Chapter 32

One of the things that made coming back to Venable College feel different to Cat and me was that we hardly knew anyone, except for Ed and Sue, of course. The class we had originally been in graduated while we were still at Phan Loc, so they were all gone. The class behind us had graduated back in the spring, so with the exception of a few people like us who had taken time off or needed an extra year, the only people still there had been freshmen the last time we had been there. We only remembered a few of them since we had shared few if any classes with them; thanks to Brian and his buddies, most of the climbing club members we remembered had turned inactive.

In our first few days back I went over to the art department to talk to Dr. Alta about getting my old job back. She was glad to see me, but had the position filled by a girl who had grown up as a nudist. The life modeling bothered her even less that it had bothered me, and she needed the money even more than I had. I told Dr. Alta that I was willing to be a substitute if needed, but there was another connection with our former lives at Venable gone.

On top of that, we were living off-campus, so we didn’t have a lot of day-to-day contact with the rest of the student body outside of our classes. Besides, our experiences were well beyond the comprehension of most of the other students. We were outsiders now, and there was little doubt that it was going to stay that way for the rest of our college careers. Speaking just for myself, I was filling in time until we graduated; I refrained from counting days like most of the guys had done in Vietnam, but there were times it was tempting because I was in exactly the same mind set as they had been.

About the only time we got to interact with other students outside of class was at the snack bar where we ate more hamburgers and fries from their limited menu than we probably should have. It was easier than going back to the apartment and cooking something for ourselves, and we didn’t have to clean up afterwards.

Sometime in our first month back, Cat and I were sitting at a table for six in the snack bar with a couple of other girls we didn’t know. We were all eating the not-very-good burgers the place offered and talking about nothing much, when a couple of guys, one white and one black, came over to us. “Would you mind if we sat down with you?” one of them asked us.

“Suit yourselves,” I told them. I had seen these two before, and figured they were checking us out, as guys will do to girls. I had gotten used to it and didn’t mind, but somehow these two looked vaguely familiar although I didn’t think much about it. “There’s plenty of room.”

“Thanks,” the white guy said. “Look, we don’t want to bother you but we’ve been arguing for a couple of weeks, and the only way to settle it is to ask you a question.”

“Sure, go ahead,” I smiled.

I got a question I wasn’t expecting. “Do the words ‘Phan Loc’ mean anything to you?” the white guy continued.

I’m sure Cat and I both gasped. My mind flashed back over a year, almost two years, and realized these two guys had come into the canteen from time to time! It had been back toward the early part of the tour, and they had been getting short.

“They sure do,” Cat smiled. “I think I remember your faces, but so many guys went by that I’m afraid I can’t place your names.”

“I was right,” he grinned. “The two of you are Kittycat and JoJo, aren’t you?”

“That was then,” Cat replied. “It’s just Cat and Joan, now. We left those nicknames there.”

“I thought so,” he replied. “Wilbur here said I had to be crazy. Small world, isn’t it?”

One of the other girls at the table spoke up. “What are you talking about?”

“We were all in the same place in Vietnam,” the white guy explained to her. “Kittycat and JoJo here worked in the Red Cross canteen. Wilbur and I did helicopter maintenance, and we went over to the canteen now and then just to be around an American girl and remember that we had homes to go to.”

The girl turned to us. “I can’t believe it!” she said. “I can understand guys getting drafted, but what were you two doing in that horrible war? What kind of animals were you?”

I wanted to say something snippy back to her but I held my tongue. This was just the kind of reaction we often got when we mentioned that we had been in Vietnam, which is why Cat and I usually didn’t say anything about it unless we had to. I was trying to think of something neutral to say when the white guy leaned over to the girl and said in a really sharp voice, “Angels like Kittycat and JoJo here are the reason why guys like us came back home to bitches like you.”

The girl drew in a sharp breath and was obviously about to fly off the handle when Wilbur added, “Amen, brother.”

“You’re disgusting, all of you,” the girl said, getting up from the table leaving her half-eaten meal behind. Her friend looked at her, looked at us, then got up and joined her.

“Crap,” the white guy said as he watched the two of them go. “I hope I didn’t say something I shouldn’t have said and screw things up for you.”

“That’s all right,” I shrugged. “We haven’t talked about it much around here, but I guess the horse is out of the barn now and there isn’t going to be any herding it back in. That isn’t the first time we’ve gotten a reaction like that, and I guess it was going to come out sooner or later.”

“I’m sorry if I caused you any problems,” he apologized. “Look, my name is Steve, and we agreed that if the two of you were really Kittycat and JoJo, we wanted to thank you for what you did for us.”

“You’re very welcome,” I told him. “It is nice to meet someone who understands what we were doing and why we were doing it.”

We settled into a pretty nice discussion. It turned out that both Steve and Wilbur had dropped out of college at the end of their freshman years, mostly out of boredom and the fact that neither of them liked the schools they were going to. We found out later that money was also an issue. They both enlisted, and met each other in Vietnam. They had made up their minds by then that they were going to use their GI Bill benefits to go back to college but were undecided where to go. Apparently a chance remark one of us had made about having gone to Venable College had caused them to look into the place, and here they were, seniors now like us.

From that instant on we all knew we had friends on campus that would understand us – and we could understand them and where they had been coming from. It may sound funny to outsiders, but the four of us spent a lot of time together over the next few months, and the topic of the war hardly ever came up. It didn’t need to, for most of what we all had to say about it went without saying.

We hung out together a lot in that time. Often it was nothing much, just going off-campus to a movie, or over to the apartment to split up a six-pack. The guys lived in the dorm where there were still a lot of restrictions, so it gave them a chance to loosen up a little. Venable College was still pretty white at the time, and Wilbur was one of only two or three black guys on campus and he said there were no black girls, so with the exception of Steve he was pretty close to friendless. Like us, he was counting the days until graduation when he could get on with his life. It turned out that all of us were education majors, although for some reason Cat and I only had one class with the guys and we really hadn’t connected with them before this.

I only slowly began to realize that there was more going on than just the four of us hanging out from time to time. It started pretty innocently, but once in a while Cat and Steve would go somewhere on their own. This was nothing major; they would head over to the library to study, and sometimes after they studied they’d head out for an off-campus dinner or a drink at a downtown bar. I didn’t really feel left out, and I don’t think Wilbur did, either, as we both realized that we had our own lives to live. In any case, Wilbur and I just accepted it, and that was that. He and I were friends, but we didn’t hang out together the way Cat and Steve did unless they were with us; that was just the way it was.

I’m pretty sure that the penny didn’t drop for me until just before Christmas. I mean, I should have seen it coming, but I can be as blind as anyone else.

I was talking to Cat about my holiday plans, not that I had any except to go home and spend a little time with the folks. I felt I really needed to for their sake, and it would be the longest period I’d spent at home since the holidays before we left for Vietnam. “Are you going to want me to take you home?” I asked her – we were still getting along on just the one car – “Or are your folks going to come and pick you up?”

“Neither one,” she replied. “Uh, look. Steve and I . . . well, uh, if you don’t mind, we’re going to stay here for a few days, and then he’s going to take me home so I can introduce him to my parents. We’re going to go see his folks after Christmas, and then we’re going to come back here until classes get going again.”

I didn’t ask Cat what they planned on doing while they were alone in the apartment, because the answer to that one was pretty clear. I knew it had been a while for Cat because it had been the same length of time for me, a one-night spree with a couple of guys we’d met in one of the climber bars in Chamonix. That evening wound up between the sheets and had been at best mediocre, at least for me, but it was the kind of thing that hadn’t happened very often for either of us. I wouldn’t have minded a little of what Cat would be getting, but there was nothing in the cards for it for me.

“Sure, enjoy yourself,” was all I could say, and I was a little envious.

It wasn’t until I was driving toward Simsville a few days later that I started to understand what was really going on: this thing with Cat and Steve had all the signs of being serious.

Clear back to when I first met Cat I realized that there was a difference between her goals and mine. Although there hadn’t been much sign of it in the last few years, I knew that ultimately she wanted to go down the husband/mommy/family track that was more or less expected of girls back in those days. She had managed to hide it or put it off for several years while we had been out traveling, climbing, and being donut dollies, but it was still there, and now it was coming out.

At the time I first met Cat I didn’t have much in the way of those kinds of goals, and really, I still didn’t. While I enjoyed a good roll in the hay every once in a while, it wasn’t the focus of my life and I could get along without if I had to. I had conceded reluctantly that the day for it might come to me eventually, but I was in no hurry to see it. I still thought I had things to do, although I had no idea of what they might be.

Cat and I hadn’t made any plans about what we were going to do after graduation. Oh, there had been some vague discussions back in Geneva about doing another trip around the west and climbing some places we had missed years before, but they had never gelled, and now I started to realize that they might never go anywhere.

Beyond that vague notion of a trip, it was also clear that it was time for us to be looking for jobs – and by that, I meant real jobs, most likely teaching since that was what we were working toward. But in my own mind that was vague too; I had always figured without it being said that Cat and I would find something else to do. We would have to do something; we’d saved a lot of money from our months in Phan Loc, but we’d spent a lot of that money in Europe afterward, and I knew that what I had left wasn’t going to last forever.

I honestly don’t know what plans Cat had made about the same question, but whatever they had been, it looked to me like she’d developed a different plan, one that involved Steve – and didn’t necessarily include me. Cat’s cultural training or hormones or mating instinct or whatever it happened to be was starting to get the better of her.

That understanding was underlined the next few days back in Simsville. Joey was still living at home, still working on the dock at the truck terminal, but he’d been doing a little substitute driving and it was beginning to look like he might get a regular less-than-truckload delivery route when a position opened up. He wasn’t seeing anyone, but I sensed that he was chafing a little at still having to live at home and was looking forward to having a place of his own. He couldn’t do it just yet on what he was making as a dock man.

Since he was working, sometimes at odd hours, I didn’t get a chance to sit down and be with him all that much. Ever since graduating from high school I’d kept in loose contact with some of my old friends – actually, the old Joanie’s old friends – like Patty, Barb, and Diana, so I figured that I would do some catching up with them. But I couldn’t.

All of them had graduated from college, and had done it while I had still been at Phan Loc. And all of them had gotten married in the months right afterwards, and had scattered to the winds; none of them were left living in Simsville. Barb and Diana had babies now, and Patty was pregnant, or at least that is what I found out from their families when I went looking for them.

While I had been out having fun and doing things I considered worthwhile, they had gotten out of college and started down the husband/mommy/family track like Cat was apparently considering doing. I was being left behind – not that I minded, because it wasn’t what I wanted to do.

I would have to say that by then I was not any longer the Joe who happened to be living in Joanie’s body. I had evolved into Joan, my own person, a woman who was an amalgam of the two, although one who often got influenced by Joe’s memories. It was probably Joe’s influence that kept me from wanting to get involved with the family and parenthood trap, partly because he had been through it once and had plenty of memories of it both good and bad. I think also felt that way because I still hadn’t become fully integrated as a woman yet and the idea of pregnancy and motherhood was still a little beyond my comprehension.

So, what with everything, I felt even more alone and confused when I drove back up to Venable after the holidays.

When I walked into the apartment, somehow it didn’t seem quite like mine, or ours. Steve wasn’t around, but his presence sure was. It went without saying that he and Cat had managed to spend a lot of time there while I had been gone, and part of me wasn’t sure that I minded.

“So how did it go with Steve?” I asked Cat, who seemed, well, contented might be the word. Or more like a housewife than a co-ed. It was something I couldn’t quite get my finger on, anyway.

“Oh, we had a pretty good time,” she replied. “We didn’t really do much of anything but hang around here. We watched the parades and some football on TV on New Year’s Day, but not really much more than that except be together.” She didn’t have to explain things more than that because I understood her perfectly.

“Well, good deal,” I said. “So how did you like his parents?”

“They were pretty cool,” she said without elaboration. “They think it’s wild that we met at Phan Loc.”

“That’s good. How did he get along with your folks?”

“Pretty good,” she smiled. “Mom was actually a little relieved to meet him. I think she had the impression that we’d both given up on men, if you know what I mean.”

“Not likely to happen,” I smiled. Mom had never come out and said it, but sometimes I got the feeling that she had been wondering the same thing herself. “Look, Cat, it’s neat that you like the guy and I’m glad you’ve found someone you like. But where is this going?”

“I’m not sure myself. I know where I would like it to go, but we’re not there yet. We may be soon. I wouldn’t be surprised to be wearing a ring before too long.”

“I wouldn’t be either,” I sighed. That was just where it was looking like it was heading to me, too. “Look, Cat, I know you’ve wanted something like that, and if you’re getting it, well and good. Just be sure it’s right for you. Remember all the guys we met at Phan Loc who had family problems because of their wives or girlfriends running around on them while they were in Vietnam. All I’m saying is that you need to be pretty damn sure you know what you’re doing before it’s too late.”

“I know, and I’ve thought about it. I heard just as many of those stories as you did. It turns out that Steve was one of them. His girlfriend in college dumped him the week after he arrived in-country, but he got the message that he wanted to be pretty damn sure about what he was doing himself.”

“It’s a risk,” I shook my head again. “But you’re the one taking the risk, not me.”

After that I had a pretty good idea of which way the wind was blowing, and what was going to happen with Cat. Among other things, it would probably be the end of her climbing since Steve was not a climber and thought Cat was out of her head to do some of the things she had done with me. Well, that was going to be her loss, too.

One of the things we had to accomplish during our last semester at Venable was to get in the practice teaching needed for our teaching certificates. This would involve half days in a classroom with high school students. The various schools that were used were scattered around, and as it turned out Cat and I were assigned to different schools far away from each other, which made it difficult for us to get along with one car. But again, as it turned out, Steve was assigned to the same school and in the same session, although different classes, so they could ride together. It was something we could handle, but it meant that Cat was pulled even farther from me and closer to Steve.

The practice teaching had to continue while Venable was on spring break, which meant that we couldn’t take off, not that we had planned to go south with the remnants of the climbing club anyway, which consisted of Ed and Sue, Brad, Cat, and me. I presume Brian and his buddies went somewhere but if so I didn’t hear about it and didn’t care, either. He still had another year to get through school, and I hoped that Ed would be able to revive the climbing club after he left, although Cat and I obviously wouldn’t be any part of it.

Since they closed the dorms during spring break week, Steve had to move in with us, which is to say that he moved into bed with Cat. They tried to keep it quiet, but I knew what was going on and couldn’t blame them, either, but I felt Cat slipping even farther away from me. The old days were clearly over, and now even the remnants of them were passing.

I don’t know when it happened, and it may have been before that, but sometime that week Cat appeared wearing an engagement ring. It was not a big one – Steve wasn’t wealthy – but it clearly marked what was to come. By then I was seriously counting the days until the term was over with and I could get out of their way, and I was well down into double-digit midget country, as we used to say at Phan Loc.

There was a lot of calling back and forth between Cat and her mother in those days. Cat’s mother was anxious for the wedding to take place, perhaps because she thought I might drag Cat off on some other wild adventure instead of her settling down into marriage. There was no chance of that happening; Cat was too far gone with wedding plans. There was nothing I could do about it, or felt I should do about it, except to tell Cat that I would be moving back home once we were through graduation, so I would be out of Steve’s and her way.

The last weeks of the semester, and of my college career, passed. I can’t say they went quickly or slowly, but I had gotten to the point where I wanted them over with, no matter how much I had enjoyed most of them.

I would have been willing to skip the graduation ceremonies since graduating with my class meant little to me – they had graduated two years before. But Mom and Dad wanted to see it, so I went through with it on the first Saturday in May. I walked down the aisle, got my sheepskin, then took off the cap and gown and turned them in. The Chevelle had already been packed with my things, so there was nothing for me to do but to drive home.

A month and a few days later I walked down another aisle, this time in a small white clapboard church in a wooded suburban town. I was wearing a chartreuse bridesmaid’s dress as Cat’s maid of honor. Wilbur was Steve’s best man. All I could do was stand next to my best friend while trying to stifle the realization that nothing between us could ever be the same again.