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They study the Vietnam War at the tail end of Rose's junior year.
"Did you know anyone who was there?" she asks over dinner one night, as Lucy passes the mashed potatoes to Billy.
Lucy's arm freezes halfway to its target and Billy scowls, reaching the rest of the way.
"Lucy?" William asks from across the table, a small frown creasing his face.
"Mom?" Rose asks at the same time, the same concerned frown on her face.
Lucy clears her throat. "Yes. Yes, of course. We were that generation, you know. The war on TV, the protests in the streets…" She clears her throat again. "This really isn't an appropriate subject for dinner, Rose. Billy, please don't chew with your mouth open."
Rose opens her mouth, and Lucy knows she isn't going to drop it. She sees it in her eyes, the same fire that was in Max's eyes as he shouted at their father, the same fire in hers as she shouted for her mother to hear her.
"It's not appropriate dinner conversation," she says again, firmly.
"But-" Rose starts.
"Listen to your mother," William tells her. "She usually knows what she's talking about," he adds with a quirk of his lips.
Rose frowns and stabs at her dinner. Lucy pours herself a second glass of wine and doesn't chide her daughter on her manners or respond to her husband's comment.
That night, she stands outside on the patio behind the house, nursing another glass of wine, an old forgotten tune running through the back of her mind. Maybe that's why when Rose comes outside, she doesn't send her back upstairs.
"Uncle Max was there, wasn't he?" Rose asks. Lucy glances over at her. She's seventeen years old - the same age Lucy had been. She's a child, pulling her long sweater sleeves down over her hands, looking up at her with her bright eyes. Her eyes. Max's eyes.
"Yes," Lucy finally says. She knows her daughter, knows she'll push and push and push. She knows herself. "Max spent half a year there."
"Were you scared for him?" Rose asks and pulls over a chair. She's going to make this a conversation. Lucy sighs and lowers herself into another chair.
"It was a long time ago," she says with a sigh. It's been years, it's been decades, it's been a minute. For a crazy second, she wonders where Prudence is now.
"It's just…" Rose pulls on her sleeve and gathers herself. "You know, when you study history, it's all so long ago? But I realized in class that you would have been my age - you would have watched the broadcasts and known people impacted and listened to the music. Or I guess maybe knew that there were people out there who were involved in all that."
Lucy chuckles into her wine. I was there, she wants to say. I lived with Sadie and Jo-Jo and all those names you read about in your books. I got covered in mud at Woodstock and stood on a roof as Jude sang to me, and only to me. I protested and marched and shouted, through tear gas and rubber bullets. I smoked and drank and ran wild in New York City and somehow by some miracle I survived.
"Did I ever tell you about Daniel?" she says instead, because she was Rose's age once and now she understands her mother, crying into the phone, terrified that she's going to lose two of her children.
Rose shakes her head. "No?"
"He was my first boyfriend." Lucy wants to look at her daughter, but it's easier to look at the wine. The wine can't tell how much she's leaving out. "He enlisted right out of high school, thought it was his patriotic duty." She takes a sip of wine and finds the glass is almost empty. She frowns down at it, but she won't be refilling it.
"Oh," Rose says quietly, mostly to her knees.
"He did something brave," Lucy tells her glass, "so they buried him with a medal. I was the same age you are now."
"I'm sorry." Rose's voice is tiny.
Lucy shakes her head. They buried Daniel with a medal. They buried Max with a medal. What does any of it matter. "It was a long time ago. I haven't really thought of him in a very long time."
"Did you love him?" Rose asks, curious.
I loved my brother, Lucy thinks to herself. I loved Jude. I loved my freedom. "We were so young," ahe says instead. "It was a long time ago," she echoes again.
Rose opens her mouth, rethinks her question, and pulls on her sweater some more. "Did you get a lot of the protests at Princeton?"
For a moment, Lucy is back in the phone booth, the bullet hole near her head, the dogs snarling a few inches away, the door refusing to budge. She clears her throat. "Not really. By the time I got to school it was much quieter. And no one was bothering us English majors anyway." She braces herself. "Aside from Daniel, it really was almost like everything was happening to someone else." It feels like it did anyway. "I was very far away from it all." I was in the middle of it all.
Rose gnaws on her lip. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to bring up a bad memory."
"It's all right," Lucy lies and smiles over at her daughter. "It was a long time ago."
Rose fiddles with her sweater sleeves. "What about the music? Not just Woodstock, but a lot of the music of the era was really impacted by the events that were going on, you know?" She pauses and thinks for a moment. "What kind of music did you listen to?"
Lucy thinks back and remembers finding out that her own mother read Kerouac. "Oh what didn't I listen to? The Beatles of course, Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, The Who…" She pauses, remembering that first night, watching Sadie sing, and shakes her head. "I know, not quite the lineup you were expecting from your boring old mom." She glances over and Rose is staring at her, mouth slightly agape.
"Woah!" Rose finally says. "Did you ever see any of them perform?"
"No, I wasn't that wild," Lucy says with a shake of her head. If Rose goes digging in the attic, she'll find photos proving her a liar. But maybe not - they're blurry now, and she's barely in any of them, more likely to have been the one taking the photos. "I just…hero worshipped my brother so I listened to what he listened to," she finally says, blinking rapidly at the porch railing.
"Oh," Rose says. "Is that why you let Billy listen to all his weird music? Do you actually like it?"
Lucy laughs and glances over at her daughter. "Oh no, I have no idea how he can stand it. But my mother never complained about my weird music choices and don't ever tell her this, but she did have some good ideas about child rearing. I mean, she raised me and Aunt Julia and I like to think we turned out alright."
"What about-" Rose interrupts herself as Lucy abruptly turns away to blink rapidly out into the darkness. "Right. Forbidden subject, dropping it."
Lucy stares at a star, right at her eyeline. She blinks and it moves, revealing itself to be a plane. She shakes her head at her own silliness. Anyway, it was their father Max had butted heads with. Their mother gave them a long leash, even baby Julia. She regretted it, but she still did it.
"So how did you guys get news about bands and stuff back then? Like when there were concerts or if someone was doing so many drugs they fell off the stage?" Rose asks from behind her.
Lucy thinks back to how they used to do things, before MTV and all these portable radios everywhere. "Over the radio, mostly, but it was a lot harder. We mostly had neighborhood bands performing copies of songs, or sometimes you'd get lucky and know someone with talent." She had known people with talent. They all burned out at the end. "I was always the last one to find out anything, really. Always got my gossip from Max." He had been the one to call her about Sadie. About Jo-Jo. About Jude. There wasn't anyone left to call her about Max. She swallows, hard.
She turns around, her smile forced but pasted on. "It was a long time ago, and sometimes, that's where the past needs to stay."
"But Mom - aren't we supposed to learn from history?" Rose asks, looking so much like herself. "So we don't make the same mistakes?"
"Yes, of course. Don't do drugs, don't drink, and there's nothing wrong with a little rock and roll," Lucy says. Don't run off to New York City because your boyfriend is dead, dead, dead. Don't fall in love with an artist who leaves you for your brother. Don't watch them both fade away and feel your own heart fade away with them. Don't join protests that end in bloodshed and bombs. Don't follow musicians who can only find peace at the bottom of a bottle.
Be the only one to survive.
Rose frowns. "But Mom-"
"I'm sorry," Lucy interrupts, "I really was rather boring and uninvolved. Maybe see if your father has something he can add?" He can't. She knows he can't because she was there and he wasn't. He looked down his nose at all the protestors and doesn't know how often and how close Lucy came to being arrested. What was she thinking back then. No wonder her mother cried so much.
Rose is quiet for a few minutes and Lucy thinks that the subject is finally closed. "Aunt Julia says you ran off to New York City with Max," Rose blurts out finally, folding herself over to bring her knees to her chest. "That's why I wanted to talk to you and not Dad. And I already know what Dad will say about 'those damn hippies' anyway."
Lucy takes a deep, fortifying breath. "I spent a few months in New York with Max before he shipped off to Vietnam and I went to school. I don't know what Julia told you."
Rose frowns. "She made it sound like you were there for a few years. I called her to see if she would tell me about Uncle Max and she said she was really young but you two basically joined at the hip with him and you were the one who took care of him and -"
And I was the one who found his body. "Rose, please, leave the past behind. I've told you - I wasn't the kind of person who got involved." Lucy manages to pull on a smile. "Do you want me to see if maybe someone at work was covering the scene twenty years ago? They'll have a lot more information than me." She should have done this to begin with.
Rose frowns and gnaws on her lip. "Yeah, all right, that would be interesting." She pulls on her sweater sleeves again and rocks a little bit in her seat. How did her mother ever let her run away. "Mom, I did the math. There really are two years missing from your life."
Lucy studies her daughter, drinking in her nose, her eyes, the tight look on her face. She remembers mocking women who did that. She barely remembers being that naïve. "Rose, it's the past. Please leave it alone."
"You never talk about anything personal," Rose says, glaring up at her. "I have to call Aunt Julia half the time if I have a question more detailed than what's the secret ingredient in the chocolate chip cookies. I just want to know you a bit better. How you were when you were my age. About family and grandpa and Uncle Max and just…I just want to know. It sounds like you were there, living through history and I just want to know a little bit, a crumb, something."
I was a hot-headed idiot who threw herself into a world I didn't understand, Lucy thinks to herself. I went down a rabbit hole and I was lucky to get out alive and whole. And you will not follow in my footsteps.
"It was the past, and that's where it should stay," she says firmly as she meets her daughter's eyes. There's no regret left in her. She thinks the grief has long since eaten it all away. "My life was boring, and then I met your father and had you and Billy, and it was chaotic and lovely and now here we are. If you're interested in more history, I'll set up that interview for you at work."
Rose glares, but Lucy has more experience and it's her daughter who folds first. She nods and gets up. "That sounds good, thanks Mom. Have a good night."
"You too. Sweet dreams," Lucy tells her and watches her go back inside.
She stays out on the porch long after the light has gone off in Rose's room, though she can still hear music from Billy's open window. Her husband doesn't come out to check on her, and she doesn't know what she would do if he did. The past is alive in her backyard tonight, and there's barely any room left for her.