by Laura Smith
On September 15, Barbara and Helen boarded the S.S. Voltaire, a steamship in New York that was bound for Barbados. They had a suitcase and a typewriter each. Sabra and her new guardian came to wave them off. Wilson was not there. On October 8, Helen wrote to Anne, “And I want Sabra! This is the first time I have dared to think of her!” Sabra and Helen would not be reunited for nearly a year and a half. Prolonged absences from children were more common then, but still the decision to leave such a young child for a year is striking.
Wilson swore he would send them money every month, but according to Helen, he didn’t. Instead, he vanished. Helen wrote frantic letters to friends trying to discover his whereabouts. His letters stopped coming. No one, it seemed, knew where he was.
—
A year later, when Helen and Barbara returned to the United States, Helen arranged for Barbara, who was now fifteen, to live in Pasadena, California, with friends of the family, while Helen went to Honolulu. She was writing a book about her and Barbara’s time at sea and following a lead on a museum job there. Helen thought it might be best for both of them if they spent some time apart. They had quarreled viciously during the voyage—Barbara insisting on her independence, and Helen grasping for a modicum of control. For the first time in Barbara’s life, she was sent to school with kids her own age.
She lasted no more than a couple of weeks. “I was not given the conventional upbringing and it is too late to try to standardize me now,” she told a reporter.
She dashed off a handwritten letter to her mother in Honolulu. “I’m not going to tell you, for the time being, where I’ll be; and names, jobs, and headquarters have all been completely changed, you see. So we’re unfindable. Besides, I want to be alone with my Disillusion or my Fairytale—as the case may be. And I expect I’ll be seeing you again in this incarnation.”
She was fifteen and could create a new name, find a job and a place to live. Identity was fluid. She could be something else entirely later.
But who was this “we”? We’re unfindable. During the voyage, Helen had alluded to Barbara spending time with “a Scotchman . . . her father’s age.” Barbara had become infatuated with him, and this had concerned Helen, though there’s no suggestion that he felt even remotely the same. Alternatively, she could have been lying.
When the police found her, however, she was alone. She had taken a train from Los Angeles to San Francisco, where she hid in a boardinghouse under an assumed name: K. Andrews. When the police came to the door, she tried to climb out the boarding-house window, but they grabbed her before she could escape. When Helen’s friends who were acting as Barbara’s guardians in Pasadena arrived to pick her up from the police station, she protested so much that the police decided to keep her in their custody until a guardian more to her liking could be found.
The press had a field day, calling her “the young literary genius.” She gave several interviews, and the stories ran under headlines like “Child Writer in Revolt,” “Girl Novelist to Be Kept at Juvenile Hall,” and “Runaway Authoress Returned.” In one she explained calmly, “I am told that I am wanted in the South for forging a check. Well, I might do anything else, even murder, for there is a streak of crime in my nature, but I didn’t do that.” The journalist who recorded her statement noted the pride in her tone. To have a streak of crime in your nature was adventurous, if not downright glamorous. But in the dozens of articles about Barbara’s running away, I found no mention of this forged check, which made me wonder if she had made it up. She was, after all, devoted to storytelling, hungrily seeking to fill her life with as many adventurous tales as she could. In her stories, she was always the brave heroine, willing to go anywhere and do anything.
Before the police found her, Barbara had hoped to get a job as a secretary. If that wasn’t possible, she would work as a waitress or a clerk. All the while, she would hone her writing skill. “I know that I couldn’t support myself by my writing yet,” she told a journalist, “but I could be perfecting it, seeking real criticism and development.” She ended the interview by saying, “That is the life I planned for myself, and all I ask is to be let alone to do what seems best to me.”
But she was a minor and no one would leave her alone to do what seemed best for her. Barbara awaited her hearing in a prison cell. There were four little girls in matching blue school uniforms in the cell next to her, which she called a cage. She told a reporter that looking at them made her wonder, “Why are older people crushing us in this way? It seems to me I cannot wait six whole years until I am twenty-one in order just to be free.”
FIVE
A year before our wedding, P.J. and I decided we needed to get out of D.C. Leaving would mean saying good-bye to nearly everyone we knew, which was, at least to me, exactly the point. Wanting to flee, if only for a time, is a fairly common fantasy. Anyone who has felt it will recognize that this feeling manages to coexist with the fact that you may love your friends and family very much. I love you. Please go away.
Many of our friends from our respective high schools, our college friends, our parents, and P.J.’s siblings and their combined five children lived within a five-mile radius of our home. There was an endless string of birthdays, happy hours, going-away or coming-home parties, soccer games, holiday and engagement parties. I often felt that rather than trying to actually spend time together in a meaningful way, we were crossing things—or people—off our to-do lists.
The total lack of spontaneity was making me fidgety. In college, I hadn’t done extracurricular activities, even ones I would have enjoyed, because I didn’t like the idea that I would have to agree to weekly meetings. As a result, I spent a lot of nights doing nothing when I could have been doing something constructive; but knowing I was free to do as I pleased was what I cared about most. Now I knew ahead of time what I would be doing every weekend for the next five months. I dreamed of saying to family and friends, “I don’t want to see you today because I need to be alone, or I need to write, or wander around without a plan, and that’s not a reflection of how I feel about you.”
I might have enjoyed the merry-go-round of social events more had I not been working so much. I was running my family’s coffee shop, waking up at five in the morning to open the store in the dark, do inventory, organize and restock the line, brew coffee, order more, create the next week’s schedule, and serve food and drinks all day. Often I had to cover shifts for employees who had overslept or were sick. On the rare occasion when I wasn’t in the shop, my cell phone would ring incessantly with questions from the staff. “The sink is clogged and overflowing.” “There’s a crazy man shouting at himself in the bathroom.” “We’re out of peanut butter.” “There’s a weird smell coming from the basement.” Each time my phone rang, it reminded me that I wasn’t a good manager. I had created an environment where people were helpless in my absence.
At night I came home with my jeans stained with coffee grounds, worrying about two employees who were fighting or a tense interaction with a customer. I was physically exhausted, but when I got in bed, instead of going to sleep, I cycled through the next day’s to-do list. We’re out of whole milk, I reminded myself. And don’t forget to order more bowls for the catering job next week. The new employee is coming in at eleven; print her paperwork first thing.
I was beginning to see that when your days are all the same, your weeks, months, and years blend together. The alumni association of my high school asked for an update for the school magazine and I didn’t have one. “Nothing has changed,” I imagined writing. “Laura Smith, Class of 2004, is exactly the same.” I imagined that my classmates were climbing the Annapurna circuit, kayaking the length of the Nile, and rescuing earthquake victims in China. I longed to see other places. Even looking at a map was painful because it reminded me of how mired I was in my life. A National Geographic special about the pyramids came on, and I thought, I really might never get to Egypt. My world was small.
�
��When are you coming over?” my mother and P.J.’s would ask in rapid succession. “Let’s get a date on the calendar for something this week.”
“You’re smothering me,” I said to my mother.
“That sounds nice,” I said to P.J.’s mother.
One night I looked into the bathroom mirror, feeling suddenly daunted by the task of flossing my teeth. How could I possibly bring myself to do one more thing I didn’t want to do? I slept fitfully that night and had a dream that I had fallen asleep at a dinner party and was surrounded by an endless cacophony of cocktail chatter and clinking glasses. I had never spent less time reading or writing in my life, probably since I had learned to read and write, and the lack of it made my life feel lusterless. “My brain is dying,” I told P.J. I was an automaton outputting work and taking in food and drink.
P.J. sometimes came in to help on the weekends, working behind the counter so I wouldn’t have to. He was teaching at a nearby high school and was often up grading papers until the early hours of the morning, but he never complained about the extra work. He memorized the smoothie recipes and sometimes made them wrong. I didn’t care because I was so grateful not to be the one making them.
His desire to please others was great when it worked in my favor. But when he wanted to please others at my expense I would grow irritated. “Of course we’ll be there!” I heard him say into the phone. I shot him a death stare, signaling that I was going to strangle him. He shrugged helplessly, whispering, “If we leave the dinner at nine we can be at the birthday party just half an hour after it starts.”
“Do you actually want to go?” I would ask him. Sometimes the answer was yes, sometimes it was no. When he would commit to things I didn’t want to do, I wouldn’t allow myself to blame him. It was the other person’s fault. I didn’t want to think about the fact that sometimes I felt trapped by him.
I wrote during any free moment I could get. After work, late at night, I would write in the darkness of our studio apartment while P.J. slept in the bed nearby. In between placing orders I wrote in the coffee shop’s cavernous unfinished basement, which smelled like damp concrete. Sometimes I typed notes on my cell phone between shifts. But the moments snatched here and there were never enough. I could never really gather the intense concentration needed because I was constantly interrupted.
“I can’t live without writing,” a journalist friend told me. I rolled my eyes because the truth is that you can live without writing. In fact, often we must live without it.
If I wasn’t writing, I was simmering with frustration about how I should be. At a bar with friends, even if I was having a good time, I would silently berate myself for again being lured away from my work. I wanted to write more than I wanted to be near the people I loved. Sometimes I worried that this made me smallhearted or selfish, but it seemed constitutional and therefore unlikely to change.
I began writing about a woman who disappears. Not Barbara, but a fictional woman. She was a botanist who had vanished, perhaps deliberately, in the Burmese jungle in search of a rare, psychedelic mushroom. I wrote about her because, of course, I wanted to disappear. Often those who write about women who have vanished are men with an impulse to eviscerate women, or women with an impulse to eviscerate themselves. I was interested in a different kind of vanishing: the kind where you disentangle yourself from your life and start fresh. People would miss you. You could miss them. You could live at a peaceful distance, loving them in a way that is simpler than the way you love someone you have to deal with in everyday life. You hadn’t abandoned them. You were just gone. Mysterious rather than rejecting. Vanishing was a way to reclaim your life.
“Let’s leave the country,” P.J. said one night after work over burritos at a Mexican chain restaurant. We had been talking casually about moving abroad for a while, but the idea was tantalizing and somehow more urgent now that we were deep in the weeds of wedding planning. Moving away was another way to say no without having to say it. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I imagined myself saying. “We can’t go to dinner because we’ll be in Asia.” We had talked about traveling, but never in a way that felt like more than daydreaming. But a few months earlier a local restaurant owner had offered to buy our coffee shop, at a loss of course, and my dad and I jumped at the opportunity to be rid of what had once been a dream. Without the coffee shop, P.J. and I could shed everything that had burdened us in D.C.
“Can we please?” I said.
“We can do whatever we want,” P.J. said.
—
Two days after the wedding, P.J. and I were in his sister’s basement frantically packing. A book I wanted was nowhere to be found, a friend was dropping by with a last-minute wedding present, and we were trying to figure out what to do with $130 in coins another friend had given us as a generous gag gift. We had a plane to catch, I had a stress rash on my face, and somehow in the post-wedding rush I had strained my neck, making it painful to turn my head to the right. We were moving to Southeast Asia for a year, mostly because it was the farthest away we could get on the planet before coming back around again. The weather, the people, the sounds and smells would all be new to us. Days would be remarkable again.
We had saved some money and had a few freelance writing and research contracts that could be done remotely. That money would cover our expenses, which would be minimal: we had picked Southeast Asia because it was cheap.
I ran upstairs, tore the cushions off the couch, didn’t find the book, then ran downstairs to my backpack and started ripping out the clothing I had neatly rolled inside. Our backpacks contained everything we would need for the next year, which it turned out wasn’t much. We’d each packed five shirts, two pairs of shorts, a pair of pants, and a couple of pairs of shoes. There were also our computers, books, and two notebooks. Other than knowing what I would wear for the next year, I had no real plan. Suddenly, I didn’t care about the book. We were leaving, and how little our old lives would overlap with our new one was thrilling.
We drove to Dulles International Airport with our respective parents because both sets wanted to take us. P.J.’s sister and her children followed behind in their minivan. This vast crowd stood in a knot at the international departures area to watch us check in. At the check-in counter, something appeared to be wrong.
“You don’t have return tickets?” the ticket taker asked.
“That’s correct,” P.J. said.
“What is your plan for exiting Thailand?”
“We’ll be leaving by bus.”
I turned around and looked at our families standing behind us. Their faces were hopeful. Had we botched the trip? Would we have to stay home forever?
A few months earlier, my mother-in-law had sat us down on her porch and said, “Maybe you should consider going away for a few months instead of a year.” I felt something constrict in my chest. She seemed to be asking us not to change, or to get onto some kind of track. To her, this was a trip. We would come back to our apartment in D.C., back to her house for dinner on Sundays, to “regular” (i.e., office) jobs and daily routines. The coffee shop had been a nice little digression, but that hadn’t turned out so well. Teaching—that was fine in your twenties, as long as it was a stepping-stone to something more prestigious. And now this “trip.” It was time to grow up and get serious. This line of thinking made me want to run screaming in the opposite direction. I couldn’t describe the life I wanted, but this was not it.
It was around this time that I read a passage in a novel about two old ladies, a mother and a daughter who lived alone together in some isolated place eating only potatoes. When a stranger came across them, he was struck by how the pair seemed to have withered mentally without outside stimulus. Having only each other to talk to, they were nearly mute. Without other minds, other sights, other experiences, they had grown dull. The passage had sent a jolt of fear through me. I was surrounded by people who loved me, people whom I loved, and yet I was
wilting. I thought about Wilson Follett and the urgency he felt to end his “poisonous” marriage. Maybe Helen wasn’t poisonous, but something about family life was. I didn’t like the idea that I might be anything like Wilson, who was, in many ways, the villain of Barbara’s story.
You must be vigilant, Wilson argued, because even the best-intentioned love can strangle. You cannot protect the things you love by sealing them in airtight containers. When you pin a butterfly and put it behind glass, you kill it. Barbara put her butterflies in a sieve, studied them, and then released them back into the wild. Go outside, she seemed to be saying. Be fearless, life will be over soon.
Barbara once signed a letter to her father, “With love and love and love and love and LOVE and LOVE,” each inky love becoming larger and larger. When her father wasn’t there, she wrote, “I am longing to see you” and “I miss you terribly.” Where is the dividing line in a love like this? At some point, love crosses over from being the buoy that lifts you up to the tide that drags you under. My chest was pounding as I sat on the porch and P.J.’s mother asked us to stay, and it was pounding just as loudly in the airport as we tried to leave. Perhaps Wilson was just being who he was when he left his family. Maybe I was too. It wasn’t a question of wrong or right or ingratitude. It was a compulsion.
Standing at the check-in counter, I imagined failing to get our boarding passes and piling back into the family cars. I could picture our mothers’ looks of contented relief as we all drove home together. Put us on that fucking airplane, I thought.