“You’re going back,” said Frank.

“But we’ll have to hire a baby-sitter.”

“No, we won’t. I’ll stay with her.”

“But how?”

“I’ll get evening classes. I’ll take care of it.”

And he did. He managed to get his chairman to go along with it, although he had to schedule his office hours for Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Mrs. Lorimer, a widow who lived down the street, came in for three hours on those mornings. She was a compulsive worker and very fond of Regina, two factors which made me feel lucky to have her. However, I would catch her giving me looks of disapproval as I gulped down my morning coffee and reviewed my lesson plans for the day. None too subtly, she liked to remind me that she had raised five daughters, all of whom had turned out exactly the way she wanted them to because she had stayed at home to keep her eye on them. I could have pointed out that my staying home would have put her out twenty dollars a week, but I said nothing. Yet her disapproval of me was mild compared to her disapproval of Frank. She avoided him entirely, except with her eyes: they crawled over him like hands that can’t quite figure out the texture of the object they’re touching. I imagined what was going through her mind: How could a man let his wife work when there was a sick child in the house? Why would a man who is a man shape his life around his wife’s job when his own job was more important? Naturally, the answers to these questions were two of the answers to why I loved Frank. But I felt no need to explain that to Mrs. Lorimer.

That school year, 1967-1968, and the following summer proved to be a pivotal period in our lives. Trying to assess all the events and their separate impacts puts me in the position of an editor trying to decide on the right headline. First of all, I returned to Peck High in a state of ebullience that was soon diminished by an amorphous tension among the students. The summer riots in Detroit had been given tremendous publicity, and every now and then I heard “Those niggers” being mumbled in the corridors. The black population at Peck was less than ten percent, but there was already talk of redistricting to bring that figure to twenty-five percent. The majority of black students slunk around the building as if they expected the walls to open up and discharge troops against them. But there was a small group of black boys to match the group of whites who were longing for confrontation. The confrontation came in February, two days after a white woman was raped and murdered by a black man in a downtown transient hotel. It broke out in a gym class, and because the seven students involved were black and white, it was the first incident in the school’s history to earn the term “racial.” Hugh Lance expelled all seven and the next day called a special assembly at which he warned every student that fighting of any kind would result in automatic expulsion—girls included. The school was quiet the rest of the semester, but the fights were continued off school property, where Lance could do nothing about them.