PAGE 9

1963

Summer

The Irish Hills is a resort area about fifty miles from Detroit. It’s filled with fields and hills and lakes and was still undeveloped during the summer I fell in love for the first time.

My first year of college had been a difficult one. At Cass I’d been a star at the center of a close group of friends. Now my friends had disbursed, and I was an unknown on the fringes of another closely-knit theatre group. George was at the center of that group. He was talented and funny, and everyone seemed to like him. I had no idea if he remembered me.

I made some inroads that first year, playing small parts in student-directed productions and appearing as an extra in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure on the main stage. I auditioned and hung out and began to be an a familiar face around the theatre.

I was at a cast party following the season’s last show when George approached me.

“I wanted to ask you something. I want to do a reading from Blood Wedding for my Oral Interp. class. I wondered if you would read the Bride in the scene where they run away together.”

“Oh, yes!” I felt myself flush. The play was by Federico Garcia Lorca, a Spanish poet/playwright whose plays featured strong, passionate, mostly repressed women. I loved everything he’d written. Blood Wedding is about a bride who leaves her wedding to go off with the man she’s always loved, which leads, of course, to tragedy.

We left the party to rehearse the scene at my parent’s house, where I still lived. Once again we were on the bus together, chatting about theatre. This time he got off at my stop, and we walked the block to the house in the warm May night. I introduced George to my mother as we came in the door. We went downstairs to the family room, stood a few feet apart facing our imagined audience, and began to read.

Lorca’s poetry is sensual and passionate There were feelings buried deep within me that I’d never experienced, but I knew that they were there. Acting was a conduit that brought them to the surface. As we read, I stole a look at George, whose eyes were on his script. We went through the scene once, talked about it, and went through it again. And again.

By now we were almost facing each other, imaginary audience forgotten, separated only by the pages in our hands. I looked up briefly and caught him glancing at me. We both refocused on our scripts.

George suggested that we turn and extend our hands toward each other as we spoke our final lines. We went through the scene again and finished it by looking intently into each other’s eyes, finger tips touching. It worked. We were done for the night. As soon I closed the door closed behind him, I ran upstairs and told my mother, “I really like him!”

A new summer theater company in the Irish Hills advertised for apprentices at the student employment center. My best friend Andrea and I signed up. So did George.

The Irish Hills Playhouse, my first home away from my parents, was a log building located on a country road, a world away from Detroit. It housed a small theatre, a large kitchen, a few small bedrooms for the owners and director, and dorms for the rest of us, mostly apprentices like myself. The lone professional actress in our dorm was named Starr Saphir (pronounced Sapphire). At twenty-four, she was older than the rest of us and very clear about her superior status in the social hierarchy. We were apprentices, and young.

We were all working hard, but for me the long hours of doing nothing but work on plays was a luxury and a joy. And no mother worrying if I stayed out late.

After rehearsals we sat up playing word games and talking, quickly getting to know each other. George seemed to like being around me. We hadn’t spent time alone together, but I noticed that people began leaving a space beside me where he could sit. I began to sense what it might be like to be part of a couple, that magic entity that I’d only glimpsed from the outside.

As the nights grew warm, we began going for long walks on the dark country roads. A sliver of moon appeared, growing larger each night, while George and I walked together, slipping behind the others. One bright night, he stepped off the road and walked over to a tree that had a large, low-hanging branch parallel to the ground and gestured for me to lie down on it. Then he leaned over me and kissed me, a real kiss, long and slow, and I knew that I had crossed a line and entered the world of women who were cherished.

But part of me remained an observer when we were together. I’d had no experience with boy-girl romance and didn’t quite know what to expect. The first time George told me he loved me I couldn’t respond, even though I knew I’d hurt him if I didn’t echo his words. Did I love him? Why wouldn’t my mind stop thinking when we were kissing? And I didn’t have the intense sexual desire that I’d read about but never felt.

“Oh, George,” I whispered.

I felt his body stiffen.

“What?”

“Oh, George,” I repeated.

We began kissing again, but I felt his distance.

I told him soon after that I loved him.

Once the shows opened, we had more time for ourselves and occasional days off. A group of us decided to go into Detroit for the day and return the next morning. George wasn’t coming and was still asleep when we were about to leave. I went to the men’s dorm to give him a quick kiss goodbye. When we got back early the following day, I rushed to find him, anxious to tell him about my day, but he didn’t seem glad to see me. He responded in monosyllables when I talked to him and then walked away.

I didn’t know what to do or say. Didn’t he love me anymore? Could love disappear in two days? Bewildered, I retreated to the women’s dorm in tears to be comforted by my friends, who had watched and envied what had grown between George and me in the past few weeks. “What happened?” Andrea asked.

I didn’t know and never will. I didn’t yet know that love wasn’t simple, that George and I had brought our unexplored pasts with us to this relationship, and that these pasts affected our present. I didn’t yet have the vocabulary to express complicated feelings or ask the questions I needed to ask. I don’t know if he could have answered.

After a few days he tentatively reached out to me, and I gratefully slipped back into the sanctuary of our relationship—he preferred to call it “our love.” We never talked about what had happened.

Other couples formed as the summer progressed, but we silently gloated. We were the only ones who were really in love.

But then it happened again—and then again: the withdrawal, the pained silence, the reunion. I didn’t know what to do when he withdrew, even though he looked as unhappy as I felt. I’d grown to depend on being an ‘us’ without being able to say what that meant to me or what it felt to be without him. When he withdrew, I tried to look as if I didn’t care, but everyone knew that I did.

Late in the summer, four of us—George and I and two guys, Larry and David—drove to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival for the day. The plan was to leave early in the morning, see a matinee, and return that night. George drove the company car, an old Porche convertible. We got there in time for the play, a wonderful performance of Cyrano De Bergerac that seemed almost as romantic as my own love story. We stopped for dinner, so it was night before we started back to the Playhouse.

We drove through rural Canada on back roads and two-lane highways. There was complete silence in the car. I sat quietly next to George, gazing out the window at the darkened homes and farmland that were briefly illuminated by our headlights. It began to rain.

I was dozing when George lost control of the car going around a curve. It skidded to the side of the road, rolled over, and came to a stop upside down. This was followed by complete silence.

Then we began to stir and take stock of the damage. All four of us climbed out of the car. The only injury seemed to be a large abrasion on my right cheek where it had grazed the car’s ceiling.

We walked to the nearest house in the pouring rain. It was obviously late, and no lights were on inside. We began pounding on the door and shouted to wake up the owners. Eventually, a light went on upstairs. Hours seemed to pass before a man opened the door. He was fully dressed.

“We’ve been in an accident!”

He stepped aside to let us in. His fully dressed, equally silent wife led George to the phone to call the police. The man ushered the rest of us into an overstuffed living room, where he sat down in a rocking chair. We sat down on the couch. I glanced at the clock. It was after midnight.

We were listening to the creaking of the rocking chair when the man broke the silence.

“Anybody dead?”

We stumbled over each other saying no, there were just us.

“Last time someone came ‘round that curve they wrapped themselves around a tree.”

There didn’t seem to be a way to respond to this, so silence returned, broken only by the squeaking of the chair. George came into the room, and Larry moved over to let him squeeze in next to me. He took my hand. We waited for the police to arrive listening to the creek of the rocking chair and the rain beating against the windows. They finally came and drove us to a hospital, where we were examined and declared well. I was given an ointment for the scrape on my cheek. It was almost morning and we were escorted to a nearby motel where the Porche, also miraculously uninjured, waited in the parking lot.

We went to a room to try to rest, but we were wide awake and laughed hysterically about our dour hosts. “Anybody daid?” we repeated over and over. We had already begun refining the story we would soon be telling again and again.

We slept for a couple of hours then called the playhouse to tell them what had happened, and of course we would be there for tonight’s performance. Then I called my parents.

“We were in an accident but I’m fine!”

“No, we went to the hospital. They told us we were fine.”

“No, I can’t come home. I have a performance tonight.”

We arrived at the Playhouse at around 6:00, with little time to rest before we had to get dressed and made up for Sheridan’s The Rivals, that night’s show. By then we were exhausted and subdued. I went directly to the girl’s dorm to lie down. My cheek was throbbing where it had struck the roof, and I had a headache. Starr Sapphir’s cat was on my bed. I took the cat and the clothes it lay on and thrust them onto Starr’s bed, which was next to mine. George came in, and was sitting on the edge of my bed, holding my hand, when Starr made her entrance. She took my clothes and threw them on the floor.

“Your goddamned cat was on my bed!”

Starr drew herself up and said: “You are an apprentice and you must never talk that way to a professional!”

I felt myself begin to levitate with thoughts of violence. George held me down.

Fatigue and the shock of the accident had replaced the adrenaline of the night before, and I had begun to unravel.

The performance started normally with an opening monologue spoken by Larry. I was in the girls’ dorm, waiting for my entrance, when I heard Larry’s voice rise to a wavering, angry pitch (not in the script) and shouting “I quit! I quit!” His prop cane hit the floor as he stormed offstage.

Like me, Larry had begun to fall apart.

Andrea and I went out into the kitchen to see what had happened. The theatre lights were on, and audience and actors poured onto the stage and into the other rooms. My parents were there, wanting me to come home with them to see my own doctor.

Then someone came and grabbed me. “George is crying.”

I hurried to the men’s dorm, where George was standing in the middle of the room, sobbing uncontrollably. I hugged him and held him then took him to a more private place, where I sat with him, holding his hand and handing him tissues. For the first time, I began to understand what it was like to feel truly close another human being. I felt privileged to be the one to comfort him, the one he trusted. Neither of us knew what was happening to him, but I was the person he wanted to be with. I had a glimmer of the responsibility that this entailed. But only a glimmer.

After a long time his sobs subsided, though his tears continued to flow. My parents were waiting for me, and I would go with them. I was still their child.

“Come home with me.”

He didn’t want to, but he wanted to be with me and eventually agreed. He would have to come back by bus early the next morning.

Summer ended and we returned to school. I went home secure in my status as George’s girlfriend and I looked forward to blending into his life. I was tied to someone special, someone with enormous talent whom everybody liked. The fact that we no longer automatically saw each other on a daily basis made me more aware of how much I wanted to be with him, that I really loved him. I wanted to tell him that my feelings had deepened, that I would follow him anywhere, but for some reason I couldn’t speak. This curse of silence would plague me for years to come. As my emotional need for him grew my sexual feelings did, too. I thought that he should somehow know this and welcome my heightened feelings. But he began to be late to our planned meetings and usually arrived with a group of his friends. “I’m sorry—I feel guilty” he told me as we made new arrangements, which he would cancel. He would then seek me out, wanting to be with me, but withdraw again weeks later. I tried not to be hurt, and waited for him to call.

My mother looked as if she wanted to shake me.

“All you do is sit around waiting for George to decide what he wants to do. A woman deserves more than that!”

Her words stuck. I wanted to ignore them, but I couldn’t. She was my mother and knew things I didn’t. I began to resist George’s intermittent attempts at closeness. I wanted nothing more than to allow him in, but I knew that he would inevitably withdraw again. It would only prolong the pain, and I wanted to get the pain over with, to get through it as quickly as possible so I could move on.

What I didn’t know was that this loss, this right of passage for so many young men and women, had triggered a response in my brain that fundamentally changed who I would be forever.

Next Chapter: 1963-64