Mrs. Everything (20 page)

On a Friday afternoon in late November, Jo was in her World Anthropology lecture, half paying attention to the lesson, half thinking about her plans for the weekend. Professor Fleiss was standing at the front of the class, asking, “What are the three principles of natural selection?” when a boy ran into the lecture hall, shouting, “The president’s been shot!”

The students looked at each other. Jo assumed that the boy was talking about Harlan Hatcher, the president of the U of M, but the boy, whose name Jo never learned, was quick to clear that up. “Kennedy!” he said. “He was in Dallas, in a motorcade. A sniper shot him. He’s dead.”

No
, thought Jo.
It can’t be.
The previous June, back home for the weekend, she had watched when Kennedy had given
his civil rights address, sitting next to her sister on the plastic-covered couch as the president, in his broad Bostonian accent, proclaimed, “we preach freedom around the world, and we mean it . . . but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other, that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes?”

“Seems to me that the Negroes are doing just fine,” Sarah observed from the kitchen, where she was ironing sheets.

“The Negroes are not doing fine,” Jo said, and her sister had muttered, “Oh, boy, here we go.”

“All I’m saying is that nobody made any special laws to help the Jews,” said Sarah.

“I think that things were a little easier for the Jews. Insofar as nobody brought us to this country as property,” said Jo.

“Maybe we weren’t slaves, but I certainly don’t remember anyone throwing us welcome parties. Remember the M.S.
St. Louis
?”

Jo nodded. It felt like every week of Hebrew school they’d gotten lessons on the Holocaust, including the story of the ship of nine hundred Jewish refugees that had been turned away from the United States in 1939 because the government believed the passengers were spies.

“I’ve told you what it was like for me as a girl. Kids calling me names. Throwing things at me. And nobody made any laws to make it easier for Jews to find jobs or houses,” Sarah said, pointing her spray bottle of starch at Jo for emphasis.

“Right,” said Jo. “You know what it’s like to feel discrimination. So why would you want anyone else to suffer?”

“I don’t want anyone to suffer. I want everyone to have the same chances.”

“That’s all these laws will do. Give Negroes the same chances.”

“No,” Sarah said, setting her iron down with a thump. “It’s giving them more.” She raised her chin. “Negroes could work hard and have all of that, too. If they wanted.”

“That’s like saying you could win a marathon if you had to start five miles behind everyone else. And then told if you didn’t
win, you just weren’t trying hard enough. Don’t you see the way everything’s set up to keep Negroes from getting ahead?”

Sarah sent the final sheet billowing into the air and began to fold it in precise squares. “I see that the Steins sold their house to the Johnsons. And now our house is worth ten thousand dollars less than what it used to be. That’s what I see.” With that, Sarah had gone to her bedroom, closing the door behind her.

“Dead?” Jo said. At the desk beside hers, a girl named Norma Tester was crying, and Professor Fleiss’s normally robust bass voice was almost too quiet to hear when he said, “Class is dismissed.”

Jo went out to the Diag, which was funereally silent, cutting through the crowds of weeping classmates, looking for a television. Kids were clustered six deep around the sets in the Union, so thickly that it was impossible to see. “It is true?” Jo asked, and the curly-haired boy in front of her nodded grimly, saying, “Cronkite just confirmed it.”

“His poor wife,” said someone, and someone else chimed in, “She just lost that baby, you know.”

“It doesn’t seem real,” Jo said, half to herself. She felt a creeping numbness, the constriction in her chest that she remembered from her worst fights with her mother. All around her, girls were sobbing, boys were shaking their hands and saying, “I can’t believe it,” all of them looking at one another, asking, “What happens now?” Jo felt a wave of longing, the loneliness that she’d trained herself to ignore.
I don’t want to be alone
, she thought. She wondered if Lynnie had heard the news. That was when the girl in front of her turned around. She’d looked up at Jo and said, in a low, familiar voice, “Will you walk with me? I need to walk. I think if I don’t start moving, I’m going to explode.”

Jo nodded. She felt exactly the same way. Together, the two of them turned and made their way back outside.

“I’m Shelley Finkelbein,” said the girl, and Jo, who hadn’t recognized her yet, said, “Oh.”

“Have we met?” Shelley asked, glancing up at Jo.

Jo shook her head. “You were in my Intro to Philosophy class for about a minute.”

Shelley waved her hand, dismissing philosophy.

“And I saw you in
Romeo and Juliet
.”

“Oh,” said Shelley, her cheeks turning pink. “Well. At least it wasn’t
Carousel
. A disaster for the ages.”

“Is that the one where everyone was naked?” Jo asked, remembering what she’d heard about that performance, which ran for three nights in a church basement and had been the talk of the campus.

“Lightly clad,” said Shelley, with a slight smile. “It was not a dramatic triumph.” She fell into step next to Jo, the top of her glossy head barely reaching Jo’s shoulder. Jo wanted to stare but contented herself with a peek.

Shelley Finkelbein was of average height, but delicately built, with light eyes and dark brows and small, uptilted breasts the size and shape of teacups underneath a soft sweater, its color somewhere between lavender and gray. She wore a pair of fitted pedal-pushers that zipped on the side and clung to the swell of her hips, and were cropped to display her dainty ankles, and a pair of pristine white sneakers. Up close, Jo could see that her brows rose in peaks at their center, giving her a quizzical look, and that her eyes were a pale, luminous gray. She had a narrow nose, slightly upturned at the tip, and lush pink lips, the lower one much fuller than the upper one, and skin that looked dewy. Even with her lipstick chewed away and her stunned, sorrowful expression, she was lovely.

“Hey, can you slow down a little?” Shelley asked. Jo stopped, looked down, and saw that, in spite of everything, Shelley was smiling. “Not all of us have legs a mile long.”

“Sorry,” said Jo. Even in her distress she felt her face flushing at the thought of Shelley noticing her legs. She slowed down. Shelley pulled a pack of Parliaments and a heavy gold St. Dupont lighter from her brown leather purse. She shook one cigarette free, tapped it on the pack, lit it, raised it to her lips, tilted her
head back, and blew a pair of perfect smoke rings, one inside of the other, into the cloudy sky. “What do you think we’re supposed to do now?”

“I don’t know,” Jo said. “Something. We have to do something.”

“You go to those demonstrations, right? SNCC, SDS?” Shelley pronounced the acronym for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as
Snick
, the way students in the know did. Jo nodded. Just like in high school, she’d protested most Saturdays, carrying an
EQUALITY NOW
sign outside of Woolworth in Ann Arbor, marching in a circle with maybe fifty other kids.

“Take me with you?” Shelley looked up at Jo. Her eyes had sooty rings of mascara underneath them, and Jo found herself, in spite of everything, noticing how sweet she smelled, and that Shelley’s cheeks were faintly freckled.

“Sure,” Jo said. “Sure.”

*  *  *

“Attention!” Doug Brodesseur had a high, nasal voice, pale skin pitted with acne scars and curly black hair, and was all of five feet, three inches tall. Doug was hosting the first meeting of the executive committee of the University of Michigan’s chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that had been convened since Kennedy’s assassination. Instead of the usual dozen students, almost a hundred kids had crowded into the living room of his off-campus apartment to listen.

Shelley had called Jo on the dormitory’s phone that morning, and had met her out on the Diag, in front of the Undergraduate Library, affectionately called the UGLI, dressed in a burnt-orange corduroy skirt and a white wool turtleneck sweater. A brown leather belt cinched her waist, and her knee-high brown suede boots matched the shade of her belt exactly. In her right hand was a cigarette; on her face was her typically amused look. “Howdy, Stretch,” she’d said, as Jo approached, and Jo had smiled.

“My dad used to call me ‘Sport.’ ” Up close, Shelley’s breath smelled like mint and tobacco. Jo wished she’d gotten dressed up, that she’d chosen something more flattering than jeans and a loose white shirt with blue stripes. Jo and Shelley had walked together to the house that Doug shared with three other guys, an off-campus residence that was easily the filthiest place Jo had ever visited. Dirty footprints and clumps of cat hair dotted the carpet, which had probably been cream-colored at one point and was currently the gray of sidewalks after the rain. Dozens of empty beer cans and pop bottles, some half-full, with cigarette butts floating in the liquid, stood on or near the coffee table. A stack of pizza boxes and newspapers teetered in one corner. A fly buzzed around the box at the top of the pile, and one of the walls looked like someone had punched a hole through it and patched up the damage with . . . Jo squinted to confirm that it was, indeed, crumpled-up pages of the
Daily
and duct tape.

Most of the meeting’s attendees were white boys. Jo recognized some of them from previous pickets or actions or meetings. Some of them were sitting on the cream-and-orange plaid couch. Others sat on folding chairs that had been set up around the edge of the room, with their feet planted on the floor and legs spread wide. Jo and Shelley found places toward the back of the living room, by the door. “In case we need to make a quick getaway,” Jo said. She watched Shelley smile and lean against the wall, and pull away as soon as her shoulder touched the knotty pine paneling. Jo knew, from experience, that the walls were sticky; that everything in the house seemed to have been lightly coated in spilled pop.

“Okay!” called Doug. “Now, more than ever, it’s important for us to stay the course and not back down. We need to show the rest of the country, the rest of the world, that they can kill our president . . .” He gulped, and his voice, which had been trembling, got steadier. “. . . but they can’t shake our commitment to civil rights, or slow the wheel of progress. No matter what.” This
prompted murmurs of assent, nods, and a smattering of applause. “We’re going to talk about the action we’ve got planned for this coming Saturday at Woolworth.

“Now, last week we only had about seventy-five people show up.” His voice became louder and more aggrieved. “There are twenty-four thousand people on this campus. What does it say that only seventy-five of them can be bothered to stand up for racial equality?”

“That you aren’t very good at your job?” Jo heard someone mutter.

“I want every person in this room who’s planning to be there Saturday to commit to bringing at least two new people with them!” said Doug. “And I need someone to volunteer to type up the flyers!” His eyes, small and close-set underneath his high forehead, moved over the room, finally arriving at a woman in a corduroy jumper, who sat perched on the couch in a manner suggesting she was trying to keep as much of her body away from the fabric as possible. “Marian, how about you?”

Marian nodded.

“Moving on,” said Doug. “We need to talk about the bigger picture. Summer’s going to be here before you know it. The Freedom Rider Coordinating Committee is asking for new riders,” he continued. “The rides begin in Washington, D.C., and end in New Orleans.”

“Or jail,” someone muttered.

“Many universities have had students participate,” Doug continued. “It would be great if the U of M could have a representative on one of the buses.”

A dark-haired white fellow with heavy stubble and dark-rimmed glasses raised his hand to ask if arrests showed up on your academic records. “Is going to jail going to keep me out of medical school?” he asked. The crowd offered competing, contradictory answers about how an arrest for civil rights activism might affect one’s future.

Jo stood close enough to feel the warmth of Shelley’s body, listening as the boys discussed the putative consequences of riding a bus and registering voters while their less fortunate, poor, and Negro counterparts were being beaten by cops or set upon by dogs or shipped off to die in Vietnam. She and Shelley and the other girls who had come stood quietly until, finally, Doug deigned to acknowledge them with a smile that displayed his overbite.

“Hey, you know what? If a few of you gals want to get dinner started, there’s spaghetti and sauce in the kitchen.”

*  *  *

“So that’s the movement.”

“I can’t believe that,” Shelley said, with a disgusted roll of her eyes. She and Jo had left the meeting and were walking through campus in the twilight, moving fast, with the empty paths providing fresh air and space to complain. “I can’t believe he expected us to make copies and make them dinner!” A few steps more, and Shelley said, “I can’t believe we did!”

Jo made a noncommittal noise. She’d washed her hands, but she could still smell jarred tomatoes and oregano underneath her nails.

“Are you planning on being a politician?” Shelley asked.

“Who, me?”

“Yes, you,” Shelley said, and playfully bumped Jo’s hip with her own. Jo felt herself smiling. “You’re all commanding and committed.”

“That’s the only time I’ve ever spoken up in a meeting. I care about the world, but I don’t want to go into politics.”

“So what, then?” asked Shelley. “I can tell you’re a gal with a plan. What’s your major?”

“English,” said Jo. Her face, her whole body, was flushing with pleasure at being the subject of Shelley’s regard. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had complimented her, or been interested in her future. “I’m going to get a teaching degree, so
I’ll be able to support myself. But what I really want is to be a writer.”