The Rapture

Francesca and I started ninth grade math with Sister Bernadine. Within a month she was dead, and we proceeded to have three incompetent substitutes. That left a lot of time for us to get to know each other without the distractions of either serious study or our other friends who were all in a different math class. Francesca was not the first woman I touched. She was the first one I fell in love with. I would stay in that place long after our last kiss seven years later. When my husband and I divorced many years later I was still dreaming about her. The last week of school in June is always warm. The auditorium where I sat to watch Francesca’s dance recital reflected the moist, obsessive stickiness of my desire. The reception at her house filled with a family and food much like my own Rochester Italian family. On this occasion none of it distracted me from getting Francesca upstairs. Under the canapé of her pink girly bed I put my arm around her shoulders as we rested on pillows, giggling about horny uncles, clueless aunts and annoying little cousins. I kissed her dark, thick hair. We kept on talking but my breathing deepened as I kissed her cheek, ran my hand down her arm, and carefully pulled her closer to me. When she turned her face to me we kissed. I felt her hesitation and her fears but I would not stop. To touch those perfect white teeth with my tongue, to run my hand ever so gently down her ample breasts, filled me with so much desire I might have given up life to hold on to that moment. Over the years I practically did. I lost my more conventional virginity that summer of 1973 in a humiliating, joyless way. It was not so much about sexual curiosity than an attempt to throw mutual friends off our scent. Any teenager with sexual antennae could detect the electricity between us. We avoided parents who had to know but would not say anything about all the time we spent together. Whole unsupervised summer days lying on couches or at sleepovers protected by assumptions about what teen-age girls do behind closed doors. Francesca had a poet’s gift for words. I liked books. Together we created a silent language for touching. The absence of convention made the experience unstable but exciting. The first night in August hinted already of fall. Francesca told me that we could not see each other anymore. She did not need to explain. The reasons were as obvious as our pleasures. We would, of course, literally see each other, at least every day of school. We shared only one class, English, which predictably I craved, if only to watch her from five rows and three seats across the room. After an errant summer friends graciously took me back into their fold without need of explanation. Neither did my parents ask what had happened to the relationship, although it is not unnatural for teen-agers to have spats, which is what they probably thought, or at least hoped, that was all it ever was. Unrepentant, I found a new female lover with whom I certified my penchants as assiduously as I tried to forget Francesca. I thought about her constantly. Imagine my surprise, then, when the following spring the vice principal called me into her office to ask me, if I, who rare among my cohort, had a car, would be willing to take Miss DelVechio home from school one early afternoon? Francesca did not feel well, and her parents were both working. Would I be so kind as to give her a ride? Nearly as breathless as the moment of that first kiss I walked out to the parking lot with her. I had a brand new lime green 1974 Camero, stick shift, bucket seats and an engine that roared. I usually drove that trophy like a demon, but the minutes to Francesca’s house were too few to waste on mere showiness. We moved along in silence. When we arrived in her driveway – and I needed no lesson from Sister Jeanine about the work habits of her parents having studied them the year before like a scholar – I asked her why she won’t at least talk to me. Pushing out from her bucket seat Francesca reached over the shift and kissed me

purposefully on the lips. In no time we were back in her house, on the couch, onto the floor and into her room. Francesca and I spent the next five years in an emotional netherworld. Gritty clandestine lovemaking made us feel desperate and dirty. Jealousy ravaged my heart as I was forced to stand by and watch, sometimes even participate in the charade of double dates. One night my father discovered us on the basement floor of his business, a restaurant, where Francesca lay drunk. The sight confirmed three years of his mounting suspicions, and he impulsively slapping her face. Valiantly, I jumped between them, helped Francesca up from the floor, to the car and then to a friend’s house where she could sober up. I slunk home like a coward. When my father came upstairs to my room to talk to me I said I had a headache. We never spoke of it again. Graduation brought out the contradictions of our life in bold, tortured relief. During my first year of college at Christmas break I refused to return to London where I had begun school, even to complete the fall semester exams. Francesca never left for college only some hours away from home, changing her mind the morning of her departure with the car fully packed. I stayed back to chaperone the dalliance she had begun with a wild boy. But it was already too late. Before Christmas, Francesca wrote me love letters in beautiful Catholic girl script, but she had begun to drift away. We were sinners in the eyes of an angry god. Both of us, in our own ways, acted it. She with Mr. Sex, Drugs and Rock-n-Roll and me by holding myself back. Self-destructiveness seemed strangely safer than owning who we were and what we had done together in the name of something that in its original moments felt nothing like sin or destruction. With the help of friends I made it to a therapist’s office before I could do permanent damage. I started college again and moved away from home. Francesca got pregnant. At the end of the spring semester in the first week in May I came back to my parent’s house for the summer but only made it through about twelve hours before the damp, dark blanket of depression starting to descend on me. I could not stay and watch her give birth, pretending to be the elated friend. Now badly corroded, the lime green Camero beckoned to me to fly away, and so in the middle of the night I left Rochester and drove into the sunrise. I chose Hyannis over Provincetown and kept the stories about myself to myself. In a boarding house I lived with drifters, criminals and Irish girls on six-month working visas. I tried working in an envelope factory, but the paper cuts hurt my hands. Break time was even worse as I listened to the details of regular employees’ lives of physical abuse, alcoholism and stagnant resignation. Having worked in my father’s restaurant for many years I returned to what I knew best, and I visited friends in Provincetown to pass the time. At the end of June my friend Mary called me on the pay phone in the hall. Francesca had had a baby girl. Ten hours later I sat with Francesca in the lounge of her hospital ward. I felt her empty belly. I understood now that she was genuinely safe. She had made a deal with her parents that she could live at home and they would raise the baby together so long as she had nothing more to do with the father. Then I got back in the car and drove straight to the Cape using every mile as a way to push back the pain. It was not the last time I saw Francesca. In the years between the birth of her baby and my entrance into graduate school we got together occasionally. Most of it was no good; some of it was sordid. Except for the last time. It was August of 1981. I had graduated college, endured a summer of language study and was about to move out of Rochester for good. Francesca drove all the way to Vermont, then a huge step for her. Over a weekend, we offered the better part of ourselves to each other -- playful intelligence, teasing fun and tender

lovemaking. With different relationship? Neither of us with Francesca before, this many events in our past, it

decisions at earlier stages could we have sustained a even probed the possibility. Like so many liaisons weekend emerged seemingly out of nowhere. Unlike so would be the last time we would be together as lovers.

Nikki, her daughter, was now three. Francesca had started college, and would eventually become an award-winning teacher working in the poorest school in the city. Some years later she would marry a man and have two more children. Off I went to graduate and then law school. The next time I saw her was almost fifteen years later, just before my mother died. And then a few more years went by before my father died too. She came to the funeral and I turned to offer her an air peace greeting where she sat with her husband several rows away. I had my own husband then, and two beautiful boys. That marriage would end not for Francesca, but because of an inchoate feeling about myself that first stirred with her. In separation and divorce I sought, and found, a relationship that gave feeling form. A few weeks ago I saw Francesca, both of us now solidly in middle age. She lives in Rochester and I in Ithaca, so we met at a small lunch place on Seneca Lake, which is for both us about halfway. Francesca has become a fundamentalist Christian. I married an Episcopal priest. When she tells me that she believes in the “The Rapture” at first I am shocked. But then it occurs to me that whatever it is that she really believes does not matter. The Rapture is a metaphor, like the distance we have each traveled to see one another again, and we are not so different after all. I believe in rapture too.