Truth be told, I was raised to teach someplace like Chelsea. But only until I got married to someone who graduated from a school like Chelsea. After meeting this well-bred Mr. Right, I was supposed to stay home with my two or three children and keep a meticulously clean, well-appointed house. Oddly, Smith, the place my parents sent me to get me started on that path, was the place that led to my departing from it. And of course, like almost always when you’re eighteen or nineteen or twenty, the whole thing started with wanting to sleep with someone.

Part of being a proper lady even in the early 1970s, when I went to college, was doing volunteer work. I took up tutoring, primarily because it had a fixed schedule—every Tuesday at three—and the community center where we tutored wasn’t too far from the campus. But I guess I should say that going to college in 1971 had a slightly day-after-the-fair quality—Kent State had happened, and everyone was getting tired, tired of fighting. The slogans were beginning to sound just a little bit hollow. I hoped that going out and getting involved with “the people” of Northampton would help me feel less like all the good stuff had already happened.

Cal was the director of the tutoring program at the center, although, at twenty-one, he was only four years older than me. He had graduated from the University of Massachusetts just the previous summer, where, he later told me, he’d majored in “making trouble for the Man.” He actually talked like that. What’s worse, I suppose, was that it impressed me. His hair was dark shiny black, almost Asian looking, but he had fair skin and the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. He had grown up dirt-poor Irish in the south of Boston, I found out later. He had six brothers and two sisters and they all had precisely the same lovely coloring and tough way of talking. He was the only one of the lot of them to go to college, the only one of the lot of them to disown the racism he’d been taught since he was a child. I found this all terribly romantic. He made it clear he was interested in me from the start. He had this little sort of appraising half-smile on his face the whole time we talked. And he did this thing, this thing of holding my hand for just a few seconds longer than necessary. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I can still remember how that sent a shudder through me, right between my legs. He was always able to get to me that way, almost up until the end.