Looking Back (17 page)

We should all have been telephone poles, but there were those after-school Cokes downtown (like something out of Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney, with a jukebox soundtrack) to make up for the dieting. And bake sales. Every Saturday, just about, some club would be raising money with a card table full of brownies set up beside the drugstore. Sometimes there would be a car wash instead, but car washes called for boys, and the boys weren’t much for fund-raising. It was the girls—the women behind the men—who ran our school, the smart cheerleaders who made their big, grinning boy friends think they were thinking. And it was the girls who baked the chocolate-chip cookies that sent the Outing Club canoeing, the shortbread for somebody’s open-heart surgery (we loved to rally for a cause; valentine hearts or real ones—it hardly mattered). It was the girls who kneaded the bread dough—often the very ones who were the most dedicated dieters—that paid for the prom decorations only girls would notice anyway, and the girls, some of them, who baked even though they’d never get nearer to the prom than clean-up day the morning after. But somehow kneading that bread and selling it brought them closer to the event, so they spent on their banana breads and their German tortes what they would have put into eye make-up and Grecian curls.

Anyway, we’d all write these club activities down on our college applications. Suddenly, being “extracurricular” mattered tremendously. How would college admissions offices know that all my two years in the French club meant was that I could bake
gâteau chocolat
as well as angel food? So it wasn’t all for nothing. Then there were the boys, who wheeled past (they just happened to be in the neighborhood) to see what was up and to eat free cookies, and we laughed dumb-femininely at their smart comments, pretended to be hurt when they said the cake frosting tasted like car grease, because after all, without them we might have decorations, but we wouldn’t have dates. Some of us didn’t anyway. For those there was compensation in the leftovers—the broken cookies and the loaves of French bread someone had returned for a refund because the dough was unbaked in the middle. We often ate more than we sold, nibbling through our wares as if God or Providence made an exception for broken cookies and crumbs of fudge. But on Monday morning we’d be dieting again, of course, with celery sticks held like cigarettes between our fingers as we planned who’d bake what next Saturday.

A
FTER THE LAUNCHING OF
Friendship 7, the first U.S. orbital spaceship—we were in second grade, and, gathered around a TV in the gym, we joined in the countdown, out loud: ten, nine, eight, seven … —after that, NASA held little interest for most of us. I watched the first space walk, hoping, I think, for Major White’s cord to snap and send him off in space (just as I hoped on “Dr. Kildare” for incurable disease) and imagining what it would be like to die floating in space. I watched the moon walk too, but after the first novelty and the realization that no moon men would appear, that there would be no oxygen leaks or short circuits, I turned off the set and haven’t seen a space walk since.

There was so little drama to it all, everything charted and predictable, double checked, A-OK, over and out. What we wanted was the thrill of the unexpected. Sometimes we got it from real life episodes—an assassination, an election scandal, a mass murder—but never in the space program. It seemed that real life had been upstaged for us by scripted, manufactured dramas on the screen. Gemini and Apollo, “One small step for man …,” unglamorous-looking astronauts’ wives and short-haired, pale-faced astronauts (even their beards, at splashdown, seemed crew-cut), and the minor excitements created by a broken TV camera or a lunar module delay—none of them could compete with “Lost in Space” or “Star Trek’s” Mr. Spock and his zippered, jump-suited crew, battling “The Blob” or space fever. Magazines filled their coverage of the space shots with what’s called, I guess, the “human angle”—the tuna sandwich some astronaut ate once in the cabin, their “gees” and “gollys,” their in-flight references to Snoopy and the World Series, and the knowledge that astronauts drink Tang too. All of that took from the strangeness of space, brought it closer to home, made walking on the moon seem to us like jogging around the block. NASA robbed us of mystery, diminished the appeal of a once-forbidden fruit by increasing its attainability. (Suddenly we could get pomegranates in the supermarket. Moon rocks next?) No wonder, now, we have a science-fiction passion, a love of the occult, no wonder that Flash Gordon has suddenly reappeared at campus film festivals, or that we read our horoscopes daily and talk of witches.

When we were seventeen, my friend Laura changed her name to Lucifera (Lucy for short) and announced she was a witch. She had always looked the part, a bit—very tall, very skinny, with strange, sharp features—and now, in her blue lipstick and long black gowns, with a locker she grew cobwebs and mushrooms in, until the principal ordered her to clean it out (“A hex on
him
” she said) she looked even more like one. Lucifera’s witch transformation came on the cusp of the supernatural era, when
Rosemary’s Baby
was born and astrology became fashionable, but it was more than just a fad, I think, taken on with obsessive energy—a game, at first, perhaps, that turned dead serious. Lucifera read old tracts on the subject, studied medieval documents, memorized chants and spells. Rumors spread—all true—that she slept in a graveyard and that the bloody marks on her arms and legs came from self-inflicted scratches made by her inch-long fingernails.

People laughed at her—her strangeness uniting us in a comfortable, shared normality—but she frightened us too. There is a scrap of doubt in all of us, ready to latch onto things outside the realm of biology books; we all carry with us the memory of strange unexplained events and when we meet a girl like Lucifera, we tend to pool our doubts and memories, like Girl Scouts trading ghost stories around a camp fire. Full moons and dark nights, voodoo dolls and stinging herbs and howling witchcraft left us uneasy. I saw the dirt under Lucifera’s purple fingernails and the Band-Aid box she kept her deadly nightshade in, but there were others who really
believed,
who saw only witchness, a few peripheral ninth-grade girls and an unloved outsider of a math-brain boy, and they attached themselves to Lucifera and to witchcraft, having a label, at last, for their outsiderness. As witches, they could flaunt it.

They trouble me, these groups that band together with only their differences from the rest in common—these alliances that misfits make. Their eighteen-hour marathons, locked up together in a tiny room, till one of them reaches hysteria, their talk of “evil,” and the car accidents and illnesses that prove them right—their talk of evil turned out to be an evil in itself, and really dangerous. It spreads; strangeness and fear always do, as normality doesn’t. As once we attributed the unexplainable to God, and trusted and accepted it, now we may attribute it to witchcraft and the occult, and tamper with it.

The witchcraft plague is surely a jackpot for television, and the new shows are full of it, because it’s chilling and dramatic, of course, without requiring explanation and the usual end-of-program tying up of strings or, for that matter, having to make any pretense at good sense. One program last year, I remember, dealt with a 1970s murderer (a vampire, the authorities suspected) who left his corpses drained of blood. I kept watching the show, in spite of my feeling that this was not just a bad program but a very ugly one, an
evil
one, because I wanted to see what rational explanation they would cook up at the end (a medical student practicing transfusions? an escaped mental patient?), but discovered instead that the killer really
was
a vampire, 1972-style, coffin, fangs and all. And when he was apprehended, as of course he had to be, it was by vampire-catching means (using a Bible and a crucifix) which left me feeling that, because the L.A. police force put themselves out for
him, he’d
really won. I’m overly protective of the viewing audience, perhaps, but I think the distinction between fantasy and reality is blurry enough without vampires and straight, Dragnet-type cops sharing one bill. We’re left uneasy, nervous, doubtful, and ready to pounce on victims like those Salem villagers more than two centuries ago.

Witches … vampires … with station breaks in between. Our 1960s upbringing has left us disbelieving and gullible at the same time, ready to accept everything or nothing.

Pollution and overpopulation have built up slowly, but our awareness of them came all at once, in 1969. Suddenly the word
ecology
was everywhere. We were juniors the year we all read Ehrlich’s
Population Bomb
and felt again the kind of fear that hadn’t really touched us since the air-raid drills of 1962. Not personal, individual fear but end-of-the-world fear, that by the time we were our parents’ age we would be sardine-packed and tethered to our gas masks in a skyless cloud of smog. Partly because the idea of pollution hit us so suddenly, and from behind (just when we were alerted to the possibility of quite a different kind of shock, and expending our fury over the war), the realization that our resources were disappearing hit us hard. We were a generation unused to thinking ahead, incapable of visualizing even our twenties, and faced suddenly with the prospects of the year 2000 and forced, in youth, to contemplate the bleakness of our middle age.

We were raised to trust science and technology above all else, and now scientists and technologists were telling us that almost nothing could be done to save us. It seemed unfair that this should happen in our lifetimes when it was not our fault—that we should limit ourselves to just two children to make up for past generations that didn’t. For the first time in my life, I remember wishing I’d been born in an earlier time and being thankful that at least I hadn’t been born ten years later. All my sensibilities were heightened—sometimes I caught myself aware of my breathing (an act I’d never really thought about); I began to notice trash cans and litter baskets and pregnant women (there seemed so many of them. I was indignant—they were using up the quota, filling spaces that should have been left for the children of my friends and me).

Like one of Dr. Kildare’s cancer patients, I felt condemned to death. Hope was held out, of course. There was Earth Day, celebrated at our school by the announcement that no one was to drive his car that day, and by a litter clean-up campaign that lasted for two hours while we attacked the beer cans on one half-mile stretch of highway. The president of our Environment Protection club (every new cause becomes a club sooner or later, and ends up holding dances) announced that we could help by cutting down on electric power, giving up our hairdryers and radios for the sake of A Better Tomorrow and boycotting the soft drinks in the non-recyclable containers. Halfheartedly I went through the motions, but my sacrifices seemed too far removed, too small a drop in the bucket. The fact that, if everybody did it, our resources would be saved (“Somebody has to be first …” said our club president) meant little when, looking over your shoulder, you’d notice no one following. The connection between cause and effect was impossible to see and so, like the taking of vitamins (another never-wholly-real or trusted activity I went through without apparent benefit) my litter picking and boycotting grew less and less fervent. The old hopeless urgency expired; we’d almost grown accustomed to our death sentences.

We feel cheated, many of us—the crop of 1953—which is why we complain about inheriting problems we didn’t cause. (Childhood notions of justice, reinforced by Perry Mason, linger on. Why should I clean up someone else’s mess? Who can I blame?) We’re excited also, of course: I can’t wait to see how things turn out. But I wish I weren’t quite so involved, I wish it weren’t my life that’s being turned into a suspense thriller.

A
T SEVENTEEN, IN MY
senior year, I left Oyster River High and entered Phillips Exeter Academy. Something strange got into the boys that year, as if, along with the legendary salt peter, something like lust for the country was being sprinkled into the nightly mashed potatoes. It wasn’t just the overalls (with a tie on top to meet the dress code) or the country music that came humming out of every dorm. Exonians—Jonathan Juniors and Carter the Thirds, Latin scholars and mathematicians with 800s on their college boards—were suddenly announcing to the college placement counselor that no, they didn’t want a Harvard interview, not now or ever. Hampshire, maybe (that’s the place where you can go and study Eastern religion or dulcimer-making). But many weren’t applying anyplace—they were going to study weaving in Norway, to be shepherds in the Alps, deckhands on a fishing boat or—most often—farmers. After the first ecological fury died down, after Ehrlich’s
Population Bomb
exploded, that’s what we were left with. Prep school boys felt it more than most, perhaps, because they, more than most, had worked their minds at the expense of their hands. And now, their heads full of theorems and declensions, they wanted to get back to the basics—to the simple, honest, uncluttered life where manure was cow shit, not bovine waste.

Exeter’s return to the soil took the form of the farm project; a group of boys who got together sold a few stocks, bought a red pick-up truck and proposed, for a spring project, that they work a plot of school-owned land a few miles out of town. The country kids I went to Oyster River with, grown up now and working in the shoe factory or married—they would have been amused at the farming fairy tale. In March, before the ice thawed, the harvest was already being planned. The faculty protested and the project died, and most—not all—went on to college in the fall. (They talk now, from a safe distance, about the irrelevances of Spenser and the smell of country soil and fresh-cut hay.) A friend who really did go on to farming came to visit me at college the next fall. He looked out of place in the dorm; he put his boots up on my desk and then remembered he had cow dung on the soles. He laughed when I reminded him about the farm project. It’s best they never tried, I think. That way, in ten years, when they’re brokers, they’ll still have the dream: tomatoes big as pumpkins, pumpkins big as suns and corn that’s never known the touch of blight.