Virtual Fire

by Mendy Sobol

  I’d already completed my Radcliffe, Swarthmore, and Wellesley applications when the high school guidance counselor left a note taped to my locker—

  An interviewer from Barton, the women’s college at Wellston University, is coming today. I think you should meet her.

  She was tall, black, stunningly gorgeous. Like my favorite Supreme, Flo Ballard, only with a PhD in English Literature. I liked her the moment she stuck out her hand, introducing herself as “Evelyn Ruger, as in ‘sugar,’ last-minute replacement for the rich white lady who normally handles Grosse Pointe.” A big, smart woman with a big Afro and bigger personality, my high school had never seen anything like her. As we walked the halls together—Evelyn asked me for a tour—every head turned her way.

  “Meg, I like your school, but I sure do feel like the raisin at the bottom of the bowl of corn flakes. I think the admissions people sent me out here because I’m from Detroit. ‘Course the Brewster Projects aren’t exactly Grosse Pointe.”

  “The Brewster Projects? Isn’t that where The Supremes grew up?” I’d read it in Seventeen Magazine, the only thing I knew about the projects.

  “Sure did. I sang with those girls in my church choir.”

  “You sang with The Supremes?”

  “What did I say? And let me tell you something. Mary and Flo—‘Blondie’ we called her because of her light hair—those girls had the voices. But that Diane Ross....”

  “Don’t you mean Diana?” I interrupted.

  “Sure, she’s Diana out here in Grosse Pointe, but in the projects she was plain Diane. Anyway, you couldn’t hear her little thing above the other girls. But she’d carry on so, the reverend always put her in the front row to keep her from making a scene!”

  I laughed. Everything Evelyn said made me laugh.

  When we returned to the lounge outside the guidance office, I asked Evelyn if she went to Barton.

  “Be SERIOUS, Meg!” Evelyn had a habit of talking in capitals. “I got my degrees from Detroit and Cleveland State.”

  “Then why do you think I should go there?”

  Evelyn didn’t say anything for a while, just looked at me, looked through me with her wide brown eyes.

  “The guidance counselor showed me your grades, Meg. Your grades, SATs, all that stuff. We both know you can go anywhere you want. Why, if you’re smart, you’ll head some place warm, like Stanford or Berkeley. But let me tell you something. Wellston and Barton are changing. They’re changing because students are making them change, and making decisions about things that really count—curriculum, admissions, and financial aid. I’m not saying they don’t have to drag half the faculty along with them kicking and screaming, but the point is, it’s happening. Four years from now when you graduate, there may not be a Barton, because students are working on a plan for equal admission of men and women, coed dorms, and complete integration of the colleges. If you want to be part of those changes, if you want to leave your mark, you should come to Barton.”

  By the time we shook hands goodbye, I knew where I was going to college.

  “Dad, I got an acceptance letter from Barton! That’s where I’m going!”

  “Like hell you are! You’re going to Harvard or I’m cutting you off without a penny. And don’t think a princess like you can work her way through college!”

  “Dad, Harvard rejected me. Here—read the letter.”

  Snatching the one paragraph letter from my hand, Dad reads, face turning redder and redder.

  “No. This is bullshit! Someone made a mistake!”

  “It’s no mistake Dad. They rejected me.”

  “We’ll see about that!”

  Dad stormed up the stairs to his study, called God knows who, but I could hear him screaming. When he came down, he was angrier than before.

  “Those bastards! How could they do this to me! I’ll bet it was that prick DeWolfe! It must be him! He’s had it in for me ever since the day I was accepted at Harvard Law and he barely made it into BU. I’m going to make that son of a bitch pay if it’s the last thing I ever do!”

  When I came home from school the next day, everything crimson had been removed from my room. Dad never again uttered the words “Harvard” and “Meg” in the same sentence.

  Of course, getting rejected was easy. And it proved one thing—Harvard’s Admissions Committee really does read those stupid essays they make you write about why you want to go to Harvard.

  Chapter Forty: Meg

  My freshman year at Barton I smoked pot, dropped acid, went through three boyfriends. By Christmas I put on fifteen pounds. So I stopped eating. By spring break I’d lost thirty. First semester I made straight As, pulling all-nighters with the help of diet pills stolen from my mother’s medicine cabinet. Second term I was on my way to Cs, Ds and incompletes. That’s when I got a note from Evelyn. “Please come see me in my office.”

  In Whitman House, home to the English Department and the most rundown building on campus, I found Evelyn’s office in the basement. She didn’t waste time getting to the point.

  “What is WRONG with you, Meg?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Missed classes, missed exams, papers not turned in—I did not traipse all the way out to your Mayflower-riding high school to invite you to a four-year party!”

  “I’m doing the best I can, Evelyn. Really.”

  “You are doing NOTHING! Now I have made you an appointment with the Madeira Point Neighborhood Association. You are going down there tomorrow and volunteer to work with those neighborhood kids. Because if you want to flunk out that’s your business, but at least you’re going to flunk out because you’re spending time doing SOMETHING. Do you understand me?”

  I nodded, stunned, not knowing what to say.

  “And Meg, you look terrible. You are coming with me this instant, AND YOU ARE GOING TO EAT!”

  I wanted a university where students weren’t treated like children, where the outmoded doctrine of in loco parentis had been cast aside. But by acting like a mother, a real mother, Evelyn saved my life. It was that simple. Evelyn saved my life.

  Working with the kids in Madeira Point changed everything. Call it amateur psychology, but I couldn’t help thinking, if my parents wouldn’t comfort me, at least I could comfort others. I even looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, the old definition, the real definition—comfort, from the Latin confortare, to give strength and hope.

  Evelyn only volunteered me for two mornings a week, but soon I was spending part of each day at the Neighborhood Association’s Community Center, reading to the Portuguese-speaking children from the Cape Verde Islands, and in time, teaching them so they could read to me. Their parents thanked me with whole roasted chickens and melt-in-your-mouth Portuguese sweet breads. Helped by their generosity and the strictly observed ritual of Friday-night dinners with Evelyn at Grant’s Womb, a lamely psychedelic campus bistro, the skeleton my body had become soon regained its form. My grades recovered too, despite, or rather because of the hours I spent off campus. By the middle of my second year, when so many classmates experienced sophomore slump, my name returned to the dean’s list, staying there until the events of my senior year made grades irrelevant.

  Chapter Forty-One: Meg

  Mom and Dad never asked me about my extracurricular activities, so I never told them. They didn’t ask about my courses, or major, or friends, or much of anything, but as long as I kept getting good grades, they kept writing checks for tuition, room, and board. Dad would call on Sundays, rubbing it in about Harvard’s annual football victory over Wellston, and I’d play along, pretending I went to the games, pretending I cared. Mom wrote me brief notes with the latest gossip from the country club or summaries of her canasta hands, always enclosing a twenty-dollar bill, always assuring me all she wanted was my happiness.

  One topic I never discussed with my parents was the war. It wasn’t that the subject never came up. Dad’s wartime proclamations became more frequent as the conflict, in Vietnam and
at home, continued growing.

  “The President knows what he’s doing!”

  “My country right or wrong!”

  “They ought to shoot a few of those protesters like they do in Russia! Maybe then they’d appreciate how good we’ve got it here!”

  I never told him how the privileged boys I knew at Wellston all had student deferments, how after graduating, the wealthy ones still avoided serving. Or how older brothers of my Madeira Point kids were coming home from the war sick, injured, addicted. Or never coming home again. I didn’t say a thing about rising opposition to the war at Wellston and throughout the country. I kept my mouth shut about my own growing involvement in the antiwar movement. I never rose to his bait. And the checks kept coming, even after I stopped coming home.

  One Christmas vacation I learned how sons of my family’s country-club friends received exemptions from the draft based on letters written by Dad. “All it took was a few words to my clients on the draft board,” he bragged after downing his fourth Scotch. “A few words, and now all those draft-dodging little bastards and their families owe me big time!”

  That was the only time I ever slipped.

  “Doesn’t that make you a hypocrite?” I said.

  Dad didn’t speak to me again until after New Years, until my mother begged me to apologize to him.

  I did.

  Dad was an officer on General MacArthur’s staff in World War II, serving under him from the Philippines all the way to Tokyo. Somewhere along the way he was awarded a Purple Heart. Dad never talked about it, and I would never have known if I hadn’t asked Mom why he walked with a limp.

  “He never got angry before the war,” she said. “I can’t even recall him raising his voice.” Then she started crying.

  I didn’t understand about PTSD. No one did. Besides, World War II vets, the Greatest Generation, they didn’t get PTSD, right?

  As it turned out, that trip to Grosse Pointe was my last. The day I returned from break, I joined S.M.C.—the Student Mobilization Committee Against The War. Within a month I was living with S.M.C.’s chairman, Nick Rector. My opposition to the war became a full-time occupation, leaving no opportunity, even during school vacations, for traveling home. So I made excuses—“Sorry Mom, I’ve got to stay here and finish my honors thesis.” “Sorry Dad, my roommate’s family needs me to housesit for them in Newport.”—every day working harder against a war I viewed as being waged by the wealthy against the poorer classes of two countries, Vietnam and America.

  In the fall of 1969, marching arm-in-arm down Pennsylvania Avenue with 500 S.M.C. Marshals and 500,000 more opponents of what was now Nixon’s War, I felt determined and optimistic, thinking, We’re really going to do it, we’re going to stop this war! The people are demanding it, and the government can’t stand against a vocal, mobilized majority of its own citizens!

  I didn’t realize Nixon had discovered support elsewhere—in an invisible, unpollable, unquestionable “silent majority,” a constituency whose support he’d soon be citing for widening the war, bombing civilian targets in North Vietnam, defoliating the jungles of the South with Agent Orange and napalm, illegally wiretapping American citizens, impounding funds appropriated by Congress for wastewater treatment, using them instead for secret attacks on Laos and Cambodia, supporting the overthrow of the Cambodian government, invading Cambodia, sending hundreds of thousands of American soldiers into combat, sending tens of thousands of them and God only knows how many Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians to their deaths. By the time of the killings at Kent State, I couldn’t understand why anyone was shocked. If anything, the murder of protesters was overdue—and undoubtedly supported by the silent majority.

  But before Cambodia, before Kent State, other things happened, small things in comparison to the war, yet far more important to me, things that changed my life forever.

  Despite the war, my “Wellston Experience” (as the University’s recruiting literature liked calling it) was a good one. I loved exploring Wellston’s ivy-covered campus, from The Green, a grassy quadrangle shaded by ancient elms where students and faculty congregated on old picnic blankets, rapping for hours and playing Frisbee or guitar, to the unfinished glass-and-concrete tower of the new science library, invaded nightly by dozens of students who hiked up its seventeen flights of stairs and huddled together on the rooftop against the chill, passing joints and waiting for sunrise. Climbing through trapdoors, out bay windows, and up fire escapes to the roofs of dormitories, libraries, and lecture halls, I made it my mission to photograph Butler’s sooty skyline from every possible angle, in every season, at every time of day.

  Thinking about life after college, planning for law school or perhaps a masters degree in elementary education, I declared a double major in political science and English literature, taking every course Evelyn taught—Women in Literature, Twentieth-Century Poets, and her multidisciplinary course, Black Voices: From Bailey (Pearl) to Baraka (Amiri). Inspired by Evelyn, I began keeping a journal, writing poetry, dabbling in creative writing and ethnomusicology classes.

  I continued working with kids in Madeira Point, and their parents asked for my help opposing Wellston’s creeping expansion into their neighborhood, where new student housing was driving up rents and driving out residents. From that experience I met Nick and other SMC activists.

  I was happy. Evelyn’s recruiting promises about Wellston were coming true—a great education and the chance to make a difference. Without ever asking, I assumed Evelyn was happy, too. Leading workshops on racism and poverty, winning praise from the community and student-sponsored awards for teaching excellence, writing articles about feminist pre-revolutionary French poets in her spare time. In my eyes, Evelyn was a rising star. It never occurred to me Wellston might not agree, never crossed my mind recruiting promises made to Evelyn might not be kept.

  The only failures I experienced at Wellston came in my relations with men. I had lots of men friends, but romances never lasted more than a month or two. Awkward, uncomfortable, frustrating, and not very romantic—that’s how I’d describe them. Sex was brief, unsatisfying, and always accompanied by fears of disease and parental discovery. Fears of pregnancy too, though I was on The Pill. I never discussed it with my boyfriends, but I realized they had similar fears, plus one more: commitment.

  Because of my interests and the circles I moved in, it was only natural I should date some of the more radical men on campus. But while they might deliver a fiery speech demanding equality for women, their abstract ideals never carried over to the women they slept with.

  Some of my girlfriends experimented in relationships with other women, seeming no more or less happy than those who dated men. Their flirtations and my own experience with men made the idea tempting, but women never held that kind of attraction for me.

  Compared to my social life, I thought Evelyn’s was perfect. She couldn’t have been more than ten years older than I, but to me, Evelyn was a woman, while I was still a girl. Evelyn was a professor, a great teacher, a committed activist, possessed of all the beauty, charm, charisma, and confidence I lacked. And Evelyn’s mix of intellectual sophistication and interpersonal earthiness, like Anna Julia Cooper and Tina Turner blended into one perfect woman, made her irresistible to men.

  Evelyn loved music—avant-garde jazz, rhythm and blues, straight-ahead blues, and anything danceable. Arriving at parties with a stack of records under one arm and always a tall, handsome black man on the other, colorful dashiki paralleling every full and dangerous curve of her body, heavy brass and aquamarine earrings dangling to her shoulders, she’d immediately abandon her date, heading straight for the stereo, ripping stacks of students’ Led Zeppelin and Cream LPs off the turntable, replacing them with John Coltrane (her favorite), Howlin’ Wolf, Aretha Franklin, and The Electric Flag.

  “Clapton? Page? Don’t make me laugh! Now you take a listen to Mr. Michael Bloomfield—that’s one white boy who can PLAY!”

  And she’d cue up Electric Flag�
��s Wine, curling one slender index finger in the direction of her date, taking over the dance floor the way she’d taken over the music, the party, the heart of everyone in the room, jitterbugging with heat and sexuality and abandon, her man coolly laying back behind the beat while Evelyn swayed and shimmied an eighth note ahead, making it seem for all the world like the song was written just for her.

  I really was still a girl, a girl who couldn’t see beneath the surface of anything.

  On the first day of November 1968, the New England weather turned bone-chillingly cold as word swept campus that Dan Reynolds, a popular young writing teacher, was dead. “Bad acid,” they whispered at a small, unofficial student vigil for those who knew and admired him. I wasn’t one of those. I’d never taken a course from Reynolds, never met him, barely had time to shake my head, muttering, “too bad,” and “so sorry,” to friends in the Creative Writing Program who revered him. When Evelyn missed our Friday dinner, it never occurred to me the reason might have something to do with the death of her English Department colleague.

  “Hi Evelyn!” I found Evelyn behind her desk in the Whitman House basement on Monday. “Where were you Friday night? I waited for you at The Womb for two hours.”

  I talked for another five minutes, complaining about Professor Modine’s Polling Statistics class, complaining about the last SMC meeting, complaining about Nick, complaining about God knows what, before I noticed Evelyn’s puffy cheeks, her sleepless, red-streaked eyes.

  “What’s... what’s the matter?” I said.

  And then she was crying. And I didn’t know what to do. So I sat there feeling uncomfortable, wishing she would stop, finally saying, “I’ll come back later when you feel better,” slipping out of her office door, closing it quietly behind me.

  The next day’s Wellston Daily Herald headline read, RUGER RESIGNS ENGLISH DEPT. POST, CITES INSTITUTIONAL RACISM. And she wasn’t in her office, and she wasn’t at her apartment, and no one knew where she was. I didn’t hear a thing until two weeks later, when a letter postmarked Detroit arrived in my mailbox.