Triblog

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

October 12, Columbus Day, we had off. Since it was a holiday, long-distance rates were low, like on Saturday nights or Sundays. I bargained with my father for a 10 minute call to Connecticut. “It’s only two dollars today, it’s a holiday. I can pay you from my allowance.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Was there ever any doubt?” he asked.

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

“Anybody else I know? Lizzie?”

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

“How’s that make you feel?”

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

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

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

“We went to Boston last weekend…”

“We?”

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

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

“Fun?” I wondered.

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

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

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

“How are you getting back? When?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s not demand so much of every single moment.

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

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

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

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

“His father decided, No, he had to show he was doing OK before he got it. I think he said he’d drive it back Thanksgiving.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But with letters, and maybe a fleeting long-distance call once a month, we kept our bond, trying to keep the bridge between us intact. His third Saturday night away, he called at 9 PM.

I wanted to sound cheerful, upbeat, even though hearing his voice tore into my chest with longing. It’s hard to hug a telephone. I went for the familiar. “You’re going to join the swimming team?”

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

“What about your classes,. are you learning what you thought you would?”

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

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

“Ummm…” He seemed to be grumbling. “How about you? Are you going to the football games?”

“What? Are you kidding?”

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

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

“So…?”

“It’s Yom Kippur. We had to eat early last night, then fast all day. I even went to synagogue. We just finished dinner tonight. I’m sure I ate too much.”

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

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

“You sins?”

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

“The only sin I asked forgiveness for was falling in love with a goyim.”

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

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

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

I almost stifled a laugh, which came out a giggle, followed by “I love you. Good-bye”

“Bye.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But you got a letter?!” I asked with real incredulity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We were smiling, laughing, that afternoon under the sun, but I couldn’t lose the dread I felt, at losing to college this boy I had just begun to see as mine. He was the first person, ever, who had broken through my veneer. Or maybe the first one I had let break in. It didn’t matter. I’d gone after him, I wanted him, I didn’t want to lose him, but keeping him in my life seemed frightful as well. It was scary, any way I looked. “He’s going away to college, he’ll forget about me, he’ll find another girl at one of those mixers, I’ll lose him forever,” went one fantasy. “He loves me, he completes me, I’ll lose me,” went the other. I didn’t know how much I should let him see either side, see me clinging or see me pushing away. I was frozen, and he knew nothing about it. I had to let it out.

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

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

Sitting on the lounge chairs his father had built, under the dogwood tree, he handed me another onion skin paper. “I don’t know, this came out this morning. I read it, it helped me. I don’t know why I say things this way, that’s just the way it works with me, I think.

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

TO JANIE, ON MY DEARTURE

I’m leaving;

I’ll be back, we know that is true;

But when I return will you still be you?

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

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

To me:

my love.

Into my lines I’ve injected my life,

The tear-bought joy you’ve carried my way

On the wings of your smiles

To me.

Smiling again? 

Showing your rareness of spirit.

Leaving.

But returning I am in the midst

Of the brown-golden leaves that fall

On the snow, newly-planted by unknown foes

Of our sorrow.

Stay with me then, in spirit and soul,

For without you I’ll never be whole.

Hear me, S. Jane: Don’t feel small;

Whatever you do, search for yourself

And see me.

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

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

[Reader beware: this is a first draft, and certainly subject to minor and major revision before the book is finished]

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

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

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

Your hair:

The falling graces

Of its beauty

Cascading to my soul.

The other pretty much sums up what I think he was trying to tell me that first summer we spent apart: Do you know/What happiness is?/Have you felt/The joy to forgive?/Can you taste/The nectar of love?/Life is not/A search for eternal pleasure,/Or a pain to be endured./Life is/What you make it;/The fullness which you lead yourself/In a striving to be free:/Free to feel a fear,/Free to cry a tear;/Free – /To make of yourself/What you can/Or accept a helping hand./But only if you need it./Seek out life/And you’ll see its beauty;/Meditate alone,/And your soul grows rusty,/Rusted by the waters of your isolation,/Rusted until you can’t accept/What others have to offer.

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

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

“Hi, it’s Janie.”

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

“Do you want to come over? I’ve still got to unpack, but we can talk, maybe walk around here, or go over to the park?”

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

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

“I got my room assignment from Wesleyan,” he announced. “They assign freshman roommates. Mine’s some guy from Newton, outside of Boston. Peter Martin. He was on the football team in high school.”

“What kind of rooms do you get?” 

“What I saw when I was there last year was, it’s a double room, with two beds and built-in dressers in one, and then a study room with two desks in the other. Bathrooms are down the hall, maybe 20, 30 guys on a floor.”

“Do you know what classes you’re going to take yet?”
“Well, everybody has to take Humanities…”

“What’s that,” I interjected.

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

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

“And foreign language, they’ve got a requirement you need two years’ college equivalent in high school. But they have a test, an interview, and if you pass, you can get out of it. That’s be great, it would free up time for other stuff I want to take, like psychology and literature classes. Then there’s math. Even though I got a 4 on the Calculus AP test, I have to take it again there. They don’t think that’s good enough. But I get credits for both histories, and biology. So I take Cell Biology right away.”

“What do you have to take to get into med school?”

“I started looking into that. There’s only five things you have to have: Biology, Inorganic and Organic Chemistry, Calculus, and Physics. So I’m doing three of those this year, get them done right away, cause I want to have time for things that make you think, not all that hard science, before I get slammed with it in medical school.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a plan.”

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

“I  feel the same way, about colleges.”

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

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

“What about Lizzie?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What happened.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

I grabbed him, for a big, long hug, there in the parking lot in front of all those people I did not know but did not care if they knew about us.

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

He’s sent all his poems, numbered 1-46, typed on that crinkly onion skin paper, each dated and most of them timed. The cover letter read, in part

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

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

My birthday was on a Wednesday. Mike and I went out to another Hollywood movie that Friday at the downtown RKO Palace theater. I wanted to see “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.” It starred Theodore Bikel, whom I’d seen when I was a kid in The Sound of Music with Mary Martin, and was about a Russian submarine run aground on “a New England island,” supposedly off the coast of Massachusetts. I wanted to see if they’d actually filmed it on Martha’s Vineyard.

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

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

“Mendocino?”

“Yeah, that’s in California.”

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

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

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

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

I extracted and unfolded a shiny piece of onion-skin paper from the unsealed envelope. It was prefaced “#34 May 21, 1966. 12:50 P.M.” Typed below:

TO JANIE, ON HER SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY

So.

You’re seventeen.

It doesn’t seem right,

Somehow;

For you to be seventeen,

I mean.

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

Everyone knows it’ll come with the sun,

In the summer:

You’ll be seventeen,

At last.

For you’ll have grown,

And I’ll have grown;

We’ll have grown

Apart.

********

The first two weeks of June, Mike was busy with graduation as well as trying to find a job for the summer. We only got together once, on the Saturday before the end of school. He picked me up, and we drove to his house.  Walking in, he informed me, “I’ve got to get my final paper for American History finished, Can you give me a few minutes while I type it out? It’s all done, but I’ve got another due for English tomorrow, so…” 

His mother, whom I hadn’t met yet, had come to the front door when she heard the car pull up. She grabbed my hand with both of hers, smiling as if with relief. “Janie? We’re glad you’re here.” She guided me into their small den as Mike raced upstairs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I grew up on a farm, in Iowa. My father was a physician, but he got tuberculosis, and wanted to be someplace that might be healthier. He wasn’t a very good farmer, though, and I think it made him a little bit angry. I also think he was disappointed not having a son. My sister is older, so when I came along, he was all ready with boys’ names, but not girls’, and he never let me forget that. He never made me act like a boy not anything like that, but he didn’t treat me, or my sister, with the respect I saw him give even the farm hands. My mother, the same way. We, the three of us, talked about that a lot when he wasn’t around, about what made men act like they could lord it over women, that we couldn’t grow up, say, to be a doctor like he was. I think that’s what made me start wondering about why people do what they do, and about how to help people change themselves.”

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

“So how did you finally become a psychologist?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday night, we went downtown, to a real restaurant and a real movie theatre, what felt to me like a real date. Afterwards, we tried kissing again on the doorstop. This time, it seemed like we knew what we were doing. We hung on a little longer, each using both our arms this time to explore the other.

This time, he came in afterwards. We sat down on the couch, just looking at each other, holding hands. I knew my mom and dad were still up, my dad reading and smoking in the den behind closed, glass-paneled french doors, partially hidden by the grand piano we’d bought for Eddie when he started showing some talent. Mom breezed in, her usual open smile broadening a bit when she saw us. She looked like she was going to sit on the comfy chair next to us, the leather one with dark red fabric draping over the arms. She seemed to think better of it, and remained standing while she started to gently grill Michael. He dropped my hand when she asked, “Janie says you’re going to Amherst next fall?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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