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  Because Max and I never actually dated, I felt comfortable about calling him when I came alone to the March on Washington in 1963. It felt perfectly natural to resume our innocent, academic friendship and I eagerly accepted an invitation to stay at his house, where I met and fell in love with his wife.

  Sukie.

  Who could help loving her?

  She was beautiful. She had enormous chocolate eyes and layers of dark curly hair that rioted around her face, tangling and untangling according to the weather, behaving hideously at the first hint of humidity. Sukie’s hair was a hostile, destabilizing force in her life because it eliminated any element of self-determination in her public presentation. We discussed that problem for decades, even after white threads began basting their way through her dark curls.

  When we talked, I used to watch Sukie’s face as if I were reading the lyrics to a hard-rock ballad on the back of an album cover. Everything she felt surfaced immediately. Ideas played across her features like strobe lights and her emotions mobilized an endless array of expressions. Her squarish jaw, her slightly snubbed nose, and her unusually wide mouth—which created awesome, luscious smiles—were always in constant motion.

  Since Sukie had no idea how beautiful she was, her insecurities and uncertainties created a distracting, but endearing, tentativeness about her. Unaware of the charm of her mannerisms, Sukie manifested all kinds of hesitancies. These made anyone watching her wait to see if she would actually light the cigarette clenched between her lips, swallow the bite of apple she’d taken, put down the child she had lifted in her arms, finish a sentence she’d started, take the spoon out of the cup before tasting her coffee, or answer a telephone ringing right beside her.

  Her bittersweet brown eyes demanded constant dues from her friends. She collected absurdities, ironies, rumors, and outrages to refuel her spirit. “Come on,” she’d beg silently. “Tell me a riddle. Talk about love. What’s been happening? Aren’t things crazy? Wild? Sick? Insane?” Savoring scandals, crazy juxtapositions, irreconcilable contradictions, she’d squeal, “Are you kidding? I don’t believe it. I love it,” about every outrage offered. She was an English major, with a poli-sci minor, searching for scenic material and larger themes.

  Sukie wore dangling hoop earrings, jeans with loose madras shirts or bulky sweaters, use-contoured leather sandals, Chloe perfume, kohl eyeliner, a thin gold chain around her neck, and her heart on her sleeve. Merriment was her battery; laughter splashed color across her olive skin. Her favorite frivolous topics were food, fat, and famous people. She’d be dressed and ready to go, anywhere, for any reason, within minutes. Frequent eruptions of throaty, self-perpetuating laughter punctuated her speech.

  After I’d spent several weekends at the Amrams’, Sukie and I became best friends. It might have happened even if Max and I had been casual undergraduate lovers, but it was better not to have to overcome anything like that. It made the friendship between Sukie and me simpler and sweeter. As the sixties advanced, our families spent more and more time together and our children became enormously important to each other.

  Before I had my first baby, I never knew how strong a need I had for community. It was only at Sukie’s house that the various women who visited could release stifled cravings for companionship and luxuriate in the empathy that flowered around us. In the mornings we always felt incredibly rich sitting in Sukie’s kitchen around her old, beat-up wooden table covered with crumbs and half-full coffee cups, while our children crawled across the floor or, in later years, toddled in to refill their cereal bowls before returning to watch “Romper Room.”

  Sukie had designed a long narrow counter that traveled along three walls of her irregularly shaped but spacious kitchen. Various sections of the counter served different purposes and a tall wooden stool on wheels allowed her to glide from one area to another, depending on her needs. Some of the counter space was designated for food preparation or for storage of oversized cooking utensils, but the corner closest to the kitchen table had been turned into a mini-desk. This area held a Rolodex, Scotch tape dispenser, stapler, a lethal-looking spindle flagging various bills or receipts, and a thin ceramic vase holding pencils and the Paper Mate cartridge pens to which Sukie was addicted.

  With the affluent early-morning sunlight settling a crust upon the cream in Sukie’s chipped blue pitcher and softening the butter in its pudgy white dish, we would sit around the table gazing at Sukie’s kitchen possessions and talking about our lives—struggling to express our feelings about our families and our own personal destinies. Inevitably someone would hesitantly announce that she didn’t feel she was actually doing exactly what she had originally intended to do. Twirling the flowered sugar bowl that always wore a sparkling choker of fallen granules around its neck, the doubter would lower her head so her hair half-hid her face, while she wondered aloud why life seemed so imperfect, why plans failed, friends faded, and dreams dimmed.

  Uneasily we would watch the sunlight dance across the room to paint patterns on our bare arms, crisscrossed upon the table, as a unanimous silence spread among us. But eventually someone would explode with an enthusiastic inventory of all our assets—our important political activities, our wonderful husbands, and our lovely children busily extracting pot covers from the floor-level drawer of Sukie’s stove. And then, each in turn, we would remark upon the wonders of our lives, reassuring the doubter that we had all taken the right path and done the right thing. Gradually, we would get high on hope again—certain that time would allow us to reconcile all our incompatible concerns so that our dreams might yet come true.

  There in Sukie’s sunny kitchen, with its scarred linoleum flooring and old tin cabinets, we would again feel the promise of creativity stir within us, like the soft foot or elbow of a baby pressing inside our bellies, and feel confident that we would eventually write a perfect novel, paint a perfect picture, cure some deadly disease or at least return to graduate school. Heady with coffee and hope, we would passionately assert that our families would flourish and that our loves would last even after we began to express ourselves and fulfill our own ambitions.

  But when we had to leave that sweet warm kitchen, with the taste of coffee and cream still kissing our lips and the intimate touch of friendship still caressing us, we would grow frightened again and not want to leave. We would want to stay right there—in Sukie’s house—forever, so that we could do all our chores together and charm each other’s children along with our own. Because each of us knew that by the time we returned home, tired from travel, to our small apartments filled with the stale smell of our own absence, the rich communal sense of omnipotence would evaporate and we would again feel isolated and beleaguered, racked by our conflicted and conflicting dreams.

  By 1963 I had completed all the courses for my Ph.D., spent two and a half years doing fieldwork in Amazonian Brazil, and moved to New York. A year later I married Leonard Satz, a successful civil rights lawyer ten years my senior, and moved into a large West End Avenue apartment. During the next four years I gave birth to our two daughters, Loren and Lisa, and finished my dissertation working mostly at night.

  In truth, the period from 1965 to 1970 was the most frantic of my life. Domestic duties devoured me, and my children consumed me from daybreak until dark when they vomited me forth, frazzled and frenzied, to work on my dissertation. Worst of all, I discovered that most of my raw data didn’t necessarily substantiate the theory I began to develop about female rites of passage in the Brazilian Amazon Mundurucu tribe. Since the research I’d designed was not totally aligned with the concepts that began to emerge when I started writing, and since there wasn’t the slightest possibility of my returning to Brazil to gather new information, I had to juggle the data to fit the concepts.

  Forcing my findings to conform to my theories was clearly a cardinal sin—the exact opposite of what I had intended or was expected to do. But even though time and circumstances skewed my methodology, Harvard accepted my dissertation happily and even c
ommended my original (for that time) feminist analysis of the life stages of the Brazilian Indian women I had studied. Sometimes, however, I still feel uncomfortable about my unorthodox procedures and wonder if the shortcuts I took permanently marred my intellectual integrity.

  Still, the sixties felt good to us because the present was always pregnant with possibilities, because right and wrong seemed easily discernible, and because we were still young and happy and in love with our handsome husbands and our bright, lovely children who played and laughed together, exhilarated by the camping quality of our Washington visits. Perhaps some moralist might say that when our country was waging a wrongful war, nothing should have felt so good. But the power we derived from our protest politics was heady and we have never quite forgotten how good it felt.

  After a while, Joanne and Elaine begin to fill me in on what had happened while I was in transit from Long Island. They say that Mary Murphy turned out to be a sixty-year-old reporter who had been “out there on her own” for the last forty years.

  “She said she didn’t know Sukie well, but had always liked her. When we thanked her for doing everything, she got a little shaky and said that since she had no family, someday a stranger would have to do the same thing for her.”

  Having finished that unsettling story, Elaine then asks me to telephone Sukie’s father in Chicago. Both she and Joanne claim I know him better than they do and for a moment my heart rises up in rebellion.

  “Oh God,” I protest. “I only met him once, maybe twelve years ago.”

  From what I knew, Sukie’s father was a gray-collar fight promoter and gambler who had suffered so strenuously during the Depression that he never regained his psychological equilibrium. Those of our fathers who survived both the Depression and “Double-yew Double-yew Two,” as they called it, had been left with deep scars that often made them erratic and unpredictable. My father had remained so silent about the war that I didn’t find out until after he died, at the age of seventy-eight, that he had been a bombardier over Dresden.

  Finally I accept the piece of paper with Mr. Smilow’s Chicago telephone number and place the call.

  He answers immediately. Our conversation is long and painful. There are moments when I’m not totally convinced that Mr. Smilow actually understands what I am telling him. One moment he seems to understand, but in the next he loses it. At several points he becomes incoherent.

  “Now who did you say you are?” he asks for the third time.

  I explain again.

  “And what’s your problem?” he coaches me.

  I tell him our problem.

  “That is impossible,” he argues. “Is this a prank call?”

  “I wish it were, Mr. Smilow. But everything I told you is true.”

  “Where are you?” he asks me.

  “I’m at Sukie’s house.”

  “Then I’ll call back to see if you answer.”

  “Oh, Mr. Smilow.”

  “Well, I’ve got to talk to my sister and find a flight,” he says. “I’ll call you back tomorrow when I know something for sure.”

  He hangs up.

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” I mumble, finally replacing the receiver. “I can’t believe I just told a man that his daughter died.”

  We fall silent.

  We are all DPs—Displaced Persons—from the land of Big Daddies, who became rich after the Second World War and bought the first new Buicks to roll off the assembly lines. Back from battle, they had donned gray flannel suits and enthusiastically joined the lonely crowd. Ignoring the Victory Gardens we had so feverishly tended, our dads built brick barbecue pits in the backyard where they directed cookouts on soft summer evenings. In the winters, when we had school snow-days, they sometimes stayed home from work to take us sledding.

  Indeed, they spoiled us rotten because we were their Depression Babies. They never wanted us to know about roofing and siding or second mortgages. Nancy’s father wouldn’t even let her bring along her own toothbrush when they went down to Miami Beach for Christmas vacation because he liked buying her brand-new ones from the fancy gift shop in the glitzy lobby of the Eden Roc. As the fifties advanced, our fathers became more and more materialistic. They called blondes “broads” and joined restricted country clubs where they did the two-step on Saturday nights while arranging to two-time our mothers with the wives of their friends. Our mothers pretended not to notice.

  Gradually our Big Daddies began to acquire slim blond secretaries, large real-estate holdings, blue-chip stocks and long pastel Cadillacs. They played the market, thirty-six holes of golf each weekend, and 78 RPM Harry James records on our new phonographs. They overindulged us with pre-Freudian abandon because The Interpretation of Dreams was never condensed for publication in either Reader’s Digest or The Saturday Evening Post. Their favorite artist was Norman Rockwell.

  Regardless of their intent, our Big Daddies succeeded in turning us into love junkies. Because so many of us were both gifted and spoiled, we grew accustomed to the kind of unconditional love they lavished upon us and that’s what eventually got us into such big trouble. Although few of us ever lived in a castle, most of us expected a rose garden behind the house. We also expected the men we married to be exactly like our fathers.

  We believed that our young, inexperienced, immature and insecure husbands would know how to make moves, waves, time, money, love and hotel reservations with sophisticated ease. We believed they would know how to raise flowers, children, shrubs, spirits, expectations, their salaries and our standards of living. We thought they would be able to kill centipedes, tip mâitre d’s, park cars in small spaces and make us live happily ever after. We were wrong.

  Suddenly Joanne leaps to her feet. “I can’t believe this is the first summer we didn’t take our vacations together. Why didn’t we do it? What made us change our minds? Why’d we break our promise? Maybe that’s why she died—because, by all rights, we should have been together at the beach this weekend.” Then she begins to sob. “I needed her so much.”

  “We all needed her,” Elaine says firmly, determined to keep our grief evenly distributed. “Sukie was probably the most important friend each of us had. Actually, if you stop to think about it, we all only know each other because of her. She was our center.”

  It was true. Elaine had gone to the University of Chicago with Sukie in the mid-fifties. Joanne had been her editor at Mademoiselle during the sixties when Sukie wrote a series of articles about women in the Kennedy administration. And my family had shared the most important parts of our lives—our passionate involvement in the civil rights and antiwar movements—with the Amrams.

  “She understood me better that anyone else except Nathaniel, and now they’re both gone,” Elaine says bitterly.

  Joanne and I nod.

  “But look, there’s something else, Diana,” Joanne adds apologetically.

  “What?”

  “Some writing Sukie left out on her desk. It’s from a diary or journal she was keeping.”

  She reaches down to reclaim a batch of papers from the floor beside the sofa and hands them over to me. Since it’s clear they both expect me to read them immediately, I dig through my purse for my glasses, put them on, and begin.

  CHAPTER 3

  APRIL 1981

  He left me on a Wednesday. Or was it Thursday?

  Right away I began to feel an overwhelming desire to buy a pair of cowboy boots. What that wish signified, I didn’t know. I simply felt certain that I needed some cowboy boots. So on Saturday morning I went to Georgetown and bought a pair of light tan, calf-high, heavily stitched Fryes. Because I was terrified of losing the past, I thought the boots might possess some special significance, but I couldn’t think of what it might be.

  I also began painstakingly mending the satin lining of the fur jacket my father had given me. I did a little sewing on it each evening. The fabric had frayed so the hem hung down below the bottom of the coat. It made me look shabby and poor. I tried very h
ard to fix the satin so it would stay in place.

  Within a few weeks after Max left, time lost all its perimeters. Terror invaded and occupied me. I had always feared any lessening of intensity. I had spent my life fighting off diminishments. Now I was overwhelmed by loss.

  I walked through my house as if it were a hotel lobby. I thrashed about in boundless pain for endless days and nights without any reprieve or respite. Security suddenly seemed like some old song no longer played on the radio. I stopped reading the newspapers or watching television. I was unaware that news announcers counted the days that the hostages were held in Iran. I do remember the day they were seized. I guess I saw the Yellow Ribbon Parade when they returned home. I remember nothing of the world in the interim. I miss my mother.

  MAY 1981

  I spend each day like a dollar. I shell out the hours like coins from my purse.

  Sometimes I can’t remember what I’ve done during a day or where I’ve been. I search through my pockets looking for parking garage receipts or carbon copies of credit card charges.

  I hear voices, two voices—one male and one female. They are having a long conversation. Sometimes they say things Max and I said in the past. Sometimes they say things we never got around to saying. I listen all the time, but I am most attentive when I am alone in the middle of the night. My nights are longer than my days and that’s when the voices become very loud. I know I am concentrating; I can feel my eyes staring with intensity.

  I used to dream about men. Now I dream about men with other women. I dream about people doing things that hurt my feelings.