I had loved her and hated her, envied her and always felt proud to
be seen with her, but at the end of our senior year, we fought about
who owned a rickety table in our apartment. I had given the table
to a friend. "Thanks for asking me," Tasha said, hurt and
imperious. We packed our belongings in silence. I left for New York
and although I knew Tasha was planning to move there also, I was afraid
to call her because she would be angry about the table. So I never
called and never ran into her, but each year when the new phone book
arrived, I checked to see if she was listed.
When I married, at twenty-four, I took pleasure in noting that Tasha
apparently was still single. A year or so later, I dialed her number
late at night and when a frightened voice said "Hello?"
I hung up. Gradually I forgot about her and had long since dropped
the phone book ritual when the doors slid shut on us in the elevator
of the Prince George Hotel.
What I saw this morning in 1972 was not the vision of perfection
I remembered. Tasha's hair was not white-blond and long; it was light
brown and cut to shoulder length. She looked pale, had gained weight,
and there were lines by her turquoise eyes that gave them a sad, defeated
look.
"Tasha, you look beautiful."
She studied me as if making a sincere evaluation. Then she said,
"You look the same."
Hours later, we sat fingering the silverware on the table of a coffee
shop. Where to begin? How did you ever get interested in meditation?
At Berkeley we were atheists. Do you remember . . .
Tasha said, "I remember you used to cook flank steak. Marinate
the flank steak. Do you still do that?"
"No. I don't remember eating flank steak."
"When I read your article about the communes, I wanted to call
you."
"Why didn't you?" I asked.
"I thought we'd have nothing to say." Awkward pause. "Do
you ever hear from Susie Berman?"
"Not in years. But I saw a picture of her in a book about revolutionaries.
She looked truly terrifying."
Tasha clicked her tongue and laughed. "She'd probably shoot
me on sight!"
Tasha showed me a photograph of the man she was living with. He was
an artist I had not heard of. "He's older. I don't want you to
be shocked when you meet him." She asked what my husband's name
was. She had not heard of him, "but I don't listen to the radio,"
she said.
Whenever I am asked how I came to write this book, I return to that
moment when I came upon Tasha in the elevator of the Prince George
Hotel. It was a moment in which life freezes. One notices details.
A door opens; a curtain flutters in the wind. In the weeks that followed
our meeting, my mind returned to the time when Tasha and I had been
in Berkeley and had been young.
In that time, that decade which belonged to the young, we had thought
life was free and would never run out. There were good people and
bad people and we could tell them apart by a look or by words spoken
in code. We were certain we belonged to a generation that was special.
We did not need or care about history because we had sprung from nowhere.
We said what we thought and demanded what was right and there was
no opposition. Tear gas and bullets, but no authentic moral opposition
because what could that be? "When you're older you'll see things
differently?" We had glimpsed a new world where nothing would
be the same and we had packed our bags.
Change, change! I had been breathless for more. Yet by the rainy
spring of 1972, I was beginning to be tired. My marriage was foundering,
I was approaching thirty and my assumptions about the future were
crumbling. I strained to see the visions of the Sixties. Had they
been a mirage? Nothing felt certain anymore.
It was at this time that I came upon Tasha in the elevator. The memories
unloosed by that meeting gave rise to a curiosity. What had happened
to the other young women I had known? Casually, and with gathering
momentum, I began to track them down, for I was developing a notion
that by tracing our journeys, I might piece together a social history
of the Sixties.
I flew to many cities, dropping into the lives of people with whom
I had not been intimate in years. I slept in their guest beds and
played with their babies and felt the tremors in their marriages and
asked questions and took notes. They greeted me, at first, with nervous
excitement. They were eager to hear about the others and compare memories,
and apprehensive about being judged.
The three whose stories I've chosen to relate are: Susie Hersh, who
was to become Susie Berman; Natasha Taylor; and myself. I chose the
other two because they were willing to collaborate and because they
had a vantage point different from mine. I was a reporter through
the Sixties. Susie was immersed in the radical Left. Tasha moved in
the world of art and Beautiful People.
For six months I interviewed Tasha in New York. To find Susie, I
had to place phone calls to Santa Fe, Djakarta and Saigon before I
caught up with her where I had last seen her--in Berkeley. We met
once a week to relive the years. We read old letters and leaflets,
looked at pictures of love-ins, happenings and street fighting and
listened to rock records.
It was agreed, very early, that I would change names and details
to respect the privacy of the women and people close to them. I have
changed the names of all the principal characters except my sister
and myself. There was a fourth woman I had wanted to interview and
follow through the years, Candy Berenson, but she felt that changing
names would not be enough. She appears in the book only as seen through
others' eyes.
It has been my intention, in Tasha's and Susie's chapters, to recount
each woman's life from her point of view. I have quoted from our interviews
and have let each woman's style and idiom spill into the exposition.
Susie tends to use blunt phrases; Tasha speaks in hyperbole and fairy
tale images.
I doubt that any of us, when we began this project, suspected what
was ahead: how draining and endless it would be; how entangled we
would become with each other. There were moments when we would laugh
helplessly. "What a life!" Susie said at the end of a monologue
about her marriage. "Who gives a fuck about orgasms anyway."
But there were periods when the burden of memory was so painful for
me and the others that, alone in my house, I would writhe on the floor.
Why had I begun this and why was I continuing? What right did I have
subjecting my friends' lives to microscopic examination? What compulsion
made me risk the exposure of myself? The grand notion of composing
a social history could not sustain me, although that history was beginning
to take form. The instinct to which I kept returning was that I would
have to face the past if I were to break the power by which the images
of the Sixties held me.
Finally, the more I learned about the disparity between the way things
had seemed in that decade and the way they were, the more I sensed
that I did not have a choice. This was a story I had to tell.
