Lucky

  But by May 1981, none of those early fumblings mattered. Two hours in a dark tunnel made my yes-or-no struggles with the morality of sleeping with high school boys like Steve seem quaint.

  Steve had gone to Ursinus College his freshman year. He returned, having discovered a new passion for the musical Man of La Mancha. My mother, and my more hard-to-court father, loved his investment in the myth of La Mancha. What better choice to engage a professor of eighteenth-century Spanish than a musical based on Cervantes? Give or take a century, Steve Carbonaro could not have hit his mark cleaner. He spent hours that summer on the porch with my mother and father, being served coffee and talking about the books he loved and what he wanted to be when he grew up. I believe their attention was as important to him as anything else, and his attention to me was a godsend to my parents.

  The first time he visited the house that summer I told him I'd been raped. We may have gone out a few times, as friends, before I told him everything else. It was on the couch in the living room. My parents moved as silently as possible in the room above us. Whenever Steve came over, my father would duck into his study, or join my mother in her bedroom, where, in hushed whispers, they would try and conjecture what might be going on below.

  I told him everything I could bear to tell. I intended to tell him all the details but I couldn't. I edited as I went, stopping at blind corners where I felt I might fall apart. I kept the narrative linear. I did not stop to investigate how I felt about having the rapist's tongue in my mouth, about having to kiss back.

  He was both engaged and repulsed. Here, before him, was live performance, real tragedy, a drama he had access to that did not take place in books or in the poems he wrote.

  He called me Dulcinea. He sang the songs from Man of La Mancha out loud, in his white VW bug, and had me sing along. Singing these songs was vital to Steve. He cast himself as the central figure, Don Quixote de La Mancha, a man whom no one understands, a romantic who makes a crown of a barber's shaving bowl and a lady--Dulcinea--of the whore Aldonza. I was the latter.

  Following a song and scene called "The Abduction," where Aldonza is kidnapped, and, it is implied, gang-raped, Don Quixote comes upon her after she has been discarded by her captors. With the force of his imagination and will, Don Quixote insists on seeing this raped and beaten woman as his sweet and lovely maiden Dulcinea.

  Steve saved up and bought tickets for us to see Richard Kiley play the lead at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. This was my early birthday gift. We dressed up. My mother took photos. My father said I looked "like a real lady." I was embarrassed by the attention, but it was a night out, and with a boy, a boy who knew and had not rejected me. I fell in love with him for this.

  And yet, somehow, seeing it played out onstage, with Aldonza chased by a group of men, fondled and abused, her breasts grabbed like lobes of meat, I could not sustain the illusion that Steve Carbonaro found essential to our relationship. I was not a whore who, by virtue of his imagination and sense of justice, he could raise to the height of a lady. I was an eighteen-year-old girl who had wanted to be an archaeologist when I was four, and a poet or a Broadway star when I grew up. I had changed. The world I lived in was not the world that my parents or Steve Carbonaro still occupied. In my world, I saw violence everywhere. It was not a song or a dream or a plot point.

  I left Man of La Mancha feeling filthy.

  That night, Steve was exhilarated. He had seen what he knew to be truth, the truth of a romantic nineteen-year-old played out on the stage. He drove his Dulcinea home, sang to her in the car and, at his urging, she sang back to him. We were there for a long time. The windows steamed up from the singing. I went inside. Before I did, what was precious to me that summer happened one more time: A nice boy kissed me good night. Everything was tainted. Even a kiss.

  Looking back now, listening to the lyrics again, it is not lost on me, as it was then, that Don Quixote dies in the end, that Aldonza survives, that it is she who sings the refrain from "The Impossible Dream," she who is left standing to do battle.

  Things between us did not end gloriously; there was no bright, shining star or quest. Ultimately, Don Quixote had a hard time loving chaste and pure from afar. He found someone who would go all the way with him. The summer ended. It was time to go back to school again. Don Quixote would transfer to Penn; my father wrote him a passionate letter of recommendation. And I, with the eventual support of my parents, went back to Syracuse. Alone.

  SIX

  In my senior year of high school, I had applied to three colleges: Syracuse University, Emerson College in Boston, and the University of Pennsylvania, where I was supposed to have gotten in, a cinch as a faculty child. I did not want to go to Penn, or at least that's how I remember it. I had watched my sister move in and then quickly out of a dorm on Penn's campus, bring her possessions back to my parents' house, and commute her first year. If I had to go to college--which I spent the better part of four years in high school saying I didn't want to do--I wanted it to have the benefit of being far away.

  My parents humored me; they were desperate for me to go to college. They saw it as an essential gateway, the thing that had changed their own lives, particularly my father's. Neither of his parents had finished high school and the shame of this was like an ache to him; his academic achievements were fueled by a need to distance himself from his mother's bad grammar and his father's drunken dirty jokes.

  In my junior year of high school, my father and I visited Emerson, where long-haired students he called "throwbacks" advised me on how to break what they saw as oppressive rules.

  "You aren't supposed to have any electrical appliances," said the resident assistant of the dorm we toured. He had dark brown dirty hair and a scruffy beard. To me, he looked like John the bus driver, who had driven me to school during junior high and had dropped out of high school. Both these boys had the smell of true, authentic rebellion. They reeked of pot.

  "I got a toaster oven and a hair dryer," this John boasted, pointing toward a grease-coated toaster oven wedged into a set of handmade shelves. "Never use ' em at the same time, that's the trick."

  Though amused, my father was also shocked by this boy, his mangy looks, his position of authority in the dorms. My father may have been divided. Emerson had the reputation of being an arty school in a town of monoliths like Harvard and MIT. Even Boston University, whose campus we also visited and which my father praised, was far above Emerson's place on the food chain. But I liked Emerson. I liked how when we drove up to it and saw the sign, two of the letters were missing from it. This was my kind of place. I felt I could learn not to make toast and dry my hair at the same time.

  That night I had fun with my father. This is a rare event. My father does not have hobbies, wouldn't recognize a ball sport if the ball hit him in the head, and there are no cronies, there are only colleagues. The reason for relaxation of any kind is largely beyond him. "Fun is boring," he told me as a child when I attempted to coax him into playing a board game I had set up on the floor. It became one of his favorite phrases. He meant it.

  But I'd always had a hint that my father could be different away from us and away from my mother. That he had fun in other countries or with his male graduate students. I liked to get my father alone, and on the trip to Emerson, he and I shared a hotel room to save money.

  The night after a long day in Boston, I slipped into the twin bed nearest the bathroom. My father went down to the lobby to read and perhaps make a call to my mother. I was wound up and couldn't sleep. Earlier, I had gotten a bucket of tiny ice cubes from the hallway. I planned my attack. I took the ice cubes and put them in my father's bed, right down near the feet. I saved the remainder and placed them by my bed.

  I feigned sleep when my father returned. He changed into his pajamas in the bathroom, brushed his teeth, turned out the light. I could see the outline of him as he pulled the covers back to get inside. I was elated, if a bit frightened. He might just be plain mad. I counted, and then it came.
A ferocious yell followed by cursing. "For Christ's sakes, what the ... ?"

  I couldn't hold it. I started laughing uncontrollably.

  "Alice?"

  "Got ya," I said.

  At first, he was angry, but then he threw a cube. That was all it took.

  It was war. I threw back. Our beds were our bunkers. He threw great handfuls and, retrieving them, I used them as individuals, firing off rounds timed to get him just as he was coming up to strike. He was laughing and so was I. He had tried momentarily to be the parent, but he couldn't hold to it.

  I got what he thought was too hysterical and reached what my mother called my hyperactive state, so we stopped. But before that, oh, to see my father joyful, laughing. At moments like this I pretended my father was the big brother I'd never had. It was up to me to instigate, but when he was that repressed kid released, my whole heart wanted him to stay that way forever.

  Like a small-town girl might view Hollywood, I saw Syracuse as my big break. Compared with my sister's proximity to my parents, Syracuse was far away from home. Far enough so that I could redefine myself against what I had once been.

  My roommate was Nancy Pike. She was a roly-poly, overexcited girl from Maine. In the summer, she had found out my name and written me a letter. It was six enthusiastic pages long and regaled me with what she was bringing and their attendant definitions--"I have a hot pot. It is a little pot that looks like a coffee percolator but it's really only for hot water and has a plug that you plug in. It is great for making soups and water for tea though you should never put soup directly in it."

  I dreaded meeting her.

  As my mother, father, and I arrived on move-in day my head was swimming. This was my new life and here were all the new people in it. A coed dorm held possibilities I dared not outline to my parents. My mother had on her Donna Reed face, which was a particularly sickly smile imbued with positive thinking, dredged up from I never understood where. My father wanted to get the stuff out of the car and get it over with. He was not made, as he pointed out many times that day, "for heavy lifting."

  Nancy had gotten there first, chosen her bed, hung up a rainbow wall hanging, and begun to putter with her belongings. Her parents and siblings had stayed to meet me and my family. My mother's Donna Reed was cracking into panic. My father drew himself up to his full academic, Ivy League-professor height, the one from which he looked down on everybody who expressed interest in sports or daily life. "I was born two centuries too late," he is fond of saying, or, "I had no parents, I sprung from the Earth whole and unique." My mother could always manage a zinger: "Your father looks down on everybody because from that height, he's hoping they won't see his bad teeth."

  Weird family Sebold meets excited family Pike. The Pikes filtered out and took Nancy to lunch. The word that suited them best, I think, is crestfallen. Their sweet daughter had drawn a superfreak.

  Nancy and I didn't talk much in the first week. She would bubble and I would lie in my bunk and stare at the ceiling.

  At the bright, happy orientation exercises that the resident assistants led us on--"Okay, we're going to play a game called Living Priorities. Write these down. Studying. Volunteer work. Rushing sororities. Can anyone tell me what they would choose as a priority and why?"--my roommate had hand in air. During one interminable afternoon, when the girls of our floor sat cross-legged on the grass outside the dining hall, listening to a lecture on how to do laundry, I thought I had been dropped off at a camp for morons by my parents.

  I stomped into the dorm. It had been a week and I had refused to go to the dining hall with the other girls for dinner. When Nancy asked why, I said I was fasting. Later, when I was hungry, I asked her to bring me food. "It has to be white food," I said. "No colors. Erik Satie ate only white food." My poor roommate brought home mounds of cottage cheese and giant pearl tapioca. I lay in bed, hating Syracuse and listening to Erik Satie, from whose liner notes my new regime came.

  One night I heard noise in the room next to mine. Everyone else was at dinner. I went out into the hall. A door was slightly ajar.

  "Hello?" I said.

  It was the most beautiful girl on the floor. The one my mother had pointed out on move-in day. "Just be glad that gorgeous blonde isn't your roommate. The line of boys would be out the door."

  "Hello."

  I went in. She had just gotten a whole footlocker of food sent from home. It was open against the wall. After a week of white food, it was an oasis. M&;M's and cookies and crackers and Starbursts and fruit leather. Products I had never even heard of or wasn't allowed to have.

  But she wasn't eating. She was braiding her hair. A French braid. I expressed my admiration and told her I'd never been able to do more than simple braids.

  "I'll do it for you if you want."

  I sat on her bed and she stood behind me and began to take the small pinches of hair and work a skull-numbingly tight French braid down the back of my head.

  She finished the braid and I thanked her and looked in the mirror. We both sat and then laid down on the two twin beds in the room. We were quiet, staring at the ceiling.

  "Can I tell you something?" I asked.

  "Sure."

  "I hate it here."

  "Oh, my God!" she said, sitting up, flushed with permission. "I hate it here too!"

  We ate our way through her trunk of food. I have a memory of actually sitting in the trunk with the food but this can't be right, can it?

  Mary Alice's roommate was what we called experienced. She was from Brooklyn. Her name was Debbie and her nickname was Double D. She smoked and thought little of us. She had a from-home boyfriend who was older. And I mean older. Early forties, but with the agelessness of Joey Ramone. He was a DJ somewhere and had a deep smoker's voice. When he visited, they went to hotels and Debbie returned to the dorm with her cheeks flushed and clearly, again, disgusted by us. Mary Alice had long toes and would feed me crackers by digging them into the box. We dressed up in stupid outfits and, with coupons from cocoa mix, sent away for a real Swiss Miss cardboard chalet.

  Debbie began two-timing her boyfriend with a male cheerleader from school. Her new boyfriend's name was Harry Weiner and of course Mary Alice and I had endless fun with that. Once, on a dare, I hid inside the Swiss Miss chalet while Debbie and Harry went at it on the bed. At a certain point, dare or no, I felt too uncomfortable and crawled, on my hands and knees, with the cardboard chalet moving with me like some sort of cartoon spy's camouflage, over to the door to make my escape.

  Debbie was incensed. She put in for a room transfer. Mary Alice never stopped thanking me.

  Within a few weeks of the start of freshman year, a group of girls gathered in the hall outside our rooms. We sat on the floor, with our backs against the walls, our legs outstretched or Indian-style. The former homecoming queens or future flirts tucked their legs to one side, while the jocks on scholarship, like my friend Linda, didn't think twice about how they sat or looked while surrounded by their peers. Slowly the stories came out--who was and wasn't a virgin.

  Some were obvious. Like Sara, who sold hash out of her black-lit room, where she had a stereo system that cost more than most of our fathers' cars, on which she played the classic stoner tracks of Traffic and Led Zep. "Some guy's in there," her assigned roommate would say, and we would throw this girl a sleeping bag and tell her not to snore.

  Then there was Chippie. I had never heard the word before. Didn't know it meant whore. Thought it actually was her name, and innocently said, "Hi, Chippie, how are you?" on the way to the showers one morning. She burst into tears and never talked to me again.

  There was also a girl who was a sophomore and lived at the end of the hall. She dated a townie and modeled for Joel Belfast, a semi-famous painter in the art department. The townie liked to chain her up to her bunk bed and we would see her leather and ultrasuede bras and panties as she hurried to and from the lavatory in the morning. The townie rode a motorcycle and had an atrophied left leg. Once, on the night th
e campus security arrived because they were making so much noise, I saw the scar that rose up out of the top of his boot and snaked up past his hip and around the back of his body. She was stoned and screaming on the bed, where she remained chained up. Soon after, she moved into off-campus housing somewhere.

  These girls and Debbie were the only four on a hall of fifty that I knew for sure weren't virgins. The rest had to be, I assumed, because I was.

  But even Nancy told a story. She had lost it in a Datsun to her high school boyfriend. Tree in a Toyota. Diane in the basement of a boyfriend's house. Her boyfriend's parents had knocked on the window during the act. The other stories I've forgotten, and remember only that the make of the car became a nickname for various girls. Few were the glorious cases--a boyfriend who had bought a ring, chosen a special night, and brought flowers, or had his older brother's downtown apartment for the day. When these girls spoke we didn't believe them anyway. It was better to say Datsun or Toyota or Ford; it was dues for a peer group, a way to belong.

  When that evening of revelation was through, Mary Alice and I, among those outside their rooms, were the only two virgins on the hall.

  These fumbled sexual exploits in the backs of cars or in the basements of someone's parents' house seem wonderful to me. Nancy was ashamed of having lost "it," as we all called virginity, in a Datsun, but it was, after all, a normal part of growing up.

  In letters sent me over the breaks that year Tree and Nancy were spending every night with their high school boyfriends. For Tree there was talk of a ring being bought. These girls began to take over my landscape.

  I also got letters from the boys I'd worked with at my summer job after high school, particularly an older guy named Gene. I begged Gene to send me a photo. Of course, I pretended to the other girls he was more than just a friend, and I wanted evidence to show around.

  The photo he sent was clearly a few years old. He was thinner and had more hair but there was the handle-bar mustache that shouted out man. When I finally got the photo late in the first semester I showed it around. Mary Alice cut to the core. "Is it the seventies still? I feel a disco ball dropping down." Nancy pretended to be impressed but she and Tree were too busy keeping connected with their real boyfriends--boys they'd gone to high school with, whom they had promised to marry someday.