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away from college before I get any high-class ideas about another kind of life and throw him over. He drives straight through this dot of a city, past the police station, the public library, the opera house. I beg him to stop.
    â€œI have to call my mother.”
    â€œWhat the hell do you want to do that for?” he demands.
    â€œI always tell my mother what I’m doing,” I fib.
    â€œI don’t like this idea, Gail.”
    I stare at this man’s profile, his lips drawn tight as a slash, and wonder how I let him take over my life. When he turned up in town at the start of my senior year in high school, the proverbial tall dark stranger, he pursued me wherever I went, offering me rides home from school, turning up at football games, even crashing parties where he must have known I would be bored with boys my own age. He was worldly and exuded a dark and illicit energy. There were days when he would lure me to sit in the cab of his truck during my study hall break and have a cigarette with him. He brought me wildflowers and told me of the terrors of war. I thought, of course, that I could save him from his paranoid fears; I would make him believe again that people can be good.
    Toward the end of the year, I would sneak out at night to meet him a few blocks from my house. He would take me to his house and make us scotch and sodas and kiss me with a violent passion. He showed me the long purplish dent in his thigh where he had been knifed by the enemy. I found it strangely erotic. When we finally coupled, the scream of pain quickly surged into a crescendo of desire that scarcely left me for the rest of the summer. I was lost to lust.
    My mother tolerated him. My father wanted to kill him. That maniac McCarthy , he called him.
    Before we cross the Vermont border, I persuade him to pull into a roadhouse. He finds the bar while I look for a pay telephone. Thank God it’s in the ladies’ room. I call home. I pray my mother’s head won’t be in the clouds. She answers.
    â€œHello, honey, everything all right?”
    â€œMcCarthy wants to marry me,” I blurt. “We’re eloping, but don’t worry, we’ll be fine.”
    A long pause, I hear her thick breathing. “Where are you right now?”
    â€œDriving. In his truck.”
    â€œYou’ve left school?”
    â€œIt was really exciting, Mom. He came for me with his tree ladder and all the girls—”
    â€œWhere are you headed?”
    â€œMassachusetts. He has a nice motel picked out.”
    Her voice shifts suddenly into a calming neutral. “Honey, don’t do anything right now. Marriage is a big step. Don’t you want to have a lovely wedding? Honey?”
    She must know. This isn’t all the romantic getaway I’m pretending it is.
    â€œMom? Are you there?” She must be telling my father. I wait, trembling. When she comes back on the phone, her voice is silky as warm bathwater. She coaxes me to come home and we’ll talk it all over. “You don’t want to elope and miss all the fun, you know? Shopping for the dress, I can give you a new hairstyle, we can have the reception on the terrace of the new house . . .” She is making it up as she goes along, bless her heart.
    â€œCan I speak to Daddy? It won’t cost him anything, if I elope, I mean.” I hear her put her hand over the receiver and my father shouting in the background.
    â€œYour father is going to bed tonight with a gun beside him.”
    â€œA gun? Why?”
    â€œBaby, just drive right straight home and we’ll work it all out, together.” I can’t remember when my mother sounded so sober and sure of herself.
    McCarthy has that beery look in his eyes when I find him in the bar. He interrogates me about the phone call. Foolishly, I tell him about my father and his gun. I can almost see the hairs on the back of McCarthy’s neck stand up, the macho surge. Back in the truck I