Triblog

!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!

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

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

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

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

“I’ve got time. OK if I go with you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Larry asked, “Barnes?” Jeanne nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But didn’t he write a poem to her?”

“Not to her. About her.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!

“Hello?”

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

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

My breath came in spasms. I looked at the clothes I’d had on for the past three days now, wrinkled almost beyond recognition. I knew my hair, not brushed the whole time, was wild with growing rat’s nests. A thought flashed by, he can’t see me like this. That brought me back, provided enough strength/stability to muster few few rational words, trying to overcome the chaos.

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

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

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

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

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

Seeing all those SDS kids, first taking over University Hall, then getting dragged out and hauled away, must have built a new courage in me, another layer in my sense of self. “No, Mike. I’m having trouble being with you now. Not just this weekend. I’ve been meeting people here, in the SDS and others, and I need some time to find out more about who I am. I have to – need to – do that by myself, without you. I need some time for that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

********

!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!

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

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

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

I felt strangely calm, without fear. I remembered that day in Chicago, when I lost Eddie and almost got trampled a mob. I looked inside Uni, where kids leaned out windows, urging, “Join us! Join us!” Mike’s face floated into my mind’s eye, and I wondered what he would think, what he would say. I looked over at Howard, feverish with anger and anticipation. He reached for my hand when I felt a tap on the other shoulder. Turning, I saw Jeanne, a look of bemused wonder on her face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After dinner, I called Mike and described what was happening. He responded by describing the takeover, by black students, of Fisk Hall at W, six weeks earlier. “Remember, my year was the first they tried to get a lot of black students here. Maybe 30, out of 350 in our class. Something about wanting Wesleyan to ‘reflect America in every way’. But just admitting different people doesn’t do it; they have to change what they teach, how they teach, as well. Those guys, when they took over the hall, had decided it was their duty to help improve the institution which was giving them a chance. They wanted Wesleyan to be better.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s wrong, Janie?”

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

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

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

We took the cushions off the couch, where Jeanne curled up, while I tried laying out on the sagging springs above. If I did get any sleep, I don’t remember it.

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

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

!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!

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

In March she introduced us to Anais Nin, her diaries and novels. That week by myself, I had time to read A Spy In The House of Love. The main character, Sabina, fascinated and frightened me. Married to Alan, a stable, stolid, patient man, she seeks excitement in serial assignations with exotic men. Lyrical and episodic, this tale of erotic heights and guilt-filled home life forced me to think about my own needs and desires. Sabine reveled in the pleasure she could feel with men, but did not feel a need to stay with them. I thought, “I did not choose to love, love chose me.” Love and sex had so far been tightly bound together; either without the other seemed wrong, stunted, denying the value of both. And yet I’d known many girls who managed that separation without a care, or at least one they would admit. Girls who swore they’d “save it” for marriage; others who thought nothing of a one-night stand, knowing only someone’s first name, then never seeing him again. I’d already foreclosed the first option, and was glad I had. I wondered if that were a slippery slope to the second, if I could be someone who could love more freely. Or was I a serial monogamist, would I need to let go of Mike before allowing another man into so fully my life?

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And if they don’t agree?” Les asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where? Which one?”

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

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

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

I realised I’d better get some sleep.

!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Supposedly, around 25, 6, 27 maybe.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why’d you stop,” he moaned.

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

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

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

I wondered what it would be like if we had some extended time together. If Mike weren’t always coming and going, spending just a night or a weekend with me, then going away for a week, or a month, writing instead of talking. I save up my feelings all that time, they take over when he comes back. I don’t think we’re growing together, as if we’re singing the same song over and over, not writing any new ones. He’d always talked about dreams, the future, building a life together. But we aren’t together, not this way, not in two college towns a two hour drive apart. And he wouldn’t try and build that life with me, wouldn’t make the effort to spend the summer here, with me.

********

!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!

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

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

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

With that, I felt I had been ushered through a narrow gate into a special garden, one where truth grew like flowers, watered by our questions, our eyes the sun. In high school, reading about science, with hypotheses generating research, followed by recording observations, had felt arid, barren, compared to the lushness of planning, then finally doing an experiment. At Avondale, Chemistry, with its mixing and heating, odors and stains, then Biology, our noses curled against formaldehyde as we dissected frogs, science had been off-putting and rote. But here in Kagan’s psych lab, I found a richness as we explored the foundations of personality. At last, I knew I had a calling. Not to be a research scientist, that was too confining. But to learn about, understand, and maybe help guide the path of these little unformed minds.

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

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

“I know what I’m going to do this summer. Kagan’s lab – those kids. He wants me to be a part of a new study, one I’ll get to help design.” Wrinkling his forehead, Mike cocked his head, asking for more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A ‘YMCA physical education director’. That’s the same as being a swim coach, in your mind? Working with kids, organizing things?” I asked. “I guess it makes sense you’d want to spend your summer, again, at that pool, with those kids. I don’t know, though, Mike. Why would you want to go back there? Shouldn’t you be doing something like the psych ward again, give yourself more experience to show when you apply? It won’t be like going to college from Avondale, where we all knew we’d get in somewhere. Not everybody gets into medical school, you know.” First his swimming, now an infatuation with skiing. 

Three years earlier, I’d fallen in love with a debater, a boy who used both his mind and his hands, who wanted to spin words into beauty, as well as play at life.  He’d seemed so sure of his direction, who he was. And now that I had decided on mine, had become clear on who I should be, he’d gotten hesitant, reluctant to grow up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I could have lied; if I claimed he’d talked about her at some point in the previous nine months, he’d accept that. While I may have left some things unsaid at times, for three years with him, I had followed  his dictum, ‘Always Be Honest’, and feared the consequences if I wasn’t.

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

He scratched his head as if trying to remember. Maybe the same thought about the value of truth was racing in his mind. He kept looking at the ground, afraid to meet my eyes. Finally, “She’s really just a kid. I don’t know, it feels like we’re…connected somehow. When I first saw her, laughing at the front desk, where people check in, we locked eyes.”

“Just a kid? How old is she, Mike?”

Still not looking up, his cheeks now red. “Fifteen.”

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

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

!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!

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

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

“No, I’ll come down.”

He did look a bit bedraggled, snow still melting in his hair. He wore a massive navy blue wool coat, suffering from too-many dry cleanings, then wrinkled after two decades at the bottom of a foot locker.

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s at home, or in New London?”

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

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

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

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

“How old are they?”

“The babies? They’re 11, 12 months old, I think. It’s fascinating, watching them both.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I nodded, tried to seem impressed.

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

“Are you going to go?”

“S is, I think I will as well. I want to try skiing again, see how good I can get at it?”

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

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

DEBBIE, I

Debbie turns her eyes toward mine

and sinks a gaze in me that shatters

every fibre that I live by.

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

owns me,

With her eyes, so blue, and hair, so

brown and golden from the sun

I am stunned by her quiet face and smile.

And so she holds me.

And then she speaks, her unformed mind

asserts itself on mine, taunts my openness;

apprehensive, where no incisive, perceptive glance

would care to go – 

She lives as still a child, though

I treat her as full-grown.

Sometime in July, 1968

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

!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!

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

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

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

“You guys ever heard of Hillel?”

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

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

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

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

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

“And did you get anything like that?”

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

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

“Really?” Leslie mused.

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

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

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

Despite his assurances, I still felt awkward, uncomfortable, even. Leslie was full-throated in her participation, determined to prove she was as knowledgeable as anyone there, using all the correct Hebrew responses as loudly as any man there. I knew nothing about any of this, though, remaining silent, feeling like someone tone-deaf at a party, afraid to sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ I didn’t go back for a long time.

********

!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!

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

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

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

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

A slight giggle as she spoke, Marcia confided, “Well, I decided that ‘everything but…’ vow isn’t worth it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Because…”

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

“Why”

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

“Like?”

“The Divine Comedy.”

Puzzled, I raised my eyebrows.

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

“What’s that?”

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

“Still headed for psychiatry,” I mused.

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

“Then you’d go right to med school?”

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

“So what would you do?”

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

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

“It’s still kids and psych, right?”

“It’s still kids and psych.”

!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!

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

One day, laying in the sun on lounge chairs in his back yard, a small radio tuned to the new FM station softly playing in the background, something about “I fought the law, and the law won”, I showed him the hair they’d taken off in the ER, a swirling mass of black lying at the bottom of a paper bag, looking ready to be plucked for lining a robin’s nest.

“Can I have that?”

“Why, what would you do with it?”

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

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

“Well, didn’t you almost die?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He patted the concrete walk with his right hand. “Here, sit with me.” As I dropped down, he lifted up my hair, pulled back the dark band over the small cotton bandage, touching gently, then kissing it lightly. “I wish I could make it better.”

Anger at his absence that day still boiled inside, fighting with the power of his presence now, the warmth radiating from his skin, the sweetness of his comfort gestures. “Well, you can’t, so let’s forget about it, OK?” Quietly,  that little radio now aired what I called the “Paranoia Song – there’s battle lines being drawn, nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.”

I took his hand from my head, squeezed his fingers while placing them firmly on his thigh, and drew my own hand away. “I want to hear about those kids, which ones did you say you like so much?”

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

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

That evening at the Harrison house, we sat with Jack and G and Shelly, watching the news while we at our dinners from what they called “TV trays”, small folding individual aluminum tables set in front of arm chairs. They were getting ready for the Miss America Pageant, apparently a family tradition. Shelly and Mike talked eagerly about Bert Parks, his smile, and the nuances of the talent competition. First, though, the local newsman tut-tutted about some protesters in Atlantic City. On the screen we watched flickering images of women of all ages throwing undergarments into a metal barrel, then setting them afire.

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

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

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

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