se, until I was 9. We didn't have television in our house until I was 10. And, unlike virtually everyone else I knew, I didn't have a middle name... The no-middle-name thing took on too much importance to a little girl who wanted to fit in as badly as I did. However, I soon discovered a way to "get" a middle name for myself. I would simply go through the confirmation ceremony that all young Catholics go through and then use my confirmation name as my middle name. My parents were a couple of nervous, eager, brilliant, kindly, Catholics in their mid-twenties. My father had graduated ninth in his class, at Harvard Law School. My mother had excelled in her graduate studies, too. She had been just a thesis away from getting a Doctorate in Comparative Literature, when she had dropped out of Graduate School, to marry my father, in 1953. On October 14, 1954, I arrived into the world, the flailing, screaming, tow-headed firstborn. By all accounts, I was in turns smiling/sweet and loud/autocratic. My parents nicknamed me "Mother Abbess". They adored me and I idolized them. But the shining little world I quickly built up, in which I was the sole center of my parent's universe, came to an abrupt, screeching halt a month before my 2nd birthday. That was when my mother went away on a week-long, mysterious journey, only to reemerge with a brand new baby---my brother Bobby. I have been told that upon first view of my mother, newly dispatched from the hospital with brand-new Bobby, I looked up at her with hurt, solemn eyes and said in a quiet voice, "Hello, Betsy..." Betsy was my mother's older sister, with whom I had been staying. I do not think that I truly mistook my mother for her 7-years-older sister. Rather, I imagine that I was just expressing my hurt at my mother for her recent one-week desertion. But, my mother did bear a more than passing resemblance to Betsy. Both had dark brown, curly hair, glasses, slender figures, good bone structure, and attractive faces. But Betsy, at 5'7" or 8", had the regal carriage and attitude that had gotten her offers of modeling jobs, when she was in college. After the advent of Bobby, my mother seemed to be continually pregnant when I was little. Before my eighth birthday, I would have five brothers. A change-of-life girl child, the female baby for which I had prayed ever since I had figured out my mother's predisposition to bear male children, was finally added to our disorganized, boisterous but well- meaning mix when I was thirteen. From the beginning, both my parents gave all of us the tremendous gift of their fierce, undying love. However, along with the immense sense of flattery I felt at having such a gift bestowed upon me, I sometimes experienced this "gift" as an overwhelming burden. Since my parents were good, kind and sweet in an unhypocritical, unworldly way, I knew that they represented everything that I, as a good little Catholic girl should aspire to. The only thing that I sometimes questioned was how on earth a mischievous young hoyden like me could ever achieve the lofty goals with which my parents seemed so at ease. My parents both came from small families and comparatively quiet, well run households. We children must have provided a somewhat rude jarring shock to my modest, genteel courteous parents. In contrast to them, we were often as loud, ill- mannered, disrespectful, and uncivilized as we could possibly be. I knew if only on an unconscious level, from the time I was quite young, that I was not exactly the Catholic Church's poster dream child. I was mischievous, rebellious, and willful. I understood that I lacked certain characteristics the presence of which would certainly have made being a good Catholic girl easier. Virtues such as patience, restraint, humility, tact and temperance were in notably short supply in the makeup of my character. And whenever I was even tempted to have any doubt of the efficacy of having and practicing the aforementioned virtues, my youthful irrepressibility would almost inevitably be snuffed out by a nun or other religious authority figure, in her (---it usually seemed to be a "her" ---) forbidding stare, her almost imperceptible shake of head, her censorious , long warning frown, and/or a silencing finger on her lips. A first communion photograph pictures a six-year-old, radiant me, with my hands folded in prayer, my light eyes sparkling with mischief and my what I am sure was meant to be a pious smile spreading into an uncontrollable grin. And from beneath the skirt of my frilly white first communion dress peeks not two legs but one. The other one is purposely bent back so as to be out of the camera's view... Long before I knew of the transgressions that had made Mary Magdalene one of the Bible's main "bad girls", I felt a kinship with her that I did not know with Mary, Jesus' mother. The latter tended to have churches named after her with dolorous sounding names, names like " Our Lady of a Thousand Abysmal Thinly Veiled Sorrows". It was clear that Our Lady had the virtues I was lacking in, in abundance. However, the martyrlike, pious, almost-too-saintly-for-words preconception I had of Our Lady failed to fully impress me. It was only years after I was fully grown and had long ceased struggling against invisible ties that bound, that I would start to peel away the pseudo-sanctimonious image with which, for me, the Blessed Virgin had always been inextricably fettered, and recognize her for the strong, gutsy lady she was. **************** When I was 7, our family moved into a big old middle class house complete with white picket fences, trees lining the sidewalks and red bricks paving the streets. I still didn't feel I fit into the neighborhood I had moved into, though. The other houses tended to be cleaner than my own. Their families, be they big or small, Catholic or Protestant, were more neat, orderly and well organized. The other girls of the neighborhood tended, with very few exceptions, to either be a few years older than me or a couple of years younger. Being as painfully shy and insecure as I was, I did not even try to make friends with the older girls. Some of the younger girls were friendly enough. A few of them, however, hated me on sight. ******************** There are a number of things that I have always admired about my parents. They unselfconsciously cherished each other, and their children, from Day One. The rare times they fought they did so in private, lowering their civilized, well-cultured voices, never losing their politeness with each other. They stood up for causes, such as civil rights, years before it became popular and trendy, among certain more liberal circles to do so. They held themselves up to the same high moral standards that they set for their children. It simply did not occur to either of them to ever do something so morally repugnant as lying, cheating or stealing. My mother and father were very careful to follow all the rules that the Catholic Church had set out. They emphatically believed in their faith and did everything they could to determine that we were raised as good Catholics as well as people of ethical character. The main ingredient that my parents lacked was the organizational skills needed to run an ever-growing family smoothly and efficiently enough so that its members would be encouraged to feel not only loved but well adjusted. My mother having come from a priveleged background, where maids and cooks were the order of the day, had scarcely had to learn to cook and clean for herself, let alone for a noisy, ever-increasing brood of children. Much as she tried, she could not clean our house as quickly as we could mess it up. She could not provide us with clean clothes as fast as we could dirty them. And her culinary skills left something to be desired. Pictures flash before me, in my mind's eye of my mother, in those early days, forever pregnant, or recovering from her most recent pregnancy, an anxious, wearied look on her soft, kind face, usually sporting clothes that were sizes too big for her and that did nothing to flatter her slight figure or her pale coloring. She could not seem to find anybody to cut her dark curly hair in a way that would properly embellish her delicate face. And a little bit of the right makeup ---she usually limited herself to a slash of dark lipstick---might have done wonders to enhance her fine features. I am positive she was exhausted, at times from the sheer physical and emotional demands that having all those babies in that short amount of time imposed. She admitted to me recently that there were a number of times, in those years, when she had felt she "just couldn't cope". Though she had never said anything to me about these feelings, when they were going on, I caught their impressions, at times, to the marrow of my bones. Those feelings frightened me. If my mom didn't feel capable of coping with the various twists and turns that the big, bad world handed out, how on earth was I supposed to learn coping skills? I think that the real problem was that though she would eventually show herself to be a woman quite capable of dealing with life's blows she didn't have much confidence in her ability to do so. That my mother had trouble coping would become almost a self-fulfilling prophesy. I certainly bought into it. My reaction to my perception of my mother's inability to deal with some of the cold hard truths of the world was to keep from her certain facts about me, my behavior, and some of my real feelings about things. When I was growing up, I thought that I must be the only little girl in the civilized world whose mother, on those rare occasions when she forgot her hat for Church services, would bobby-pin a Kleenex to her head, in order to fit the Roman Catholic dictum that females should always have their heads covered in the house of God. It was only recently that I learned that the Kleenex-on-the-head occurrence had not been just a weird aberration invented by my mother. In fact a number of people in my age group with Catholic backgrounds, have lately had their own Kleenex-on-the-head stories to relate to me. My mother, however, sometimes wore things I wouldn't have been caught dead in, even if I had been in her age group. I remember the time I was 9, and couldn't find my bathing cap, to wear to a family outing to the lake. My mother grabbed a shower cap, with the idea that I could simply wear it, instead of a bathing cap, to swim in. I flatly refused. My parents made me sit in the car, fuming, for a time, while the rest of my family went swimming. After about 20 minutes, my mother relented. She came back to the car saying cheerfully, "All right...I won't make you wear the shower cap! I'll wear it instead!!!" I didn't have the heart to tell her that to have one's mother wear a shower cap to swim in the lake is only a tad less embarrassing to a nine-year-old girl, than being forced to wear one oneself. The shower cap and kleenex-on-the-head episodes simply contributed to the impression I got from my mother that she didn't care about how she looked, that she didn't care about clothes, that while it was all right to care about clothes, it was more virtuous not to be bothered with things like keeping in fashion and remember God loved you no matter how you looked, anyway... Our family wasn't exactly poor but it was big enough so we often didn't have as nice clothes as we would have liked. My brothers and I wore a lot of hand-me-downs. Mine were usually handed down by some older neighborhood girls. Almost invariably, these were a couple sizes too big to fit me and many inches too long to be in fashion. Since my mother didn't sew and I wouldn't start to learn how until I was in junior high school, I just had to wear them as they were. Of course all of my clothes were not ill-fitting hand-me- downs. But in Cleland School, the private school where I spent 2nd, 3rd and 4th Grades, and nearly all my classmates could afford to be as expensively and appropriately dressed as they needed or cared to be, I definitely stood out as an underprivileged sore thumb. When I was in 2nd and 3rd Grades, this difference didn't matter overwhelmingly. Nonetheless in 4th Grade it took on too much importance. That was the year that Cindy, a new addition to our class, seemed to go on a campaign to make my existence miserable. "Why do you always wear your dresses so LONG, Anne??" she would exclaim in a loud enough voice to be overheard by our other classmates. This chant would regularly be taken up by some of the other people in my class, while I tried futilely to think of befitting defensive retorts. Also, whenever I ventured an opinion about anything, Cindy was as like as not to snort "Who doesn't know THAT?" Cindy freely criticized a number of things about me during that year. The fact that I was both attractive and smart was almost totally obfuscated by other more obvious things I also was: absent-minded, untidy, shy, awkward, uncoordinated and graceless. Cute little Cindy, who could always afford the most stylish dresses still stands out in my mind, as being the 4th Grade classmate who, more than anybody else, wouldn't, for a second, let me forget my numerous shortcomings. As if having to encounter Cindy on a daily basis weren't bad enough, I also had to deal with a particularly troublesome instructor. Upon having her as my teacher, Mrs. Grant and I formed a society of mutual animosity, rather quickly. I really tried to like her. Up till then, I had liked nearly all of my teachers. Mrs. Grant, however, was different. From the beginning, I could sense that I irritated her. I do not think she could handle the fact that I was a disorganized, messy daydreamer and was usually totally unprepared for her lessons or tests. I imagine she could sense I was holding out on her, not performing anywhere near the level I was capable of. To add insult to injury, my best friend, Candy, was one of Mrs. Grant's favorite students. So was Cindy. I suspect that besides being bright and far more organized than I was, Candy and Cindy were part of a group of students that was more acquiescent (at least on the surface) when acceding to Mrs. Grant's wishes than I could ever bring myself to be. My brother Bobby was in 2nd Grade in Cleland that year. In contrast to the difficult relationship between me and Mrs. Grant, Bobby's teacher of that year thought the sun and moon rose on Bobby and his opinions, that he could do no wrong. Soon it seemed he believed her, at least in part. For my part, my feelings were hurt intensely by Mrs. Grant. The few times she wasn't using an irritated, aggrieved tone of voice to speak to me, she seemed incapable of not adopting a patronizing or falsely pleasant sound in her speech. So Mrs. Grant thought I was holding out on her, did she? As I withdrew more and more that year into my own private defensive shell, I would give new meaning to the term "holdout"! The next year my parents took me and my brother out of the too expensive private school and put us in Madison, a public school a block from our house. Things were a little better there. I was still agonizingly bashful, self conscious and uncoordinated. I would have to endure more than my share of teasing because I was part of that Rodes family who was just too weird and rambunctious to fit in no matter how hard some of us tried. But I liked my 5th Grade teacher Miss Smith. Small and spare with a no nonsense attitude about her, I could sense the kindness that lay beneath her slightly gruff manner. I got through that year all right, though I made hardly any new friends. I never could warm to one of my main 6th Grade teachers, Miss Woodworth, a fussy strict lady who must have been in her 60's. Miss Woodworth had an annoying habit of furiously raging at me, such things as " You only hear what you WANT to hear, Anne!" and "I am out of patience with you, Anne, and am I ever out of patience with you!" I would stand by silently fuming, listening to her berate me yet again, just itching, but not daring, to answer her back, to say "If I DID only hear what I wanted to hear I CERTAINLY wouldn't be standing here listening to you yell at me now" and "Miss Woodworth, you are ALWAYS out of patience with me anyway, so why should I even bother to try to get in your good graces?" Miss Woodworth notwithstanding, 6th Grade was a good year, for me. I liked my homeroom teacher, Mr. Fiwek. I got along with most of my classmates and started making friends with some of them. The teasing slowed down. Even though I still didn't dress in the height of fashion, my clothes weren't notably bad. I started parting my long blond hair on the side and letting it flow loosely about my face, in a more grown up, au courant style, instead of scraping it straight back with a plastic headband. My old friend, Candy, from Cleland School (which had just been renamed Stanley Clarke School and was more prohibitively expensive than ever) started going to Madison that year. At an age when too much importance is placed on fitting in, I fit in better. Consequently, I was reasonably happy in 6th Grade. Junior High brought about changes, some of them not all that pleasant. I had to start doing courses in "Home Economics" and "Guidance". With her demure glasses, sedate A-line skirts that hung a few inches below the knees and her perfectly permed brown hair, (----I can't remember whether or not she wore a string of faux pearls---) Mrs. Hartshough, my Home Ec. teacher had the look and unfortunately many of the most disconcerting attitudes of a fifties housewife. Unhappily, Mrs. Hartshough and I quite quickly developed an antipathy toward each other. She particularly aroused my ill will the time I was sweeping the floor and my classmate was laughing at my clumsiness in doing this. Mrs. Hartshough, instead of firmly telling my classmate to go on about her business, made a bad situation infinitely worse by almost smiling at my classmate, as she said, her voice dripping tones of tainted honey "Hush Debby, Anne can't HELP it if she sweeps awkwardly!" Mrs. Hartshough induced my disbelief and my eternal scorn the time she had a sex talk with our class. The talk consisted, in part, of two vintage movies straight out of the early fifties; "Girls Beware" and "Boys Beware". From these movies' points of view girls should beware of taking babysitting jobs from people they didn't know because they might end up getting murdered. Girls should also beware of unscrupulous young men trying to go all the way with them; that might lead to an unwanted pregnancy. Boys, on the other hand should just simply beware, or rather be aware, of the cleanliness of the females they chose to bed; otherwise they might end up with dreaded social diseases. The movies, to my recollection, said nothing about the social diseases sexually active girls could be privy to. It also made no mention of the toll an unwanted pregnancy could take on an unwed father. Why were movies this sexistly one-sided still being shown to twelve and thirteen year olds in 1968, I wondered. They made some valid points but fell far short of the whole truth, even the limited version of that truth I knew then. The rest of the sex talk consisted of Mrs. Hartshough, discussing the meaning of various sexual terms she had written on the blackboard. When she came to the word "rape" she said something so astounding, so patently false that her words will be forever burned into my memory. She remarked, almost casually, "I don't really think there IS any such thing as RAPE! I think the woman would have to HELP the man..." Yeah, right, I thought to myself, more than a little disgustedly. I was 13 and would be a virgin for four more years. But apparently her greater sexual experience as a married woman had not taught her a thing when it came to discussing something as repugnant and real as rape. She would just prefer to believe that such a thing simply did not exist. Mrs. Hartshough's Home Economics course was the only subject I ever got a "D" in, in Grade School, though only for one grading period. She was not the only teacher I did not get along with, though. There was, for example, Mr. Martin, my Eighth grade English teacher and Guidance Counselor. Mr. Martin, or "Ferd" as we called him behind his back, was a rather heavy man who slicked back his black hair with gel. Mr. Martin had the more than a little obnoxious habit of opining his unfavorable view of teenage behavior and logic. According to the narrow world which Ferd Martin populated, teenage logic went like this "I know I'll get caught if I do it. If I get caught I'll get punished. I don't want to get punished. Therefore I'll do it." He also was only too fond of repeating, as if it were an immutable statement of fact, "Six words you will never hear a teenager say is 'I admit I made a mistake'." As stubborn and cantankerous as I was at 13, even I had had occasion to admit (much as such an admission galled me) that I had made a mistake. I knew, therefore, that his "Six words" assertion was innaccurate, not to mention patronizing. Moreover, even at my tender age I knew that the real teenage logic went more this way " This seems like a fun thing to do. But, if I get caught I'll get punished. I don't want to get punished. Therefore I'll do it, taking care not to get caught. If I do get caught, I'll worry about the consequences then!" His "statements" about teen-agers and their purported logic angered me. They indicated to me that his love of, understanding of and respect for the intelligence of teenagers were sorely lacking. Why does my school have, as its junior high guidance counselor, a man who is so obviously antagonistic toward teenagers, I often wondered. Mr. Martin also had other ways of exasperating me to no end. A case in point was that whenever he caught me daydreaming (a thing I did frequently, especially in his classes) he would shout "Annabelle!!!" at me, his articulation dripping with sarcasm. This had the wanted effect of embarrassing me but it did not curb the behavior that he was trying to correct. If I had been more savvy and self-assured I would not have let myself get embarrassed by his pointless attempts to shame me. Instead, taking care to keep my voice even I would have replied "Why, no, Mr. Martin, my name is Anne, not Annabelle! They're rather different, you see..." Of course answering back that way might well have landed me in the principle's office, but oh, the temporary satisfaction! As yet, I was lacking in the confidence and attitude required to carry off such a move with aplomb. All the same, belying my still cautious nature, I was developing a mouth, a reputation as a smart-aleck. I had always had a gift for expressing, within my mind, the exactly right combination of argumentative, combative words toward those individuals who succeeded in getting under my skin. In junior high, I began to give voice to those thoughts, with increasing regularity. In doing so, I lost some friends and made some new enemies, among both the students and the teachers. Even teachers such as Mr. Fiwek, who had been my Homeroom and Social Studies teacher since 6th Grade, got to a point where he found it hard to stand me with my seemingly endless stream of sarcastic remarks and the oh-so-hostile, defensive attitude that shone like a beacon from my very being at times. A tendency on my part to be messy and unkempt, combined with my rude, smart mouth made many of my classmates not want to befriend me. If the boys in my grade sometimes treated me like a social pariah, I started getting more than my share of attention from young men who were unacquainted with me. Boys suddenly were stopping me on the street, asking me out. Boys would come up to me at the movie theater asking me to make out with them. And young men from Notre Dame would invite me to their parties, always backing away fast when I informed them of how young I was. I had been well trained by my mother to turn away any invitations made by strange boys. To accept any such thing might eventually lead to my "getting in trouble"--- a euphemism for finding oneself pregnant "out of wedlock". All the same, it was flattering to be asked. It let me know that even though I sometimes thought I was very unattractive, with my paler-than-pale skin and my short, slightly pudgy waist, there were plenty of young men who did not agree with my negative self-assessment. ************************************************************ Two of my best friends in junior high were Candy and Maria. Candy had a petite, lithe figure, a very attractive face, and distinctive red hair. Maria had a fairly slender little-girl figure, a pretty face, long brown hair and blue eyes. Both came from large Catholic families, as I did. Both were intelligent and had almost as much of a tendency as I, to make caustic, biting remarks. However, I think that both Candy and Maria continued to retain more of a sense than I did of what constituted proper behavior when dealing with authority figures. We normally made our rude remarks, to each other, about other people. Since these observations were usually sarcastically clever, I imagine that we all could convince ourselves that we were doing something superior to simply indulging in yet another round of idle gossip. When these comments started being shot directly at their intended victims, though, many hurt and angry feelings would ensue. This didn't win any of us any friends. To further complicate matters, Candy, Maria and I would frequently unleash our teenage venom on each other. This was sometimes done in the form of rude, offensive remarks or actions directed straight at the unlucky victim. Even more destructive were the times when two of us would gang up on the other one, passing toxic notes and spreading hurtful chatter about the one of us who was luckless enough to be left out of the spiteful two-person loop. When Candy and I were more than halfway through 8th Grade, we decided that we had had enough of Maria and her rude thoughtless remarks. Where we came up with the idea that she was any more rude and thoughtless than we were, I do not know. Yes, she had once meanly told me (inaccurately, I knew even then) that I had a homely face. On the other hand I had reached out and counted her zits in front of people. I would say in retrospect that the three of us were all equally disrespectful and discourteous to one another. In any case I decided that we needed to write Maria a letter about her rudeness. If I was particularly adept at getting my point across when using the spoken word, I was even more so at slamming people on paper. I wrote a couple of pages of the most hurtful, angry words I could think of. Candy added one- half a page of her bitterness. Even my two-years-younger friend, Kim, who lived three houses down from me, contributed a couple lines to that nasty-gram, although she didn't say anything offensive. Unlike us, Kim was popular and polite. While she often concurred with our negative assessments, she didn't take the pleasure we did in shoving them down people's throats. As usually happened when I took it upon myself to write "tell-off" notes to people, the note to Maria was a study in complete overkill. I had just meant to write a note that would open Maria's eyes to the fact that we thought some of her remarks about us were rude. Instead, the stern, tactless missive we delivered totally devastated her. She wrote us (and mainly me) a tearful reply. I was horrified. It was clear, from her note, that she felt totally betrayed by me and Candy. Though Candy still didn't think we had done anything wrong in writing it, that poison pen letter had started to leave an unpalatable taste in my mouth. In the end I apologized to Maria for the letter. Maria had the good grace to accept my apology. ************************************************************* If people were still making averse comments about my untidy looks and some of my less than fashionable clothes in 8th Grade, I was determined to knock them all dead with my Graduation look. I got a beautiful dress for the occasion and took special care with my hair and make-up. The result was everything I had hoped for. Nobody came close to making fun of me. A lot of people told me how good I looked, in no uncertain terms. It was a little victory for me, albeit one I kept to myself. ************************************************************* I had been on the fence, somewhat, about what school I would go to for my freshman year of High School. I thought about Central, the public High School, in my district. Central High School had a little bit of a reputation of not being the best school, academically. Some of my friends would be going there, along with some of the people I got along with least. St. Joseph's, a Catholic, co-educational High School in my district, had a good academic standing, but almost none of my friends would be going there. "St. Joe sucks!!," my friend Kim said dismissively, when we were talking about my options. "Go to Central!!" Her two older sisters had gone to Central. Furthermore, they had a number of friends who had gone to St. Joseph's. Their general feeling about the school was in concurrence with Kim's expressed opinion of it. And then there was St. Mary's. St. Mary's Academy, an exclusive, Catholic, all-girl's school where uniforms were worn, also had a good academic standing. But I could foresee problems, should I choose to go there. For a start I didn't like uniforms and no boys. For another thing, I had never been comfortable in a rich private school atmosphere. I had been there and done that. Also, St. Mary's not only had nuns in it, it was run by nuns... ...My beef with nuns was personal and of long standing. I had been wary of nuns ever since I had been a little 6-year-old in sister's school in England. There, I had had the misfortune to have as my teacher a particularly sadistic nun who habitually whacked my hand with her ruler for such offenses as "rubbing out with a wet finger". She also had denied me permission to go to the lavaratory and then smugly let me sit, my little bladder already full enough to burst, until the inevitable happened: I wet my pants. Then in case any of the other students had happened to miss it she loudly pointed out my "accident" to everyone in the room, as she led me firmly out to clean my uniform, belittling me all the way. Of course, all of my later experiences with nuns had not been so formidably traumatic. I had even met a few positively likeable sisters. But the overwhelming impression I had of nuns was that they were as a rule, too unforgivingly severe, too ready to judge and find fault and too wrapped up in the Catholic Dogma, with which I was having an ever increasing number of problems, altogether..... Candy and Maria were going to St. Mary's Academy. Finally, I decided to give nuns and private school another chance. I would go to St. Mary's too. However, the junior high "tell- off" letters that I'd seen fit to write, the semi-cruel pranks I'd sometimes pulled on people and my nasty, contentious attitude would all come back to haunt me in my first year of high school. Freshman year at St. Mary's Academy, though being emotionally painful for me in a few ways, eventually would teach me some good lessons for life. It slowly instilled in me that I should respect authority, that mouthing off to my teachers would win me no friends. It also reminded me that history does indeed repeat itself. I learned this by watching my old fourth grade nemesis, Cindy at work. Cindy was perfectly pleasant to me in freshman year of high school. By then I fit in better and had grown into a pretty girl. Cindy, in turn, had grown into a cute girl with a trim athletic body. However, it seemed Cindy was still playing the same destructive, mind games that she had subjected me to in fourth grade, doing a continuous surveillance job on all of her classmates to determine which one was most deserving of her ridicule and scorn. In the end, she settled on a plain, pudgy scholarship student. Writing the hapless student's initials on the blackboard, she would add a notation such as "really ought to wash her hair" or "needs to shave her legs". We other students would sit in frozen silence, not having the courage or know-how to correct the situation. Finally, one day, one brave soul, Maria---who had been a friend of mine since being in my fourth grade class at Cleland----got up and erased the noxious, hurtful words from the board. Then, she gave Cindy a withering stare as she said, "Don't you EVER do that again, Cindy!!!" If memory serves me correctly Cindy never did do it again... By far the most important life lesson I would have the opportunity to learn during my single year at St. Mary's Academy, though, was the law of Karma, or to put it in Biblical terms, "reaping what you sow". For during my freshman year of high school, my good friends, Candy and Maria, turned on me as thoroughly and completely as, and for a longer duration than, I had ever turned on either of them. We'd be outside talking and they would suddenly break into a run to get away from me, and avoid having to sit with me for school functions and classes. Of course I could run at least as fast as they, but I did not want to go where I was not wanted. There were parties that I suddenly wasn't being invited to. When I opened my mouth to express my views on anything more important than the weather, anymore, I could count on Candy or Maria to dismiss my opinions as being asininely stupid. Altogether, they seemed on a campaign to leave me out at every turn. When my friend Kim talked to Maria about this situation, she reported back to me that Maria had simply answered her "Well, she's been acting different, so we've been treating her different." I can imagine, looking back on it, that I bored my friend Kim to absolute and utter tears, with the amount of talk and energy I wasted that year, trying futilely to mend the twin fractures my relationships with Candy and Maria had undergone. I returned the favor, in kind, by providing a sounding board for Kim's various tales of woe. If I had a tendency to be two-faced in some of my relationships, in those days, I never was with Kim, mostly because she never was with me. My old friend, Maria, had a different theory as to why my two friends were suddenly giving me the bum's rush. "I think they're jealous of you," she said bluntly. I shook my head in disbelief. "Candy's been jealous of you for a long time," Maria insisted. "Remember all the way back when she wouldn't let you borrow her dress for our play..." ...Yes, I remembered the incident to which Maria was referring. The summer after fifth grade we had all been set, with a group of other neighborhood children, to perform "Cinderella" on Maria's front porch. I was going to play the part of the fairy godmother. Candy was going to let me borrow her beautiful, blue, play-acting dress, for the part. I was really excited, because in that dress, I felt radiant and looked "fairy-godmotherish". Minutes before we went on stage, Candy informed me that I had to take her dress off, because she wasn't going to let me wear it. I begged and pleaded with her, but to no avail. I ended up having to wear a quilted blue bathrobe that didn't fit right and wasn't right for the part... ...But that had happened years ago when we were all kids, not adolescents as we were now. It was almost inconceivable to me that either of them now had anything to feel jealous of me about. Yes, I had obvious positive attributes but they had most of the same ones, and some others besides. Who, however, can decipher, the complex workings of the teen-age mind? I, another teenager, caught in the middle of the situation, certainly couldn't. Nevertheless, in karmic terms of getting back what one has handed out, I have to say, in reexamining that period of my life, that I was given exactly what I deserved. I had previously gone about wildly sowing seeds of discontent with my stinging comments, my thoughtless actions and my cruel letters. I had felt free, at times, to have Candy and Maria bear the brunt of my meanness. In freshman year, when I suddenly found the shoe on the other foot, so to speak, I had been justifiably outraged. But, although it would take me years to realize it, I had been dealt no more than I merited. However, I would not have an overwhelming amount of time to ponder the reasons for the erratic behavior of Candy and Maria. I was leaving that summer and would be away for two years. My family and I were going to England. My father had gotten a grant from Notre Dame University to write a three- volume book on the Canon Law of the Church of England. His research was going to be done at Oxford. Candy and Maria put aside their differences with me, at least on a superficial level. Candy threw a surprise "Bon Voyage" party in my honor. I was appreciative, but I still had a "walking-on-eggshells" feeling around her and Maria. A couple weeks later Candy, Maria, Kim and I attended another surprise party for a former classmate of ours who was moving to Pennsylvania. I regret to say that Candy, Maria and I used much of that party to gossip about those of our friends and acquaintances who weren't fortunate enough to be there, to defend themselves. Kim sat by, looking more and more disgusted. After the party, she lit into me. "You guys just sounded like a bunch of bitchy, gossipy old ladies! And I'll tell you something else...At the going away party Candy had for you, she and Maria gossiped about you until you got there. They talked about how they really didn't like you at all, anymore, and how much you've changed this year...They sounded like a bunch of little bitches, just like you did tonight! You really shouldn't gossip, Anne! It just makes you sound mean and stupid.... ************************************************************* I approached my upcoming overseas trip with a mixture of enthusiasm and trepidation. Enthusiasm, because I recognized what a once in a lifetime opportunity this journey was. Trepidation, because I did not know what strange unusual territory I might be embarking on. I had spent one year of my life in England, already, as a six-year-old. That experience had left me with an excitement about the country, just as it had left me forever wary of Catholic schools. In July, 1969, my family and I boarded the United States Ship, headed for Southampton, England. On July 20th, when we were in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, we would hear that American, Neil Armstrong had successfully landed on the moon. My time in England would prove to be an eye-opening, stimulating experience. I found English people, for the most part, to be a refreshing combination of courteous and blunt. Typically, they wouldn't indulge in the immediate, easy, somewhat superficial camaraderie, with which American relationships seem to be so replete. Nonetheless, once one of their numbers decided to be a friend, you usually had a friend for life. I quickly started dating Bruce, a 16-year-old, Paul McCartney look alike. I dropped him a few months later, because he was habitually rude and moved faster than I, still just gone 15 in October, had any intention of doing. Years later, my brother Bob, who had a paper route at the same newsagent shop where Bruce was employed, admitted that Bruce had been two- timing me, almost from the start, with a slightly older girl who had none of my compunctions about going all the way. I would have a number of other boyfriends, during my time in England, but would not form serious attachments with any of them. The two years I was in Oxford I went to Milham Ford, a girl's School. Most of the schools in England were single sexed and, like Milham, dressed in uniforms. At Milham I would quickly learn to keep quiet and listen, because, as I immediately discovered, nobody was much interested in hearing the views of a loud American, let alone one who talked with an appalling midwestern nasal twang! Within a few months, I felt truly accepted by most of my schoolmates. I think that after they got over their disinclination to deal with another unrefined American, they observed that I was also bright, articulate and funny. One of my classmates, Catherine, was assigned to look after me and show me where everything was. I found her to be a lively, bright girl whose wicked sense of humor matched my own. She and I discovered that we had a lot in common, underneath the surface, that we could unquestionably talk to each other, about things that really mattered to us. We became fast friends. Catherine was naturally attractive, with her glossy dark brown hair, expressive brown eyes and turned up nose. Nevertheless, the glasses she wore made her look too scholarly and she also had a weight problem. During my second year in England however, my friend underwent a metamorphosis, during which she shed most of her excess weight, grew out her dark hair and adopted a more trendy style of makeup and dress. As this happened, she started getting more attention from boys, who wanted to go out with her and her classmates, who started telling her how pretty she looked. I got some flack for the way I dressed outside of school ("too much like a Hippie", with my flare-legged blue-jeans big floppy hats, and excessive amounts of cheap jewelry) and for my anti-war views. Yes, everybody in England was mildly aware of America's Viet Nam War, but unlike me few of them had been affected on a personal level. The English News was not full of the Viet Nam atrocities that were a nightly feature in the news from the States. Few, if any of my English friends were personally acquainted with anybody who either had to face a draft or think up a creative way to dodge it. My American friends tended to be, like myself, vehemently anti-war. In contrast, my friends from England tended to be anti-war enough, without seeing fit to overly concern themselves with a war that was not their country's. I sometimes almost felt that I was fighting for my anti-war position against a roomful of deaf ears, when I was in England. I remember particularly an elderly lady I encountered, when I was doing my paper route. As I handed her newspaper to her she glanced at my big peace symbol (or "ban the bomb sign" as the English call it) necklace and said " You're far too young and pretty to concern yourself with things like Ban the Bomb! You should think about more pleasant things---boys for instance!" My indignant reply was "Ma'am, the boys in my country are being sent over every day to Viet Nam, to be killed in an unjust war! I always think about THAT, when I think about BOYS...! " Two people had begun listening to me and my pacifistic views, however, though I didn't realize it at the time. My parents, who had begun with an acceptance of the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, eventually would come to believe, as I did, that it was an iniquitous war, unable to be justified on any moral grounds. That I had had anything substantial to do with their shift in viewpoint was something I honestly didn't recognize until many years later when my mother made me aware of it. ************************************************************* All in all, I loved my two high school years in England. In contrast to South Bend, which has some areas that are pretty, Oxford is an old town replete with breathtaking loveliness. I happily soaked up its beauty and culture. My siblings and I had always, courtesy of my mother, been exposed to more culture than the average American, in the form of "great" books, plays, musicals, classical music etc. In Oxford, where being culturally knowledgable seemed to be more the rule than the exception, I came to not only tolerate being so, but to love it. In addition, I found the English school system to be, for the most part, better and harder than the American. I, therefore, found myself having to absolutely work, more than I ever had before, to achieve the average to high marks I was used to getting without half trying. I still had my slack, lazy times, though. It was as a result of these that a group of my school friends stopped over to my house, one day and informed me that I was very bright, and I should get on the stick and really start studying in order to attain the absolutely top grades that they all knew I was capable of. My father remembers this incident with amusement; he refers to it as an example of "reverse peer pressure". When the time came for us to return to the States, in August 1971, a big part of me did not want to leave England. Coming back to America was a huge culture shock for me. Most of my old American friends were newly into various stages of sex and/or drugs (not to mention rock'n'roll). While England had not been left untouched by these things, itself, they were apparantly not nearly as ubiquitous in the smaller country. In comparison to England, everything seemed touched by a certain obnoxious tastelessness. I had kept up a semi-regular correspondence with both Candy and Maria while I had been gone and had long ago forgiven both for any transgressions on our friendship --- much (I'm sure) as they had forgiven me my similar ones. Moreover, I had many fond memories of my freshman year at St. Mary's Academy. Nevertheless, I knew there was no way that I could return there, for my final year of high school. Instinct told me that I needed to make a fresh start. For my senior year, I enrolled in St. Joseph's High School. I was lonely, that year. I missed my English friends. In fact I missed nearly everything about England. I sometimes wondered whether or not I would ever again be contented with life in this American midwestern town. Still, I settled back into South Bend with all the enthusiasm I could muster. I did not find it easy to make friends at St. Joe. Most of my classmates were nice enough and a number of them made friendly overtures to me. I, however was experiencing tremendous culture disturbance which my natural shyness in new situations only served to augment. I did well academically that year, but mostly went around with friends who did not go to St. Joseph's. As far as sex went, I was not at all sure I still believed in abstaining till marriage. When I espoused the view of holding out till marriage my words sounded hollow and empty to myself. It sounded as if I was merely paying lip service to the Catholic Church, that same institution that I was having an ever increasing internal battle with. I had started going out with Willie, a man in his late 20's. I would lose my virginity to him. I cared about Willie, but did not even try to convince myself that I was in love with him. At 17, I hadn't a clue what real love was. I also was naive enough not to have put together the fact that when an "older" man approaches a teen-age girl, it usually isn't witty repartee that he is after. I broke up with Willie after a few months. In the next couple of years, I would have several other lovers... I also started experimenting with drugs, in my senior year of high school, mostly marijuana. With drugs, as with sex, I had an overwhelming interest in discovering what all the fuss and excitement was about. My parents found out about my marijauna use and ordered that it cease. I agreed to stop smoking marijuana. I held out for a few weeks and then started smoking it again. I felt a tiny twinge of guilt at deceiving my parents, but only a tiny one. "After all," I rationalized it to myself, "I'll be a legal adult in a few months and weed is really not harmful, no matter what my parents think." ************************************************************* I had been accepted for college admission, by a Catholic school, Marquette University, in Milwaukee. Because I was having an ever increasing amount of problems reconciling my particular beliefs with the dictates of the Catholic church, I had my compunctions about going to yet another Catholic school. However, despite my misgivings, Catholicism was what I had been raised on. It was what I knew. In the end I decided to go to Marquette. If I didn't like it, I could always transfer to someplace else. By virtue of my father's being a Professor at Notre Dame, I could go tuition-free, to any institution in the country that would have me. I could As it happened, I did like Marquette, but not for all the right reasons. I appreciated living away from home for the first time, able to make my own decisions and come and go as I pleased. I also liked the fact that while Marquette wasn't particularly easy, it wasn't exceptionally difficult either. I found that I could study enough to keep my grades up and still have plenty of spare time to indulge in the fine art of "partying". Most of my circle of friends at Marquette bore a similar interest in partying. It quickly became a game for me to see how wasted I could get at night and still maintain good grades at school by day. A few weeks before the end of my freshman year, I met Tom, who was in the same Theology class as I. We went out a few times and we found we had a number of things in common. Our intelligence and physical attractiveness levels were similar and our views on many things seemed to mesh. Both of us were anti-establishment. And both of us considered ourselves lapsed Catholics. I spent the summer of 1973, living in London, with my family. My father had gotten a summer teaching job in Uxbridge University, London. I had a wonderful time getting reacquainted with my high school friends in Oxford and perusing the excellent shops, museums and pubs that filled London. Unhappily for me, that was also the summer that my parents found out, from a close family friend, that I had been sexually active. I can only imagine how absolutely devastated my parents were to hear of the casual way their daughter had thrown away her virginity, in light of the fact that they had always made painstakingly clear to us the Catholic stance ----and their corresponding position---- forbidding any sexual activity outside of marriage. Yes, now that I'm grown with teen-agers of my own---teenagers who have randomly knocked me and their father for a loop with some of their more inadvisable decisions--- I can well conceive of the strength of my parents' reaction to the discovery about my sexual activity. I can only surmise that it came as the emotional equivalent of a sharp slam in their collective guts. Back then, however, I was too immature, too stubborn and far too self-centred to realize the full impact of the effect of my actions on my parents. I had expected them to be upset. I had not expected them to be totally outraged, disgusted and horrified. My mother confronted me about what she had learned. She said some kind things, the kindness and accuracy of which I would not appreciate until years later. She made some hurtful remarks, comments which I remember to this day. She was wounded and she showed it. But as she was walking along talking with me about this painful subject, she never lost her dignity and hardly even raised her voice. She simply said what she thought needed to be said. For that, though I was furious at the time, I will forever respect her. My parents demanded that I live a celibate life as a condition of my being allowed to return to Marquette for my sophomore year. I felt trapped. I wanted to give them that promise in a truthful way. In my heart of hearts, however, I was not at all sure I could fulfill it. I knew without a doubt, though, that all hell would break loose should I obstinately insist on defying my parents and going out on my own. I did not want to cause what might be an irreperable rift in my relationship with them. In the end, I finally gave my parents the promise that they sought, though not without many misgivings. Had I been more honest with myself, and maybe a couple of years older, I might have withheld from them the promise I did not feel ready to make. That choice too, might have had disastrous consequences, but at least my parents would have known where I really stood instead of just thinking they knew where I stood. By purporting to agree to something I wasn't sure I agreed to I only succeeded in deferring an inevitable confrontation for a while. A year later the sex subject would come up again, between me and my parents. Only this time the stakes would be higher. This time I had fallen in love, and was making plans to move with my boyfriend to the west coast. Nobody would have the slightest idea of how far reaching and disastrous the consequences of that decision would be. ************************************************************* hink up a creative way to dodge it. My American friends tended to be, like myself, vehemently anti-war. In contrast, my friends from England tended to be anti-war enough, without seeing fit to overly co
