My Beautiful Hippie (21 page)

April Fools' Day I really was sick, no joke. I'd been throwing up all night and I had a fever. Still, Mom was convinced I was faking. It was her bridge day—Thelma was hosting—and Mom accused me of planning to cut school to meet Martin in the park or somewhere as soon as she left the house. That was actually a pretty good idea. I would have to try it someday when I felt better.

All morning, between fits of sleep, I was aware of Snoopy purring and kneading my pillow. I thought, Now I'm supposed to be in geometry, now world history, now orchestra. It was weird to think of the school day going on without me. Around eleven o'clock I heard Mom taking a shower, and when she checked on me just before leaving, I pretended to be asleep. A little while later I felt well enough to sit up in bed and finish the letter to Jimmy I'd started the previous evening. I'd been writing to him every two weeks or so, nothing personal, just the stuff he'd asked me to write about. He wrote back a couple of times, but not with news of the war; he liked to reminisce about home and make plans for when he returned, including a fishing trip to Clear Lake with Dan.

Just as I was sealing the envelope, I heard the back door close. Mom, no doubt, had rushed home to check on me. I heard footsteps on the stairs, and then Denise burst into the room.

“What are you doing here?” we said in unison.

“I've got the flu,” I said.

“Oh, give it to me so I can take the rest of the week off!”

“Aren't you supposed to be at work right now?”

Denise sank heavily onto her bed. “Yeah. I went to lunch, then found I just couldn't face Mr. Marlowe and his roaming hands.”

My eyes popped.

“Now when he stands behind me, he puts his hands on my breasts. He says it helps him think.”

“That's horrible! There should be a law against it.”

“There isn't.” She seemed resigned to the situation, when the Denise I once knew would be sprinting around the desk yelling, “Hands off!”

“You should tell Jerry.”

“Why would he care? He's got his life arranged just the way he wants it. Did you hear the news yesterday? LBJ has decided not to run for reelection. That's just icing on the cake. Now it seems Jerry will even get the president he wants—Gene McCarthy.”

“Maxine wants Bobby Kennedy.”

Denise shrugged. “It makes me tired to talk about politics. I just came over here to sit in this little pink room and—I don't know—find myself.” She picked up a framed picture from her senior prom. “Oh, here I am. Look at me! I was so young and pretty then.”

“That was only two years ago, Den. You're still young and pretty.”

She rubbed her cheek. “I feel like an old hag. All used up.” She lifted a volume of the complete novels of Jane Austen onto her lap. “And here I am. My favorite is
Sense and Sensibility
. I felt I was both of them. Ah! My little book of poems.” She flipped through a cloth-covered notebook, pausing to read here and there. “God! All bad imitations of Rod McKuen. Still, they're mine. I wrote them.”

I tapped a huge art history textbook lying horizontally in the bookcase. “There's you again.”

“Ah, no, Jo, not really. I only declared art history because I
knew Cal had quotas in various majors and I had a better chance of getting in. I figured I'd switch to English later.”

“You should go back to college.”

“Jerry and I fight about it all the time. He says I have penis envy.”

It took me a few seconds to understand what she was talking about. “Wait, I don't get it. Jerry thinks you wish you had one?”

“Uh-huh. Freud talks about it all the time. He says that's usually why women are so unhappy.”

“Yew, that's sickening! Why would a girl want a . . . an e
lephant trunk
hanging off her body?”

Denise reeled with laughter. “Oh, Jo, you're so funny!”

“Seriously. Why would you need a
thing
to go to college? Talk to Maxine. You need to be liberated.”

“Jerry has already liberated me quite enough. We now have an open marriage. He calls it group sex, like group therapy, like it's all clinical and normal, but it's just a filthy orgy.”

I stared back at her.

“I'm talking to the wrong person about this. Don't tell Mom. I want her to go to her grave without knowing people do such things.”

“She's not that out of it.”

“I don't want her to know her daughter does such things.”

“How is that liberation if you don't like it? You don't have to go to ogres if you don't want to.”

“Christ, Joanne, it's
orgies
. Either I go or risk losing my husband to some slut who's there on her own.”

I kicked off the blankets and leaped out of bed. “That does it. I'm liberating you myself! Take off your bra.”

Denise looked up from her book of poems. It seemed she had finally found one she sort of liked. “What?”

“Go on. Take off your bra. Here's one of mine. Come on, we're burning them!”

Denise let out a hoot and slapped her knee. “I'm in!”

I rushed down the stairs to fetch matches from the kitchen. Soon Denise bounded down after me, a bit jiggly, waving her
bra. I threw my car coat over my pajamas, and we burst through the French doors onto the patio. I dropped my bra into the brick barbecue pit, while Denise dangled hers over it.

“This is silly, really,” she said.

I snatched her bra from her hand and threw it down. I doused both bras with lighter fluid and dropped a match over them before Denise could change her mind. The elastic curled and sputtered and turned black. It stank. I watched the roaring flame in Denise's pupils. She looked beautiful.

When our bras were nothing but ash, Dan came loping into the backyard, waving a packet of papers. “I did it! I enlisted in the marines!”

“What about college?” asked Denise.

Dan batted the air. “I haven't been going to class since January. I probably flunked out by now. I took all the tests at the recruiting office today: written, practical application, physical. I was the best recruit in push-ups! I knew I would be!”

Denise and I stared at each other across the remains of our smoldering bras. “Congratulations,” she said flatly.

“Thanks,” said Dan. He hit the deck and pumped out a few push-ups. He collapsed onto his belly and craned his neck to look up at us. “Yew, what's that
smell
?”

“We're having a wienie roast,” I said. “Hey, you know what it's called when you're at a party and someone has a hot dog and you don't? Wienie envy!”

Denise's laugh came out like a snort.

After Dan ran into the house, I said, “He's been dying for a chance to get himself killed, and now he's got it.”

“Maybe not. Jerry is campaigning for Gene, the peace candidate.”

“Maxine is campaigning for Bobby, the peace candidate. I hope they don't cancel each other out.”

Denise sighed. “Guess I better go. Jerry will be expecting dinner, and I have to stop at Macy's on the way home to shop for a new bra.”

“Denise!”

“Are you kidding me, Jo? If I went around like this, in a couple of months I'd have nothing but a pair of string beans!”

I clasped my hand against my breasts. “And it does sorta hurt.”

“Yeah, and hairy legs and pits like Maxine's are just plain gross!”

I had failed to liberate Denise, but at least I had cheered her up some.

Three days later Martin Luther King, Jr., was gunned down outside his motel room in Memphis, and riots erupted in over a hundred cities. Dan made a show of propping his hunting rifle against our front door, his BB gun at the back door, and a machete at the French doors in case all-out war broke out between white and black. I couldn't tell if he was joking or not.

The next day my parents kept me home from school. Our attention was focused to the north, toward our nearest Negro neighbors, in the Fillmore District. That day we could hear the shattering glass as every storefront on Haight Street was broken. As far as I knew, that was the worst of it. There were no deaths, at least not on our side of the bay. On Saturday, Black Panther Bobby Hutton was shot in a gun battle with the Oakland Police.

“Hell, what
do
they want?” asked Dan.

In an article in the
Oakland Tribune
, the Panthers made their demands clear in their Ten-Point Program. It included freedom, employment, housing, education, health care, and the end of police brutality and wars of aggression.

I read it aloud to my family at the kitchen table. “Sounds like they want the same as what everyone wants.”

When I got home from school the first Monday in June, I found Maxine in the kitchen with Mom, no bridge party in sight.

“I'm just not in favor of it,” said Mom.

“Of what?” I asked, nosing in.

“Joanne, what are you doing in school tomorrow?” Maxine asked.

“Nothing.” It really was nothing. Instruction was done. In most of my classes we'd be applying sandpaper to the edges of textbooks.

“How would you like to meet the next president of the United States?” Maxine gushed.

“Far out.”

“I'm just not in favor of it,” said Mom, and she and Maxine argued some more. While Mom could wear Dad down in two minutes flat on just about any subject, she'd met her match in Maxine.

The next morning, Maxine's 1958 Buick Riviera, about the length of a city block, rolled up to our curb to whisk me and my overnight case off to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, campaign headquarters for Robert F. Kennedy. It was the day of the California primary election, and “Bobby” was favored to win the Democratic Party nomination. We were going to be witnesses to the historic event of his victory speech.

It was a fine day to be zooming down Highway 101, the cool morning breeze catching my hair through the open window. I'd
only been to L. A. once, to Disneyland when I was eight, and now being Maxine's sidekick felt like a real adult adventure. She and I talked and laughed together like we were girls of the same age. I found myself going on and on about Martin.

“It sounds like this boy is a real soul mate for you.”

“Yeah, but I don't know how long it will last.”

“So what? It's great for now. Now is the time in your life when you should be experiencing all sorts of relationships. You don't have to marry a guy just because he's right for you now. I envy you girls today. You have all sorts of freedoms I never experienced when I was your age. I didn't have sex before I was married, and neither did any of the girls I knew. We were all terrified of getting pregnant and then being forced into the home for unwed mothers and having our babies raised by strangers. You are using the Pill, aren't you, Joanne, or some other method of birth control?”

“Uh, I don't . . . we don't sleep together.”

“Well, when the time comes, let me know, and I'll make the appointment and come with you.”

I'd already thought about this on my own. I had actually gone with Denise for her gynecology appointment, so I knew the doctor's name and where his office was. “Thanks, Maxine. I appreciate that.”

“You're welcome, Joanne. You know I love your mother, but she's so old-fashioned about these things.”

In fact, Mom's main objection to my going to L. A. with Maxine was that she assumed Quentin would be with us, and Mom did not approve of an unmarried couple sharing a hotel room. “I thought Quentin was coming.”

“Oh, no. I don't see much of him lately. He has a lover now, and he usually stays over at his house.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh!”

“You do know about homosexuals, don't you, Joanne?”

“Yeah, but . . .” I had to smile. “Mom and the bridge ladies thought Quentin was your boyfriend.”

Maxine raised her chin and emitted a hoot. “That explains a lot! Don't they think he's a little young for me?” She laughed
again. “Oh, yes, I imagine they do! And I thought all their whispering behind my back was just about my not wearing a bra. Ha! No, Joanne. My lover is much more mature than Quentin, and I'd never bring him around those gossipmongers. I don't see him that much, anyway, because he's married, but I've decided that's the way I like it.”