“My point,” she said, “is not what he knows. She’s squelching his imagination—everything has to be accurate. ‘The teacher will holler if you make the horse green!’ He’ll get rich quicker if he makes it brown? For God’s sake.”
I was silent.
“What?” she said.
I hesitated to make her own argument back to her. “You said Adeline understands her kids. Maybe it makes sense—if they’re poor, getting high marks and a good job will be important.”
“Don’t condescend! Adeline is perfectly capable of thinking any thought you can think.”
That silenced me, and I heard nothing similar for weeks. I didn’t know Adeline, but I was uncomfortable hearing so much praise, then anger.
Helen almost never ate with us, despite all this turning up at suppertime. My mother couldn’t easily add an unexpected guest. Some cooks can cheerfully take five baked potatoes, mash the interiors with butter and cheese, and calmly serve six people, doing something crunchy with the liberated potato skins. Never my mother. Helen’s appearances embarrassed or annoyed her.
Twice a week I had a class from four to six, and my mother refused to serve dinner until I got home, though I’d have preferred otherwise. One evening, when I finally arrived, Helen was there. She’d never come this late before. She was reading in the living room, and she followed me into the room I shared with my sister, whose voice I heard coming from my brother’s room.
“What’s going on?” I said, irritated. I wanted her to tell me quickly what was wrong—obviously something was wrong—and leave.
“Adeline threw me out,” she said.
“How come?” I was taking off my coat, putting down my books.
“It’s my own fault. I was supposed to tutor Tania, but I kept arguing with her mother. Now what will happen to her?”
“What did you argue about?”
“Lots of things. TV. Adeline wants a color TV more than anything. It’s depressing.”
“She’ll take you back.”
“I don’t think so. It’s terrible for Tania.” She stood in the middle of the room, her hands at her sides. “I did wrong, Olivia.”
My mother appeared in the doorway, shrugging meaningfully. I smelled food cooking. I was hungry. Helen—who missed nothing—seemed to miss my mother’s discomfort, as, apparently, she had missed Adeline’s.
“If only you’d told me,” my mother would say, later that evening. “I’d have baked another potato!”
Now Helen, her small face full of misery, turned wordlessly to my mother. I think she was just noting the interruption, not pleading for food, but my mother said brightly, “Helen, stay for supper! I thought there wasn’t enough, but we can be a little creative here!”
I didn’t want to hear about creativity. For once, Helen stayed and ate, and my mother refused a potato. Helen’s scrupulous mind was as exacting as ever, but something had shifted. I was used to feeling inadequate when considering Helen’s noble feelings, and at first, I didn’t quite know what to conclude about the black welfare mother who wanted a color TV. If it had been Helen’s rich relative who wanted a color TV, I’d have cheerfully looked down upon her along with Helen. Color TVs, I would agree, were materialistic, showy, pointless: people would be better off buying Latin textbooks. Helen and I had been snobs together on many occasions—and then reconsidered, when her sense of fairness returned.
But never before had Helen questioned the values and tastes of the poor women she’d come to know. The term “black” was just replacing “Negro”: black history, black power, black is beautiful . . . and I ruminated with interest about the black woman rejecting a black-and-white television. I wrote a poem that I showed Helen, in which “black and white” had different meanings in different lines. But I was troubled. I was determined to argue, not just listen.
“I think she knows best,” I said, on another evening when Helen had stayed late. She was still criticizing Adeline about the TV, but she had uncharacteristically stopped blaming herself for spoiling Tania’s chance to be tutored.
“Don’t be silly,” she said quickly. “This is just capitalism teaching her to want what she can’t buy. She’s a victim. More TVs, more money, more soldiers, more killing. She’ll spend the rest of her life wanting what won’t make her happy.”
“Maybe she gets tired at work. She likes watching television at night.”
At that point, my mother in her apron appeared once more. Helen cut her off before she could speak. “That’s okay, Mrs. Grossman, I’m leaving. I have a paper to write.”
“I wish—” my mother began.
“No, I can’t, thank you.” Helen thought she was being invited, not sent away. She wrapped a fuzzy blue scarf around her head and let herself out. Helen always liked scarves, even when it wasn’t especially cold. She looked like someone in a poem.
“Sweet,” my mother said, when she was gone. “You should have told me . . .”
“It’s fine, Mom,” I said.
Helen was making me uncomfortable, but I disapproved of myself when I discovered that I was looking forward to time with my parents and sister and brother. My sister was a funny, chatty girl of twelve who took modern dance; my brother was shy and sweet, only nine and in awe of his sisters. My classes had not yet seized my attention—that would come later. I joined an antiwar group at Brooklyn College, but though I agreed with what I heard, I didn’t say much.
Val Benevento was already on the staff of the newspaper, and soon I heard that she was dating one of the editors. I began seeing her byline. When we’d meet on campus, she’d propose having lunch together at a restaurant nearby, and I was flattered that she wanted to. As always, Val was fun. She knew where to go and what to order, and told me I looked good in brown and green. We were both English majors, and Val had found out which professors to avoid. When I told her stories from my life, she claimed I was funny. Val had a part-time job at Lord & Taylor and had more money than I. I couldn’t afford lunches out, but I never said no when she suggested one.
As I became more sure of myself, I began to miss Helen instead of resenting her greater fortune. Now I think that maybe her fortune wasn’t so great after all, that her life was more than she could handle. As high school girls who were aware of the war and opposed it, we had been about as praiseworthy—at least in my mind—as possible. Helen’s new acquaintances asked themselves not merely to oppose the war but to end it. She seemed to think that she was supposed to end it.
If we had been men, we might have been sent to kill and be killed, and as women we might have been sleeping with men getting ready for war, but because we were students, our personal worries were postponed. The men’s student deferments kept them from being drafted. The system changed in 1969—when my classmates and I were twenty or twenty-one—with the lottery that made every nineteen-year-old American male a potential soldier, not just those who weren’t in school. In high school, boys I knew who were going to college had been relieved to have student deferments and didn’t think much about the men who didn’t have them. But the students Helen and I met now were self-conscious about it. Bourgeois privilege was a big subject with Helen, who sometimes behaved like a visitor from college observing people in the slums and sometimes like a visitor from the slums (she retained several tutees but stopped mentioning conversations with their mothers) observing those in college. She began to speak disdainfully of boys with deferments.
One winter afternoon (piles of coats were stacked at the back of a room with a piano, and embarrassed students pawed through them at the end), I attended an audition for a chorus. I had remembered that I liked to sing. I have a reliable alto voice and had sung in the high school glee club until time with Helen and the literary club became priorities. The students looking for their coats were embarrassed, or angry, because they hadn’t been picked. I was picked, though only two altos were accepted that day. I was so startled to hear my name read that I wondered for a moment if there might be another Olive Grossman. It was my fi
rst distinction in college. I phoned Val that night to tell her, and she promised to come to our first performance. I suspected she wouldn’t, and she didn’t. By then, we were seeing less of each other, if only because of where our schedules took us, when we happened to meet.
The chorus sang Orff’s Carmina Burana that spring. I found its percussive energy irresistible. And most of it was in Latin. I felt distinctive in the world for knowing the Carmina Burana and distinctive in the chorus for knowing a little Latin. Singing, I had power—nothing tentative about this music. I bellowed some of the songs at home and taught bits to my brother and sister. Much of the piece is about the wheel of fortune; my own wheel had turned a degree or two.
When I stepped out of the building at five, each week it was a little less dark; that felt like a personal achievement. A girl in the chorus was in one of my classes, so I had a reason to speak to her. She knew a tenor named Patrick—a friend of her boyfriend—and soon the three of us would emerge together, sampling the weather and putting on hats and gloves. At last, I had friends. We’d find a place to drink coffee. I had finally persuaded my mother not to delay dinner for me, and sometimes my friends and I ate hamburgers. I’d never tasted coffee before—the first time, I said, “Black for me,” because they drank it black; it took years to discover that I don’t like my coffee black.
Sometimes we got into trouble for singing bits of Carmina Burana in a booth at the luncheonette, banging on the table with the heels of our hands. Helen and I had never walked down a street singing; when I asked, it turned out she couldn’t sing on pitch. My new friends and I sang on our way to our bus or subway stops.
Sometimes Patrick and I were alone. He was a dark-haired, sturdy boy, a little older than I, and lived not with his parents but with cousins, a young couple with a baby. He smoked cigarettes, and I liked his smell. Patrick offered to teach me the guitar. I began smoking regularly instead of only when a friend gave me a cigarette, but I never learned guitar—I was too self-conscious to let him watch me make mistakes. Still, I discovered the pleasure of visiting him at his cousins’ apartment, where he slept on a couch in the living room. We sang folk songs together. I knew every Weavers song by heart, and so did he. He could sing the Kingston Trio song about Charlie on the MTA, and soon we sang that. And he could sing Bob Dylan songs, which I found difficult. Learning to produce raspy, angry, rhythmically complex sound and still be making music was irresistible.
Once, his cousins were away, and Patrick began groping and kissing me, first my neck, then my body. His hands were enormous and hot, and every place he touched felt erotically charged. Then he said sensibly, “I didn’t think we’d get to this point for months, but we may not have another chance, and I can’t afford a hotel.” I was shocked for half a minute, both at what he was proposing and at his lack of sentiment—and then I decided that the girl I wanted to be would not be shocked. We took off our clothes in his cousins’ bedroom and got into their bed. He had condoms. We were clumsy, frantic—but excited and happy. When we were done, I insisted that we had to change the sheet (which had a little blood on it), and I suppose the cousins guessed what happened, because the clean sheet we found was a different color. Delighted with myself but self-conscious, I dressed fast and left.
Soon Patrick and I were not just sleeping together but singing protest songs at antiwar rallies. We’d walk up to the microphone, and people would yell. I knew they weren’t yelling because we were good—but maybe we were good. The yelling resumed after we sang. People grabbed us as we left, glad to spot us in the crowd. We called ourselves “Pat and Ollie,” and people began using those names, though we always said “Patrick” and “Olive” to each other.
I did all right in my classes, and at the start of my sophomore year, I found a couple of professors who knew more than I’d ever know. All I wanted was to listen to them—no, I also wanted them to think I was remarkable; there were hints that they did.
One Saturday afternoon in February of 1968, I was playing Scrabble with my mother when the phone rang. Patrick had become less attentive except when we sang, and I worried that he had found a girl with her own apartment. I hoped it was Patrick calling, but it was Helen, who hardly ever phoned. She invited me to visit her the next day.
“I haven’t told you,” she said. “I moved out.”
She had a job sorting books in the Columbia library and had moved into a cheap apartment where two other women lived. “They’re letting me stay in the living room. They need the money.”
“Like my friend Patrick,” I said, and would have liked to say I had a boyfriend, but I didn’t feel sure enough. I envied her once more and wondered if her parents paid some of the rent. I thought, as I often did, that I should have been more like Helen—I should have found a way to move out.
“It’s cheaper than the dorms,” she said. “And the train takes so long.”
She said she had a boyfriend, and I tried to suppress competitive thoughts. “I met him at a rally,” she said. “He’ll probably stop by tomorrow.”
I wondered why she wanted me to come, and to come now. This was the first time I couldn’t read her thoughts. She had been like a small child who bursts into tears when disappointed, her outbursts unmediated by self-consciousness. The time she wanted to go to the rally at the Waldorf with me but not with Val, it didn’t matter what she said, because what she felt was obvious. But, I pointed out to myself, we were closer then. Maybe her new friends or her roommates understood her now.
Then she said, “My roommates don’t like Daniel.” So I was the reliably friendly friend. And yet, wouldn’t it have been simpler to leave with Daniel and avoid the roommates? All these years later, I see that everything Helen did—the long series of changes and decisions that were beginning for her—she did ambivalently. It didn’t seem so at the time, but it was so, and when she felt hesitant about the life she was rushing toward, she turned toward me. I was safety; I was the past that had almost been sufficient, and maybe I could have pulled her back—or maybe I could have gone a distance with her, and that might have modified the life she led during those years, essentially alone.
I took the long ride on the rattly IRT to her apartment in Morningside Heights that Sunday afternoon, a little worried that the apartment would be full of bugs and mice, a little afraid that it would be so enticing—even though Helen was sleeping in the living room and had roommates who criticized her choice in men—that I’d be wretched with envy. Helen came to the door in an old green sweater, with something white on her jeans and hands, and there was a scattering of white on the worn parquet floor: wood strips in an intricate design, now ugly with ancient stains. Later I realized the floor had once been covered with carpet, because occasional bits of gray string were held down by tacks. The floor was a hint of what I was walking into: not just young people figuring out adult life. Everything spoke of other times and places, ideas that had been argued through decades.
I hadn’t seen Helen in a while, and she looked thinner. Her brown curls too were dusted with white. “What’s wrong?” I said, before I completely took in that all this white was flour.
“Oh, Angie’s mad,” she said. So something was wrong. “Come on.” She led me into the kitchen, where ingredients for baking were on a small green wooden table with flaking paint.
“What are you making?”
“Banana bread,” she said. “The bananas got brown.”
I stood there in my coat. Helen mashed bananas with a fork. Then an untidy woman—a girl, we said “girl” until about 1970, when the women’s movement told us we were women—came into the kitchen. She wore glasses with black-and-white frames and overalls. I was afraid of her.
She glanced at me and said nothing. Helen was scraping mashed bananas into a bowl, which seemed to give her the excuse to ignore both of us, like a scientist at a delicate stage of an experiment.
“I’m Olive,” I said.
“Olivia,” Helen said. The correction pleased me: she was protecting her investm
ent in me. “This is Angie.”
Angie and I nodded.
“The point,” Angie said to Helen, “never had anything to do with showing up or not. We were always going to show up. This was a given.”
“I know,” Helen said.
“Whether they did or not.”
“I get it.” Helen turned and crouched, trying to light the oven. It was a gas stove, and the oven had to be lit with a match.
“Pull your hair back,” Angie said.
I offered to light the oven. “My hair is shorter,” I said. Nervously, I leaned over and struck the match. Angie’s was shorter yet, but she stayed where she was. There was a pop when the gas caught, and I jumped. I’ve never liked that kind of oven.
“Thanks,” Helen said. “I hate it.”
As if she’d been waiting to make sure we all survived the lighting of the oven, Angie left the room, and Helen offered me tea. She put a kettle on the stove and then scraped the batter into the loaf pan.
“What was she talking about?” I said.
She didn’t answer for a moment, then said, “Half a million troops,” maybe indicating the reason for whatever people did or didn’t go to. When the banana bread was in the oven, she took out a box of tea bags. She reached for two mugs and put tea bags into them. “Can you imagine?”
I knew there were now half a million American troops in Vietnam. Helen continued, “All this marching and chanting. We’ve accomplished nothing.”
The kettle boiled. “Did you see those pictures?”
A series of photographs that everyone was talking about had come out a week or so earlier. I didn’t want to think about them. “What did Angie mean about going to something?” I asked.
“I don’t remember,” Helen said. “Probably the gym. She thinks I’m wasting time on that stuff. She thinks Daniel only cares about me because he wants a white face at the protest, so the cops won’t shoot.”
For a second I thought she meant flour on her face and was baffled. Then I said, “Daniel’s Afro American?” using the term I believed was correct at the moment. Her boyfriend, it became clear, was a black Columbia student who’d become involved in a fight that Harlem people were having with Columbia over a gymnasium. It was scheduled to be built in Morningside Park, with an entrance at the bottom of the hill so the neighborhood people could use it, while the Columbia students would enter from the top.
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