Loretta wanted to be good, she really did. But so often it turned out that what she was doing was not good in a way that she hadn’t even seen. If being good meant not eating the crusts off the sandwich first, why hadn’t her mother told her this? Instead, she was scolded after the fact. If she was supposed to brush the little ledges behind her front teeth, why hadn’t anyone showed her that? Instead, she got cavities in both of them and was told she should have known to brush there. If resting her head on her boyfriend’s lap while he read Hemmingway stories out loud had led to him having a hard-on, why had he not told her? Instead, he told her of this embarrassing fact a year after they had become intimate.
She had been told that sex was good, but only in the context of marriage. But she had also been told that sex was good, natural, freeing, a normal interaction between two people, whether or not they were married. She may not have succumbed to Enrico’s scientific references to William Reich. Enrico claimed that it was actually unhealthy not to have sex. That was ridiculous. Nuns live longer than ordinary mortals, by decades! But neither did she succumb to the idea that sex had to wait until marriage. What kind of a god would awaken sexual desire in the body at age 14 or 15, then require the body’s inhabitant to wait 5 or 10 years to actually use that body? It was possible, she supposed, that this god actually wanted people to marry at age 15. She understood, of course, that having babies without the support of marriage was extremely difficult, so in that context, being careful not to have sex made sense. But even without modern birth control there were ways to have sex without having babies.
Most of her life, deciding what was good had been so much easier. Honoring her parents’ wishes had been so much easier. The problem here was that that her parents’ wishes were not relevant since this matter did not involve anyone except her and her boyfriend. Loretta did think that it was proper to only have sex with one person and that you should love that person. She had told her boyfriend that she loved him, but he had shut that down quickly by saying, “I don’t know what that means.” Since she, in fact, loved him, she did not question his authority to question her understanding of a word. He was quite the authority on words! The two of them talked for hours and hours, usually all night after they had sex. This, she accidentally found out was quite unusual. Apparently most guys fell asleep right afterwards. She loved him even more for it, but didn’t have words to describe her feelings that way. Was this love? She accepted that this was a difficult thing to define and that she had no right to even think it much less proclaim it given its philosophical complexity.
Later, after she had left school to be with her boyfriend when he moved to another city, the boyfriend left her for another woman. And just like that, she was there, alone, living in a city she had barely heard of. Luckily she had made friends and had found a job, so she was able to stay put in her apartment trying to process what on earth had happened. Instead of getting angry at the boyfriend, Loretta stayed in character. She searched her soul for all the ways that she had failed to be good. She mulled over the specific failures he had enumerated in parting: The main complaint was that she did not take him seriously or envision life from his point of view. It was true that she had invented a small fantasy farm where the two of them ate food they had grown themselves and slept under coverlets she had made herself. He claimed that she had not included him in these plans. Mostly she went to work, got together with friends and did her usual activities, but when she was home alone in the evening, her thoughts returned again and again to her failures. What about that lampshade she had started to make, the one whose components sat in the middle of the living room for months? And what about her disinterest in politics? It was so easy to come up with all the ways she had failed to be good enough for the boyfriend.
One day, Loretta sat at a table at a friend’s house eating a special spaghetti dinner prepared in honor of a visit from her mother. Her friend’s mother was there as well. It was a momentous occasion, a meeting of important people in Loretta’s life, people who were meeting each other for the first time. The departed boyfriend came up. Loretta’s mother said she had had his number quite a while before and gave various pieces of evidence she had collected over the years that showed he didn’t value Loretta as highly as she would have wanted. For example, he didn’t make time for them on the day they had driven through the town where he was going to school, even though no pressing exams or papers were happening. Loretta was quite surprised at this novel perspective. She had always felt that being a good girlfriend meant facilitating the important work her boyfriend did!
Despite the new view opening up to her, she entered into the familiar state of intense sense of shame that she had allowed this painful situation to unfold. She tentatively brought out a few sentiments that she didn’t know why she had followed him or slept with him. Again her mother surprised her. “You loved him,” she said, as though that simple and natural statement explained everything. A huge burden of guilt was suddenly lifted. It really was that simple.
