Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (23 page)

My separation from Elaine, who was one grade behind me and would not enter junior high for another year, made my adjustment more difficult. For as far back as I could remember, Elaine had been my best friend, the first person I called in the morning, the last person I spoke to at night. And even after we finished talking, we had continued to send messages across our driveway on our second-story clothesline-pulley. Elaine, full of energy, enthusiasm, and adventure, had planned our days, devised and organized our games, led our expeditions. Her fearless assertion of ideas and opinions commanded my respect. Now, for the first time, we had different schools and different circles of friends.

The distance created by our separate schools was lengthened by the changes of adolescence. The alterations in my body were gradual, and I remained thin and angular. My period came, but without the pain and headaches that Elaine experienced. She was now the tallest person in her class, and her large breasts seemed to encourage boys who had been her friends to jostle her and whisper teasing remarks. Formerly bold and outspoken, Elaine became withdrawn and bookish, slumping forward as she walked and
rounding her shoulders protectively. Her confidence, particularly in relation to boys, began to diminish. She even began to worry that her passion for and extensive knowledge of baseball were a liability in a girl and would further alienate the boys.

Elaine’s parents could not comprehend her unhappiness. Her older brother, Gary, was one of the most popular boys in the high school. In the spring of ’55, he was nominated to run for president of his class. Every afternoon, Gary’s fervent supporters gathered in the Freidles’ basement to construct posters and placards for the campaign. “Don’t tarry, vote for Gary,” read one sign, with, a sluggish turtle painted on the front. On the day Gary won, Elaine and I watched him ride down our block in an open car with his girlfriend June, followed by dozens of high-schoolers beeping their horns to celebrate his victory.

“Don’t worry,” Mr. and Mrs. Friedle assured Elaine. “Boys will start calling once you learn how to handle them. Stop talking, start listening. Ask them what they like to do. What interests them, what are their hobbies? Focus on
them
, not yourself.” The Friedles’ recommendation reverberated throughout the fifties—the self-effacing woman was the ideal; in order to be attractive to others, popular magazines and books admonished, a girl had to conceal her intelligence, subordinate her own interests. To the extent she catered to the ego of others—i.e., men—a woman would find approval and acceptance.

“If only I’d been given permission to read my books, play my piano, and think about baseball, I might have been fine,” Elaine said many years later. “But when the boys didn’t call, my parents forced me to call them, to invite them to dances at our church. It was excruciating. I would call them up, I would ask them about their stupid hobbies, and still they would turn me down. Then, on Sundays,
when our city relatives came to our house, they would ask scornfully, ‘What’s the matter? Can’t you find anyone you like better than yourself?’”

I tried to talk Elaine out of her sadness. Sometimes I could make her laugh recalling the silly songs we used to sing on the way to the beach, recounting the terror of our trespass onto Old Mary’s property, or remembering the thrill of disobedience when the matron at the Fantasy Theatre banished us for throwing the bag of popcorn over the balcony railing, but I couldn’t console her about the present or the future. Her lack of social confidence gave way to depression, a barrier I could not penetrate. Although Elaine was one of the smartest and best-read girls in school, her extreme nervousness and self-consciousness made any public appearance difficult. She told me that once, in the middle of delivering an oral book report, she got so nervous she broke off in the middle and ran from the room.

Although I did my best to comfort her, my attention was directed to understanding and mastering the brave new world of junior high. I had become part of a new circle of friends. We were not the cheerleaders, the prettiest girls, the best dressed, or the daughters of the richest families. My friend Judy’s father owned a television-repair store, Nancy’s father was a lawyer, Valerie’s parents ran the local bookstore. None of us could match Sheri Hoffman’s glamour, her long thick ponytail, her slender waist emphasized by the thick cinch belt she always wore. Nor could we boast her fabulous wardrobe, with cashmere sweater sets in different shades of pastel, coordinated Papagallo flats, and perfect circle poodle skirts held aloft by three crinolines. My friends, however, were smart, popular, talented, and involved in a multitude of after-school activities. Marjorie wrote poems that were published in our local paper, Valerie was a talented science-and-math student, Judy was
a stellar Ado Annie in our school production of Oklahoma!, Nancy was near the top of our class, and Susan was the only one of us who could make herself faint on demand. Except for me, everyone in our group was Jewish. Our circle was large enough that we never lacked a pal to sit with at lunch, hang out with on weekends, or call on the phone. Every Saturday in the late fall and winter, we went to the movies together, flirting with boys with ducktail haircuts and turned-up shirt collars. In threes or fours, we went ice-skating on Hickey Field, shopping at A & S in Hempstead, and bowling on Maple Avenue. We attended sock hops, pep rallies, football games, and basketball games. Invariably, we ended our evenings at the Pantry, our favorite diner. Crowded together in small upholstered booths, we sat for hours, talking, watching boys, and playing our favorite songs on the table-side jukebox.

My father never accepted the cultural conventions that crushed the ambition and imagination of so many girls. He did not agree that girls should subdue their competitive instincts, or alter their behavior to make themselves attractive to men. He urged me to run for class office, try out for the school plays, and speak up in class if I had something to contribute. When he learned I was going to see a cowboy movie I had already seen and disliked just to please a boy, he shook his head disapprovingly. “You wasted your time once,” he said. “Don’t do it twice.” Elaine’s feeling that her parents had invested their energy in promoting her brother Gary’s aspirations while counseling her to conceal her own gifts and desires, was shared by many young girls whose brothers became the focus of their parents’ ambitions. Perhaps my father’s attitude was different because he had no sons, or perhaps it could be traced to his love for his sister, Marguerite, who had been his closest childhood companion.

The fact remained, however, that it was the men who took the trains and went off each morning to make money and pursue careers while every woman in my neighborhood, without exception, was occupied solely in managing a household and caring for children. It was my great and lasting good fortune to attend a school where the dominant voices on the teaching staff belonged to a group of women whose careers and lives provided eloquent opposition to the social conventions of the time. Several of these women had been made department heads during World War II, while the men were in the service. In contrast to Rosie the Riveter, however, they did not leave the world of work and responsibility when the men returned; instead, they devoted the rest of their lives to bringing about social, educational, and, in the end, political change. Since then I have had exceptional teachers at Colby College and Harvard University, but I can’t remember a more original, vivid, and committed group of teachers than the half-dozen or so women I had at South Side Junior and Senior High.

Mrs. Nardino read us the poetry of Emily Dickinson and long passages from her favorite novel, Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
, until we, too, were captivated by the saturnine Heathcliff and the bleak beauty of the moors. “Who would you marry?” she challenged our class, “the gentle Edgar Linton, and be mistress of civilized Thrush-cross Grange, or the elemental Heathcliff up on the Heights?” The boys in the class smirked and shrugged, but finally someone said what was in every girl’s mind—Heathcliff. “Of course, Heathcliff,” she said, laughing. “Everyone wants to be browbeaten by Heathcliff. Water your choice down and transport it to the Deep South and you’d prefer the scalawag Rhett Butler over the steady Ashley Wilkes, wouldn’t you?”

I was already an old hand at enmeshing my own life with the lives of the characters in my books, and didn’t think the choices were as stark as Mrs. Nardino made them seem. I, too, would have chosen to live at Wuthering Heights. But I would figure out a way not to be browbeaten by Heathcliff. I would soften the place and try to domesticate Heathcliff himself. But if I succeeded, I wondered, would I end up with an Edgar Linton? With her probing style, Mrs. Nardino forced us into the books we read, provoking us to debate issues of motivation, gender, and power, to analyze the nature of relationships.

Miss Sherman approached literature from a different perspective. Her chief interest lay in understanding the different societies and cultures depicted in the novels we read. She was partial to the novels of Willa Cather, Thomas Hardy, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, in which the landscape and the nature of the society are decisive in determining the fate of the characters. She made us understand the grim moral judgment of Puritan New England and how it weighed on Hester Prynne, and gave us a feel of what it would be like to be young Ántonia on the Nebraska prairie in the days of the pioneer. At the end of the school year, she handed out exhaustive summer reading lists that she had carefully compiled with enticing synopses under each title. We would compete with one another to see who could finish the most books on the list.

Mrs. Brown had a passion for geography and seemed to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of every lake, mountain, and river in every country, together with the chief products that each country produced. Her maniacal intensity compelled us to memorize what seemed like the capital of every country on the globe. We were forced to commit to memory all the major stops of the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Vladivostok and beyond, to the
port station of Nakhodka—with extra credit offered for those who could further delineate the stops on the Trans-Manchurian line, the Trans-Mongolian line, and the Baikula-Amur offshoot. Though her famous map tests inspired our fear, her engagement with her subject commanded our respect.

My favorite teacher, Miss Austin, taught “citizenship education,” an amalgam of history and government, my introduction to how our democracy was formed and how it worked. She was a large and impressive woman, deeply committed to civil rights and social justice, who regularly decried our generation’s lack of political commitment and implored us to know what was happening around us and to take an active part in political affairs. On at least two occasions I can remember, she wept openly in front of our class: the first when she read a speech by Adlai Stevenson calling for a renewal of national purpose, the second when she re-created President Roosevelt’s death. At the time I was taken aback, unable yet to understand how political feelings were powerful enough to make one weep.

I tried to describe these remarkable women to Elaine, their commitment to their subjects and their skill in communicating their passion to us. I was certain that her confidence would be bolstered once she fell under their spell. I pictured myself taking her around the hallways, introducing her to my favorite teachers. I missed my best friend and I wanted her to believe in herself once more. “Just wait till you get here,” I told her again and again. “You won’t believe some of these teachers… . The way they talk about books, history, the whole world. It’s so exciting. You’ll love it, I promise.”

I
RONICALLY, IT WAS
the same passion for baseball which Elaine thought alienated boys that provided the surest
foundation for our changing friendship. None of my new girlfriends cared about baseball the way we did; none could debate comparative lineups or pitching staffs like Elaine. She was the only one who had seen me jump for joy when the Dodgers won a close game or seen me cry when they lost the playoffs or the World Series. She was the only one who could tease me about Jackie Robinson as I could tease her about Billy Martin. When we talked about baseball, we were simultaneously talking about our shared friendship.

As the 1955 season got under way, there was a sense among Dodger fans that time was running out for Brooklyn. The extraordinary continuity of the lineup over the years had intensified our loyalty, but now the heart of the team was growing old. Because of advancing years and a variety of injuries to his legs, the thirty-six-year-old Jackie Robinson could no longer dance on the base paths with the agility he had shown in his early career. Pee Wee Reese was also showing signs of age. His throws from deep in the hole could no longer catch a fleet runner; he was no longer an All-Star shorts top. Gil Hodges was thirty-one; Campanella and Furillo were both thirty-three. Preacher Roe had retired. Campy was coming off surgery for a broken wrist that had reduced his batting average in ’54 to a meager .207, and Furillo’s average in ’54 had dropped more than fifty points from his career performance in ’53. If our team was ever to requite our love with the World Series victory we had longed for, it had to be soon.

The Giants of Leo Durocher, on the other hand, had just won the 1954 World Series. “It’s hard to explain what it feels like,” Max told me many months after the Giants had beaten the formidable Cleveland Indians in four straight games. “I’ve had a happy winter, warming myself replaying those four Series games in my mind. When I
close my eyes at night, I can still see that miracle back-to-the-plate catch Willie Mays made in the first game. Winning the world championship … it’s like nothing you can imagine.”

I didn’t begrudge my friends in the butcher shop their satisfaction. It had been twenty-one years since the Giants had last won the World Series. Still, no matter how long the gap between victories, the fact remained that the Giants now boasted
five
world championships, whereas the Dodgers had never won a single World Series. Seven times we had won the pennant, and seven times we had lost the Series: the first to the Boston Red Sox in 1916, the second to the Cleveland Indians in 1920, and then five straight to the Yankees, in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952, and 1953. No other team had come so close so many times without winning.