Triblog

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What happened? Are you OK?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the moorish banks of a sandy isle,

Flung from the mainland’s breast

Lies a glimmering, grass-covered haven,

Where dreams may come to rest.

Dream’s are born of nature’s yearnings,

But birth is never enough

To satisfy the life in you;

Living requires the stuff

Of being, a tangible barrier

Which makes you human,

And time a god, 

Begging the present’s promise

Of a dream to create our future.

Set as a jewel, deep in velvet

As red as a storm-day’s morning,

Your secret cove will keep your yearnings

Till the time you’ve grown

        to need them.

But now, to live at now

Is begged of you

And dreams are only meant

for dreaming,

Not living, 

      not yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s that mean?”

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

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

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

“Refrigerator”

“Icebox”

“Purchase”

“Buy”

“Walk”

“Perambulate,” I tried.

“Wait. Who would ever say perambulate?”

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

“A motorbike?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had seen the thick soft-covered Harvard course catalogue for the1967-68 academic year, with that shield and “Veritas” on the cover. But it had been too intimidating to explore, so I had just day-dreamed about being in Cambridge, in the Radcliffe quad, then going to Widener library to study, or into a class in one of the red brick or sandstone buildings. I wondered what the other girls would be like, if I’d make friends. I wasn’t ready yet to return to student life. I wanted a summer of sun, and sand, and quiet. Mike and I had only a week here, together, before we’d be apart again. I wanted to block that off in time and space, not let the urgent pull of the future intervene.

• !!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!

Two weeks later, I joined Mom in the kitchen where she’d begun initial preparations for Seder. She interrupted work on her shopping list, looking up at me over her reading glasses. “Honey, your school ends on May 20, right? Linda will be home by then, and George is having his graduation in Rhode Island that weekend. Dad thinks maybe we should go out to the Vineyard a little early, attend the ceremony in Providence, then go down and all off us open up the house. What do you think?”

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

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

I explained the looming predicament, receiving a full five seconds of silence from him on other end. Finally, “OK, here’s what I think. I come down there to the Vineyard Friday after my last exam. Should be done by noon, it’s, what, maybe three hours to the ferry? You could meet me there, we could hang out in Falmouth, then go over to island for the evening. I don’t have to start work until June 5th, so I could stay with you guys for a few days?”

“Work? You got a job?”

“Yeah, I’m going to work in the hospital, Cincinnati General. The psych ward, as an intern. I think it’ll look good when I apply to medical school, right?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s a distinctive smell

of a storm approaching – 

Thunder in summer;

You can always tell,

even if it’s only spring – 

the air seems to shimmer,

heavy-laden new formed clouds

come to cleanse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The last two years, the insatiable demand for Beatles’ records meant a new album every three or four months. But it had been since last August’s Revolver that anything new had come out, and they’d announced they’d be no more tours, either. So people wondered, is that the end? And now, finally, we’d get more music to swoon over.

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

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

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

“Micha?” she wondered.

Uncle Michael? I wondered to myself.

Back at Eddie’s car (his Beetle), I handed Denise over to him, saying, “I think I want to walk off. I can see his car over there, is that OK?”

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

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

“Everything there?” I asked.

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

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

“I’ve got some surprises for you here. A couple of birthday presents, I guess.” First was a poem, which he read aloud to me from a green-lined spiral notebook page. I noticed the tiny holes had not been ripped; he must have taken the wire spiral out, leaving them intact. He recited:

To Janie, On Her Eighteenth Birthday

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

What?

Again?

You don’t mean to tell me

That you’re really that much older,

That you deserve a recognition, 

Cognition of the flow of time,

Segmented just for you.

I could write

the trite,

unknowing phrases,

Wishing you much joy

and other

mindless babblings.

You deserve much more

Beyond that imposition.

So here’s a proposition:

I remember another

Marking-day

(A day outside of past or future).

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

So: pick a day (any day)

And for you a genie I will play – 

Three free wishes

(And three soft kisses)

Are yours from me

With Love.

“Anything you want, it’s your birthday. Was, I guess, yesterday.”

“I thought you were going to be here by then?”

“Oh, yeah. The inorganic chem exam was changed. Sorry. I’m here now, and I really do want to give you three wishes…”

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

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

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

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

********

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

Alongside the nightly scenes of war in Southeast Asia, the evening news began to feature footage from San Francisco of hippies, long-haired dropouts. They flaunted all convention, urged everyone to do go with the flow, do their own thing, and leave others alone. “Peace” and “love” were their bywords. Although the Beatles appeared to have been under their influence for the past year, that style and tone had yet to penetrate my high school friends. Oh, we fell under the spell of the music, and a few even tried marijuana. And maybe the lure of Free Love enticed a few; there were always rumors of abortions when we giggled in gym class. But we still wore khakis and skirts to school; only the bravest boys were willing to try white levis, skirting our unofficial dress code of no blue jeans. Not going to college, not pressing on, never seemed an option.

Alongside the nightly scenes of war in Southeast Asia, the evening news began to feature footage from San Francisco of hippies, long-haired dropouts. They flaunted all convention, urged everyone to do go with the flow, do their own thing, and leave others alone. “Peace” and “love” were their bywords. Although the Beatles appeared to have been under their influence for the past year, that style and tone had yet to penetrate my high school friends. Oh, we fell under the spell of the music, and a few even tried marijuana. And maybe the lure of Free Love enticed a few; there were always rumors of abortions when we giggled in gym class. But we still wore khakis and skirts to school; only the bravest boys were willing to try white levis, skirting our unofficial dress code of no blue jeans. Not going to college, not pressing on, never seemed an option.

The New York Times featured an article, back on page 40, headlined “Organized Hippies Emerge on Coast.” No need to say which coast apparently. After multiple columns describing a dissolute life-style of total societal abnegation, it offered a grudging admiration for the Diggers, who scrounged food from dumpsters, and distributed it free among the 15,000 or so young people encamped in San Francisco’s Haight-Asbury district. The article ended with: “The city fears a mass migration of 100,000 would-be hippies to the area this summer from all over the country.”

One evening, on the phone with Eddie, I asked him, “Are you guys hippies? I keep hearing about them in San Francisco.”

He came back laughing, “No, we’re too busy to be lazy. We may look like them, with our clothes and our food and all, But when you have a kid, it all gets real, and dropping out and turning on doesn’t get the diapers changed or the bills paid. Those kids, they’re so close to Berkeley across the bay. You know, University of California, where they had the Free Speech protests a couple of years ago? And now the Governor, Reagan, he wants to clamp down on anyone who speaks out about how things could be better.”

“Things?”

“You know, get out of Vietnam, teach what the world is really like, how people around the  world and even here are oppressed. Blacks. And women, too. Arlene gets mad that her professors didn’t teach how women have been held down all through history. She thinks we need women’s studies, and black studies, or all that will all remain hidden.” Arlen was a Berkley drop-out, who countered the counter-culture by heading east, to Nantucket, to find her thing.

Mike appeared again at end of March, leaving in early April for his short spring break. I felt, despite our letters, we weren’t even treading water, that we needed to take a few steps forward if we wanted to stay together the coming summer, into fall. His birthday would be a week after he got back to school, and I wanted to give him a card in person, not mail it. I spent an entire afternoon decorating it with spring flowers and tiny, floating hearts. Even a rabbit poking its ears above a clump of grass. Along the bottom, then up the edge and across the top, a declaration of love, admiration and thanks. I ended with “Radcliffe Boston Weekends” repeated three times.

After a particularly tight hug and kisses on my neck, he pulled back and asked, “When do you hear again?”

“It should be the week of April 10. Maybe I’ll hear from them all at once.”

“Right after my birthday,” he mused. “What a present if you got in.”

“Miss M says she gets notice of acceptances a day or two before the letters come to our house. She’s not supposed to tell us, but she said, if I get into Radcliffe, she’ll run down the hall…”

“She can’t run! Not in those clunky shoes she wears.”

“…and tell me first thing.”

It was a little frightening imaging that gray haired, straight-laced woman panting as she scooted over the linoleum floored halls of our school seeking out each of her Five Fingers to tell them the good (or not-so-good) news. In the end, she told us to come by her office at the start of lunch period on the 11th. She was all smiles, and couldn’t hold back. As each of us came in, she started nodding, saying, “You got it, you got it.” For Lizzie, that meant Mt. Holyoke, and for me…for me, I stood stock still when I heard, then started jumping up and down, face in my hands, smiling and crying all at once. Radcliffe. I got in.

I floated through the rest of the day, feeling at last I could relax. For once, there was no future, no past, no pressure, no fear, just an endless, perfect present. I knew it wouldn’t last. The only way to flow through to the other side was to grab Lizzie, and talk myself back to earth.

I rode home from school with her, to Woodland Park. In the car, we played with our new status as College Girls. “So you and Emily Dickinson, right? You’ll be there with all those kids from Amherst, Smith, U Mass…”

“Don’t forget Hampshire. It is the Five College Area, after all,” Liz chimed in. “And look at you. Harvard. Boston College. BU. Tufts. Emerson. Northeastern. And Boston! Boston…it’s where you’ve always wanted to be.” Shifting gears, she asked, “Have you told Mike yet?”

“How? He’s in classes, and daytime phone calls, the prices. I’ve got to wait until I get home, I guess. I hadn’t thought about that yet, telling him.”

“Really? You guys write each other, what every week or even twice? And now you get to be only two hours away, you can see each other every weekend?” Pausing, then, “Wait a minute. You went to that thing at Fountain Square with Will. Is that giving you second thoughts about Mike, you’ve found somebody else? Janie, I never knew you’d be going after one boy, much less two.”

“What? It wasn’t like that. Besides, he’s a little creepy. Like he expected me to just melt over his manliness.”

“You didn’t fall for that? Or maybe you just didn’t want to make Mike jealous?”

I gave that some thought. I’m just beginning to learn what love can be, how to give it, what it can mean for me. Jealousy seemed another level entirely. I asked, “Jealousy? I thought that was something for older people, people who’ve been together longer, like married people who have an affair or something.”

“I know, it seems a little odd to feel so possessive of someone that you can’t let them have fun.”

“What, like flirting?”

“It’s like, if you have a total connection with someone, you have both their mind and body as yours, you don’t…you can’t share them with anyone else.”

I wondered if that’s how I felt about Mike. “Hmm…I really like that Mike writes me letters all the time. If he’s doing that, I know I’m in his thoughts, in his mind all the time. That’s what I wouldn’t want to share with anyone, that emotional space, that feeling in his head.”

“You wouldn’t mind if he made out with, or even if he slept with, another girl?”

Instantly, I blushed. I looked down at my lap, where my fingers were clutching themselves so tightly they turned white. ‘Was Lizzie having sex with Leon?’ was my first thought. But I couldn’t ask her. She was so proper, so clean and innocent. Then I thought of myself. Did I have feelings that way, towards Mike? It had been so scary, just getting to kiss and hug each other last year. Then all that time apart, seeing each other only for a week or so, a few times the past year. If it entered my mind at all, it had been in a purely analytic way, almost a scientific curiosity. What would it be like? Would it hurt? Would I even want to? Would I enjoy it? So much I didn’t know, and had just begun to think about.

Lizzie heard my silence. “Wait? You guys still haven’t…?”No, we hadn’t, and probably wouldn’t any time soon.

“You mean, he doesn’t bring it up, even obliquely?” Lizzie asked the next morning. I’d spent the night at her place, where we’d fantasized about our upcoming lives in New England’s academic dreamlands. Her mother drove us to school, so we couldn’t continue the conversation until we spilled out onto the circle drive. We had about 15 minutes before the home room bell, so we sat on the steps, our backs to the brick wall, staring down at Victory Parkway. The rising April sun warmed our faces; dogwood trees blossomed on the hill below.

“He’s in college, he’s been writing to you for a year, seeing you every vacation, and all last summer. What’s been going on with you two?”

“Honestly, it’s never come up. And, to think about it, there’s the question of where, and when, isn’t there. It’s been too cold for his car, which is pretty small to begin with. Otherwise, it’s either his house or mine, and our parents are always there it seems. But like I said, we don’t talk about it.”

“So he really is a straight-laced guy? You’re sure he likes girls, maybe he thinks of you as a friend?”

I glared at her. “He doesn’t kiss me like I’m just a friend. I’m happy to leave it at that, really. We’re doing pretty good just being who we are.”

********

The New York Times featured an article, back on page 40, headlined “Organized Hippies Emerge on Coast.” No need to say which coast apparently. After multiple columns describing a dissolute life-style of total societal abnegation, it offered a grudging admiration for the Diggers, who scrounged food from dumpsters, and distributed it free among the 15,000 or so young people encamped in San Francisco’s Haight-Asbury district. The article ended with: “The city fears a mass migration of 100,000 would-be hippies to the area this summer from all over the country.”

One evening, on the phone with Eddie, I asked him, “Are you guys hippies? I keep hearing about them in San Francisco.”

He came back laughing, “No, we’re too busy to be lazy. We may look like them, with our clothes and our food and all, But when you have a kid, it all gets real, and dropping out and turning on doesn’t get the diapers changed or the bills paid. Those kids, they’re so close to Berkeley across the bay. You know, University of California, where they had the Free Speech protests a couple of years ago? And now the Governor, Reagan, he wants to clamp down on anyone who speaks out about how things could be better.”

“Things?”

“You know, get out of Vietnam, teach what the world is really like, how people around the  world and even here are oppressed. Blacks. And women, too. Arlene gets mad that her professors didn’t teach how women have been held down all through history. She thinks we need women’s studies, and black studies, or all that will all remain hidden.” Arlen was a Berkley drop-out, who countered the counter-culture by heading east, to Nantucket, to find her thing.

Mike appeared again at end of March, leaving in early April for his short spring break. I felt, despite our letters, we weren’t even treading water, that we needed to take a few steps forward if we wanted to stay together the coming summer, into fall. His birthday would be a week after he got back to school, and I wanted to give him a card in person, not mail it. I spent an entire afternoon decorating it with spring flowers and tiny, floating hearts. Even a rabbit poking its ears above a clump of grass. Along the bottom, then up the edge and across the top, a declaration of love, admiration and thanks. I ended with “Radcliffe Boston Weekends” repeated three times.

After a particularly tight hug and kisses on my neck, he pulled back and asked, “When do you hear again?”

“It should be the week of April 10. Maybe I’ll hear from them all at once.”

“Right after my birthday,” he mused. “What a present if you got in.”

“Miss M says she gets notice of acceptances a day or two before the letters come to our house. She’s not supposed to tell us, but she said, if I get into Radcliffe, she’ll run down the hall…”

“She can’t run! Not in those clunky shoes she wears.”

“…and tell me first thing.”

It was a little frightening imaging that gray haired, straight-laced woman panting as she scooted over the linoleum floored halls of our school seeking out each of her Five Fingers to tell them the good (or not-so-good) news. In the end, she told us to come by her office at the start of lunch period on the 11th. She was all smiles, and couldn’t hold back. As each of us came in, she started nodding, saying, “You got it, you got it.” For Lizzie, that meant Mt. Holyoke, and for me…for me, I stood stock still when I heard, then started jumping up and down, face in my hands, smiling and crying all at once. Radcliffe. I got in.

I floated through the rest of the day, feeling at last I could relax. For once, there was no future, no past, no pressure, no fear, just an endless, perfect present. I knew it wouldn’t last. The only way to flow through to the other side was to grab Lizzie, and talk myself back to earth.

I rode home from school with her, to Woodland Park. In the car, we played with our new status as College Girls. “So you and Emily Dickinson, right? You’ll be there with all those kids from Amherst, Smith, U Mass…”

“Don’t forget Hampshire. It is the Five College Area, after all,” Liz chimed in. “And look at you. Harvard. Boston College. BU. Tufts. Emerson. Northeastern. And Boston! Boston…it’s where you’ve always wanted to be.” Shifting gears, she asked, “Have you told Mike yet?”

“How? He’s in classes, and daytime phone calls, the prices. I’ve got to wait until I get home, I guess. I hadn’t thought about that yet, telling him.”

“Really? You guys write each other, what every week or even twice? And now you get to be only two hours away, you can see each other every weekend?” Pausing, then, “Wait a minute. You went to that thing at Fountain Square with Will. Is that giving you second thoughts about Mike, you’ve found somebody else? Janie, I never knew you’d be going after one boy, much less two.”

“What? It wasn’t like that. Besides, he’s a little creepy. Like he expected me to just melt over his manliness.”

“You didn’t fall for that? Or maybe you just didn’t want to make Mike jealous?”

I gave that some thought. I’m just beginning to learn what love can be, how to give it, what it can mean for me. Jealousy seemed another level entirely. I asked, “Jealousy? I thought that was something for older people, people who’ve been together longer, like married people who have an affair or something.”

“I know, it seems a little odd to feel so possessive of someone that you can’t let them have fun.”

“What, like flirting?”

“It’s like, if you have a total connection with someone, you have both their mind and body as yours, you don’t…you can’t share them with anyone else.”

I wondered if that’s how I felt about Mike. “Hmm…I really like that Mike writes me letters all the time. If he’s doing that, I know I’m in his thoughts, in his mind all the time. That’s what I wouldn’t want to share with anyone, that emotional space, that feeling in his head.”

“You wouldn’t mind if he made out with, or even if he slept with, another girl?”

Instantly, I blushed. I looked down at my lap, where my fingers were clutching themselves so tightly they turned white. ‘Was Lizzie having sex with Leon?’ was my first thought. But I couldn’t ask her. She was so proper, so clean and innocent. Then I thought of myself. Did I have feelings that way, towards Mike? It had been so scary, just getting to kiss and hug each other last year. Then all that time apart, seeing each other only for a week or so, a few times the past year. If it entered my mind at all, it had been in a purely analytic way, almost a scientific curiosity. What would it be like? Would it hurt? Would I even want to? Would I enjoy it? So much I didn’t know, and had just begun to think about.

Lizzie heard my silence. “Wait? You guys still haven’t…?”

********

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

The next three months breezed by, punctuated several times a week by letters from Mike. Reading them and writing back was always a break from the stress of school, both classwork and extracurriculars. Enveloped in his words, I tried to imagine the unfolding of spring in Connecticut. I shared my fears, anxieties that kept bubbling up, that I was never good enough, never would be. Things I would never say even to Lizzie, much less my mother or sister. His letters were seldom as dark; he had a perpetual rosy attitude about life and everything that happened to him. I began to think he used that optimism to avoid dealing with anything that didn’t go his way. His poems became fewer and farther between; those he sent were truly forgettable. He claimed that writing to me was replacing the urge, the need to discover his thoughts in verse. 

He drove that Lancer, equipped with studded snow tires, back at the end of January, and again in March, for a week each time. That was just enough to keep us connected, but not enough, it seemed to me, to move us forward. We were suspended, satisfied with what we had, not lusting for anything more.

Mid-April, he sent another poem, shorter this time, that seemed a harbinger of better times. No title, just a date:

Cheeks acquiver,

Flaming rose

anoints their beauty.

Rushing joys

Deny the body

to control its own.

Cascading tresses,

Now unfurled

caress a fleeting passion.

Black yet shining

A world of

Ingenuous striving

is hidden there.

My father started watching the evening news, which every night showed frightening film from jungles on the other side of the world, in “East Southeast Asia”, as our history teacher Mr. Knab called it. Indochina, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos – it was a slow rumble which had escalated into a quickening roar. My brother Eddie, home with Charlotte and little Denise, spoke only of the “resistance”, and the “mobilization against the war” which the Students for a Democratic Society was organizing.

At school, it had also punctured into the conversations, along with fascination over hippies and strange new music. Songs not about simple love, but rather complexities of the world, competed with the Beatles and Beach Boys for airtime on AM radio. Names like Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix (why did they all seem to start with “J”?) burrowed past my filters, replacing the show tunes and songs of Streisand which used to live in my head. Always a little off to one side, I saw the world rushing past me faster than I could watch it go.

In the news room one day, Lizzie, Kit and Will were heatedly discussing how to process all this in our school paper. As I walked in, Will was intently pointing at Lizzie. “No, we can’t just do a fluff piece on the school review. I know the Pony Chorus is your little baby and all, but there are more important things happening. We should lead with something about the rally they’re having at Fountain Square next weekend, try and get as many kids out as possible. It’s important! We’ll all be gone next year, and we have to make sure the younger guys, the sophomores and juniors, carry on the struggle.” He turned to me. “Janie. What about it? Can you get through to your friend here?”

I’d just come from It’s Academic practice. I was part of our three person team, along with Phil Schwartz and Larry Schnieder, competing in the high school version of a popular TV show, College Bowl. Sort of a proto-Jeopardy, or maybe an off-shoot of Whiz Kids. We were the acknowledged brains of the class, ready to answer any question about math, science, history, literature, culture, or trivia. Each of us had a specialty: Phil was the math/science guy, Larry history and literature, which left me with culture and trivia. That was Janie Stein, filled with a bunch of useless facts, easily and quickly recalled.

I stared at Will, at his imploring moon-shaped face. I wondered if he and Mike would become friends at W, if there was anything at all which connected the two of them. Mike was cool, quiet, often with a blank exterior. Underneath, I knew, he boiled with passion, a hidden romantic who saw the world, and his life in it, as a continually evolving story. Will’s interior was open, always there for all the world to see. Hiding nothing, everything he thought was instantly available to anyone around him.

“I know!” he said. “Why don’t we go down to that rally this Saturday afternoon? Take some pictures, nose around a bit, get a read on kids at other schools, how they feel about the war and all.”

Lizzie moaned, “Our final dress rehearsal is Friday night, and then we open on Saturday. I’m gonna be exhausted. I just don’t have time to do that, Will.”

He turned to me. “What about it?” He looked exactly like a shaggy sheep dog, eyebrows raised expectantly.

I was torn three ways. Eddie had been drumming into me the importance of this moment, the need for action, not just concern. On the other hand, our It’s Academic team had the semi-final round against two other schools that morning. The half-hour show was live, airing at 11AM, which meant, win or lose, we’d do a post-mortem at the Big Boy drive-in afterwards.

And then there was Will himself. He seemed awfully eager to get me out there. I was suspicious of his motives, but he was so insistent, and I was so curious that I surprised myself by saying, “What time would we have to get there? I’ve got It’s Academic that morning, you know.”

“Oh yeah. Miss Brainiac. I forgot. It doesn’t start until around three. I can pick you up maybe at 2 o’clock?” I looked at Lizzie, hoping I’d find an ally there. But I knew she had to be back at school by 4, to get ready for the premiere of the review. I’d have to deal with Will all by myself if I wanted to be a part of the anti-war brigade.

That Saturday, Mr. Gleason drove us to the WLW studio. Phil and Larry sat silent, nervous in the back while I fidgeted with my necklace up front. There was really nothing we could do to prepare at this point, not knowing what any of the questions would be. The anticipatory anxiety was isolating each of us, apart together in that old Dodge sedan. I mentally reviewed the process. Each of us would have a button, able to buzz in at any point if we felt we knew an answer. Points were taken away for wrong answers, so guessing was not advised. But gut feelings were the way to go, Mr. Gleason had said. “You’ll know you know the answer before you think you do,” he’d said. Whatever that meant.

The studio lights glared down on us as we sat behind our desk, little name cards in front. Mine read “Sarah”. I hoped I’d remember to answer to that when called, instead of the “Janie” I’d come to be ever since third grade, when I thought my first given name was too old and frumpy. My forehead started to glisten with beads of sweat under those hot floods. Just before we started, a lady came over and patted our faces with powder. “Dearie, don’t worry, you’re gonna show these boys.” I looked across at the other two desks, and saw that I was the only girl on stage. I thought of Lizzie, high-kicking before a different audience that night in her fishnet tights, chest held high, long hair flung from side-to-side while the chorus line counted out its final kicks, “…65, 66, 67.” I wondered what the poor kids in the class of ’99 would be doing? And how the kids in the year 2000 would get to be so lucky.

In the end, we slaughtered the other two schools, going on to the finals where we would be up against the Catholic league champs from St. Xavier and the county league winners from Princeton. Princeton, the same team Mike and Beto had to beat to get to the state debate tournament. At least this would be the end of the line for us, only one more round to go.

A bunch of kids from school were there, all bouncing and happy. Everyone was grabbing hands, shouting at our success. Phil and Larry looked a little pleased with themselves, but were standing off to the side. Being more accessible, I found myself smiling in a group of girls, simply relieved my time in the spotlight was over. Through that mob came Will, who grabbed me suddenly in a giant bear hug, nearly lifting me off the ground. “You’re the best, Janie. So quick. I loved it when you knew all those Rodgers and Hammerstein songs.” He finally let me down, but kept a hand on each of my upper arms. I was wearing a sleeveless jumper, on the advice of my mother, who knew how hot the studio would be. I didn’t really want him fawning all over me, but didn’t know how to stop it in the aftermath of our victory. I backed away as best I could without actually throwing his hands off me.

“We’re going to the Big Boy now,. just the team. A ‘de-brief’, Gleason calls it. I’ll see you at 2? You know how to get to my house?”

“Of course, right off Clifton? I’ll be there, don’t worry. Here’s hoping we don’t get arrested.”

“You serious?”

Quickly, Will said, “No, no, don’t worry. It’s just, they’re so much more conservative here in Cincinnati, and you know what happened out in California, when they started having these kinds of rallies there.” He had these hooded, wolfish eyes, and I though I saw a slight bit of menace behind the smile.

In the end, the rally was polite, benign. Local politicians and religious leaders spoke for over an hour. A representative each from the colleges, UC and Xavier, politely asked the mayor and the governor to consider – not “pass”, just “consider” – resolutions against the war. A kid from Western Hills High School got up for five minutes, talking about how it was “Our time to stand up for what’s right. I’m seventeen, and I don’t think I should have to fight in a war that’s wrong, that takes a country away from its people.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,’ I whispered to Will. “I thought we were fighting the Communists there.”

He looked down  a bit disparagingly at me, saying, “I think you’ve got a lot to learn, Janie.”

********

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

Colored lights began to break through the evening mist as we pulled up to Mike’s house in Woodland Park. Set on a little rise above the street, the front lawn was filled with homemade Christmas decorations cut from sheet aluminum and painted with glossy enamel: a couple of four-foot high children in choir robes, holding hymnals, eyes raised in song; several candles, static flames on top lit by inner bulbs; and branches cut from a fir tree at the base of the drive, across the front door’s lintel. G, Mike, and I all got out before J pulled into the garage, which barely had room for the compact Lancer and Buick station wagon.

Inside, G pulled some covered ceramic bowls from the, as she called it, icebox, saying “I really don’t like to cook.” Turning towards me, she asked, “Janie, would you like to help me here? Mike and J can get the table ready in the other room.”

There didn’t seem much to do as she put as few things in the oven for re-heating, and started a pan of water on the stove, to defrost a bag of vegetables. I looked around, wondering how I could seem busy. While I pulled glasses from a shelf by the sink, intending to fill them with ice, she wondered, “I suppose you’ve got all your applications finished and mailed in by now?”

“Well, actually, I’ve really just started. I’m going to get them done over the holiday, I think.”

“Smith, Radcliffe, Barnard, and what else?”

“Yes, and Wellesley, too.”

“What do they ask on the applications? I remember Sheila and Mike both had to write an essay about something personal. And they needed letters, recommendations from teachers, and someone outside of school, a personal friend. Oh, and of course, all the school grades and test scores.”

My mind froze and raced at the same time. I didn’t know if I could count Mrs. … Dr., I guess I should say… Harrison as a “personal acquaintance.” To me, she was mostly Mike’s mother; we hadn’t really talked more than two or three times. I knew, though, that she loved her son, and would do anything for him. A letter of recommendation for his girlfriend seemed to flow naturally from that. So I stammered my way through, “Yes. I’ve been thinking…It’s OK if you don’t want to, but, uh, could you…would you think about writing a letter for me? For Radcliffe?”

She pulled an oven mitt from her right hand, paused a beat, then said, “I wondered if you could use some help there, but I didn’t want to ask. Of course, I will, Janie, of course I will.” Another pause, punctuated by a warm smile. “I want to make sure I put just the right things in there. I know I won’t have to talk about all your fabulous accomplishments at school, your grades and test scores and activities. Your teachers and Miss M. are already doing that. I do think I know you a bit, so I can truthfully say what a good, warm, and caring girl you are. But I would like to know more about your plans, your aspirations – why you would benefit from and contribute to that university environment. Mike says you are interested in psychology, in children?”

This was still just a feeling I had, more than a plan. “Well, that’s what I’m thinking now, but I don’t really know that much about it. I just know children are special, they need the right direction at the start of life. And I like thinking about how people act, what makes them do what they do, how they fit in with other people, that sort of thing. That isn’t really something you get in high school, and I haven’t really done any looking or reading…”

“I want to give you a couple of books to look at, Janie. Wait here. Oh, and can you watch that pot, so it doesn’t boil over?”

She came back with a foot-high pile of books. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to give them all to you,” she laughed. She placed one next to the glasses I’d been filling with ice. “Here, you should start with this. He was at Yale, Gesell. He wrote books about the developmental stages of maturation. This one” – it was titled Child Development – “is a good summary, but if you want more from him, I’ve got a lot more.” I could see titles such as The Child From Five to Ten and Youth: The Years from Ten to Sixteen.  “And of course, you should read Piaget.” She placed another book on top of the Gesell, The Origin of Intelligence in the Child.  “I think if you just read these two, you’ll get a good idea of how to start thinking about all this. Or even if that’s what you want to do. But whatever you do, I know you be great at it. You are so lucky, you have the ability to do anything you want. Just be sure you make good choices.”

[?It was like] Mike’s mother saw something in me I didn’t even know was there. “Oh, this is great, I can’t wait to read them.Thank you.” Then I remembered the recommendation. “I’ll make sure you get the form for Radcliffe. Mike’s coming over tomorrow, he can bring it back, I guess.”

After dinner, we watched a Christmas special with Perry Como for an hour. Upstairs, I got to use Sheila’s room for the night. It was larger than Mike’s and had an old four-poster bed with antique furniture to match. “This is all from my parent’s room at the farm where I grew up,” G explained as she found fluffed the pillows and fussed with the sheets. “I hope you’ll be comfortable. The bathroom’s right around the corner. There’s only one, so we have to take turns.” Mike’s room was across the small central hall at the top of the stairs; his parents slept in a larger room next to his.

I put my bag down on the cedar chest at the foot of the bed, and walked across the hall to sit with Mike at his desk. “Your mom said she’d write me a recommendation for Radcliffe. I don’t know, I feel a little funny about that. She doesn’t really know me. Does she really count as a “personal or family friend’?”

“She’s always asking me about you.”

“What do you say? What does she say?”

“Oh, I don’t tell her much, just what you do at school, where you live, your parents and sister, how you like the New Yorker, movies, plays. Nothing about us.”

“I know. Mothers love to pry, don’t they?”

We chatted a bit more that Christmas night. He opened up the window over the garage, the one with a little flat space on the roof outside, where he would sit sometimes, just to be alone. We both crawled over the bookcase built into the wall below, squeezing into the nook which was not really big enough for one. Knees drawn up, cuddling close, he wrapped his arms around me while I squeezed him tight around his waist. He buried his face in my hair. I was glad I’d washed it that morning.

Even our combined body heat wasn’t enough to keep us out there more than five minutes. We struggled back inside, and I returned to Sheila’s room. Once in my floor length caftan-style flannel nightgown – white with small red flowers – I crawled into the double four-poster bed. I felt myself drifting away, open to the state of mind Mike called a “nobrieism”, what you have when you are still awake, just before falling asleep, and your mind seems to be starting to dream. I sensed him lying next to me, stroking the soft flannel over my back. I jerked fully awake, and found myself alone.

********

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

Christmas day was always a bit depressing at the Stein house. If it were on a Saturday, we could hide out at the synagogue, otherwise the lack of traffic and the sounds of merriment from the gentiles all around us reminded me that, at certain times like this, we very clearly did not fit in. So I jumped at the chance when Mike invited me to go to the Krohn Conservatory for his family’s annual venture into Eden Park. We sat in the back of his parents’ blue Buick Le Sabre station wagon.

“Where’s Sheila,” I asked, when I noticed it was just the two of us back there.

His father answered, “She’s in Idaho.” That seemed to be all he was going to say on the subject, so his mother added, “She’s spending winter break at Sun Valley, working in the cafeteria and skating in the ice show. We’ve gone out in August several times since 1962, for the ice skating. The last two years, she’s spent the summer there, and met some people who convinced her to come in the winter and learn to ski. She’s growing up so fast.”

“How’s she doing at school, in St. Louis, right?” I asked

“Oh, she’s well-settled in. She joined a sorority, something she never got to do at AHS. They have an annual competition among them, putting on variety shows. She’s so talented. She helped write the songs, and choreographed the dance team.” Mike’s mother was very proud of her daughter, but I hadn’t yet heard her praise her son.

“She’s a cheerleader there. They do all the St. Louis Cardinals’ games. We went to see one last month,” his father chimed in.

“Cardinals?” I wondered. “They have cheerleaders at baseball games.”

“No, football. It’s the St. Louis football Cardinals,” Mike added with a touch of disdain in his voice I hoped only I could hear.

We passed under the new Expressway, then right past Avondale High School. This prompted Mike’s mother to ask, “Mike says you’re having another good year at school? Are you finding yourself?”

I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but then I remembered: She’s a psychologist. One who’s interested in child development. She’s probably wondering how my development is going.. With that in mind, I said, “I think I’m ready to move on. It’s lots of fun, being a senior, and in charge of everything. But high school is starting to seem small. And Cincinnati, my mother has always said, ‘It’s a great place to grow up, but I don’t think you want to live here, do you?’ I’m looking forward to getting back east, to going to school near Boston and New York, being able to see museums and plays more often, things like that.”

She turned around to face me, smiled, and said, “Good for you, Janie.”

We arrived at the giant greenhouse that was the conservatory. Through the glass panels which cover the walls and roof, Christmas lights sparkled, refracting on the water droplets forming there. I remembered, plants breath, they emit oxygen and water from photosynthesis. One of the many many little facts I’d crammed into my brain at school, I mused. How does my brain do that, I wondered, why do I remember stuff and recall it so much more easily than most people?

We wandered around, reading all the little signs in front of each plant, finally ending up at a giant Christmas tree reaching to the top of the central dome. It was covered with paper cut-outs of angels, donkeys, Virgin Marys with shawls over their heads, all made, so a sign in front proclaimed, by the children of various elementary schools. I felt like folding a blue six-pointed star and hiding it in the branches.

Outside, Mike’s parents took a little stroll around the park while we gravitated towards the giant swing set. He shouted, “Watch!” as he pumped his legs and flew higher and higher with each oscillation, almost reaching the horizontal until, finally, at the very apex of a swing, he flew off, leaning slightly forward, and landed far in front, feet first, knees bent then standing bolt upright. “Come on, go ahead, JUMP!” he hollered.

I was swinging much more gently, afraid of heights, or anything physically taxing, really. I had a skirt on, and tried not to let it slide up too far, even though I had on tights, not nylons. I tried a dainty little leap from four feet high. He ran to catch me before I fell. “That’s so much fun,” he exhilarated. “Didn’t you ever do that when you were a kid?” I watched as he flew off a few more times, trying to beat his previous height and distance each time. I was sure he’d break his leg, but he landed perfectly, with ease. He seemed to revel in his body, in the fun it could produce. I didn’t know if I could match that with him, ever enter that sanctuary.

We sat down on a bench overlooking the Ohio River, the low, late afternoon winter solstice sun weakly sparkling on the muddy flow below.

“Isn’t this where people come to watch the submarine races?” I asked sarcastically.

“Subm…wait, they don’t have submarines in the river. Do they?”

I couldn’t tell if he were kidding. He often had a dry sense of humor, and gave no clue in his expression when he was using it. “I don’t believe you. What d’ya mean?” he challenged.

“This is where people go to make out in their cars. You didn’t know that? Somebody’ll say, ‘What did you do last night.’ Then, “Oh, we went to watch the submarine races in Eden Park’.”

He pondered this, saying nothing. Finally, scratching his cheek, he mused, “I don’t think that’s the kind of people we are.”

“What kind of people are we, then?”

Again, a long pause. Finally, “I don’t think you – we – live moment to moment. You always act like you know where you’re going, what you want. You wanted to help run the Student Council, ran for office, and you won. You wanted to be on Five Fingers, and you are. You wanted to be debate team cheerleaders, you made time cards, you showed up, and you never made fun of us. You want to go to school back east, to the best place, and you will. You can find fun, I think, in so many little things, like watching a play, or walking on the beach. You don’t need submarine races, you just need time.”

“What do you want, Mike?”

“Um…wait, I told you, you tell me what you think I want, OK?

Now it was my turn to think. “Well, here’s what I know. You are the most self-directed person I know. You might be oblivious to this, but lots of people find you scary, unapproachable because of that. Girls talk, and they ask me, they wonder, what I see in you. I tell them, that man has a heart, he has a soul, he knows where he’s going, and nobody’s going to stop him. He may act like he doesn’t want anybody to touch him, like he has no personality, but he sees the world so clearly, and he can tell me about it so well, I don’t mind following.

“Sometimes, though…sometimes…” I hesitated, afraid I was about to say something he might not like. Then I remembered that first rule he’d told Marc, the night of the party when we walked forever, when I first began to use the word “love” as I thought about Michael Harrison: “Always be honest.”

I went on. “I think you get so wrapped up in yourself, you can’t see anyone…can’t see me…anymore. It hurts, because I want you to see me, see all of me, the whole me. The scared little girl I used to be. The one who thinks she has to be better than all the boys around her, has to do twice as much just to get half of what she wants. School is easy for us, but life…life, it’s not something you can learn from a book or a lecture. Life has to be lived, and I wasn’t to live it. Right now, I want to live it with you, but I also want to live it with me, from me, from what I see.” It sounded so confusing, but that’s what I felt, sitting there with him on the bench that evening, confused and wondering who we were, where each of us would go. I remembered my sister’s advice, when she told me about boys: “When in doubt, Janie, ask him a question.”

“You wrote me about that rush week at the start of school, going to see all the fraternities. What was that like?”

He signed, maybe a bit relieved, and launched into “Everybody had to go, we were in groups of, I don’t know, maybe 15 or so? There was a schedule, and all of us trooped into the house together, we had maybe 15 minutes to make an impression on whichever upper classman grabbed us at the door. Most of what I learned, I got from the others in my group as we walked down the street, as we waited for out turn to go in. Each house had a personality, it seemed. ADP, they were the jocks, the football team. Beta Theta Pi, they were the big men on campus. Psi Up, the really rich preppies, tri-Delts the conceited go-getters, another Alpha house which was for writer, KNK had the rejects, and there was even a house for non-conformists. They didn’t have greek letters, used a Latin phrase instead: Esse Quam Videri.”

“Be, rather than seem,” I murmured

He nodded. At AHS, everyone took Latin graded 7-9.

“So did you choose one? Did they choose you? How did that work?”

“Well, you could sign up for three, in order. The houses also made a list, of who they wanted. Some committee somewhere tried t match it all up. But there are only enough fraternities for about 1/3rd of the class, so maybe half the people who wanted to get in one, didn’t. I knew I wasn’t really a fraternity kind of guy. I’m younger than everyone else, I’m not really a jock, not a football player at least. I’m from the Midwest, not New England, my family’s not rich, I didn’t go to prep school. But I didn’t want to be left out. So I listed what I thought were the three worst: EQV, KNK, and the writers’ one. Nobody took me.”

“How did that make you feel?” He didn’t act at all bothered, now about getting left out, but it must have hurt, even a perennial optimist like Mike.

“Yeah, it hurt at first. I didn’t cry or anything, but it made me think a little about something one of the guys in my rush group as we were walking from there Beta house to the tri-Delts. Something like, ‘I wake up every morning feeling like I made a bad choice of motel for the night.’ He got into the writers’ fraternity – obviously he knew about metaphors.”

“So it that how you felt, at first, like you didn’t fit in there?”

“No, I don’t think so. See, all the freshmen are in the same dorms, we have our own dining room, and we take a lot of the same class, like Humanities, and for the guys going to med school, Cell Biology. I saw the same people over and over, a lot of them just like to talk, and sharing the same experiences, it was easy to be a part of that. Then in November, there was swimming, and another group to feel a part of. It’s so small there, you know, maybe 350 in a year, fourteen to fifteen hundred overall, that there’s always someone you know you can talk to wherever you go. It’s why I wanted to go to a small school, not even one the size of Harvard or Yale. I thought I might get lost in a place like that. And a school like UC or Ohio State, I just can’t imagine.”

“Same here. I’ve just about got my applications done. It’s gonna be Barnard, Smith, Wellesley, and Radcliffe.”

“Which one is your safe school,” he said playfully.

“My sister tells me ‘You don’t need no stinking safe school.’ I hope she’s right. Now, I’m the big fish in a backwater pond…”

“But AHS has a reputation, we’re not some po-dunk place, we’re just as good as Shaker Heights, New Trier, Bronx High School of Science, Boston Latin, aren’t we?”

“But we’re not a prep school. You know what that’s like, it’s all buddy-buddy, I don’t have an in like that.”

“My mother went to Radcliffe, she could write you a recommendation, couldn’t she?”

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

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

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

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

“We?”

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

“What did we talk about?” I laughed.

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

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

“The best.”

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

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

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

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

While Mike sat on the bed, I took a [Leigh what do you call those bags that clothes come in from the store, like Nordstrom’s would be a dress or suit in. The most informal term possible] from my closet. I yanked the zipper down, and carefully extracted a wool suit, dark tan. “Wanna see me in it?” When he nodded yes, I went on, “Well, you’ll have to give me a couple of minutes to change, then.” He didn’t budge, so I added, “Um, wait in the hall, OK?”

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

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

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

“Huh? What’s that?” Mike blurted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’d heard other girls talking about the boys they went out with, how they were always asking to “go farther”. I wondered why I never felt that sense of urgency from him, especially since he’d gone away to college, where parents weren’t around and restraints were gone. He seemed content, happy, maybe even overwhelmed just by what we were doing. I was very relieved by this unspoken attitude, as one of my biggest fears once I found myself growing physically from girl to woman, was having to submit to a boy’s physical advances, just to get his love. It seemed wrong, unfair. I was every bit as smart and capable as any boy I knew at school, and didn’t want someone else to rule my life or desires. With Mike, I was sure we were equals, in every way.

********