You Are One of Them (6 page)

“I didn’t see them, but they must have been doing it.”

“I don’t want to think about it,” I said. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. After Jenny fell asleep, I lay beside her and wondered if my mother missed having sex. Did she make those noises in bed with my dad? When my father had an affair, did his mistress make those noises in a hotel room? Would Jenny make the same noises someday? I listened to her breathing: mouth open, every exhalation throaty and extreme, as if she were entitled to more air than the average human. There was no one I felt closer to in the world, but someday I knew that we would be in bed with other people, that nights like this would take on the foggy quality of dreams.

•   •   •

W
HAT ELSE DO
I
REMEMBER?
Jenny and I on our backs in her yard on a summer night, our heads touching, our hair intertwined, pinpricks of light from the fireflies, and the day’s swelter draining from the air as the sky blackened and the stars came out. The whole neighborhood smoky with barbecue. Our skin itchy with chlorine, our fingers sticky with watermelon, bits of corn lodged in our teeth, and her mother’s voice, like a wind chime from the patio, telling us it was time for bed.

•   •   •

A
LL THE ARTICLES
about Jenny described her the same way. She was “precocious” and “charming” and even “brilliant.” Everyone wanted a piece of her. I once made a list of things you wouldn’t know about Jenny even if you read every single published word about her:

1. She was fussy about the texture of her food. She wouldn’t eat anything mushy (no avocados, no oatmeal).
   
2. When we played Clue, she insisted on being Miss Scarlet.
   
3. When we played Monopoly, she was always the shoe.
   
4. At night while she brushed her teeth, she would pretend she was in a toothpaste ad. She slicked her tongue across her enamel and said, “Now, that’s what I call clean!” I said her mother was like a mom in a commercial because she smelled the laundry while she folded it. Jenny thought that was funny.
   
5. She may have been precocious, but she wasn’t the genius the press made her out to be. Every night she called me so I could walk her through our math homework. And she also needed my help with grammar. The subjunctive confused her.
   
6. She wanted to have three children when she grew up. She intended to name them Amy, Lucy, and Troy. Troy because of the Trojan Horse, which was her favorite story in our studies of ancient Greece. “What if you don’t have any girls?” I said. But she refused to indulge this line of questioning. Jenny was always certain that things would work out.
   
7. She planned to live in a “mansion”—so many dreams in the eighties involved mansions. We played that game called MASH (Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House) in which possibilities for the future were limited to four categories scratched on a pad. Four names of boys we might marry, four careers we might have, four places we might live.
   
8. Jenny talked in her sleep, although she never said anything coherent.
   I didn’t!
   she said, or
   NO!
   Sometimes she’d start laughing so hysterically that I was sure she was awake. I’d lean my head over from the top bunk and shine the flashlight in her face to verify that she was really asleep.
   
9. She had a birthmark on the front of her left thigh. It was a small caramel-colored stain, so high on her leg that it wasn’t visible when she was dressed.
   

I
T ALL STARTED WHEN
I
DECIDED
to write a letter to Yuri Andropov.

I was at Jenny’s house on a Saturday afternoon in November of 1982. We were in private school by then. In the fourth grade, we had both started at the nearby girls’ school, so now our morning walk took us in the opposite direction on Lowell Street. We had been in our new school for a year and were still adjusting to the absence of boys. A boycott, we called it. The school started in the fourth grade, but most of our classmates had been together at the same private, coed elementary school, so Jenny and I felt like foreigners among them. We were trying to decipher their references and translate the inside jokes. Mrs. Jones had begun dressing like the other mothers—with cashmere sweaters draped over her shoulders—and was looking for sponsorship to join the exclusive Sulgrave Club. She asked my mom if she knew any women who were members, and my mother laughed. “I used to be,” she said, “but I gave it up.”

It had been raining all day. We’d spent the past few hours restlessly searching for ways to fill the time. We played three games of Connect Four. We played five games of Spit—I can still hear the impatient snap of the cards as Jenny shuffled. We made chocolate-chip cookies and licked most of the dough out of the mixing bowl instead of baking it. We took turns dialing Q107’s request line—we wanted to hear our voices on the radio—but it was always busy.

“If you get through, what will you request?” Jenny said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

I didn’t need to ask her what she would choose. Her favorite song was “867-5309,” since it was about “Jenny.”

There were girls at school who knew which bands were cool, who knew all the lyrics to the right songs, but I was always out of sync. On more than one occasion, I’d made the mistake of nodding knowingly at the mention of a band only to be humiliated when grilled about its discography. If you weren’t careful, you could be tricked. “You like U2? What do you think of
November
?” a classmate named Lisa said to me. “It’s okay,” I said diplomatically. “There is no
November
!” she said. “Just
October.
And
Boy.
” Jenny was almost as clueless about music as I was, but she listened to Casey Kasem’s
Top 40
and took notes.

Jenny’s room was in a turret, so one wall was round, like a gazebo, with large windows that faced my house. I liked the shape of her bedroom—it usually made me feel like I was in a castle—but in dreary weather the fishbowl shape added to the sense that we were trapped. And because the room jutted farther out than the rest of the house, we seemed especially vulnerable to the storm. Every gust of autumn wind sounded dangerously close. The rain was furious on the windowpanes.

Jenny was on the bottom bunk, flipping through the yearbook from the previous school year. Each graduating student got a whole page of the yearbook and got to choose who was on the page opposite her. We were connoisseurs of those senior pages; in them we hoped to find clues about how to navigate preppy culture. We studied the photos of girls bracketed by friends, smiles perfected by orthodontics, and memorized their senior quotes. I still remember the page of a Caroline Winslow Corcoran, class of 1982. She was pictured with her black Lab and quoted David Bowie
(“Time may change me / But I can’t trace time”)
and Eleanor Roosevelt
(“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”)

Jenny was already thinking about our pages. “If I have a boyfriend then,” she said, “I won’t put a picture of us together, because what if we break up by the time the yearbooks come out?” Seniors had to turn in their pages in September, but the yearbook was published in June.

“We won’t be seniors for seven years,” I said. I wasn’t sure we’d still be alive then. I sat on her plush pink carpet, scribbling.

“
What are you writing
?”
Jenny wanted to know.

“A letter.”

“To your dad?
”
In those days I often wrote to my father. He rarely wrote back. He had recently remarried. His new wife, Phillipa, was a barrister and an equestrienne.

“To Yuri Andropov,” I said.

“
Who?
”

“The new head of the USSR.” Brezhnev had recently died, and my mother was already worried about his successor. Andropov used to run the KGB; his shadowy past made him seem especially sinister.

“
Why?
”

“I want to know if he’s going to start a nuclear war.”

My mother subscribed to
Time
and
Newsweek,
to the
New Yorker
and the
New Republic
.
But also to
Mother Jones,
and the September/October issue was devoted to disarmament. When it
arrived that fall, I was the one who picked it up from the floor where it landed under the mail slot.
THE RACE AGAINST DEATH,
screamed the cover. And below those ominous words, four faces in four separate photos, arranged like the frames in the opening sequence of
The Brady Bunch.
But these were not smiling faces. In fact, when I looked closer, I could see that the faces in the bottom panes were not faces at all but masks. A bloodred skeleton on the left, with an expression so infernal it seemed possessed, and on the right a Picassoesque profile painted on papier-mâché. It reminded me of a KKK hood. The top two images were equally frightening: a wounded woman (or was it a man?) whose head was wrapped in a bloody bandage and whose expressionless gaze made me wonder if she’d rather be alive or dead. And on the left, a face stiff with white pancake makeup, the hair covered by a shroud. I didn’t know the context of these gruesome photographs. But the faces had been haunting me. For the last two months, it was those faces and that horrible headline,
THE RACE AGAINST DEATH,
that had dominated my dreams. It was more terrifying than any horror flick. I had to do something.

“
Can Andropov read English
?”
said Jenny
.
This was an astute question. I’ll admit I hadn’t considered it before.

“
I’m sure he has people to translate stuff.”

“
Even if he is going to bomb us, do you think he’s going to admit that to
you
?
My dad says they have way more nukes than we do.”

“That’s true. They do,” I said. What I didn’t say was that it didn’t really matter who had more nukes. Thanks to the space-based detection technology developed in the 1970s, the United States would know about a Soviet strike as soon as the missiles launched and would immediately retaliate. If there were a launch on warning, we would destroy each other simultaneously.

I didn’t expect Andropov to reply. But I wanted him to know that regular Americans—people like my mother and me—were scared. If he listened only to Reagan, he might think of us as enemies, but if he heard from regular citizens, he might understand how many innocent lives were at stake. That was my mother’s logic. She’d been writing letters to American members of Congress for years. I don’t know exactly what I said to Jenny—probably something I parroted from the Nuclear Weapons Freeze campaign rally in New York that my mother had dragged me to in June. Nearly a million people had descended on Central Park to hear Helen Caldicott preach about civic responsibility. Bruce Springsteen sang also, but my mother and I were too far away from the stage to see him. Whatever I said to Jenny was persuasive, because she announced that she was going to write a letter to Andropov too. She sat at her desk and flourished a purple pen with a pom-pom on top.

“‘Dear Mr. Andropov,’” she said as she bent over to write in her notebook. “How do you spell ‘Andropov’?”

I told her.

“Thank God this pen has erasable ink.” She fixed her mistake. Then she said, “This is like writing to the Wicked Witch of the West.”

“Except he’s in the East.”

“He can’t be as bad as he seems.”

“I hope not.”

“‘Dear Mr. Andropov,’” she repeated. “‘My name is Jennifer Jones. I am ten years old.’”

How long did it take her to write the letter that made history? I’d say she worked on it for twenty minutes. I knew she was concentrating hard, because she was sucking on a strand of hair, the way she did during math tests, her saliva releasing the unmistakable scent of Prell. And then in a burst of energy, as if breaking through a finish line, she said, “I’m done! Are you?”

“It’s not a race,” I said.

We sealed our letters in envelopes we took from her father’s rolltop desk.

“What are you girls up to?” he said when he found us in his office. “You know you’re not supposed to be in here without permission.”

Sometimes Mr. Jones spoke a little too loudly, as though addressing a courtroom. If I hadn’t known better, I would have guessed he was a litigator. Most people we knew in Washington were lawyers, though there were also cabinet members and senators among the parents at our school. I didn’t know exactly what Mr. Jones did every day—his work was as nebulous to me as that of every other adult. I assumed that every office was like my dad’s old one at the IMF, where the occupants’ names hung on placards outside their office doors, where the copy machines were segregated in a room down the hall, where page-a-day
Far Side
calendars were exhibited on desks as proof that long hours spent restructuring loans for developing countries couldn’t dilute the employees’ sense of humor.

“We needed envelopes,” said Jenny.

“We had to write some letters,” I said.

“To Yuri Andropov,” said Jenny.

“What do you know about Yuri Andropov?” said Mr. Jones.

“We wrote to ask him for peace,” she said.

“Well, that’s an idea,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was laughing at us.

“We need to know his address,” said Jenny.

Mr. Jones was one of the adults who seemed to know everything. It was reassuring to be in the company of someone who always had answers. We addressed the envelopes under his supervision. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll take these to the post office on my way to work Monday morning and make sure they have enough postage to get all the way to the Kremlin.” Mr. Jones exuded competence. And unlike everyone else I knew, he had actually been to the Soviet Union. He and some of his college friends traveled to Moscow in the 1960s for a basketball tournament. He still had the poster—with huge red letters in Cyrillic—hanging in his home office.

I’ve tried many times to remember what Mr. Jones did with our letters. Did he leave them on a corner of his desk? Did he put them in his briefcase? I only remember handing mine to him. Mr. Jones’s face was unremarkable and bland—the sort of face that blends into crowds—but his hands were strangely graceful, with the long fingers of a piano player, and he wore a gold signet ring. My mother made cracks about men in jewelry, but on Mr. Jones the ring seemed like proof of something solid in his character. I can still see my letter in his hand; it was authoritative and substantial.

We mailed the letters in the middle of November, and after that we were distracted by the holidays: Thanksgiving (for the second year in a row, the Joneses invited my mother and me to join them; I was grateful to sit at a candlelit table with a perfectly roasted turkey and homemade pies); Christmas (the Joneses went to Vermont to ski, and my mother and I stayed in Washington—she was still afraid of flying—and I feigned enthusiasm about the gift of vintage
Encyclopaedia Britannica
my father sent me); and New Year’s Eve, when the Joneses hosted their annual party (thirty or forty people, lots of champagne) and let Jenny and me stay up and watch the ball drop on TV.
Time
magazine’s 1982 Person of the Year was the computer.

And then it was 1983.

At school we were diagramming sentences and slaving over fractions. We joined a swim team and went to practice two afternoons a week. We spent snow days sledding at Battery Kemble Park—it was not uncommon to see Teddy Kennedy there with his Portuguese water dogs. We carved construction paper into valentines and were careful to hand out only the most innocent candy-heart messages. Giving someone a “Be Mine” could complicate things. We rehearsed for our class play. We were doing
The Wizard of Oz,
and Jenny was cast as Dorothy. I had only one line—I was a Munchkin, which required me to shuffle around the stage on my knees—so I helped Jenny memorize hers. I knew her part so well that our teacher, Mrs. Gibson, made me Jenny’s understudy. I had terrible stage fright, but I knew I’d never actually have to perform: nothing short of apocalypse could keep Jenny from the stage.

In February, U2 released their third studio album,
War.
On March 3, President Reagan delivered his famous Evil Empire speech. Three weeks later he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative. The Cold War was getting colder, and my mother was staying later and later at her office downtown. Her disarmament efforts had begun as a hobby, but by the time Reagan was inaugurated, she was working for WAND, Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament. She found friends among the fellow acolytes of Helen Caldicott and Randall Forsberg. Occasionally one of them would stop by to strategize over coffee. Knowing that my mother was not alone made it easier for me to leave her behind and escape to the serenity of Jenny’s house. So I was at the Joneses’ house on the afternoon at the end of March when the first reporter called.

“Jennifer, come down here!” her mother shouted up the stairs.

The urgency in her voice made me think Jenny was in trouble. I followed her down to the kitchen to find out what she’d done.

“Honey, you’re famous,” said Mrs. Jones.

“That was
the
Washington Post
on the phone,” said Mr. Jones.

They had asked her parents to comment on Jenny’s letter to Andropov. It had just been published in
Pravda,
and the Western news media were picking up the story. The next day the headline of the
Post
read,
AMBASSADOR FOR PEACE IS 10 YEARS OLD.

I told my mother that I had written a letter to Andropov, too.