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 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