also fought over the infallibility of the pope. How could a mere human be infallible? The priest assured us that the pope was infallible only in questions of the Church. But if popes were infallible, why did they change the laws of the Church seemingly willy-nilly? Priests could marry, for example, until the twelfth century, when a pope then declared they couldn't, and they still couldn't. But why could married Episcopal priests become Catholic priests and remain married? And suddenly, after 1966, eating meat on Friday was no longer a grave sin? What happened to all the poor fools who'd committed the sin before 1966?
My pope questions were the ones that exceeded the priest's tolerance, because he threatened that if I didn't accept the infallibility of the pope, I was “excommunicable.” If that was the case, then excommunicated I was at seventeen years of age. I never went to catechism again or to Mass. I was liberated from confession and no longer worried about adding new sins to the sin list.
· · ·
The Thunderbird might have been a hotbed of high school sin, but once I left for the University of Vermont, about three hours northwest of Brattleboro, it didn't manage to bring Claude to see me on the weekends. Back then there were strict and early curfews in the dorms, which were not coed. With no friends at the university, Claude had no free place to stay, and he couldn't afford a hotel room. That meant it fell to me to find ways to get home to see him as often as I could.
When my parents had driven our empty station wagon away from my dorm after helping me move in, I'd seen my world coming to an end. No family. No Claude. I was bereft. But moping around, homesick and weeping over my faraway boyfriend, helped me maintain my good-girl status through my first semester at college.
As I'd set out for my first day of classes in 1968, I'd thought myself a picture, albeit a sad and distracted one, primly attired in a blue-and-white checked A-line skirt with matching blue sweater. I can't say for sure what the classes were, but I have no trouble remembering the outfit. It seemed to define me as I began my college career.
I made my life at school as small as possible. I always went to class, then scurried back to my room to study. Signing in and out of my dorm as required and never missing curfew, I was a model of propriety. My desperate energy was always focused on those weekends when I could get home to my beloved. I was so distraught that I considered moving back there and going to a community college so I could be near him.
My parents weren't happy about it. They wanted me to have the education they never had and a broad and open future. But they never pushed back hard or tried to stop me from talking about how sad I was and how much I “hated” the University of Vermont. They tolerated my whining, hoping I'd get over it.
Because I was such a pitiful homesick and lovesick creature, I managed to wangle the family's “extra” car out of my parents. It was a blue Corvair convertible Dad had fallen in love with and picked up cheap during one of his stints as a part-time used car salesman. When he later got my mother a newer used car, he couldn't give up the Corvair.
Whenever I went to Brattleboro, there'd be a list of other townies needing a ride. It was a boon because they'd share the gas bill. One deep-winter weekend, the townie was Pat Casey. I had no idea then that one of the most important friendships of my life was being forged in the Corvair as we struggled our way back north through an unexpectedly intense snowstorm.
At one point in the ride, I found myself spinning in a 360-degree circle, twice, while avoiding the two cars I was passing at the time and the car coming at us from the other direction. Stunningly, not one car slid off the road and everyone continued driving as if nothing had happened. Casey and I shrieked, screamed, and laughed like maniacs through the entire episode. We recognized in each other a weird sense of humor and a predilection for risk taking. With that fear-inspired adrenaline rush, our bond was forged.
We hadn't been friends in high school, which we still joke about. Casey was part of the so-called wild crowd, even though she was Irish Catholic. Where were her guilt and shame? I'd never seen her at confession. By the time we were friends and I could jokingly ask her about it, it didn't really matter because we'd both left the church. In any case, her response was always punctuated with a funny little giggle, revealing the gap between her two front teeth. All our lives she's maintained that the gap is sexy, like Lauren Hutton's; I tell her she'd benefit from braces.
Casey was always more interested in extracurricular activities than schoolwork, until she found her passion in nursing school at UVM. In high school, she smoked, drank, and swore and sometimes even went parking with boys! She'd cut classes if she found them boring, or out of sheer bravado. In my little worldview, she seemed provocative and dangerous.
In high school, I didn't smoke, I didn't drink, I didn't swear, and most definitely, I did not cut classes. In fact I finished assignments almost as soon as they were given. I'd have English papers that weren't due for a month written within a few days so I wouldn't have to fret about them. Casey thought I was an uptight, somewhat snooty, boring asshole who worried too much about school and didn't care about having real fun. Neither of us had been particularly excited about being stuck with each other in a car for a long ride back to Burlington—even though she can and will talk to absolutely anyone.
But that ride changed everything. Under Casey's tutelage (at least that's what Mom wanted to believe at the time), I began to drink beer, the most readily available beverage at college. With the beer came twenty additional pounds that I had to struggle to get rid of. I began to pick up more “colorful” language; and by my junior year, fuck had become my favorite word. Think about its versatility. It can be a verb, adverb, noun, and adjective. I still love the word even though Mom has struggled to get me not to use it in public since the Nobel. She worries my language might tarnish my public image.
Casey and that Corvair sparked a sense of freedom that went beyond my initial joy at the thought of seeing Claude more easily. Perhaps the feeling also grew because other friends and I started talking about sororities. (Casey, of course, thought sororities completely lame and wouldn't give them a second of her time.) Maybe it was being invited to a frat party, and going. The boyfriend back home, now working for my father's vending company, seemed more and more mundane.
If Claude noticed any changes, he let them slide. He said nothing and I offered nothing. It would be the pattern of our communication during all our years together and not so together. The relationship dragged on painfully through the holidays before I escaped back to school for the second semester. I was a coward. Trips home became less frequent. I wanted the situation over with no pain involved. I wanted him to somehow intuit that we were broken up without my having to say a word. Couldn't he just kind of disappear?
Lacking the grace or guts to tell him in person, I got up the weak-kneed nerve to dump him over the phone. That way it would be easier to cut off the conversation if it got too difficult. Anyone who knows me now would swear I am lying through my teeth when I say that. No one believes that, when I was young, I'd do most anything to avoid confrontation. In those days, my escape techniques were fraught with hurt feelings, anger, and broken hearts.
Maybe we talked one more time by phone before school was out, but I didn't see Claude again until I was home for the summer. We dated some, and it went that way for the next couple of years. I'd give him little thought at school but go out with him when I was in Brattleboro. The fit was never the same as it had been during our first year of teenage love, but our story dragged on. And on.
· · ·
One night during the summer of 1969, Casey and I wandered downtown to a dance party outside the town's recreation center. We ran into Steve, one of Claude's best friends throughout high school. He wasn't the handsomest guy in high school, but he was one smooth talker and extremely well built. His nickname was Atty, after Charles Atlas, the best-known body builder of the time. It didn't take long for him to convince us to leave
