The Love Children by Marylin French Page A

government, Robert McNamara, say, but I also knew that not everybody over thirty agreed with them. My mother was over thirty, but she thought war was used by elites to maintain their power over the rest of us. My father supported the war, but not because he thought war was wonderful. He thought it was inevitable. He bragged about Leightons fighting in all this country’s wars—he felt they had sacrificed themselves. But I didn’t see him signing up for Vietnam, and Mom said he hadn’t wanted to fight in Korea either. Sandy’s parents didn’t support the war, but Bishop’s did. They didn’t change their minds even after their second-oldest son was killed in Vietnam.
    A lot of people didn’t like our ideas. When I look back on those days, I see how naive we were, how simpleminded. People today talk about the sixties as a crazy time; they say we were foolish, deluded, a wasted, drugged-out generation of losers. But our experiments with drugs were part of our sensibility, one aspect of our enlightenment. We were open to discovering our inner being, instead of driving drunk or fighting each other with fists, or metaphorically killing each other on the floor of the stock exchange. We tried on altered states of being, and the truth is, my friends were a sweet bunch of kids who mostly turned into a sweet bunch of adults. We really were the beginning of the brave new world. If you tell that to anybody today, they smirk. But I say it’s true.
    Of course, some of us got lost along the way.
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    Steve and I often cut school. One day that spring he came over to Barnes and found me in the hall on my way to French class.
He asked if I wanted to cut. I nodded and we darted out a side door just before the bell rang. He’d promised to hang out with his friend Jeffrey, so we walked back to Cambridge High and Latin to get him. Steve would go into the school at the period break to find Jeffrey. We stood across the street having a smoke on the sidewalk while we waited for the period bell. We were in front of the house of some lady who didn’t like us (she’d chased us away before), when we saw a squad of police with riot shields and helmets charging down the street. We looked at each other: were they coming for us? Had the lady called the police on us like she’d said she would? And they were coming for us with riot shields? We started to walk quickly, trying not to look like we were running, toward town. But even after we were a hundred yards from the lady’s house, the police kept running in our direction, batons in their right hands, shields in their left. They looked absolutely terrifying, like robot medieval knights. We finally stopped dead on the sidewalk, but they went on running past us and into the school. They disappeared, and after a little while kids came running out, white faced. Some were crying. No one we asked seemed to know what was going on. We didn’t see Jeffrey.
    Steve said, “Let’s go get my car. Then we can take off if we need to.” He had earned enough at his job at Monaghan’s to buy himself a red-and-white Chevy, a couple of years old but shiny and nice.
    We ran toward Bow Street. The car was parked in the lot behind Monaghan’s. We got in Steve’s car and crouched down in the backseat. We were both panting from running and were very thirsty. Steve jumped out and went in the back door of Monaghan’s and came out with some bottles of water and a little bag of weed. We sat on the floor of the backseat and gulped water, then Steve rolled a joint. He licked three little skins, and pressed their edges together to make a big one, then laid the dried-dung-looking tobacco leaves into a crease, spreading it out along the
paper. Dexterously, he curled the paper up into a cylinder, slid in a tiny piece of cardboard, and twisted the end of the paper. He lit it and passed it to me. I inhaled deeply. Oh, it was good.
    While he worked, Steve