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A COUNTERCULTURE CHILDHOOD | PAGE 1, 2, 3
Out of varied pasts, my mother and father came together, a testament to the attraction of opposites. The only photographs I have of their brief union were taken during that time: four black-and-white frames from a coin-operated booth. My mother is nineteen, my father twenty-one. Their faces are pressed together in front of a pleated curtain, scrubbed and gleaming in the washed-out prints. My father could have stepped straight off a balcony in West Side Story: his curly hair slicked back into waves, his skin olive, lips full. He is laughing in the first shot, the gap in his front teeth giving him a vulnerable air. My mother's hair sweeps away from her face and cups his cheek, the last wisp seeming to give him a cleft chin. She says they had gone out to dinner in Greenwich Village and missed the train back to Valley Stream. Grand Central Station, 1 A.M.; "God, we were so in love." And yes, it's all there in the photo: their faces full of the sharp present tense of happiness. Not long after that, my mother brought my father home to Huntington, and her parents gave him a withering reception. Kate and Bob served an endless parade of highballs and tried to mask their disdain with tight smiles and platitudes about how some of their best friends were Jews. My mother still can't say what proportion of crassness and wisdom made them warn her off my father, but she thinks that if they hadn't hated my father, she might not have married him. Their college romance was showing its seams. But as soon as her parents made their disapproval known, as soon as they brought their stuffiness and bigotry into the equation, she told them, "In a pig's eye. I'm marrying him." And marry they did, in 1964, when my father had just graduated from Cornell and my mother had finished her sophomore year. My grandfather Bob, despite his rue, invited his business friends and spared no expense. At the rehearsal dinner my mother ate frogs' legs with garlic, and out of some mixture of fear and indigestion she spent the night before her wedding retching in the hotel bathroom. At the reception she and my father got separated, and she wandered through the cacophonous crowd, still faint from her sleepless night, being kissed and gripped by hundreds of near strangers. After the wedding, my parents moved in with Grandma Leila in Valley Stream. My father took a job teaching in the Newark public schools, and my mother transferred to Sarah Lawrence to finish her bachelor's degree. The change in colleges suited her. Sarah Lawrence had no official majors; students were allowed to design their own curriculum. That freedom and rigor renewed my mother's interest in her studies, at a time when talk inside the classroom had begun to seem disconnected from the urgent mood in the streets. In the fall, eight hundred students were arrested at a sit-in at U.C. Berkeley. In the spring, Lyndon Johnson launched an all-out war on North Vietnam. My father went to teach in the ghetto and brought home stories of families barely clinging to the hem of working life. Late in her second year at Sarah Lawrence, my mother took a poetry course with Muriel Rukeyser. The class met in a cottage set in a nook of the campus, surrounded by a flowering garden. Inside, the students sat in a circle, with the doors thrown open to the greenery, and talked about poetry and politics and daily life. My mother thought of Muriel as a mentor and went to speak with her often, but one afternoon in particular frequents her stories. She had just found out she was pregnant, and at twenty-one, with a war on and her marriage under strain, the prospect of motherhood made her worry. "I don't know if this is a good time to bring a person into the world," she said. Muriel looked her in the eye. "Don't worry about the baby," she said. "Babies are powerful. They look helpless, but you'll see: the world will turn around it."
That summer, my mother graduated from Sarah Lawrence and she and my father moved to Newark to work on the Newark Community Union Project, part of a wave of student activists moving to the ghettos. NCUP ran a storefront office headquarters and held meetings that stretched into the early morning hours. My father went around ringing doorbells, visiting with people in the neighborhood, working with them to file complaints against the slumlords. Around that time, my mother's uncle took her aside and offered her a job at his bond brokerage firm. She was a bright girl; he needed people like her. She could rent a place in Manhattan, get a nanny for the baby, and start socking it away for a house on Long Island. My mother smiled and said thanks but no thanks. She had set her sights on another career: she wanted to teach school in Harlem. It would be a while before she fulfilled that goal, but in the meantime she and my father lived in a world her uncle would have found unfathomable. They rented a dingy one-bedroom apartment in a section of Newark that had cobblestone streets and erratic garbage collection. They didn't drink or smoke, never did drugs, never ate out, never went to the movies. Instead, they spent their days organizing rent strikes, trying to get the trash collected, and, in late 1966, backing a black liberal Republican, Earl Harris, in a bid for a council seat against a white Democrat. In a profile of Tom Hayden in New York magazine (another clipping Grandma Leila saved) the writer has this to say about NCUP: "Newark Community Union Project: Romance drips all over it; the young radicals love it out there across the land." In a photo that went with the article, a group of these vanguard youth are gathered on a Newark street corner, dressed in what would now be called casual business clothes. Midway through the piece, my mother makes a cameo appearance, as "the Lost Daughter of Goldwater Parents." In the writer's description, Ann, "pretty, long hair falling to her shoulders, closes the door, heading for Earl Harris' headquarters. 'If Harris loses we're going to have a fight here. Some of the community people are carrying guns.' Her eyes are flashing. It is prom night all over again." I read these lines to my mother not long ago, thinking she'd laugh at the patronizing tone, but instead some of that flashing resurfaced: "Prom night! Yeah, and Newark fucking exploded." She was almost hissing with the memory of those riots, which would convulse the city six months later. But the writer, despite his glib style, did manage to capture my parents' shared conviction for political work. In the private realm, they shared less. My mother, who was tending to a newborn and keeping the house polished, was becoming disillusioned with the division of labor in the new society. My father wrote the speeches and she typed them; he was to speak at a meeting and she was to give him a ride. This had as much to do with the times as it did with the depth of my father's needs, but it seemed to my mother that even amid the radical movement some aspects of the old order remained the same. When they argued, my father went off to the headquarters and she stayed up into the middle of the night scrubbing the kitchen floor with a rag and brush. N E X T+P A G E: The slow, backsliding muckiness of protest politics |
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