During the rest of the weekend, I obsessively reviewed what I’d worn to work. I took out all my clothes and tried to eliminate anything that was overly feminine or revealing. But my clothes were not the problem. There was nothing to suggest sexual availability. For the second time in my life, I had failed to keep a man from sexually abusing me; a man that I knew, a man that I thought respected me. I hated myself even more than usual. On Saturday afternoon I went to the package store and bought several bottles of wine. I spent that night drinking.

After I graduated from pole climbing, I was told to report to work the following day.  I would meet my gang of employees and start my job as a resident installation foreman for New Jersey Bell Telephone. “Fresh meat!” The speaker was about seven feet, hugely muscled, tattooed. with a buzz cut. “Excuse me?” I’d heard him, but I hoped he wouldn’t speak to me like that again.
“I said, ‘fresh meat.’ Where are you from, baby? You’re new, right?”
I nodded.
“So, which side? Business or residential?”
“Residential.”
”You just get out of pole school or what?”
“Hey, looky, look! It’s our new management hire!” A very spiffy, buff man with slicked-back hair and a wide smile was standing at my elbow. ”Howdy, Mary Ellen.”
“Molly.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” the fresh meat guy said, spitting on the ground. “She’s one of them bitches?”
“Watch your filthy mouth Halloway and fuck off!” The spiffy man extended his freshly manicured hand. “Welcome to hell, Molly. I’m Marco Lopez, and I will be your tour guide.”

Of course, I wasn’t healthy enough to accept we needed to stop seeing each other. During the few months that remained in the Trinity year, we drifted apart. He came to say goodbye when I was leaving Ireland, and we drank coffee in the back garden pretending we would see one another again although neither of us believed that was true. Trine was driving me to catch the train to begin my trip across Europe, but he was standing on his head and refused to say goodbye. I leaned over and whispered in his ear, “Don’t forget me, Christopher Robin.”

I landed in Dublin and was in a cab headed to Emily Murphy’s flat on Wilton Place before I felt anything but a mild sort of shock that I had actually managed to leave the country. “Are you visiting a relative?” the cab driver asked.
“I’m going to Trinity for a year.”
He glanced in his rear-view mirror. “Ah, Protestant then?”
“What? Oh, no. I’m a lapsed Catholic. Well, not even lapsed, never started. My grandmother was from the North. She grew up in a convent.” This need for self-identification was always in play in Ireland. Unlike race in America, Irish people looked alike and needed a guide to hate each other. It was almost impossible to remain mysterious about your belief system or to deny religion when choosing a side was necessary.

James and I went to the pub, had a few drinks, and he made it very clear any mention of his dead fiancée was off limits. My jet lag resulted in a stagger to my room, but a few days later we slept together. I was immediately drawn to this man, his broken heart, his anger, his humor, and his connection to my childhood. Of course it ended badly, with his shooting out the mansions’ windows with a pellet gun and fucking another woman, an old girlfriend, in the room next to me.

Here’s what I knew about the world at seventeen: men could walk on the moon, all good politicians would be assassinated, and people murdered one another for no good reason. Six million Jews, gypsies, gays, Catholics and anyone who lacked Aryan cred were exterminated. Not just Anne Frank. Hippies were doomed to failure and capable of the utmost hypocrisy. The Beatles would never reform. The Summer of Love was over. Adults were treacherous and selfish. Men blame women for being beautiful. Men didn’t like smart girls. Men didn’t want an uncontrollable woman. I was uncontrollable. We dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My parents got married on the day we bombed Hiroshima. Placing your hands over your head would not protect you from atomic fall out. Cancer was fatal. Heroin was fatal. Love was fatal. I wanted to save everyone I loved from harm. I was powerless to save anyone from anything.

Seventh grade was supposed to be set in a brand-new school. Instead, we were sent to attend school in the National Guard Armory. I'm not sure where the National Guard was. After the Kent State shootings, it seemed like everyone was either an anti-war protester or a soldier. That year, the US Selective Service started the first draft lottery date for the Vietnam War. On December 1, 1969, men aged nineteen to twenty-six would be drafted based on their birthdates. The National Guard kept getting photographed looking overwhelmed and miserable at the prospect of beating up more college students.

I think the library saved my life. I sat on the floor looking at books about nudist colonies filled with black-and-white pictures of naked people in sneakers, playing volleyball, practicing archery, grilling hamburgers, and generally being naked, which I found bizarre but also helpful since there were no boys in our family and my father was not a naked person ever. Also, I read all of Jane Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, Louisa May Alcott, piles and piles of books. I read magazines about teenage life, girls who gave cute parties with refreshments that looked like doll food, crustless sandwiches, heart-shaped cookies, and sherbet punch. These girls had long, shiny, brushed hair, small, oval faces, and huge eyes. They stood gracefully, knees jutted out at attractive angles; they seemed like space creatures, but they were just models.

I had already almost died a number of times. When we visited our glamorous Welsh friends in Mumbles, where Dylan Thomas had once lived, we swam in a tidal river that evidently had a killer current. Apparently, my sisters, one six, the other nine, were meant to serve as lifeguards. I was three. My mother described me as “bouncy,” which might have meant floaty. I had also been lost on Fire Island for twelve hours, and my father convinced drowned. Waking up to a house full of hungover adults and my sleeping cousins and sisters, I decided to go for a walk on the beach. As the evening approached, I found myself sitting on the counter of a man who had walked up to me and said, “Is your name Molly Moynahan?” He had called the police, who called my hysterical parents. He gave me Pecan Sandies and forbidden orange soda.

My family believed in Dickens, root vegetables, ignoring difficult truths, and Louis Kahn. They believed in making fun of the fat, the unintelligent, the poorly read, the conservative, and God. We believed in Ireland and scorned the Brits but loved England and adored the Beatles and hated The Monkees. I had no idea what was morally correct as a child, except you should suffer for everyone and not show off. You should tell a good story, and when your parents drank, go to bed, and hold your breath and hope morning comes fast. You should swim in the ocean as frequently as possible, not expect praise for mediocre effort, and remain aware that mediocrity would be determined by two incredibly talented and impressive people who both graduated from Harvard. You were fucked.

Luke started screaming in the middle of the night. I swam up towards the light, towards the air, a dream pulling me back, but Luke's cry made me surface, and I opened my eyes to his eyes, my eyes because we had the same eyes. But his were full of tears. He was sobbing.

It was eleven hours of driving to get to where Luke was staying with Kevin’s brother and sister-in-law. If you went in a straight line, it was eleven hours. I would have made it before dark If the highway wasn’t under construction if I hadn’t stopped for gas and water and the bathroom and called Scott to yell at him for the mixed tape that featured song after Canadian Irish love song featuring a male vocalist with a heartbreaking voice. These instrumentals expressed longing, regret, grieving, and lust. I should have stayed in a motel and finished driving the next day. I didn’t listen to Scott’s tape until I had listened to a call-in radio show for the relatives of drug addicts, my tapes which included The Cranberries and Enya, but Enya was the soundtrack of my birth, Seventy-two hours of labor with Enya chanting unintelligible Gaelic words. I pulled into a general store to get gas.