Triblog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Voltaire.”

“Yeah, that guy. What did he say?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our jaws dropped to the car floor. My father NEVER buys anything without thinking for two months, comparing a thousand prices, and making sure he isn’t being swayed by the emotion of the moment. What he’d done during those 90 minutes was take a jeep trip with the salesman to the last of 14 five acre lots. Now he wanted us to see what he was so excited about.

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

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

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

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

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

Denise and Arlene stayed behind while Eddie and I drove that old VW beetle through Indiana to Chicago the last weekend of August. Along the way, he told me what to expect.

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

At first sight, Howard resembled a Russian revolutionary. Wild wiry hair sprouted above his eyes, made smaller by thick, square wire-rim glasses. A mustache and goatee framed thin lips, atop which perched a flaring hawk nose, Baggy, wrinkled khakis, a faded thin denim shirt and red bandana around his neck attempted to hide his patrician North Side roots. His thick veined hands, smooth as porcelain, emphasized his never-ending observations on everything that entered his head. Velvet toned, methodical and persuasive, he already possessed an assurance that his views were right and just.

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

Eddie cautioned, “Howie, I already told you, she’s got a boyfriend, from Wesleyan.”

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

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

Monday, the first day of the convention, we reconnoitered the park outside the Amphitheater. Helmeted police set up steel fencing across the streets. Others on horseback kept onlookers away. I noticed apprehensively the long slick black clubs dangling from their belts.

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

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

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

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

On Wednesday, the day Eugene McCarthy would finally be denied the nomination, we joined the massed crowd outside. More and more people came, filling the confined space cordoned off by the steel fences, our designated protest area. Suddenly, some of the bigger guys clambered up and over, while others shook and pulled the barrier down. I felt people all around me surge, moving towards freedom. I tried to stay, to swim against them, afraid of the police rushing at us, raising billy clubs and shields. Horses neighed, rising on hind legs, snorting and spitting. The leading edge of our group, the first across the now prostrate fence, were grabbed, beaten, and yanked by their limbs or hair, to a grassy area across the street, where squat vans awaited. Some willingly went in, others were more forcibly tossed. I lost sight of Eddie in the melee. I screamed his name, feeling terrified and alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kennedy. He’s been shot.”

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

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

My Dad calmly went through the details being repeated over and over on the TV. The last thing he said was “Sirhan Sirhan.”

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

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

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

“So has he said anything?” Mike asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We were lying on my bed, side-by-side, playing a new game we’d just invented: “What do I remember?” It didn’t matter who’d started it, the idea was to come up with something we’d done, somewhere we’d been, the other did not remember. We’d been miserable failures up to this point, as everything I said, he nodded vigorously with, and added to. He couldn’t find any gaps in my recollections either. 

“Events, words, they’re easy to share. Sounds and sights, even. But what about aromas? I bet they’re more private, personal. What about these?” He turned on his poet’s [?speech/eyes/]. “Your hair in a graveyard,. an un-washed tent, Italian ambrosia, ambergris and wine – and love.”

“What am I supposed to do with those?”

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

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

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

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

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

“No, we both won, buddy.”

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

“I think I hear a poem in that,” I offered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wondered if Leslie had ever felt love they way I had, if she’d only been hurt, or used or abandoned. I wondered if I were simply lucky, to have stumbled onto Michael Harrison. I wanted to say, “I know what it’s like to be loved, and that’s a feeling I don’t ever want to lose.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Janie’s boyfriend,” Marcia added softly.

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

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

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

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

“I think I memorized Desolation Row.”

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

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

I laughed, “You can’t either!”

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

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

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

“What do you mean?”

“I’m thinking of going to the SDS convention in Chicago after the Vineyard. The convention, it’s very important. They’re going to work on the Democrats to get real about making change, the war, civil right, blacks, women, everything.”

“I don’t know.”

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

“I guess … both…?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

“Today’s Pesach.”

********

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

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

“How old were you?” Mike asked.

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

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

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

I was looking forward hearing that speech. Ever since she saw all those people on TV getting fire-hosed down South four or five years earlier, my mom had been raving about him. Before I could answer, Mike piped up, “I saw him a few weeks ago, at W.” I stared at him. He hadn’t told me about that.

“Really?” Jack prompted.

“Yeah, it was not a speech or anything. It was a special service at the Chapel, Sunday night,  I think in early February.”

“You don’t go to church…” I started.

“Right, but this was by invitation only. He’s good friends with one of my Religion professors, Dr. Klassen. He signed a bunch of us in his class up for that. There were only, maybe, 60 people there. It’s not a big cathedral or anything.”

“Religion?” Jack wondered.

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

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

Without a car, Mike took the train back to school, while I flew into Logan that weekend. Tuesday after we got back was his birthday, so I called him. Our conversation seemed off, somehow. Maybe it was the assassination, and the riots that followed in Avondale that Sunday just after I left. Only a couple of miles from my home, stores were trashed, people were killed, soldiers were called out, a curfew put in place. My mother was frightened, grateful that I was not around to see it.

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

He wrote me a letter, about seeing King at W, how that made him feel, about his sorrow and anger at King’s murder, and the riots that followed. He sent along a poem:

A VOICE ACROSS THE MOUNTAIN TOP

A grey-toned man approached me and

  unasked

I answered, Yes, I would, Yes

Yes

I’d follow him

To the bus in the back

of a team of mules

He rides now

covered with kisses

And other near misses

and the one that found him

Will not confound him

But hopefully raise his wishes

that covered with kisses we all might love

as he felt we could and should and

Would

someday

When he’d gone away

To his promised land

      where his dreams have dawned

on the mountain top

He spoke to us

unasked

He answered, Yes I will, Yes

Yes

4-10-68

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

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

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

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

Love, 

        Janie

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

HAPPY BIRTHDAY – 

Love – 

        Janie

********

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you serious?” I laughed.

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

“Red. No, wait, yellow.”

“Yellow? Red? I think they only come in that Army green color, right?”

“Doesn’t matter. You get me a Jeep, I don’t know…”

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

“Dunno. Did we hit something?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Every time I see him talk, I think about this guy, from Houston, who tells a little story about his cousin in Dallas. After Johnson became President, he said, ‘Finally, someone in the White House without an accent!’ I don’t know, how can he go from doing all the civil rights stuff, and Medicare, to this?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, look!” 

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

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

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

********

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

“Hey, Janie, here we are!” Jeanne waved me over to her table, where she was finishing dinner with Marcia and two other girls I didn’t know. “Oh, this is Bev and Leslie. They’re juniors, they promised to help us with our chemistry.”

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

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

“What do you mean,” I asked.

“Janie, is it? Haven’t you noticed Harvard doesn’t care how smart you are, how smart we are? Don’t you feel like an adornment, or an after-thought? There’s only what, maybe 5% of doctors who are women? We can’t afford to sit around and wait for men to change. We have to demand our place. Have you read Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir?” When I shook my head, ‘No’, she reached into her bag and took out a thick, well-worn paperback, The Second Sex, shaking it towards my face.

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

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about!” she almost shouted. “See, someone like you, smart enough to get into Radcliffe, and, from what Jeanne tells me, sophisticated enough to enjoy plays on Broadway, still thinks of a woman in terms of her relationship to a man. Do you think of yourself as a feminist?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yup. Those are Lippes Loops.”

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

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

“Like a cross for vampires?”

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

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

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

I couldn’t respond. I didn’t want to appear naive, inexperienced, or lacking in self-assertion. But I wondered if I were indeed under the spell of a juvenile infatuation, seeing myself as a princess in a fairy tale.

********

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

CHAPTER FOUR

I place my trust apart from me

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

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

“What did you think? Did you understand it?” I asked as we walked past Carnegie Hall towards the Park. Our plan was to ride the carousel before heading on back to Grand Central for the train to CT.

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

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

“Huh?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I do. Everybody at school, they’re always talking about ‘finding’ themselves.” Mike helped me onto a coal black stallion, fiery eyes staring endlessly upward towards the brass ring. The ring I remembered Phoebe, in Catcher, kept trying to grab.

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

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

“Bull sessions?”

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

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

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

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

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

********

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

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

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

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

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

“Holes?”

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

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

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

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

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

“That sounds like the theatre on the Vineyard.”

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

“Right.”

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

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

“Not yet.”

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

“What did you do?”

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

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

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

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

I nodded, “Um hum.”

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

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

SERANADE

These are what sang me to sleep last night:

Ephemeral imagery wafting soundlessly

    across

My sight,

    leaves no tracks

Bears no weight and knows no

  boundary,

Bother or burden.

Buffeted, soft and restful as a 

Feather

Easing itself upon a crackling bed of leaves,

Herald of some now flown drifter,

Seeking warmer shelter.

Or else some cloistered curls, no unfurled,

Drifting, wafting, fading

    across

The undraped softness of two still young shoulders,

Now draped in raiment

More fine than purest silk or gentlest

Tears,

warm and liquid,

Cried for love.

The shoulders

soft and young

and warm and

Slightly freckled

Transform into a [leaping?] vastness

Softness

Vastness,

And out pours

Yellow

Mounds and mounds of

    yellow

Daffodils and raisins, kissed by the

yellow

Sun and

  yellow brighter

still

Than daffodils – –

and raisins

Are the clouds ands grains of dune-

Grass, 

growing from the sand

On which a drifter bird

Has landed, 

        near two

Bronzed shoulders,

        hid by

Voluptuous hair, revealing a misty,

        shrouded

Silk-shrouded form

Of tears of love

Weightless

      boundless

Endless

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