College?

 

My parents settled me in at my brand new dormitory and as I watched them drive away down the long driveway, I was stunned by the wave of homesickness that completely enveloped me!

Then I met my first roommate who informed me that she came to have fun and if I wasn't happy about that I should probably get a new room. Approximately three weeks later I gave up and transferred to another room on the same floor and we were both relieved None of this helped my homesickness. I went home every single weekend even if it meant getting a ride with someone part of the way and making my parents drive thirty miles to pick me up.

Higgins Hall was built on the ninth hole of a golf course and it was not finished when I moved in. The phones did not work for the first week or so. Neither the cafeteria nor the laundry facilities were up and running so we had to walk to the boy's dorm across a long parking lot for both of those things. 

My resident advisor seemed very old and grown up to me. She was twenty one and she and her brother were both RA's to help pay their way since their parents had been killed in a car accident a few years before. I was seventeen but so immature and so homesick. I alternately sat in her room crying or playing little tricks on her like putting a squishy frozen gargoyle in the bottom of her bed.

I met an English major at English club, but he was Japanese and into Japanese poetry. We tried sitting up in the empty football stadium on school nights and sharing poetry, but it just never jelled. Then my girl friend invited me on a blind date with her and her date. My date was a drama student. He worked part time for the local radio station during basketball games and I loved listening to his shows. Sometimes I even got to accompany him. We would practice his parts for plays in my dorm lounge. Back then no boys could go above the first floor of a girl's dorm. I felt very cool sitting on his lap with the script hidden behind our chair, reading lines. with him.  We were very dramatic!  We had to walk everywhere we went because freshman could not have cars, so when we went to the show we would act out scenes along the way where he was stalking me, or a detective was pursuing me, or once I was a cat, and he was chasing me around the park. Goofy kid things. Very funny and just reeking of a need for attention. He made me much less homesick, but eventually he wanted to seriously make-out and pet. I thought only really bad girls did those things. We ended up breaking up and I was heartsick

My freshman English teacher was a hippie who perched on her desk in old brocaded mini dresses and black holey ripped stockings. She had a boyfriend who had just published what was reportedly the dirtiest textbook around and we had to read it. It was pretty bad. I remember one long poem dedicated to a menstrual spot. She would give us credit for going to sporting events and once a poetry reading that was so bad I crawled out halfway through. 

I also had to take a speech class and I was terrified. I thought I would die before I got up in front of people; but that teacher was amazing, allowing for lots of creativity, which was good. One time I forgot I was supposed to have a visual for a speech that I had not even written. I got up at the last moment with a handful of paper scraps and gave a speech about my pet monkey destroying my visual aids. 

They put me in fifth year French and I was lost. My years of French had been juggled around different schools and different methods, mostly just learning to speak it. Our professor expected us to read Balzac!

Gym was required, but I discovered that if I signed up for specialized classes when I showed up they would inform me that I wasn't eligible and then let me pick the class of my choice. (Otherwise those classes were often closed or full.) I managed to get bowling, golf, fencing and archery before they caught on to me.

That year was more about socialization than anything else I think. I learned to live with other young women and take part in their ceremonies and events instead of just being with my family. We used to have a thing called a Candlelight. Someone would post a note in front of the elevators that said there would be a Candlelight at 7 pm. When we went to the lounge and stood in a big circle our RA would pass a lit candle around the circle while we sang, A Tree In The Meadow. The secret person would blow out the candle when it came to her and announce her good news. Usually that she was pinned or engaged. 

I ate in our cafeteria and gained the freshman twenty plus pounds, eating hot rolls and desserts. I met girls who would iron my curly hair on the ironing board at the end of our wing, because straight hair was the "thing." I shared clothes with other girls and they became my surrogate family. I also learned to do my own laundry and discovered there were pianos in the practice rooms on third floor if I wanted to play.

I spent more time doing almost everything except studying that year and went on academic probation the following year. No one in my family seemed to notice! There were no recriminations about wasting their hard earned money, or advice on what to do next. It felt like it might be true. I was only there to get my MRS. My dreams of some day being an architect or anthropologist just all got lost in the chaos, but I never stopped writing and I never stopped playing the piano.

On May 17, 1968, my friend Mouse invited me to join her and her friends on a blind date with a guy who had a car! Now any car was something in those days. His car, it turned out, was a 1950 Jeep with a 1946 engine. It was dark green and went down the hills of the state park much better than it went up. Going up only the driver got to ride. The rest of us had to get out and push. My date turned out to be the driver. a very good looking guy who was 22 and a graduating senior. We were on what they called a laker, my first drinking party at Lake Argyle State Park. There was an assortment of liquor they placed on a blue blanket along with a carton of fresh strawberries.  The park ranger came by and my date tossed a blanket over our booze. I remember the ranger saying how glad she was to meet students  picnicking and not drinking. I had my first drink that night. I think it was CC (Canadian Club) and coke. Then I had more and more and finally I had to pee, so I went off into the trees, but I got lost trying to find my way back. By that time there were dozens of people partying out there. I stumbled from group to group calling out, "Strawberries! Who has strawberries?" When it was time to go home one of the other guys drove and my date kept throwing up in a bucket in the way back of his Jeep. Every time he did that someone would push the bucket under my nose just in case and finally the smell got to me. I ended the night throwing everything up on the way home.

The next day I called his room on some pretext and left my phone number for him to call back. He called me and asked if I wanted to go see what ducks do in the rain? I thought this was so creative and we began to date. He asked me if I wanted to go on a camp out with him just before graduation, so neophyte that I was, I called my mother and asked her if I could go! She of course said no and I, of course, went anyway. 

I was probably lucky my period started just before that camp out, because while it never occurred to me that he might expect to have sex, he was determined to until he found out I couldn't. Instead we roasted hot dogs and made s'mores. That night I saw his beer opener had a name on it. It said, "Angell." I thought this was hysterical. "You named your beer opener Angel?" I laughed. That was when I discovered it was his name. I was dating an angel, although not the heavenly sort. His  name was spelled with two L's. The next morning I woke with the sun glaring down into my face. I had just spent my first night with a boy and he was leaning over me, backed by that halo of sunlight. The radio was playing,  Angel of the Morning and these were the words he said to me, "You've just complicated my life. I think I might be falling in love with you." I was completely overwhelmed and, I thought, in love.

He graduated and I sat with his parents during the ceremony. He was easy to spot. He was the only guy wearing a mini gown for graduation because he had failed to try it on until it was time to go. Afterwards he drove me home to Taylorville and met my parents. When he went home a week later I went with him to meet the rest of his family. 

One night when he was he was at his house in Dixon, Illinois and I was at my house in Taylorville, I had a terrible dream. I dreamed I was in a church with an upside down cross and he was the priest doing a black mass. He would point at me and I would say one of the ten commandments. "I will not honor my father and my mother, "or "I shall commit adultery." I could hear ominous chanting all around us and I woke up terrified. My dad was working in his office next to my bedroom and I told him about the dream. He said to get a drink of water and go back to sleep on my other side. I did. And I had the same dream again! Maybe that should have been a warning of some kind. But I chalked it up to the fact that he was so active in his Episcopal church. Sometimes, when I was visiting, they would call him at the last minute to be an acolyte for a wedding. In fact, the church had a hidden button that would call him back from the Rec room where he played pool during communion if there were a lot of people. That way he didn't have to just stand there waiting.

When we spent time at his house his cousins said we could use an empty house on the river if we wanted time alone and at first I thought this was awesome. It turned out not to be. He kept pushing himself on me and finally forced me into having sex with him. It was so unlike anything I had ever dreamed of that I didn't know for sure what had happened. It certainly hadn't been making love. I remember saying, "I guess it would have been okay if we'd made love." The shock on his face when he realized I didn't even know we had had sex for the first time was memorable. He continued to push himself on me whenever he came up to the room where I was sleeping in his house and even my threats to call his parents didn't stop him. Of course I was too ashamed to ever call out for help or tell anyone. I think he counted on that.

It was going to be a long distance romance. The Vietnam war was in full swing. Graduating seniors were just waiting to get drafted. He decided to enlist, theoretically it meant he got to choose what he did in the army. My Dad talked him out of being an officer. He said those guys were just cannon fodder. He asked to work in supply and eventually became an E-5 Supply Sergeant.

When he was in basic training at Fort Leonard wood I rented a trailer with another girl who was dating a guy down there and we rode with that guy's entire family down to see them graduate. Their family slept in the trailer. We slept in the car. I remember they were very religious and the whole family would pray when they crossed a bridge, or it began to rain. After all that traveling I only saw him for that one afternoon and there was nowhere to go so we went bowling.

We both agreed that we would date while he was gone. I probably would have been happy not to, but he was insistent. Still, we wrote every single day and once he called me from Vietnam via short wave radio.  The surprise call came through in the middle of the night and we had to talk through someone and say "over" when we finished our sentences. When it was done he said "over and out." Then in August of that year his father died unexpectedly and the Red Cross flew him home for the funeral. I went up and stayed with them while he was home, but he only had three days before he had to fly back.

We planned an April wedding, because that was when he would come home. He took his R and R (Rest and Relaxation) in Australia and had a big fling with some Australian girl. Back in Vietnam he was fixated on the girls who did the laundry or girls he called Donut Dollies.  

During this time I also went back to school and did much better because I was less distracted. Although I did have a few funny escapades now that I felt so worldly (having learned to drink and having had sex?) Once I was at a party where we were all dancing and singing Hava Nigila. They would push someone into the middle of the circle at the end and everyone would dump their beer into that person's glass so they had to chug it. By the end of the night I was seeing two of everything and I assumed my date was even drunker so I refused to ride home with him. I stayed on the couch in the living room and it was funny because when I said goodnight he stood up to undress! I quickly put a stop to that and he fell on the floor in a stupor where I let him sleep.  Another time I was riding through the beautiful snowy Illinois countryside with my friend, Gross Eugene, so named because the first time I saw him he was carrying two big bottles of beer in his arms, one in each of his boots. The new falling snow in the light of the moon was truly breath taking, but then we came to a hill and his car's racing slick tires would not go up it! We had no traction. We went back and tried to go up the other way, but the roads had become too slippery. Finally, in desperation, we pulled into a farmer's driveway and asked him if we could stay until morning when, hopefully, the roads would be better. He said fine. And left us out there in the cold all night long! When morning came we were half frozen when they invited us in for breakfast. His wife made the runniest, most unappealing, flattest fried eggs I had ever seen and served them with yellow tinted water! I was almost afraid to eat, and I didn't drink any of the water, but we thanked her and finally made it out of the country and back to my dorm. The dorm matron grounded me because I hadn't come home the night before.

In those days women had a lot more rules then men in dormitories. We had to be in before ten on week nights, eleven on Sunday and midnight on Saturday. Skirts or dresses were mandatory unless it was ten below zero and a sign was posted in the lounge. Then we could wear slacks under our dresses!

Planning our wedding was awkward. I wanted to be married barefoot in a woodsy setting, carrying daisies. His mother and mine wanted a formal church wedding in the Episcopal church. Then I wanted gray morning coats and gloves and maybe even top hats!

In the end we were married in the Episcopal church with rented tuxedos and a Juliet bridal dress with bishop sleeves and a lovely coronet covered in pearls. I carried white roses and my bridesmaids carried daisies.  They did let me have a cake with white doves on it instead of the traditional bride and groom. We had the reception in the basement of my grandfather's restaurant and left for a honeymoon in The Ozarks.

I'm not sure either of us knew what The Ozarks were, but they were close. we could drive and they sounded nice so that's what we chose. We only had a certain amount of time before he had to report back on post and we didn't have a lot of money. After many hours of him driving and me navigating we discovered we had driven straight through the Ozarks. So we turned around, found a little two bedroom cabin with a blooming cherry blossom tree in front of the kitchen window and began our marriage.My mother had packed a white nightie and robe for me.  My godmother told me to put the nightie under my pillow in case of fire. He gave me a sheer black pornographic outfit every night, which I mostly refused to wear. It was not the most auspicious start. 

At breakfast I made coffee with a coffee pot you set on the stove. I had never seen anything but a percolator, so I kept waiting for it to stop percolating! That coffee was the strongest I ever poured into a cup, but we survived the honeymoon and packed up our wedding gifts to head out for Fort Riley, Kansas.