I think these stories entrancing; how could anybody who ever wanted to run away think otherwise? My mother must want to escape herself, is in fact devoted to practices of escape, but for her my sister’s wild days are horrible. For her some vista opens out—downtown blocks, pawnshops, cocktail bars, Negroes, as Allen Ginsberg put it, “with curlicues of marijuana in their hair”—which isn’t anything like what she must have wanted for her daughter’s future. These same elements strike me as exotic ingredients of a vivid demimonde nothing in all the environs of Rincon High School seems to match. My mother’s anxieties are a brew she probably can’t sort out herself: shame, humiliation, a will to control what that girl does, a rage that she can’t control much of anything, a bitter wish to stamp out her own wildness: Chinese horses brushed on a scrap of scroll, then put away. Moral outrage? The shock of having your daughter turn out to be somebody you don’t know? The plain fear that her child will come to harm?

Not entirely unfounded, since soon the police catch Sally with some checks and some prescription pads, some bottles of pills that can only have come from the drugstore she entered the hard way, through a hole she and her friends had cut in the roof.

Like my mother, I’m also smitten with a priest, or a priest-in-the-making, anyway. In my new drama class I’ve met a boy two years older than me, a thin Polish Catholic named Rudy, with high cheekbones and a lank fall of black hair combed up in an oiled wave—shades of Jerry Lowell! It must have been his exoticism that drew me first; his family had moved to Tucson from the East, and something about his pale skin and dark hair, his white cotton shirts and black slacks and the holy medals he wore under his white T-shirts, gave me a little thrill of difference.

It wasn’t his body, exactly, though I liked his wiriness, the white, thin reach of him which I associated, somehow, with litanies: tower of ivory. In fact I never even allowed myself to imagine sex with Rudy, which was just as well since he was a straight boy as well as a future seminarian. He was himself devoted to a girl in the drama class, a cool and brilliant blonde named Veronica Roberts, whom he loved with a noble idealization after the fashion of courtly love. He hadn’t any intention of giving up his vocation for Veronica; she served him more as a sort of hobby, an aesthetic object. And so I attempted to model my passion for Rudy on his idolization of her, imagining him as an ideal figure, a boy who’d give up his pale and denied body for the higher life of God.