that – maybe they wanted us to do that.”

“Uh-huh. But lately, there’s so much in school I’ve got to do, I don’t have time anymore for books I want to read, outside of English class.” I paused a moment, as a new thought came to me. “Why didn’t you want to stay in there, at the party?”

“I don’t feel good in a big crowd like that. Up to six or seven people, that doesn’t seem to bother me. But a lot, with music playing so I have to talk loud, I don’t know, that makes me nervous.”

Not a big fan of parties either, I always seemed to find a way to make fun of them and how people acted. I much preferred a group of kids working at something, like the rules of Student Court, the layout of the school paper, or in class where I always knew the answers, and wasn’t afraid to speak up at all. “I feel good, though, talking here with you. Let’s keep going out there, OK?” I said, pointing to the T-intersection where the cul-de-sac joined the larger neighborhood. “What do you think we’ll see?”

“Probably more houses?”

We walked, and talked, for at least two hours. The chill grew sharper. I shivered now and then, from excitement as much as the cold. Michael took everything I said so seriously, but often turned it into a little joke or wry observation about the larger world. I felt his mind opening up to me, and me letting him in more and more. I got a little dizzy, it was all so new and different.

By the time we found our way back, it was nearly one in the morning. Beto and Bev were gone, Lizzie and Leon too. About the only ones left were Kit and Marc, and Kit’s girlfriend. I needed a ride home. I sure wasn’t going to call my mom or dad at this hour, not after I’d told them I’d be home before midnight. I was a little scared, but I had to ask, “Uh, Mike, I don’t have any way home. Can you take me?”

“Yeah, no problem.”

I knew he hadn’t had anything to drink – he didn’t seem like someone who ever drank – still, I hoped he wouldn’t get drowsy. “You OK? Still awake enough?” I said.

“Sure. I don’t have any trouble staying up. Seems to be a special talent of mine, think I got it from my mother. She always stays up late, reading the Saturday Evening Post past midnight. My father, he goes to bed around ten, has to get up for work and leave by 7. He watches the Today show then drives away. Except morning’s in the summer, when he swims first thing….” Mike seemed ready to go on and on all night. I could listen to whatever he had to say, so reassuring and stable, so domestic were his thoughts.

“…and so, after they dug out the dirt for the swimming pool, that raised our back yard about a foot all over. My dad hauled in a lot of rocks, and created a barrier between us and the next door neighbors, ‘cause we had to have a wall protecting the pool from little kids, I guess…”

“There should always be a wall,” I interrupted. “You must always leave the wall” I sang.

“Huh…wha…” Mike had clearly never heard this before.

“The Fantasticks? It’s been running for years in New York.”

“ ‘The Fantasticks?’ What’s that?”

“It’s a play,” I almost whined. “A musical.”

“Where did you see it?”

“My family goes to Martha’s Vineyard every summer. When we drive out, we stop off in New York on the way. There’s always a show there somebody wants to see.”

“What’s it about?”

“I saw it when I was twelve or thirteen. It’s about two families, they live next to each other with a wall in between. There’s a boy and girl, they fall in love. But things get in the way, the boy goes out in the world, and only when the fathers re-build the wall between their houses can they have a happy ending.  It’s hard to tell if their fathers are trying to get them together or keep them apart. At least that’s what I remember.”

“What’s Martha’s Vineyard?”

“An island near Cape Cod. It’s like going back in time. We go to the same house every year for a month, a house they only use in the summer.” I closed my eyes, getting lost in summer memories. “We go down to the beach, collect shells, wander in the town, Menemsha. My father sits around and reads the paper all morning, my mother looks in the little shops and buys shawls and stuff. My older brother, Charlie, he lives out there now, so he visits us. George, he spends his time reading textbooks for school. And Lisa looks for trouble, trying to find a boy with a car.” Why was I telling him all this about my family? It felt like I wanted him to know everything about me, and there would never be enough time.

We left the expressway, heading up the hill towards my house. I’d have to leave him soon. I didn’t know what to do. Once again, he walked around to open my door, but I forget about that, opened it myself, and left it there between us as I started up the walk.

“Wait!” he whispered. “I’ve got to make sure you get in OK.”

I scoffed. “Clifton is very safe…”

But up the walk he came, arriving at my side just as I pulled my key out. Reaching for the door knob, I said simply, “Thanks for the ride,” and hurried inside.

Up in my room, I flopped on the bed, lying down, then sitting up. I looked in the mirror. My hair was a little messy, after I’d taken my headband off while we walked outside. My face flushed, and I felt like crying for some reason. I’d never been so confused in my life. Before tonight, things were pretty simple and straightforward. Lizzie was my best friend. I always had something to do after school, something to keep busy with. I studied every evening, aiming for all Advanced Placement classes as a senior. But now…now, I’d started day dreaming about something – someone, really – at the most inconvenient times. I wanted this boy to like me, I didn’t know if he did, I didn’t know how to find out if he did, and I didn’t know how to get him to like me if he didn’t. Before, I’d always known what to do, or at least who to ask – Lizzie, my mother, Lisa. With Michael Harrison, though, it all seemed so personal, so secret, almost like I didn’t want to share that part of myself with anyone else.

“ARGHH!” I thought. Boys! I always knew they were trouble, but I’d thought I could avoid all that, I was above all that. I cried myself to sleep for the first time I could remember.

 LOVE

RHYMES

An Imagined Memoir

by

Al Truscott

Author’s Note

…About a year ago, I came into possession of some artifacts – a diary, letters, poems, scientific papers, an obituary – documenting the life of someone who came of age during the 1960’s and ‘70s. Looking through them, I began to visualize a tale filling out the sparse details of her story, emerging as a memoir I imagine the narrator’s real-life inspiration would have written. While some events occurred as depicted, most names have been altered and conversations often invented. Where I lacked facts, I made them up. Otherwise, all this is true…12/14/20

BOOK ONE

#1

Now the tears have dried

leaving

smudgy, salty traces

of my sorrow

— Early February, 1966

PREFACE

In 1965, for my sixteenth birthday, I gave myself a diary. Pink, with a locking clasp, it represented my belief that I was almost grown, and should daily document the finishing touches. A five-year diary, as I was sure I’d become as old as I needed to be by twenty-one. I filled it with frequent jottings, my mundane and romantic hopes and dreams. Looking back, I see myself progressing from childish fantasies, opening up to people and the world. My memory isn’t what to be; I suppose I should write it all down, flesh it out while I can. What follows, guided by these fading signposts from my past, is a story of those five years.

Sarah Jane Stein, May 25, 1983

CHAPTER ONE

Every Broken Heart Begins With A Love Story.

November, 1965

At first, all I could see were his hands.

My junior year at Avondale High School, I sat kitty-corner from him in French class, one row back, hiding in my matching John Meyer sweaters and skirts. Languages came easy for me – I’d taught myself to read before kindergarten –  so when I got bored I had a lot of time to pore over his appearance. His hair, though dark, had a blond-green sheen, from too much time in a chlorinated pool. Parted on the left, long enough to flop over his brow, but short enough to not yet curl. This was a year or so into the Beatles’ reign, and he appeared torn between letting a mop-top grow, and keeping it short for his swimming. Chiseled cheeks peaked through his still smooth, softly contoured skin. He wore those plastic glasses, translucent frames which would now be nerdy, but back then were the norm for our mid-western city. Later, in college, he’d go full John Lennon, hair over the ears, wire-rims, worn work jacket and jeans.

But his hands…he had good hands. Perfectly proportioned, in my estimation: fingers and back of equal length, nails with short white tips. Gently curled at rest, they moved gracefully when he gestured. I could see his right hand best, where veins on the back coursed sinuously from wrist to knuckle, curving thick ribbons within the skin. The hands of a doer, I thought.

I vaguely wondered if he knew I was there, but he never had any reason to look my way. For the first three months, when I got bored with declensions, I would fantasize about those hands, and pretend they showed his soul.

“He’s a senior?” Lizzie asked when I confessed my obsession in the lunch room one drizzly November day. We’d arrived late, and the Johnny Marzetti casserole had grown cold.

“I know he’s on the swim team. Debate team, too.”

“Debate? Is he the one who almost won the regionals, with Bobby Buchannon last year?”

“Don’t know. All I really do is stare at him when Mr. Eick starts doing his unintelligible Gallic thing in class.”

Lizabeth Upton and I were best friends. A dancer, she had dirty-blond hair and blue eyes, all innocence and smile. We sang together in choir, worked together on the school paper, and shared the same disdain for high school’s social games.

“Janie, it sounds to me you want to meet him somehow.”

An involuntary shudder hit deep inside my chest. I spent my time either studying or running from one school service task to another. Big Sister. Student Council. Our paper, the Chatterbox. I’d just come out of a prolonged early adolescent ugly ducking phase. Boys, scary to me, kept their distance. In our family, good grades and good schools were all my parents – well, my mother, really – cared about. No sports, no “make sure you find a good Jewish boy”. My oldest brother Charlie rebelled a bit. Already married, with a baby on the way, he could have gone to law school after Brown, or had a good job on Wall Street, Instead, he lived on a farm in Rhode Island with three other couples, eating a macrobiotic diet, sewing his own clothes. Middle brother Henry, still at Princeton – I don’t know if he was a monk, or what, but I’d never seen him on a date. My sister Lisa had been voted “Wittiest” her senior year, the quintessential class clown. She’d landed in a mid-tier college, already being written off by Mom. I was the family’s last hope. Trying so hard to be the Good Girl, I thought I had no time for boys. But, at sixteen, I did have feelings, stirrings, and found I couldn’t fight them off any longer.

Christmas was coming up. Lizzie and I were both in choir, and rehearsals started coming daily. We sang all the hymns, like “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” We’d march onto the stage in our blue robes with gold collars, carrying burning candles in the otherwise unlit auditorium. I couldn’t help giggling when that made everyone’s face look like some kind of dybbuk. During the solos, we shared various scenarios to get the debate team’s attention, come January.

Lizzie whispered, “These guys win all their meets. They’re sure better than our football or basketball teams.” Our college-prep high school, pulling all the smartest kids city-wide, had never made it out of team sport regionals in the five years we’d attended.

An idea flashed into my head. I started laughing, catching the stern glance of our choir director, Mr. Hammons. Sotto voce, I mouthed to Lizzie, “They’ve got cheerleaders at every game. That must be some consolation. And I bet it’s easier to get asked out by the players if you’re bouncing around in one of those short skirts.”

“You want us to wear mini-skirts and dance in the audience?” Not being part of the social crowd, we prided ourselves on making fun of what we saw as the debasing behaviour of even the smartest girls in our class, when it came to getting boys’ attention.

The next day I went to room 338 about ten minutes before the home room bell rang. Miss Foley she greeted me warmly. Glancing over her cat-eye glasses, her smile mellowed out the pock marks on her cheeks.

“Well, Janie, you lost?” she chortled.

“Miss Foley, you coach the debate team, right?”

“Yes…”

“Lizzie Upton and I, we were thinking, they could use some cheerleaders. They’re going to do well this year, right?”

“If we can get by Country Day, then, yes, they should win the regional and have a good shot at the State in Columbus.”

“Well, we’d like to help them out somehow. For starters, I’m on the features’ staff at the Chatterbox – I can get a good article published in it, talking about their upcoming tournaments.”

“That’d be great. I expect you’ll want to see them in action? There’s the Public High School League round robin at Hughes after the break.”

A month later on a cold January Saturday morning, there we were. I’d never seen a debate tournament before. An easel at the entrance featured a flood of forensic categories, such as thespian, oratory, declamation,  humorous, and extemporaneous speaking.  But we were there to see Beto and Mike.

Bobby Buchannon lived one street south of us. Bobby – Beto, his friends called him –  was president of the Student Council, captain of the swimming team, and a National Merit Finalist. Smart, good-looking, and popular to boot. Everybody loved Beto.

But it was Michael I was there for. Mike, the boy in my French class, the one whose hands entranced me. I’d told Miss Foley we wanted to be incognito, sort of like restaurant critics, so they wouldn’t feel any performance anxiety. We tucked ourselves into the back of the room, hiding behind the judges and coaches filling the front row. Mike went first, giving a tight ten minute argument in favor of controlling nuclear weapons through a treaty among the five major powers. He had it memorized and well-rehearsed; it seemed that every hand gesture, hesitation and side-step was planned in advance for maximum effect.

Three things struck me about that performance. First, his voice. In French class, struggling with diphthongs, he sounded a little reedy, even cracking now and then as befitted a late-blooming teen-ager. On stage, he held his audience with a deep-throated baritone, smooth and confident. Second, his clothes. He and Beto made quite the dapper pair, with their sport coats and neatly pressed slacks. Beto’s were dark corduroy, while Mike had a smooth blue wool coat and pants to match. They wore starched white button down shirts. Most striking were their ties. The British Invasion had unleashed a Beau Brummell aesthetic, evidenced by their freely flapping paisleys. Darker blue than his coat, Mike’s featured eye-catching ameboid shapes. Their opponents looked like ragged street waifs in comparison. Michael walked back and forth, sometimes stopping to look directly at the judges when he wanted to emphasize a point. He kept returning to a lectern sitting by itself in the middle of the classroom desk. Every now and then, he pulled a little note card off it, snapping the 4 x 6 smartly or tapping it gently as he built his argument. Then, when his ten minutes ended, he folded the slanted top of the lectern, closing the contraption with a flourish using a small handle which screwed the whole thing shut, then served as the grip to carry it back to his seat.

Ten minutes later, after the first negative speaker gave his response to Mike’s soliloquy, Beto got up as the “second affirmative”. He gave me a twinkly-eyed smile, kind of an Elvis thing on the right side of his mouth. I panicked, met his eyes, shook my head, and put a finger to my mouth, miming “Shhh.” He gave a slight nod like he understood, and then proceeded to totally bury the other side’s rebuttals, using more 4×6 cards filled with quotes from newspapers and magazines to buttress his arguments. There was another half hour to go, but it was obvious the other team was over-matched, so Lizzie and I started exchanging notes.

“Did you see those ties?”

“And the box. I love it!”

“They are polished!”

We sat quietly while the head judge gave the critique and final score, Avondale in a rout. After everyone had filed out, we headed down the hall to watch some of the other AHS debaters, so I could in good conscience write a summary piece for the school paper. But I couldn’t get Michael Harrison out of my mind. At first glance, he seemed a bit of a nebbish. But watching him command that first affirmative slot, hearing his voice, seeing that tie, and the home-made lectern box, I noticed a subtle feeling right below my ribs. Almost like being in a scary movie. I knew I had to find a way into his hidden core.

ii

Mid-afternoon, after they’d walked off the stage with the first place trophy, Mike headed directly to his car for the drive home. Beto came back to us and said, “Hi, guys, what’s up?”

I volunteered, “I’m writing a story about you for next week’s Chatterbox. So we needed to see for ourselves, not rely on Miss Foley’s report. Impressive…You and Mike know your stuff.”

“Yeah, he’s a lot smarter than he looks, isn’t he?”

Lizzie piped up as I vainly tried to shush her, “Janie wants to know how to get him to pay attention to her.”

My dark Semitic face doesn’t blush easily, but I could feel the space below my neck warming up. I always kept the top button of my shirts closed, and I hoped no one saw. I noticed a wet feeling under my arms.

Beto gave another impish half-smile, offering, “Why don’t I drive you home, we can talk about that.” He casually put his arm around me. I turned around, nodded at Lizzie to follow, giving her the facial equivalent of a shoulder shrug.

As he backed out of the parking lot, he said, “Here’s what you gotta know about Mike: it takes a long time for him to let people in. But once he does, he’s totally comfortable, and cool, and funny. As well as being the smartest guy I know. Smart meaning he can take an idea, see right through to its center, then talk about it in a way that’s easy to understand.”

  Lizzie piped up, “Does he ever go out on dates? Talk about girls?”

I glared at her.

Beto let out a single chortle. “Not as far as I can tell. He sure doesn’t say anything about it if he does, not like other guys do, you know?”

Well, that was encouraging. At least the part about his analytic brain. He might be a tough nut to crack, but worth the effort. Beto dropped us off, and Lizzie and I went into the kitchen, to help Mom get the Saturday night dinner ready.

A geode someone had bought on a trip to the Southwest sat on the counter. While Lizzie chopped vegetables, and Mom shredded potatoes and onions for the latkes, I picked up the heavy grey rock, turned it over, and stared inside for a long time. The outer shell was encrusted, as if layered with barnacles. Next came a white seam, looking soft as snow, glittering in the afternoon light. Finally, pale blue crystals jutted into the hollow core, pure and luminescent. At once, I knew the way into Michael Harrison’s secret center.

“Lizzie! We could be their timekeepers!” My mother, deep into chicken fat, couldn’t hide her interest, though her eyes never left the stove. I turned to her. “Mom, where’s that bolt of paisley fabric Lisa had to make her prom dress last year?” My sister, the clown, thought it would be funny to go to a dance in a hand-made outfit all covered with funny blotches. She was puzzling over the sewing machine one day when Mom ended that potential fiasco, and hauled her immediately to Pogue’s department store for a proper prom formal.

“Sweetie, I think it’s there in the den, behind your father’s chair, still all folded up…Say! I bet that’s where my pinking shears went. If you find them, let me know. What do you want it for, anyway?”

“Bobby asked me to the prom, and I want to make a dress he’ll be proud to show off.” Mom knew this was totally a joke; Beto and Bev Hanson, the coolest girl in our class, had been pinned for months now. Distracted, she forget to ask what I really wanted it for.

iii

Next Tuesday, we showed up at Miss Foley’s apartment, soon after debate practice started. “There’s a couple of girls here who’ve got something they want to ask you,” she announced, turning around to face the guys as we shadowed behind her. Miss Foley, known as a stickler in class, had a very informal attitude with the debate team. She half-smiled as she went on. “Is that OK?”

Mike sat at the kitchen table, leaning over to make a point with Marc and Kit, the junior-varsity debate team. He turned and started to get up, asking, “Who’s there?”

“Let’s see, Lizabeth Upton and Sarah Jane Stein,” she responded.

Mike stood there slack-jawed, face totally blank. Beto was right, he was a very slow starter when it came to anything or anyone new. I don’t remember which of us girls spoke first; Lizzie and I were joined at the hip in our little project.

“We noticed you guys have been doing so well, at the regional and state meets last year, and now at the PHSL. But nobody pays any attention.”

“You need support, like we have pep rallies for the football team.”

“So we want to be your cheerleaders.”

“What, like pompoms and chants? That won’t go over very well during a debate,” Beto noted, somewhat sardonically.

“No, we’ve got another idea. We’ve seen a couple of debates…You guys have to hold up those time cards for each other, when you should be thinking about what you’re going to say next round.” It was true. Each speaker had 10 minutes to first present arguments; then, 5 minutes for rebuttal. Going over the limit incurred a severe penalty from the judges, so instead of guessing, they timed each other with cards, counting the minutes down by 1, until the final 30 seconds, when another card flashed up.

“We could be your timekeepers,” I said. I used what I thought were my best physical assets. I ran my left hand through thick (but slightly frizzy) black hair, cut in bangs above the eyes, flowing down past my shoulders, held back with a paisley headband. True, my head is a bit large for my body, but I used every bit of that face to smile. Dark eyes, dark brows, with my best voice and diction, I felt so sure of myself.

“We made these cards to use.” We brought them out, fanning a set each, the numbers hand cut with pinking shears from paisley fabric glued to white paperboard.

Mike grabbed a set, looked at each one in turn, as if making sure all the numbers were there. He beamed, laughing when he saw the last one. Oriented horizontally, not vertically like the numbers, it read, “STOP!”

“Paisley – I guess that’s our thing, huh?” He turned to Beto, who just shrugged.

Miss Foley suggested, “Why don’t we give them a try? Mike, start your first affirmative, and Janie, you sit there” – she pointed to her couch about ten feet away from the kitchen table – “then ring this bell to start the clock.”

Mike, all business, laid his lectern next to the flower vase and coffee cup, and started to unscrew the handle. Lizzie plopped down next to me on the couch; Beto sat on the other side, smiled and patted my knee. I looked at Liz, pleading for help.

She piped up, “Where’d you get that box? How does it work?”

That’s all Mike needed. As he unscrewed the handle and lifted up the front, unfolding it to become a slanted resting place for his note card, he explained, “I made this with my father…See, on top all our articles, and underneath, we’ve got two drawers for our cards…”

“Yeah, Mike’s real proud of that, but I’ve gotta take my dog for a walk in an hour; let’s get this done,” Miss Foley said, nodding at me to start the clock.

I rang the little bell, held up the first card, “Start”, and studied Michael as he went into his spiel. I’d heard it before, and rather than follow the argument, I examined the boy as if framing him for a photograph. His face was long and goyish, smooth, like he wasn’t really shaving yet. He had full, dark eyebrows, slightly arched, which he used them to underscore and emphasize his facts. His arms were also long, fingers ending about six inches above his knees. Those hands! I couldn’t keep my eyes off them. They said as much as his words, implying a maturity of thought belying his tender visage. I felt that flutter, those jangly nerves down in my stomach again.

Beto jabbed me in the ribs. Startled, I looked over. He was tapping his watch and glaring at the cards. My reverie interrupted, I flipped to “5”, and got back to my task. The other guys – Kit and Marc, the B team, juniors prepping to take the mantle next year, and Tom, an extemporaneous speaker – had heard this all before, of course. Instead of listening, they pored over the latest Dylan record Kit had brought in, arguing for the full-length version of “Like A Rolling Stone”, instead of the shorter, A-side which had been released.

I wasn’t that into music, but my big brother, Charlie, was. He had indoctrinated me into the Gospel according to Zimmerman, our little Jewish hero from the North Country. That’s where my head was at when I flipped the last card to “Stop!”,  just as Mike lowered his hands to indicate the end of his talk.

Miss Foley said, “Very good. I like the way you wove the Test Ban Treaty into it this time. I think we’ve got this where we want it. Bobby, comments?”

Beto looked thoughtful, then asserted, “No, Mike’s setting me up very well. We’re ready.”

“OK then Marc, why don’t you get up there as first negative, give Robert something to work with.”

I handed the cards to Lizzie, and followed Mike into the kitchen, where he was pouring a glass of water. Glancing my way, he raised those brows and asked, “Want some?”

Those were the first words Michael Harrison spoke to me.

iv

Beto was driving me to school that winter, after he finally got a car from his father. I viewed him as a mentor; he had the job I wanted the next year, Student Council president. While other girls got sidetracked over which boy might ask them out, and where they stood in the gossip pecking order, I tried hard to please my mother, getting elected class representative, and working on making sure my report card was all A’s. I wasn’t athletic, not at all, couldn’t even dance. Not like Lizzie, who’d taken ballet all her life, and lead the Pony Chorus dance troop in our class review, “Peanuts”.

I felt comfortable with Bobby. I’d known him since 7th grade, when we moved to Clifton, and saw him as sort of a brother, or worldly cousin. One who wasn’t Jewish, too. All that made him safe for me.

So it was easy to ask him one morning, “What more can you tell me about Mike Harrison?”

“Are you serious about this,  Janie? ‘Cause you’re gonna have to do some work to get to know him.”

“Well, for starters, where does he live? How does he get to school?”

“He’s in Wilson Heights Village, or maybe Woodland Park.” This was a white-bread enclave at the very northeast corner of Cincinnati. Woodland Park, where Lizabeth lived. Why hadn’t she told me that? “He drives his mom to work every day, then comes and parks on the front drive. She’s getting her Ph.D. in psychology at UC. He says she got a Master’s at Radcliffe, right after the war.”

Radcliffe. That was number one on the list I’d made with the school counselor, Miss Mkrtchian. A crusty old lady, she decided long ago that women did not get a good deal in life, especially when it came to college. She’d find the “top” girls in each class, guiding them towards somewhere other than the kitchen or the nursery. Every year, she picked her five pets, calling them the Senior Girls’ Council, euphemistically known as her Five Fingers. It was a honor equal to cum laude or Quill and Scroll. When I’d met with her to talk about college applications, she sent me signals I would be one of the chosen. Which made sense, as I was on my way to being valedictorian. She said, “You know Janie, that half of all ‘Cliffies are either first or second in their high school class.”

His mother going to Radcliffe, and in Psychology at that, added to the intrigue. I had to find a way to him, to learn more about him and find out what that wrenching flutter inside was all about.

As we pulled into the football field lot – only seniors at the top of the social order dared park there – I asked Beto, “What about college? Do you know where he’s applied?”

Beto gave me his serious look, a downward nod as if peaking over reading glasses. “Oh, he’s already in. John Calvin U, early decision. Found out last year. He doesn’t have to worry about a thing.” Beto’s first choice was another one of the Little Three, Williams, so that made sense. The two paired up so well, intellectually at least. They weren’t friends, but they could at least hold their own with each other.

As we walked by the gym towards the back entrance under the dome, Beto continued, “Are you two serious about this timekeeper thing? We’ve got the Regionals coming up in two weeks.”

“We’ll be there. Lizzie’s got some dance recital that night, but you’re done by three or so, right?”

…About a year ago, I came into possession of some artifacts – a diary, letters, poems, scientific papers, an obituary – documenting the life of the person who inspired the main character of this book. Looking through them, I began to visualize a story filling out the sparse details of her narrative arc. I couldn’t get it out of my head, and by early March, I felt compelled to write it down. Which took about six months…

Introduction

Author’s Note: “What follows is a memoir I imagine the narrator’s real-life inspiration would have written. While some events occurred as depicted, most names have been altered and conversations are often invented. Where I lacked facts, I made them up. Otherwise, all this is true…” 

Preface: “In 1965, for my sixteenth birthday, I gave myself a diary. Pink, with a locking clasp, it represented my belief that I was almost grown, and needed to daily document the finishing touches. A five-year diary, as I was sure I’d become as old as I needed to be by twenty-one. I filled it with frequent jottings, my mundane and romantic hopes and dreams. Looking back, I see myself progressing from childish fantasies, opening up to people and the world. My memory isn’t what to be; I suppose I should write it all down, flesh it out while I can. What follows, guided by these fading signposts from my past, is a story of those five years. 

Sarah Jane Stein, May 25, 1983” [Presumed narrator]

Who might enjoy this?

Ex-hippies and wannabes; book club ladies; 30-something professional women; late-teen high school/college girls.

Main characters

Sarah Jane Stein – Narrator. Enters Radcliffe College (grad. ’71) in Boston from a Midwest public high school, graduates Magna Cum Laude, goes on to study maternal/infant interactions and earns Ph.D. in Psychology, becoming a psychoanalyst. 

Miriam Stein, her mother; Charlie Stein, one of her brothers. 

Michael Harrison, her high school & college boyfriend; Howard Lehrman, a Harvard Law student and anti-war activist with whom she lives after college; Petyr Cohen, a refugee from the Holocaust who becomes her fiancé. 

Lizzie Upton, her high school BFF; Jeanne Heldman, Marcia Levine, Bev, and Leslie, college roommates and friends, Stephanie Seacrist, an ob-gyn who befriends her at a critical moment.

The work is structured in two parts, the first covering 1965-1970 (Chapters 1-6), the second 1971-1984 (Chapters 7-9). In its current form, it is 163,000 words, which is 450 pages in book form. I anticipate it will be cut down a fair bit before reaching its final form. This is a dialogue-driven work, with several poems and letters sprinkled in which move the action forward. The current events, cultural and political, of the time appear in the background, mostly in the first part (1965-70, aka “The Sixties”). 

If you’re interested enough to start reading, click on the link below right…there are subsequent links. If you do decide to read on, let me know. I’m not averse to feedback; in fact, I’d appreciate it. Leave a comment on the blog, message me on FB, email me, whatever. At my current rate of final polishing, I anticipate dropping 1-2 chapters a week into this blog.