The Love Children Read online

  “It looks like chopped-up mushrooms,” I said.

  “That’s what it is. Magical mushrooms.” He grinned. “Take a handful. Eat them.” He washed them down with Coke. I imitated him, chewing the tasteless things.

  “Now just wait.” He fiddled with his big portable radio until he found a station playing the Beatles. You could always find one eventually: the Beatles were constantly on. They were playing “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

  We sat close to each other, our legs jiggling in time to the music, letting the mushrooms settle in. After a little while, I could see the strawberry fields. I was wandering in sunlight, delighted at the tiny red berries nestled in the deep green leaves all around me. All my pores were open to the sun, and I was a cauldron of fire.

  “I am fire and air!” I cried. “I have immortal longings in me!”

  We were reading Antony and Cleopatra in junior English.

  “I am open to the universe!” I cried. Steve tried to hush me. He hugged me lightly, told me to calm down.

  But I pulled away from him and ran outside. I was burning up. I threw open my coat; I put my face up to the rain and tried to drink it. It was amazing how hard it was to get the drops to fall in your mouth.

  “Jess! Jessamin! Stop!” Steve urged from the door. “Suppose a cop sees you!”

  I stopped. That remark had penetrated my haze. I turned to him proudly. “I am open to everything!” I announced, holding my wrists out in front of me for the cuffs.

  “You idiot.” He laughed and grabbed me. He pulled me back inside and sat me down and sat next to me and kept stroking my forehead and uttering calming words, for a long time.

  He said, “No more mushrooms for you,” but after that I clamored to try everything Steve came up with. One time Bishop had some pills—God knows what they were—and I took them; I scrawled for hours in my notebook, poem after poem bubbling up into my head. Sometimes a whole group of us would take something together, and we’d compare visions. Everything looked so weird with the pills, it felt as if you were seeing the very bones of life, the skeleton under the surface. The trees looked like fingers drawn by Van Gogh; my own hand was a continent filled with ships and land and bodies of water. We would lie around in the gallery, everybody offering his or her picture. We were full of love for each other; we were adored babies in the laps of the gods.

  Over that winter and spring, we regularly experimented—that’s how we thought about it, as experimenting; we saw ourselves as Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley. We took mescaline and acid, pills that made you soar. Some people took downers, just to see what they were like; I didn’t. We always smoked pot when we had it, and we almost always had it. It was easier to get than alcohol, which stores weren’t supposed to sell us, though some kids could get it. Bishop could always get beer and even whiskey from one of his older brothers’ friends or even his sister’s husband. He could take it out of the family liquor cabinet if he wanted. His family—well, the men in it (and it was mostly men)—believed in drinking. It was the best part of life for them.

  But most of us preferred drugs. And until the cops kicked us out of the gallery, what a time we had! We’d lie around on the floor in states of benign passivity. We were experimenting with altered moods, and our experiments made us broader, more tolerant, more generous people. That was what it meant to be part of the new generation; we were each a love child.

  We thought that we were a miracle generation born to create a new way of seeing and feeling, a different morality. We had the sense that for generations, for eons, maybe, people had thought war was a great thing, killing was heroic, and domination noble. But we knew that killing was awful, domination miserable for dominated and dominator, and war a horror. We were against the Vietnam War, yes, but also all war, all violence, and racism. We were convinced that if the people of the world took drugs instead of alcohol, and preferred peace to war, violence would disappear in a haze of well-being. It filled me with terror to think of Bishop or Steve or any of my friends having to go to the jungles of Vietnam with a gun, to kill or be killed. What mattered was connection: getting in touch with your feelings and with other people, seeing the beauty in other people, loving them. Relatedness. We were fond of quoting E. M. Forster: “Only connect.” We were incredulous that anyone on earth would deny the truth of our ideas. We spoke in wonder of people who did, the over-thirty or over-forty generation. We couldn’t grasp their mentality. I couldn’t comprehend the men in the government, Robert McNamara, say, but I also knew that not everybody over thirty agreed with them. My mother was over thirty, but she thought war was used by elites to maintain their power over the rest of us. My father supported the war, but not because he thought war was wonderful. He thought it was inevitable. He bragged about Leightons fighting in all this country’s wars—he felt they had sacrificed themselves. But I didn’t see him signing up for Vietnam, and Mom said he hadn’t wanted to fight in Korea either. Sandy’s parents didn’t support the war, but Bishop’s did. They didn’t change their minds even after their second-oldest son was killed in Vietnam.

  A lot of people didn’t like our ideas. When I look back on those days, I see how naive we were, how simpleminded. People today talk about the sixties as a crazy time; they say we were foolish, deluded, a wasted, drugged-out generation of losers. But our experiments with drugs were part of our sensibility, one aspect of our enlightenment. We were open to discovering our inner being, instead of driving drunk or fighting each other with fists, or metaphorically killing each other on the floor of the stock exchange. We tried on altered states of being, and the truth is, my friends were a sweet bunch of kids who mostly turned into a sweet bunch of adults. We really were the beginning of the brave new world. If you tell that to anybody today, they smirk. But I say it’s true.

  Of course, some of us got lost along the way.

  Steve and I often cut school. One day that spring he came over to Barnes and found me in the hall on my way to French class. He asked if I wanted to cut. I nodded and we darted out a side door just before the bell rang. He’d promised to hang out with his friend Jeffrey, so we walked back to Cambridge High and Latin to get him. Steve would go into the school at the period break to find Jeffrey. We stood across the street having a smoke on the sidewalk while we waited for the period bell. We were in front of the house of some lady who didn’t like us (she’d chased us away before), when we saw a squad of police with riot shields and helmets charging down the street. We looked at each other: were they coming for us? Had the lady called the police on us like she’d said she would? And they were coming for us with riot shields? We started to walk quickly, trying not to look like we were running, toward town. But even after we were a hundred yards from the lady’s house, the police kept running in our direction, batons in their right hands, shields in their left. They looked absolutely terrifying, like robot medieval knights. We finally stopped dead on the sidewalk, but they went on running past us and into the school. They disappeared, and after a little while kids came running out, white faced. Some were crying. No one we asked seemed to know what was going on. We didn’t see Jeffrey.

  Steve said, “Let’s go get my car. Then we can take off if we need to.” He had earned enough at his job at Monaghan’s to buy himself a red-and-white Chevy, a couple of years old but shiny and nice.

  We ran toward Bow Street. The car was parked in the lot behind Monaghan’s. We got in Steve’s car and crouched down in the backseat. We were both panting from running and were very thirsty. Steve jumped out and went in the back door of Monaghan’s and came out with some bottles of water and a little bag of weed. We sat on the floor of the backseat and gulped water, then Steve rolled a joint. He licked three little skins, and pressed their edges together to make a big one, then laid the dried-dung-looking tobacco leaves into a crease, spreading it out along the paper. Dexterously, he curled the paper up into a cylinder, slid in a tiny piece of cardboard, and twisted the end of the paper. He lit it and passed it to me. I inhaled deeply. Oh, i
t was good.

  While he worked, Steve joked about the owner of Monaghan’s, Varashimi Agni, who had two daughters named Jolly and Jett. Steve was doubled over laughing about Jolly and Jett, and I was laughing too and told him I knew someone who had a sister named Brie. I said maybe when I grew up and had a daughter I’d call her Cheddar.

  He said, “Or Jarlsberg!”

  And I said, “Or Bleu!”

  He exploded: he had a friend named Blue! At this point, we were both laughing so hard we had to pee, and he ran into Monaghan’s again, then I did. I knew we were both laughing off our nervousness from seeing the cops. A vision had flashed through my mind of being arrested by those robots in plastic helmets, booked, lined up against a wall, shot. For a moment, it had seemed possible.

  We had another joint and calmed down, and then we started to make out, and I, well, we’d made out before, and I loved Steve, I really loved him, but before that day I hadn’t felt quite so, well, something was new, something was squirming inside me, it was like the time I ate the mushroom, I was painfully open, hungrily open, and I let him touch me and I touched him and he came in my hand. He’d never done that before, and I was kind of overwhelmed, it was a little disgusting, I didn’t know it’d be like that. I cried out and sat up. And he turned away and wiped himself off and said he was sorry but he couldn’t help it. I kissed him and tried to pretend I didn’t mind, but I felt a little sick.

  I went home after that. Mom was home although it was only a little after four and she was surprised that I had skipped work. I didn’t tell her I’d also skipped French and math. The minute she laid eyes on me, she could tell something was wrong, so I told her about the cops. I said I didn’t feel well.

  She looked at me with concern and felt my forehead, and I had this idea she was smelling my breath. I could still taste the pot in my mouth and wondered if she could smell it, but she didn’t say anything. She told me to lie down and she’d bring me some tea. In a little while, I drifted off to sleep. But after that, I thought she acted just a little bit odd. Something was bothering her. I could tell by the set of her neck. And a few days after that, she told me she thought I should spend the summer with Dad. She had decided this all on her own. She asked Dad to get me a job and he called a couple of nights later to say I could be a waitress at some bistro there a friend of his owned, and together he and Mom hustled me up there, giving me no say whatever about it. I was livid.

  I admit it was heading to be a lonely summer anyway. Sandy was going to the summer camp she’d gone to for years in Maine, this year as a paid counselor. Bishop was going to the dude ranch in Nevada that his uncle owned, also to work for pay. The only kids who would be around over the summer were Dolores, and probably Steve. Steve was going to be working full time but he’d be around nights and I could see him on weekends. I didn’t want to go to Vermont and protested vociferously. It did me no good. Mom was determined to get rid of me. Steve thought she knew what we’d done in the car—I think he thought I told her—and that she wanted to separate us. I didn’t see how she could know about that, but then I didn’t see how she could know about the drugs, either. That she knew something seemed clear.

  Or maybe Dad had been right all these years and she did have a lover and wanted to get me out of the way. The idea had crossed my mind before. Or maybe it was because she was trying to find a new job. Ever since Daddy left after Christmas, I’d been hearing her phone her friends to ask if they knew of anything. She had made up a résumé and had it photocopied in the Square and sent it to a hundred colleges. She did most of this in her cubicle in Holyoke Center, where she kept an electric typewriter, so Daddy wouldn’t know what she was doing—we never knew when he might appear, and whenever he was home, he searched her desk and trash basket. He wasn’t the least bit embarrassed to do this, even if I saw him. I’d told her about it. He’d always done it, even before he left.

  Mom did find a job, late in June, right before I was to leave for Vermont. She was hired at Moseley in Boston, luckily, starting in the fall. The night they called to offer her the job, we were in the kitchen together, preparing vegetables. She dried her hands and took the phone. She didn’t say much, and when she hung up, she stood there for a while, as though thinking deeply. Then she said, “I got a job, Jess.”

  “Great! Where?”

  “Right here,” she was almost crying. “In Boston. Moseley.”

  “Terrific!” I meant it.

  She took off her apron. She poured a scotch. She sat down at the table. “Sit with me, Jess.”

  I put down the leek I’d been about to slice.

  “You know I wanted to get a full-time job, a tenure-track job, so I could earn enough to support us.”

  I knew.

  “I’m going to be paid thirteen thousand dollars,” she said. “We can live on that.”

  “Great.”

  “That means I can divorce Daddy.”

  “No!” I cried.

  She sat there in silence as I bent forward, crying. My heart was broken.

  “I’m really sorry, honey.”

  “It will kill him. Do you have to? Do you have to?”

  “It won’t kill him. And I do have to. You know why. His constant rage . . . It makes me hate him. And living with someone you hate is unhealthy. It makes me hate myself. It’s bad for my health. And it’s bad for you. And I want a happy life. I’m thirty-eight years old. I still have a chance for a happy life.”

  “It will kill him!”

  “No, it won’t. He’ll think it will, but it won’t. He’ll find someone else to rage at fast enough.”

  “I won’t ever see him!” My voice rose.

  “We’ll try to fix it so you do,” she said.

  But I was inconsolable, and she had to finish making dinner all by herself. I went up to my room and lay on my bed. In the end, I came down. I was hungry, and we were having veal chops with a puree invented by Alice Waters, a great chef in California, of leeks, potatoes, celeriac, and white turnips, something I really love. And stewed tomatoes.

  She made the divorce another reason for me to go up to Vermont. She said I should be with Dad while I could. He didn’t know she was intending to divorce him. I sure wasn’t going to tell him: I didn’t want to pay for her sins. Not only did she make me go, she sent me up there by bus.

  As it happened, that summer in Vermont wasn’t so bad. Dad was easier when Mom wasn’t around. He stayed out in his studio from about ten in the morning until eight or nine at night. His housekeeper would carry out a sandwich and a beer and some cookies around one in the afternoon, and she left food on the stove when she left in the afternoons at about three, when her kids finished school. He was supposed to heat the food up for his dinner, but he never did; he ate it lukewarm, right out of the pot. But at least food was available. I heated it up when I came in from work, and always thought of Steve. It wasn’t spaghetti like his grandma’s, it wasn’t bad, and maybe it was even good, but heated-over food is never delicious, and I was used to delicious food.

  Dad would come in around nine, pour a stiff drink, and sit down. He’d just sit there, staring into space for a while, drinking fast, pouring drink after drink. After a while, his soul would come back into his eyes, and he’d get up and grab a pot and a fork and sink into a kitchen chair and eat. He’d slice off a hunk of meat and eat it with his fingers. He ate this way when he was alone—he thought I didn’t know. When I was in the room, he used a knife and fork. Whether he finished something or not, he left the pot on the stove. Unless I happened to go in and see the leftover food and wrap it in foil and put it in the fridge, it would get so dried out that the housekeeper, Mrs. Thacker, would have to throw it out the next day. I thought about my mother’s horror of waste and shuddered, but I knew it was useless to say anything to my father. He was in another world. Like Mrs. Blake said about Mr. Blake, he was always in paradise. Only I felt my father wasn’t in paradise but maybe hell. It made me feel so bad for him. Like being an artist was some terrible doo
m.

  After he ate, he’d pour a fresh drink. I’d hear the ice cubes tinkling in the glass when he came into the living room, and I’d look up from my book or the TV and say, “Hi, Dad,” and he’d say, “Hi, Jess,” and sink into his armchair and after a while he’d fall asleep. I’d wake him before I went to bed and tell him to go to bed. He either did or he didn’t. I couldn’t stand the way he lived, but he didn’t give me a hard time. He always spoke gently to me, always seemed a little surprised that I was there.

  Working at the café, which I had dreaded, was fun. It drew college kids from New York who spent summers in Vermont. I made some friends and became pals with a girl called Gail, who lived in Manhattan and went to Brearley. She came in every day for a cappuccino. She smoked pot right out in public. She reminded me of Phoebe a little. When we met after work, we usually shared a joint or two, and often I just stayed at the café, hanging out with Gail and some other kids. There was nothing else to do there.

  Mom called me every week. At first I wouldn’t talk to her; I was so mad at her for sending me up there. But after a while I relented; I knew she missed me and was sad without me. I never told Dad she’d got a job, or said anything about her wanting a divorce. Some things you just didn’t mention to my father; it would be like lighting dynamite. At the end of August, she called to say that she was flying to Mexico in a few days to get a divorce. I asked if Dad knew and she said no. I didn’t understand how she could get a divorce without his knowing, and she said he’d signed a power of attorney. She said that when he had been home at Christmas, he’d been in a rational state of mind for a few days and she could talk to him about their separation without his having a tantrum. She even got him to go with her to see a lawyer; she’d borrowed five hundred dollars to pay him. The lawyer called Dad and asked him to come into the office to sign a separation agreement, and Dad did. But judging from how he acted later, he must never have believed Mom would go through with it.