Legend, Tennessee Sunday Night
December 22, 1968
“I’m a virgin, Kitty!”
At the sound of her name, the small calico cat curled up on the sofa opened a lazy eye. She blinked once, yawned and shut her eye in disinterest.
Kathleen Fields didn’t mind. The cat she had brought home from college two years earlier was the only one home, so the animal had to suffer her complaints.
“ I’m boring. My life is boring!” Kathleen opened the roll of red and green Santa Claus wrapping paper and stretched it out on the dining table. In the far end of the living-dining room, Joe and Hoss Cartright were deep in a sibling argument. Even without her father at home, Kathleen had—out of habit—turned on the television set at nine o’clock. The noise provided by Bonanza’s familiar opening music was welcome in the silent house.
“ I was twenty-one last week and I haven’t slept with anyone,” she continued her monologue. “Frank will probably propose after Christmas and then I’m in for a really boring life in this really boring town.”
Kathleen snipped a large sheet of paper from the roll. Oh, she loved Frank Smith and did plan to marry him. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was her. She’d never been anywhere except to England last summer on a six-week study tour with her college drama team. Even that had been well chaperoned. She hadn’t taken advantage of the luscious, long-haired English boys or the Guinness in the pubs. She’d kept her nose in her books, as always, coming home with the expected “A” but no real-life adventure.
That was her trouble. She didn’t take risks. She was a good girl. After high school, she’d gone to college at the University of Tennessee, where her parents had met and wanted her to go. She was on schedule to graduate this spring with an elementary education degree, just like her mother’s. She’d had one boy friend since age sixteen, and they’d never done anything but kiss and make out a little. They were “saving themselves” for marriage.
That was the way it was supposed to be, wasn’t it?
“ I wish I’d worn flowers in my hair,” Kathleen said with a sigh.
It was hard to be a good girl when so many of her contemporaries were burning bras. Sex, love, and rock ’n’ roll were the watchwords of her generation. But stuff like that didn’t happen in Legend, Tennessee. Her hometown was far removed from the reality of the modern world.
Folding the edges of the paper around the box containing her grandmother’s pink flannel bathrobe, Kathleen bit her lip more in disgust than in concentration. In her heart she knew she was a fraud.
Times were changing. Kids and clothes and music were changing. Starting with the British Invasion of the Beatles and Rolling Stones a few years earlier, life seemed to have sped up. Nothing was sacred and nothing the same.
Yet deep down the Cultural Revolution scared the heck out of her.
Her life was a terrible paradox of wishing for freedom and fear of trying it. Just because it was new, didn’t make it better.
Kathleen Fields, Magna Cum Laude, had never explored marijuana or LSD. Heck, she’d never even tried smoking regular cigarettes. She was too timid to espouse radical views and too straight to protest the Viet Nam War, because, frankly, she didn’t agree with those ideas or understand enough to know what to believe. Yet the changing world was exciting, watching it from the sidelines like she did—seeing the sit-ins on campus and attending a political rally for presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey in October.
Kathleen tied a red ribbon around the box and attached the card. Then she placed the box in a pile of gifts at the other end of the table. Her parents had wrapped their presents before leaving town, so all Kathleen needed to do was wrap hers.
She’d given Frank his cuff links and sweater before he left to spend the holiday with his roommate’s family in New York. Her gift from him, a polished mahogany jewelry box with a dark green velvet interior, was wonderful. Yet the gleam in Frank’s eyes and the slight smile on his lips had told her there was more to come, something he’d hinted about for over a year.
Kathleen sighed a big sorry-for-herself sigh and cleaned up the mess on the table. It was strange being home alone at Christmas. Frank was gone. She had promised to housesit for her parents and also keep an eye on Harriett Winchester’s house next door. Her neighbor was leading members of the Legend senior class on a two-week tour of France and Italy. Her father, the high school principal, and her mother had gone along as chaperones.
Retrieving a bottle of Coke from the refrigerator, Kathleen popped the top and tossed the cap in the trash can. She grabbed a bag of Fritos, and returning to the living room, turned up the volume on the TV before plopping cross-legged on the sofa beside the cat. Fritos were her downfall. Whenever she was lonely or depressed they were an all too easy comfort food. . . .Buy Now!