Chapter One

      The All-American Dream

      The horizon line beckoned as I drove the open highway from New York City to Colorado, my hair flying in the wind and my spirit soaring. With a couple of duffel bags stuffed with jeans and flannel shirts and my cat in a carrier in the back seat, I was freedom bound, headed for whatever was calling me. If I needed other clothes, I’d buy them later. My box of jewelry-making tools and supplies was tucked in the back in case I decided to try to make some money at it. A thermos of coffee would get me over the first state line, and from there it would be adrenalin and snacks I’d buy when I stopped for gas. I would drive until the night seemed too long and I had to pull over to get some sleep, then I’d pitch my tent at a KOA, dwarfed by monstrous camping trailers, and curl up in my sleeping bag, my kitty purring beside me. The next morning I would be back in my Jeep for the last leg of the journey to my brother’s doorstep.

      “I can see why you’d want to leave New York,” Johnny had said when I called to say I needed a place to stay for a while, “but why would you leave your family?” Didn’t I have everything I wanted? A husband with a good career, an adorable five-year-old daughter, a two-story house in the suburbs? What had happened to the life and the city that had thrilled me? All I could say was New York was poisoning me. I had to go.

      Twelve years earlier Arnie and I had rented an upstairs flat in the Bronx, the instant his army duty was done. Pelham Parkway was worlds away from the Kansas prairies of my childhood, with our flat that shared a fenced yard with a row of identical brownstones lining both sides of the street. I loved everything about our neighborhood—the bakeries, the delis, the Italian markets, the hair salons everywhere. “Hey, Wonder Bread,” our friend Ed Yaconetti would say to me as I lifted another fresh pastry out of a pink box. “Ever have a cannoli back there in Kansas?” This love affair with opening a waxed paper envelope filled with a chocolate éclair or chocolate chip cannoli drove me not only into the bakeries but into the offices of diet doctors in Manhattan, a very “in” thing to do in 1963.

      Every day I rode the subway to Manhattan to my job as a secretary at New York Life Insurance on 39th and Park Avenue, two blocks from Grand Central Station. After work I picked up fresh loaves of bread for nineteen cents and wedges of Parmesan and spicy Italian sausage to make Arnie’s favorite dinners—his mama’s good Italian sauce over every kind of pasta. Arnie’s career in advertising was taking off, and at night we’d share stories about our workdays in the big city.

      I was in love with my life, our friends, our Saturday evenings with the Yaconettis for an Italian dinner that Marie or I prepared while our husbands talked and laughed about the pros and cons of everything. We stayed up late playing cards or board games and having a zany, hilarious time. Life with Arnie in the Bronx was a hundred times better than anywhere in the playgrounds of my childhood.

      Until November 22, 1963, that is. After President Kennedy was shot, people seemed more serious on the subways. The whole world seemed a different place. Culture seemed to be changing around us, and sex suddenly became a bigger part of our lives, with Arnie asking me to go with him to sex shops on Times Square and sit with him in half-empty theaters watching porn films. I tried to be interested, looking around the dusty, sleazy shops as he pointed out this and that and sitting through movies that seemed endless. Playboy arrived in the mail every month, and I pored over the slick pictures of buxom women with him and dressed up for the Playboy Club some Saturday nights to have drinks and look at the Bunnies, their oversized bosoms pushed into a daunting cleavage. I didn’t like how women were objectified, and I liked it even less when Arnie and his friends called out from our car window, “Hey, look at that!” every time a shapely woman walked by. But Arnie was my husband and I wanted to be a good wife, so I didn’t say a word.

      When Arnie and I had married two years earlier I was a virgin, and I was still a virgin a week after our wedding. Maybe it was because of all the douching—a friend of my mother’s had undertaken my education in “feminine hygiene” and I was so well douched every day that I had none of the natural fluids that might have made penetration possible. And maybe it was Arnie’s inexperience at stimulating me and my discomfort at being naked with a man. We had petted heavily during our year of dating, but never naked. Now I slept in pink curlers and baby doll pajamas and made sure the room was completely dark when we climbed into bed. (I had to be in a dark room for the next several years every time we had sex.) When we finally stumbled onto a jar of good ol’ Vaseline, I said goodbye to my virginity. It hurt, it was bloody, and it was disappointing, but I was officially Arnie’s wife and a member of the world of women and wives at last.

      Around us, friends were getting pregnant and having babies, but try as I might, I was not. I had no idea what having children really meant to me, but Arnie was certain he wanted them—four daughters, to be exact—and I wanted whatever he wanted. We tried everything we knew. Once I even stood on my head after intercourse to help the sperm find their way.

      It was around this time I ventured outside my marriage. There seemed to be opportunities everywhere! I flirted with my handsome, married boss and heated up afternoons in his office making out pressed up against the mahogany paneling, impaled by an erection that never saw the light of day. On my lunch hour one day I met one of his clients, the CEO of a thread manufacturing company, at a midtown hotel, trading my cotton briefs for something black and lacy at a department store nearby. His desire for me was fulfilled before I even unwrapped our sandwiches. So much for another attempt at this thrilling thing called sex. But I kept on with the kissing and fondling and many times released my pent-up sexual energy in the ladies’ room on the 42nd floor, perched precariously on the commode with my legs in the air. I wondered if any other secretaries did this, too.

      Later, after I left that job, I told Arnie about these escapades. He was shattered to think I would break our vow of monogamy so casually. “You don’t even like sex that much!” But that was exactly why my indiscretions never seemed a big deal to me, because I didn’t like sex that much. The sexiest we got was counting how many clitoral contractions I could have during orgasm. We had read that women can have several clitoral contractions during orgasm, and this interested us. Every chance Arnie got he would find his way between my legs to give me orgasms with his mouth and try to increase my number of contractions. “Just lie back and let me taste you,” he would say. Not a problem! I was happy to receive Arnie pleasuring me, and I liked that he seemed to love doing it. But oh, if only sex could be over after my orgasm! When it came to intercourse I could only pretend to like it, and I was never interested in oral sex with him. Anything having to do with his penis caused me to numb out and disappear inside, and at twenty years old, I was too naïve to wonder why.

      On New Year’s Eve 1964, sex was hot and heavy after celebrations at the Yaconettis’ house, and just before dawn I woke with a terrible shock. Fiery pain shot through my insides. “Holy shit, Arnie!” I moaned, doubling over. “I think I need an ambulance.” My gynecologist