Judas and the Slave Girl

When I was thirteen I was in love with a man exactly three times my age. This year he would have been ninety-four, if he'd lived. No Mason of high degree could have put greater faith in numbers than I did at the time: 13:39. I actually fell in love with him when I was twelve, but I knew that when I turned thirteen, he would love me back. To put my story in the nutshell from which I shall subsequently extract it, I belonged to a children's theater group, and the man I loved conducted his dance classes—tap, ballet, and modern—in the studio next door. He had recently returned from out West to the birthplace he had left when he was eighteen. Although he'd planned on becoming a movie star, he was now a student at the local teachers' college, Ball State.

I think he came home to forge a realistic career for himself in middle age, but I really don't know. A child in love has so few ways of gathering information and even less right than usual to question the beloved, who enjoys a real difference in status, not just the difference imagined by all lovers. I don't know why Richard came back. I don't know what he did for the twenty-one years he was away. At the time I could only vaguely imagine him out in Hollywood, not as a successful actor, of course, but as a glamorous failure. For the most part, I looked into his mysterious past as if it were a crystal ball in which coagulated rich, albeit murky, images of life far, far away from Muncie, Indiana. I am trying to avoid names in this story, but my own bears the same numerical relationship to "Dora" as "Muncie" does to "Vienna," and as for the man I loved, I'll call him Richard.

I have always been reluctant to tell this story, initially, I think, because I was afraid it would somehow make me seem strange—if it didn't, conversely, make me seem downright ordinary. This confusion I drank in with the water and breathed in with the air of the town I grew up in, for typicality might be thought rare and precious so assiduously has it been sought in the environs of Muncie. In the 'twenties and 'thirties, Helen and Robert Lynd chose the town for their pioneering sociological works, Middletown (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937). Then, in the 'seventies and 'eighties, scholars at the University of Virginia chose to replicate and expand the Lynds' work. It was only after coming across one of these books, Middletown Families, that I began to wonder whether the story of that Easter morning in the 1950s was far from commonplace although not particularly strange.

When I imagine the Muncie I grew up in, I take a bird's-eye view: the White River undulates back on itself, a thin brown snake trying to swallow its tail as it catches in its coils a small innocent place utterly uninterested in self-knowledge and consumed by the need to keep up a good front. What strong local pride! Certainly I was not the only creature in Muncie who confused the typical with the ordinary and invested it with a dimension of scorn. How boring it is—how truly boring!—to be the norm. You may suspect that you are ordinary, but who wants to know? Who wants others to know? Like most of the characters in this story, I lived in hysterical avoidance of the normal, that is, when I didn't live in fear of seeming strange.

Not surprisingly, life in Muncie in the 1950s was characterized by a high degree of standardization. The town was surrounded by fields of soybeans and corn, row after row after row of them. The principal industry was the manufacture of automotive parts, the production line the destiny of most of its inhabitants. The Lynds accurately posited the existence of two basic classes—white-collar business (who lived on the north side of town...