Thanksgiving. Christmas. New Years. I couldn't bear spending these holidays anywhere but in Nevers. Not because my parents lived there, but rather because the relationship between tradition and place seem sacred to me. By sacred, I don't mean religious; on the contrary, I mean a personal conviction that poptrash and bizness have never shaken. As long as these holidays occur when it's cold and everybody agrees on the dates, what difference would it make if we celebrated Thanksgiving sooner and Christmas later, assuming that New Years would be hard to move? Hardly would I dispute the convenience of ending the old year on a certain day acknowledged by everybody everywhere and starting the new year on the next one. While it might have been in midsummer, we can't change it now. Maybe extravagance is appropriate for the celebration of an arbitrary date. Even when I was little, I wondered why the pilgrams thanked God for letting some of them survive a year of hardship which he had inflicted on them. Shouldn't they rather have thanked the indians for letting them settle on their land and teaching them how to grow food? The birth of a healthy baby whose parents want it and whose mother survives deserves celebration all right, yet the one we commemorate has served as an excuse for a great variety of crimes, including tyranny, massacre and destruction. Although it happens every day and every night, giving birth is infinitely more generous than giving presents that some givers can't afford and some receivers don't want. Cluttering a house or a street with electric lights and other decorations resembles vanity more than generosity. On the other hand, what could be more reasonable than setting aside a few holidays for everybody to be kind to everybody else and have a good time with family and friends?

I had a joyful argument with Pie over the contents of the preceding paragraph, on which we disagreed all the more heatedly because we had nearly the same opinion. Each of us took the usual pleasure in exaggerating the insignificant differences between us and exploiting the slightest linguistic excuse to raise our voices. Attracted or distracted by the noise, a few neighbors drifted in and out, making mostly sarcastic comments. After wasting an hour this way, we had to stay up another hour to finish our preparation for the next day's classes. The argument had started when Pie remarked how soon Thanksgiving was. He was looking 

forward to seeing his parents, his three younger sisters and his friends in Mapleton. Making fun of himself, he expected to hold a certain hand and kiss a few cheeks. Even on New Years Eve? Well... nobody knew what might happen then, why he might even smear some lipstick! I envied him, but he didn't want to believe me. Modest favors from modest women, I insisted, raise more enthusiasm than other kinds.

Betsy said she would miss me during Thanksgiving, for which her parents and her older brothers expected her in Mammoth. Although I told her I would miss her too, the remark came as relief because I couldn't imagine taking her home with me. Betsy in Nevers? I didn't mind Thanksgiving dinner alone with my parents, but what was I going to do Friday and Saturday? I hesitated between calling Joe and Holly...

"Holly?"

"... Trav?"

"I haven't heard from you in months."

She laughed: "Your studies? You had a lot of catching up to do."

"Too many distractions."

"Sorry, Trav. I already have something to do."

"If only you had called a few weeks ago!"

"... It's really sweet of you to ask me, Trav."

"Remember Mike Hogan?"

"He asked me to go steady."

"He's not the same any more."

She sighed: "This is as painful for me as it is for you."

Back at ZU, Betsy hooked my arm on the way to psychology.

"Hey, you look angry," I told her.

"The rest of us would be delighted."

"You did?"

I laughed: "I didn't know I was so dangerous."

"They are right... A beach boy is going to teach you how to surf."

"He's going to rub suntan lotion all over you... especially your thighs."

"Betsy!"

"The hell I do!" I whispered in her ear: "You are my mistress and I'm your lover."

"I don't have any girlfriends in Nevers."

so I declined the cup of coffee and brownies she offered me. As I continued down Through Street, I felt as if I had left Nevers years ago. How quiet the street was, how quaint the accent! Then I heard somebody coming up behind me: "Trav!" It was Joe.

We had a coke at the BigBite. Joe guessed that Nevers must seem provincial to me after a semester at ZU. "Yes, it does. At ZU, you meet all kinds of people from all kinds of places. I met a nice girl from Mapleton whose father was living in a trailer." Why did I bring that up?

"You must have liked her," he said. Had he heard it in my voice?

"I'm sorry, Trav. You must have been in love with her."

"If I had been able to talk to her, I would have told her that the Lord had given her a chance to take you down the road to salvation."

Joe smiled: "If you loved each other, you tended to accomplish the creator's will."

"So I guessed."

"The way to salvation begins with sin and leads to forgiveness."

"He didn't do it. You did it. He wants you to get married and have children."

"I don't know. Maybe he wanted to stop you from corrupting each other."

"How could a creator not care about his creatures?"

"That doesn't imply that he doesn't care about them, it only implies that we don't understand why he sacrifices some of them." 

"So he sacrifices some of them! I guess I'm one of those."

Joe gave me an anxious look. "You still have a lot of life to live, Trav. Maybe he wanted to prepare you for the rest of it."

Joe invited me to join him and other young people in singing Christmas carols. Rolf Kremer, the music director at Resurrection Tabernacle, had agreed to hold rehearsals for them. They planned to make the rounds of Nevers on Christmas Eve and sing a "Hallelujah Chorus" in the Tabernacle on Christmas morning. The Rev. Carstens was making arrangements for a tour of U County with the RT bus on Christmas afternoon. Stapled together with the words of the carols, a map of the route indicated the stops they would make. These brochures were distributed to the congregation on the Sunday before Christmas. Young musicians would accompany the choir with a guitar, a recorder and a portable xylophone. The other singers were at least a year younger than Joe and me because graduation from high school usually ended participation in carol singing. As I expected, Rolf tried less to improve our performance than instill in us an enthusiasm that would incite our listeners to sing with us. For the same reason, he chose popular arrangements of carols that I would have preferred to sing in the original and included songs that were not carols at all, such as "A White Christmas," which I have always hated. He held the more dramatic notes of "Silent Night" longer than the measure allowed, but he left "Oh Come All You Faithful" alone thank heaven! Although I regretted "Once in Royal David's City," I said nothing for fear that he would add it to the program and make it sound sentimental.

By our second rehearsal, I had become accustomed to hearing the other voices beside me on the back row with the basses and all around in front of me. The tone and air of innocence, which had irritated me at the first rehearsal, enchanted me now. We were teasing each other as if we had grown up together. Singing next to them, standing close to them, brushing against them, I began to enjoy their presence and especially that of the girls. For once, good, clean fun didn't seem ridiculous to me. Maybe I enjoyed their company so much because I had never had much contact with wholesome youth. I found their admiration for Joe touching, but, when it rubbed off on me, I felt embarrassed. They must have heard of my reputation and yet they had respect for me. On the other hand, I wondered 

once again, as I always have, what it was exactly that distinguished Joe from other handsome, intelligent, honest young men. Was it his barytone? He had the most beautiful voice in the choir, except for the contralto of a big girl named Christa U'Fersy, the gentlest and sweetest of them all. That wonderful week before Christmas not only accustomed us to singing together, but also to being together. After rehearsal, we would invade the BigBite joking, laughing, visiting between booths and ignoring the other customers, who either enjoyed the spectacle or left in irritation.

Fear of excess moved the parents of local youth to subscribe to a dance for all of us at the Country Club every Christmas. Although some of us in the choir could have borrowed a family vehicle, we went together in the RT bus, which rattled and shook itself up to all of 50 mph, 55 being out of reach. We might have been playing musical chairs if the treble of the chatter and the bass of the motor had stopped from time to time. Everybody was changing seats, squeezing by each other in the aisle and climbing over each other to get in or out of seats. The girls competed to sit by Joe and, after Joe, me, because we were "older", but the competition was playful:

"Move over Trav," said little Eggy Schlechtweg giving me a hefty shove, "here comes Christa."

"I will take Christa any time," said Jimmy Snowden, beside whom Eggie had plumped down.

"You get more for your money," chortled Jimmy cringing behind his arms.

As more couples joined the other group, however, a pair of emerald eyes needled me. Holly was wearing a light blue gown covered by a layer of transparent tissue that modulated the light, thus continuously varying the color beneath it. Hence the expedition to Mapleton! With a low bodice, a high hem and a wide skirt, it displayed the best body in Nevers irresistibly. Damn: a wild girl had become a dangerous woman! She had probably parked Mike in Mapleton as soon as he had parked his car. How hard it was to keep my eyes away from her! After dancing with Christa, who had to go call her Mom, I tapped Mike on the shoulder, but he didn't like it. He gave me an angry look, turned back to Holly and jerked his thumb over his shoulder: "Do you want to dance with him?"

"Yes, I sure do!" she said crossly.

She giggled: "I'm just catching up, Trav."

"Mike," she said looking sternly over the same shoulder. "I haven't had a chance to talk to Trav since September. Get a drink, sit down and relax. I will come and get you when we are through."

"May I have a few more minutes, please?" she asked Eggy. "I will bring him over to you as soon as I'm through. I promise."

The dance ended with Christmas carols, which we sang, accompanied by our three musicians, and Joe invited the others to sing with us. Most of them did, including Holly, but I noticed Mike exchanging sly smiles with his friends. On the way back to the bus, I had to linger in the men's room and, as I came out of the Club, Mike, who had been waiting for me, started shoving me. I shoved back, but he shoved faster and harder than I could and I fell backwards into the snow cleared from the walk. Running up, Holly slapped him so hard that he staggered. Then she gave me a hand standing me up and I brushed the snow away from the seat of my pants. I wanted to shove Mike into the snow drift on the other side, but my feet stuck to the sidewalk. Then Joe appeared. I have viewed the scene in my mind so many times that I see the walk in front of the Club as a stage with the villain on one side, the lover on the other with his mistress beside him and the preacher in the middle with his back to the audience. All of us are standing in silent awe of Joe. He spreads his arms, raises his head and his voice rings out: "Forgive us, oh Lord!" We lower our eyes and he continues: "Forgive us, for we have sinned. We have yielded to temptation, we have indulged in excess, we have resorted to violence and [raising his voice ominously] we are ashamed! [Lowering it again:] Yes, oh Lord, we are ashamed and we implore your forgiveness. Move us to love each other and worship you as the day of your holy birth approaches. Amen!"

"Amen!" we all repeat.

With tears in her exquisite eyes, the dangerous woman blushes like a little girl and, summoning her courage, darts a kiss at Mike's rugged cheek and Mike is embarrassed.

Mike comes over and we hug each other, but I can't help thinking of a boxer consoling the adversary he has just defeated.

The choir, which had sung enough Christmas carols for the evening, sang everything else they could think of on the way back. I didn't feel like joining in and Christa, who sat beside me, assured me that she didn't either. Up until Christmas Eve, our rehearsals continued with joy and enthusiasm. The 

choir treated me as if I hadn't danced with Holly and as if Mike hadn't shoved me into the snow, in other words as if I hadn't forgotten them a few times. They realized that the fun we had with each other came at the price of neglecting friends who didn't care to sing with us. When we made the rounds of Nevers on Christmas Eve, I wondered what would happen in front of the Stevens' house. Yet Holly came out with her parents, Connie and Par, and they sang "Oh Come All Ye Faithful" with us. Then Holly gave me wave and a smile. After the assembly the next morning and our resounding "Hallelujah!", the choir dispersed among family and friends, so that the Merry Christmases I exchanged with the Stevens merged with the mood. When Connie took Par's arm, however, Holly took mine, so I promptly hustled her away and walked her home by a path behind the houses along Through Street. We clinched on her back porch, where neighbors probably noticed us before I fled.

The choir's tour of U County exposed me to a lot of kidding about my "sneaky departure" and my "back porch romance." Eggy grabbed my arm on one side and Christa, on the other, and they jerked me back and forth:

"Hey! he belongs to me."

"No he doesn't, he's mine."

"... She would have been a distraction."

The next evening, Holly and I lavished those pleasures on each other and pushed them to the limit. We told our parents that we were going to meet some friends in Concordia, dine in a restaurant and go dancing. Instead, we stopped at a liquor store on the way to the restaurant and got a cabin at Carter's Cabins after dinner. We found Cabin D fresh, clean and neat, but, four hours later, it was in a mess that must have challenged the toughest cleaning women in Condordia. The only excuses I can make for us are that we didn't soil much linen, spill much liquid and break much glass. Once we had dressed, we straightened the mattress, which we had skewed obliquely across the springs. We stretched the mattress cover back over it, picked the sheets, the pillows and blankets up off the floor and put them back on the bed. In the bathroom, I tightened the hot water spigot to stop the dripping in the shower, while Holly picked the towels up off the floor; she rinsed the sink while I rolled the toilet paper back up. Pushing the chair back under the table, I noticed the ashtray and flushed a heap of ashes down the toilet. I took the empty bottles and, at the door, we glanced back and then at each other. Smiling wanly, she looked as tired as I felt, but her eyes sparkled: "Do you feel guilty?"

"No. Do you?"

"If we didn't have to stop, we would kill each other."

Snuggling up to me as I drove back to Nevers, she began to breathe the rhythm of sleep in my ear and, with my arm around her, I felt it in her body. Her hair tickled my nose with a scent of flowers and caressed my jaw with its ephemeral texture. After four hours of impudent sin, here we were in a posture of tender innocence that Joe would have approved. The pleasure seemed to suspend time. Suddenly, two headlights struck my eyes and a horn, my ears as the silhouette of a truck loomed in front of us. I grabbed the steering wheel with my right hand, squeezing Holly with my arm, and swerved back into the right-hand lane while the truck roared by, buffeting the car with its turbulence. Resnuggling, she went right back to sleep, but I felt cold sweat on my brow.

The next day, Joe invited me to a New Year's party that he was organizing for Tabernacle youth. On behalf of the choir, he urged me to come and bring Holly with me. If we already had another invitation, he said, we could 

spend the early part of the evening at the Tabernacle and then join our other friends. Laughing, I remarked that, since the incident with Mike, Holly's friends hadn't been very friendly. As for our high school classmates, they no longer thought they had much in common with me. On the other hand, I warned him, my relations with Holly wouldn't blend very well with the fellowship of the choir. The choir were aware, he replied, that our relations had developed beyond the fellowship that united them. He had discussed the matter with many of them and they wanted us to join them. "You know how fond they are of you," he told me.

"I'm fond of them too, but Holly and I are more than fond of each other and I don't know whether she will like sharing me with a lot of other girls."

My second date with Holly was an invitation to dinner with Connie and Par, followed by a drive to Concordia to see a film with them. A few years older than Connie and me, Par had moved to Nevers to replace the postmaster who had retired. He had also become the scoutmaster of Troop 213 at St. Gregory's. Decent and kind, he neither smoked nor drank, but he knew where babies came from. Connie had told Holly to warn me that he didn't know about drive-arounds, as if that were necessary. Connie couldn't keep her hands off of him: if she didn't lean on his shoulder, she took his arm under hers or put hers around his waste; if she didn't play with his hair, she stroked his chin checking his shave. Par didn't seem to mind yet. Holly was dying to give me the same treatment, but dared not, hence the distress in her eyes, which I enjoyed even more than these endearments. Sitting across from each other, we played a lot of footsy under the dinner table. Having said grace, Par shaved paper-thin slices off of the roast beef, as Connie kept jumping up and running back to the kitchen, so badly did she want to make her first dinner party a success. The back seat of Par's Studebaker placed another constraint on Holly and me because of the four eyes and ears in front. Slipping her hand into my pocket, she gave me an erection that lasted all the way to Concordia. It was trickier getting my hand under her skirt and over her thigh, but I managed in the dark. Although the 

movie made everybody laugh, I don't remember the title or the stars it featured because Holly kept her hand in my pocket, wiggling her fingers from time to time. I dared not try to reciprocate because Par was sitting on the other side of her. On the way back, Connie snuggled up to Par, who nonetheless kept both hands on the wheel. I slipped mine into Holly's pants and, unzipping my fly, she slipped hers into mine, but, when our breathing became heavy, we had to withdraw them a little while. By the time we reached Par and Connie's house, we were so excited that we barely managed to thank them enough for the wonderful evening we had had, although it hadn't been exactly as Par imagined. I wondered how much Connie knew about what we had been doing. Holly was about to jump up and down like a little girl who had to run to the bathroom.

Rushing to the back porch of her house, we laid on a rattan couch. As we relieved the need we had for each other, the rattan creaked under us even more loudly than our sighs, groans and cries. We hardly noticed the cold. After two episodes, we decided to adjourn until New Year's Eve, which we discussed on the way around to the front of the house.

"Square dancing in the Tabernacle on New Year's Eve!" she protested.

"You will be dancing with Eggy, Christa and the others instead of me!"

"That's because they couldn't get you without me!"

"Our relations?"

"So they expect me to cook your meals and have your babies!"

She made a face.

"I'm not in a hurry either!"

"You discussed our relations with Joe?"

"What other relations could he be talking about?"

"So he was talking about some other relations you had!" 

"Holly!"

"Some ZU coed!"

"You were tending to accomplish the creator's will!"

"Everybody knows how promiscuous coeds are!"

She slapped me as hard as poor Mike.

She dug her fingernails into my wrists, jerked her wrists free, ran to the front door, let herself in and slammed it in my face.

Waking up the next morning, I discovered that the wounds on my wrist had bled on the sheet. Yet I was less worried about what to tell my mother than how to make peace with Holly. The urgency of the thought surprized me, but I could think of nothing else. Although it wasn't even eight o'clock, I dialed the Stevens' number and damned if Holly didn't answer at the first ring: "Trav?"

"Yes, I"

"We're going to the square dance." 

"You don't have to."

"Meet me at the Christmas tree in front of Town Hall at 8:15."

top? That year, the tallest volunteer fireman had barely managed from the top of an A-stand ladder. Since the star flashed night and day, no wise men would have had any trouble finding Nevers Town Hall. Although I was right on time, no Holly. I was looking up Through Street in her direction, when she snuck up behind me and clapped her hands over my eyes. Turning and pulling them away, I saw shiny eyes, glowing cheeks and vaporizing breath. She looked so soft and warm under all that wool that I wanted to hug her and feel her body beneath it, but we were in the most visible place in Nevers. Seeing the frustration in my face, she burst out laughing and took me by the arm. We trudged through the snow, taking every road and path we could find without losing sight of the town. By the time we had finished our zigzags, Nevers had us engaged more surely than a photo on the social page of the Nevers Weekly News. They expected a wedding in June.

Except for a few hours every night each in his own bed, Holly and I were inseparable for the rest of Christmas vacations. We couldn't keep our eyes away from each other during the square dancing at the Hall, in which we took part with enthusiasm, both of us. The exchanges of partners only dramatized the affinity we had for each other, as the courtesy of my friends in the choir confirmed. A windup alarm clock with bells like ears on either side and a little hammer that vibrated between them sounded a noisy New Year. Fifteen boys gave seventeen girls a kiss on the cheek, and the girls reciprocated, but one couple did so with a passion that everybody pretended not to notice. Then Joe stood up on a chair and we fell silent: "Trav: twice the square of fifteen plus fifteen times the square of two?"

"... Five hundred and ten."

Everybody was looking at everybody else, then Eggy asked: "You mean 510 kisses?"

"511," Jimmy corrected.

"Who got the extra kiss?" demanded Eggy.

"Christa," he bragged."

"Jimmy!" scolded Christa.

Amen." Now everybody hesitated to look at anybody else, except Holly and me who exchanged a nervous smile.

This prayer might have forced us to postpone our departure, but we were enjoying ourselves and didn't feel like leaving yet anyway. It was another hour before we tried to get away with as few goodbyes as possible. Yet we got a sendoff like those that precede a honeymoon. I doubt that Joe was the only one who knew we were going to celebrate the New Year in a way that would tend to accomplish the creator's will. My parents were attending a New Year's party at the Marshaways, whose turn it was that year, so I took Holly to my room. Since they had always returned at three in the morning, we took full advantage of their absence. It must have been around three when I kissed her goodnight at her front door.

"How long are we going to last?" she murmured in my ear.

I really meant it and yet, when Betsy caught me on the way to psychology, forever didn't seem very urgent any more. Despite her tan, no beach boy had smeared lotion on her. "But you were in Nevers wallowing in the snow with high school girls."

"They were telling me how fast the coeds are at ZU."

I distinguished myself at ZU by introducing drive-arounds. Since many brothers and sisters had cars, I bragged of what we had done with them in high school. They snapped at the bait and the determination to outdo high school kids soon developed into a rivalry between several fraternities. Drive-arounds could begin on any weekend evening and they often continued into the next day. Betsy and I never knew who would pick us up or when, so we let them look for us, whether we were in the library, the café in the Student Union or the lounge in Cosgrove Hall. Climbing into a car, we sped back and forth across Concordia, which boasted several places where we could eat, drink, listen to music or dance. The lead driver had a choice between the ZU Golf Course at the end of a winding drive and the Concordia Country Club straight out on the highway to Mapleton. When the ZU Police caught us on the campus course, they usually gave us a boring lecture. We ran a greater risk of tickets or arrests by state police on the highway, but the risk only lasted ten minutes. Once Betsy and I were so drunk we couldn't wait for the golf course and, when our driver realized what we were doing, he headed for the ZU Golf Course closely pursued by the other car. Swerving and screeching, the car threw us back and forth while the others cheered and jeered. They laughed us all the way to the parking lot between the twelfth hole and the thirteenth tee.

Betsy and I joined the fraternity and the sorority that had the best drive-arounds, which had enabled them to pledge the wildest students on campus. The Concordia, ZU and state police were competing with each other to show which one was toughest on us. Psi Chi and Theta Tau Alpha were drawing the most attention from the Student Advocate, the Concordia Semaphore, WZTV and WZFM. Rumors, which only the Student Advocate took seriously, even flattered us with driving the dean of students to resignation. Our notoriety incited rival houses to outdo us. One broke into the campus laundry, stole three trunkfulls of women's underwear and threw it up in the trees in front and back of the dean of women's house. The University Fire Department had to send its hook and ladder to get them down. Another fraternity loaded three pickups with manure from a stable and spread it over the parking lot reserved for the president and the top administration. A photo of the manure with vapor rising from it in the cold appeared in newspapers and on television as far away as Mapleton. Even after Buildings and Grounds had cleaned it up, the stench lingered a few weeks. 

Then Betsy decided that it was time for Theta Tau Alpha to upstage the fraternities. She assembled her entire sorority, except for weak sisters, in the Psi Chi house at 2:45 one morning in their gym clothes. They slipped through the woods between our house and Beta Pi, which boasted some of the most famous jocks on campus. All on ground level, this house slept only a third of the brothers in double rooms along a corridor with doors at either end. The sisters, who outnumbered them, stripped at the nearest door, which Betsy unlocked, and entered. She had assigned each room to three or four girls, who stole what clothes they could find, usually those the roommates had removed for the night. The raid went astonishingly well until some girls, failing to find clothes on chairs, opened some drawers, made some noise and awakened some snoring men. After unlocking the other door, Betsy led a squad of women to cover the retreat. Despite a lot of shouting, only a few men tried to catch the women, who proved hard to hold. When a man did catch a woman, however, Betsy and her squad ganged up on him and freed her. In a final encounter, a big man shoved her against the wall near the door so hard that he broke her shoulder bone. The other girls were all over him scratching, biting, kicking and screaming. One kicked him in the crotch and he fell on his back holding himself and howling. Immediately, the squad ran through the door, which Betsy locked behind them. Carrying the sisters' clothing back to the Chi Psi House, as Betsy had ordered us, we saw badly clothed, half-clothed and unclothed women pouring out of the Beta Pi House, where rooms were lighting up and the shouting was getting louder. The fleeing sisters fanned out across the landscape of Fraternity Row as they headed for Sorority Loop. Forgetting the back door, the jocks battered the front one open, but their assailants had disappeared by then. They found a key in the keyhole.

Once Betsy had inhaled the scent of the reddest rosies money could buy, I put them in a vase on the table beside her bed. The doctor had told her not to move, but she grabbed my pants, pulled me over to her bed, sat me down and threw her arm around my neck. When we had kissed ourselves short of breath, she indicated her roommate, a nice looking woman in her thirties, with her head and whispered that, "if it weren't for that hag..." Then she glanced at her body under the covers.

"We might break something worse than a shoulder bone," I whispered back. 

We had such a good laugh in a place where you usually don't that I didn't ask about the key to the Beta Pi House. The two jocks Betsy had flirted with to punish me belonged to that fraternity. Since one of them had probably given her the key, I hoped she hadn't used it before the raid. I never found out.

Everybody learned what had happened, nobody knew what to do about it. The jocks denied that anything had happened and swore that they would get even. When the coaches got wind of that, they told them they would do nothing of the kind. The dean of women called the Theta Tau Alpha housemother in, but she had slept through both the departure and the return of her girls. Betsy had left a bottle of rum in a place where she knew the last old woman in a series would find it and drink herself to sleep. Only a drunkard would accept the ordeal of mothering such girls on such a salary. Professors who attended cocktail parties noted that, since the jocks had damaged their own door, they had only lost some of those aweful clothes they wore and a little pride. A diminutive shrug usually modified the latter word. The administrators defended the athletes' pride, claiming that the university's depended on it, at least in part. This claim usually made the professors smile. Though gorged with rumors, the press couldn't find any reliable sources for a week. When it did begin to substantiate some of them, it met with contradictions from people who didn't want them substantiated. The raid had exalted Betsy from an emancipated freshman to a princess of evil, admired and feared by all. Nothing she said or did went unnoticed or uncommented on any more. This transformation alienated me, since people were constantly appealing to her in matters of no interest or concern to me. Though still devoted to each other, we alternated between moving further apart and closer together from then on and we dated other people. Still, we preferred each other as long as we were in Concordia. We tacitly agreed to forget each other when she was in Mammoth and I, in Nevers. Occasionally, she mentioned taking me home with her and I think she meant it, but she never followed through. While I told her I would show her Nevers if she wanted to see it, she never seemed interested. I don't blame her.

We had agreed to keep Scratchy's Dodge a secret, which implied that neither of us would take anybody else there. So where could I take other girls? I had too much respect for Pie to smuggle them into our room. 

Sneaking into sororities and women's dormitories had become dangerous since Betsy's raid. Wherever I took a girl, I either found another couple already there or ran the risk of being discovered by another couple. Yet the competition drove me to an ingenuity that surprized me and won the admiration of others, both men and women. Eventually, I noticed a grassy plot behind the Wilcox monument in the back of the university graveyard. I took girls there, until, one night, I discovered another couple already on the ground together writhing, groaning and making little cries. I started to withdraw with my date when I heard Betsy's voice:

"Hey! Who's that?"

After initial surprize, she and I burst out laughing. We made a double date of it and even exchanged partners. Thus Betsy had the opportunity to whisper in my ear that nobody could screw like us. Unfortunately, that reminded me of Lee.

Once rushing and pledging had run their course, I limited my debauchery mostly to weekends. While my enthusiasm for Scratchy's psychology continued, a course on calculus began to interest me too. The professor was a stout, energetic little man whose head resembled an arrowhead with his stiff beard forming the point. Alexander Boroskonoff's beard pointed everywhere his feverish eyes focused as his head oscillated back and forth between the board and the class. He ended nearly all of his sentences at the top his his shrill voice, conveying an irony that took us weeks to decipher. Having written a formidable equation on the blackboard, he would point back and forth between it and, for instance, me: "You, Pillbury [he omitted the s]: you will never see that this root equal this power? No, you will play with radical on other side of equal sign. You will always be a ningkaput [pronounced that way]." Thus challenged, I stumbled through the operation as he made corrections that had the class laughing at me. Everybody took a turn, but I and another boy, whose name I can't remember, took more turns than the others. I don't know whether Borsko considered us funny or dumb. Neither of us had such a reputation outside of class. His method had discouraged us during the first week, angered us during the second and fascinated us from then on. We spontaneously formed an exclusive club competing with each other to find skonocuts and tell borostories, some of which made the Student Advocate. An insider in psychology, Betsy didn't like being an outsider in boroskology, which 

enabled me to tease her in language she couldn't understand. I admired Pie even more because he was taking differential equations already. A's in psychology and B's in calculus were offsetting C's in two other courses and a D in chemistry, where I distinguished myself by splashing water on sodium. I got one of the C's in French taught by Gus South, who was trying to make little Frenchmen of us. I just wanted to pass the course, satisfy the foreign language requirement and be content with reading menus for the rest of my life.

During the semester, I was able to raise the other C to a B. A big, rough, gray-haired woman named Flory Stokka, who had a man's voice, taught English Composition. We called her the Stokka pretending to throw coal in a furnace, a job women didn't do in those days. Did she play golf or tennis? We couldn't decide, but then, one day, she told us that good students are like horses: they never forget what they have learned. Thus we realized that she rode horseback and had been treating us like horses. To our surprize, we liked it. She had us write a few pages on a subject she had assigned to hand in at the beginning of every class. At the same time, she returned the compositions from the previous class with her comments. She wrote these in an incandescent green ink as endnotes referring to call numbers in our text. Always interesting and often funny, they held our attention during the first ten or fifteen minutes when she roamed the room answering questions about them. We were always showing them to each other and I still keep mine in a drawer of my desk. I read them even now when I feel depressed. The Stokka spent most of the remaining time writing examples from our papers on the blackboard and discussing them with us. Her whole body wiggled, shaking her buttocks, and her dress swished back and forth while the chalk screeched against the blackboard.

An early assignment required us to describe an animal that had caught our attention. I described the giraffe family and the Stokka, who was a tough grader, gave me a B to my surprize and satisfaction. Unlike most of the other teachers I have had, she could tell exactly why you didn't get a higher or lower grade. I got more than a C because my composition had focused on the predominant feature of the animal, the long neck, but I got less than an A because I had failed to explain why these long necks were graceful. The Stokka suggested that the way they moved them when they walked could have helped me to solve the problem. A later assignment challenged 

us to expose the effects of a profound emotion without explaining the cause. I related my twenty-four hour vigil at Schipitz's Trailer Park. The Stokka praised my observation of the alternation between hope and despair that numbed me to the humidity and the cold. I was proud of the A- she gave me, but my fame got me in trouble with Betsy, who wanted to know who the hell I was looking for in a trailer park. I finally told her that I had suspected she was inside with some other guy:

"Bull shit!" she snapped and girls didn't say things like that in those days.

"You could use a little jealousy!"

Expecting to show Joe around during the return visit by ZFF, I hinted that Betsy shouldn't feel obligated to meet him. Taking this as a challenge, she dressed as elegantly and decently as a Friday afternoon allowed and accompanied us everywhere we went. Though disconcerted when she ran into us, I felt more and more confident in her good manners and congenial urbanity as we proceeded. Neither Joe nor I said anything to suggest why we were enjoying her company, but, once she had left us, Joe laughed, which was rare: "She was checking up on me."

"I'm afraid she was."

"She certainly does!"

"Mammoth."

Alarmed: "I'm not doing it on purpose."

The tall girl hadn't tied her ponytail with a blue ribbon this time. I saw her seated with an empty place beside her as I went through the buffet line. "Are you saving this seat?" 

"No, why don't you take it?" The way she turned and looked up at me reassured me.

"Peg Acob."

She laughed: "It was a midair collision."

"You must have thought I was brazen."

"I don't know what got into me."

"What was that?"

"... I guess I felt the same way."

"... No."

"It wasn't an idea."

"Yes. It came as a surprise."

"So did I."

"No, it wouldn't... it wouldn't have been innocent."

She laughed: "What could be more innocent? Didn't the Lord inspire us to hug each other?"

She laughed at me: "Otherwise how could we have done it spontaneously and simultaneously?"

Embarrassed: "You will have to ask Joe about that."

Disturbed: "Then you don't agree with him."

Peg avoided me after this conversation.