Part V: Snakes – (Chapter 84)

I feel really thin: I’ve been starving myself for weeks just for this day.

Finally. I’m down to 130 pounds.

As I march in the processional ‒ my graduation partner is Michael, a boy who, within a year, will lay dead on a Vietnam riverbank ‒ I feel a little unsteady and gaunt. I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday morning, and, last night, I drank two beers at Chrissy’s pre-graduation party.

I look back at the end of the line where the foxy P.J. Bert stands with Anna Lange, both over six feet tall, both red heads, both headed for Ivy league colleges in the Fall: P.J. to Harvard and Anna to Yale. My heart does a little flip at the sight of P.J., but I know that he’s now out of my league, that I blew my chances with him years ago, that day long ago when I had been so mean to him, even though he was (and still is, so I hear) a raging Lothario. I wonder if he remembers what I said to him, the day after JFK was assassinated? If he does, he has given no hint, but then he has offered no hint that he even acknowledges my existence. Besides, no girl would ever tame P.J. Bert ‒ I know that now ‒ even the famous actress who will later become his wife and then his ex-wife.

I allow a few seconds of vague regrets, and then I let them go, an ability cultivated through necessity.

Sister Mary James, the Dean of Women, runs up and down the processional ‒ like a Keystone Kop in a habit ‒ yelling at us to shut up and straighten out. To march like young men and women of the Lord.

Michael and I crack up; we know that the red-faced nun no longer wields any significant power over us. She barks at us to behave, but that makes us laugh all that much harder.

“I’ll tear up your diplomas,” she hisses, “and send the pieces to your parents.”

But we know better.

We have never been close friends or anything ‒ except that in junior year biology we were lab partners, and, once, he picked a scab off his elbow, which we cross-sectioned and stuck under the microscope. Angry red cells. Then I swabbed some white cells from the exposed sore and stained them with blue dye, and we looked at them as they skittered around on the slide. Sister (Jesus) Mary (&) Joseph caught us and lectured us on lab protocol, but also gave Michael a detention. I’ll never forget his expression as the nun passed sentence on him and not on me, like, “What guardian angel did YOU pay?”

Now, for one last time, we are allies as we test our new independence and Sister Mary James. She finally realizes her loss of hold over us and finds another graduation pair to bully.

Michael then whispers, “wild party tonight at my house.” He’s a rich kid who’ll have a catered affair; I’ll grab Chrissy and the others, and we’ll crash the thing, give the “in-crowd” something to gossip about for the rest of their lives.

As the school band mutilates “Pomp and Circumstance,” the procession files in, boys in blue seating themselves on one side, girls in gold on the other side.

It seems silly to separate us at this stage in the game, but traditions die hard in the Catholic Church, especially when matters of sex are involved. One commandment seemed to rule my growing-up years: “Thou Shalt NOT!”

Sex has always been a problem, even when I didn’t know what it was

Stirrings started when I was nine, about six months after Danny had taken advantage.

But Danny’s game was never about sex, at least not for me, so when I first felt the ache “down there,” I was surprised and scared.

Am I coming down with a strange disease, some weird itch that will kill me if I couldn’t stop it?

When it first happened, I was at Mass, my mind not on the canon, daydreaming about Donnie Bedford, a boy in my class.

First just a little tingle, as if I needed to scratch my crotch, but then the ache began to throb, until I could not help but wiggle around.

I wanted to jump out of my underwear, run to the girls’ bathroom ‒ anywhere private ‒ and scratch and scratch and scratch....

Then the long bony hand of the nun on my shoulder and a hiss: “Sit still, Samantha Anne Mallory. You’re in God’s house.”

Does this have something to do with the “impure thoughts” that the nuns, priests, and Baltimore Catechism are always warning us about?

The Sixth Commandment: “Thou Shall Not Commit Adultery.”

It seemed that impure thoughts would fall under this commandment, although I had no idea what adultery was.

Even when I figured out what was going on, I couldn’t help myself; Mass seemed to bring out the itch, even when I tried concentrating on the words: Munda cor meum ac labia mea, omnipotens Deus, qui labia Isaiae Prophetae calculo mundasti ignito: ita me tua grata miseratione dignare mundare, ut sanctum Evangelium tuum digne valeam nuntiare. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.

Maybe it was the ritual and frankincense that set me off, maybe it was the Latin, but I spent at least 10 years of my youth warring with my sexuality in a Midwestern Catholic church, thinking impure thoughts, daydreaming about sneaking into dark closets with sweaty boys to do ‒ what?

Just things that would ruin your reputation or, worse, send you away on a nine-month visit to Auntie’s.

Even as an adult, when I’ll come back to Sioux City as a lapsed Catholic and am pressured to sit through Mass, all those primal feelings will return, and I’ll daydream about sexual adventures with Ian or even Sheldon who’ll squirm next to me in the pew, and I’ll wonder if he feels those hot and moist feelings, too, or if his Jockeys are just cut too tightly.

Now I find myself at the end of the row, picking at the gold threads of my graduation gown.

The pompous lectures that follow feel unimportant and do not have anything to do with my plans for my immediate future.

I tune out and think about what I’ll wear to Michael’s party and how I’ll explain to Nana and Pappa why I’ll need to leave the graduation party they have planned for me.

I’m still a virgin, if not technically, and I wonder if tonight’ll be the night I’ll really give myself up to someone. God knows I’m ready, but I can’t think of one boy in my class, except P.J., who I’d want to see naked.

I’m thinking about this important matter when Nana, like an apparition, appears before me, camera aimed head-on.

Before I can object, the flash explodes, and I feel like I must jump two feet into the air.

(The resulting photograph will show me sitting sedately in my seat, my mortarboard slipping, my red hair shaggy and frizzier than usual, my eyes closed, my mouth frozen in a stupid, lopsided grin.)

And I’m dying of embarrassment. No one else’s parents are running willy-nilly around the gym, poking cameras into their progeny’s faces.

Where did this woman come from, anyway?

Nana has always struck weird poses in front of my friends.

At my 16th birthday party, she leaped through the kitchen door and began gyrating to Wild Thing, flapping her arms like a bird, totally out of rhythm.

“See?” she said as she pumped her arms even harder, “I know how to do this new-fangled dancing. There’s nothin’ to it.”

All my friends laughed and not with her, either.

When I tried steering her back into the kitchen, she jerked away from me and said, “I’ll stop when I’m good and ready,” and continued dancing until she was out of breath. “Whew! In my day, we really knew how to dance. None of this silly pokin’ around, not even touchin’ each other.” And then she waltzed, as if she had a partner, back into the kitchen, leaving behind a dying party, another one of her victims.

*

After the ceremony, Mr. Kirk finds me and after exchanging a few pleasantries with Nana and Pappa offers me a package with a gold bow and silver wrapping.

“For me?” I ask.

He nods. “Go ahead. Open it.”

My heart pounds. I’m being singled out as someone special by the Mr. Kirk.

The package is too pretty, so I carefully peel away the tape on one end and pull the gift out.

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.

Poems?

“I know poetry is difficult for you, Samantha, but Dickinson is accessible.”

I realize it really doesn’t matter what the gift is, just that he thinks enough of me to give it to me at all. “Thank you, Mr. Kirk.”

“Give Emily a try and drop me a line.”

“I will!”

Other than the “Thank You” note Nana makes me send, I never do write.

I, the lesser, it would have been just too improper.

*

I never make it to Michael’s wild party.

Nana pulls a surprise on me: after the ceremony, all my Sioux City relatives ‒ and even some, including Auntie, from far away ‒ are waiting for me at Aunt Gwen’s, bearing gifts and money.

To celebrate my finally moving through the system.

Even Danny has taken time off from the seminary in St. Louis to be here today, so how can I sneak off to another party, a better party?

These are my people. They are supposed to love me, and I’m supposed to love them.

God knows I try.

Besides, I might have to borrow money from one of them someday.

“Just a little bit longer,” I sing to myself as I put on the Mallory Mask one last time and face the crowd that has gathered on my behalf.