“You’re very smart, Peter. But to tell you the truth, I’ve never seen the Easter Bunny, so I have no idea of his size.”
“An Easter Bunny. Their size.”
The next morning, Bach’s Mass in B Minor was playing on the kitchen radio as I stepped out on the porch and lit a cigarette and spotted, one by one, each of the dozen eggs scattered around the back yard. So obvious. On his way out to join me, my father turned up the volume on WFMT and, for the first time ever, asked me for a cigarette. Finally, Sabrina and my mother appeared at the back door holding Peter back, like a greyhound in his starting gate, then let him go. We watched, the three of them smiling and shouting encouragement, as he crept and scurried from obvious hiding place to slightly less obvious hiding place—the faucet handle, the lowest oak limb, a swing-set seat—holding each egg up in the air before placing it in the special Easter bucket painted (by me, nine years before) with golden crosses and pink bunnies.
Ten minutes later, he was done, Mom and Sabrina were upstairs getting ready to go to church, Dad was watching Dean Rusk or Robert McNamara or somebody on TV defend the war in Vietnam, and Peter was lining up his eggs on the kitchen table according to their colors while I ate Rice Krispies and read the Tribune. “I think,” he said to me, “that they must either hide their tracks somehow, or else they’re weightless. The Easter Bunnies.”
“Weightless? Like astronauts in space?”
“Maybe more like the Holy Ghost.”
“Do you suppose there are Easter Bunnies in Vietnam?” I asked my ten-year-old brother. “There are lots of Catholics there.”
“Then I guess there must be. Easter Bunnies go wherever they have Easter, right?”
“Then that makes me really sad. Because with the war going on, with all the bombs and napalm and everything, the Easter Bunnies in Vietnam must be getting wounded and burned and blown up.”
Peter stopped organizing his eggs and stared at me. It was as if I’d punched him, but worse, because I was being so earnest and artificially sweet, like a nun. He didn’t shed a tear in front of me, but my sister said later that he cried and cried during Mass that day. “You’re really a bad person, Karen,” Sabrina told me. “You think you’re so smart and sophisticated, and a good person, but you just enjoy upsetting people.”
One night watching the news, as they showed some rare Canadian footage shot inside communist China, my mother remarked how chilling it was that the people all dressed exactly the same, in Mao jackets.
“It’s probably just the Party members,” my father said.
“And in America,” I said, “people aren’t just as conformist? Short hair, white shirt, necktie, yes, sir. Dad looks and dresses exactly like every man in the Loop.”
My father chuckled and gave me a salute.
We had just started a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society at New Trier. When I showed Dad my national membership card and he laughed at its italicized mission statement—We are people of this generation looking uneasily at the world we inherit—I got as angry as I’d ever been at him. “Jesus, is everything just a big joke to you?”
“No, I’m sorry, my dear. But on something like this, it’s usually slogans, exhortations: ‘Liberty, fraternity, equality,’ you know, ‘Victory to the proletariat.’ This is so wordy, so self-conscious and cautious and … sociological. It’s like something someone my age would write about people your age.”
“People my age don’t give a shit about the way slogans are supposed to sound, the way movements for peace and justice used to be in the old days.” I had never said “shit” to my parents. “That’s why it’s the New Left.”
“Okay. Good.”
That, of course, made me even angrier. I turned and stomped up to my room and played “Paint It Black” and smoked a cigarette. My parents were still making it very difficult for me to rebel against them.
Although America at large was capitulating to progressivism, like an anxious dweeb doing whatever the sexy popular kids say to do—the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the de facto abolition of capital punishment—my anger was not yet spent. The Vietnam War, growing bigger and uglier every week, was there to satisfy my ongoing need for outrage and bile, daily proof that the system remained hideous. In order to keep the moral high ground—to give substance to the natural superiority of our unsullied golden youth—we needed to climb higher and higher. We required enemies, and since Goldwater’s defeat had left conservatism in the ash heap of history, the liberals running the country and waging the war became our enemies. In the spring of our junior year in high school, Alex and Chuck and I started calling ourselves radicals.
I’d founded the New Trier Esperantists two years earlier, and now I decided it was my mission to disband it. Esperanto was not really a means to global harmony and peace but one more first-world missionary charade, this one meant to wipe out indigenous languages. I’d made the club’s two least active members—Alex and Chuck, whom I’d forced to join freshman year—attend the crucial meeting. When Jamie Harwood, a freshman boy who was a Bahá’í and the one club member who spoke Esperanto more fluently than I, made an impassioned argument for letting the club continue, and suggested that I resign if membership seemed incompatible with my antiwar feelings, Chuck and then Alex started humming “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” which was a patriotic pop hit at the time. People laughed. Jamie turned red. My resolution carried by one vote.
My hidden agenda had been to aggravate my mother. And to the degree that being the founding president of the Esperantists might help me get into college, it had already served its purpose.
“I suppose,” my peeved mother said to me, “this means you’re not going to submit an Esperanto translation of your college application essay?” I’d raised that possibility at the beginning of the school year.
“Yes, I suppose it does,” I said, radiating self-satisfaction. “In fact? Verajne mi volo neniam plu paroli Esperanton, karega Patrino.” I will probably never again speak Esperanto, dearest Mother.
That summer I worked three days a week in an office of a little SDS offshoot called JOIN (Jobs or Income Now) in a poor white Chicago neighborhood called Uptown. I mostly did what I’d done the previous two summers for my uncle’s law firm on clean, shiny Sheridan Road in Evanston, mimeographing and filing and making coffee, but instead of getting $1.25 an hour, I worked for free on bleak, crappy Sheridan Road in North Chicago. And instead of feeling like a bored child, I felt like a seventeen-year-old adult, a certified New Left warrior. “Welcome to the Movement, Karen,” my young boss said to me when I showed up the first day. The Movement. I loved the vague grandeur of that term.
The first week I had the heebie-jeebies as I walked alone from the unfamiliar El station past the groups of pale, unwell-looking teenage boys and young men loitering, drinking, smoking, staring. But one morning the second week, one of the boys shouted, “Hey, girl, smile sometime at this good-looking Appa-latch-in shitbum,” I couldn’t help but smile, and he kicked one foot on the sidewalk—he was wearing work boots—and said, “There you go now.” I was very pleased with myself. I was a woman! I was making my way in the city, in the real world! Some weeks after that, when the Chicago police shot and killed one of those neighborhood boys, everybody from the JOIN office attended a protest rally outside the local police station. I was forging bonds of solidarity with the poor! Also, a few months later, I was able to write “Community Organizer, summer 1966” in the Work Experience sections of my college applications.
When Richard Speck raped and murdered eight student nurses in their dorm in Chicago that July, my mother wanted me to quit my job. “He was one of these aimless unemployed Southern boys, too,” she said. I’d had the same thought, but I told her she was bigoted against the working class. And in August, when an ex-marine randomly shot and killed sixteen people from a clock tower at the University of Texas, I joked to my mother about those “aimless unemployed white southern boys” and asked if she’d n
oticed that the sniper had been an altar boy at his Catholic church.
I took a summer school course at Northwestern called the Literature of Revolution. How wonderful was it? It was a seminar taught by a young visiting professor from the Freie Universität Berlin. There were four students enrolled, of whom I was the only girl, and all four of us and the professor—”Call me Nikolas, please”—drank coffee and smoked cigarettes in class, which met for two hours, twice a week. There were no quizzes or tests, only reading and discussions and a single twenty-page paper.
My paper was on Sartre’s play Dirty Hands, which I’d read earlier that year for extra credit in French class, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which had just been published. I argued that Malcolm, like one of the main characters in the Sartre play, was a revolutionary assassinated by comrades who mistrusted him for making alliances with more moderate factions. Just before he was murdered, Malcolm had given the speech in which he said that Negroes had the right to protect themselves from Klan attacks “by any means necessary.” In Dirty Hands, Sartre’s tough-hearted victim-hero tells his would-be assassin, a middle-class idealist, that “it is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies—it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.” I wrote that Malcolm was an existentialist hero “in the Sartrean sense: authentic, true to himself as a Negro and a revolutionary, defined by his actions rather than just his thoughts, a man for whom important ends justified radical means and who accepted full responsibility for his actions.” I was very proud of connecting those dots, and of using the word “Sartrean.”
Instead of having a final class, Nikolas held a half-hour private conference with each of us in his office to discuss our papers. He handed me mine—an A! in a college course! from a European!—and offered me a Gitane.
“It is very fine work, Karen. The original research, the speech you, you … what is the English, you shoveled from the earth, dug up, by Malcolm X with ‘par tous les moyens nécessaires,’ by any necessary means … very impressive.” He asked me if I thought—if I thought!—that “the American ghettoes of this time” were “in a pre-revolutionary condition of turmoil.” Based on my extensive conversations with exactly one American ghetto resident, who washed my clothes and made me lunch and preferred to be called “colored,” I said, “Maybe. It’s hard to say. In America, there’s a lot of false consciousness”—a phrase he’d taught us—”even among the Negroes. I guess, like everything else, revolution is always easier said than done.”
He nodded. “Ah, yes, ‘leichter gesagt als getan.’ easier said than done. You are how old, Karen?”
“Seventeen.”
He smiled and nodded again, more enthusiastically, as if I’d said something meaningful. “Do you know where you will attend university?”
I shook my head. “I apply this fall.”
“If you need a letter, the recommendation, please, it would be my privilege to write for you.”
“Thanks!” I dropped my cigarette in my Dixie cup of water. It sizzled. “And thank you for the course. I really liked it. More than any other I’ve ever taken. I learned so much.”
He gave a gracious shrug of acknowledgment. “Do you enjoy the cinema?”
My God: the cinema. “Uh-huh, sure.”
“Well, nearby, at the Wilmette Theater—”
“That’s where I live! In Wilmette.”
“Ah! They are exhibiting now the two new films by Jean-Luc Godard. Perhaps some evening you might join me to see them?”
My God: he was asking me out on a date. And so, three days later at six o’clock, he met me at the Baskin-Robbins on Central Avenue. I wore bell-bottoms.
Nikolas had shaggy blond hair and wore circular wire-rimmed glasses. He looked like the younger British costar of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
We saw Alphaville, whose hero is a secret agent in a dystopia run by a sentient computer which he finally destroys, and Pierrot le Fou, in which a rich TV executive played by Jean-Paul Belmondo abandons his family with his children’s babysitter, becomes an outlaw, acquires machine guns, kills the lover, wraps his head in dozens of sticks of dynamite and—in the end, unintentionally—blows himself up.
“I was believing all summer you look like this actress who is the Catwoman in Batman on TV,” Nikolas said as he lit a Gitane and we walked to his car.
“I’m tall, is all.”
“But now I see you look also like Anna Karina.” She was the lead actress in both Godard movies.
“Elle,” I said, in the most exquisitely sophisticated riposte I had ever made to anybody, “est beaucoup plus jolie.”
“No, not more pretty at all. And did you know she’s not French? She’s Danish.”
“Really? So am I. I mean, my dad’s from Denmark.”
“Voilà! Before I drive you home, maybe we have just a … an Absacker, oh, what is the word”?
“Sure, why not?” I answered, no idea what I was agreeing to do.
“… a nightcap!”
His car was a very old blue sedan—a 1949 Hudson, he told me, which he’d bought when he arrived in America last winter because it’s the car Dean Moriarty drives in On the Road.
He bought a six-pack at a little grocery store on Sheridan Road—”To me, the zip-top is a fantastic invention”—and we drove to Gillson Park, where we drank two Schlitzes apiece and talked as we watched the nearly full moon slip into Lake Michigan.
He asked if I had a boyfriend. “No,” I said. I’d broken up with Chan Payne over the winter. “Not anymore.” Was I blushing because of the beer and the intimacy of the question? Or because my unquenched feelings for Chuck made me feel like I was fibbing? “Not really.”
Nikolas was thirty-one and unmarried. I didn’t know that seventeen was the age of consent in Illinois, but I think he probably did.
Alex and Chuck were consumed that summer with writing a skit for Lagniappe, the New Trier student revue performed every fall. Alex phoned the day after my date with Nikolas and asked me to come over to his house to hear their work so far.
I was excited to see them. That is, for them to see me, to experience all that is, seen and unseen, now that I was a bona fide woman. Having had sex delighted me; having sex had not, particularly. But I was happy I hadn’t worn stockings, happy that one of us knew what he was doing, and happy to discover that the backseat of a 1949 Hudson was like a couch, with big upholstered arms, so my head wasn’t jammed up against the door. And happy, to tell the truth, that it happened with somebody I’d probably never see again.
In Alex’s basement, I sat in the beanbag chair across from the two of them on the couch. Alex read all four roles in their skit, and they both sang the three songs, with Chuck playing his Stratocaster and a toy piano.
Watching Chuck’s left hand form chords and listening to him sing, free to stare at him since both he and Alex were staring at their scripts, looking at his uncombed curly hair and sleepy eyes, I was a little disappointed that my feelings for him hadn’t been evaporated by what had happened the night before.
I applauded when they finished. “That is great, you guys.”
“It’s a pastiche,” Alex said. I didn’t know what that meant.
“It’ll be better with props and costumes,” Chuck said.
“And that last song isn’t completely finished yet.”
“The hell it isn’t.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s going to be great. People will freak out. I can’t wait.”
In their ten-minute play, James Bond is dispatched to Cuba and South America by MI6 and the CIA to track down and terminate Che Guevara. It had an original rock-and-roll score, with each appearance by Bond cued by two bars of a silly toy-piano rendition of the familiar Dr. No riff, which had now featured in four movies. (On principle, we had vowed not to see Thunderball, the latest one.)
“A lot of Che’s lines,” Alex explained, “maybe half of them, are things he’s actually said.”
“Or written,” Chuck added. “Mostly written.”
&nb
sp; “I figured.”
“ ‘Many will call me an adventurer,’” Alex said, “ ‘but I am one of a different sort, who risks his skin to prove his platitudes.’ And ‘The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe—you have to make it fall.’ Like, those are real.”
“And the chorus in the last song, ‘I Don’t Care,’” Chuck added, “that’s a Che quote, too,” and he proceeded to sing the line once more: “ ‘I don’t care, I’m not the one, as long as somebody picks up my gun.’ We got them from some books about him at the library at Northwestern.”
Ah, the Charles Deering Library, where Chuck Levy and I spent our first and final date, on that summer afternoon so long ago, when we were only fourteen …
“Any suggestions?” Alex asked me. “You can be our dramaturge.”
Speaking of Northwestern and dashing foreign leftists in their thirties, like Che, I had sex with my professor last night in his car! He’s thirty-one, and he’s German!
“ I wonder if a few of the lines won’t maybe sound too … stiff. They’re kind of a mouthful, some of them. Like ‘Our enemy is the monopolistic government of the United States of America’? I don’t know.”
“Exactly,” Chuck said. “They’ll sound like jokes. People will laugh in the wrong places.”
Alex looked up and closed his eyes and shook his head. “That’s what Mr. Hendricks says conventional people who don’t know what they’re talking about say about Brecht. It’s all in the performance. And it is still a work in progress.”
I heard the Macallisters’ automatic garage door opening above us and a car pulling out. “I thought your mom and dad were in Europe?”
“It’s Flip. He and his buddies are celebrating before he heads back to Madison.” Alex’s older brother wasn’t doing well at the University of Wisconsin, so that summer he’d had to take the national Selective Service exam in order to keep his student deferment and escape the draft.
“He passed?” I asked, and Alex nodded.
“That is so unfair,” Chuck said, “that getting sent to kill people in Vietnam is a punishment for being stupid or poor. The screwed over get more screwed over.”
True Believers Page 19