Portia: A Not So Subtle Influence!

When we lived in Venezuela, the school most of the American kids attended was called Campo Alegre and it was known as the  American School. That’s how it looked back in the day. It had been created by the oil companies that hired and brought in American employees and their families. Most of our teachers were imported from the U.S.

But the school only went up to ninth grade and after that, the choices were somewhat limited. So my dad’s company, Creole, a subsidiary of Exxon, offered an attractive option – they would pay for your kids to attend boarding school. So for 10^th and 11^th grade, I attended a girls’ boarding school in Massachusetts. This was real culture shock. I met very wealthy kids – heiresses, and kids whose parents were in the diplomatic corps in places like Pakistan, and then just your plain ole’ variety of rich kids whose fathers were the CEOs of major New York corporations. This is how Northampton looks today:

I lived in one of the houses on campus, with a girl from Darien, Connecticut whose mother had been a former model, and an exotic looking girl, an American whose father was a diplomat in Pakistan. Phyllis and Randall. Next door lived a rebel and rogue, a rich girl named Portia. She was from New Rochelle, New York and became my closest friend. From her, I learned that rules could and should be broken.

If lights out was at 9, then at 9:02 p.m. you should sneak down to Holly’s room on the second floor and have a party. If and when the housemother heard the ruckus and came to investigate, you should hide under beds and inside of closets. She called me Swartz, a takeoff from my maiden name, and I called her Porsh.

On the weekends, when we were allowed to sign out of the campus and explore the town, Porsh and I often jotted down some bogus destination in town – a dress shop, for instance, or Friendly’s Ice Cream store. Then we headed wherever we wanted, which was usually to the Smith College campus. I don’t remember what we did on the campus other than walk around and study people. But to me, these excursions were delicious precisely because they were forbidden.

When my parents move to the U.S. in my junior year, I knew that would be my final year at boarding school. Sure enough, I spent my senior year in high school in South Florida, and hated most of it. At one point in that year, I received a call from Pinkerton Detective Agency and then from the FBI, asking if I knew Portia______. She apparently had run away from boarding school and someone had told the feds I might know where she was. I didn’t. But I was sure that wherever she’d gone, it was an adventure and I was sorry I’d missed it.

Turned out that Porsh had run away and gotten married.

We reconnected several times some years back, when she was living in northern California, happily married to her third husband, the proud mother of a son from her first marriage. Porsh and I and our husbands sat on a wide balcony of a restaurant that overlooked the Pacific coast and talked and talked.

We’re friends on Facebook, a fact I’d forgotten until just tonight when she popped into my mind. If our lives from birth to death are a moving, breathing depiction of who we are in this second, then Porsh is one of those not so subtle influences in my life, the rebellious blond who was smarter and more daring and adventurous than the rest of us. She’s what Carl Jung would call an archetype, wild and unpredictable and always living according to her own rules, her own code.

And time and again, those traits have worked their way into the women in my novels. Thanks, Porsh! Everyone should know a rogue, a rebel!