by Laura Smith
To make matters more guilt inducing, I was sick. It was nothing serious, a minor respiratory infection, a slightly glorified cold—but still, point for me.
“Are you sure about this?” P.J. asked, standing in the doorway of our bedroom, where I was reading and collecting a small mountain of snotty tissues. He looked uncertain, like an animal sniffing out food, wondering if it’s a trap.
“Yes, please, go,” I said, waving him away nonchalantly.
Once he was gone, I sat on my bed reading a book, blowing my nose, and hacking up phlegm. It occurred to me that I had created the exact scene that I had been so afraid of in the months before our experiment began. I was reading alone at night in a room while P.J. was out with another woman. The illness was an added cherry on top, making the scene more pathetic than I had imagined. Was it so awful? Not really. Mostly, there were too many things happening for me to be horrified by any one of them. And part of me was relieved. I felt on some level that I had emasculated P.J. I would remasculate him, then.
“We’re still in the abyss,” P.J. had said to me, rubbing my shoulder one night when I had gotten upset. “We don’t know what to do, except to keep moving.” We’ll figure this out together, was what I took him to mean. But at home surrounded by my tissues, realizing that this scene was not as heartrending as I had imagined, made me feel like the oddest woman who had ever lived. I didn’t care. I put my book away and called Michael.
Perhaps the most baffling part of being back in New York was that sometimes things proceeded normally, and this normalcy in the midst of a maelstrom only confused us more. P.J. and I still ate ice cream. We still had sex. We still huddled together on our tiny couch and watched movies. We babysat a friend’s baby who slept in the stroller while we quietly ate beside him, terrified that he might wake up from his fierce, sweaty slumber and that we wouldn’t know what to do with him. We walked a friend’s dog. We both loved the dog and loved loving the dog together. We went grocery shopping and enjoyed plotting the things we would eat. We enjoyed the things we enjoyed no less during this time—perhaps even more.
And then there was Michael, whom I texted or spoke to on the phone every day. What were we to each other? A friend very reasonably asked me, “Aren’t there ways to be close to people without sleeping with them?” Yes, of course. But the truth was that Michael and P.J. were the closest people to me in the world. Sex is a fast track to intimacy and it felt as though my skin was stitched to both of them.
—
It was now fall. The sharp clear air and the chimney fires and the homey smells of sweet things baking had made me nostalgic for a time when things were simpler. I realized that one of the things I had lost was a story: the simple story of marriage, with clean lines and a sensible narrative arc. I always imagined this told in the form of a toast at a golden anniversary. In that story, our devotion was unshakable, always growing rather than wobbling or retreating. The hard times were ordinary—sleepless nights with a colicky baby, money and work worries—and our union never in question. The hard times weren’t really all that hard. But everyone knows that marriage doesn’t easily accommodate the narrative form. A jagged edge always exposes this elegant love story as a farce.
One evening I went out for drinks with two friends, both of whom worked at progressive magazines and generally were difficult to shock. But when I told them about our marital experiment, they were horrified. They sat across from me in the dimly lit booth with their mouths literally agape, like shocked cartoon characters. They seemed to take my decision personally, as though somehow my arrangement endangered us all. One was about to get married (the drinks had been to celebrate her engagement, admittedly an inappropriate time to make my announcement), and the other was eager to find a more serious relationship.
“Ben and I could never do that,” the engaged one said.
“Why?” I asked, wondering why she had specifically said her fiance couldn’t, which suggested that maybe she could.
“He’s too loyal,” she said.
The comment stung. Were we not loyal? I didn’t like to think of myself or P.J. as being disloyal. We are loyal, I wanted to say. We don’t think of it that way at all. But I couldn’t say anything because I was so wounded by the comment and felt suddenly unsure.
When I ordered an unusual cocktail and offered them a taste, the other friend declined, joking, “We don’t want what you’ve got.” I recalled how I had felt the first time P.J. and I had discussed not being monogamous. I had felt so suddenly untethered. The urge to jam my fingers in my ears had been overwhelming.
I had felt pigeonholed by the story of marriage, but now that I had complicated my own marriage, I longed for that simpler narrative. Commercials featuring happy couples made my heart twinge. I could not walk into home stores because they evoked visions of domestic utopia that were painful to me. Watching happy couples dining in restaurants, I was torn between thinking that they were desperately engaging in an elaborate charade and that I wanted to be one of them again. Did any part of that story still belong to me? Talking with friends in the midst of relationship problems, I had an urge to qualify everything I said with, “I know I’ve made some weird relationship decisions, but . . .”
—
One night P.J. and I went to an Italian restaurant not far from our house. The spaghetti was overcooked and P.J. was jittery. Michael would be visiting that weekend. Did he want to see Kristin again that weekend? Something about spending another night with her again so soon didn’t seem like a good idea to him.
“Of course, I just want you all to myself,” he said in passing. He was stuck, he said. He couldn’t get over his visceral resistance to another man sleeping with me. But since he knew I wanted to—and of course he still wanted other women—there was no alternative but pressing on. Or stopping. Neither was right.
“Do you think you ever will be comfortable with the idea of my being with another man?” I asked.
He thought this over. “Not really. I think it will always feel like a punch in the gut. Maybe I’ll learn to live with it, maybe I’ll be able to twist it into something else. But I think I’ll always be pierced by it.”
I was struck with clarity. He was trying to intellectualize an animal instinct. And I could imagine him doing this forever: twisting, explaining, reexplaining, and still feeling stabbed. He was too proud to ask me to stop. It occurred to me then that this was the true pact of our marriage: it was a promise that neither of us would have to ask to be protected.
“It’s over,” I said. “I just want to be with you.” I wasn’t sure I meant it. I was saying the words to see if they felt true. And I wanted to save P.J., from me and from himself. His indecisive nature was overriding his instincts for self-preservation.
My initial feeling was disappointment. Then relief. It felt like I had just been pulled off a racetrack. I settled back into my chair. We talked more. We decided we would put things on hold. “It’s a pause,” I said. “Not a definite stop,” P.J. said. We were deciding not to decide. One day, we hoped, the way forward would become more obvious. But as we talked, I wondered if we had flipped a switch that could not be flipped back.
—
The hard part was telling Michael he couldn’t visit. I called him the next day, as I paced around the little park near my apartment. He was gracious, but hurt. “When you write about this,” he said, “make me tall, charming, and handsome. Point out how tall I am—that I’m taller than P.J.,” he said.
“You are taller than P.J.,” I said.
“But really make the point.”
And then, sounding wounded, he said, “You know, you didn’t really do the experiment. The experiment was about freedom, about opening yourself to possibility, but in your mind, you always wanted to wind up in the same place. You never really considered starting a new life.”
I didn’t know what to say, but I thought that he might be right.
/> “In a way, it’s more beautiful like this,” he said quickly. “I always thought your story and Barbara’s story were running in parallel. But now I see that that’s not true. Barbara’s story is about running away and your story is about coming home.”
NINETEEN
As I searched for Anderson, I continued to look directly for Barbara. I requested the police files from Boston and asked the Brookline police if they had any additional ones beyond what I had seen during my visit. The logbook, I was told, was all that remained. Because it had happened so long ago, the other files had been destroyed.
In 1952, Helen had contacted the Social Security Administration to find out if Barbara had had any earnings since her disappearance. When Barbara ran away at sixteen, Helen had been quite sure that she was capable of quickly finding work, and no doubt she would only have been more capable at twenty-five. But the Social Security Administration told her that this information was confidential. “Even if the regulations of the Administration permitted the disclosure of confidential information and we told you that we had no records of your daughter during the time she has been missing, such information would not be conclusive as to death. It is possible that she may have been unemployed or engaged in employment not covered by the Social Security Act.” Even if we told you that we had no records . . . It wasn’t a form letter, but something personally written by an administration employee addressing each of Helen’s specific points. Had he looked? Had curiosity been too much and had he thought, I’ll just have a peek at the files, and was this his veiled way of telling Helen there were no records? It seemed a stretch.
Helen had been wise to check with the Social Security Administration, even if she didn’t have the legal right. Not having earnings would not have meant that Barbara was dead, but having them would have conclusively proven she was alive. And if Barbara had lived a regular life span anywhere in the United States, it was hard to imagine that she would never have worked again, though she could have gotten a fake social security card. She had always worked—from the time she was nine, and arguably even before that. Perhaps realizing that no great investigation was under way ten, fifteen, or even thirty years later she might have felt it was fairly innocuous to take a job for which she had to fill out tax and social security information, and considered it not worth falsifying those documents.
First, I checked the Social Security Death Index to ensure that no one with her name was in the system. There were no Barbara Newhall Folletts, and no Barbara Folletts who matched her description. There was a Barbara L. Follett, but the birth year didn’t match. There were many Barbara Rogerses but I doubted she would have kept her married name for long, and there were too many to track each one. I created a file to pursue them as a last resort. There was also the possibility that she had changed her name to something else entirely. When she ran away to California, she had traveled under a pseudonym: K. Andrews. What I really needed was her social security number—which she would have been less likely to change than her name—to see if that number was tied to the Death Index. I decided to call her last employer in Brookline, on the off chance that they would, very unprofessionally, give me the number or any other information.
No such luck—they didn’t keep records for that long. The woman on the phone suggested I could try their national offices, but she doubted they would have anything. I was keeping an ever-growing to-do list. At the top I listed more promising leads and at the bottom less promising ones. I put this toward the bottom.
I called the Social Security Administration. After a long wait, a man came on the line and I explained Barbara’s story. She had been missing for over seventy-five years. Was there any way I could find out if someone with her social security number had been declared dead? Or had ever paid social security taxes after a certain date? The man on the other end of the line was baffled. “No one has ever asked me a question like that,” he said, clearly delighted. “It’s usually just wives calling to say their husbands are dead.”
I could hear him typing on his computer, looking things up. He gave me the names of some forms I might have to fill out, either the 711 or the 714, and suggested I go to the Social Security Administration in person and discuss the matter with them. And then he paused. “Why do you want to know? Are you some kind of journalist?” I told him yes. “Oh, good,” he said. And then he proceeded to tell me a long story about a girl he had known as a child in Cleveland who had gone missing. Her name was Beverly Potts.* He made me write her name down and confirm the spelling. “Maybe after you find this woman, you can look for her,” he said.
There was a Social Security Administration office a few blocks down from my apartment and the next day I walked over. I took the elevator up to the sixth floor and entered a fluorescently lit room with rows of black plastic chairs. The waiting area was half full and everyone was bored and fiddling with their phones. I was quite possibly the only person in the history of people going to the Social Security Administration who was thrilled to be there. A man instructed me to take a number and wait in one of the chairs. The woman down the row from me was taking selfies, making a sexy pouty face. Another woman, speaking to an agent at the window behind me, seemed to be telling the agent her entire life story, including a long list of people she was no longer speaking to. There were birthday balloons in one of the offices. Occasionally the light chatter was broken by the piercing announcement over the intercom of the next number. After about half an hour, my number was called.
I explained to the agent why I was there. She looked at me bug-eyed and then thought for a long time. “Hold on one second,” she said before getting up and returning with another woman, to whom I repeated the whole story. This woman looked at me bug-eyed too but was more assertive. “Are you related to this woman?” she asked. “No,” I admitted. She shook her head, “A family member can file a claim, but you can’t.”
“But isn’t there an age at which it’s safe to presume that someone is dead?” I asked. “She would be a hundred and one if she were alive and she’s been missing for seventy-five years,” I said. “Yeah, she’s probably dead,” the woman said, but she shook her head again firmly. I wasn’t family. And it was the administration’s policy not to presume someone was dead until they were more than a hundred and twenty years old. I would just have to wait nineteen years.
I decided to try a different tactic. Barbara’s family and friends had all believed that Barbara had run away, though the details of their theories differed. But if there was one obsession that gripped Barbara throughout her life, it was the sea. As her mother wrote in Magic Portholes, the other book she had written about their Caribbean and South Seas voyage, Barbara had a “sea madness—it’s in her blood.” She believed that the sea was her destiny, once pointing out to her mother that she was born a Pisces, “the water sign.” And she was impulsive. She got an idea in her head and acted, logistics be damned. “Ask Barbara to wait?” her mother had scoffed during one of her bouts of sea obsession. “Might as well ask a Northern river to change its course.” Barbara had described herself as being “haunted” by the sea. The sea had a voice, she said—it called to her. Helen wrote that the sea had a “mystery that was compelling her to go back to it.”
I began going through ship manifests online, looking specifically for ships sailing to and from places Barbara had already been. St. Lucia had “felt like home.” There was Barbados, Montserrat, Tahiti, the Tonga Islands, and Samoa. I looked at ships leaving from Seattle, thinking that she might have paid Anderson a visit, but I also looked at California, Boston, and New York, considering her familiarity with those places. I looked at Alaska as well, since Anderson might have been there. I searched using her married name and her maiden name.
It was a more conservative time. How many twenty-five-year-old women could have been traveling by ship alone in those days? Many, it turned out. I spent hours at the library scrolling through the names. I tried various iterations of her pseudonyms and s
pellings of her last names. I tried looking just for the name Barbara with her birth year. There were thousands of Barbaras traveling who were my Barbara’s age. Barbara Rogerses abounded.
One night, after a particularly long day in the library scanning through ship manifests, I got home and had a sudden itch to check a few more before going to a kickboxing class. This happened often. Just one more search and I’ll find her. I had become convinced that the information was out there somewhere. People left trails. Not as many as they do now, but when they traveled, their passports were stamped. When something noteworthy happened, there were newspaper stories. When they died, there were death certificates. I was nagged by the idea that the information must be available. If I just looked hard enough, or thought creatively enough, I would find it.
Sometimes a different variation of search terms would occur to me and I would have to check the manifests immediately. What if I tweaked the age range just a few more years? The manifests were handwritten. What if the person recording the information had gotten it wrong, or written illegibly? What if “26” accidentally became “28”? What if I listed Barbara’s married name in the search terms but named her parents as relatives? The smallest changes in the search variables could turn up entirely different results.
Lying on my bed, trying these various search terms, a new manifest popped up for a Barbara Rogers. In March of the year that Barbara had disappeared, a twenty-five-year-old Barbara Rogers traveled from San Francisco to Hawaii. I froze. It was her. She had traveled to Hawaii before. I shouted for P.J. to come into the room.
“I found her,” I said, dumbfounded.
“Are you sure?” P.J. asked.