That was when Ferguson put his right arm around her shoulder and said: I love you, Amy. You know that, don’t you?
Yes, Archie, I know that. And I love you, too.
Ferguson stopped walking, turned to face her, and then put his left arm around her as well. As he pulled her body up against his, he said: I’m talking about real love, Schneiderman, all-out, forever-and-ever love, the biggest love of all time.
Amy smiled. A moment later, she put her arms around him, and as her long bare arms came into contact with his bare arms, Ferguson’s legs started to buckle.
I’ve been thinking about this for months, she said. Whether we should try it or not. Whether we’re meant to be in love with each other or not. I’m so tempted, Archie, but I’m scared. If we try and it doesn’t work out, we probably won’t be friends anymore, at least not the way we are now, which is the best friends in the world, close in the way brothers and sisters can be close, that’s how I’ve always thought of us, as brother and sister, and every time I try to imagine kissing you, it feels like incest to me, something wrong, something I know I would regret, and I don’t want to lose what we have, it would kill me not to be your sister anymore, and would it be worth losing all the good things we have together for a few kisses in the dark?
Ferguson was so crushed by what she said that he disentangled his arms from hers and took two steps back. Brother and sister, he said, with anger mounting in his voice, what nonsense!
But it wasn’t nonsense, and when Amy’s father and Ferguson’s mother were married eleven months and four days after the night of that first dinner, the two friends officially became brother and sister, and even though the word step was factored into the designation, they were henceforth members of the same family, and the two bedrooms they slept in until the end of high school stood side by side in the same second-floor hallway of their new family house.
4.1
The housing policy set forth in the Barnard College Student Handbook stated that all out-of-town freshmen were required to live in one of the on-campus dormitories, whereas freshmen from New York could choose between living in a dormitory and living at home with their parents. Independent Amy, who had no desire to stay with her parents and no desire to share a room with someone in an over-regulated dormitory, outfoxed the system by claiming her parents had moved from West Seventy-fifth Street to a bigger apartment on West 111th Street, a much bigger apartment that was in fact occupied by four students who were not freshmen, a sophomore and a junior from Barnard and a junior and a senior from Columbia, and when Amy moved into that immense place with the long corridors and ancient plumbing fixtures and beveled glass doorknobs, she became the sole occupant of the fifth bedroom. Her parents went along with the deception because Amy had shown them the numbers, which proved that it was cheaper to pay one-fifth of the two-hundred-and-seventy-dollar apartment rent than to live in a dormitory, and also because, and especially because, they knew it was time for their willful daughter to leave home. A little more than a year had passed since the cookout in the Fergusons’ backyard, and now the Schneidermans’ daughter and the Fergusons’ son had been granted their most ardent wish: a room with a lock on the door and a chance to fall asleep together in the same bed whenever they wanted to.
The problem was that whenever turned out to be a sticky concept, more an idealized possibility than a workable proposition, and with one of them still stuck in Montclair and the other caught in the whirl of confusions and adjustments that come with the start of college life, they wound up sharing that bed less often than they had expected. There were the weekends, of course, and they took advantage of them whenever they could, which was most weekends in September, October, and early November, but the freedoms of the summer had been curtailed, and only once in all that time was Ferguson able to make one of his weeknight dashes into the city. They continued to talk about the things they had always talked about, which that fall included such matters as the Warren Commission Report (true or false?), the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley (long live Mario Savio!), and the victory of the bad Johnson over the infinitely worse Goldwater (not three cheers but two, perhaps one), but then Amy was invited on a weekend outing to Connecticut and they had to cancel their plans, which was followed by another cancellation the next week (a touch of the flu, she said, although she wasn’t in the apartment when he called her on Saturday night and again on Sunday afternoon), and bit by bit Ferguson sensed that she was slipping away from him. His old fears returned, the black ruminations of last winter when he thought she might have to leave New York, conjuring up the other people she would come to know in those imagined other places, the other boys, the other loves, and why should it be any different in her home city? She was living in a new world now, and he belonged to the old world she had left behind. Just thirty-six blocks to the north, and yet the customs were entirely different up there, and the people spoke another language.
It wasn’t that she seemed bored with him or loved him any less, it wasn’t that her body stiffened up when he touched her or that she wasn’t happy with him in the new bed in the new apartment, it was simply that she seemed distracted now, unable to focus her attention on him as she had in the past. After those two missed weekends, he managed to arrange a visit to the empty apartment on the Saturday after Thanksgiving (her roommates had all gone home for the holiday), and as they sat in the kitchen together drinking wine and smoking cigarettes, he noticed that Amy was looking out the window instead of looking at him, and rather than ignore it and go on with what he was saying, he stopped in midsentence and asked her if something was wrong, and that was when it happened, that was when Amy turned her head back in his direction, looked him in the eyes, and pronounced the seven small words that had been forming in her mind for close to a month: I think I need a break, Archie.
They were only seventeen years old, she said, and it was beginning to feel as if they were married, as if they had no future anymore except to go on being together, and even if they did wind up together in the long run, it was too soon to lock themselves into that commitment now, they would feel smothered, trapped by promises they might not be able to keep, and before long they would start to resent each other, and why not take a deep breath and just relax for a little while?
Ferguson knew he was being dumb, but there was only one question his dumb heart could think of asking: Are you saying you don’t love me anymore?
You haven’t been listening to me, Archie, Amy said. All I’m saying is that we need more air in the room. I want us to keep the doors and windows open.
Which means that you’ve fallen for someone else.
Which means that someone has his eye on me and I’ve flirted with him a couple of times. It’s nothing serious, believe me. In fact, I’m not even sure I like him. But the point is that I don’t want to feel guilty about it, and I have been feeling guilty because I don’t want to hurt you, and then I ask myself: What’s wrong with you, Amy? You’re not married to Archie. You’re not even halfway through your first year of college, and why shouldn’t you have a chance to explore a little, to kiss another boy if you want to, maybe even to go to bed with another boy if you feel like it, to do the kinds of things people are supposed to do when they’re young?