"Me Rambo, you Jane," Lila said, and beat her chest.

"Me good muscle, you girl muscle."

"Grrr."

"Tee-hee."

Near the end of the film someone cleared his throat quite audibly. Lila and I froze but kept staring at the screen. "I thought we were alone," she whispered.

"So did I," I said.

We kept it down and attempted a respectful silence during the final raging shoot-out scenes. We did this by digging our nails into each other's arms and biting our lips. We giggled but we did not erupt fully.

When it was over, and the lights went up, we were alone again. We started letting out what we had held back until we turned the corner and saw the manager of the theater standing there.

"You think Vietnam is funny?"

He was an imposing man; muscle gone to fat and with a pencil mustache that slid across his upper lip, like Madison's first attorney.

"No," we both said.

He blocked our way to the exit.

"Certainly sounded like you were laughing to me," he said.

"It's pretty exaggerated," I said, expecting him to see my point.

"I was in 'Nam," he said. "Were you?"

Lila was scared and holding on to my hand.

I said, "No, sir, and I respect the veterans that fought. We didn't mean to offend. We were laughing because we found the level of machismo exaggerated."

He stared at me as if I had blocked him with reason when what I had really blocked him with were words found inside me when under threat: a skill I now had.

He let us pass but warned us he did not want to see us again in his theater.

We didn't even try to get our giddy mood back. I was furious as we walked down the hill toward home. "It sucks being a woman," I said, stating the obvious. "You always get smashed!"

Lila wasn't ready to go there yet. She was busy trying to see his point. In my mind I was doing now what I did more and more of: fighting a man hand to hand and no matter how I played it, losing every time.

There were good men and bad, thinking men and muscle. I made that separation in my mind. I began to categorize them this way. Steve, who had a sort of ropy runner's body, was gentle in his movements and cared most about his studies. He would sit for hours until he had memorized-verbatim-the chapters of his textbooks. His Ukrainian-immigrant parents were paying cash for his education as they had for their cars and house. It was expected that he would study every day for hours.

I began a sort of unconscious lying to myself when engaged in sex. Steve's pleasure was all I focused on, the point of the journey, so if there were bumps and memories, painful flashes of the night in the tunnel, I rode over them, numbed. Happy when Steve was happy, I was always ready to pop right out of bed and go on a walk or read my latest poem. If I could get back to the brain in time, like oxygen, the sex didn't hurt as much.

And there was the color of his skin. I could focus on a patch of white flesh and begin. As Steve was being gentle and ardent, inside I was talking myself down the path again. "This is not Thorden Park, he is your friend, Gregory Madison is in Attica, you are fine." It often worked to get me through it, like gritting your teeth on a frightening carnival ride that those around you appear to enjoy. If you can't do, mimic. Your brain is still alive.

By late in the year I had established myself as a sort of chubby New Age diva. The art students knew who I was and so did the poets. I threw a party with the confidence it would be packed and it was. Steve bought me white vinyl dance versions of my favorite songs and made dance tapes from them.

Mary Alice and Casey were back from London and showed up. The whole apartment house throbbed, but this time it was with my music and my friends. I had gotten A's in Carruth's and Carver's independents and was now taking a class with a poet named Jack Gilbert. I couldn't believe my luck. Even Gilbert showed up! In the kitchen a trash can full of rotgut punch had more and more ingredients added as the party-goers got drunk. Lila's spices were being pitched in wholesale and small things, like forks and houseplants, joined the nutmeg and arrowroot.

Suddenly people we didn't know began to show up-boys. They were loud and strong and went for the pretty girls like magnets. This meant Mary Alice, who, by that time, was very drunk. The dancing on the dance floor got sexual. Steve almost had a fight with a stranger who was moving in on one of his female friends. The music got louder, a speaker blew, the booze ran out. All of this resulted in the sanest and soberest, who had not left already, peeling out. I stood like a barking Scottie by Mary Alice. When boys came toward her I steered them off. I threatened them with what they respected: a man. Mary Alice's boyfriend, I lied, was the captain of the basketball team and due soon with his teammates. If they doubted me I got up in their faces and did my straight-shooting act. I had listened to the detectives and how they talked, knew how to sound streetwise.

Mary Alice decided to leave and Steve and I found her a person we trusted to take her home. Near the door, as we were saying good-bye, she passed out. I and those around us stood and stared at her as she lay unconscious on the floor. I thought she was faking and at first said, "Come on, Mary Alice, get up." Her hair had been so beautiful as she fell, the long golden mane swinging up and out.

I got down on my hands and knees and tried to prod her. No luck. Steve came through the stragglers and strangers. As we stood over her in a circle, boys began to offer to take her home.

I can only think of dogs here. From barking Scottie to scrappy terrier to sudden superhuman strength. I wouldn't even let Steve carry her. I picked Mary Alice up in my arms-all 115 pounds of her-and carried her, with Lila and Steve clearing the way, back to Lila's room. We lay her out on the bed. She was a drunk coed but looked like a sleeping angel. The rest of my night was devoted to making sure she stayed that way. When cruisers showed up because of the complaints of neighbors, I watched the party break down and Steve and Lila escort the more intoxicated strangers out. Mary Alice spent the night. In the morning the place was sticky, and we discovered a friend of a friend of someone's who'd passed out and fell behind the couch.

The summer between my junior and senior years Steve and I lived in the apartment together and took summer school. Morally, my mother was able to adjust to the idea of me living with a man because, as she said, "it's nice to think you have a built-in security guard." Following summer school I got my first taste of teaching by assisting at an art camp for gifted students at Bucknell University. If I didn't become a lawyer, I decided, I would teach. I had no way of knowing then that teaching would end up being my lifeline, my way back.

By my senior year, I was a habitué of the poetry and fiction readings held on campus. I also worked as a waitress at Cosmos Pizza Shop, on Marshall Street, and my work schedule, combined with these evening readings, meant that I was out at night a lot. Lila seemed not to mind. She had the apartment to herself or shared it peaceably with our new roommate, Pat.

Lila found Pat via the anthropology department. He was younger than we were by two years and only a sophomore. Lila and I had discovered porn magazines in his room, fetish publications like Jugs, and one that featured only nude obese women. But he paid the rent and kept to himself. I was just happy that he didn't look the part of the regular bug eaters in anthropology. He was tall and slim with shoulder-length black hair. His Italian ancestry meant a lot to him, as did his love of shock. He showed Lila and me the speculum he had pilfered from a relative who was a gynecologist. He strung it to the light pull of his overhead.