Move #1
I decide to go to Boston. After all I have a degree. I’ll try a big, new city. Annie’s not happy. It leaves her all alone with Linda and it means they have to look for a roommate. But that isn’t what happens because Linda decides to move next door with Peter and so they give up the flat and both move to Peter’s flat.
After consolidating my possessions drastically, everything I own fits into the Austin Healey Sprite. I’m too naïve to be nervous. After prolonged good byes (especially to Luke) I hit the road. That evening I’m there. I go to Cambridge. I park. I walk past Harvard Yard and peek in. Beautiful, classic. It’s September and the quadrangle is all reds and yellows and ambers and browns, the sidewalks covered with leaves. I ask around and find a boarding house. Nothing beautiful here, strictly utilitarian, but clean. Parking the Austin Healey near the boarding house is a hassle, but I persevere and finally locate a space. The owner of the boarding house hires me to clean rooms in exchange for my room rent.
Wandering around Cambridge in the fall is not too shabby. Little movie theaters with artsy facades, tons of restaurants, delis, every price from next to nothing to your eyeteeth. I’m living on a credit card and it has to last. If I don’t find a real job soon I will even have to take a cash advance to meet my next car payment. I go to several employment agencies. They are not optimistic. Apparently almost every resident of Cambridge who is old enough has a bachelor’s degree. Even people’s nannies have degrees. There are colleges all over Boston.
I buy the paper and religiously go through it. I dress up every day and go out looking but I’m not feeling so well. I’m tired all the times, I’m nauseous, no fever. I just ignore it and keep cleaning the boarding house and looking, looking, looking for work. I didn’t even have any interviews. I never got that far. I could probably have worked in the public schools, at least as a sub, but after my previous experience I had lost my confidence.
Eventually I located a job as a cook for an MIT fraternity on Beacon Street. Beautiful old house. The fraternity had been split in half by the college as punishment for some computer “borrowing” that had taken place the previous year. Although the fraternity usually had forty members, twenty had been banned from the house in a deal to let the house stay open at all. I reasoned that if I could cook for ten Taylors, I could cook for twenty fraternity guys. I’d just double the recipe.
My domain was a big old kitchen in the basement which opened to the frat parking lot, the dumpster, and a view of the Charles River. I never met a faculty advisor. The boys hired me themselves. They gave me a room of my own on the third floor with a panoramic view of the river and the MIT buildings across the river. I could watch my soap operas in the chapter room. I made breakfast, lunch and dinner, but lunches were usually take-away fare.
I knew nothing about the economics of commercial cooking. The guys got the best. Everyday suppliers brought their wares right into my kitchen, the very best cuts of meat, the freshest vegetables, anything frozen my heart desired. Even beverages were delivered. Apparently among professional cooks alcoholism is frequently a problem. The guys were happy to have someone who was sober in the kitchen. We had simple meals, meat, starch, vegetable, bread. We often ate Italian food as that was in my repertoire. They let me adopt a kitten from the dumpster. You could smoke anywhere in the frat house. I was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.
MIT guys are brilliant. They can deal with anything mechanical or technical. Later I learned they had rigged a camera in the shower. The little pervs. This was the down side of the job. I was a young, attractive, single woman living in a house full of guys. Will was the president of the fraternity, so he was always checking with me to go over my menus and he even helped in the kitchen. On the first date night at the house I was to cook flank steak, fries, salad, cake. The cakes were done ahead of time. We had twenty flank steaks, one for each couple (a bit excessive you might say). I was keeping fries warm after deep-frying by scooping them into a metal bowl in the oven. Once when the bowl was sitting on the stovetop waiting for its next load of fries I forgot that the bowl was hot and gripped it with my bare hands. I did not feel the heat right away and by the time I screamed and removed my hands, they were badly burned. Will had to administer first aid, and finish cooking and serving (via a dumb waiter that connected the kitchen to the dining room. We were thrown together a lot. He was from Hawaii, way far from home and very, very sweet. He was a short guy but I was short too. We developed an attraction for each other and eventually I moved into his room. He ferreted out the camera in the shower and made sure it didn’t make a reappearance.
Annie came to Boston with her new roommate, Grace. It was wonderful to spend some time with other women and they were really impressed with my kitchen. Knowing Annie she was probably her to meet an MIT guy, but they all proved too geeky for her. We hung around the kitchen, talking and laughing eating one maraschino cherry for every time we had ever ‘done it.’ Grace had a live-in boyfriend so she had ‘done it’ a lot. By the time they left I realized I was homesick, even though I talked to Mom every week.
It was November. Looking out the back door of the kitchen I saw thousands of people on foot, pouring over the Charles River bridge between MIT and Beacon Street. I knew it was Moratorium Day and they were marching to end the war in Vietnam. The number of marchers stunned me. I also was facing the reality that I was pregnant. With all the nervousness of relocation I had not noticed that my period had failed to arrive for several months now. I counted. It had to have happened just before I left in September. So we had September, October and half of November. I had switched my birth control method because some of those side effects from the pill were showing up. There had been a few lapses with my new method. I hadn’t been worried because I was leaving. That part of my life was over. This was my “new” life.
But here I was in a strange city, with all these guys depending on me to be their cook, and with Will, who I really liked, taking such good care of me.
Will invited me to go spend a day on Cape Cod with him. The guys could take care of their own meals for the day. It was an unseasonably warm November day. I would have been excited to be by the ocean with Will, but I knew that I would have to tell him my news. I knew he would probably think the baby was his. Oh no! I have become a story in True Confessions magazine. He did think he was the father but I explained that he couldn’t be.
“What will you do?” he said
“Go home,” I said.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“It’s OK,” he comforted. He held me close.
“What about the cooking,” I said.
“We’ll hire someone new,” he said. “You’re making us broke anyway. We spent our food budget for the year in less than three months,” he said. “We’ve already had to ask our parents for more money.”
“But who will you get this time of year,” I said.
“Probably another alcoholic,” he said.
He hired the new cook quickly and helped me pack up the Austin Healey, which had a new dent from a Boston driver who pulled out of a parking space into the side of my car because he couldn’t see it. It was sad to say good-bye but Will said they had appreciated having good food for at least three months of the year. He said if I needed him I should call. I wanted him to finish school. I knew I wasn’t going to call him. I was really scared about what was ahead. I didn’t know what I would do. I certainly didn’t plan to involve Luke. He was too young.
Move #2 and #3 (sort of)
Annie got Peter to agree that I could stay there until I decided what to do and got back on my feet. I was so in debt from my trip to Boston, still had my car payments, had no savings, and now no job. Peter didn’t want me but he had agreed and he stuck to his part of the bargain. I did not feel that I was at all ready to have a child. I could barely take care of myself. I was immature and floundering. Abortion was illegal.
I talked it over with Augusta and Hobart. They took out a loan so I could fly to London and have an abortion. I was filled with dread every day. I had never flown in a plane except once in Wing Scouts when we all saved up and flew to a city one hour away by air and then turned around and flew right back. I had never been to England. I had never thought I would have to go off by myself and get an abortion. But I went. It only took three days. I flew there pregnant and sick and frightened. I flew back three days later lighter, sicker and sadder. I saw almost nothing of England. I walked on King’s Row. I saw the red double-decker buses. I had toast for breakfast in one of those silver toast holders they use, all the toast points pointing up. I saw a doctor on Harley Street. I saw a pharmacy near my hotel. I saw a hospital, clean and neat, with nurses dressed like nuns. I rode in one of those black taxicabs that look like refugees from the 1940’s. My cab driver insisted he drive me past Buckingham Palace. I saw Heathrow airport. And that was my trip to London.
I couldn’t go home to Peter’s. I had spent the night with his downstairs neighbor one night when Peter wanted to have an orgy. The neighbor was married, but his wife was away for the weekend. Now I was officially a slut. I had never imagined myself growing up to be a slut.
Move #4
When I got back Linda and Lena were “in love”, which I guess had been going on for some time and had decided to live together. Neither of them worked. They were drug dealers. I moved into a rented room in the Appleby Street area. They moved into an apartment right across the street. This area was adjacent to the immediate university neighborhood. It was close enough to be full of students. Everyone called this area the Appleby Nation because all the hippie freaks lived here and there was a communal spirit building. There was a grocery store, a small theater, several restaurants, a five and dime (the last one in the city), some “head shops,” and some shops selling the work of local artists. I was sick and just wanted to hide out and lick my wounds. I didn’t even have a phone. Will took a bus from Boston after talking to Annie. He came to see me. I sent him right back to Boston. I let a man pick me up one day and brought him home to my room. He turned out to be a scary lunatic and would not let me leave. Finally I told him my parents expected me to call them and would worry if I didn’t. He let me go to the phone booth downstairs. I called Linda and Lena. Lena came over and rescued me. That guy didn’t know what hit him. I felt as low as I could get. Apparently I had not yet reached rock bottom.
Move #5
Lena and Linda moved away from Appleby Street. As dealers they couldn’t stay in one place too long. They said the police were after them, but at that time I think it was other drug dealers who were after them. They had unwittingly encroached on someone else’s turf. They had been dealing only pot. Now they also had a baggy full of all types of capsules and pills. They had black beauty time spansules and crystal meth and methamphetamines. They had LSD.
They sublet their apartment to Luke and his friend “the Weasel” (Alex). Luke and Alex invited me to move in with them. I did and continued my reign of sluttiness, sleeping with both of them. In February, through one of Linda’s old friends Howard Cunningham, I got a job as a reading tutor in a college preparatory program. The job was part time and all we did was hook people up to speed reading machines that helped them read faster. Howard was convinced that speed would solve all their reading problems. He said they couldn’t comprehend because they were processing information too slowly. I thought this was really bogus, however I was so happy to be back in a classroom, I just went with the flow. It was an exciting place because it was a “minority” program and the faculty was very diverse, very “hip,” and very committed to social change. Everyone, men and women wore jeans, the more worn the better. There were gorgeous, educated, hunky black men with big Afros on the faculty who could turn their “blackness” on and off. Every staff meeting was like theater.
Move #6
In the summer months there was no school and since I was an hourly employee I wasn’t getting paid. I got a job as a secretary for a plumbing supply company. I had to put together job quotes, which was a lot like doing college papers. Now that the lease was up on Linda and Lena’s apartment the guys were no longer welcome there. According to the landlord there had been complaints about loud music and noise. Hippies do not always make good neighbors, especially if the people nearby are straight. Annie was also at loose ends as Peter was leaving his apartment to get married. Annie and I found an apartment further east on Appleby Street with three floors. The kitchen was in the basement. The living room and bathroom were on the first floor and there was a bedroom on the third floor. The wall next to the stairs was a wall of windows. I was still smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, Marlboros.
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