The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [74]
Everyone suddenly seems to be saying “fuck,” using the adjective “fucking” in the easy, habitual way they used to say “groovy.” Renee denies it, but Valerie and Lydia admit to being jealous of Miranda’s wifely status. They all feel free to say how good-looking he is: his beautiful hair, his beautiful eyes, how easily he blushes. Lonely and inadequate in their single beds, they dream of what she has. Adam’s shyness, his seriousness, touch the maternal in them. If Miranda isn’t in when he calls, they speak to him as if her absence were a deprivation he must be protected from. As if not hearing her voice, he will feel starved and they must feed him.
They are very young, Adam and Miranda. Their bodies are continually miraculous to each other. They have never seen other bodies, and so for them both, the body of the other is all bodies, or the first body: they are Eve and Adam in the Garden, and the apple has not yet been thought of, tasted, known. Their skins are fresh, unblemished; not having touched other skins, they do not fully understand this; their joy in each other is absolute; there is nothing to which it can be compared. Each touch is arousing; they can hardly wait to be in each other’s arms. Having come together first as almost children, they had not had time for the malice that corrupts desire, that mixes it with punishment and blame. Making love soon became quite customary; it was as if it were something they had never not done. Customary, and yet still miraculous. Often they say to each other, lying in each other’s arms, “I am happy. I am very happy.”
How did it darken? Was it that the world was getting darker in those days, a daily darkening, a cloudy thickening? Miranda volunteers for draft counseling; the sister of Rob, how can she not, and Rose at home is counseling neighbor boys to resist the draft: assuring them that they’re behaving justly; helping them relocate to Canada, directing them to psychiatrists who will swear that they are psychologically unfit for battle, that they would bring danger to their fellow soldiers; that this risk should, in the interest of the war effort, be avoided at all costs.
For a time, Miranda moves in a well-meaning pastel-colored clutch of colleagues and companions: Quakers, Unitarians, left-wing Catholics and Jews, people whose parents had voted for Adlai Stevenson. She sings in the dormitory lounge the songs of Peter, Paul and Mary. The edgiest lyrics that come out of her mouth are “Accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone … For the times they are a-changin’.”
Was it because the music changed? That Dylan became ironic, angry, that the Beatles moved from vaudeville to LSD? And then there are no more parietal hours; the young women of Wellesley will no longer accept that they should be told when men are or are not allowed into their rooms. And so now they are allowed in more and more, and suddenly there are male voices in the hall, male presences in the dining room.
Tall Renee experiments with drugs because of her new boyfriend, Arnold, who is from Florida and insists that only through pharmaceuticals can enlightenment be found. Two weekends into the second semester of sophomore year, Marian decides that she no longer wants to be friends with Miranda and Lydia and Renee and Valerie; she doesn’t even want to live on the same hall with them, although they’d gone to great trouble the year before