Free You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt

and New Year’s Eve, when the Joneses hosted their annual party (thirty or forty people, lots of champagne) and let Jenny and me stay up and watch the ball drop on TV.
Time
magazine’s 1982 Person of the Year was the computer.
    And then it was 1983.
    At school we were diagramming sentences and slaving over fractions. We joined a swim team and went to practice two afternoons a week. We spent snow days sledding at Battery Kemble Park—it was not uncommon to see Teddy Kennedy there with his Portuguese water dogs. We carved construction paper into valentines and were careful to hand out only the most innocent candy-heart messages. Giving someone a “Be Mine” could complicate things. We rehearsed for our class play. We were doing
The Wizard of Oz,
and Jenny was cast as Dorothy. I had only one line—I was a Munchkin, which required me to shuffle around the stage on my knees—so I helped Jenny memorize hers. I knew her part so well that our teacher, Mrs. Gibson, made me Jenny’s understudy. I had terrible stage fright, but I knew I’d never actually have to perform: nothing short of apocalypse could keep Jenny from the stage.
    In February, U2 released their third studio album,
War.
On March 3, President Reagan delivered his famous Evil Empire speech. Three weeks later he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative. The Cold War was getting colder, and my mother was staying later and later at her office downtown. Her disarmament efforts had begun as a hobby, but by the time Reagan was inaugurated, she was working for WAND, Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament. She found friends among the fellow acolytes of Helen Caldicott and Randall Forsberg. Occasionally one of them would stop by to strategize over coffee. Knowing that my mother was not alone made it easier for me to leave her behind and escape to the serenity of Jenny’s house. So I was at the Joneses’ house on the afternoon at the end of March when the first reporter called.
    “Jennifer, come down here!” her mother shouted up the stairs.
    The urgency in her voice made me think Jenny was in trouble. I followed her down to the kitchen to find out what she’d done.
    “Honey, you’re famous,” said Mrs. Jones.
    “That was
the
Washington Post
on the phone,” said Mr. Jones.
    They had asked her parents to comment on Jenny’s letter to Andropov. It had just been published in
Pravda,
and the Western news media were picking up the story. The next day the headline of the
Post
read, AMBASSADOR FOR PEACE IS 10 YEARS OLD.
    I told my mother that I had written a letter to Andropov, too.
    “The Russians probably chose to publish her letter because her name sounds so quintessentially American,” my mom said.
    “My name doesn’t sound American?”
    “It sounds German,” she said. “Or Jewish.”
    “But we’re not Jewish,” I said.
    “I know that,” she said. “But Zuckerman could be a Jewish name.” My mother wasn’t a Zuckerman. She’d kept her maiden name, Whitney. “And the Russians are notoriously anti-Semitic. Besides,” she said, “it doesn’t matter which letter they published. The exciting part is that they published it at all. This is good for the cause. It puts the focus on ordinary people instead of politicians. Everyone’s sick of reading about summits with the Soviets.”
    The American embassy in Moscow arranged to have copies of
Pravda
sent to Jenny via diplomatic pouch. Looking at her missive translated into Russian made me tired: every letter was capitalized, so the print was uninvitingly dense. “I’m sure they’ll publish yours next,” said Jenny.
    But the next letter published was Yuri Andropov’s response. Because he wrote back, of course. That’s what made Jenny really famous. She showed me the letter when it arrived from Moscow—it was typed in English on official stationery. And it was long. “Propaganda!” said my mother when she read the text of it in the newspaper. “My God, look at this. He compares Jenny to a Mark