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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 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 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 the dance and go have a couple of beers.
Atty drove us to the top of Memorial Park, the hill where I'd first learned to ski. We got out of the car and sat on the grass. After one beer, he pulled out a joint. I stiffened. I'd never smoked pot in my life and until then had never even been in its proximity. I almost believed a joint was the beginning of an inevitable path to heroin addiction. They both knew I didn't smoke, and I chattered worriedly about how it might make me feel. I had the sense to stop short of mentioning the road to heroin. They laughed and mocked me as they passed the joint.
The pot smelled sweet and inviting. I'm still drawn to the odor if not the substance itself; perhaps it reminds me of incense. While we sat around and talked, I didn't notice the smoke transforming them into raving lunatics. They only seemed to be laughing more. That didn't seem so bad, so I took a toke. Like every neophyte smoker you've ever seen, and to the amusement of Casey and Atty, I began hacking like my lungs were in danger of falling out. But they were willing teachers, and it didn't take long before I could successfully inhale, hold in the smoke, and not erupt.
Just as I was proclaiming that I didn't feel a thing, the night seemed richer and the air velvety. The stars shone more brightly and looked magical in the sky. Casey and Atty were simply hilarious, two of the funniest people I'd ever heard in my life. We were brilliant, fantastically attractive, and life was wonderful and full of adventure! Right then and there, Casey and I decided we absolutely had to go to the Newport Jazz Festival. We weren't into jazz, but in ‘69 the festival was going to be a fusion of jazz and rock, and the bands were ones we wanted to hear.
The plan was to borrow my dad's station wagon so we could sleep in the back. We'd take off early Friday and spend the long Fourth of July weekend there. When I talked to my dad about it, I made the festival sound as innocuous as possible, and it was easy to get the car. The truth of the matter is that my parents remained pathetic at saying no, my father in particular. In a typical parent-child scenario, he said yes if Mom agreed. Mom agreed because I told her Dad had already said yes. Mary Beth heard it all, and suddenly we were a trio. Casey, my sister, and I packed up the car and roared off to Newport.
It was one hell of a weekend. It wasn't the first concert I'd heard, but Newport was the first weekend-long music festival any of us had been to. Some of the jazz greats played, such as Miles Davis, but we were there for the rock and roll: Jethro Tull; Johnny Winter; Blood, Sweat and Tears; and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, capped off by Led Zeppelin. None of us can remember if we were still there for that closing act. In any case, the band that brought down my house was Sly and the Family Stone. They took us “high-igh-er. Baby, baby, baby light my fi-re. High-igh-igh-igh-higher!”
Maybe we slept in the back of the station wagon; Casey and Mary Beth insist we slept on the side of a hill. But sleeping didn't matter. It was the thousands of people, tens of thousands of people. It was the bands and the music. It was the dawning of the age of Aquarius! You didn't have to have pot, the air was pot. We left Newport committed to going to every music event we could possibly get to. For the rest of our lives. Watch out, Woodstock, here we come!
I have no idea what we looked like when we pulled into Brattleboro, but whatever it was did not impress my parents. No to our using the car. No to our commitment to music. And most definitely no to Woodstock. It proved to be one of the few times when my parents held firm to “no.” We couldn't even make an attempt to sneak off in the Corvair, because somehow I'd managed to render it inoperable by the end of the school year. Something my father never let me forget.
But if my parents thought they would stave off my transformation to college hippie by making Woodstock off-limits, they were wrong. Eventually.
· · ·
Although I'd started my college career while pining away for Claude and most of the family, Steve wasn't one I missed. He'd made it through high school at Austine but just barely. After that, he had only two different jobs, neither of which lasted for more than a couple of weeks.
First, he went to Poultney and stayed with my grandparents while Grampa tried to teach him to run the big presses at his printing business. The horrible noise they generated wouldn't bother Steve, but routine did. He couldn't or wouldn't focus, and he never made it to work on time or stayed there until the end of the workday. Quickly, he ended up back at home with my parents. He fared just as badly in the second job and has never worked since.
My brother's pleasures in life have been few. In addition to smoking cigarettes, he has watched endless hours of television, often way into the night, while eating nonstop. His rhythm was often out of synch with the family's, which in many ways was a blessing. He'd sleep all day and be up all night. He'd take the car and drive endlessly. My parents worried he'd get into a serious accident somewhere and it would take forever to find him. There were times we all hoped that, if he did crash, he'd never see it coming, that it would be blessedly painless and instantly fatal.
As Steve's physical violence toward Mom had accelerated, Dad began to say that if he ever knew he was terminally ill, he'd take Steve with him before he died so Mom wouldn't have to face him alone. I think my father believed he meant it. We all knew he'd never be able to do such a thing. And of course Mom already had to face Steve alone whenever my father was working. My brother's tirades grew, and the tense calm between them shrank.
Not long before I was to go back to UVM for my sophomore year, Steve completely lost control, with no perceptible provocation. Had he seen a picture of Castro somewhere? Had Elizabeth Taylor's lusty life set him off again? Maybe, maybe not.
Mom and I were in the kitchen with Steve, who was showing signs of going off, and as usual she was trying to calm him down. I, on the other hand, was fairly certain I knew all things in the world better than anyone else, and I had little tolerance for her feeble attempts at soothing him. I believed it was way past time to tell him to fuck off and to approach him head-on.
Steve was working himself into a lather, and he was in Mom's face. But this time he raised a hand toward her. I threw myself at him, not only to get him away from my mother, but also because I wanted to smash him one for myself. It became generalized chaos. Mom managed to break through to me, and we started backing away from the scuffle through the kitchen door into the dining room. Suddenly Steve grabbed a butcher knife and was coming our way.
We scrambled out the front door and locked ourselves in her car in the driveway. It was blisteringly hot, one of the few times in a Vermont summer back then when it got really hot. Mom and I sat sweating in the car, too scared to roll down the windows and get some air, even though he'd not followed us out.
Steve appeared in one of the dining room windows overlooking the driveway. He stood there flailing about with the knife and yelling, yelling, yelling. Then he turned the knife toward his chest, indicating he was going to kill himself. Mom might have been crying, but I lifted my arms to make sure he could see them and began to clap. I was egging him on, hoping he might actually do it and give us all some relief.
But we all knew he'd never kill himself. It was so much more satisfying to torture the entire family. Besides, suicide was a mortal sin, and he'd go straight to hell and never achieve his dream of being like everyone else. How come the world got Helen Keller and we got Stephen John Williams? It's a question that still crosses my mind.
A couple of days later, he went after Mom again. This time I wasn't home. She ran upstairs to her bedroom, closed the door, and locked it with the chain lock Dad had installed. As she was calling my father, Steve threw himself against the door and crashed through, splitting one of the door panels in the process and ripping the lock out of the wood. He looked ready to strangle her.
This time it was Mark who jumped in. Mark was a little over fifteen, still short and slight and no match for Steve. But the fact that his little brother was standing up to him stopped Steve that day.
Ten-year-old Janet was probably hiding behind the living room sofa or under her bed, and Mary Beth was out somewhere escaping the chaos. As much as possible during the summer, Mary Beth stayed with friends at the lake. Mom and I were usually in the house, making the potato and macaroni salads and the sandwiches to fill Dad's vending machines.
A few days later, Steve tried to strangle Mom in the kitchen with the telephone cord. Somehow we managed to call my father and the police. By the time the police arrived, followed by the county sheriff, my brother's fury had abated. He was shaken and full of agitated remorse. He was confused and couldn't understand why the police were there. When the sheriff put him in the car to take him to the county jail in Newfane, he was exhausted, deflated, and terrified. No one in the family was in a much better state, and it only got worse.
Mom and Dad went to see him in Newfane, where he cried and begged to come home, promising that he'd never be “bad” again. They returned from the jail without him and emotionally in shambles. Both of them cried for their son. They cried for their inability to make him happy. They cried for his inexplicable anger and for their self-perceived failings as parents. I cried for them, but I didn't cry for Steve. Not yet.
The court determined my brother to be a danger to himself and to others and incapable of making his own decisions. He was to be taken directly to Waterbury, the state mental institution, for observation and supposedly for help. Dad was made my adult brother's legal guardian by order of the court and remained so until he died at the beginning of 2004, when Mom took on the role.
My parents felt acute agony tinged with hope. Maybe, just maybe, someone at Waterbury would be able to figure out the root of Steve's anger. But Mom's novenas didn't work that time either.
Mom and Dad couldn't face seeing their son in Waterbury. I don't remember how I felt about that at the time. Although I wanted Steve to quietly disappear from the face of the earth without a trace, it was impossible to leave him alone and afraid. He'd been absolutely terrified just a few miles from Brattleboro at the county jail, and he knew Newfane. Nobody wanted to think about what he was going through at Waterbury, but it had to be much worse. So countless times over the year that he was there, I borrowed a friend's car and drove the twenty-one miles south to Waterbury to see my brother.
A few weeks after he'd been admitted, Steve was permitted to go out on the hospital grounds during the day. But the only thing my brother wanted after he got to Waterbury was to go home. The minute he was out the door, he walked straight over to the interstate, which you could see from the hospital, and hitchhiked back to Brattleboro.
When my startled and frightened mother saw him come in the front door, she immediately called Waterbury, only to find they hadn't noticed he'd left. This happened several more times until the powers that be, in their eternal enlightenment, decided to lock my brother up with the seriously insane. My first visit to him then mirrored scenes from Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Big locked doors slid open to let me into a large open room. As they clicked shut behind me, I saw my brother on the other side of the room, just as he saw me. He watched me make my way to him. The room was peopled with ravaged examples of humanity, many of them shuffling about, in various states of disarray. Others slouched in chairs, open eyes fixed on nothing as they drooled through their day. I wondered what drugs they were given to keep them that way.
It was too agitating to look around and take everything in, so I tried to breathe deeply and move through it. I couldn’t avoid seeing two men sitting on the floor, propped against the wall, vigorously handling their exposed genitals. They howled when they saw me, and Steve could see I was freaked out. He stepped between me and the men and told me not to worry, that he’d protect me. He flexed his muscles to show me he was man enough to take on all the crazies, as he put it. Maybe he could protect me if need be, but who in that hellhole was protecting him?
That day after I left Steve there, I did cry in horror and empathy and anger. This time my anger wasn’t directed at my brother but at those who ran Waterbury. What exactly were they doing for him? There were no psychiatrists or social workers there who understood sign language. The administration didn’t have the presence of mind or the interest or will to bring in sign interpreters so the “mental health care professionals” could, at a minimum, try to communicate with my brother. Steve was never diagnosed, nor was he given medication. He simply did his time and, one year later, was released. He returned to Brattleboro and resumed life with the family.
The mere passage of time had not magically cured him. His curse was not acute, like Mom’s depression when we first moved to Brattleboro, nor was he simply an “angry deaf man.” His condition was chronic. But what the hell was it, and how was he ever going to have a life? His rage had not dissipated, but it was held in check for some time by his terror at the thought of going back to Waterbury. That threat was the only real weapon my parents could wield to manage his violence.
· · ·
My brother was released from Waterbury shortly before I got home for summer vacation. But I had a plan. I wasn’t going to make sandwiches with Mom all summer for my father’s vending machines. I got a job waitressing at Howard Johnson’s. I’d spend less time near Steve, and maybe, since Claude and I wouldn’t both be working for my father, I’d manage not to go out with him over the summer.
I was looking forward to renewed summer fun with Casey, but she had other plans. On the spur of the moment, she’d decided to stay in Burlington to work for the summer and had found someone to share an apartment with. I was stuck home with my parents. With Steve. Who was I going to mess around with; where was my escape?
It was a dismal prognosis. Nor did I excel at being a waitress—then or a decade later, when I got fired after two weeks of “wait training” at a new restaurant on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Waiting on people is not my forte. Howard Johnson’s was particularly uninspiring. One week, I managed to get a few days off, tacked onto a long weekend, and went to Burlington. I wanted to hang out with Casey and meet her roommate, Linda, at their apartment on Monroe Street in a less-than-great neighborhood (although, that didn’t have much meaning in Burlington, Vermont, in 1970).
When Casey opened the door to their apartment, my view of the place was consumed by Linda, who was draped across an old sofa in the living room decorated with an Indian-print bedspread. She was wrapped in a sheet and engaged in intense conversation with a man, also wearing only a sheet, who was at least twenty-five years older than she was. His salt-and-pepper hair was wavy and full and he spoke with an indeterminate European accent. They were smoking Gauloises cigarettes and discussing poetry or philosophy or freedom or the lack of it. They could have been talking about waste management and it would have sounded heady to me.
Linda was the most exotic person I’d ever met. She was slim with huge breasts for her size and liquid brown eyes that filled her thin face. Her beautiful cheekbones were objects of envy, and her fine, wavy brown hair framed her face perfectly. And how did a girl from Burlington, Vermont, get to be so worldly?
I was taking all this in as Casey, who, thankfully, was fully dressed, broke into their conversation to introduce us. They were friendly enough but immediately returned to their conversation as Casey took me to her room and showed me the mattress on the floor where I’d be sleeping.
Those first few hours in Burlington, I felt awkward, drab, and pedestrian, like a kid in junior high school trying to fit in with adults. By the end of my stay, I felt more or less comfortable in a sheet myself. I’d also smoked my first cigarette, which made me so faint and ill I had to take to my mattress. (Fortunately, I never became a smoker.) Most important, I’d engaged in what I considered to be mind-broadening discussions with Casey and Linda and her European friend.
With each passing hour my dread at having to return home to my parents and Steve increased. The thought of waiting on people at Howard Johnson’s and the seeming inevitability of dates with Claude bored and depressed me. And almost from the minute I’d gotten to Burlington, Casey had been badgering me to stay with her and Linda for the rest of the summer. The spare mattress in her room was mine if I wanted it.
For the rest of that summer and my last two years at the university, I lived off campus in apartments I rented with friends. Monroe Street for those few weeks in the summer was fine, but when the three of us returned to school, it wasn’t going to work. Fortunately I was able to move in with Judy Rand, another friend from home in need of a roommate. She had been one of Mary Beth’s closest friends since fourth grade. It was Judy who taught my sister to smoke and swear—my mother’s preferred take, again, on who’d done the teaching—so I knew her well.
Then, senior year, it was Casey, Judy, and me sharing an apartment just down the street from where Mary Beth lived with yet another friend of hers from home. She’d hated the first college she’d gone to and had dropped out after the first semester. After deciding that working for a living with just a high school diploma wouldn’t do, she came to UVM to begin her nurse’s training as I entered my last year there.
Fragments of memories from each of those apartments linger in my mind, but no place could ever compare with Monroe Street, where my transformation from button-down almost-sorority girl to genuine, barefoot, ripped-dungaree-wearing college hippie was seemingly completed.
