“You mean you're a drunk.”
“Yup.” He said it with pride, ordered lunch for them both, and after lunch they walked through Central Park and stopped at Wollman Rink where they watched the ice skaters for more than an hour and talked about life, and he sensed that there was a strange reticence about her. She didn't offer herself, in a romantic sense, she was careful and closed, and yet at the same time she was intelligent and warm. She cared about people and causes and things. But there was no hand held out. He knew that he had made a new friend, and no more, and she saw to it that he understood, in so many words, and it aroused his curiosity. “Axe you involved with someone near Green Hill?”
She shook her head, and her eyes met his. “No, nothing like that. I don't want to get involved with anyone right now.” He was surprised at her honesty. And it was a challenge, too, of course, one he couldn't completely resist.
“Why not? Afraid to get hurt the way your mother has been?” She had never thought of it that way. It was why he had told her he didn't want kids. He didn't want to hurt anyone as badly as he himself had been hurt. And she had just told him how Arthur had stood her mother up for Christmas again that year.
“I don't know. Maybe. That, and other things.”
“What kind of ‘other thing’?”
“Nothing I want to talk about.” She looked away, and he tried to imagine what had marked her that way. She kept a safe distance between them, and even when they laughed and played, she sent out messages that said “don't get too close to me.” He hoped that there was nothing strange about the girl, about her sexual propensities, but he didn't think it was that. It was more that she seemed to be hiding in a protective shell, and he wasn't sure why. Someone had driven her into it and he wondered who it was.
“Was there someone important in your life before?”
“No.” She looked him square in the eye. “I don't want to talk about that.” The look on her face made him back off at once. It was anger and hurt and something he couldn't even define, but it was so powerful it took his breath away, and he didn't scare easily. But this time he got the point. A blind man would have.
“I'm sorry.” They changed the subject then and went back to talking about easier things. He liked her a lot, and he saw her several times during that Christmas holiday. They went to dinner and lunch, went ice skating in the park, to a movie one night, and she even invited him to dinner one night with Jean. But that was a mistake, she recognized at once. Jean was grilling him as though he were a hot marriage candidate, asking about his future plans, his parents, his career goals, his grades. She could hardly wait for him to leave, and when he did, she screamed at Jean.
“Why did you do that to him? He just came here to eat, not to ask me to marry him.”
“You're eighteen years old, you have to start thinking about things like that now.”
“Why?” Tana was enraged. “All he is is a friend, for chrissake. Don't act like I have to get married by next week.”
“Well, when do you want to get married, Tana?”
“Never, dammit! Why the hell do I have to get married at all?”
“What are you going to do for the rest of your life?” Her mother's eyes were hunting her, shoving her into corners and pushing her hard and she hated it.
“I don't know what I'm going to do. Do I have to figure that out now? Right now? Tonight? This week? Shit!”
“Don't talk to me like that!” Now her mother was angry too.
“Why not? What are you trying to do to me?”
“I want to see you have some security, Tana. Not to be in the same boat I'm in when you're forty years old. You deserve more than that!”
“So do you. Did you ever think of that? I hate seeing you like this, waiting around for Arthur all the time, like his slave. That's all you've been for all these years, Mother. Arthur Durning's concubine.” She was tempted to tell her about seeing him with another girl at “21,” but she couldn't do that to her mother. She didn't want to cause her that much pain and it would have for sure. Tana restrained herself but Jean was irate anyway.
“That's not fair and it's not true.”
“Then why don't you want me to be like you?” Jean turned her back on her, so that she wouldn't see her tears, and then suddenly she turned on Tana, and twelve years of sorrow showed in her eyes, and a lifetime before that.
“I want you to have all the things I didn't have. Is that too much to ask?”
Tana's heart suddenly went out to her and she backed down. Her voice was gentler as she spoke again. “But maybe I don't want the same things you did.”
“What is there not to want? A husband, security, a home, children—what's wrong with all that?” She looked shocked.
“Nothing. But I'm too young to think about all that. What if I want a career?”
Jean Roberts looked shocked. “What kind of career?”
“I don't know. I just meant theoretically.”
“That's a lonely life, Tana.” She looked worried about her. “You'd be better ofiFif you just settled down.” But to Tana that felt like giving up, and she thought about it as she rode south on the train and she and Sharon talked about it their first night back in Jasmine House, once the lights were off.
“Jesus, Tan, she sounds just like mine … in a different way, of course. But they all want for us what they wanted for themselves, no matter who we are, or how different we are from them, or what we think and feel and want. My dad understands, but my mom … all I hear about is law school, and sit-ins, and being ‘responsible’ about being black. I'm so goddamn tired of being 'responsible,‘ I could scream. That's why I came here in the first place, to Green Hill. I wanted to go somewhere where there would be other blacks. Hell, here I can't even date, and she tells me that there's plenty of time for that. When? I want to go out now, I want to have a good time, I want to go to restaurants and movies and football games.” She reminded Tana then, and the pretty blonde smiled in the dark.
“Want to go to Harvard with me at spring break?”
“How come?” Sharon propped herself up on one elbow in the dark with an excited look. And Tana told her about Harry Winslow then. “He sounds neat. Did you fall for him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
There was a silence which they both understood. “You know why.”
“You can't let that screw you up for the rest of your life, Tan.”
“You sound like my mother now. She wants me engaged to anyone by next week, as long as he's willing to marry me, buy me a house, and give me kids.”
“It beats the hell out of going to sit-ins and getting raw eggs in your hair. Doesn't that sound like fun?”
Tana smiled. “Not much.”
“Your Harvard friend sounds nice.”
“He is.” Tana smiled to herself. “I like him a lot, as a friend. He's the most honest, straightforward person I've ever met.” The call he made to her later that week underlined why she so enjoyed him. He called pretending to be the owner of a laboratory in Yolan, and they needed young ladies to perform experiments on, he explained.
“We're trying to find out if young ladies are as intelligent as young men,” he said, disguising his voice. “We realize of course that they are not, however…” and just before she flew into a rage, she recognized his voice.
“You shit!”
“Hi, kiddo. How's life in the Deep South?”
“Not bad.” She let him speak to Sharon eventually, and the two girls stood beside the phone, passing it back and forth, and eventually Sharon went upstairs and Tana talked to him for hours. There were no romantic overtones at all, he was more like a brother to her, and after two months of phone calls, aside from Sharon he was her closest friend. He was hoping to see her at spring break, and she tried to get Sharon to come along, but to no avail. She decided to brave her mother, and invite Sharon to stay with them, but Miriam Blake had been on the phone to Sharon almost every night. There was an enormous black rally scheduled in Washington with a candlelight vigil for Civil Rights over Easter weekend and she wanted Sharon to be there. She felt that it was an important part of their life, and this was no time for a vacation trip. Sharon was depressed about it when they both left Green Hill.