An American Tune

by Barbara Shoup

  “I was there,” Jane said, quietly. “I wasn’t protesting, but I will be next time. I agree with them. I think the war is wrong.”

  “Do you?” he said.

  She’d looked at his piggy little face, remembering how he had always had something critical to say about Bobby. Why didn’t he play sports? Why did he run around with those hoodlums? Why didn’t he clean the grime and oil out from underneath his fingernails? And get a decent haircut?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I do.”

  He snorted. “So, now you’re in college you know more than a President and a Congress full of men who’ve studied foreign policy all their lives.”

  “I have a right to my opinion,” she said. “In case you’ve forgotten, that’s what this country is supposed to be about. You think the war is so great, go ahead and think it. That’s your right. Go ahead and send your own boys when they get old enough and see what you think when they come home dead, like Bobby did.”

  “Bert,” Aunt Helen said, stricken. “Please. Now’s not the time.” She took his arm, hurried him into the kitchen.

  “Timing is not the problem,” Jane called after them. “The problem is, it’s immoral what we’re doing in Vietnam, and if you’re too blind, too goddamn smug to see it, God help you. God help you all.”

  She had realized, suddenly, that she was shouting. All around her, there was a shocked silence. For a long moment, she stared into the roomful of people, most of whom she’d known since childhood. Her own parents and sisters, who looked at her as if she were a stranger.

  Then she turned and left, Tom and Bridget in her wake.

  “Asshole,” Bridget said, brimming with righteous anger. “Let’s get Jane’s stuff and get the hell out of here.”

  “He was wrong to say it,” Tom said, quietly. “But – Jane, are you okay? Do you want to go back?”

  “No,” she said. “I can’t.”

  Tom and Bridget had come straight to the funeral, now Jane gave directions to her house – her voice so quiet and small that, more than once, Tom had to ask her to repeat them.

  “Are you okay?” he asked again.

  She didn’t answer.

  She hoped he would think grief had stolen her voice. But it wasn’t grief, or not only that. Was it possible to be ashamed of being ashamed? If so, that was how she had felt turning into her neighborhood that day, seeing it through Tom and Bridget’s eyes. Cracker-box houses falling into disrepair, scruffy kids watching the passage of the unfamiliar car, nicer than any other on the street. The gratitude she felt knowing her neighbors were all at the funeral and would not come out to say, again, how sorry they were about Bobby. This was where she had come from, the secret she’d kept all this time.

  “No,” she said when Tom offered to go in with her to get her suitcase. “Really, I’m fine.” What had they said to each other in the few moments she was gone?

  God. Poor Jane.

  I had no idea . . .

  No wonder . . .

  She still couldn’t bear to consider it.

  She went home for Christmas; what else could she do? But it made her feel crazy listening to her mother speak of Bobby’s sacrifice; she was hurt by her sisters’ cool indifference toward her, shocked by the medicine bottles of whiskey she found under the front seat of the car, tucked between the sofa cushions, in the toe of her father’s worn leather slipper – and returned to Bloomington the first moment she could get away.

  In the next weeks – the body count rising, the film footage of the Tet Offensive playing relentlessly on the evening news, the threatened escalation of troops – despair threatened to paralyze her. If she didn’t act – do something, anything.

  The thought frightened her. The gap between herself and her family was unbridgeable, she could be of no help to them now, but she could work to stop the war that had taken Bobby from them. So she joined SDS and, with Bridget, spent every spare moment manning information tables in the Union, trudging dorm-to-dorm in the freezing weather, working for peace. When Dow Chemical came again in March, they stood in protest, held lit matches to the cloth doll the demonstrators set on fire to mourn all the real children burned by Dow’s napalm in Vietnam.

  Tom went to the demonstration with them, but he wouldn’t join the group, and his acceptance to law school in the spring further strained his already touchy relationship with Bridget.

  “It’s guys like you who need to stand up,” she said. “Get drafted and refuse to go – instead of ducking into law school to save your ass from Vietnam.”

  “I always planned to go to law school,” he said. “But, you know what? If it keeps me out of Vietnam in the process, I’m fine with that. My guess is you’d feel the same way if you really had to put yourself on the line. But you don’t, do you? You don’t want to admit that the only way to make anything happen is from the inside, either.”

  “Inside,” Bridget sputtered. “Inside is the fucking Pentagon. Like anything’s ever going to change there. Inside, you’re them. Inside – remember? ‘We’ve met the enemy and he is us?’ ”

  Jane could see both sides. But if she agreed with a point one made it felt like betraying the other, so mostly she sat in silence, longing for a domestic peace that seemed, increasingly, as unlikely to occur as peace in Vietnam.

  The assassination of Martin Luther King, then Bobby Kennedy in June, had heightened Bridget’s resolve, but by then Jane was exhausted and so downhearted that she was incapable of doing anything but the most necessary tasks. Lying in the bedroom she shared with Tom, she could hear Tom and Bridget arguing about her.

  “Now’s no time to stop,” Bridget said. “Aren’t you watching the fucking news?”

  “I don’t give a shit about the news. I give a shit about Jane.”

  “Like I don’t? She’ll feel better if she does something. Anything.”

  “She’ll feel better if you stop trying to make her feel personally responsible about Vietnam.”

  “Oh. Fine. So we all just forget about all that and go out and have some fun.”

  “What’s wrong with having some fun?” Tom said. “It’s not the worst idea I’ve heard.”

  Fun. It seemed like part of a completely different life, one Jane could barely remember. Yet, suddenly, she longed for it, longed to be with Tom as they had been before all this sadness.

  In late July, Pete pulled up in his Corvette. He’d flown in from San Francisco, stayed in Indianapolis just long enough to have a big blow-up with both parents, then headed for Bloomington to spend the rest of his leave.

  “I know. I was a dumb shit,” he said cheerfully. “Like the Army was going to be better than studying. It was brutal, man. You can’t even imagine.” He put his arm around Bridget, drew her close. “When it got bad, I’d think of you, Bridge,” he said. “All you guys. I’d think, if I get the fuck out of here I am changing my ways.”

  They had one conversation about the war, in which Bridget set out to convince him that, having been there, having seen the senselessness and destruction firsthand, it was his obligation to join those trying to end it.

  “I don’t give a flying fuck about the war,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, it is over. I’m serious, man. I don’t even want to talk about it. I won’t.”

  “Pete –”

  But the look on his face quieted her and, to Jane’s surprise, she didn’t mention the war again.

  She quit her job to be with him. She had money in the bank, enough to tide her over until he had to go. Plus, Jane knew, her parents would give her more if she ran out; disconcerted by her stubborn independence, they were constantly begging her to tell them what she needed, pleased at any opportunity to take care of her. The two of them were inseparable while he was there. They played. Evenings, they’d sit out on the porch drinking beer, listening to the radio, singing along. Late at night, Jane could hear them making love.

  On the last day of Pete’s leave, they drove out to Bean Blossom – Pete and Bridget in the Corvette, Jane and Tom
in the MG. It was a Monday, the park they liked to visit empty, and they unloaded their picnic at the place by the lake where they used to go. They swam awhile. Laughed, remembering the girl, someone’s girlfriend – what was her name? The one whose pet boa constrictor lived under the dashboard of her Volkswagen Bug.

  And that Hairy Buffalo the first spring after they’d met: every kind of liquor and cocktail mix poured into a new metal trash can and served up in big Dairy Queen cups, deceptively fruity, but in fact so potent that both Pete and Bridget had passed out on the roof of the shelter, where they’d climbed on a lark. Tom found them, finally – after everyone at the party had searched nearly an hour and had begun to fear something terrible had happened to them.

  “I was scared to death you guys had drowned,” Jane said.

  Pete grinned. “You were scared to death of everything,” he said. “Man, I still remember lying up there, drunk out of my mind, looking at the stars.”

  They ate the picnic lunch Bridget had spent hours making: a vast amount of fried chicken, four kinds of salad. “Fucking Donna Reed,” Pete teased, pouring from the Thermos of fresh-squeezed lemonade.

  When they’d eaten the strawberry shortcake she made from scratch, they threw themselves on the quilts they’d spread out on the grass. Jane was tired; she’d worked a double shift the day before. She closed her eyes and felt the sun on her skin, felt her wet hair drying. Tom lay beside her, not touching her, but she felt preternaturally aware of him, as if her body had lost all its edges. She breathed in the clean scent of the water.

  No one spoke. There was just the sound of water lapping at the edges of the lake, a slight breeze rustling in the trees, an occasional birdcall. Odd, she thought, listening to the faint whistle of her own breath. It grew louder, intensifying so that soon what she heard with each breath was like a scream. And her breath itself seemed strange, alive, moving through the tunnel of her body to billow out into the atmosphere, drifting and tangling in the trees above her. She opened her eyes and saw it, like you’d see your breath in cold weather – except it had a pinkish hue. She could see the veins on the leaves, the slivers of green light holding the leaves to the trees by some kind of magic.

  She’d read Proust in a literature class last semester, and she might have thought that what she was experiencing was the kind of waking dream he described – but she was absolutely, fully awake. Her eyes open. Her breath, the veins on the leaves, the slivers of light were real, there.

  What’s happening to me, she thought, with some alarm. She wanted her breath back. It scared her, way up there in the trees. She sat straight up, as if to go after it. Then she caught sight of Pete watching her, watching them all – and she knew.

  “It’s acid, isn’t it?” she said. “You put acid in the Thermos.”

  He smiled, slyly. “Go with it, Jane,” he said. “Nice little hit of Blue Cheer from the Haight. Consider it a farewell gift.”

  She looked at her hands, which had begun to shake – from the acid or from fear of it, she couldn’t tell. “You asshole,” she said. “You don’t just – decide something like that for people.” She stood, wobbly on her feet, and began to gather their things until Tom took her hand and pulled her back to the blanket beside him.

  “We can’t go now. I can’t drive like this.” He put his arms around her. “Calm down, okay? I’m right here; I’ll stay here with you. But Jesus fucking Christ,” he said to Pete. “It was a dumb-shit thing to do. Jane’s right. You don’t just –”

  “Hey, lighten up,” Pete said. “You’re not in law school yet.”

  Jane felt Tom’s whole body clench, and for a moment she thought he might go after Pete. Instead, he closed his eyes and sat perfectly still for a long moment. Then said, “Bridge? Are you okay?”

  “Groovy,” she said.

  “Seriously,” Pete said. “Don’t sweat it, man. It’s just . . . more of everything. That’s all. Good trip, bad trip – you decide. Come on. Bridge –”

  He held out his hand and she took it, glancing back at Tom and Jane as they walked toward the woods together.

  Jane watched. Color bloomed and pulsed around Bridget as they went, absorbing her so completely that Jane was simultaneously awestruck, broken-hearted, and aware that Bridget had simply disappeared into the trees. What was Tom seeing, she wondered? She might have asked, except for the thought that followed: What is he ever seeing? Could it be that, even without acid, the world looked completely different to each one of them?

  A wave of loneliness engulfed her, only slightly assuaged when she and Tom lay back on the quilt, wrapped in each other’s arms. She concentrated on breathing evenly, trying to ignore the whistle of her breath, the ominous thud-thud of her heart. If she closed her eyes, bright, quivering strings of matter grew from the darkness, drifting into patterns that collapsed into themselves again and again, as if someone were turning a kaleidoscope inside her head.

  It frightened her. But it was a kind of kaleidoscope she understood. What terrified her was to open her eyes and watch the sun shatter and fall into the lake – because, with that, came the sudden apprehension that the lake, the woods – the whole physical world as she had known it till that moment – was just one pebble in some cosmic kaleidoscope of what was real. Twist it and you would tunnel through the void to patterns of being that negated – or expanded beyond comprehension – everything you’d always believed life to be.

  This was something she did not want to know or even think about. The slow, earnest accumulation of hours leading to the teaching degree she’d staked her whole life on suddenly seemed pointless, absurd. The happiness she imagined it would earn for her no more than an illusion.

  Don’t think, she told herself. Yet in this new universe, thought was the only recognizable thing and she clung to it like a life raft. How strange that she could look at the bird pecking at the remains of their picnic lunch and see in the fold of its black feathers the very essence of flight – and at the same time think, I’m okay. If I just stay calm, I’m going to be all right.

  Later, at home, Tom lost himself until nearly dark washing, then waxing his car. He was thinking, Jane knew, watching him from the kitchen window. Waxing the car was what he always did when he needed to think – in this case, probably about how to deal with Pete.

  “He needs to grow up,” he’d said on the way home. “And so does Bridget. She knew about the acid. I’d bet money on it.”

  “No,” Jane said, shocked. “She wouldn’t –” But then she stopped, because there was a pretty good chance he was right. “Well, if she did, Pete talked her into it. He’s so . . . I hate the way she always thinks she has to please him. How she’s not herself when she’s with him.”

  Tom glanced at her. “You don’t always . . . see Bridget,” he said. “She’s your best friend, I know; it’s cool how close you are. But I’ve known Bridget forever, I know her whole family – and, the truth is, she’s not that different from Pete, really. It’s just, what she wants plays out nicer – or has till now. She wants to save people. She thinks she can save Pete.”

  “She saved me,” Jane said. She remembered Bridget appearing in her doorway that first day, claiming her, how every single good thing in her life had happened to her since had been born of that moment.

  “Bullshit,” Tom said. “You saved yourself. If you needed to be saved, which I don’t think you did. Hey, I’m not saying Bridget isn’t a great person. She is. Jesus, she’s got a huge heart. But she’s used to getting what she wants – and she wants Pete. She’s been living in a fucking fantasy world since he got here, she’s conveniently forgotten about how he ended up in Vietnam in the first place. She needs to cut him loose, get over him, live her life. But she won’t do it. She won’t listen to anyone. She never does.”

  Now Jane ranged around the house, worrying that they shouldn’t have left the park without making sure that Pete and Bridget were okay. It was nearly nine when Pete pulled up in the Corvette and the two of them spilled out into the yard
.

  Through the open window, Jane heard them call out to Tom. But he ignored them.

  “What’s he being such a tight-ass for?” Pete asked, when they came inside. “Come on, Jane. It was far out, right? Beautiful. And now here we all are at home, cozy as bugs.” He grinned, stretched his arms, cat-like, above his head. “I’m racking out, man,” he said. “Bridge?”

  Bridget waved him away. “You go. I think I’ll sit out here awhile with Jane.” She plopped into a kitchen chair, closed her eyes and heaved a deep sigh. “Whoa! Was that some kind of amazing shit, or what?” she said, after he’d gone.

  Jane didn’t answer.

  “Okay,” Bridget said. “I know I shouldn’t have let him do it. I’m sorry. But, seriously –”

  “It scared the crap out of me,” Jane said.

  Bridget opened her eyes, alarmed. “You’re okay, though, aren’t you? Jane?”

  “Yeah. I’m okay.” Jane sat down beside her. “Bridget. The problem is, Pete’s not okay. He wouldn’t have done that if he were okay. He wouldn’t have asked you to do it. We’d never dropped acid before. How did he know one of us wouldn’t totally freak out?”

  “But we didn’t,” Bridget said.

  “So what?” Jane said.

  Bridget shrugged. “I said, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let Pete talk me into it. Love makes you stupid, I guess. I mean, what if Tom had asked you?”

  “Tom would never ask me to do something like that. He’d never do it himself. You know that.”

  “Of course.” Bridget held up her hands in surrender. “Tom: always the good Boy Scout.”

  Jane flinched, as if she’d been slapped. “I can’t believe you’d say that.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Bridget said. “I love Tom. I love you and Tom together. But, you know, Jane, I don’t want what you want. I don’t want that kind of – comfort. Shit,” she said, crying now. “Not like it even feels like I can choose. I just fucking love Pete, and I always will. The more he fucks up, the more it hurts, the more I think loving him is what I’m supposed to do. The more I think he needs me.”