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did. At the same time he vowed he really wanted to be a chef.
    I couldn’t understand why he didn’t simply go ahead and go to a cooking school. If he couldn’t find one in the U.S. he liked, wasn’t there was one in France? It seemed to me that a twenty-three-year-oldboy could choose to go almost any place to study anything. I’d had to persuade my father that, aside from my own lack of interest, girls didn’t necessarily have to study home economics or elementary education, that I could be a reporter.
    Tony only said, “They would never let me do it.”
    “Who has to let you?”
    “My father. Always my father. And my brothers, but they’re secondary. My mother doesn’t give a damn as long as I do what my father wants— My family is a middle-class joke.”
    “My brother doesn’t get along too well with my father either, but he doesn’t want to be anything particular. He just despises school.”
    “Me too— Law school.”
    There was something more I knew. Law, to the Gregorys, was surely a cut above cooking no matter what fancy French schools might be available. To Tony’s people in Omaha, a chef was the guy in the tallest white hat that forked the steaks.
    For using his parents’ money and hating their choice, Tony accused himself of indulging in the luxury of guilt, an odd idea to me. How could guilt be a luxury? It was always available. All I understood was he often drank too much. I began to drink more when I was with him.
    Those six weeks in Colorado I studied history and philosophy; they made me sad because I was realizing once more there was no way I could help change the world entirely. Since the bombs had fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I lived under the same cloud of dubious hope as the rest of my friends. Born in peaceful times, we longed for them again, a paradox because none of us wanted to be stuck in the past.
    Tony and I went to the opera in Silver City, to the dog races in Denver, rode the roller coaster that screamed out over a lake in an amusement park, went swimming in mountain lakes, tried the highs and lows of everything. Tony insisted, “Caviar and hot dogs!” It was frantic, exhilarating, and finally frustrating. I kept hoping to find a way to smooth over the edge of desire.
    Tony reserved a motel room the last night I was in Boulder. We sat outside of it in his car and argued. Like most of the girls I knew, I feared pregnancy and had little faith in rubbers. I’d known girls at the university and in Leon High School who disappeared, didn’t come back after Christmas vacation or left abruptly at mid-semester. We knew … all of us did, they were pregnant. In Leon when I was in high school, the school board had ruled against pregnant girls attending as if the mere sight of one might be contaminating.
    Tony and I were as far apart as we could be on the front seat. My backbone rubbed the door handle on my side. He kept saying, “I don’t see why not. We love each other. I want you.”
    “I want you too … but—”
    “What?” He leaned toward me a little and I couldn’t help meeting him in the middle. He’d already loosened my bra when I pulled away and began buttoning my dress. Tony had been initiated in a whorehouse somewhere. How expert he was I could only imagine, however he knew well how to slide zippers down, unbutton the smallest buttons, unhook the tightest hooks. Women’s underclothes, though he liked to complain about various complications, were no mystery to him. He would even hook a bra up in the back if I asked. I didn’t ask that night.
    “I can’t,” I repeated.
    “You want me, don’t you?”
    “Yes. I can’t have you though.”
    Whirling around in my head was the memory of a girl I knew at school packing all her clothes in her parents’ car that spring. She wasn’t showing yet, but we knew she was in trouble. Her parents were in such a hurry to get her away, so frantic about her supposed disgrace, they hadn’t waited long enough to let her slide