Wendy and the Lost Boys

by Julie Salamon

  One day Carole was invited by Tillie Olsen, the feminist writer, to participate in a women’s consciousness-raising session; Olsen was teaching at Amherst that year, her focus on poverty and oppression.

  Carole brought Wendy along. Most of the other fifteen or twenty women who came to the lunch were faculty wives, women who had Ph.D.’s but not jobs.

  Wendy didn’t talk much, but she was listening, with startling acuity.

  In The Heidi Chronicles, written almost twenty years later, she recapitulated the lunch. The play isn’t a diary—Wendy always allowed herself much poetic license—but it captures the serious frustration of the women without overlooking the earnest foolishness that was part of the moment. In the play the women’s meeting takes place in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

  Heidi, the Wendy character, remains silent throughout the discussion. One of the women tells Becky and Heidi, the newcomers, that Fran, in addition to being a gifted physicist, is a lesbian and that the group supports her choice to sleep with women.

  Fran turns to Heidi. “Do you support my choice, Heidi?”

  Heidi responds, “I’m just visiting.”

  Heidi’s waffling reflects Wendy’s own confusion and self-doubt, her feeling of not being part of the group. Her need for self-protection could trip off inconsiderate, even cruel behavior when she felt threatened, as she was by Abby Stewart’s superior grades. Rather than confront, she fled.

  When she was overcome by ambivalence toward James Kaplan, she simply avoided him.

  The summer before Wendy went to Amherst, she and James spent a great deal of time together, seeing movies and plays, enjoying the city they both loved. Wendy was on hiatus from academic and political concerns, working at a comfortable, dull job as a receptionist in a dentist’s office on Central Park South. They were cautious, but they had romantic moments, most memorably on July 20, 1969. Walking across Central Park under a starry sky, they came across a crowd in the Sheep Meadow gathered in front of giant video monitors. Wendy and James paused to watch Neil Armstrong become the first man to walk on the moon and listened to the crowd cheer, a peaceful mirage of national unity at a fractious time.

  For James this became a romantic memory. For Wendy the evening became material. In 2002, writing about the importance of Shakespeare in the Park for the New York Times, she recalled the evening fondly—minus James. He wasn’t the only detail Wendy altered. To make her point, she substituted Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, which was actually playing at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater that night. And, to serve her story, she changed the time of day Neil Armstrong took that first step on the moon.

  James thought he was her boyfriend. His earlier casual attitude had changed to a more intense desire. True to the yin-yang pattern of their relationship, his willingness to become close made her pull away; her with-drawal only made him want to draw closer. Her hesitancy was encouraged by the general tumult and by James’s particular neediness and extreme emotional distress. At Amherst, with its ridiculously skewed male-female ratio, she saw his shortcomings more clearly.

  She had learned to recognize the signs of infatuation, from men who longed for Mary Jane. No matter how much affection James professed, he never looked at her like that. She still felt the sting of his comments about her weight, even though he now wanted to be with her.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t like him. She did. But he wasn’t a dashing iconoclast like Montpelier Pa-zazz, or even her brother Bruce. No matter how much James complained about the System, he was headed to law school—or worse (in Wendy’s imagination), his father’s textile business. When she told James about breaking into the faculty meeting at Amherst, he didn’t take her that seriously.

  “Settle down,” he said, but then brought it up when she lost interest in him, to coax her back. “What happened to the Amherst Women’s Caucus?” he would ask.

  She told herself that he was on a conventional path, which—if she married him—put her in danger of becoming a Shirley, à la Marjorie Morningstar.

  When he had an emotional crisis and needed her help, she wasn’t there for him.

  She detached; he pleaded.

  Dear Wemp,

  I’m sitting here trying to do my work which I’m way behind on, but I’m really upset because I haven’t been able to talk to you in so long. I must have tried to give you at least 51 phone calls in the last week, but I’ve never been able to get through. You see I’m having an acute Wemp crisis (and have been all week) and an acute case of James paranoia. I really miss you and love you and really want to see you. Finally I guess after having got a long no answer on your phone for about the fiftieth time I’m taking the unprecedented step of writing you. I don’t know why it’s so unprecedented, but I feel like it just is. I’m really afraid that because there’s been so little communication between us in the last two weeks suddenly I’m going to talk to you and discover that you’re on an entirely different wave length and we won’t be speaking the same language. I don’t know maybe I’m not now.

  I hate to tell you why I’m so upset or feel like I’m trying to bother you with my hassles, but then if I can’t tell you who can I tell? You see in a way it’s like communicating with you makes my life important and when our communication is shut off life no longer is so important. That’s why it was so awful at the times you didn’t show up to see me when you said you were coming. . . .

  I’m really upset because it seems like the whole world is falling around me. I don’t want to go into any political bullshit about what’s happening in this country or what’s happening at Yale. Your roommates told me you were really working on the strike at Amherst. They told me, but I don’t know. You see I decided that political events don’t affect people in the abstract. They either affect you directly or not at all. That’s why it’s so much more important to me that I haven’t spoken with you, than that Nixon invaded Cambodia.You see I’m really afraid that concurrent with the fall of the external world my private world is beginning to fall as well. I really hope I’m not “a luxury you can no longer afford.” But if I am I wish you’d please tell me and not leave me in this damn uncertainty. I guess like you said you had with me, I’ve come to depend on your love and the thought of losing you really hurts me. I really do love you very much. Maybe I’m just really afraid of uncertainty. Like right now the future is very uncertain.

  . . . I really love you and need you. The thing I hate though is the continual uncertainty about our relationship and my doubts about whether what you say is true one day will be true the next. I understand that it’s a big hassle to have to pay for a phone call to me, but from now on I promise any time you call me you can call collect. Please call collect, but call me. Love James

  PS: How are your dots?

  They resumed their relationship, but he wasn’t a priority for her when she returned to Mount Holyoke for her senior year. Her primary concern was to figure out what to do next. Lola was pushing hard for law school, and Wendy hadn’t found a better idea for her future. She wasn’t alone. The women she lived with that year felt anxious about having to face the world. These doubts, unremarkable for seniors about to graduate, were compounded by the enormous flux that made every choice seem questionable. The political climate imposed an inflated sense of self-importance, but also a feeling of great vulnerability. They propped one another up and assumed a pose of bawdy sophistication. It would be years before they managed to stop referring to their dorm as “North Fucking Mandelle.”

  Mary Jane was part of the North Mandelle group, though she almost went the way of Abby Stewart and James Kaplan. Over the summer, home in Glenview, Illinois, she received a letter from Wendy saying she didn’t want to room together. “The past year has just been too difficult for me,” Wendy wrote. “It’s just too hard, I’m putting it behind me.”

  Before school began, Wendy changed her mind.

  Mary Jane saved the letter for twenty years and then threw it away. She hated the way it made her feel. The year at Amhe
rst had been so strange, not least because of all the men who’d paid attention to her. She knew she hadn’t handled the situation well. She understood that Wendy might have been jealous, although they’d never discussed it. Mary Jane felt that their friendship really began senior year, when they were away from the odd pressure of being rare specimens at Amherst.

  Besides Mary Jane and Ruth, their group included Harriet Sachs, back from a year abroad in Greece.

  Harriet was from Montreal and always—to the other girls—seemed very sure of herself. She would become the inspiration for the character Kate in Uncommon Women and Others.

  Harriet was one of the 1837 “misfits.” She saw Wendy as a kindred spirit, a Jewish girl from a big city, out of place in the prim Wasp propriety of Mount Holyoke. Like Wendy, Harriet was younger than the other girls, only sixteen when she arrived at Mount Holyoke, but accustomed to adult freedom. The summer before she started college, she had a job at Expo 67, the World’s Fair held in Montreal. She finished work at 2:00 A.M. and then went out to party at discotheques; she dated an “older man,” a law student in his twenties.

  After freshman year they drifted apart. Harriet became obsessed with another man, and then they took their junior years away from Holyoke—Wendy at Amherst, Harriet in Greece. Reunited senior year at North Mandelle, they once again felt themselves outsiders. The dorm had become a center for the campus black-power movement, and there was tension between the black and white students. Harriet and Wendy felt particularly sensitive, being Jewish, feeling they were being identified with slum landlords oppressing black people. Amiri Baraka, the poet formerly known as LeRoi Jones, had become a potent cultural figure, declaring himself a black nationalist—and he had divorced his Jewish wife, Hettie (née Cohen). With the self-dramatization of college students, Harriet and Wendy saw themselves as aligned with the enemy.

  It was a difficult year on all fronts. Wendy took her law boards and scored unimpressively, in the fiftieth percentile. When someone asked Ruth what she planned to do when she grew up, she shrugged and said, “I’m going to be a fertility goddess.” Wendy then dubbed her “Fertila T,” and Ruth called Wendy “Responsibilia,” referring to Wendy’s continued arguments with the committee on academic responsibility about long-overdue library books.

  For a senior project, Wendy compiled a mock “handbook for seniors,” weighing various alternatives for the future. Great Expectations was the title; the cover was a full-page picture of a very pregnant woman. Wendy stapled together applications to graduate school, forms for “vocational planning and placement,” and ads for wedding rings.

  As graduation came closer, Wendy felt panicky. She hadn’t gotten into a single law school and dreaded going home to contend with Lola. Harriet was stoned when she took the LSATs and got in. But then Harriet was Phi Beta Kappa, whereas Wendy “Responsibilia” was almost denied her diploma because of those library books.

  Gretchen Scarry came to the rescue with an invitation to spend the summer in California.

  Gretchen was a Smith College student who had performed in many plays at Amherst. After Wendy returned to Holyoke for her senior year, both she and Gretchen continued to spend a great deal of time at Amherst, working on plays. Wendy didn’t talk about a career in theater, but it had become a refuge for her, a natural extension of her inclination to inhale the raw material of life and exhale a comedy routine or a story.

  The pinnacle of their Amherst theater career came senior year. They became part of an of-the-moment production of Peter Pan, reconfigured as a radical treatise, in which the Lost Boys were hippies. Peter Pan was played by a black man, Tinker Bell by a gay man. Wendy choreographed the play; Gretchen was cast as one of the Lost Boys.

  Peter Pan had always had special significance for Wendy. There was the obvious connection of her name, the link to Sandy and childhood. She had fond memories of starring in a summer-camp production. The story’s magical quality of perpetual innocence continued to be part of Wendy’s aura, even though her perceptions about people could be ironic and quite adult.

  It was during the Amherst production that Gretchen recognized Wendy’s talent—not as a writer but as a choreographer. All those years at the June Taylor dance studio had left an imprint. Gretchen was impressed by the elaborate sequences Wendy plotted out for Peter Pan (especially the tap routine she choreographed for a song called “Wendy”).

  Right before graduation Gretchen was informed that Smith wouldn’t give her credit for a class she’d taken at Hampshire College, which had just opened with an experimental program. But Smith would accept credits for a dance course Gretchen found at California State University at Long Beach, California, that she could complete the summer after senior year. She asked Wendy to come along.

  It didn’t take much convincing for Wendy to exchange the gloomy prospect of rattling around New York, being nagged by Lola while avoiding and pursuing James Kaplan. A summer by the beach, with a continent between all that, seemed perfect. This would become another pattern of Wendy’s. If someone invited her somewhere, she went. Like her parents, she kept in motion. (Morris was said to wear out three pairs of guaranteed-for-life ripple-soled shoes a year, probably a Wasserstein exaggeration but accurately reflecting his love of walking.)

  She set out for California with Gretchen and Nancy Steele, a friend of Gretchen’s who was a dancer, too. The three of them drove across the country—or rather Gretchen and Nancy drove. Wendy didn’t have a driver’s license; this wasn’t unusual for someone raised in New York City.

  Wendy was that peculiar breed, the New York provincial—the type who can rattle off the names of Broadway directors and Greek gods and has visited the major European capitals but has never ordered french fries at a drive-in window. For her the California world of fast-food joints like Taco Bell and Jack in the Box was exotic and mystifying. She had a dorm room but spent most of her time at the little apartment that Gretchen rented a block from the beach. They swam in the ocean and entered a go-go-dancing contest at a hotel. They ogled their gorgeous dance professor, William Couser, an avant-garde choreographer who blended primitive, folk, and jazz techniques and used performance to reflect on the condition of the black race.

  Wendy liked Gretchen, but it was Ruth Karl who, in absentia, became her partner in misery, as well as an appreciative audience for her adventures and concerns that summer. In long letters they commiserated with each other about their failed attempts at losing weight and their lack of direction. It was hard for Wendy to talk about dieting with lithe Gretchen, who was sympathetic but who could also gorge without noticeable consequence.

  When Wendy sent Ruth a detailed explanation of a lecture she’d heard about the relationship between movement, self-image, and the potential for change, Ruth gave a comforting reply:

  My dearest Wendella,

  Your exercise on self-image and movement was fascinating but I forget what movement means. I’ve reached unprecedented dissipation. You would have been so proud of me today. I consumed a whole 39 cent Hershey Almond Chocolate Bar, among other things. I’ve abandoned all hopes of will power. Tomorrow my 3 week supply of super duper time capsule Benzedex diet pills is arriving. Better living through chemistry.

  I hope to find a waitress job tomorrow, if I can summon up the energy. Then I’ll have a little “bread” for the move to the big city. . . .

  A Mini heavy

  I think life is a pile of shit. I will sell my soul, body and anything else I can get my hands on to construct a safer little world of my own. I don’t think I can change the world. Even if I could and did, people would fuck it up again. Have I turned into a no-good capitalist pig? If so, do you still like me? Also, I hate men. And most women.

  Love, Ruth

  Wendy replied in kind:

  Dear Ruth,

  Got jealous of your dissipation so Gretchen and I went out and outdid you—a Hershey Almond bar and P’nut butter. Eat Your Heart Out. I am marshmallow woman. Each day I vow to the goddess of thin woman . . . that I
will become asparagus queen—and then a suggestion from a friend and I’m back in candy land. To put it bluntly, Lola was right. I’m not a mensch.

  Despite her self-flagellation, Wendy enjoyed herself that summer. She said she was happy. “I am living the good life,” she wrote. “Protein, dance and fun in neon city. It is a bit like being in a health spa with decorations furnished by McDonald’s. . . .”

  Yet she knew that her romance with L.A. was just a summer fling. As the return home to New York approached, she remained worried about her future.

  “Did you ever think you could be great if only,” she wrote to Ruth. “I live in the fantasy where that if only doesn’t exist. In reality it looks larger every day.”

  Part Two

  BECOMING A WRITER

  1971-80

  WENDY’S SIBLINGS SEEMED TO KNOW WHERE THEY WERE GOING,

  BUT AFTER GRADUATING FROM HOLYOKE SHE WAS FLOUNDERING.

  HERE WITH SISTERS SANDY AND GEORGETTE.

  Six

  THE FUNNIEST GIRL IN NEW YORK

  1971-73

  “Wendy, you make me want to blechhh,” Lola said to her in exasperation one day. “You know what blechhh is?”

  Wendy knew exactly what “blechhh” was, especially after Lola put her hand to her mouth and pretended to retch.

  “Why don’t you do something?” Lola snapped.

  Wendy decided to make a play for maternal sympathy.

  “Mother, I’m not feeling well, I’ve been feeling sad lately.”

  A futile gesture.

  Lola turned to Wendy, ready to pounce. “What have you got to be sad about? Did your husband die? Did your son get sick?”

  Up until that moment, Wendy had no idea that Lola had had a first husband, much less one who’d died.

  In the torrent that followed, she forgot to ask her mother who that husband was—or knew better than to delve into family secrets, or was afraid to pursue a line of questioning whose answers might be too disturbing.