“Connecticut.”

“Where in Connecticut?” He wanted to ask her if she was planning to visit them.

“Hartford. What difference does it make?” “Don't be rude, Bernard.” She looked prim and he folded his napkin and pushed back his chair. Eating dinner with her always gave him stomach pains. “Where are you going? You haven't been excused.” As though he were still five years old. He hated coming home sometimes. And then he felt guilty for hating it. And then he got mad at her for making him feel guilty for hating it….

“I have some studying to do before I go back.” “Thank God you're not playing football anymore.” She always said things like that that made him want to rebel. It made him want to turn around and tell her he'd gone back on the team … or that he was studying the ballet with Sheila now just to shake her up a little bit….

“The decision isn't necessarily permanent, Mom.” Ruth Fine glared at him. “Talk to your father about it.” Lou knew what he had to do. She had already talked to him at length. If Bernie ever wanted to play football again, you offer him a new car…. If Bernie had known, he would have gone through the roof, and not only refused the car, but gone back to playing football immediately. He hated being bribed. Hated the way she thought sometimes, and the over-protective way she treated him, in spite of his father's more sensible attitudes. It was difficult being an only child, and when he got back to Ann Arbor and saw Sheila she agreed with him. The holidays hadn't been easy for her either. And they hadn't been able to get together at all, even though Hartford was certainly not the end of the world, but it might as well have been. Her parents had had her late in life, and now they treated her like a piece of glass, terrified each time she left the house, frightened that she would get hurt or mugged or raped, or fall on the ice, or meet the wrong men, or go to the wrong school. They hadn't been thrilled at the prospect of the University of Michigan either, but she had insisted on it. She knew just how to get what she wanted from them. But it was exhausting having them hang all over her. She knew just what Bernie meant, and after their Easter holidays they devised a plan. They were going to meet in Europe the following summer, and travel for at least a month, without telling anyone. And they had.

It had been blissful seeing Venice and Paris and Rome for the first time together. Sheila had been madly in love, and as they lay naked on a deserted beach in Ischia, with her raven black hair falling over her shoulders, he had known that he had never seen anyone as beautiful. So much so that he was secretly thinking of asking her to marry him. But he kept it to himself. He dreamt of getting engaged to her over the Christmas holidays, and married after they graduated the following June…. They went to England and Ireland too, and flew home from London on the same plane.

As usual, his father was in surgery. His mother picked him up, despite his cable not to. Eagerly waving to him, she looked younger than her years in her new beige Ben Zuckerman suit with her hair done just for him. But whatever good feelings he had for her disappeared as she spotted his traveling companion immediately. “Who is that?”

“This is Sheila Borden, Mom.” Mrs. Fine looked as though she might faint.

“You've been traveling together all this time?” They had given him enough money for six weeks. It had been his twenty-first birthday present from them. “You've been traveling together so …so …shamelessly …?” He wanted to die as he listened to her, and Sheila was smiling at him as though she didn't give a damn.

“It's okay …don't worry, Bernie … I have to get the shuttle bus to Hartford anyway …” She gave him a private smile, grabbed her duffel bag, and literally disappeared without saying goodbye, as his mother began to dab at her eyes.

“Mom …please …”

“How could you lie to us like that?”

“I didn't lie to you. I told you I was meeting friends.” His face was red and he wanted the floor to open up and swallow him. He wanted never to see his mother again.

“You call that a friend?”

He thought instantly of all the times they had made love … on beaches, in parks, next to rivers, in tiny hotels…. Nothing she ever said could take away that memory and he stared at his mother belligerently.

“She's the best friend I have!” He grabbed his bag and started out of the airport alone, leaving her standing there, but he had made the mistake of turning back to look at her once, and she had been standing there crying openly. He couldn't do it to her. He went back and apologized and hated himself for it afterwards.

Back at school in the fall, the romance had flourished anyway, and this time when they came back for Thanksgiving, he drove up to Hartford to meet her family. They had been cool but polite, obviously surprised by something Sheila hadn't said, and when they flew back to school, Bernie questioned her.

“Were they upset that I'm Jewish?” He was curious. He wondered if her parents were as intense as his own, although that hardly seemed possible. Nobody could be as intense as Ruth Fine, not in his eyes anyway.

“No.” Sheila smiled absentmindedly, lighting a joint in the back row of the plane on the way back to Michigan. “Just surprised, I guess. I never thought it was such a big deal I had to mention it.” He liked that about her. She took everything in stride. Nothing was ever a big deal, and he took a quick hit with her before they carefully put out the joint and she put the roach in an envelope in her purse. “They thought you were nice.”

“I thought they were nice too.” He lied. Actually he had thought them boring in the extreme, and was surprised that her mother had so little style. They talked about the weather and world news, and absolutely nothing else. It was like living in a vacuum, or enduring a perennial live commentary of the news. She seemed so unlike them, but then again she said the same thing about him She had called his mother hysterical after the only time they met, and he hadn't disagreed with her. “Are they coming to graduation?”

“Are you kidding?” She laughed. “My mother already cries talking about it.” He was still thinking of marrying her, but he hadn't said anything to her. He surprised her on Valentine's Day with a beautiful little diamond ring he had bought for her, with money his grandparents had left him when they died. It was a small, neat emerald-cut solitaire, it was only two carats but the stone was impeccable. The day he bought it his chest felt tight he was so excited all the way home. He had swept her off her feet, kissed her hard on the mouth, and thrown the red-wrapped box in her lap with a careless toss.

“Try that on for size, kid.”

She had thought it was a joke, and laughed until she opened it. And then her mouth fell open and she burst into tears. She had thrown the box back at him and left without a word, as he stood with his mouth open, staring after her. Nothing made any sense to him, until she came back to talk about it late that night. They both had rooms, but more often than not, they both stayed in his. It was larger and more comfortable and he had two desks, and she stared at the ring in the open box on his. “How could you do a thing like that?” He didn't understand. Maybe she thought the ring was too big.

“A thing like what? I want to marry you.” His eyes had been gentle as he reached out to her, but she turned away and walked across the room.

“I thought you understood … all this time I thought everything was cool.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means I thought we had an equal relationship.”

“Of course we do. What does that have to do with anything?”

“We don't need marriage … we don't need all that traditional garbage.” She looked at him disgustedly and he was shocked. “All we need is what we have right now, for as long as it lasts.” It was the first time he had heard her talk like that and he was wondering what had happened to her.

“And how long is that?”

“Today …next week …” She shrugged. “Who cares? What difference does it make? But you can't nail it down with a diamond ring.”

“Well, pardon me.” But he was suddenly furious. He grabbed the box, snapped it shut, and threw it into one of his desk drawers. “I apologize for doing something so innately bourgeois. I guess my Scarsdale was showing again.”

She looked at him as though with brand-new eyes. “I had no idea you were making so much of this.” She looked puzzled by him, as though she suddenly couldn't remember his name. “I thought you understood everything …” She sat down on the couch and stared at him as he strode to the window, and then turned to look back at her.

“No. You know something? I don't understand anything. We've been sleeping with each other for over a year. We basically live together, we went to Europe together last year. What did you think this was? A casual affair?” Not for him. He wasn't that kind of man, even at twenty-one.

“Don't use such old-fashioned words.” She stood up and stretched, as though she were bored, and he noticed she wasn't wearing a bra, which only made things worse. He could suddenly feel his desire mounting for her.

“Maybe it's just too soon.” He looked at her hopefully, led by what he felt between his legs as much as what he felt in his heart, and hating himself for it. “Maybe we just need more time.”

But she was shaking her head. And she didn't kiss him good night as she walked to the door. “I don't ever want to get married, Bern. It's not my bag. I want to go to California when we graduate and just hang out for a while.” He could suddenly just imagine her there … in a commune.

“What kind of life is 'hanging out'? It's a dead end!”