“Graduation Day”
Listen to “Graduation”
Soon we were lost in the whirl of our graduation. It was so beautiful; we both cried. But the excitement of college life soon caught us up. I remember those warm summer afternoons we spent window shopping for bedspreads and rugs and curtains and hoping that we would get a nice dormitory room.
The college was immense—and all the people! There was registration, orientation, new classes, new teachers, new friends—and a third roommate. She was a lovely girl, Diana. She and Donna had so much in common. By now Donna had been taken by my previous secretarial ambitions while my major was going to be piano. Diana, too, was going to be a secretary. Besides, she was in love with Steve.
I tried harder than ever to not interfere with Donna’s life—only to help her if I could. But as the weeks passed, we became strangers again. Night after night Diana and Donna shared their shorthand and accounting and then shared their Steve and Tom. They did not include me in those intimate conversations. I was always supposed to be asleep in my bunk.
But I wasn’t a social wallflower. I dated—more than I ever had in my life. I was so thrilled with all of college life, from the most routine class work to the exotic Spring Banquet. But, because I wasn’t “in love,” I “couldn’t understand how it was,” I heard them whisper once. For a while, I ignored it. Of course I understood my own twin sister. Of course I knew what it was like to be in love—Donna had told me.
Then I listened more closely to their conversations—those Saturday nights when they didn’t even seem to know I was around. Diana’s ideas were so different from the ones Donna and I had always shared. I could see how Diana felt about men and love and marriage and children—yet I never could quite agree with her.
And I didn’t understand my very own sister, how she had changed. No, we never quarreled violently as we once had about Tom—not one disgruntled word. I dared not say a thing. I tried to blame Diana for the influence she was having on my sister. I tried to hide from myself what I knew deep inside—that it was Donna herself who was pushing me so rudely from her life. But, proud and naïve, I only wondered and waited.
“Sex is a perfectly normal part of genuine love,” I would hear in the wee morning hours as I lay still and listened to the two voices in my room. I soon gathered that Diana always went out with Steve on Saturday nights to a secluded little haven of their own. It was near the college, someplace called Rainbow Rock. Soon Donna and Tom, when he came home, found one for themselves at Willow Creek. “I love him very much and have never loved another man, nor will ever love any other man like this. In God’s sight, we do belong to each other.”
Donna and Diana both seemed so happy, so contented, so convinced that love, as they experienced it, was right. “If we didn’t love each other so completely, of course, it would be wrong. But we do love each other only—forever and ever, amen—and we both love God. This kind of love makes it right.”
One night, when even my curiosity was to the bursting point, Diana filled Donna in on the details of the most complete act of physical love. Even I listened intently, wondering and thinking. “Take it from me,” Diana concluded, “never say you’ll never do it. Because if you love him, you will.”
I thought very fleetingly of my own relationships with any of the fellows I had been dating. Not in my wildest imagination could I picture myself “doing it.” Nor could I picture it happening to Tom and Donna. I wanted desperately somehow to stop her before it was too late. Yet, how could I convince her she was wrong? Love makes it right.
Summer came. Diana and Steve disappeared into memory. Tom came home. I had never seen my sister happier. Tom would be at the college the very next fall. Once again Donna and I seemed as close as we ever had been. She assured me that Diana’s “influence” hadn’t been bad, that her own love for Tom was her own choice. And I’m sure it was.
I’ll never forget that sultry September day just two weeks before school was to begin when Donna and I went downtown. She had put our biggest suitcase into the car. “Lock is broken,” she told me. Has to be repaired. We talked eagerly of the coming year back at college—at least I did. I didn’t notice her strange quietness while we window shopped together as we always had done.
Then we stopped at the bank. I supposed she was going to deposit her last paycheck in the small account that Mom and Dad had started for each of us when we were small children. How could I have known her account would be empty when she returned? Before I knew what was happening, Donna pulled the car up beside a large gray building.
“Help me with the suitcase, will you, Kathy?” Her voice quivered slightly.
Bewildered and amused, I reached for the empty luggage to find it heavy. She tugged on it, too, and we carried it inside. My head was spinning as I stood there speechless, watching her buy a bus ticket. Surely this was a joke of some sort. Some red-capped boy even came, put a tag on the suitcase, and carried it away.
“It leaves in five minutes.” She smiled weirdly.
“Okay, sis, I give up. What are you up to?” I giggled.
She sat down on the worn bench. “I’m just going up to Aunt Margaret’s for a little while.” Her voice was casually soft.
“Aunt Margaret’s!” Funny, we had always taken our vacations together before. “But school starts a week from Monday—”
Suddenly her solemn gaze froze my words in mid-air. She spoke slowly and deliberately. “I won’t be going back to college with you this year, Kathy. I can’t—I’m pregnant.”
I was stunned! I tried to laugh. “Oh, I see. Tom’s going to meet you, and you’ll have the wedding there, then—”
She shook her head slowly as her glassy eyes stared far past the big bus that was just pulling in. “There will not be any wedding, Kathy. Not now—not ever. Tom will be there at college this year. His parents want him to be a teacher, you know.”
“But I also know you love each other!” I protested.
“Tom’s a stranger to me. We don’t love each other now. We haven’t for a long time.” Her voice was bitter. “All I’ve been to him is a sex partner!”
“Oh, Donna, don’t say that!” My voice was choked with emotion. “Why did it have to happen to you, my own sister?”
Her sad eyes looked deep into my tear-filled ones. “It didn’t have to happen.” She placed a sympathizing hand on my trembling arm. “And it won’t have to happen to you, Kathy! Love is good and right when it stays pure. But somehow”—she bit her lip— “it didn’t work for Tom and me. Oh, Kathy, don’t ever do what I did!” She squeezed my arm hard. “Don’t ever do it!”
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