Looking Back (7 page)

All fifth graders are obsessed with sex—the boys, with their mostly bathroom and bosom humor, of course, and—a bit more secretly, but more profoundly, the girls. Never so loud or raucous, they do not leer or whistle, or jab each other in the ribs and call out “I see London …” when the waistband of a boy’s shorts shows. Their sex talk is softer because it’s less taken for granted and smiled at than the boys’ is (“Boys will be boys.…”), but it’s there, all right, whispered under the blankets at Girl Scout sleepovers or in heads-together huddles on the playground. Boys, coming home from school at three, would weave and spin on their bikes, making little orbits around us as we walked, standing up on the seats when they passed us, to call out some new and thrilling combination of four-letter words, or taking their hands off the bars and giving us the finger. And we would clutch our neatly lettered notebooks to what we still shyly referred to as our “fronts” and speculate about the sex lives of our teachers. The little boys were being nothing more than little boys while we, the fifth-grade girls, who saw special movies and wore bras and dreamed of John Lennon and the eighth-grade baseball team, we were the true pornographers. Our shyness about real-life sex, when it concerned us personally, was concealed behind the gusto with which we dwelt upon its aberrations. Never acknowledging our own sexual vulnerability, we were thrilled, shocked and titillated by the exploits of others.

And in a classroom full of smart, wise-cracking dirty jokesters, I was the biggest know-it-all of all. Whether my sex information was accurate or not, the point is that I
thought
it was and, thinking that, I set myself up as the counselor and information center for our class. I was full of sex lore; I glibly expounded on the meanings of the most sophisticated
Playboy
jokes; I had vague but elaborate notions about lesbians and eunuchs and—when the explanations were too embarrassing to give—I escorted my friends into the girls’ room at school, wrote out the definitions on toilet paper (or drew explanatory diagrams) then, after showing what I’d written, dramatically flushed them down the toilet. I wrote pornographic stories and circulated them at school, hoping of course, to buy myself an in. The situation is a common one: the never-wholly-accepted kid discovers that he’s got something negotiable—a swimming pool, a talent for math, an electric Yo-yo, an exploitable knack for writing dirty stories and so he thinks, just briefly, that he can parlay what he has into social capital, that
now
he will be liked, plummeted to stardom. Cocker-spaniel eager, he repeats over and over the song and dance that worked so well, brought him such favor, the first time round. It’s the one tune he knows, though, and so of course his audience tires of it—by that time, they’ve found a new court jester. The whole point of the jester system is that the briefly well-loved clown-show-off can gain at best only a temporary place within the group. He interests them only so long as he is different from them. They are amused and entertained—fond, even—because he is and will always remain an outsider.

Anyway, for a while I basked in my role as classroom sex expert, until the subject filled my life almost completely. Somewhere I had read about phallic symbols, and from then on my girl friends and I imagined them everyplace we looked, which wasn’t hard, since everything except a square is either longer than it is wide or wider than it is long. (I realize this now, but back in fifth grade it seemed as if my landscape was filled with innuendo, with richly sexual, symbolic Meaning.) We marveled at our history teacher’s calm (how thick she was; didn’t she
know
?) as she described to us, while we sat frozen with mixed relish and horror, that monumental event of 1889, the erection of the Eiffel Tower.

I set myself up as a counselor too, full of advice for girls just starting out with boy friends while I had none, myself. Suddenly, though, just about everyone else knew more than me, and what they knew came from experience, not books read in the closet, men’s magazine advice columns read, one sentence at a time, from quick, nervous perusal in the drugstore. By seventh grade, the make-out parties had begun, and my ribaldry wasn’t funny any more because it ridiculed a world more and more kids were entering, while I remained outside.

M
ORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE
, I enjoy an experience that lets me like, really
like,
people. That’s not so simple for me, quick to find fault and suspicious, when I don’t find it, of over-goodness. It’s not that I don’t feel affection for a good many people, but blanket love, the kind Miss America contestants always swear to (“I love tennis and horseback riding and people …”) has never come readily to me. That’s what I liked about Pete Seeger—he brought out my most tolerant side. By all sorts of short-cut devices (a specially joyful banjo-picking style, blue lights, and certain combinations of notes —there must be a formula—that never fail to make me want to cry with love), somehow he always made me feel generous-spirited. It never worked on records, and two hours after hearing him, the desire to run away and join the Peace Corps or send my money to India would have worn off. But in the concert hall it worked. For once I didn’t care about standing out—I reveled in assimilation. Boundaries (me and them) disappeared. It was
us,
the audience—we were a single body. Pete Seeger didn’t sing or play all that well. Often he just strummed his guitar. Fancy picking wouldn’t have seemed right for his gritty dust-bowl singing, his drab shirts and baggy pants that looked as if he’d spent the day farming. His Adam’s apple was more memorable than his nose or his mouth—it throbbed, and seemed to be the heart of him. Resonant, mellow notes wouldn’t have been right for that thin neck, stretched forward and turned toward the ceiling in a way that always made me think of a crowing rooster. His songs were not exactly distinguished either—rarely beautiful or sweet-sounding, anyway. They were simple lines you could sing along with and whistle later to yourself on the way home. Pete Seeger talked a lot during concerts. That was part of what you paid to get, the long, low-key introductions that explained what he was going to sing, or who wrote it. Not funny, Las Vegas-type jokes, these were more like bedtime stories, ramblings, and you were never quite sure when they were finished because they didn’t have what you could call punch lines, or even endings.

But because nothing was so exquisitely beautiful you didn’t dare touch it, it was fine to cough or sneeze during songs, if you needed to, or hum along, or clap in time, or sing as loud and off-key as you wanted. Pete Seeger taught us harmony parts and led sopranos, altos, tenors and bass all at once, switching melody lines from rooster-falsetto—with the neck stretched like a licorice whip—to low, low bass notes, losing the tune sometimes. He would cue us with each line just before we sang it, walking around the stage or putting his foot on a chair and stamping hard, turning red in the face and looking really happy, making us feel that we were a special audience, able still, after all these performances, to stir him on the final chorus of “Michael—Row the Boat Ashore.” Then there was “Guantanamera,” whose preface-story we all knew so well that he had only to say the first words for us to break into applause.

We sang “We Shall Overcome” and dedicated it to the civil rights workers who died in Mississippi, and once (I heard him often) he asked us all to take each other’s hands so we formed a single chain. We sang “This Land Is Your Land,” and I felt more patriotic than “America the Beautiful” at basketball games ever made me feel. We applauded ourselves at the end, and stood up, wishing there was something more we could do than give a standing ovation. Right then, with “… this land is made for you and me” still fresh and swirling, not yet settled in my head, I would have jumped over the balcony or set fire to my treasured purple concertgoing coat, I think, if he’d asked me to.

I was eight when Joan Baez entered our lives, with long black beatnik hair and a dress made out of a burlap bag. When we got her first record (we called her Joan
Baze
then—soon she was simply Joan) we listened all day, to “All My Trials” and “Silver Dagger” and “Wildwood Flower.” My sister grew her hair and started wearing sandals, making pilgrimages to Harvard Square. I took up the guitar. We loved her voice and her songs but, even more, we loved the idea of Joan, like the fifteenth-century Girl of Orléans, burning at society’s stake, marching alone or singing, solitary, in a prison cell to protest segregation. She was the champion of nonconformity and so—like thousands of others—we joined the masses of her fans …

Somehow I could never imagine Jackie Kennedy going to the bathroom. I knew she must but she was too cool and poised and perfect. We had a book about her, filled with color pictures of Jackie painting in a spotless yellow linen dress, Jackie on the beach with Caroline and John-John, Jackie riding elephants in India and Jackie, in a long white gown, greeting Khrushchev like Snow White welcoming one of the seven dwarfs. (No, I wasn’t betraying Joan in my adoration. Joan was beautiful but human, like us; Jackie was magic.) When, years later, she married Rumpelstiltskin, I felt like a child discovering, in his father’s drawer, the Santa Claus suit. And, later still, reading some
Ladies Home Journal
exposé (“Jacqueline Onassis’ secretary tells all …”) I felt almost sick. After the first few pages I put the magazine down. I wasn’t interested in the fragments, only in the fact that the glass had broken …

I can remember—just barely—a time when I didn’t know who the Beatles were. People my age are about the last generation who can say that—for the ones who were nine or ten instead of twelve when the Beatles burst into our consciousness, it must seem as if they have always been a part of life. We were in fifth grade when they first sang on the Ed Sullivan show to an audience that screamed so loud we scarcely heard them. I had no desire to scream or cry or throw jelly beans; an eighth grader would have been old enough to revert to childhood, but I was too young to act anything but old. Still, I remember that wonderful, shivery moment when I first experienced “I wanna hold your hand,” and it seemed as if a new color had been invented.

Because I can remember life without the Beatles and because it seems we aged together, I feel proprietary about them, when I see the new young crop of fans playing those first albums or, worse, abandoning them for weaker imitations. I feel a little weary too; how could I begin to explain what we’ve been through, John and Paul and Ringo and George and I: Liverpool accents and “A Hard Day’s Night” and Cynthia and Jane Asher and a reporter asking “What do you call your haircut?” and George saying “Arthur” and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Ravi Shankar and
Yellow Submarine
and things not sounding as pretty as they used to, and Yoko—like a bad taste in the mouth—and Paul leaving and suing, and breaking up finally, which freed us to love them again, as the death of a senile grandparent frees the good memories.

The Beatles gave us something more than music. Quite a lot, I think. For one thing, they made kids part of history-journalistic history, at any rate. Through the Beatles’ existence we held some sort of control, we could act. Their appearance gave us our first sense of youth as a power—one that could hold moratoriums and keep LBJ from seeking re-election and raise a couple of million dollars for Bangladesh, without depending on grown-ups for anything. For that—for the fame they gave us—we gave fame back to them.

My love for the Beatles at ten or eleven was, I think, a pure, pre-teen-age love. They made me dream of dancing and romance, of holding hands and sipping milkshakes together, riding on merry-go-rounds, images used on TV to show that two people were in love. But it was never the Beatles themselves that I imagined myself holding hands with, although some girls did—they bought Beatle posters and lunch boxes and sweatshirts and planned pilgrimages to Liverpool, and abandoned them all a few months later for the Dave Clark Five or the Beach Boys. I was too practical for that. It seemed like a waste of time to swoon over John when my chances of meeting him were so slight, and anyway, he was already married.

The Rolling Stones were a different matter. No matching collarless suits and hair like well-clipped shrubbery. They didn’t want to hold your hand, they wanted “Satisfaction,” “girly action,” “gang the groover” (I didn’t know quite what that meant, but something in the way the Stones moved, the way they breathed and the way Mick Jagger’s eyes looked—damp and muddy—made me feel funny). With the Beatles I felt a part of things; the Stones made me feel hopelessly out of it. Clearly their league was way beyond mine. I didn’t hate them for it though. It was a blissful pain—my age, and Mick Jagger’s contempt for it; the sinister look on Charlie Watts’s face—just barely grinning, as if he was imagining Ed Sullivan in his underwear, while they shook hands and Ed said “nice work, boys” (these, obviously, were
men
); Mick’s skinny hips and his chicken-strutting (while the Beatles bounced in place, more like the happy winners on quiz shows); Keith Richard’s ex-convict face. I imagined tough-looking girl friends smoking backstage, with dyed red hair and tattoos, chains and boots.

T
HE PRESSURE OF THE
Group is strong in any period. There was a new kind of pressure affecting us during the sixties though—not just the push toward conformity and the fear and distrust that people have by nature (and that public schools seem to reinforce) of anything that’s different. In the fifties, I think, groups pretty rigidly conformed, but they were discriminating too. A pair of bobby sox, a V-necked sweater, and you were
in.
The sixties were a more critical-minded, sophisticated time, full of more negative adjectives than lavish superlatives, a time when it was easier to do things wrong than to do them right. Products, ourselves, of hours spent listening to TV commercials, we had become comparative shoppers, suspicious and demanding, minutely analyzing one another’s actions and appearances—new haircuts with unevenly trimmed sideburns, cowlicks, unmatched socks, Band-Aids that, we suspected, concealed pimples, new dresses, new shoes. We knew each other’s faces and bodies and wardrobes so well that any change was noticed at once, the fuel for endless notes. That’s why I dressed so carefully mornings—I was about to face the scrutiny of fifteen gossip-seeking girls, ten only slightly less observant boys ready to imitate my voice and walk, and one stern, prune-faced teacher who would check my spelling and my long division with the care my enemies gave to my hems. At every moment—even at home, with no one but family there—I’d be conscious of what the other kids, The Group, would think if they could see me now. They ruled over us all—and over each other—like a supreme court. Their presence was frightening, their judgments quick and firm and often damning, and the tightness of the circle when I was in it only made the times when I was outside seem more miserable. The hierarchy was re-established a hundred times a day—in choosing partners for science experiments, in study halls, when the exchange of homework problems began, and at lunch. But most of all in note passing. We rarely needed to take notes, and so we passed them. We could have whispered easily enough, of course, or remained silent. (It wasn’t ever that we had important things to say.) But note passing was far more intriguing, spylike. (Those were “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” days, all of us playing Illya Kuryakin.) Most of all, note passing was exclusive. Whispers were impermanent and could be overheard. Notes could be tightly sealed and folded, their journeys followed down the rows to make sure none was intercepted along the way. Getting a note, even an angry one, was always a compliment. Whenever I received one, I was amazed and grateful that I had made some slight impression on the world, that I was worthy of someone’s time and ink. There were kids, I knew, whose letters died, like anonymous fan mail, unanswered and unread.