Caitlin Higgins was as straight as an arrow until she met Jennifer, sweet Jennifer, Jennifer of the soul kisses, the warm caresses, the laugh, the....But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Caitlin wanted to be an altar boy, and that's when the trouble started. Boys had so much freedom. Take peeing for example. Boys could go on a tree whenever they want when girls had to squat, watch out for bugs and thorns, make sure that no ants crawled up into you know where...yuk...and then step over their trickle so as not to get their shoes wet.
An altar boy, assisting Father at the consecration of the host turning bread and wine into the body and blood of Our Lord, was a step closer to God than girls could take. Bobby Links was on God's stage, a supporting actor to Father Brophy, and to Jesus himself who had to look down from the cross on sinners like Henry Carter, a serial adulterer and cheat but serial confessant who walked up the aisle to receive Holy Communion in his snappy Armani suit, razor-cut, and trailing a scent of St. Laurent without a care in the world.
Absolution was only granted if you promised the Lord never to sin again, but there he was, cocky as ever as he knelt at the railing, shut his eyes, and received the body and blood of Christ on his tongue.
God forgave men like that? Caitlin was more angry with him than even pompous little Bobby Links, swishing and sashaying up there on the altar careful not to step on Father Brophy’s hems. That little...prick. There she went again, another sin this time in God's house, to add to the list for whenever she went to confession which would be a while because the sins had been piling up.
Caitlin felt like Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, frustrated, confined by abusive men until she found Petruchio who made her a woman, let the chrysalis emerge from the cocoon (or was it the other way around?) and become herself.
Yet, why was it always some pathetic Prince Charming that always had to come and rescue women? Why couldn't all women be more like Goneril and Regan, Caitlin's heroes, determined, willful, dominating women who get men to do their bidding. Or Tamora who gets her sons to rape and mutilate Titus' daughter.
She shook her head at the thought. Another sin of intent, smiling at the ruin of a perfectly good, innocent girl; but she couldn't help it. Better be a Goneril or Tamora than a Juliet simpering in her bedchamber, hanging over the balcony, pining for her Romeo.
She got her wish - being closer to God - when her parents decided to send her to the Convent of the Sacred Heart. They thought that being in the company of devout, Catholic girls would keep her mind on her studies, her soul pure, and her body clean.
Caitlin did not resist. In fact being in the exclusive company of girls would be a welcome relief from the likes of Bobby Links, the twit and Father Brophy who, despite his sermons on devotion to the Lord and the celibacy and abstinence of St. Paul was certainly doing it with Markus Hetherington. They had almost been caught by the plumber who had come for a leaky toilet, but Arnie Swensen knew what was what and he didn't have to exactly see who was doing it to whom to figure out the whole sordid story.
Men, thought Caitlin, who needs them? But of course with the exception of her father, a loving man who always took her places, bought her ice cream, and got her out of the clutches of his hectoring wife, her mother whom she barely tolerated, all kitschy make up and volunteering. Daddy was a mensch, and if all men were like him, life would be a bed of roses; but alas, they were not, so she really and truly looked forward to Sacred Heart.
It was there she met Jennifer, Jennifer of the soul kisses and warm caresses, but not right away. There were simply too many girls to choose from, a harem of sweet young things. Many were plain, praying the stations of the cross, reading The Lives of the Saints, and going to morning mass; but there were others, Lolitas whose flowers would open at a touch.
There was Mary and Laura, and Benneton (Bennett), a girl from Boston who had been asked to leave Miss Porter's Finishing School for 'inappropriate' behavior. Her parents had had her on an Ivy League path when she was caught in bed with another debutante and summarily dismissed.
The affair with Bennett lasted until Spring Break when they both went to different islands, Bennett to St. Bart's and Caitlin to St. Kitts; but they both came back with enviable tans, and resumed their affair until the end of school.
The affair with Jennifer was the best. Jennifer knew things, knew how to do things, and was never concerned with 'them' - the nuns who dropped their knickers with the entire Junior class; and the priests and their altar boys. So what if they were caught, said Jennifer. Caught for what, doing what?. It wasn't as if those nuns were any better. And besides, it’s only a sin if you believe it is, and we don't.
They went their separate ways after Sacred Heart. Nothing was the equal to those years. How could it be? Universities, the good ones at least, were now sink holes for every queer duck in the union, and sorting them all out was time-consuming and low-reward. In any case who wanted a trannie who couldn't decide which end was up, a flaming gay boy, or a tough girl from Bernal Heights anyway?
The idyll of Sacred Heart could never be repeated, so pure and passionate as it had been. Everything else afterwards was dross - an assemblage of sexual misfits, and many of the girls who went to Harvard came out as straight as an arrow, sick and tired of the gender nonsense, and headed right to the altar with some man from Beacon Hill.
The last I heard from Caitlin was that she was a sexual returnee. Since Sacred Heart could never be repeated - innocence is a rare gem - and the sexual hysteria of neo-feminists and old Freedom Marchers simply too irrelevant to put up with, she married and had children.
Whoa! Really? She was so committed to women and then turned over for a man?
Yes, for thinking any differently would be to deny her - any woman's - fungibility, ease and compromise with reality after having tested it victoriously. A woman's place might indeed be in the home, but the journey there should be an exciting one.
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