“But he’s not good for you,” Jane said. “He only cares about himself.”
“So what? So what? Could we just not talk about this anymore? Please. You don’t have any idea how I feel about Pete. I don’t think you can have.”
“Why? Because you think I love Tom less?” Jane asked.
Bridget didn’t answer.
“Okay,” Jane said. “So you love Pete in a way I can never understand – and that means his idiotic idea to put acid in the lemonade didn’t freak you out at all?”
“Actually, not that much,” Bridget said. “If you think about it, the freaky thing is that we never dropped acid until now.”
Jane comforted her when Pete left the next morning, but both she and Tom were glad to see him go. “I’ll write,” he promised Bridget. But she didn’t hear from him – and on Labor Day weekend, Tom got a call from Pete’s father. He was AWOL from the Army, he said. Had Tom heard from him? Did he have any idea at all where Pete was, what he might be thinking?
“No,” Tom said. “No idea at all.”
8
“Everybody’s Talkin’ ”
Jane drove a half-hour each morning in the winter darkness to get to the elementary school where she’d been assigned to do her student teaching – beyond the outskirts of Bloomington into the country, passing farmhouses with lights twinkling inside, a little roadside church, fields and copses, black ponds holding the morning moon. Entering the old brick school, she breathed in the scent of floor wax, chalk dust, paper, and was, for an instant, entering the grade school of her childhood, the one place she had ever felt she truly belonged. The first morning, she had regarded the classroom full of second graders who sat, hands folded on their desks, curious and expectant, and something settled in her. She had known she wanted to be a teacher from her first day in school, but this was a whole new kind of knowing. Like stepping into herself.
The sound of pages turning, the scratch of pencils on paper, the ping of the old radiators brought back the comfort and happiness she had felt in school as a child, the approval of teachers, the small kindnesses that made her believe she might be worthy of their attention. Each morning she watched the school buses lumber in like big yellow animals, her heart opening to whatever the day would bring.
She adored her supervisory teacher, Mrs. Thompson, a maternal, gray-haired lady in her fifties whose common sense and dry wit frequently snapped things into perspective. “There are really only three things you need to know about teaching,” she told Jane during their first meeting. “One, be over-prepared. Two, don’t get overwhelmed by what you don’t have time to teach them. Choose what’s possible and necessary to teach and teach it well. And third –” She smiled. “You loved school when you were a little girl, right?”
Jane nodded.
“So, think about the class you went through school with. How many people in it loved school like you did?”
“Not very many,” Jane said.
“Exactly,” said Mrs. Thompson. “And that never changes. It’s funny, if you think about it. Most of us go into teaching because we loved school so much – well, and school supplies,” she added, laughing. “Anyway. Number Three is, always remember that most kids don’t love school like you did, but you signed on to teach them all. It’s fun to teach children who remind you of yourself at that age, but the real satisfaction is in winning over the reluctant learners. Pick one and I think you’ll see what I mean.”
Jane chose Daniel Pettus, a scrawny, stubborn little boy who often sat hunched over in his seat or even put his head down on his desk when she or Mrs. Thompson was teaching a lesson.
One of eight siblings, he came to school each day dressed in threadbare clothes, his white-blond hair sticking up every which way. Never quite clean, he smelled of greasy cooking and stale cigarette smoke and just a tinge of urine. Some of the children were mean to him; most ignored him. He ate his sack lunch alone in the cafeteria, stood alone at the outskirts of the playground.
“I don’t know,” he would answer if called on during class. Sometimes he refused to answer at all. When Jane spoke directly to him, bringing his attention to something he might enjoy or making a positive comment about something he had done, he shrugged and looked away from her.
He was often kept in from recess for not doing his work and, one morning, she drew a small chair up next his desk. He was slumped in his chair, his jaw clenched, a sullen expression on his face, a page of math problems untouched before him.
“I hate math,” she said in a low, conspiratorial voice.
No response.
“I really hate story problems. Jack has six apples and Johnny has five. I always think, ‘How come Jack gets more?’ Or sometimes I think, ‘Who cares?’ ”
Nothing.
They sat quietly awhile, the sounds of recess drifting in through the open window: kids yelling, balls bouncing. “So what about you, Daniel?” Jane asked. “You don’t do the problems because you hate math like me, or because you just don’t want to –”
He looked at her then, his blue eyes swimming with tears. “Because I can’t.”
“Ah,” Jane said, resisting the impulse to draw him into her arms. “That’s a much easier problem to solve. Here. I’ll do one to show you how. Then we’ll do the rest together.”
When the bell rang, they’d gotten through most of the page. “Would you like it if I called your mom to see if it would be okay for you to stay after school a few times a week, and work on math together?” she asked. “I could give you a ride home afterwards.”
He nodded, yes.
“Yeah, well, the government will eventually just use him up as cannon fodder,” Bridget said when Jane got home from school that day, thrilled by this first success. “It’s what they do with kids like that. You can suck him in and teach him story problems . . . or whatever, but ten years from now there’ll be some other stupid war to send him to – if we’re not still in Vietnam.”
She’d nearly failed student teaching last fall, insistent on bringing politics into whatever she taught, organizing groups of her high school students to participate in the antiwar rallies in Dunn meadow. Now, as spring approached, she was barely passing her last classes, in a perpetual state of rage. LBJ was gone, but Nixon was worse. His promise of an “honorable peace” apparently meant endless negotiations in Paris about what kind of table was suitable for discussion, in lieu of actually talking about the problem at hand, and training Vietnamese troops to fight for democracy, when all they really wanted was for the war to end so they could go back to their villages and live their lives. Meanwhile, American boys kept dying.
What was a bourgeois college degree in the face of that, she said – and boycotted commencement despite her parents’ pleas. Jane skipped the ceremony, too – letting Bridget believe she agreed with her when, in fact, not attending was the only way she could justify not inviting her family.
She hadn’t seen them since an awkward visit in January, the big framed photograph of Bobby in his Marine uniform on the wall above the couch where they sat. She hadn’t written or called since Susan returned the birthday gift Jane had sent to her in February, with a letter that began, “Just in case you’re interested, Mom cried for an hour after you left.
“It’s obvious you don’t want to be part of this family anymore,” she went on. “You think Bobby was stupid to die for his country; you’re embarrassed by the rest of us. So why don’t you just go ahead and live your life with your rich boyfriend and leave us alone. Mom doesn’t know I’m writing this and I don’t have to tell you she’d be upset if she found out. Tell her if you want, but I think we both know it would only make things worse.”
Jane hadn’t mentioned the letter to Tom or Bridget, but tucked it away in the shoebox of letters Bobby had sent from Vietnam. Rifling through them, pierced by the sight of his handwriting, it occurred to her for the first time that he might have kept the letters she sent to him, too, and, if he had, they’d have been returned with his personal ef
fects. Of course, her mother would have read them. Jane had written to Bobby about how grateful she was to have gotten away from home; she’d encouraged him to use the G.I. Bill when he got out of the service to do the same – and, worse, she’d shared painful childhood memories about their father’s drinking, their mother’s refusal to acknowledge it. Bobby’s unhappiness, his painful memories were in the letters he’d written to Jane, small, true pieces of himself that their mother would ever know.
His picture remained on the refrigerator, Bridget’s call to revolution. But when Jane looked at it now, she saw the bright, rambunctious little boy who’d fallen through the cracks, and she found some measure of comfort in her determination to become the kind of teacher who might have set him on a different path. She had a job for the fall, third grade at the school where she had done her student teaching, and she spent a lot of time that summer in her classroom. “Miss Barth, Grade Three,” she printed in the top corner of the blackboard the first day she was there, just so she could look at it. She’d be teaching the kids she’d student-taught the spring before and loved thinking about them walking in on the first day of school in the fall to find her waiting for them. She spent hours working on curriculum, clipping construction paper into letters of the alphabet and bright autumn leaves for her first bulletin board, and poring through professional magazines with articles on everything from art projects to classroom management.
Still, once school started, Jane was so busy that she had little time to do anything but grade papers and make her lesson plans for the next day. It wasn’t that she no longer cared about the war. If anything, she felt more heartsick as time went by, every news broadcast with its battle footage and body counts and lying politicians confirmed the belief that her brother had died for nothing at all. When a national moratorium against the war was planned for mid-October, she agreed to help organize it, waiting till the last moment to tell Bridget that she wouldn’t actually be attending the event, which was on a school day.
“Take a personal day,” Bridget said. “Or just call in sick. What’s the big deal?”
“I can’t,” Jane said.
“Bullshit,” Bridget said. “You’re a grown-up, remember? You can do what you want.”
“I can’t do it,” Jane said again.
“You mean you won’t. You’re scared you’ll get your picture in the paper or your principal or your kids’ redneck parents will see you on TV, aren’t you?”
Jane didn’t deny it. She couldn’t say whether the principal and most of the teachers at her school were for the war, but knew from the little time she spent in the teachers’ lounge that most of them were disgusted by the tactics of the antiwar movement. As for the parents, maybe they were rednecks, but a lot of them also had sons, brothers, husbands, or friends who’d served in Vietnam or were there right now and, like her own parents, felt that not to support the war would be a kind of betrayal. Plus, it was a weird time. It was wrong that undercover police and FBI agents would be watching, taking pictures, taking names, but it was the way it was and Jane wasn’t willing to risk her job just to make Bridget happy.
The evening before the moratorium, both Jane and Tom joined the stream of students, faculty, and some townspeople who gathered at Showalter Fountain for the candlelight parade to Dunn Meadow that would begin the event. People talked quietly as they walked along Seventh Street, but fell silent as they approached the meadow, lit by a thousand tiny flames. Soon, voices rose in song. “Give Peace a Chance,” “We Shall Overcome.” There were a few speeches, then a ripple of agitation ran through the crowd at the news that someone had just been arrested at the Auditorium. There’d been a lecture going on there at the same time of the march and about halfway through the speech, a student in a devil costume leapt onto the stage and threw a cream pie in the speaker’s face. He took off running, but the police had wrestled him down. He was on his way to jail right now, people said, and maybe half of the Dunn Meadow crowd headed for the county jail to demand his release.
Bridget was among them, though Jane didn’t know it until she walked into the teachers’ lounge the next morning and saw her on the front page of the newspaper, her fist raised, her hair wild, her mouth wide open in a scream.
“Look at that girl,” one of the teachers said. “So hateful. That’s what upsets me most about all this. They talk about peace, but are they peaceful themselves?”
“She’s gone off the deep end,” Tom said. He refused to talk politics with Bridget anymore and, if she tried, he’d simply declare that his life goal was to be a thorn in the side of the Establishment.
“What the fuck kind of life goal is that, anyway?” Bridget would say. “The war’s not funny, Tom. It’s not funny the way people’s lives get wrecked by what asshole politicians do. If they even survive it.”
Jane sat quietly when the two of them argued. She just wanted them to stop. She knew Bridget thought she was naïve and maybe even foolish having come to believe, as she did, that making a child’s eyes light up with understanding was in its own small way a political act. Tom thought the same of her for believing that some part of Bridget was still the lovely free-spirited girl she’d once been. But she loved them both and would not choose. She couldn’t. So she avoided talking to Tom about Bridget, avoided talking to Bridget about Tom, and was grateful that, for whatever reason, neither of them pushed her to tip the precarious balance among them.
9
“Ohio”
“Good evening my fellow Americans,” President Nixon began.
“ ‘Good evening my fellow Americans,’ ” Bridget mimicked. “Fucker. I swear to God, the very sound of his voice makes me insane.”
“Would you just listen,” Tom said.
She rolled her eyes at him.
Jane concentrated on the screen: the President in a dark suit, reading from the pages of the speech he held in his hands. “Ten days ago, in my report to the Nation on Vietnam, I announced a decision to withdraw an additional 150,000 Americans from Vietnam over the next year. I said then that I was making that decision despite our concern over increased enemy activity in Laos, Cambodia, and in South Vietnam . . .”
“Meanwhile, bombing the shit out of them,” Bridget said. “Like we don’t know about their so-called secret bombing there.”
Tom turned up the television to drown out her muttered commentary as the speech proceeded, though Jane could hear it anyway.
“Look at him,” she said when Nixon rose and, with a pointer, delineated areas of troop build-up along the border between Vietnam and Cambodia on a huge map beside him. “Jesus. He’s got visual aids. What? Is he going for the ‘I am your trusted social studies teacher’ effect?”
But even Bridget sat in stunned silence when, after accusations, explanations, and excuses, he baldly stated, “Tonight, American and South Vietnamese units will attack the headquarters for the entire Communist military operation in South Vietnam . . .
“This is not an invasion of Cambodia . . .” he went on. “Our purpose is not to occupy the areas . . . We take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam and winning the just peace we all desire . . . We will be conciliatory at the conference table, but we will not be humiliated . . .
“My fellow Americans, we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed . . .”
“Bullshit,” Bridget said. “Fucking bullshit. He knows it, too. Look at him. He’s sweating like the pig he is. He can hardly read his own lies.”
Nixon stopped once to mop his face with a white handkerchief; he paused, clearly having lost his place in the speech, and Jane watched him collect himself, breathe deeply, reconnect – anyone else, she would have felt sorry for.
Bridget stood up. “ ‘Great universities are being systemat
ically destroyed?’ Well, Dick. Let’s get to it.” She grabbed a sweatshirt, tied it around her waist. “You guys in?”
“I want to hear the end of the speech,” Tom said. “Jane?”
“I’ll stay with you.”
Bridget looked at them a long moment, shook her head, and was gone.
When it was finished, they joined the stream of people heading for Dunn Meadow, where student leaders stood on a makeshift stage urging a peaceful protest. But the crowd was too agitated to listen and, when a rumor rippled through the crowd about a panty raid going on at Read Center, most of the demonstrators left the Meadow like a flock of birds suddenly turning in the sky and marched to the dorm, where they found a couple of hundred drunk fraternity guys ranging around, yelling up at the girls, who hung out of the windows laughing and tossing out their underwear. Soon cries for panties changed to “Get out of Cambodia” and “To Hell with Nixon.” Girls streamed from the dorm, joining the march back to Dunn Meadow, as it proceeded onward, picking up more people along the way.
The balmy spring evening, scented with flowering trees; the absurdity of the panty raid turned protest; the way the crowd swelled and flowed back toward Dunn Meadow as if directed by an invisible hand – none of it seemed quite real to Jane. When they reached the Meadow, news that police had begun to gather at the courthouse set them moving again, down Kirkwood Avenue, toward the town square.
“Let’s get out of here,” Tom said. “It’s a big, fucking party, that’s all.”
But as they passed the newly dug earth of People’s Park on their way home, students began to pick up rocks to break the windows of some of the storefronts they passed. Anti-war protestors, drunk fraternity guys – by then, it was hard to tell the difference. Tom wrested a rock from a kid wearing a Phi Delt sweatshirt and scuffled with his friends, who were looking for a fight. But he gave up, disgusted, and walked away from them. Neither had mentioned Bridget all evening; they didn’t mention her now. Jane had spotted her once, among the students leading the protestors toward Read Center, but she’d covered her long red hair in a bandana, which made it easy for her to disappear into the crowd, and Jane hadn’t seen her again. She lay awake a long time, waiting for the sound of Bridget’s key in the lock, the door closing behind her.
An American Tune Page 11