In Case We're Separated by Alice Mattison Page B

She would have to teach herself to be unhappy, but even as she formed that resolve, she knew how far she’d have to go.
    What had just happened on the phone stunned but also pleased her. Ruth would be a martyr to religious freedom. Maybe she’d have to defend Jeanie and her song not just to the treasurer, but to the vice president, the president of the temple, and the rabbi.
    â€œBut are you Jewish?” they’d say.
    What was the answer, and why didn’t she know? A person trying to become unhappy, Ruth almost let herself understand, might well begin with that question. She carried the garbage outside and put it in the metal can with its battered cover, stuffing the old medicines deep inside and pressing the misshapen lid down tightly. Then she looked up at the Brooklyn sky—faint stars overlaid with tree limbs. She stood in her open coat with its empty pockets until she was cold, and then climbed the stairs to Lillian, who was alone in their room, her math book open, her sleeves pulled down over her wrists.

Election Day
    I met a sweet man named Harold during the Eisenhower years, but Kennedy was president by the time we went to bed. When I finally saw Harold naked, his penis rising toward me even as he stepped out of his checked boxer shorts, I loved the way he looked if only because I’d waited so long to see. I taught fourth grade, and was in my classroom when Kennedy was shot, but that afternoon I made my way through grieving crowds to meet Harold, a high school teacher, in our usual place, an Upper West Side apartment belonging to a friend of his—a bachelor, we said in those days, but the elegant, subtle drawings on the walls were of men. That afternoon, as we made love, then smoked in silence, the men—nude, hardly more than needy clusters of lines—seemed to reach toward one another in hope not of sex but consolation.
    â€œYou have talkative bones, Sylvia,” Harold said when I walked to the window, still naked, and stared out. “I can see what you’re thinking.” I hadn’t been thinking of the dead president, just then, but of Harold’s constant smoking. But I liked—how I liked—his eyes and mind on me. I told nobody about Harold except my sister Bobbie, who’s dead. So now (it’s 1980; Ronald Reagan has been elected president) to my knowledge nobody alive knows except Harold himself, assuming he’s alive.
    My husband, Lou, is a Democrat, but he didn’t respond to Kennedy’s death by sitting dully in front of the television set for days. He’d stop where the doorway framed his familiar slope, glance at the set and me while tying or untying his tie, and leave the room, saying “Enough.” From the day Roosevelt died until 1963, I hadn’t wept over the news either. As the sixties continued, public happenings changed not only my thoughts but how I spent my time. Lou remained as he’d been.
    Harold couldn’t stop talking about Kennedy’s death. He carried around a letter about it from his son, who was somewhere in Africa, in the Peace Corps. In the waning light of a weekday afternoon, Harold read me letters to and from his son, and letters he’d written me but hadn’t mailed. I mailed my letters to him, and at times I wrote about wishing I could give him up. I was trying to stop smoking, and I said breaking up with him might save my life. I didn’t worry that the affair might end my marriage.
    Two years after Kennedy died, my son, Richard, graduated from college and waited with distressing resignation to be drafted. A pianist, he refused to do anything but practice—anything that might get him a draft deferment. “The Peace Corps?” Harold suggested.
    I’d already said it to Richard with stupid nonchalance: “Why don’t you just join the Peace Corps?”
    â€œJust?” Richard had replied, waving an arm. Then, “I couldn’t practice in the Peace