“‘Betray’?” Chuck said. “Oh, man, come on. Cool it.”
This duel of aggrieved scare-quoting continued for another minute.
The back door opened, and over the sudden blast of James Brown’s voice and horn section, we heard Patti shout, “Alex! Come in and play Twister! There’s four mats! It’s a gas.”
Alex didn’t respond but waited until the laughter and party roar and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” were muffled again.
“And what’s more,” he told us, “you wait to go public—”
“ ‘Go public’?” Chuck said.
“—until after I’ve told Penn no and sent my deposit to Harvard. Thanks. Thank you both so much.”
“You’re actually claiming,” I said, driving in for the cross-examination, “that you would’ve gone somewhere else to college, that you would’ve turned down Harvard so you wouldn’t be with us, if you’d known a month ago that we, that things were changing, and we might, you know …”
“Start fucking?” I had never heard the word used literally, out loud, not even in a movie. “No, fine with me. Do your own thing. But I don’t want to be lied to, especially not about this. It’s so … bourgeois.”
The sun was just rising when Chuck pulled up to my house. We made out for a while, and we would’ve kept going—bliss was it in that dawn!—if I hadn’t needed to pee so badly.
In the delirium of that phase-changing night, I chalked up my odd spiral of unquenchable thirst and endless urination to enchiladas and Pabsts and having my period, to overexcitement and staying up late and Mountain Dew. But it continued the next day and the next and then the next, and on Tuesday a doctor in Evanston told my mother and me that I had juvenile diabetes. For mysterious reasons, my pancreas had stopped working. I would have to inject insulin every day for the rest of my life.
“You are a very lucky girl,” the doctor told me, “because you live now, in the 1960s.” Not only would I grow up and live “a relatively normal life,” but I could use the new strips to test my own urine for sugar every day at home! I’d have disposable plastic syringes I’d use just once! No muss, no fuss!
On the other hand, the chances of my eyes and kidneys and circulatory system failing had skyrocketed in the previous week, and my life expectancy diminished by a decade or more.
I had to comfort my mom, who was crying before we reached the parking lot. I was stunned by the news of my condition. But I did not cry. Within a few days, I was making jokes about it. One night at dinner, my dad said he’d learned that some scientists believed that diabetes is caused by one’s own immune system going haywire, attacking the pancreas and destroying its insulin-making capacity.
“What do you know,” I said, “I was the victim of a military coup inside my own body by my treasonous white blood cells, who decided my pancreas was the enemy within. And it’s May! My own Seven Days in May!”
Peter and my father laughed. My dad suggested I use the idea in my speech at commencement. Sabrina, obviously fed up with the new gobs of nonstop attention I was getting—Radcliffe, commencement speaker, and now a serious illness—excused herself to go watch The Monkees.
After my mom finished the dishes and was about to head off to St. Joseph’s to continue her anti-diabetes novena, I asked her if she thought God was punishing me because I’d stopped believing in him. She didn’t smile and didn’t answer.
Although the endocrinologist had been ridiculously upbeat about my half-full glass, I did feel lucky. One of my uncles, my father’s older brother, had died from diabetes when he was four, in 1921, only months before scientists discovered and extracted insulin. And although Mom’s Catholic faith seemed ridiculous, I immediately formed my own superstitious understanding of what had happened to me that spring. I decided that luck came in clusters, good and bad bunched together, and that luck also existed in some cosmic balance, like matter and antimatter. In under two months, Harvard University admitted me and my two best friends; I was named salutatorian of my graduating class; I landed a cool summer job in New York City; Scott Norquist asked me out; and my love for Chuck Levy was at long, long last requited; but my pancreas stopped working. I just hoped that the diabetes was a large enough piece of bad luck to pay for my bumper crop of good. You can take the girl out of the church, but apparently, you cannot take the church out of the girl.
Until I got my diagnosis, nothing really terrible had ever happened to me. The misfortune of diabetes made me a more admirable and authentic human being. It didn’t make me want to surrender to a higher power. Instead, it reinforced my rationality and sense of self-reliance: something I did twice a day, every day, was the only thing keeping me alive.
It wasn’t just that my hard luck balanced out the great gift of Chuck revealing his feelings and plighting his troth. I was now his tragic inamorata, a fierce and doomed (but not too doomed) Juliet to his fierce enraptured Romeo, the two of us lovers and comrades headed off to an ivy-covered bower far away.
By graduation, we’d apologized to Alex for keeping him in the dark, and he had evidently forgiven us. I did mention the diabetes from the podium at commencement, although I badly misjudged the effect. The title of the speech was “Amerika the Beautiful.” I talked about how New Trier was named after Trier, a German city, and quoted JFK’s Ich bin ein Berliner line. After a series of rhetorical questions about what it meant to be an American in 1967 (“Is it ‘American’ to make war on civilians abroad and benefit from racism at home?”), I asked, “Bin ich ein Amerikaner? Am I an American? Am I an American?” I thought the Seven Days in May line would make me seem like Mort Sahl, soften them up for my hectoring, but rather than laughs, the announcement of my illness provoked gasps and mass pity. At least I went over better than Jimmy Graham, who summarized The Lord of the Rings as a geopolitical parable, recasting the Dark Lord Sauron as both Hitler and LBJ, the orcs as Gestapo and CIA, Gandalf as Ho Chi Minh and FDR, and the hobbits variously as World War II veterans, the Vietcong, and the members of the Class of ‘67. “Go forth to college and beyond,” he told us, “to unmake the Ring.” Alex accused him of “completely ripping off my Henry the Fifth concept,” but Dad said it didn’t matter, because “the Graham boy was even more confusing and sentimental than Mr. Tolkien.”
A couple of weeks later, Chuck took me to a club in Hyde Park to see Muddy Waters. I hadn’t considered myself a blues fan, but I was really enjoying the music.
“This is going to sounded stupid and conceited,” I said halfway through the set, returning from the bathroom, where I’d gone to inject a dose of insulin.
“No, it isn’t,” Chuck said. “What?”
“I feel like I finally understand this music,” said the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Danish marketing consultant to the eighteen-year-old son of a Jewish engineering professor. “I mean, I get the blues now.”
He grinned and glanced down. Muddy Waters had just played “(I’m Your) Hoochie Coochie Man,” so Chuck thought I felt newly bluesy because we’d started having sex.
That wasn’t it, not mainly. “Because of the diabetes. Because now I really know I’m going to die. And probably why. And it’s not as far away as I’d assumed.” I shrugged.
Chuck put a hand on each of my shoulders and looked deep into my eyes. “The carp is God,” he said.
I laughed hard, and teared up, and kissed him right there at our table in front of the world. Back in ninth grade, Alex and Chuck briefly convinced me that “Carpe diem” is a corruption of “Carp est Deus” and thus literally meant not “Seize the day” but “The carp is God.” In the month since I’d gotten diabetes, my seize-the-day outlook had been shaped by the line of Dr. Johnson’s that I’d just learned in English class—”When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully”—and by the Schlitz beer slogan that ran on TV all the time: “You only go around once in life, so you’ve got to grab for all the gusto you can.”
Knowing you’re going to die and therefore grabbing for gusto can
go two very different ways. I alternated between both. Life did seem precious, each bite of burger and each cigarette drag perfectly delicious, every touch of Chuck’s an unparalleled pleasure, music more electric, movies more intense and profound. But time felt in short supply. Which amped up an eighteen-year-old’s natural impatience and inclined me to take risks I wouldn’t have dared take before. Carpe diem: life is beautiful. Carpe diem: fuck it, life is short.
“You really think it’s safe?” Alex asked from the backseat of Chuck’s mom’s Impala.
“Safer than driving this car,” Chuck said.
“Those clouds are so dark,” Alex said.
“They’re moving away, out over the lake. You can see up ahead, it’s already stopped raining. And this was your idea in the first place.”
“I don’t know, Chuck. I don’t want to die for a silly reason.”
“We’re not gonna die. Don’t be a pussy.”
It was a Saturday in late June. The next day I was headed for New York City and my summer job, and Alex would be leaving soon for Eastern Europe and his student cultural conferences. It had been raining all afternoon. We were driving up the Edens Expressway, on our way to the Palwaukee airport. Alex had never flown with Chuck.
The plane was small. “It’s only got one engine!” Alex said. “What if it conks out?”
“Then I glide in.”
The rain stopped, the clouds were blowing east, and we could see a widening bar of blue on the western horizon.
We each put on headsets and took off. The trick was to keep the low late-afternoon sun behind us and fly east, over the lake, toward the rain—but then to circle back before we reached the cloud bank.
I was the first to spot one. “There!”
“Where?” asked Alex, who disliked not being first to see or hear or know anything. “Where?”
“There, at four o’clock,” Chuck said. “No, down.”
Alex gasped. “Oh my God. I didn’t know you could even see one from above. It’s like being an angel. It’s like a God’s-eye view.”
Alex and I stared out the right side of the plane at the stripe of red fuzzing into a stripe of orange fuzzing into yellow, green, blue, darker blue, and purple. We were dumbfounded by the rainbow, unaware of everything else.
Until Chuck banked sharply left.
Alex screamed. I wet my pants a little. Chuck grinned as he finished the turn and leveled off, heading back toward the afternoon sun.
We didn’t see another rainbow during our next four passes. As Chuck prepared to turn away once again from the vast cliff of dark, dark gray, he said, “This time, before I bank, close your eyes.”
“It’s okay,” I said, “I’m used to it now.”
“No, close your eyes. It’s an experiment.”
We did. We felt the sharp left turn.
“Keep your eyes closed.”
“What are we waiting for?” I asked.
Alex started humming “Somewhere over the Rainbow.”
“Okay,” Chuck instructed finally, “I’m done with the turn, but keep your eyes closed. What direction are we going now?”
“West,” we both said.
“Open your eyes.”
Alex screamed again. I grabbed my right armrest with both hands and held tight, as if to keep myself from falling. The plane was tilted left at a shocking angle, and in front of us, the cloud wall to the east looked darker and more filled with menace than ever.
“I lied. We’ve been banked thirty degrees this whole time, flying in a circle. And now your eyes are lying to you. You felt me going into it, and you can feel me coming out of it”—he started leveling off and straightening out, back toward the sun—”but you can’t feel the angle when you’re in the turn.”
A few minutes later, when we turned east again, we were pointed directly into the center of a rainbow that stretched over our entire field of vision.
“Whoa,” Chuck said.
We could see the whole thing, the complete arc, the top and both ends—and there was a second rainbow encircling the first, but in a mirror image, with purple on the outside and red on the innermost arc. Against the nearly black clouds, the colors of the double rainbow were super-brilliant, like neon. It looked fake.
“Could we fly through it?” I asked.
“Let’s fly through it!” Alex said.
“You can’t. See, it just keeps moving away. You can never reach it. We’d get to the rain—rainbows are made of raindrops, right?—and then it’d just … disappear.”
I thought of God, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. It had never occurred to me before that He’s a trickster.
After we landed and Chuck parked the plane, I asked, “What would happen if we had just kept flying straight through? The rainbow would disappear, and then what?”
“We’d be inside the thundercloud. We might’ve gotten hit by lightning.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Alex said.
“You’re safer getting hit by lightning up there than down here. The problem would be these big currents inside the thundercloud, these intense winds in there, updrafts and downdrafts. They can tear you apart.”
I grinned and kept grinning. Which was weird. But we were safe and sound, sneakers squishing and squeaking on the wet tarmac, walking under a blue sky toward a red Impala washed shiny clean by the rain. We were eighteen.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
My parents agreed to let me spend the rest of the summer in New York City because I was staying in a dorm room at Barnard with an older New Trier girl whose parents they knew. I’d gotten a volunteer job in a tiny new organization trying to drum up support inside the Democratic Party for dumping President Johnson and nominating an antiwar candidate in 1968. When I got to New York, I discovered it wasn’t much of an organization at all, but a few devoted typists and collaters and phone answerers devoted to one guy, a lawyer and politician who seldom came to the office. But the office had a Xerox copying machine, so the operation seemed sophisticated and legit.
I became best buddies with one of the other interns. Sarah Caputo had grown up the youngest of six kids in Camden, New Jersey, where her dad worked as a welder in a shipyard. She had (still has) a voice like Judy Holliday’s, roomed with an aunt and uncle in Queens, and worked nights as a waitress. She was about to start at NYU on a full scholarship. Sarah was the first person I ever met who’d gotten 800 on both SATs, and who used the words “preppy” and “broad”—after we became friends, she told me that at first she’d taken me “for some rich preppy folksinger broad.” Sarah was also the first person to whom I was completely honest about my years of tortured pining for Chuck Levy.
We met some of the SDS kids from Columbia, who had a summer project to enlist regular New Yorkers, nonstudents, preferably black, into the Movement. The Columbia kids argued constantly over the relative merits of antiwar education and antiwar protest and antiwar “resistance.” Whenever they used the words “resistance” and “struggle,” which they did a lot, their already serious voices got quieter, deeper, grave.
I was afraid they’d think I was a silly, ignorant midwestern girl if I asked, What exactly do you mean by “resistance”? Instead, I mentioned that my boyfriend’s uncle had been in the armed Jewish resistance in Palestine in the 1940s.
Israel’s Six-Day War had taken place a few weeks earlier. “ ‘Jewish resistance in Palestine’,” repeated one of the SDS boys, chuckling. “I’d call that an oxymoron.” And so I felt like a silly, ignorant midwestern girl. Sarah said they were all “businessmen’s kids, doctors’ and lawyers’ kids who spend their time feeling guilty about being comfortable instead of just fucking helping people who need help.” I loved Sarah. I still do.
I missed Chuck. But I also took pleasure in missing him, especially when he phoned me at the end of my first week in New York. No one had ever called me long-distance. In addition to working as a lifeguard at Gillson Park, he said he was helping out at his father’s electronic
s firm.
“You’re working for your dad’s company? I thought you had that big fight about him being a war profiteer?”
“I know, but he’s not. It’s not. It’s just research into some kind of Teletype system for computer scientists. That the government happens to be paying for. Just like the government has paid your dad to do research.” I’d made Chuck nervous, gotten him off-track. “Anyhow, I’m also mowing lawns on weekends. Saving up money for a surprise for you.”
“How will it be a surprise if you already told me you’re giving it to me?”
“Hmm … riddle me that, Catwoman.”
In fact, it was a complete surprise, a few weeks later, one that made me yelp, when I found Chuck sitting on the steps of the dorm where I was staying. I didn’t recognize him at first, from far away, because he hadn’t cut his hair since May. He’d taken the bus all the way from Chicago. He was going to stay in New York for a week.
I cried. Chuck laughed and hugged me. I felt as happy as I’d ever felt in my life, and I said so. “I’m glad you didn’t tell me you were coming. I know we’re supposed to always tell each other the truth and hold back nothing. But I’m glad you held this back. Some secrets are best if they’re kept secret.”
He’d booked a room for the two of us at a cheap hotel in Times Square, not far from where I worked. At the Northwestern library, he’d researched New York restaurants and had a list of a dozen where we could have dinner for under three dollars apiece, although most nights we ate at a place in Chinatown called Hung Fat, where the only other white people were also in their teens and twenties.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
Sgt. Pepper’s was playing over the PA system in the basement of the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village as we awaited the boozeless Friday-evening “teen” show, and when Chuck sang along with the chorus to “When I’m Sixty-four,” I leaned over and kissed him. We wandered over to a psychedelic dance hall in the East Village, where we were surrounded by kids and even some adults with snakes and stars and moons and flowers and words painted on their faces and chests and arms. I’m not sure I’d even smelled marijuana in a public place before, but here the smoke was like a fog.
True Believers Page 24
