Living Out Loud Read Free

aged wonderfully. Nowadays he looks like one of those computer-generated pictures of someone twenty-five years later, the ones that add only lines and gray hair and overlook the usual accumulation of fat and jowls and rapidly enlarging forehead.
    Over the years I’ve sometimes tried to escape being a Paul girl, but it’s never worked for long. I once made an attempt in high school, taking a crack at a hefty blonde who’d made fun of me in the cafeteria and missing her substantial jaw by a good six inches because of bad eye-hand coordination. And once or twice, particularly in convent school, I’ve had friends so good-natured and conformist that they made me seem like Irma La Douce for a time. When the going got tough, however, I always wound up a Paul girl again. I’d had lots of practice. One of the most satisfying things about growing up Catholic during the 1950s were the rules, which were not then, as we say now, flexible. The only questions were of degree: If you inadvertently ate baloney at lunch on Friday, would you go to hell if you were hit by a car during recess afterward? If you sucked on a cough drop in the car on the way to nine o’clock mass, had you violated the Communion fast requirements? And which was worse: to leave a piece of Host stuck to the roof of your mouth during breakfast, or to move it with your finger in direct violation of what the nuns had told you about stuck Hosts?
    Is it any wonder I became accustomed to the letter of the law? Rules were a relief. They were like basic tap-dance combinations: you could set them up any way you pleased, add thestray shuffle or heel-and-toe, but at least you didn’t have to improvise everything. Of course there were always the people who seemed not to need rules—the John girls, as it were. My last year in high school I nursed a secret admiration for them, even while I scrambled each morning to match kilt and crew neck, circle pin and earrings, knee socks and Weejuns. In Indian-print dresses and sandals, the John girls skipped pep rallies, asked the history teacher whether Richard Nixon wasn’t as bad as Adolf Hitler, and applied to alternative schools.
    I got to know them better in college, and realized that they had their own set of rules, and that they distrusted deviation and liked conformity as much as I did. Talk about how high you got even if you didn’t; look bored; disdain all academic disciplines except for philosophy and creative writing; use rhyme in poetry only on pain of death; and affect a writing style as close as possible to that of
Franny and Zooey
. That was how their game was played.
    We’ve all changed a good bit since then, although when I wear dinner-plate earrings just because everyone else is wearing dinner-plate earrings, I sometimes have my doubts. More of my life now is about character building than image making. While there aren’t quite as many rules as there once were (you can pull a piece of baloney out of your purse in church on Friday and nobody seems to mind as long as you show up) I distrust them more. They just don’t work as well for human relationships as we might like. I wouldn’t insult either my husband or myself by reading one of those one-minute marriage manager books. And as far as kids are concerned, the rules are just plain silly, as you find out the first time you try to give a baby his every-four-hour nurse and discover that an hour-and-a-half later he’s hungry again.
    I guess I can tap-dance better now—more improvising, fewer set pieces. I think of the Paul girl as a bit like an illustration in a coloring book: black outlines, no fill-in. It was usefulin its time, in its place. It made it easier to believe in God, to hate certain people passionately, to choose Paul without thinking twice about any of the other three. Of course, I now understand the bits of those three that were attractive to others; I understand the gestalt, which was a concept, not to mention a word, that was beyond me at the