file into the gym and line up against the walls in the same curled-up position. Because the gym didn't have any windows, the idea was that it would be harder for the bomb blast to reach us. Right. Have you ever been to Hiroshima?
I don't know who developed these fabulous exercises in “nuclear safety,” but we felt anything but safe. The possibility of nuclear war felt like much more than just an unpleasant thing to worry about. Fear seeped deep into the marrow of my bones.
At that time in my very young life, if I wished that my family had tons of money, it wasn't so that I could have lots of beautiful clothes that matched, and toys, and a fabulous house with a built-in swimming pool. What I wanted was our own bomb shelter in the backyard so we might really be safe. I tried hard to focus on the fantasy of the security a bomb shelter offered, and not on what the world would be like once we dared emerge from it. I especially wished we had one when Russia tried to put nukes in Cuba.
The image of President Kennedy on the television screen during the Cuban Missile Crisis is seared into my brain. Young and handsome, yet presidential and somber, he spoke to the nation about the possibility of war because the Soviet Union was threatening our hemisphere with nuclear weapons in Cuba. America was demanding their immediate removal. Each day of the crisis was more tense than the last, until finally we were told the Soviet Union had backed down. The world had edged away from the nuclear abyss.
Though I had just turned twelve at the time, I was furious at Khrushchev and “the communists.” I had visions of storming into the United Nations and addressing the General Assembly, where I'd get Khrushchev to “admit” that he was indeed a communist. Somehow, through the force of my eloquence, and before the world, I'd convert him into a freedom-loving democrat who would then return to the Soviet Union and liberate all its citizens.
I should be embarrassed at the memory. My only defense is that I was young and obviously had an unsophisticated understanding of the world. At least I knew about the United Nations, even if I did embrace the fantasy that it was a world body where people actually put aside national interests and worked together to resolve issues for the good of us all.
Once the crisis had passed and stability in the Cold-War world was restored, my U.N.-peacemaker fantasy passed as well. Little did I know how much the UN. and weapons would feature in my adult world.
CHAPTER THREE
Claude, Casey, and the Corvair Convertible
In the last days of summer in 1967, I fell in love with Claude. It was an August afternoon before the start of our senior year in high school when we first noticed each other. I was sixteen. Everybody was at the bowling alley. I hated bowling, but it was a place to hang out when the day wasn't nice enough to spend at the lake. So there I was at the Brattleboro Bowl with a bunch of girls, watching the boys watching us back.
Claude and I had seen each other in school over the years and never given each other a thought. That afternoon, seemingly out of nowhere, I became viscerally aware of him as he played pool. I knew he was feeling something, too, because, when I'd try to glance surreptitiously in his direction, he would be looking right back at me. The air felt charged.
The attraction I felt that day wasn't a figment of my hyper-stimulated imagination. Shortly after the bowling alley, we had our first date and then became inseparable—until the trauma of my going off to college a year later. Until then, it was Claude and me and his turquoise-and-white Thunderbird.
The car was an older model with fins sweeping up in back. Its interior was more beat-up than the exterior and had great tears in the upholstery that continuously spewed foam stuffing, which clung tenaciously to anything it touched. Janet, eight at the time, apparently was mortified by the car and its stuffing, and when she rode with us she tried to hide in the backseat so no one would see her. I never noticed. From my perspective the car was a blessing and a curse. Claude drove my siblings and me to and from school every day, but the Thunderbird was also a convenient place for the possibility of “sin” followed by shame and confession angst.
· · ·
By the time Claude and I were kissing in the Thunderbird, I was visiting the confessional less and less frequently. At seventeen, I found that the underpinnings of my faith were collapsing after years of questioning.
One night a few years earlier, when I was thirteen and sleeping over at a friend's house, we were lying in sleeping bags on the attic floor. Through the windows, I could see stars spread across a broad expanse of the sky, layer after layer, from the brightest to mere pinpricks of light. I started trying to imagine the expanse of the universe. Struggling to grasp infinity and where it all came from made my brain feel like it was hyperventilating. The correct answer, of course, was God, who had created heaven and earth. But that night, for the first time, the rote answer didn't feel right.
Maybe the universe existed simply because it existed. Maybe God was the creation of humans and not the other way around. This wasn't original, breakthrough thinking, but that night it was for me, and it excited and scared me in equal measure. As those excommunication-worthy thoughts crystallized, I panicked. According to the faith, and as in many other religions, its adherents are the chosen ones. If you choose to deny the existence of God, you're damned to hell for all eternity.
Eternity and infinity were equally incomprehensible, but the hellfire that plagued my mind for years felt very real. Even though I thought a truly just God would prefer honesty to lies about believing, I balked. Thinking about burning in hell was just too frightening, and I beat a terrified retreat. But it was only a matter of time before questions resurfaced.
During the time I was with Claude, the priests who ran our church were of a particularly militant order. Forget about the compassion and mercy of the New Testament, they were stuck in the older books of the Bible. Keeping the flock in line was, for them, about fire and brimstone and fear.
The head priest, with his close-cropped white hair, square jaw, and rigid posture, could almost be taken for a marine. He must have prided himself on being a stalwart soldier of Christ. (Pride is one of the seven deadly sins ...) I could envision him smiting idolaters for Yahweh. One thing young girls definitely didn't want to experience was time in his confessional. He simply hated women.
After a close encounter in the Thunderbird, I had to confess for the first time that I'd “let my boyfriend touch me.” I'd had all my clothes on, so there wasn't much to be excited about, but that didn't count for anything. Unfortunately, the confessor that day was the marine-priest of God. The incident itself had been traumatizing. I felt dirty, guilty, and conflicted enough without that man telling me it was all my fault because women were temptresses who led men down the path of sin. Apparently in his book, men were completely defenseless before our charms.
I emerged from the confessional more livid than shamed. He couldn't know who did the tempting; he hadn't been there. And he was a priest and didn't know anything about male-female relationships anyway. I disliked him intensely, and his lack of compassion only made me feel more and more alienated from the Church. His colleague wasn't much better.
I was continuing to attend catechism, although I was increasingly at odds with the other parish priest, who taught the classes. We fought over sin and just about everything else. For example, I asked why, if the intention to sin was so important, taking birth control pills was a deadly sin, while the “natural method” was perfectly fine. In both cases the intention was to sin by avoiding pregnancy.
Because, I was told, with the natural method a couple could still receive God's gift of a child. But if God were omnipotent, I said, he wouldn't be hindered by a little pill if he were really intent on giving that gift. The flustered and angry priest was adamant: pill bad, natural good. I was equally adamant that it wasn't logical.
We
