And yet, somehow, seeing it played out onstage, with Aldonza chased by a group of men, fondled and abused, her breasts grabbed like lobes of meat, I could not sustain the illusion that Steve Carbonaro found essential to our relationship. I was not a whore who, by virtue of his imagination and sense of justice, he could raise to the height of a lady. I was an eighteen-year-old girl who had wanted to be an archaeologist when I was four, and a poet or a Broadway star when I grew up. I had changed. The world I lived in was not the world that my parents or Steve Carbonaro still occupied. In my world, I saw violence everywhere. It was not a song or a dream or a plot point.
I left Man of La Mancha feeling filthy.
That night, Steve was exhilarated. He had seen what he knew to be truth, the truth of a romantic nineteen-year-old played out on the stage. He drove his Dulcinea home, sang to her in the car and, at his urging, she sang back to him. We were there for a long time. The windows steamed up from the singing. I went inside. Before I did, what was precious to me that summer happened one more time: A nice boy kissed me good night. Everything was tainted. Even a kiss.
Looking back now, listening to the lyrics again, it is not lost on me, as it was then, that Don Quixote dies in the end, that Aldonza survives, that it is she who sings the refrain from "The Impossible Dream," she who is left standing to do battle.
Things between us did not end gloriously; there was no bright, shining star or quest. Ultimately, Don Quixote had a hard time loving chaste and pure from afar. He found someone who would go all the way with him. The summer ended. It was time to go back to school again. Don Quixote would transfer to Penn; my father wrote him a passionate letter of recommendation. And I, with the eventual support of my parents, went back to Syracuse. Alone.
SIX
In my senior year of high school, I had applied to three colleges: Syracuse University, Emerson College in Boston, and the University of Pennsylvania, where I was supposed to have gotten in, a cinch as a faculty child. I did not want to go to Penn, or at least that's how I remember it. I had watched my sister move in and then quickly out of a dorm on Penn's campus, bring her possessions back to my parents' house, and commute her first year. If I had to go to college-which I spent the better part of four years in high school saying I didn't want to do-I wanted it to have the benefit of being far away.
My parents humored me; they were desperate for me to go to college. They saw it as an essential gateway, the thing that had changed their own lives, particularly my father's. Neither of his parents had finished high school and the shame of this was like an ache to him; his academic achievements were fueled by a need to distance himself from his mother's bad grammar and his father's drunken dirty jokes.
In my junior year of high school, my father and I visited Emerson, where long-haired students he called "throwbacks" advised me on how to break what they saw as oppressive rules.
"You aren't supposed to have any electrical appliances," said the resident assistant of the dorm we toured. He had dark brown dirty hair and a scruffy beard. To me, he looked like John the bus driver, who had driven me to school during junior high and had dropped out of high school. Both these boys had the smell of true, authentic rebellion. They reeked of pot.
"I got a toaster oven and a hair dryer," this John boasted, pointing toward a grease-coated toaster oven wedged into a set of handmade shelves. "Never use 'em at the same time, that's the trick."
Though amused, my father was also shocked by this boy, his mangy looks, his position of authority in the dorms. My father may have been divided. Emerson had the reputation of being an arty school in a town of monoliths like Harvard and MIT. Even Boston University, whose campus we also visited and which my father praised, was far above Emerson's place on the food chain. But I liked Emerson. I liked how when we drove up to it and saw the sign, two of the letters were missing from it. This was my kind of place. I felt I could learn not to make toast and dry my hair at the same time.
That night I had fun with my father. This is a rare event. My father does not have hobbies, wouldn't recognize a ball sport if the ball hit him in the head, and there are no cronies, there are only colleagues. The reason for relaxation of any kind is largely beyond him. "Fun is boring," he told me as a child when I attempted to coax him into playing a board game I had set up on the floor. It became one of his favorite phrases. He meant it.
But I'd always had a hint that my father could be different away from us and away from my mother. That he had fun in other countries or with his male graduate students. I liked to get my father alone, and on the trip to Emerson, he and I shared a hotel room to save money.
The night after a long day in Boston, I slipped into the twin bed nearest the bathroom. My father went down to the lobby to read and perhaps make a call to my mother. I was wound up and couldn't sleep. Earlier, I had gotten a bucket of tiny ice cubes from the hallway. I planned my attack. I took the ice cubes and put them in my father's bed, right down near the feet. I saved the remainder and placed them by my bed.
I feigned sleep when my father returned. He changed into his pajamas in the bathroom, brushed his teeth, turned out the light. I could see the outline of him as he pulled the covers back to get inside. I was elated, if a bit frightened. He might just be plain mad. I counted, and then it came. A ferocious yell followed by cursing. "For Christ's sakes, what the…?"
I couldn't hold it. I started laughing uncontrollably.
"Alice?"
"Got ya," I said.
At first, he was angry, but then he threw a cube. That was all it took.
It was war. I threw back. Our beds were our bunkers. He threw great handfuls and, retrieving them, I used them as individuals, firing off rounds timed to get him just as he was coming up to strike. He was laughing and so was I. He had tried momentarily to be the parent, but he couldn't hold to it.
I got what he thought was too hysterical and reached what my mother called my hyperactive state, so we stopped. But before that, oh, to see my father joyful, laughing. At moments like this I pretended my father was the big brother I'd never had. It was up to me to instigate, but when he was that repressed kid released, my whole heart wanted him to stay that way forever.
Like a small-town girl might view Hollywood, I saw Syracuse as my big break. Compared with my sister's proximity to my parents, Syracuse was far away from home. Far enough so that I could redefine myself against what I had once been.
My roommate was Nancy Pike. She was a roly-poly, overexcited girl from Maine. In the summer, she had found out my name and written me a letter. It was six enthusiastic pages long and regaled me with what she was bringing and their attendant definitions-"I have a hot pot. It is a little pot that looks like a coffee percolator but it's really only for hot water and has a plug that you plug in. It is great for making soups and water for tea though you should never put soup directly in it."
I dreaded meeting her.
As my mother, father, and I arrived on move-in day my head was swimming. This was my new life and here were all the new people in it. A coed dorm held possibilities I dared not outline to my parents. My mother had on her Donna Reed face, which was a particularly sickly smile imbued with positive thinking, dredged up from I never understood where. My father wanted to get the stuff out of the car and get it over with. He was not made, as he pointed out many times that day, "for heavy lifting."