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.The doctor diagnosed her with severe hypoglycemia and low thyroid, and gave her armloads of vitamins, thyroid medication, and a regimen for reducing some of her psychiatric drugs.Although still addicted to sleeping pills at night, she became less groggy in the daytime.Mom was rumbling back to life.Years later, she would tell me how defective she had felt when she knew her marriage was ending, like there was something really wrong with her.Somehow she decided to go on.That winter semester, she enrolled in a master’s of education program to become an elementary-school teacher.Sometimes I helped with her projects.One day, I came home to find her seated in front of a large blown-up balloon resting on the table, a bucket of papier-mâché next to it.Her ashtray was filled with cigarette stubs, and one smoking cigarette rested on its edge.“Hon, can you help me? I don’t have the patience.” She was supposed to make a globe.I loved anything to do with art, and I launched in, spreading newspaper on the table under the balloon, layering the papier-mâché around it.After it dried, I painted the continents in green, the ocean in blue, happy to have such a simple way to help Mom.IN THE SPRING OF 1965, American planes started the bombing raids on North Vietnam dubbed Operation Rolling Thunder, and Mom joined Women Strike for Peace.It threw me into a dilemma: Did I think the war was wrong? In 1965 there was no large peace movement yet, and I knew no other kids who were against the war.I sought out advice from my eighth-grade teacher, Mr.Shelton, whom I adored.He wasn’t handsome, but I thought he was the greatest because he challenged his students to think.I hadn’t yet learned to dampen my smartness in deference to boys, and I was one of those students always furiously raising a hand.One day after class, I asked Mr.Shelton what he thought about Vietnam.He wouldn’t answer.He told me that I had to learn about Vietnam myself and come to my own conclusion.I begged, I pleaded, “What do you think?” but he kept pushing me; “This isn’t a decision someone else can make for you.You have to delve into it, and then decide what you believe.”Mr.Shelton’s respect for my reasoning abilities made me face the responsibility.It was a scary decision.I hesitated because in some vague way I understood that once I concluded that America was not the righteous purveyor of freedom, many beliefs I’d been taught would come tumbling down.I had stared at the newspaper pictures of Vietnamese Buddhist monks protesting by immolating themselves in the Saigon streets.Puzzled, horrified, and moved by such an act, I was led by the intensity of those pictures to research more.Mom had bought a couple of books about Vietnam.Reading about the history of foreign interventions in Vietnam and the escalating U.S.role, I became clear.Mr.Shelton was right—I could figure out what I believed.I joined Mom on the picket line.In front of the New Brunswick Army induction center, there were the handful of Women Strike for Peace housewives marching with picket signs held aloft with one arm, their huge pocketbooks crooked on the opposite elbow, and me, the sole adolescent.I felt nervous and exposed marching along the sidewalk, but also angry about the war and proud to be taking action.For the first time, I witnessed these women as more than housewives and parents.Mom had found kindred spirits, passionate women, committed to a cause.I decided the United States had not simply made a mistake in Vietnam, but that our foreign policy was deliberately imperialist—a word I’d just learned.By then, I had watched black people being attacked by police with fire hoses and police dogs in the Birmingham demonstrations on TV.Right here in America, things were very wrong.But I also saw how courageous people could be, standing up against oppression, and that there was hope for change.I put away my horse books and launched into reading to deepen my understanding of the world.I read To Kill a Mockingbird, The Diary of Ann Frank, 1984, The Trial, The Grapes of Wrath, The Crucible, The Jungle, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.The books widened me, touched me with human experiences that were so different from mine, yet so reverberant with our human pathos.At meals, Mom and I now discussed politics, history, and current events.I discovered something about my mother, something that had been buried by drugs and depression, lost to electroshock and sorrow in the years since she had read me Greek myths: her sharp, passionate intelligence.Mom and I had a new bond.As the peace movement grew, we went together to antiwar marches.We boarded buses to Washington, D.C.; Newark, New Jersey; and New York City.We carried signs and screamed slogans with the other marchers.The antiwar movement and the growing social unrest gave us a focus for our discontent, and a place to feel some commonality with others after so much stigma and isolation.Chapter 21.HayrideSOMERVILLE HIGH WAS a shock.The three-story, L-shaped brick building had a huge smokestack at its center that made it look like a factory.The grounds were asphalt, with not a blade of grass.But bleaker than the physical setting was the dullness of the classes and the loss of my friends.During seventh and eighth grades, I had been with the same classmates in the top track, in the electric air of teachers who challenged us, and we had bonded as a group.Now, I was in an English class where some kids could barely read.My body sagged in the thick, dull air of the classroom, and sometimes, no matter how hard I fought sleepiness, my eyelids would grow heavy and my head would bob down and then jerk up with a start.Most of my classmates had stayed on for ninth grade at our old school; only the few of us from Millstone township had to go as freshmen to Somerville High.The worst was that I had lost Theresa.Her family had moved away over the summer, but our friendship had ended before that.Toward the end of eighth grade, Theresa had stopped sitting next to me at lunch and passing me notes in class.She stopped asking me over.She acted like she didn’t know me at all—no longer catching my eye, raising her eyebrows, and grinning that conspiratorial buddy grin.I was completely baffled, and devastated.What had I done? I wondered if it was because I had decided I was against the Vietnam War.Or perhaps I had done something to offend her, or now that she knew me better, she didn’t like me.Or maybe it was about my mother.The loss left me hurt and aching, and I stayed away from her.I never asked her what had happened.Shame held me back.THERE WAS ONE ELECTIVE I chose that was actually interesting.It was Ancient Civilizations, my only class that had upper classmen, which made it exciting and intimidating.In the chapter on the Fertile Crescent and the ancient Middle East, there was a profile of a nose with a huge hump labeled “Semitic Nose [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]