A Slice of My Life

Abstract

The first woman I had a lesbian relationship with called herself Tiny Hero, or TH for short. She called me many things, including Kitty Kitzmueller, which she sometimes shortened to Kit. She gave my breasts good Polish names, Sophie and Stella. A pious college friend of hers, Regina Kelly, she nicknamed Regina Coeli, and an obnoxious male in our English department she called Birdlegs. Because she felt burdened by a long Italian name, TH wanted to get a WASP name by marriage. For a time she dated an ex-seminarian with a WASP name and not much else to recommend him. When he broke off their engagement, she was very hurt. I comforted her. Out of that experience, a lesbian relationship developed. But long before we caught on to what was happening between us, we invited a third woman to move into TH's apartment at the same time I did. Like us, she was the product of a small Catholic women's college. TH called her by her full name, Maren Ann Agatha Norgaard, Agatha having been added when Maren converted to Catholicism. During the baptismal ceremony, a candle carried by one of her friends set fire to her veil-a small incident which delighted the pagan heart of TH and foreshadowed Maren Ann's later involvements with Rome. Beginning a lesbian alliance with a roommate in a very small apartment, occupied by a third woman, had its special intricacies and awkwardnesses, among them the bedroom arrangement: the three single beds had no room between them and no room between walls and beds except in front. It would have been an ideal bedroom to display to a suspicious parent. Before Tiny Hero and I knew we wanted to sleep together (not one of the possibilities mentioned by the nuns who taught us), we had chosen the outer beds. I can still see us, two rather slight, dark-haired women separated by a very large blond Norwegian. One night at three a.m. we awoke to the sounds of choking. M.A.A. Norgaard was clutching at the rosary she wore around her neck, which had become tangled up in the scapular she also wore around her neck. TH and I cut them loose, perhaps saving her life. Cradle Catholics who had by then lapsed, TH and I judged Maren Ann's religious zeal with the bored detachment of regular Sunday zoo visitors who know the chimp will be scratching his crotch. We protested angrily, though, when Maren Ann's spiritual adviser, one Father Brendan, announced that he would thenceforth interpret the will of God for her. Sometime later she decided to go to Vietnam to see for herself if the United States ought to be involved. (I was never sure if Father Brendan and Mother Church could be blamed for this third threat to her life, but my opinion of the priest was not improved when I ran into him several years later in Minnesota. The woman I loved was with me. Brendan looked at her and asked, Is this your son?) Many of the women who were with us in a Catholic graduate school had passed through parochial schools. We each had our little collections of bizarre tales, of pagan babies ransomed, for example, and spectacular apparitions of the Blessed Virgin. TH herself had a fine sense of humor and imagination-playful, fanciful, irreverent. I was irreverent myself, but the quali-