The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [70]
The waiter brings the food; it’s not very good. Neither of them wants to remark on this.
“We’re more than halfway through,” Miranda says.
“Through what?”
“Our life.”
“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” Adam says, making a face so she won’t think him pretentious.
“Past the median.”
“Postmeridian.”
“Postmeridian. It just means after noon.”
“Dolce?” the waiter asks. He hands the menu to Miranda, and translates for her, “Sweet?”
September 1967
She knows he doesn’t want to go, and that it’s difficult for him to tell her.
The march on the Pentagon. The biggest antiwar demonstration ever planned. The government will have to understand that they are wrong to be in Vietnam. The war will have to end.
Miranda and her friends have been planning for it, negotiating with bus companies, attending training sessions: what to do if you’re teargassed, if the cops approach you intending to beat you up. Miranda’s father doesn’t believe that any policeman would dream of harming his daughter. He would not, however, have dreamed that his daughter, in blue jeans and a work shirt, a bandanna around her neck, would be carrying in a knapsack bottles of water and tubes of Vaseline (smear the Vaseline on your face, then douse the bandanna and cover your face in case of teargas). Small bottles of iodine to treat potential wounds. He would never have dreamed that his daughter would be a “demonstrator,” that she could imagine she had anything to fear from the police, that she would be shouting (so unladylike! he had raised her to be a lady like his mother, like her mother) phrases that were ridiculous to him, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
There is not, she believes, anything more important than stopping the war. When she arrived at Wellesley, in September 1966, a little more than a year before, she did not know she would be thinking this. She thought the most important thing was choosing the right classes for her first semester. Would she study Russian or continue with French? Should she do her science requirement in her freshman year? What would her roommate think of her new blanket, a Hudson Bay (cream, trisected by three bands: turquoise, orange, gold), which she and her mother had shopped for and which she loved, the first domestic item owned only by her, not by her mother, her father, though paid for, of course, by them.
Two days before he will leave for Boston, she spreads the new blanket out on the floor of her bedroom. Her mother is shopping in the city; she has read about a special kind of cloth bag that will prevent clothes from being wrinkled when they’re folded in a suitcase. She is determined that Miranda will have several.
Adam and Miranda lie on the blanket; he is running his palms against the soft wool. She tells Adam she’s signed up for a course in music theory. He is rarely angry, but he looks angry now; a beautiful russet creeps up toward his brows and he says, “I don’t want you to do that,” and that, too, is odd; he never asks her for anything, but she can ask him why because they love each other, nothing can hurt their love or weaken this bond, which she knows will go on unto death. So without fear she asks, “Why?” and he says, “I want you, when you listen, to listen to me playing. To listen to me, not the music. I need to know you love me as a man, not as a musician.”
She is thrilled to hear him speak this way. To refer to himself as a man. He is, after all, only eighteen and perhaps has never before used the word to describe himself. And because his using it in her hearing frightens them both at first (as if they were inhabiting a room they’d been told they had no right to enter), and then seems entirely right—they have moved not only into