Two Rivers (23 page)

C
hristmas in Boston was not the same. In the little two-bedroom house my parents had bought in Cambridge, I was given the sofa to sleep on. (The second bedroom was devoted to the operations of the
Freedom Press
.) My family tried to carry on its few traditions despite the change of venue, but nothing about it felt quite right. And trying to sleep on an old burlap couch, one my father had saved from certain euthanasia at a local thrift store, I felt displaced.

Usually on the night before Christmas, my father would cook a pot of oyster stew. As a kid, I was more fond of the salty hexagon-shaped crackers served with it than I was of the stew (which always tasted a little too fishy and gritty with sand to me). As I got older, I acquired an affection, if not a taste for it, and insisted that my father make it every year for the holiday. We were the only people on our street, and quite possibly in all of Two Rivers, to wait until Christmas Eve to set up our tree, but what was probably just the product of my mother’s procrastination became a beloved tradition in our household. As my father cussed and struggled to get lights strung, my mother and I would drink eggnog. Then we would hang our assortment of mismatched ornaments to Handel’s
Messiah
as our neighbors went off to midnight Mass.

In Boston, my parents had already put up a small aluminum tree, barely bigger than a potted plant. We ordered Chinese take-out on Christmas Eve and sat in front of the TV eating Lo Mein as we discussed school and my future plans.

“Have you been going to the Friends meetings?” my mother asked, waving her chopsticks at me in a way I considered to be vaguely threatening.

“A few,” I said. I had, indeed, returned to the Unitarian Universalist Church where the Friends meetings were held on a couple of occasions that fall, but I was actually more engrossed by the UU literature I found in the church vestibule than I was by the discussions of war. I even attended one sermon given by a diminutive Buddhist monk entitled “Without Autumn: Transience and Impermanence.” He wore an iridescent orange robe and could barely see over the podium, as he discussed the notion that acceptance of change is an integral step in achieving enlightenment. When the service was over, he moved slowly through the congregation to the back of the church, his robe billowing behind him dramatically like a falling leaf. When I walked out of the church that crisp afternoon I felt relaxed for the first time in ages. Back at school, I walked for hours in the woods, listening to the leaves under my feet. Maybe this is God, I thought. Just the crush of leaves.

What I didn’t know was that while I was wandering in the woods that day, contemplating the impermanence of things, Betsy was in the hippie couple’s VW bus on her way back from Washington, D.C., where she’d nearly been arrested during the March on the Pentagon after spitting on a U.S. Marshal’s shoes. Instead of hauling her off to jail, he’d simply hit her legs with his club over and over again until she collapsed and her friend was able to carry her away. He also took her camera and smashed it to pieces. Betsy called me late on Sunday night, weeping.

“God, Betsy, why didn’t you tell me you were going?”

“I didn’t want you to worry,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t want me to go.”

“Jesus, Betsy. I don’t get this. Look what happened to my mother. I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to you. If I lost you.”

Betsy’s voice changed. “It’s not always just about
you
, Harper. God, can’t you for once look past your own nose? I
care
about this. This war is wrong. We shouldn’t be there. I went to D.C. because of all the
other
mothers. The Vietnamese mothers whose babies are being slaughtered. The soldiers’ mothers whose sons are being murdered.”

I didn’t know what to say, and so I didn’t say anything.

After several awful moments of silence, Betsy softened. “I’m sorry. I know I should have told you.”

I did understand her need to protect me, though; I was protecting her as well. I’d been keeping a secret too, a secret I knew would worry her, anger her. What I didn’t tell Betsy, or my parents for that matter, was that after graduation I planned to join the Reserves. I knew it was a terrible compromise. Cowardly. But I also knew that if I wasn’t willing to exile myself from everything I knew and loved, from
Betsy,
I had only a few options. She was right. I couldn’t see beyond the tip of my own nose. But the truth was, it was just a matter of time before I had to make a choice. Some friends of mine in the class ahead of me at Middlebury had received their draft notices within days after graduation ceremonies. I might have been shortsighted, but I wasn’t deluded. I had found out exactly what I would need to do to join the Reserves, and what that would really mean for me. For us. Of all the options, it seemed the most reasonable. The most rational.

And, in the meanwhile, I tried to accept the impermanence of things. I even thought I’d been doing pretty well (with my parents’ move, with the resignation of my favorite professor at Middlebury, even with the Lo Mein) until my father yawned and said he was going to hit the sack early.

On Christmas Eve we
always
stayed up until midnight. And just as my mother’s Windsor chimes rang out, my father would make a big show of going to get the Yule log (which was actually nothing special, just the biggest piece of wood on the wood pile), and my mother would ceremonially disappear into their bedroom. A few minutes later, she would come out with a handful of splinters from the previous year’s log, which she kept in a shoe box under her bed. Then she would light the fire, using the splinters as kindling. This tradition, one my mother pilfered from her distant European ancestors, was meant to keep the home safe from fire and other demons. I hadn’t thought about the irony of this, one of my mother’s few but beloved customs, until this moment. I felt suddenly wrecked with nostalgia.

“Good night,” she said, reaching for my father. He went to where she was sitting with her knees curled under her in an overstuffed armchair. They looked at each other in a way that made me blush and then kissed each other in a way that made me squirm with embarrassment. Boston seemed to have rekindled something in my parents—something I thought had been extinguished with my birth.

“Good night,” he said to her, winking (winking!), and then to me, “night.”

“What about the
log
?” I asked, sounding like a whiny child but unable to stop.

“We don’t have a fireplace,” my father said, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes.

“Oh.” I glanced around the room as if a chimney and mantel could appear at will.

“Were you warm enough last night?” my mother asked, concerned. “We can turn the thermostat up. Your father keeps it at sixty-five. I’ve told him that’s too cold.”

“I’m fine,” I said. How could I have not noticed that this house did not have a hearth? Its absence seemed ludicrous.

I spent the rest of the night tossing and turning on the thrift store couch. I got up to get myself some water and cracked my toe against the coffee table. I grabbed my foot, silently cussing, afraid to wake my parents, whose bedroom was also on the first floor. Instead of making a second attempt, I lay down again, defeated, and let my heart beat in painful rhythms from my head down to my toe.

I took a bus from Boston to Two Rivers right after Christmas. I planned to spend the rest of my holiday break with Betsy. Her father had agreed to let me stay at their house as long as I slept on the couch and kept the woodstove stoked throughout the night. Getting up and putting wood on the fire was a small price to pay to be close to Betsy again.

Betsy’s father spent most of his time in a rented hospital bed now, which Betsy had set up in the dining room. She had single-handedly dismantled the elaborate mahogany table her mother had once used to entertain and put it away in the garage. This allowed her father, who now used a wheelchair, to easily navigate from his bed to the kitchen and downstairs bathroom. It also gave him a perfect view of the living room, where I was supposed to spend my nights. Fortunately, her father was a sleep-talker, and I had become quite skilled at determining the exact moment at which he had fallen into a sleep deep enough that the sound of my sneaking upstairs to Betsy’s room would not disturb him.

It usually took a half an hour or so after he turned out the lights, but eventually he’d begin mumbling. The first few times I heard him, it sounded like nonsense. But after a few nights, I realized that it was only garbled because the stroke had paralyzed half of his mouth. If you listened closely, you could hear him singing.
Beatles
songs. It was as if the music that had poured out of Betsy’s room in the years before had somehow become a part of her father’s subconscious. And these nightly serenades were my signal that I could safely make the long trek up the stairs to Betsy’s room.

The first night that I spent with Betsy, I noticed right away that something was different about her. After Mr. Parker started humming the first few bars of “Paperback Writer,” and I made my way up the stairs to her door, she pulled me into her room and quietly started to undress me. She seemed to be scrutinizing me, studying me with her fingers, as if she were memorizing every inch of my skin. It made me nervous. She didn’t smile, or tickle me, or whisper silly things in my ear. She unbuttoned my shirt quietly, tracing a line down the center of my body, and when I started to speak, she pressed her finger to my lips. When we crawled under the covers of her childhood bed, she clung to me in a way she never had before. Even after I felt the familiar shudder that seemed to ripple through her body like an electric current, she held on. Even as the light in her room began to change, from absolute darkness to the glow of early dawn, she wouldn’t let go.

“I’ve got to get downstairs before your dad wakes up,” I whispered. I was lying on my side, and she was pressed against my back.

“Not yet,” she whispered back, and then slowly lifted her arm, which had enclosed me for hours. I could feel her eyelashes, wet flutters against my skin.

Every year there was a big New Year’s Eve black-tie party thrown at Madame Tuesday’s. There was typically some sort of band brought in from out of town, and the whole place was decked out. At midnight, from the second-story balcony, a giant pinecone made from a bunch of small pinecones was lowered in Two Rivers’s version of Times Square’s ball drop. It was
the
social function of the season. Neither Betsy nor I had ever attended the event before. In high school, we usually spent New Year’s Eve shivering around a bonfire at an outdoor party. But this year, Betsy insisted that we go. She had gotten tickets, bought a new dress. I rented a tuxedo from Moore & Johnson’s again, vowing that this would be the very last time. I felt awkward and uncomfortable. I dressed in the downstairs bathroom, and came out when I couldn’t get my bow tie tied straight.

“God, you need a haircut,” Betsy said, shaking her head.

My hair was well past my shoulders now (more a result of my laziness when it came to grooming than any sort of radical fashion or political statement).

“Come on,” she said, pulling me by the hand. “Let’s run down to the shop real quick.”

“Can’t you just trim it up here?”

“I haven’t got any good scissors or clippers here,” she said.

It was snowing like crazy outside. The sun was just starting to set, and the streetlights on Depot Street illuminated the falling snow in a way that made me feel more merry than I had so far during the holidays.

“Stop,” I said, as Betsy trudged toward the barbershop, single-minded and purposeful in her floor-length evening dress and winter boots.

“What?” she asked, unable to hide the irritation in her voice.

“Look,” I said, motioning toward the sky. “Look at the snow.”

She sighed and stood with me on the steps of the shop, looking toward the black sky as snow fell down around us. I reached for her hand, pulled off her mitten, and stroked her fingers.

“You need a haircut,” she said again, blinking hard when a large snowflake landed on her eyelid.

Inside the cold barbershop, I sat down in one of the barber chairs. Betsy made me get up and take off my jacket and then she carefully secured an apron around my neck. She turned me to face the mirror and started to cut.

“Just clean it up a bit,” I said. “I want to keep it long, but maybe just get it out of my eyes.”

She didn’t answer. But in the mirror I could see her nod as she worked. I could also see the poster hanging on the opposite wall, the one that had hung there since we were kids,
OFFICIAL HAIR STYLES FOR BOYS AND MEN
, the one with the black and white drawings that illustrated a variety of haircuts:
butch
,
crew cut
,
flat top
,
flat top with fender
,
brush back
,
forward brush
,
professional
,
ivy league
,
businessmen’s.
Below this was a guide to acceptable haircuts for the various branches of the military.

Betsy saw me studying them. “I guess I should be grateful,” she said. I could feel the cold touch of her scissors on my ears as they expertly snipped and clipped. I listened to the click-clack of their blades.