Olive Grossman

Throughout our senior year, Helen made sure I knew what was happening in the war. The number of our troops—mostly reluctant draftees—went way up. Resistance increased, and Helen was often busy in the afternoons. She didn’t invite me along, as if, like writing, protest was private.

But one February day in 1966 she asked if I wanted to go to a demonstration outside the Waldorf Astoria. President Johnson would be speaking inside. Of course, I said yes. The next day, Val and I were the last to leave a meeting of the Sidewalks staff, and as I erased some notes on the blackboard, I sensed that she was stuffing papers into her large leather satchel extra slowly. She wanted to talk with me alone. I felt a brief thrill.

“Johnson’s speaking at the Waldorf,” she said. “Next week.”

I didn’t answer, wondering if Val was proposing that we go to hear the president. She didn’t seem like a protestor any more than she seemed like a writer. Had the school paper assigned her to report on the speech? But she said, “There’s a protest.” She had a flyer. She described what it said at some length. “Want to go?”

“I’m going with Helen Weinstein,” I said.

“You knew about it? Why didn’t you say so?”

“Want to come with us?” I said, hastening past the embarrassing moment. Helen, I tried to persuade myself, would be glad to hear that Val was antiwar.

“Sure. It starts at six,” she said. She announced that we’d go straight into the city after school, so as to eat first. I—even I—would not have thought of food, and it would have been a matter of principle for Helen to remain hungry.

Explaining all this the next day, I talked fast. “You can have a glass of water while we stuff our faces,” I said—surely a mistake. We didn’t acknowledge that Helen didn’t eat.

She was silent. “It’s not a party,” she said then. “Does Val think it’s for fun?”

“That’s not fair.”

“Go with her.”

That made me angry, but I understood. Protest was sacred. If Val was involved, it would be an ersatz protest, a glamorous protest that serious people should ignore. I agreed with Helen—but compromise seemed easier than trying to explain to Val how Helen and I felt.

“Anyway,” she continued, “my parents need me in the store after school. I’ll see you at the Waldorf.”

I knew they didn’t need her in the store, but I gave in, remembering that if Helen and I went together, I would get no supper.

Helen was exhausting but correct. The rally was not trivial. Vietnamese people were being killed, and their villages were being destroyed—the trees knocked down, the land left bare. The boys in my class who didn’t have the grades for college were grim with the approach of graduation, knowing that without student deferments, as they turned eighteen they’d be drafted and quite possibly killed.

Still, it was a relief to go with Val. Bundled in scarves and hats, we took the subway into Manhattan, and she led me to a luncheonette where we ate hamburgers and drank Cokes. I forgot to leave a tip, and Val sent me back. By the time we reached the Waldorf, others surrounded us—small groups with printed posters or homemade signs. I didn’t see Helen.

I thought we might spot President Johnson getting out of a limousine and going inside, but someone said he had been brought in the back way. It was hard to believe he was there.

When it was almost over and Val and I were moving stiffly toward the subway, I saw Helen standing by herself, staring at the door of the elegant hotel. I took Val by the arm and dragged her to Helen, then linked my other arm through hers. Helen resisted, but I didn’t let go, and we took the subway home together. Val found a seat, but Helen and I stood, and then Helen dropped her face into my shoulder and cried. I was holding the pole with one hand, steadying my big bag with the other, but I tried to make my arm enclose her, and my fingers stroked her curls.

“We accomplished nothing,” Helen said the next day. Four thousand people had attended the rally, she said, but Johnson had never seen us. She’d read in the paper that he’d seen only one man—carrying a sign that read “Bomb Hanoi.” The newspaper had printed the president’s speech, in which he explained why objections were incorrect: the war would merely prevent North Vietnam from taking over South Vietnam. Our country would nobly help the South Vietnamese remain democratic.

I thought Helen was wrong—that gradually people would come to agree with us—but she was right. The war worsened for many years, though protests forced Johnson not to run again in 1968. Nixon won, and the war continued.

Two weeks after Griff had contrived to lose my copy of Bright Morning of Pain, I had done nothing to replace it, and despite his protestations, neither had he. Either of us might have procured a cheap old copy that would arrive packed by hand in a used, cut-down carton. I was writing about some novels written in England after the First World War, but I ordinarily acquired whatever I needed for other projects promptly and established off-center piles on the big table in our living room. I continued enjoying the delusion that if my copy of Bright Morning was gone, I couldn’t write about it.

Griff was busy, certainly. He was invariably overcommitted at school and served on two boards, both going through changes requiring extra meetings. He was often asked to speak at public events. But I thought his tardiness might have to do with how far he’d read when he lost the book: he had been near the end. He had stayed up late, then gone to bed when the suspense was greatest. I didn’t remember the structure of Val’s book precisely, but I knew what happened at the end. Griff was afraid to finish Bright Morning of Pain.

During those weeks, he was often gone for dinner or even breakfast. He’d get up early, buy coffee on his way to school, and have time to work in his office before anyone else arrived. When Griff was absent, I ordinarily reveled in solitude—or solitude with dog. Not this time. I wanted him to worry about me, I noticed one morning, while I ate breakfast by myself. I wanted solicitous inquiries about whether the loss of Val’s book was ruining my work life, whether the deadline for the essay was imminent. I wanted him to be curious about what I was working on—the novels about which I was writing an essay, the book I was editing for my job. I wanted the approval conferred by curiosity.

And then, as I had these thoughts, I heard his key in the lock, his step in the hall. Our kitchen had a small square table shoved into a corner, and two chairs. When we ate meals together, we sat at right angles to each other, on the sides of the table that weren’t against walls, with an imaginary diagonal line separating our personal plates or mugs from the box of cereal, the coffeepot, or the platter of food. Alone, I spread out, the dog at my feet. When he came in, I was sitting with my feet on his chair. My food, as well as the New York Times, covered the entire table.

He said, “Hi,” and began rummaging in the cupboard. I took my feet off his chair. Griff likes instant oatmeal. He put water into a bowl without measuring, shook in the oatmeal, put it into the microwave, and punched buttons. I would never touch that stuff. “I told you I’m running for president of the Barker board, right?” he said.

He hadn’t told me. “You don’t need that!” I stood, as if to act, then sat down again.

“If I don’t, the present guy will stay. A good man, but terrible. This smiley Ingrid wants to do it, but I don’t trust her, and anyway, he’d win. He won’t bother to run if I want it. So, I have to.” The microwave chimed. “Nobody else will stand up to Jean Argos.”

“She’s so bad?” I tried to remember if I’d ever met Jean Argos. I’d heard him say the name often enough.

He laughed. “Oh, she’s scary. Drives down the hill at you with her high beams on and her horn blasting.” He put milk, brown sugar, and raisins on his oatmeal. “That’s not fair. But no executive director should push any board around.”

“You push everyone around. Is she fiercer than you?”

“Much,” he said.

“Have I met her? What does she look like?”

“Like anyone. Dyed blonde, fifties.”

“Like anyone?”

“A classic director of an agency.” He tucked a dish towel into the neck of his shirt, arranging it like a big apron, then ate his oatmeal standing up, though I had taken my feet off his chair. Instead of making him look silly, the dish towel bib made him even more dignified.

“A lesbian?” I said. Several women I knew with jobs like that were lesbians.

“I never asked her.”

He left quickly—as if he’d come only because our house was the most geographically convenient source of microwaved oatmeal—and I was disappointed in myself. I had wasted our first conversation in days by talking about what didn’t matter. I didn’t care about Jean Argos. Griff and I both knew too well how to be offhand, but that tone was an inaccurate measure of what we were. We had fallen into sharp chatter, like people who only just happened to share a kitchen, as if we had no right to strong opinions around each other. It was appalling.

I didn’t want Griff to extend himself still further into the doing of good, which already used up too much of him. Educated, civic-minded black people in New Haven are much in demand—on boards and commissions, as spokespersons, candidates, campaign managers, and board presidents—and he’d told me he had to be careful not to feel flattered when someone phoned to say he was the best person for some job. What had become of that rueful, insightful grasp of his place in our city? Griff did matter, and I was glad he knew that. But when he decided that he was the only one who could do something, I’d learned to be suspicious. I was angry that he hadn’t talked to me about this. He hadn’t even remembered whether he had or not. It was the opposite of wanting to borrow my book—and more like losing it. I surprised myself by thinking that I should have burst into tears. I don’t cry much. Thinking about it, I actually did cry—didn’t burst into tears, but enough to have to wipe my eyes. Not only had Griff lost it, but after initial dismay, he seemed to have forgotten he’d lost it.

I stood to wash my mug, feeling even worse—though enjoying the slight satisfaction that comes from understanding what’s wrong. The mug was handmade, dark blue, with ridged circles around the outside, a present from an author whose book on ceramics I’d edited.

Then I left for work. I was working on a book about weaving. While I work on a book, I become an expert, and shortly after I finish, I again know nothing. I’d been hired originally at this house that specializes in books about crafts because in addition to being literate, I could truthfully say that I knew how to knit and sew, though I remarked even back then that I hadn’t done either for years.

“You never forget,” the woman who hired me said, but the last time I picked up my daughter Annie’s knitting project, I had forgotten.

The spring when Griff lost Bright Morning of Pain, I could say a good deal about warping a loom, and because weaving was even more complicated intellectually than some of the crafts about which I edited books—I was astonished at how many ways there are to weave—I found this book particularly challenging and engrossing. Because I thought about weaving techniques all day, I was free to think freshly of literature at night or on weekends, and now that I had cut back my hours at the job, I could have spent a couple of days a week on my own work. I should have been able to do it well. But I wasn’t able.

Joshua Griffin

Wouldn’t it have been reasonable to purchase a larger table years ago? We’re not rich, but that rich we are. The kitchen is small, but there is room for a larger table. Or it would be possible to eat at the table in the living room, if it weren’t covered with books and papers 98 percent of the time. She has a room upstairs to work in, but she works at the big table in the living room—and I understand that. I like that. But we could have bought another table—either for the kitchen or the living room. I might have said, I will no longer perch on a corner of the table. Or we could break down the wall to Martha’s old room, have a good big kitchen and get a good big table. A likely idea.

Sometimes I look to see if she’s taking the clothes she puts on out of a suitcase. I hang my clothes on decent wooden hangers in a decent closet, because I know where I live and I own my house, but her clothes are in piles on the floor, as if she’s getting ready to travel. The basics, the basics—is it a quirk of mine, a quirk of mine as a black man to say here is the proper way to live, let us live in the proper ways, cleaning ourselves and our possessions, making room, smoothing what is rough until we get no splinters, or else we dishonor ourselves?

Making a kitchen in which we can drink coffee while facing each other, with room for bowls and spoons.

I parked the car at the coffee shop, walked in, opened my mouth to ask for a medium coffee and a cranberry muffin, then turned, saying, “I am sorry,” to the baffled barista, who recognized me from yesterday and the day before that, and was reaching for the cranberry muffin. I left the coffee shop, returned to the car, drove to the house, and went inside. Her legs stretched across the chair. Her legs stretched across the chair. As if she was glad to have the extra room.

How can a man who is helpless before the quandaries of his own life exert influence on children in trouble? The boy yesterday. My father, my father, my father, he said—how he is helpless before whoever this father is. I pictured my own father, but surely his—younger than I, an unjust man who is a victim of injustice, a man with prison in his past—is nothing like mine. I urged and advised, provided reasons, provided rationales, provided solutions. He left relieved. I should have said, Let us mourn together the death of what you want to have with your father, what I wanted to have with my father—who is dead—and what I want to have with my wife.

If I’m not careful, I’ll be president of the board of Barker Street. My pride disgusts me.

Olive Grossman

Helen Weinstein took Latin for the first time as a freshman at Barnard. I had studied it in high school, but Helen, atypically, was afraid. Few students learned Latin even then, but she believed she should, and couldn’t. I assumed Helen regarded me as sweetly inferior in intellect and skills, but when I saw her in those first months of freshman year, it was supposedly to help her with Latin. We both lived with our parents and commuted to college as we had to high school—but one of us was at Barnard, the women’s college at Columbia University, way up on Manhattan’s West Side, and the other was at Brooklyn, a public college inconveniently located, even for many Brooklynites, an hour and a half or more by subway from Barnard.

“Explain,” Helen would say, thrusting her page of exercises under my nose, and I would discourse on how the farmer, agricola, became agricolae when a horse belonged to him, while the horse, equus, became equum when the point was that the farmer owned it. I wondered what was on her mind for which Latin was the excuse to see me. My college work was not onerous, but despite pretty buildings, Brooklyn College was an insufficient destination: going to class felt like running an errand, not joining a community of scholars. I didn’t know what to do with myself between classes. Living with my family, I had no social life.

Helen made friends at school, even though she didn’t live in the dorms. At home, I gathered, she was a boarder who came and went, shutting herself in her room to study. Her parents, darting up from the store and rushing back, apparently considered Helen and her slightly younger brother a project they’d finished, except for tuition payments.

But my brother and sister were in elementary school, so our household still existed primarily for the care of children—inoculations, teachers’ conferences, outgrown shoes. I was an assistant adult. I did homework at the kitchen table or in a big chair in the living room, as I always had, interrupting myself to participate in whatever was going on. I was jealous of Helen’s brooding self-discipline, her distinguished private college, and her adult, solitary days, yet despite myself, I encouraged my family to treat me as someone whose life was still primarily with them. Helen was coming to know Manhattan, the exotic borough, while I was stuck in Brooklyn, the boring one. I preferred not to hear about what she did.

Inserting my key into the lock in our apartment door, I’d often recognize her voice and discover her watching my mother cook dinner, talking. Helen would insist that I take a quick walk with her, or she’d tell me her news in a corner of the living room. She’d have brought her Latin text, but we’d soon put it aside. Now I can’t forget those unexplained visits. I should have behaved differently—and maybe everything would have been different. I should have had the sense to feel confident about my own life, confident enough that maybe she’d have continued to think that what I thought and did might be something she too could think and do.

Helen had joined an antiwar group and expressed surprise that I hadn’t. I said, “I’m still figuring out where the library is,” and she made an impatient noise with her mouth.

She told me less about the political group than about a program she’d signed up for, tutoring poor kids after school. She’d locate their apartments and sit down with the children amid crying brothers and sisters and harried parents, trying to teach them reading or arithmetic. I asked, “Are there bugs?” and she scolded me. Like me, Helen spent much of her time on public transportation or with children, but she seemed adult, productive, and unselfish, while the same actions—deprived of meaning because they took place in my own neighborhood and my own house—made me pathetic. So I didn’t argue enough.

I’d hear not just about the children but about their parents. Adeline understood her kids in a way Helen’s parents never could, she told me. Adeline wasn’t afraid to laugh, and once she cried openly. Adeline was the mother of a girl called Tania. There was also a little brother who was not Helen’s charge, but she was teaching him letters and numbers.

One late fall afternoon, we were perched next to each other on the broad curved arm of the sofa in my parents’ living room. Our arms in their sweaters touched as we gestured, talking while looking out the window at rain. My mother came through the room and said, “Something’s wrong with my chairs?” but we ignored her. We had begun talking where we were, studying the rain to see if we wanted to walk, and there we remained.

“I could have shot her,” Helen was saying. I hadn’t been paying attention.

“Who?”

“Adeline. I said ‘Adeline.’”

“I’m sorry. I was looking at the rain.”

“She yelled at Godfrey for coloring a horse green. She said he should know better.”

“I guess he never saw a horse,” I said.

“That’s not my point. He knows they’re not green!” Her voice turned sarcastic. “Even black kids know horses aren’t green, Olivia!”

“That’s the three-year-old? The little brother?”

“Four. He’s four.”

“Four,” I said evenly, trying to avoid an argument. “I don’t remember what kids know at four.”

“My point,” she said, “is not what he knows. She’s squelching his imagination—everything has to be accurate. ‘The teacher will holler if you make the horse green!’ He’ll get rich quicker if he makes it brown? For God’s sake.”

I was silent.

“What?” she said.

I hesitated to make her own argument back to her. “You said Adeline understands her kids. Maybe it makes sense—if they’re poor, getting high marks and a good job will be important.”

“Don’t condescend! Adeline is perfectly capable of thinking any thought you can think.”

That silenced me, and I heard nothing similar for weeks. I didn’t know Adeline, but I was uncomfortable hearing so much praise, then anger.

Helen almost never ate with us, despite all this turning up at suppertime. My mother couldn’t easily add an unexpected guest. Some cooks can cheerfully take five baked potatoes, mash the interiors with butter and cheese, and calmly serve six people, doing something crunchy with the liberated potato skins. Never my mother. Helen’s appearances embarrassed or annoyed her.

Twice a week I had a class from four to six, and my mother refused to serve dinner until I got home, though I’d have preferred otherwise. One evening, when I finally arrived, Helen was there. She’d never come this late before. She was reading in the living room, and she followed me into the room I shared with my sister, whose voice I heard coming from my brother’s room.

“What’s going on?” I said, irritated. I wanted her to tell me quickly what was wrong—obviously something was wrong—and leave.

“Adeline threw me out,” she said.

“How come?” I was taking off my coat, putting down my books.

“It’s my own fault. I was supposed to tutor Tania, but I kept arguing with her mother. Now what will happen to her?”

“What did you argue about?”

“Lots of things. TV. Adeline wants a color TV more than anything. It’s depressing.”

“She’ll take you back.”

“I don’t think so. It’s terrible for Tania.” She stood in the middle of the room, her hands at her sides. “I did wrong, Olivia.”

My mother appeared in the doorway, shrugging meaningfully. I smelled food cooking. I was hungry. Helen—who missed nothing—seemed to miss my mother’s discomfort, as, apparently, she had missed Adeline’s.

“If only you’d told me,” my mother would say, later that evening. “I’d have baked another potato!”

Now Helen, her small face full of misery, turned wordlessly to my mother. I think she was just noting the interruption, not pleading for food, but my mother said brightly, “Helen, stay for supper! I thought there wasn’t enough, but we can be a little creative here!”

I didn’t want to hear about creativity. For once, Helen stayed and ate, and my mother refused a potato. Helen’s scrupulous mind was as exacting as ever, but something had shifted. I was used to feeling inadequate when considering Helen’s noble feelings, and at first, I didn’t quite know what to conclude about the black welfare mother who wanted a color TV. If it had been Helen’s rich relative who wanted a color TV, I’d have cheerfully looked down upon her along with Helen. Color TVs, I would agree, were materialistic, showy, pointless: people would be better off buying Latin textbooks. Helen and I had been snobs together on many occasions—and then reconsidered, when her sense of fairness returned.

But never before had Helen questioned the values and tastes of the poor women she’d come to know. The term “black” was just replacing “Negro”: black history, black power, black is beautiful . . . and I ruminated with interest about the black woman rejecting a black-and-white television. I wrote a poem that I showed Helen, in which “black and white” had different meanings in different lines. But I was troubled. I was determined to argue, not just listen.

“I think she knows best,” I said, on another evening when Helen had stayed late. She was still criticizing Adeline about the TV, but she had uncharacteristically stopped blaming herself for spoiling Tania’s chance to be tutored.

“Don’t be silly,” she said quickly. “This is just capitalism teaching her to want what she can’t buy. She’s a victim. More TVs, more money, more soldiers, more killing. She’ll spend the rest of her life wanting what won’t make her happy.”

“Maybe she gets tired at work. She likes watching television at night.”

At that point, my mother in her apron appeared once more. Helen cut her off before she could speak. “That’s okay, Mrs. Grossman, I’m leaving. I have a paper to write.”

“I wish—” my mother began.

“No, I can’t, thank you.” Helen thought she was being invited, not sent away. She wrapped a fuzzy blue scarf around her head and let herself out. Helen always liked scarves, even when it wasn’t especially cold. She looked like someone in a poem.

“Sweet,” my mother said, when she was gone. “You should have told me . . .”

“It’s fine, Mom,” I said.

Helen was making me uncomfortable, but I disapproved of myself when I discovered that I was looking forward to time with my parents and sister and brother. My sister was a funny, chatty girl of twelve who took modern dance; my brother was shy and sweet, only nine and in awe of his sisters. My classes had not yet seized my attention—that would come later. I joined an antiwar group at Brooklyn College, but though I agreed with what I heard, I didn’t say much.

Val Benevento was already on the staff of the newspaper, and soon I heard that she was dating one of the editors. I began seeing her byline. When we’d meet on campus, she’d propose having lunch together at a restaurant nearby, and I was flattered that she wanted to. As always, Val was fun. She knew where to go and what to order, and told me I looked good in brown and green. We were both English majors, and Val had found out which professors to avoid. When I told her stories from my life, she claimed I was funny. Val had a part-time job at Lord & Taylor and had more money than I. I couldn’t afford lunches out, but I never said no when she suggested one.

As I became more sure of myself, I began to miss Helen instead of resenting her greater fortune. Now I think that maybe her fortune wasn’t so great after all, that her life was more than she could handle. As high school girls who were aware of the war and opposed it, we had been about as praiseworthy—at least in my mind—as possible. Helen’s new acquaintances asked themselves not merely to oppose the war but to end it. She seemed to think that she was supposed to end it.

If we had been men, we might have been sent to kill and be killed, and as women we might have been sleeping with men getting ready for war, but because we were students, our personal worries were postponed. The men’s student deferments kept them from being drafted. The system changed in 1969—when my classmates and I were twenty or twenty-one—with the lottery that made every nineteen-year-old American male a potential soldier, not just those who weren’t in school. In high school, boys I knew who were going to college had been relieved to have student deferments and didn’t think much about the men who didn’t have them. But the students Helen and I met now were self-conscious about it. Bourgeois privilege was a big subject with Helen, who sometimes behaved like a visitor from college observing people in the slums and sometimes like a visitor from the slums (she retained several tutees but stopped mentioning conversations with their mothers) observing those in college. She began to speak disdainfully of boys with deferments.

One winter afternoon (piles of coats were stacked at the back of a room with a piano, and embarrassed students pawed through them at the end), I attended an audition for a chorus. I had remembered that I liked to sing. I have a reliable alto voice and had sung in the high school glee club until time with Helen and the literary club became priorities. The students looking for their coats were embarrassed, or angry, because they hadn’t been picked. I was picked, though only two altos were accepted that day. I was so startled to hear my name read that I wondered for a moment if there might be another Olive Grossman. It was my first distinction in college. I phoned Val that night to tell her, and she promised to come to our first performance. I suspected she wouldn’t, and she didn’t. By then, we were seeing less of each other, if only because of where our schedules took us, when we happened to meet.

The chorus sang Orff’s Carmina Burana that spring. I found its percussive energy irresistible. And most of it was in Latin. I felt distinctive in the world for knowing the Carmina Burana and distinctive in the chorus for knowing a little Latin. Singing, I had power—nothing tentative about this music. I bellowed some of the songs at home and taught bits to my brother and sister. Much of the piece is about the wheel of fortune; my own wheel had turned a degree or two.

When I stepped out of the building at five, each week it was a little less dark; that felt like a personal achievement. A girl in the chorus was in one of my classes, so I had a reason to speak to her. She knew a tenor named Patrick—a friend of her boyfriend—and soon the three of us would emerge together, sampling the weather and putting on hats and gloves. At last, I had friends. We’d find a place to drink coffee. I had finally persuaded my mother not to delay dinner for me, and sometimes my friends and I ate hamburgers. I’d never tasted coffee before—the first time, I said, “Black for me,” because they drank it black; it took years to discover that I don’t like my coffee black.

Sometimes we got into trouble for singing bits of Carmina Burana in a booth at the luncheonette, banging on the table with the heels of our hands. Helen and I had never walked down a street singing; when I asked, it turned out she couldn’t sing on pitch. My new friends and I sang on our way to our bus or subway stops.

Sometimes Patrick and I were alone. He was a dark-haired, sturdy boy, a little older than I, and lived not with his parents but with cousins, a young couple with a baby. He smoked cigarettes, and I liked his smell. Patrick offered to teach me the guitar. I began smoking regularly instead of only when a friend gave me a cigarette, but I never learned guitar—I was too self-conscious to let him watch me make mistakes. Still, I discovered the pleasure of visiting him at his cousins’ apartment, where he slept on a couch in the living room. We sang folk songs together. I knew every Weavers song by heart, and so did he. He could sing the Kingston Trio song about Charlie on the MTA, and soon we sang that. And he could sing Bob Dylan songs, which I found difficult. Learning to produce raspy, angry, rhythmically complex sound and still be making music was irresistible.

Once, his cousins were away, and Patrick began groping and kissing me, first my neck, then my body. His hands were enormous and hot, and every place he touched felt erotically charged. Then he said sensibly, “I didn’t think we’d get to this point for months, but we may not have another chance, and I can’t afford a hotel.” I was shocked for half a minute, both at what he was proposing and at his lack of sentiment—and then I decided that the girl I wanted to be would not be shocked. We took off our clothes in his cousins’ bedroom and got into their bed. He had condoms. We were clumsy, frantic—but excited and happy. When we were done, I insisted that we had to change the sheet (which had a little blood on it), and I suppose the cousins guessed what happened, because the clean sheet we found was a different color. Delighted with myself but self-conscious, I dressed fast and left.

Soon Patrick and I were not just sleeping together but singing protest songs at antiwar rallies. We’d walk up to the microphone, and people would yell. I knew they weren’t yelling because we were good—but maybe we were good. The yelling resumed after we sang. People grabbed us as we left, glad to spot us in the crowd. We called ourselves “Pat and Ollie,” and people began using those names, though we always said “Patrick” and “Olive” to each other.

I did all right in my classes, and at the start of my sophomore year, I found a couple of professors who knew more than I’d ever know. All I wanted was to listen to them—no, I also wanted them to think I was remarkable; there were hints that they did.

One Saturday afternoon in February of 1968, I was playing Scrabble with my mother when the phone rang. Patrick had become less attentive except when we sang, and I worried that he had found a girl with her own apartment. I hoped it was Patrick calling, but it was Helen, who hardly ever phoned. She invited me to visit her the next day.

“I haven’t told you,” she said. “I moved out.”

She had a job sorting books in the Columbia library and had moved into a cheap apartment where two other women lived. “They’re letting me stay in the living room. They need the money.”

“Like my friend Patrick,” I said, and would have liked to say I had a boyfriend, but I didn’t feel sure enough. I envied her once more and wondered if her parents paid some of the rent. I thought, as I often did, that I should have been more like Helen—I should have found a way to move out.

“It’s cheaper than the dorms,” she said. “And the train takes so long.”

She said she had a boyfriend, and I tried to suppress competitive thoughts. “I met him at a rally,” she said. “He’ll probably stop by tomorrow.”

I wondered why she wanted me to come, and to come now. This was the first time I couldn’t read her thoughts. She had been like a small child who bursts into tears when disappointed, her outbursts unmediated by self-consciousness. The time she wanted to go to the rally at the Waldorf with me but not with Val, it didn’t matter what she said, because what she felt was obvious. But, I pointed out to myself, we were closer then. Maybe her new friends or her roommates understood her now.

Then she said, “My roommates don’t like Daniel.” So I was the reliably friendly friend. And yet, wouldn’t it have been simpler to leave with Daniel and avoid the roommates? All these years later, I see that everything Helen did—the long series of changes and decisions that were beginning for her—she did ambivalently. It didn’t seem so at the time, but it was so, and when she felt hesitant about the life she was rushing toward, she turned toward me. I was safety; I was the past that had almost been sufficient, and maybe I could have pulled her back—or maybe I could have gone a distance with her, and that might have modified the life she led during those years, essentially alone.

I took the long ride on the rattly IRT to her apartment in Morningside Heights that Sunday afternoon, a little worried that the apartment would be full of bugs and mice, a little afraid that it would be so enticing—even though Helen was sleeping in the living room and had roommates who criticized her choice in men—that I’d be wretched with envy. Helen came to the door in an old green sweater, with something white on her jeans and hands, and there was a scattering of white on the worn parquet floor: wood strips in an intricate design, now ugly with ancient stains. Later I realized the floor had once been covered with carpet, because occasional bits of gray string were held down by tacks. The floor was a hint of what I was walking into: not just young people figuring out adult life. Everything spoke of other times and places, ideas that had been argued through decades.

I hadn’t seen Helen in a while, and she looked thinner. Her brown curls too were dusted with white. “What’s wrong?” I said, before I completely took in that all this white was flour.

“Oh, Angie’s mad,” she said. So something was wrong. “Come on.” She led me into the kitchen, where ingredients for baking were on a small green wooden table with flaking paint.

“What are you making?”

“Banana bread,” she said. “The bananas got brown.”

I stood there in my coat. Helen mashed bananas with a fork. Then an untidy woman—a girl, we said “girl” until about 1970, when the women’s movement told us we were women—came into the kitchen. She wore glasses with black-and-white frames and overalls. I was afraid of her.

She glanced at me and said nothing. Helen was scraping mashed bananas into a bowl, which seemed to give her the excuse to ignore both of us, like a scientist at a delicate stage of an experiment.

“I’m Olive,” I said.

“Olivia,” Helen said. The correction pleased me: she was protecting her investment in me. “This is Angie.”

Angie and I nodded.

“The point,” Angie said to Helen, “never had anything to do with showing up or not. We were always going to show up. This was a given.”

“I know,” Helen said.

“Whether they did or not.”

“I get it.” Helen turned and crouched, trying to light the oven. It was a gas stove, and the oven had to be lit with a match.

“Pull your hair back,” Angie said.

I offered to light the oven. “My hair is shorter,” I said. Nervously, I leaned over and struck the match. Angie’s was shorter yet, but she stayed where she was. There was a pop when the gas caught, and I jumped. I’ve never liked that kind of oven.

“Thanks,” Helen said. “I hate it.”

As if she’d been waiting to make sure we all survived the lighting of the oven, Angie left the room, and Helen offered me tea. She put a kettle on the stove and then scraped the batter into the loaf pan.

“What was she talking about?” I said.

She didn’t answer for a moment, then said, “Half a million troops,” maybe indicating the reason for whatever people did or didn’t go to. When the banana bread was in the oven, she took out a box of tea bags. She reached for two mugs and put tea bags into them. “Can you imagine?”

I knew there were now half a million American troops in Vietnam. Helen continued, “All this marching and chanting. We’ve accomplished nothing.”

The kettle boiled. “Did you see those pictures?”

A series of photographs that everyone was talking about had come out a week or so earlier. I didn’t want to think about them. “What did Angie mean about going to something?” I asked.

“I don’t remember,” Helen said. “Probably the gym. She thinks I’m wasting time on that stuff. She thinks Daniel only cares about me because he wants a white face at the protest, so the cops won’t shoot.”

For a second I thought she meant flour on her face and was baffled. Then I said, “Daniel’s Afro American?” using the term I believed was correct at the moment. Her boyfriend, it became clear, was a black Columbia student who’d become involved in a fight that Harlem people were having with Columbia over a gymnasium. It was scheduled to be built in Morningside Park, with an entrance at the bottom of the hill so the neighborhood people could use it, while the Columbia students would enter from the top.

I had heard about this. “I thought having an entrance at the bottom was a good thing,” I said. “So it’s not just for students.”

“Yeah, separate entrance for the ghetto, so they can lock it when they get tired of black faces. Tearing up the park for the benefit of outsiders.”

I felt a moment of embarrassment for Helen—did she have a right to use the word “outsiders”?—but put my feelings aside, watching her methodically adding milk and honey to our tea. I pulled a chair out from the table, arranged my coat around its back, and sat down.

Before, when we weren’t out in the wind, Helen and I were in school, in public places, or in our parents’ apartments. “I love this,” I said too loudly, waving an arm. The tea was hot, strong, and sweet, and I wanted to move in. Maybe throw Angie out. But I didn’t want to think about those photographs and what we had to do to stop the war or about a gym that would be bad for Negroes or blacks or Afro Americans or whoever they were. I wanted us to be happy people drinking tea in a warm apartment. We were finally adults.

The doorbell rang before the banana bread was done, and Helen admitted Daniel. He was a boyish, light-skinned black man with a big Afro that was brown, paler at its edges, so he had an ethereal look. She led him into the kitchen (“This is Olivia,” she said firmly), and he smiled at me while reaching from behind her to take her into his arms, then turning her shoulders so she faced him, pressing her face into his chest. It was the first time I saw Helen touched by a man, and she was a strange mix of child and wanton woman. She pushed back instead of burrowing in, but I thought it was not distaste but a need to take charge herself, and then, indeed, she turned again and drew his hands in front of her, where they might have chastely hugged but instead lay on her breasts.

Daniel, at first glance, was the perfect boyfriend for Helen—like her, someone who had never been a teenager, having moved directly from childhood to adulthood. The tea made me want to love everything, and I was moved by the way he touched her. He spoke in a hurried, intense whisper: “I am really glad to meet you.” Or, “I most definitely want banana bread.” It came out of the oven, and we waited just until it was cool enough that Helen could take it out of the pan. We ate it. Angie ambled back in and nodded at Daniel. She picked the crust from the pan and ate it.

I assumed the second roommate wasn’t home until she appeared, a tall girl, also with glasses, but with coiled hair. “I overslept,” she said. “Now I have to get out of here.” She stood next to the table, ignoring Daniel and me, breaking off pieces of banana bread and nibbling. “I have to write that thing.”

“What are you writing?” I asked.

She looked at me. “You mean who the hell am I, or what am I saying about the war that I didn’t say yesterday?” She wore a heavy black sweater—big enough for a large man—on which the sleeves had been rolled several times. Her arms were long and thin, with narrow hands she frequently raised to brush hair off her face. When she did that, the clumsily rolled cuffs dropped along her forearms, and without noticing, she would shift one of the sleeves a little, or unroll and reroll the cuff.

“The second,” I said, though I didn’t know who she was, besides being Helen’s roommate. It turned out that she wrote pamphlets for the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. Maybe she thought I should have heard of her. I wasn’t angry or hurt by her tone, just curious—admiring her air of significance, her looks. She was not rushing out, but she didn’t sit down.

“Those photos will keep me busy for a while,” she said, more to Helen than to me. “Reaction from Europe, all that. We’re putting the worst one on a pamphlet.”

She stretched out her arm toward Helen’s head and mimed aiming a gun, and as if it appeared behind her thin arm with that big, lumpy woolen sleeve hanging off it, I saw again the black-and-white photograph I’d seen in the newspaper and on television the week before: the unbending arm of a South Vietnamese general stretching a pistol toward a young Vietcong prisoner with mussed, straight black hair and a checked short-sleeved shirt, his face tense but not terrified. In the previous picture, an American Marine guards the man in the checked shirt. In the following picture, the man in the checked shirt crumples, dead.

Barb—someone said her name—held her arm stretched out for a while, and Helen looked up and returned to drinking her tea. Her hands were around the mug, not on the handle. Her feet were on the seat of her chair, her knees drawn up. Helen had sliced most of the banana bread but hadn’t taken a piece, which didn’t surprise me.

They were all talking now. Not paying close attention, I looked at the walls, which had cracked yellow paint that looked like the topmost of ten or twelve layers. The windows looked painted shut, but a draft came past the edges of the steamy panes. There was cracked green-and-yellow linoleum on the floor. Years earlier, it had been new, and a grandmother had cooked soup for her large family in this kitchen. She spoke what—Italian? Spanish? Yiddish?

Angie said, “But we’re saying something. They don’t hear us, but we’re saying something.”

“I get that, I get that,” Daniel said. Then he said something different. “We have tried that.”

I waited to find out from this young man with his innocent look what they had tried and who had tried it. I thought Daniel was our age, but as I listened, I realized he was older, a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement who had taken time between high school and college. What they had tried, I slowly understood, what had not worked, was nonviolent protest. Daniel was thinking about carrying a gun.

“That’s stupid,” Helen said, looking up sharply.

“Baby,” Daniel said.

“Yeah, you’ve tried everything else, but you can think of new things. Or you can try everything else again.” Helen leaned forward, her voice raised. “That’s just what they want. Carry a gun, someone shoots, you all get killed. We all get killed. End of protest.”

“Oh, don’t give me that,” Angie said. The argument was more complicated than I had thought, and I figured it out only later. Angie didn’t like Daniel and thought he was simpleminded about guns, but she too was tired of nonviolence. She was interested in protesters in California, who smashed windows and committed other acts of vandalism but didn’t carry guns.

“Are the cops around here violent?” I said. “They’ve been peaceful when I’ve marched.”

Nobody answered and I felt like an idiot. Helen was crying. Her nose ran and her eyes streamed, but she didn’t dig in her pocket for something to blow her nose with. She didn’t even wipe her face with her arm. Then, as she cried and snuffled, she reached for a piece of banana bread. It broke as she took it, and she ate what was in her hand quickly, put the fragments that had fallen onto the table into her mouth, and then reached for another piece.

I stood. “Don’t go!” Helen said.

I didn’t want to be there. “Where’s the bathroom?” I said, an excuse for standing up. I did need a bathroom. Barb said, “I’m leaving. I’ll show you,” and I followed her from the kitchen and saw where she pointed down a hall. In the living room, Helen’s things were crammed behind a sofa: a single mattress, a bookcase made of bricks and boards. The bathroom was like the rest of the apartment: thirty years earlier, someone had been proud of it. The floor was tiled in chipped black-and-white trapezoids in concentric circles.

I washed my hands and tried to decide which towel was Helen’s. It seemed unpleasant to use the towels of her combative roommates. If I stayed, I’d have to let myself think freely about the war. I had dealt with my horror by trying not to think about it much or about how little I’d done. We all felt a responsibility then, though in retrospect it seems foolish that we ascribed so much power to ourselves. I’d never thought about the questions these people were debating, never thought to question the tactics that were announced by the leaders of organizations I joined, never wondered who started a group or why. When I marched, I thought we were spontaneously expressing rage. Now I saw the obvious: someone had decided that rage might best be expressed by marching, and not some other activity. Helen’s towel, I decided, was the fluffy green one, the one that looked as if it might have come from her parents’ apartment.

When I returned to the kitchen, I intended to pick up my coat and put it on. But Barb—she had not left—was sitting in my chair, opposite Helen. She’d turned the chair at a right angle to the table, and her long legs stuck out into the room. When she did leave, her legs seemed to announce, she would go fast. My coat was squashed behind her, and it was too hard to claim it. Angie was in another chair, and Daniel sat on a high wooden seat with steps that swung out, a contraption I’d seen in my grandparents’ apartments. It was painted in scratched and marred yellow paint. The four of them, it seemed, had been left by ancestors—somebody’s ancestors, anybody’s ancestors—as the unlikely responsible parties, the people who now had to make things right. For a moment, before my skepticism and irony returned, I was awestruck by their willingness.

The banana bread was almost gone.

“This is our ally!” Angie said.

“Yup.” Barb’s voice became louder and more sarcastic. “The general is the guy we’re fighting for. All those dead soldiers—this was the worst week of the war for us, did you know that?” She meant the South Vietnamese general in the photographs, the man who shot the Vietcong soldier. I was startled that she said “us.”

“So who cares about a fucking gymnasium?” Angie said. It was the first time I’d ever heard a woman say “fucking.” “With this war going on—who the fuck cares?”

Helen leaned forward so her head was on the table. Then she sat up. “Oppression is oppression,” she said, but she sounded tentative.

“Look, sweetie,” Angie said, “we’re not going back in time. We don’t have slavery in this country. We have stuff to worry about, sure—and prejudice? well, sure—but it’s not slavery. Get that? Fighting the gym is not the Civil War, get that?” She stood, leaning forward with her hands on the table, then walked heavily from the room.

“Let’s get something to eat,” Daniel said. He looked at me. “Come with us.”

Barb, at last, left when we did, but she went in the other direction at the street. It was dark. Helen, Daniel, and I ate eggs at a nearby greasy spoon. Daniel said, “Helen told me a lot about you”—what my mother might have said. I asked Daniel about his family, and he said he was from Baltimore, the youngest of three. He had grown up in a household of cherishing adults. I saw that he’d always feel sure of himself, certain that he belonged wherever he was. How many black men would spend an afternoon with four white women and never look as if he’d rather be elsewhere? I asked myself the question and then I said it out loud in those words, because it was a day for taking chances.

Daniel laughed. “I always think people want to be with me,” he said.

Helen looked up from her eggs—she was eating heartily in my presence for the second time that day—and I almost heard her considering that maybe he didn’t like her; maybe he simply liked everybody. He stretched an arm around her and transferred his fork to his other hand.

“Where do you two go for privacy?” I said, because I suddenly felt in the way.

“My roommates and I have a signal,” Daniel said. He smiled like a child. After we paid the check, I got up to leave and nobody stopped me.