Back when I was in college, Fiona was known in the English department as a talented writer with a distinctive, ironic voice: a rising star. I admired her, though intimidated by her reputation and the mordant style that entered even her personal interactions. Then, when we worked together on the literary magazine editorial board, I got to know her better. We discovered we'd been dumped by the same boyfriend, first her, the year before, and more recently, me, and we became good friends.

One spring day in front of the library, we passed a throng of students crowded around a man shouting through a bullhorn. I paused. "What's going on?" I asked someone on the edge of the crowd.

"A demonstration against the atom bomb," he said.

"Oh.”

Fiona snickered. "I mistook you all for a cheerleading squad," she said.

She swept on, and any slight inclination on my part to stop and listen for a moment was quickly embarrassed into following her into the library building and to our cubbies in the stacks that were peacefully dark and redolent of musty books. Before beginning study, I used to open one of the books on my desk, press my nose in it, close my eyes and deeply inhale. The leafy, moldy smell of paper brought me to the tantalizing threshold of another world, as if I were embarking on foreign travel.

Fiona and I were going to room together the next year, but over the summer, on the rebound from that boyfriend who'd dumped me, I suddenly married Martin. Fiona, on the other hand, worked on a novel that she was submitting for her honors thesis. She was surprised at my move and made some acerbic remarks, but she didn't treat me like a ninny for shackling myself, not even when I became pregnant. After Benjie was born, she sometimes visited and talked to me about books and ideas as if I were still a sentient being.

Martin and I moved to New Mexico so Martin could attend graduate school, and Fiona started teaching high school. I lived in a small house with a two-hundred year old narrow living room of thick adobe walls, the rest of it tacked on with chicken wire and plaster. A large hole gaped in the wall between kitchen and bedroom where I'd thrown a frying pan at Martin.

At first Fiona and I exchanged letters, and then I didn't hear from her again for many months, until one day in the spring. She wrote she'd finished her novel "a la Faulkner's Temple Drake, which no one in this Anglocentric English Department even recognized, so they thought me brilliantly original." Then she announced she was in love, "seriously in love," she said, with one of her students, a local rancher's son. "We're taking a trip to the Southwest this summer—can we stay with you in Albuquerque?"

He was only a sophomore. I was shocked. I showed it to Martin. We shook our heads, tsk, tsk.

I had held an image of her as someone above life's fray, able to keep her distance and look sharply and ironically at the world. A writer, in other words. Now I assumed she'd fallen to some hollow sexual craving, and I thought it seedy. Probably I assumed this because my own marriage on the rebound was in trouble. Time passed, and absorbed in my own unhappiness, without making any conscious decision, I didn’t write her back. I never heard from her again, and stopped thinking about her. Once every few years I might wonder, whatever happened to Fiona? and then I wouldn’t think of her again for a long while. I was busy. Now and then, when I was in a bookstore or reading my paper’s book review section, I'd look for her name—had she succeeded?—but I never came across it.

Years later, during the time of the Vietnam War, I worked part-time as office manager for the El Cerrito Peace Center. Wanting Benjie to grow up in a better, safer world, I had become political.

Martin had not been called up to serve, nor would he be, because he was doing a post-doctorate. We were living in a small, rented, single-story house on a street of square houses with square front and back yards.

We made friends with a couple who had a kid Benjie's age, Booboo, and I kept urging them "to get involved." I gave them leaflets. I said to them, "The way it's going, in ten years time Booboo could be over there. Doesn't that scare you?"

“If only everyone appreciated the trees and grew their own food, there wouldn't
be wars in the first place," said Harry. He worked in a suit and tie at the DMV, but at home he wore canvas pants and red suspenders. He had deep set eyes and the look of a seeker.

Jennifer wore the long granny skirts popular at the time. "We're just not political," she apologized.

Martin thought I was too pushy.

Nevertheless, we remained friends. I liked their old-fashioned, unpretentious ways, so different from the stuffy, patronizing academic world that Martin was now part of. When we went to their house I would help Jennifer, who always cooked vegetarian meals, in the kitchen. We talked about our kids, childhood experiences, books we liked; occasionally I would tell her about some of my anti-war activities and she would listen politely. In a way, I envied her lack of stress and anxiety about the world, her freedom to enjoy sunsets and good fresh food and her child, Booboo. I still have an old photo of the six of us posing in nineteenth century frontier garb we’d scrounged up. Booboo is grinning; Benjie looks serious and plaintive, as if straining to belong to this make-believe world.

The first summer after Martin and I finally split up, they invited Benjie and me to spend a weekend with them on a bit of land they owned in Mendocino. Benjie and I lived now in a large, dilapidated Victorian that we shared with four others who were all active, like me, in the movement. I had left my job at the Peace Center and was working as a waitress to support us, but, when I wasn’t working and when Benjie was in school or being watched by housemates, I was even more involved than before in the anti-war movement, doing actions like blocking trains that carried war equipment to the ports. I attended endless meetings to plan such actions of civil disobedience. To get away for a few days was appealing.

We drove in separate cars into the hot, dry hills of Mendocino, way up a dirt road. Harry had built a platform deck, shaded by oaks and smelling of fresh-cut wood, where we laid our sleeping bags and cooked on a Coleman stove. A creek in a nearby gully provided water. The creek formed a small, icy pool like a bathtub under a bay tree, which shed its leaves into the water, perfuming it. Here we took turns submerging ourselves to cool off. Mostly we lay in the hot sun and watched out for rattlesnakes while the children played with Tonka trucks in the dirt.

Harry and Jennifer hoped to build a house and live here someday, if only they could figure out how to support themselves.

"Booboo could have a horse here," Harry said. I nodded.

Jennifer leafed through a book on camp cooking. "Here’s something that calls for miners’ lettuce. I think there’s some of that growing by the creek."

We went to look for it.

But I had begun to speak a different language from Harry and Jennifer, one full of words like imperialism, the masses, bourgeois. I no longer knew what to talk about with them, and, used to the fervor of impassioned political activity—for in those days we really felt that we were on the verge of changing the world—became more and more restless in the crawling heat. Flies buzzed in lazy loops. I began to think Harry and Jennifer were a little bit boring. By Sunday afternoon I was desperate to get home.

Our two cars were winding back down the narrow dirt road to the highway when Harry and Jennifer's old Volkswagen bus suddenly lurched and stopped. It sat there for a minute while I patiently waited behind, and then Harry opened the door and shouted back at me, "The engine's given out." He looked under the hood, fiddled around, tried the engine again: nothing. Booboo squashed his face and hands against the rear window and stared mournfully at us.

I had to push them a few miles further down the road to the gas station by the freeway. The mechanic said he couldn't check out the car till he finished the job he was already working on. It must have been 104 degrees, heat bouncing off the pavement and walls and stewing the fumes of gas. Jennifer and I took the kids down the street for popsicles. When we returned, the mechanic still hadn't gotten to the car.

"Oh no," groaned Jennifer.

Harry looked distressed.

I felt I should stay with them to give them moral support and help with Booboo. I was certain that's what they wanted. Who knows, I might even have to give them a ride home. But then I asked myself, why should I? I reasoned that my life was much busier than Jennifer's, and I was doing important work—opposing an unjust war—which she wasn’t. And it was so hot. Just because Booboo was miserable, did that mean Benjie had to be miserable also?

In the end I said, "Look, I have a meeting that I really have to get to this evening." This was partly true, but I'd been thinking of skipping it, and only now I decided it was important.

"Oh?" said Harry.

Within minutes I was pulling out of the gas station, waving good-by, while Jennifer gazed at me, eyes rounded with surprise.

I had deserted them, and I was too ashamed to call them up the next day and find out how they'd fared. Then, after letting one day go by I felt worse, for now I had two things to apologize for, not just one. The more days that went by, the more I couldn't call, so I never did, and I never saw them again. Benjie sometimes asked to play with Booboo and I replied that it was too far to drive, and anyway, I hadn't heard from Booboo's family so they were probably too busy, like myself.

Still today, when I remember that incident, shame flushes my face. Sometimes I try to imagine what happened to them. I picture them "dropping out," caught up in the times as I was, and starting a commune on their land in Mendocino. Jennifer would be overworked, milking goats, making yogurt, washing clothes in the little stream, chopping and sautéing in the communal kitchen, while Booboo romped around with other kids dressed in frontier garb, or perhaps not dressed at all, and Harry would hunt with a bow and arrow, or maybe work part-time in that same gas station at the crossroads for a little extra money, or build various structures on the property. But the commune wouldn't have lasted more than a couple of years—none of them did—before everyone got disillusioned and weary of the work. The other members would leave and then, I'm certain, Harry would have experienced the terrifying emptiness of a denuded landscape. Nothing ahead, failure behind.

Later still, I lived in the Pink Elephant Apartments, a long line of attached, motel-like, single-story units, each with its own tiny, fenced, treeless backyard. It was a tough, bleak neighborhood, known as Sal Si Puedes, Get Out If You Can. Sometimes, to comfort myself, I pretended the steady swish of cars on the nearby freeway was the sound of ocean waves.

I belonged then to a socialist organization, one of many that sprang up towards the end of the war. I worked on an assembly line in an electronics factory, trying to organize a union and speaking out against U.S. imperialism. Almost every night I had to go to meetings—changing the world, I was finding, required hours and hours of sitting on hard metal folding chairs.

It was difficult for Benjie. One day I caught him dealing. Someone scratched at our front screen, and Benjie ran to talk to him outside, on the doorstep, without letting the boy in. I glimpsed a tall kid with a ponytail whom I'd never seen before.

After the boy went away, I read Benjie the riot act. At first he tried to deny his guilt, but he'd always been a poor liar.

"Believe me, I know what's going on. I'm not naive. And if I ever catch you at this again, I'm sending you to live with your father."

Martin was teaching at a small Midwestern college in the middle of the plains.

"Aw, Mom, it was just a little pot."

"Smoking's one thing, and dealing's another. Dealing's exploitive. It's counter-revolutionary!"

"Aw, Mom."

But he stopped. I think.

In fourth grade Benjie had had a friend, a sweet little boy with dark, soulful eyes, who confided in me that his New Year's resolution was to wear out the bumps on his sneakers. Recently he'd been arrested for assault with a knife. It's what happened to kids here, one of the things we in the socialist collective were trying to change.

In the factory, I and a few others distributed mimeographed leaflets about why we needed a union: minimum wages, no job security, the use of cancer-causing chemicals like xylene and trichlorethelyne, as well as hydrofluoric acid, which burned through clothing and burned off hair. There were showers to jump into if this happened, but it was usually too late by then. Many of the women (the workers were almost always women) were immigrants from Mexico, the Philippines and Vietnam, and were not receiving proper training in their language. One day a woman in one of the assembly areas caught on fire from an acid explosion. We wrote a leaflet about it and talked to the workers in other areas, and slowly recruited a network of women to work with us in putting out a shop paper. It was all very secret: a fight behind enemy lines.

The assembly line I was on worked over microscopes, using tweezers to attach microcircuit chips to electrode packages. To rest our sore eyes or smoke a cigarette or talk with someone from another line, we had to resort to the bathroom.

One day I retreated there for a break and startled a woman named Aracele, who worked on a line across the room from me, leaning teary and red-faced over the sink. No one else was in the room. She hastily wiped her hands across her eyes and smiled.

"What's the matter? Are you crying?" I asked.

She nodded. "Stupid me. I was sitting there over my microscope and thinking about my life, and I just started crying. Oh bother."

Like me, she was a single mom, with a boy close to Benjie's age.

"I know what you mean," I said. "Is it anything specific?"

"Oh, not really. I'm just worried about my Luis. He's running around with a bad bunch at his school. And I think maybe he's sniffing glue."

She started to tear up again.

I recognized someone I could share my own troubles with. I wanted to become friends with her.

"I worry about my Benjie too. He smokes dope all the time and his grades are bad."

"What can we do? I've talked and talked to him. `Okay, okay, Mom,' he always promises, but nothing changes."

"Do I hear that. I know exactly what you're talking about."

I thought about inviting her over some time or meeting with the kids for a picnic at the park.

"Hey, why don't..." I started, and then stopped. Larger goals suddenly intruded: the union, what we in the collective called "the struggle."

"Why don't?" she questioned.

"Why don't you read this," I said, suppressing my heart. I pulled one of the leaflets out of my purse and handed it to her.

"Okay," she smiled, wiping her eyes again, and stuffed it into the pocket of her work smock.

Then there was nothing for it but go back to the line.

In the days following she was friendly to me but restrained. I could tell I had frightened her, she didn't want any part of a union movement or to hear about U.S. imperialism, so I didn't approach her with any more leaflets. When I ran into her while clocking in, or at lunch break, I would ask how things were going with Luis and say something about Benjie, but that was it. I told myself I had too many meetings and too little time to pursue a friendship with someone who was not going to share my goals. Eventually our brief exchanges eroded into nods and smiles.

We never succeeded in getting a union into the factory.

I became a teacher.

"What was it like back then?" my students asked.

To those so disillusioned, who measured everything with the ruler of irony, how could I explain the certainty we had that we could bring justice and equality to the world?

"We forced an end to the Vietnam War. We won some civil rights legislation."

"But you failed. Things are even worse now."

One night not long ago, alone in my condo and feeling vaguely discontent, I Googled my old friend Fiona. Her name sprang up on the screen as if it had been crouching in wait for years. There was no list of novels by her, but there was an article reprinted from a Denver Post Sunday magazine section, titled "Fixed Stars." It was an interview with Fiona and a man named Richard Purdy.

He'd been a student in her first year of teaching high school, the article said. They had fallen in love. "Was he a good student?" the interviewer asked. "Not particularly," she said. "His grammar was bad."

"The difference in years seems so silly now," she said, "but back then they really mattered, especially because of my role as teacher."

She and Richard, while he was her student, had once camped for a week in a deserted adobe under cottonwood trees near a small town in the Southwest. The scene of unfettered love, it became an icon of their romance. Later on, to end the relationship she considered impossible, Fiona left the school and moved to that small town, where she got another teaching job. She married and divorced a couple of times, but she could never stop thinking about Richard.

Richard went on to become an astrophysicist. As a professor, he published hundreds of articles in the most prestigious scholarly journals, wrote books, and was interviewed on National Public Radio.

Fiona happened to hear that interview. She contacted the producers, obtained his address, wrote a note to him. He replied to her, "I've never stopped loving you, Fiona." His marriage had failed also.

And so, after many years, they were reunited.

The story obsesses me. Fiona, of all people. Late at night I find myself, again and again, putting down my book and going back to the computer to raise the article from its netherworld to the screen, and pondering it.

Truth

Untruth

We Don't Know and TheyWon't Tell Us

We Don't Know and They
Won't Tell Us