It seemed no time before the seven miles were behind us and we arrived at the park. We stayed with the doctors, quite a ways from Black Panther David Hilliard and the other speakers, so it was difficult to see them, but we'd come to see the crowd more than anything and we could hear well enough. As we stood talking, waiting for the speeches to begin, a nun in full white habit and a wimple came and stood near us, holding a sign that read not one more dead. Something about her—just the nunness of her, I suppose—made me think of Sister Mary Alice, the head of my high school. Sister Mary Alice was a big barrel of a woman who made things happen, though she'd been nearly eighty when I was in school. I wondered if she was still alive, and if she was still running the school, and if we'd be in this mess in Vietnam if she were in charge of the show. If you'd asked me in the car on the way up if I could imagine Sister Mary Alice—or Sister Josephine or any of the other nuns who taught me—demonstrating for peace, I'd have gotten the giggles so badly I'd have started hiccoughing. But that nun's face held the same measure of compassion those nuns could startle you with when they'd learned your grandmother was sick or your dog had died or you had not been asked to the prom. When they mailed you a note after you'd taken your fiancé to meet them, a note that said, “Danny is clearly a very smart young man, Frances, but don't forget that you are a very smart young woman, too.”
It made me tear up, imaging Sister Mary Alice's stooped old body under the weight of a not one more dead sign, though I couldn't begin to say why.
The speeches that afternoon were relatively unremarkable, the crowd moderate, enthusiastic but well behaved. When Hilliard tried to stir everyone up, suggesting in the most unpleasant language that we ought to kill President Nixon, the crowd simply drowned him out with shouts of “Peace! Peace! Peace!”
“Peace!” I found myself saying, not exactly shouting but not exactly not, joining Danny's lunatics without feeling the least bit crazy, or even the least bit wrong. And when I looked to Kath and Brett and Linda and Ally, they too were saying, “Peace!” All while President Nixon sat in the White House watching the football game our husbands were watching at home with our children, a game the network didn't even think to interrupt to show live coverage of hundreds of thousands of Americans taking to the streets.
ALL THAT FALL, even with so much going on, I worked on “Michelangelo's Ghost,” revising and revising. As the Chicago Eight became the Chicago Seven, as two million people participated in the first moratorium against the war, as others were going off to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or reading The Godfather or The Andromeda Strain, I sat at my typewriter. The amazing thing was I didn't want to do anything else. I didn't want to go shopping or to the movies, I didn't want to watch That Girl or Laugh-In or even Johnny Carson, which I'd always loved. And I wasn't alone. Brett was revising her novel, Linda started a new story, and Ally traded in her “Not Some Duck” for a porcupine who was at least moving out of her journal onto full pages in a way the duck never really had. Even Kath was writing: gut-wrenching journal entries that were melodramatic and awful, that made me want to talk her into leaving Lee, just dumping him and starting over. But even now, with divorce not the taboo it was back then, it's a hard thing to tell a friend you think her marriage is over. It's impossible, really. What if you're wrong and she leaves him when the next day he might have dumped the girlfriend and, having gotten that out of his system, gone back to life with her and old age and all the till-death-do-us-part happily-ever-after she'd hoped for at the altar on her wedding day? Which was the way Kath's sad melodrama of a story would end if she ever finished it, if she ever got beyond ideas jotted in her journal, you could tell that from the little she'd written. As if by writing it she could make it true.
I'm not even sure now how we'd gotten to the point that we were all writing. I know writers who have a talisman or a ritual to make writing easier: bunny slippers they wear or a certain candle they always burn when they're writing; putting pen to paper at sunrise, or noon, or 11:00 P.M.; sitting in a certain chair in a favorite café or walking their dog on the beach first; playing one song on their iPod on infinite repeat for one novel, then choosing another song for the next. But that always strikes me as dicey. What if that café table is taken? What if the dog you walk on the beach eats your bunny slippers? What if your iPod dies? And the fact is, we were mothers and wives; if we waited for the stars to align just so, we'd still be waiting.
I suppose what we did was park our butts down and write any moment and any place our children were otherwise occupied. We got up early and wrote while our households slept. We carried journals and pens and even manuscripts in our purses, and if the children fell asleep in the car on the way to the grocery store, we sat with our writing propped up against the steering wheel, scribbling quietly, careful not to inadvertently honk the horn. We grabbed every minute we could, hoping it might turn out to be five minutes or ten, maybe an hour if we were lucky. And even when it was frustrating and we didn't like what we wrote, even when we were just jotting down thoughts about a day that had not gone well, there was joy in it, one part the pleasure of feeling creative and one part the way our friendship wrapped around our hopes.