Early Warning

1964

AFTER HE WATCHED the Beatles on TV, and then got himself into the performance at the Coliseum, Steve Sloan made Stanley and Tim watch the second Ed Sullivan performance together. They were absolutely quiet; Steve watched George Harrison’s guitar playing as closely as he could. The next day, he threw out all of their songs and fired the drummer. Enough “Tom Dooley.” Enough “Banks of the Ohio.” If you wanted girls to scream, then hangings and drownings were not the way. Steve had to admit that when he’d heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” he hadn’t been impressed. But the song had a beat, the Beatles had a look, and the girls in the audience were weeping and clawing their faces. Steve’s goal was that they would play at least one set at their senior prom, in June. Between now and then, they had to come up with new songs and a new look — not imitation Beatles, but themselves renovated and renamed: The Sleepless Knights? The Knight Riders? The Colts?

Debbie watched the Beatles at home, with Mom, Dad, Dean, and Tina, and two days later, she came home with a Beatles magazine. Tim laughed at her, but when she wasn’t looking, he glanced through it. He decided that he looked most like John. At school, he noticed that the girls quickly formed into groups — those who preferred John, Paul, etc. The mommy types, like Debbie, preferred George; otherwise, he couldn’t detect a pattern.

Tim had applied to Williams, Amherst, and U.Va. His father had gone to Williams, Amherst was down the road from Williams, and his great-uncle had gone to the University of Virginia two years before his grandfather had gone to West Point. Steve Sloan hadn’t applied anywhere. His plan was to leave home the day after graduation (his eighteenth birthday was in May) and head for New York, guitar in hand. Stanley was a year younger, so he would be working for his father all summer. The prom would be their farewell gig.

They all spent the last two weeks of March writing songs, and, Steve said, the stupider the better. “I Want to Hold Your Hand”? “I Saw Her Standing There”? Not a word about fucking. No wonder the ninth-graders were going bananas. Tim came up with “Come here to me, yeah yeah. Baby, I see you now. Come here to me, yeah yeah, and say hello. Hellooooo. Helloooo. Come here and say hello. Baby, I see you now, please don’t go.” They did it in G, with Tim singing the harmonies. Once they had mastered the first verse, he came up with a second verse: “Walk me down the street, yeah yeah. Baby, take my hand. Stand next to me, yeah yeah, and please don’t go. Don’t gooooo! Don’t gooooo! Walk me down the street, sweep me off my feet, please don’t say no!” Then the first verse again. He was pretty proud of it.

He was sitting in his car in the parking lot of the high school at the end of the day, with the windows closed, practicing this song at the top of his lungs, when Fiona Cannon walked up, opened the passenger’s side door, and got in. She said, “No, sing it. I want to hear.” So, though he warbled and went off key for a note or two, he finished the song.

She said, “Could be worse.”

“The song or the voice?”

She laughed.

Fiona Cannon had had one boyfriend, Allen Giacomini, who rode a motorcycle. The other boys were afraid of her. She said, “You want to drive me home?”

“Where’s your car?”

“In the shop. They’re replacing the brake pads.”

“How many miles does that thing have on it?” Fiona drove a ’56 Chevy, blue and white.

“A hundred and four thousand.” She leaned across him and looked at his odometer. He was driving his dad’s old Mercury Comet, ’60 station wagon. It was useful for hauling the Colts and all their instruments around, but he wasn’t proud of it. The odometer said 54568. She didn’t remark upon it. He said, “Sure, I’ll drive you home.”

After that, he didn’t drive her home every day, but sometimes he did, and sometimes at lunch she would come out to the parking lot and say, “Want to go get a Coke?” Or she would get in, lift her hair from her collar, and say, “Want to see a movie Friday night?” (Never Saturday at first, because the fox hunting was on Sunday until the end of March.) Even when her car was there in the parking lot, she would leave it behind; that meant he had to pick her up in the morning and bring her to school.

He took other girls out — Allison Carter and Janie Finch, on regular dates to movies and parties when he wasn’t practicing with the other Fire-Eaters, Dragons, Camerons. “The Camerons?” he said to Steve. “What is that?”

“A famous highland clan. The Camerons are coming.”

Stanley said, “Those were the Campbells.”

For two weeks, they were Steve and the Rattlers. When The Beatles’ Second Album came out, and Steve saw that it had “Long Tall Sally” and “Roll Over Beethoven,” which were by Little Richard and Chuck Berry, he relaxed a bit, and said that they didn’t have to write all their own songs, but the ones they didn’t write had to be by black people. They started practicing “What’d I Say.”

Then the skinny envelopes arrived from Amherst and Williams, the ones that said, “Thank you for applying.” The fat one was from U.Va., but Tim had known he would get in there. Tim wasn’t disappointed. His dad was disappointed, but Tim wasn’t. There was nothing wrong with U.Va. And it was cheap, which was what he said to his mom. Amherst was thirty-two hundred dollars a year, and Williams was thirty-six hundred. His mom said they would have found it, it was worth it. But U.Va. was fine with Tim, not such a change from everything he knew.

With his fate decided and Fiona showing up now and then, Tim maybe felt better than he had his whole life. She started saying, “Ever driven ninety? Ever gotten over a hundred? How fast will this thing go, really? Ever spun out?” Once, at seventy-five, she put her hands over his eyes and laughed. That evening, she showed him a spot on the hill above her house, looking west, toward the Blue Ridge, and while he was kissing her, she unzipped his khakis and put her hand in there. He felt her hand through his shorts, and then she eased his cock out of his shorts, too. He said, “You’re the only person I ever met who is crazier than I am.”

“How crazy are you?”

“Ninety-five, but not a hundred.”

She unbuttoned his shirt, and slid her cold hands across his bare skin and lay her head on his chest. His cock pressed into the rough fabric of her Levis. But that was as far as he got that night.

A week later — it was now May — they were driving in the Comet to Arlington to see The Last Man on Earth, and she kept reaching over and tickling him. For a while he laughed and pushed her away, but she kept at it, so finally he lost his temper, which he had never done before, and shouted, “Quit it! Fuck you!” They stopped at the next light; she opened the door and jumped out. When she slammed the door, he reached over and locked it, and then the light turned green, and as he was pulling away, she vaulted onto the roof of the Comet. He drove. She started pounding. He sped up, but she stayed up there, pounding, and when he pulled over, maybe a mile down the road, and unlocked the door, she jumped down, pulled it open, and threw herself across the front seat. She was laughing. She took his hand, and they went to the movie, which was about vampires. That night, she showed him a way to get into her room — he had to climb a tree, cross a roof, and go through the window she opened. It was worth it.

—

ANDY DIDN’T GO back to Dr. Smith right away. After that first appointment, she decided that he made her nervous — not exactly what he said, but the eyes, the posture, and the hands. After JFK’s assassination (there were only two time periods in the world now, before and after that event), she had started reading a book about frontal lobotomies. As far as Andy could understand it, the doctor lifted the patient’s eyelid, pressed the point of an ice pick against the top of the eye socket, and drove it into the patient’s brain with a hammer. Then he did it on the other side. Dr. Smith struck her as the sort of person who could comfortably do such a thing. But Dr. Grossman was giving up on her — Dr. Grossman had consulted her mentor about Andy’s “lack of affect.” Their only really good session had been as friends, deploring the assassination, expressing a fear they shared that much more was going on in Washington and in the world than most people suspected. After that one, though, Dr. Grossman had gone back to being a professional, and Andy had begun to run out of tales to tell, either as dreams or as childhood experiences. She read about Freud’s patient Dora, and made the mistake of telling one of Dora’s dreams as her own. Dr. Grossman seemed to recognize it, though as a dream Andy thought it was fairly common — returning home after the death of her father, then getting lost, not nearly so interesting as dreaming that a guest came for dinner, ate more than his share, and then went out to the outhouse to relieve himself. When he was halfway to the outhouse, he suddenly swelled up to a monstrous size, jumped onto the roof of the house, and began riding the house like a horse, screaming and shaking the whole place. This dream Dr. Grossman found trivial and without meaning.

And so she returned to Dr. Smith. With the spring, he seemed healthier and not as depressed as he had in the fall. She wrote him a check for five hundred dollars, ten appointments in advance. The next thing she had to do was stand up against the wall in his office so that he could draw pictures of her — front, back, left side, right side. This took the whole of the first fifty minutes. At her next appointment, he laid the pictures on the table in his office. Over each of them, he had superimposed a grid, and by means of this grid, he diagnosed where and to what degree she was out of balance. For example, if she had had disproportionately large hips, he would have diagnosed a blockage between her lower body and her upper body. For these women, the first step to a cure was to lift their shoulders and open their mouths wide, and to make a habit of taking deeper and deeper breaths. As a result, they would eventually speak the truth about themselves.

In Andy, the disproportion went the other way — she had broad shoulders and a prominent bust, but narrow hips, slender legs, and slender feet. She was barely, he said, connected to the earth, and, more important, to her sexuality. How often did she and her husband have sexual relations?

“Almost never,” said Andy.

And did she have sexual relations with other men?

“No,” said Andy.

“Women?”

Andy shook her head.

He took her over to the mats and had her sit cross-legged and close her eyes. He straightened her here and adjusted her there. It hurt. Then he had her think of sex and say five words. The five words she said were “shoe, earth, automobile, bath, and Kennedy.” But she wasn’t thinking of sex — those were just the first words that came into her mind as she looked around his office and out the window. There was a long silence.

She opened her eyes. The position was getting slightly more comfortable, and she took a deep breath. Just then, Dr. Smith sat down on the mat right in front of her, crossing his legs in an Oriental position, with his feet turned upward on his thighs and his knees flat on the mat. After a moment of silence, he leaned forward until their faces were almost touching, and he enunciated the words “Don’t bullshit me, Andrea Langdon. I don’t like it.”

His breath was sour. Andy jerked backward, but then she said, “All right.”

They agreed to meet on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

—

JESSE WANTED to learn to drive the tractor. He was very sober about this, undeterred by Joe’s previous reactions. “When?”

Joe said, with pretend seriousness, “I don’t know.”

“Did you think about it, Dad?”

“Since when? Since yesterday, when you asked before?”

He nodded.

“No, Jesse, I haven’t thought about it since then. You are eight.”

“Uncle Frank drove Grandpa’s car to Usherton when he was my age.”

“Who told you that?”

“Granny Rosanna.”

“She must be remembering wrong.” He didn’t say that Frank had been thirteen at the time, which was bad enough.

“How old was he?”

“Laws were different then.”

“How old was he?”

“Tell me, is your name Walter?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“Because your grandfather Walter drove his mom and dad crazy asking questions.”

“Really?”

Joe looked at Jesse, said, “Get down off the seat of the tractor.”

He got down. Then he said, “Really? Crazy? Like they went to a mental asylum?”

“No, like they whipped him.”

“Are you going to whip me?”

“Have I ever whipped you?”

“No.”

“Am I going to whip you?”

“No.”

Then there was a silence, and Jesse said, “When can I learn to drive the tractor?”

Joe laughed and said, “When you’re thirteen. Let’s see. That was summer, so Frank was thirteen and a half when he drove that car. You are eight and a half. So you have a while.”

“Five years.”

Joe allowed himself a smile, then said, “Good subtraction. You must be a smarty-pants.”

Jesse didn’t smile, only said, “When is it going to stop raining?”

“The weatherman says later in the week.”

“Is the corn ruined?”

“Not yet.”

“Are you worried?”

“I’m never worried.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” Joe said, “something always works out on a farm.”

—

IT WAS Henry’s idea that Claire and Paul would take their two weeks’ vacation in England, where he was helping at a dig not far from York — he wasn’t an archeologist, but he thought all medievallit professors should get out of the library and into the dirt or the bog. He wrote to Claire that it was a beautiful spot — there was plenty to see, not only York Minster, but the Shambles, an old street still left from the Middle Ages, as well as a castle and several museums. She and Paul could also go for walks nearby, in the Vale of York, or a little farther away, in the Lake District.

Rosanna said, “Well, Granny Elizabeth would have loved that, though the Chicks and the Cheeks, as she never forgot to tell me, were from Wessex, which is way at the other end of England.” This reminded Rosanna of something, and three days later, in Claire’s mail came a little box, wrapped in white paper. When Claire opened it, inside there was a tiny lace handkerchief, quite discolored but lovely, of handmade crochet lace in a scalloped pattern. There was a note attached. Claire opened it carefully. There was her father’s handwriting: “Made by my great-grandmother, Etta Cheek, sometime around 1830. Saved for Claire, March, 1942.” She had never seen the box, the handkerchief, or the note. She was three years old in 1942. She burst into tears. She thought she could smell the scent of his clothes rising around her.

When she called the next day and asked, her mother said, “Oh goodness. That year, Frank was in Europe. We simply forgot your father’s birthday, so here is what Walter did. He went and found a box of different things, one for each of you children. He let everyone choose from the box what you would most like to have. Lillian chose a feather. Joe chose a sprig of something, thyme? Lavender it was. Henry chose a coin. And we put away a photo of your father and a couple of army buddies for Frank. This handkerchief went to you. We set it aside for safekeeping, and you know what happens when I do that. When you said you might go to England, it struck me that that was what was in that little box in my dresser drawer. I’m sorry it has taken me so long to…Oh, Claire, honey, don’t cry.”

But it was no use — Claire cried and cried. She wrote to Henry, did he remember that coin, but of course he did. It was an Indian-head gold dollar, he replied in a letter back. He wrote that he kept it with the Marcus Aurelius coin he’d found loose in a muck pit in Winchester. Once again, she opened out the tiny handkerchief. The very thin linen was four inches by four inches, and the crocheted border looked as if it had been made out of sewing thread in a pattern of leaves, like elm leaves. She smoothed them under her finger. That very afternoon, she took it to a picture framer to preserve.

Paul did not like the fact that their bed-and-breakfast had twin beds with footboards. He was too tall for footboards — he had to sleep on his back with his legs spread and his feet to either side of the footboard, or else on his side, curled up, and one time he stretched out and bumped his head on the headboard. And then, for breakfast, they served the toast cold, in a rack, unbuttered, and when you buttered it, it fell apart. Henry showed them around; Paul could not help correcting him — surely York Minster was York Cathedral? Were those really kings in the choir screen (though Claire could see that they had crowns on)? Was that window really about the War of the Roses? Had Henry ever read Richard III? Henry was polite every moment.

The third night, sitting across from her in his pajamas, on the other twin bed, Paul said, “I sound like an ass, don’t I?”

“I don’t think Henry is ever wrong about this sort of thing.”

Paul said, “He’s been very decent.”

“He likes you.”

“I can’t imagine why.”

She sat down next to him. The bed dipped almost to the floor. She said, “I can’t imagine why not.”

“I know I can be a jerk.”

“You don’t try to be a jerk. The jerkiness just pops out once in a while.”

Paul put his arm around her, and they lay back on the twin bed. The next morning, Paul asked for a room with a double bed, and as it happened, someone was checking out that very day, and the owner of the bed-and-breakfast would move their things. That day, Henry had to work, and so they went back to York Minster, bought a nice simple guidebook with large pictures and short explanations, and enjoyed their morning very much. The best part of the day, besides “tea,” was the hour she spent in a small bookstore, uneven floors on three levels, books piled everywhere willy-nilly. On the shelves marked “Local Interest, Yorkshire,” she saw Wuthering Heights, which she had been supposed to read in ninth grade and had never even started. She bought it for a half-crown.

Henry took them to supper in an Indian restaurant with eight of the other diggers, all of whom were about her age or younger, enrolled in colleges and graduate schools in the United States and England. Four of the boys had beards, which Claire thought was interesting. One couple lived in a tent not far from the dig. That day, Henry had let them take a shower in his room, because they had spent the last three days digging up the tanning pit to see if there was anything in there. The girl gaily related how the boy had had to hold her by the ankles for the last bits, as she scraped the bottom of the pit with her trowel. “Up and down, in and out, and stinking to high heaven.”

Henry turned to her. “In the Middle Ages, they tanned leather with manure.”

The boy said, “It was pointless to bathe, since we had to do the whole thing. So we just slept outside the tent. Thank goodness, it hasn’t rained.”

Claire looked them up and down. They seemed clean enough now. One of the boys was a Negro man. He was about Claire’s age, and had gone to school in New York. His name was Jacob Palmer. He didn’t seem to realize that he was the only Negro in the restaurant. He chatted and laughed at Henry’s jokes just as the others did. Claire noticed that she glanced at him more often than Paul did, but Paul was from Philadelphia, not Des Moines. Claire was in favor of civil rights. She’d thought it was shocking when that church was bombed in Alabama the year before, but everyone forgot about that when Kennedy was assassinated. Then those three boys, just about her age, were murdered in Mississippi, and their bodies were discovered four days before she and Paul left for England — eight or nine days ago now. She hadn’t heard any news about them since coming here, but looking at Jacob Palmer in this sea of white people made her think of them. However, it was easy to be in favor of civil rights when she spent all day sitting in Paul’s office, listening to his patients (or their mothers, actually, since many of his patients were children with ear infections) babble on about whether now, since President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, they were going to let Negroes into the Wakonda Country Club. And why not? thought Claire, who had been there twice. There were plenty of Negroes there already — caddies, waiters, groundskeepers. Jacob Palmer talked just like the other students — about the excavations, the grid, the sherds, the artifacts.

That night, she began reading Wuthering Heights. She didn’t put the book down for two hours — Paul was sound asleep. Heathcliff was said to be dark-haired, but when she read about him, the face in her mind was Frank’s, not Joe’s. Two days later, when Henry took them to a town called Otley for just a little walk, and not into very steep countryside, that was where she imagined everything in the book to take place. It was a shocking book, but when she finished it, she turned back to the first page and started over.

—

AFTER HE DELIVERED his trunk and his suitcase and met his two roommates, Tim drove back to McLean. He did not drive Wednesday to his house, where they were expecting him for a last lunch before Lillian took him back to school and left him there; he drove Tuesday, late, to Fiona’s, and parked on the road up beside the horse pasture. It was nearly midnight. The weather had been hot and humid, and there were flies and midges everywhere. Fiona was leaving for Missouri in two days, for a college that was known, from what Tim had heard, solely for its horse-riding program. Rocky, who had been some kind of champion for 1963, had been sent ahead. Debbie had earned enough money working for a summer day camp to take over Prince’s expenses for the school year. The only one who got nothing in all of this, as far as he could tell, was himself.

Tim jumped the little ditch and crossed the Cannons’ yard to his tree. He chinned himself on the lowest branch, then caught his foot on a little knob maybe four feet off the ground, and swung onto the branch. Then he stood up, stepped onto the next branch and the one above that. From there, he jumped lightly to the roof of the back porch, squatted down, and duck-walked to Fiona’s window. The other window looking over the roof of the porch was a bathroom, so the curtains were usually closed. Only once, sometime in May, had the curtain been flung wide, and a face, the face of Mr. Cannon, stared out over the roof. But Tim had frozen outside the triangle of light, and the curtain closed again. Fiona remembered that particular night as their most romantic. The window was up and the screen unlatched. When he put his hand on the sill, Fiona said, “Who’s there?” in a soft, trilling voice. Tim said, “I don’t know,” also in a soft voice. This exchange made them laugh. He pulled the screen out and slid through the opening, then turned and secured the screen in the window frame. The light of the full moon, which had been obscured by the thick foliage of the tree, shone on the bare floor of her room and the end of her bed. He saw that she was totally naked. He said, “Hot, huh?”

She laughed again.

Tim began to take off his clothes.

She had a rule that he couldn’t come during horse shows (and there were lots of horse shows in the summer). Two nights she had been sick, and he had stayed away for a week after spraining his ankle playing baseball. What with taking all his stuff to the university and then some orientation classes, he hadn’t been here for six nights. He lifted the elastic of his shorts over his erection, dropped them to the floor, and slid in next to her, partly under the sheet. She kissed him. Her lips were always sort of flat and hard to begin with, then they softened and warmed. He pressed his erection against her stomach, and her leg came over his, drawing him closer; then she put her hands on either side of his head and slipped her tongue into his mouth. His cock got harder — too hard, he thought. If he entered her now, he knew he would come quickly. He decided to think of something, and then he thought of burning his tongue on hot soup. He thrust once, and then another time, and then he stopped. Her eyes were closed. She turned him over on his back and rose above him, smiling, in the moonlight.

She moved slightly, smoothly. The bedsprings creaked one time, and she stopped. Crazy as she was, she had never done anything that might disclose to her parents (fortunately, upstairs and at the other end of the hall) what was taking place in her bedroom. She said that they were sure she was still a virgin and “occupied her time” so thoroughly with the horses that she didn’t have a moment for boys. It was true that, since the beginning of the summer show season, they hadn’t gone on a single actual date — not eaten a bite together, seen a movie, been to a party. Did anyone know they were even friends? Tim had said nothing to Steve or Stanley Sloan. Thinking of this secrecy made another thrust irresistible. She groaned, hardly louder than a breath.

She smiled a beautiful smile that he almost never saw, except in the framed picture on her desk of her on a horse, seven years old, her hair sticking up and her grin delirious with pleasure. Her smile made her eyes crinkle upward and revealed her inner mischievousness. He pulled her down and kissed her again, two or three times. Burning soup. Burning soup. His cock, just for a moment, stopped throbbing, but his balls made themselves felt, hard between his legs, ready to ache.

She froze, put her hands on his shoulders, and looked toward the door of her room. Then he could hear it — a footstep in the hall. Her father’s voice said, “Fiona?” Then, “Fiona?”

Fiona’s head turned and she stared down at him, made an O with her mouth, and said, as if she were just waking up, “Huh? Everything okay, Daddy?”

“I thought I heard you.”

“What?” Just exactly as if she had been asleep.

Then, because he moved, because she moved, Tim ejaculated. His back arched, his entire lower body shook and throbbed, and his mouth opened. At the very moment that he felt the usual scintillating thrill run into his brain, her hand, a large hand, covered his mouth. He opened his eyes and put his own hand on top of hers. As best he could, he stilled all movement. She said, “I’m fine, Daddy. I must have fallen asleep reading my book.”

“Your door is locked.”

His muscles seemed to vibrate, but he wasn’t moving.

“Oh, I did that by mistake. I’ll unlock it in the morning.” She yawned loudly. “I’m just so tired. Night-night.”

“Night-night, honey. Just as long as you’re okay.”

“I’m fine, Daddy.”

Tim realized that he hadn’t pulled out.

Now they were absolutely still, listening to the retreating footsteps — three, four, then up the stairs. Tim felt a belated urge to flee, but she had him pinned. Her strawberry-blond hair was in her face, and she was looking down at him with, it must be said, an adoring look in her eyes.

They slept until dawn. Tim woke up when he felt her move beside him. It was the first time he had ever spent the night with her. She looked good even in the early light, even as she whispered, “It’s after six-thirty. When I go down to breakfast, you need to leave.”

He nodded.

She dressed methodically. She made a fat ponytail and wound a rubber band around it. She kissed him on the forehead, then on the lips. She went out the door; he waited until all footsteps had quieted, and slipped out the window, down the tree, across the ditch, and up the road, without looking back. If someone saw him, he figured he would hear about it soon enough.

—

AT THE MADEIRA SCHOOL, not four miles from Aunt Lillian and Uncle Arthur’s (though she could only go there once in a while), Janny informed the other girls that her name was Janet, and after that, she felt older, smarter, and prettier. It didn’t matter that Tim was gone to the university and Debbie was busy with her last push before college applications, or that Aunt Lillian herself seemed a little distracted. Whenever Janet got leave, there was so much going on — all of Dean’s friends splashing in the pool; Tina at the easel in her room, or wandering around talking to herself (when Janet asked her what she was talking about, she said she was telling a story); Aunt Lillian cooking enough for ten, adding plates for friends until someone had to sit at the counter, with Uncle Arthur’s colleagues in and out (once, she opened the door of the hall bathroom, and a man in a hat was sitting on the toilet; when she gasped, he smiled and said, “Peekaboo”) — that she felt wonderful for days, just knowing she loved them and they loved her. Since she could not imagine anything better than being related to the Mannings, she was not intimidated at all by this fancy boarding school or the other girls she met.

She took English, French, geometry, biology, and ancient history. Whereas her roommate, Cecelia, groaned every time she hefted a textbook, Janet set hers on the left side of her desk and worked through all her lessons one by one, the minutes ticking by, and in every single one counting out her pleasure that she had left her father, mother, and two numbskull brothers behind. She was not the smartest girl in any of her classes, but she was the most methodical, the most grateful. Likewise on the hockey field: if a girl on the other team was dribbling toward the goal, or passing to another girl, Janet never took her eye off the ball — she was so effective that the goalie got bored and started yawning. By October, the teachers would not call on her anymore. Was she ambitious? Did she want to get to Radcliffe, or even Vassar? Not at all. If you took a string and a pin and poked the pin into Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, where her parents and the twins were, the farthest college from the pin that was still in the United States was the University of Hawaii, which was fine with Janet.

She was friendly to everyone, even to Cecelia, whose heart had been set on Chatham Hall, where her best friend had gone. Cecelia was making herself disagreeable so that they would send her home; she refused to bathe or wash her hair. When Janet told this story at Aunt Lillian’s, everyone laughed and said bring her over and we’ll throw her in the pool. And, Janet knew, Cecelia would enjoy every minute of it. Madeira, like every high school, was fraught with cliques and gossip, but Janet didn’t care. She did not dread being ignored; she did not dread being talked about; she did not dread having the wrong hair or braces; she did not dread breaking the rules and being punished, though this was unlikely. The only thing she dreaded was Christmas vacation at home.

She began her campaign at Halloween. As she wrapped Tina’s head in her mummy costume (careful to leave openings for her nose and eyes), she said, “What day does your Christmas vacation start, honey?” Tina went to public school.

Tina had insisted that Janet wrap her mouth. She mumbled, “We onry hab a wik.”

“Really? We have three.”

“Luggy dug! You shud tay her.”

“Well,” said Janet. “Ask your mom. We can do lots of things together. I’ll take you Christmas shopping.”

The next thing was to write a note to her mom. It began, “Dear Mom and Daddy, I am doing really well, I got an A on the geometry test and I have to write a report about cells for biology. It isn’t due till next week, but it is almost done. If I turn it in early, I will get 10 % extra credit. Guess what? My roommate, Cecelia, is going to take a trip with her family at Christmas. They are going to”—Florida? Too close. Paris? Mom would like that but Dad wouldn’t. Australia? Perfect, except that Richie and Michael might blow up the plane before they got there. Caracas? Texas? Her parents went there all the time. She thought of something—“Disneyland. I guess she and her brothers have been there three times, and they love to go back. There is so much to do that”—she thought again—“they can barely keep their eyes open for dinner. Her dad just drops the kids off, and then he and her mom go do things in Hollywood.” She read it over. It was perfect. She signed, “Love, Janny,” with a little heart next to the “y,” sealed it up, and sent it.

Her mom was good about corresponding. She wrote back, “Darling, Thanks for your letter. So glad you are doing well. And enjoying yourself. Know you are being a good girl, as always. Wish the same could be said for you-know-who. Back to the principal’s office yesterday. Nothing very bad, though. Knew it was a mistake to put them in the same class, but now Richie is being put into the other class. Think the teacher, who is a man, can handle Michael if he is the only one. Exhausting! Saw Dr. N. the other day. He asked after you. Said you are happy and not worried. You aren’t worried, are you? Can’t help feeling sad for the North Vietnamese, but do think that the Vietnam War, and even bombing North Vietnam, makes it LESS likely that there would be nuclear war rather than MORE likely. So DON’T WORRY. Daddy is fine, and says to say love to you. Love, Mom.” Nothing about Disneyland.

Janet then wrote a note to Aunt Lillian, on a special note card with flowers, telling her that lots of the girls from far away, like her, were staying through Thanksgiving. Aunt Lillian wrote back, “Janny, I was hoping you would invite yourself! Hope you have time to help Debbie and Tina with the pies. Dean and Uncle Arthur are planning to do something very strange with the turkey, so the pies will be important.” When she wrote to say that she was staying for Thanksgiving, and that Aunt Lillian had asked if she could, her mom wrote back, “Maybe we will fly down and join you,” but then the weather was bad. They were not missed, at least by Janet. The turkey turned out to be delicious — Uncle Arthur and Dean took turns basting it with a mixture of apple cider, butter, and whiskey, every half-hour, so it took an extra-long time to cook, but they played charades. The pies were also good, apple and pecan, her favorite of Lillian’s many and always delicious pies.

The day after Thanksgiving, she tried the Disneyland gambit again, by postcard, to Richie: “Hi, Richie! Guess where my roommate is going for Christmas! Disneyland! She says that Tomorrowland is really great!” To Michael, she wrote, “Dear Michael, Get Nedra to tell Mom to take us to Disneyland! You would love Frontierland.”

A few days later, she thought she had done it: “Dear Janny, Must say, the constant whining about Disneyland is driving me crazy. Though hear it is a nice place. Daddy should visit his friends out there in Los Angeles and take us along. Christmas is not a favorite holiday! Everyone in the world should spend it traveling, the way they do in France.” However, no plans were made, and Christmas vacation approached.

Janet managed to get Cecelia up for classes, but not much else. Sometimes she went for days with the same clothes on, rolled in her bedclothes, her mattress showing. Janet tried to set a good example by making her own bed very carefully — hospital corners, the way Nedra had shown her — everything smooth and fresh, desk neat, closet straight. Cecelia didn’t take the hint. Janet woke up in the night and heard soft noises, but they were so soft that she couldn’t tell if it was crying or not.

On December 10, she received her train ticket, leaving December 17, returning January 10. She put it under her mattress and turned over in her mind the idea of saying that it had never arrived, or that she had lost it, but school would be closed, so someone, probably Aunt Lillian, would just buy her another ticket. On the night of December 16, after the Christmas pageant and party, she cried once, and then gave up. The next morning, she left Cecelia still bundled in her bed and went in a taxi with the two other girls who were taking the train. When she came back in January, her roommate was Martha, who was in advanced math classes. She never saw Cecelia again.