Free The Love Children by Marylin French Page A

years.”
    â€œHow can you be sure you won’t marry again?”
    She smiled. “I’m sure, honey. Very sure.”
    Â 
    She was right, Dad did marry again, twice. A few years after he married for the third time, he died, at fifty-nine, from lung cancer. And Mom was right about herself, too. She never married again. She had a recurring dream, she told me—long afterward, when I was in my forties—that she had somehow married Daddy again. She would discover this and cry out in grief and rage, “How could I do that? I was free of him, how could I let myself marry him again?” In the dream, she was frustrated to tears that she had blown her chance at freedom. I like to think that if she had lived long enough, she would have got over her fear of marriage and let herself have a companion again, but she died at sixty-two, also of cancer.
    Â 
    The whole event—Mom sending me up to Vermont and then secretly getting a divorce, my father’s dreary way of life and the
way he acted toward me at the end—all of it did something to me. It didn’t turn me against my parents, exactly, but it changed where I stood in regard to them, as if a giant hand had picked me up and set me down again at a different place on the globe, farther away from my family, my friends, my country. I began to see them as if they were not my parents, but just people. It felt disloyal. But it also gave me a sense of freedom. They weren’t me, I wasn’t bound by them, I wasn’t like them and didn’t want to be.
    Mostly, it made me decide that no matter what, I wouldn’t live like them. I would be careful whom I married and I would do whatever I had to do to have a happy marriage. I would never drink too much. I would live right.

5
    Over that summer , my friends seemed to change, too. They were more distant. Or maybe I was the distant one. But it shook me up that when I told them that my parents had divorced, they just murmured sympathetically, as if it wasn’t a disaster. I’ll bet they’d think it was if it happened to them, I thought. They probably just didn’t know what to say, but it felt as though they didn’t care. The truth is, I was not unique. All of a sudden, everybody was getting divorced. It was a tidal wave. I’d never heard of anyone getting divorced before, except my mother’s friend Alyssa, who acted as if her divorce was a major tragedy and whispered about it.
    Nobody was really interested in my problems. Just after the term started, there were massive demonstrations across the country against the war; everybody was up in arms about it. Nixon had made a peace offer, but those of us who were against the war thought he wasn’t serious. People seemed to be getting more and more angry and were blaming us for all the problems. It seemed like the four of us—Sandy, Dolores, Bishop and I—symbolized everything the conservatives hated. We all had long hair. Almost everybody in our school had long hair. And wherever we went, into the little stores that lined Mass Ave or the shops on the side streets, storekeepers and cops and shoppers practically hissed at us, especially Bishop. They railed at him as if his
hair was their business. Even the portly ladies in hats and gloves who never raised their voices would make nasty cracks about our dirty jeans, our dirty hair. It was as though the country was at war, not with the North Vietnamese, but with long-haired kids.
    One day we were sitting together on a bench facing the Charles River, just smoking and watching people crossing the bridge and talking about the war. It was warm out, even though it was December, and I was wearing sandals, and when I wiggled my feet, my shoes fell off. A huge cop came storming over—luckily we weren’t smoking pot—and commanded me to put my shoes on immediately. Sandy glared at him, asking, “Is it against the law not to have shoes on?” But he