I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway

by Tracy McMillan

  “Rad,” I repeat. Rad is not what I was thinking this was. “And why’s that?”

  “Because now you get to get free.”

  “Free,” I say. “Keep going.”

  “Yeah. Think about it. This isn’t a new feeling.” She sucks in a huge breath because she’s about to start giggling. Because this is so funny. And so rad. “This is how you’ve always felt.”

  You know how some people can just string a few words together, words you’ve heard a thousand times before, but for some reason, this one time you hear them and you know what they mean and you know it’s true? That’s what’s happening to me in this conversation.

  This is how I’ve always felt.

  She’s right. I remember feeling pretty much exactly this way about Andy Weld, in second grade. He always wore this T-shirt with a happy face on it, which was ironic because he was definitely a future Zoloft user.

  “You’re just on a wheel, going over and over the same thoughts and feelings until you realize that they’re an illusion. One day you just see it and then you’re free.” Siobhan puts a vocal flourish on the end of the sentence, the same one a game show host would use while explaining the rules to a new contestant. Once you buy a prize, it’s yours to keep!

  Oh, goody.

  But wait, there’s more. “You have to act like you personally invited every single person, place, or thing into your life so that you could see whatever part of the illusion it’s showing you.”

  Huh?

  I kind of get it.

  Then I totally get it. If what Siobhan is saying is true—and I know it is—it turns cause-and-effect upside down. It means these feelings—of abandonment, anxiety, not-enough-ness—actually came first, and the men followed. Like maybe I’m conscripting them, at gunpoint, into my war against me. I stick a pistol in their ribs and say, “I need someone to prove to me that men will ultimately disappoint me. You’re coming with me.”

  The guys I draft are the ones who already feel bad about themselves, already have mommy issues or daddy issues or whatever, who already can’t believe they’re worth being close to. So they abandon and feel guilty. And I get abandoned and feel worthless.

  Perfect!

  A nice guy isn’t really a match for that. Unless he’s a nice guy who feels bad about himself. In which case, I’ve been hired to play the abandoner. It’s not that I don’t love them. It’s just that there’s a script, and we have to stick to it.

  I hang up with Siobhan glad to have some clarity. To understand what’s going on.

  Too bad it doesn’t take this awful feeling away.

  I HAVEN’T SEEN MUCH OF DADDY lately. He’s a dashing figure, literally, on his way in or out all of the time. Mostly out. Even though he’s gone a lot, there are still signs of his presence. Like the spinach stain on the kitchen wall from the night he and Yvonne had that major blowout. Or my ill-behaved dog Stanley—50 percent German shepherd, 50 percent Siberian husky, 100 percent total nightmare—who’d be toast if my dad weren’t here, because no one can stand him, not even me. Stanley is sweet, but he could do with some of my hyperactivity pills.

  There are other indications that my dad’s still here—like his friend Tina and her boyfriend Marvin (referred to by some as “a rat in a toilet”), who are upstairs living in my bed, where they’ve been hunkered down for the past three months. Tina is an unidentified associate of my dad’s, or is it Marvin who is the associate? I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter. All I know is they never leave the room and they’re awfully subdued.

  When I ask Yvonne where my dad is, she says he’s “at work.” His job is obviously nothing like Betsy’s dad’s job. Betsy’s dad walks down the street from the bus stop every night at precisely five-something carrying a briefcase and wearing a fedora. He works at Honeywell, where he’s some kind of engineer.

  My dad carries a briefcase and wears a hat and even works downtown, but it’s just not the same thing.

  Case in point. One night last week Yvonne and Freddie wake me up in the middle of the night. They pour me into the backseat of the car and we drive to one of those bad suburbs two tiers out—the kind populated with meth types and people who like aboveground pools.

  We knock on the door, and it opens into a party. Not, like, a seventies party with Afros and hoop earrings and halter dresses. This was more like a Saturday-afternoon family barbecue where kids are running around, the women are klatching in the kitchen, and the men are off doing their (illegal, but the women don’t—or don’t want to—know) Men Things.

  Except it’s in the middle of the night.

  There are probably a half dozen kids there, several right around my age. We quickly rustle up a competitive game of tag that—necessarily—takes place indoors. We run through the house, tagging each other, screaming, and having a generally fabulous time. No one has to tell me why that band Chicago is wondering if anybody really knows or cares what time it is. Gatherings like this are proof positive that time is just a number.

  I’m barreling up the steps, hot on the heels of a sandy-haired girl with a voice that sounds like she’s smoked one too many secondhand Marlboros, when I look to my left, into the master bedroom. The men must have heard us coming, because one of them is in the process of giving the door a nudge just strong enough to swing it shut. He doesn’t seem worried. It’s more like he’s just being thorough. As if you were going to the bathroom with the door open and you heard someone on the stairs.

  But he is too late. I see in there.

  They are all holding balloons. Long, skinny ones. The kind used by street-fair clowns to make Jeff Koons–type dogs.

  There are five guys, maybe six, and they are either sitting on or kneeling by the bed, arranged in the kind of classical tableaux you first encounter in Survey of Art History 101 during your freshman year in college. The wavy-haired dude nearest the door—a dead ringer for Oates of that band Hall and the Other Guy Who Is Not Hall—is holding a dangling, flaccid, green balloon. The other guys have them, too, and they’re filling them with something—something that is apparently located in a pile in the middle of the bed, since that’s where their attention is very intensely focused. My dad is the only guy standing, and he’s apart from the rest of them. I guess that means he’s the supervisor. I don’t know if I’m seeing things, but I could swear there’s a hat and a briefcase.

  Then, in a split second, the door closes.

  Suddenly I know where my dad is when he’s not with me. He’s out having birthday parties with men in bad suburbs in the middle of the night. Women, as a business, is over, replaced with “girl” (a street name for heroin), a substance of such towering profitability it moots even the easy money to be had in the sex trade. Not that womanizing—the sport—wasn’t in full effect. But that’s not business; that’s pleasure.

  Not long after that, Tina and her rat-in-the-toilet boyfriend Marvin get out of my bed and go “live” somewhere else. I move back into my room, glad to be out of the guest bedroom, where the bed doesn’t have a canopy and the wallpaper isn’t a pretty Edwardian pale blue. As I’m exploring my new-old-new-again room, I find a saucer on top of the tall dresser, the one I don’t often use. The saucer is littered with a few grains of something that looks almost like salt and pepper, but darker and smaller. That’s heroin, I say to myself. I don’t really know how I know that.

  But I know that it goes into balloons.

  AFTER SIX DAYS, I CALL PAUL. This is a big deal because normally, I do not call men. Ever. I operate on the theory that men vote with their fingers—if they want you, they dial, and if they don’t, they don’t. I don’t refuse to call men as part of a game. I do it because when a guy doesn’t call, he is communicating—the fact that he doesn’t want to/can’t/won’t call. So why ring him up and make him say it out loud? That’s just masochism for me and sadism for him. (Or is it sadism for me and masochism for him?) And then there’s the fact that if the guy isn’t highly motivated toward me now, how’s he going to stick around when we
get into our first fight? Better to just not start something I already know, deep down, he can’t finish. You’d be hard-pressed to talk me out of this strategy, because it has worked extremely well. My dating-to-living-together ratio is like 97.6 percent.

  But this situation is different. Paul had called me so many times, and I had felt such a connection to him. I decide to break my rule. Just this once. I think long and hard before I pick up the phone. To clarify my intentions. Am I trying to get him to change his mind, to see how wonderful I am, to realize that he really wants to fall in love with me? No, I’m calling to act as if I am a girl you cannot just never call again—she’ll think you got hit by a truck or something.

  This is new for me. Usually, I think it’s perfectly normal for someone to be your brand-new boyfriend one day and then fall off the face of the planet the next. People change their minds about stuff all the time, my warped thinking goes, like deciding they don’t want to be your mom anymore.

  Paul picks up the phone after one ring.

  “Hello, hello?” Singsongy. Like nothing’s at all the matter.

  “Hey, it’s Tracy.”

  Comic book noises. Lame excuse along the lines of I know I haven’t called. Then: “I’m at the doctor’s office.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. This is embarrassing, but…I have a boil. On my leg.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  That’s weird. First that you have a boil. Second that it’s your conversation opener. When you haven’t called me in six days. After leaving me with one of the most soulful kisses of my life and saying, Have a sweet, sweet day.

  “How’ve you been?” he says.

  Does he really want to know how I’ve been? Is he really asking me this? Like everything’s normal?

  “Good. I was wondering if you were okay.” I pull over into the parking lot of Astroburger. Although I thought I would be more relaxed if I had the conversation while driving, this is taking more processor speed than I thought it would and I am unable to steer, accelerate, work the blinkers, and talk all at the same time.

  “I’m good. I’ve been, uh, really busy,” he says. Of course he has. That’s what all guys who never call you again are: really, really busy.

  “Oh. Okay.” There you have it. There is nothing more to say. Why did I call this guy again? So much for my selfish exercise in contrary action. Good job wanting to practice acting like a girl who expects a man to love her. I’m totally a fool, and one who has read way too many self-help books, at that.

  I’m about ready to hang up when Paul blurts out, “I just don’t think we had any, uh, chemistry.”

  What?! This is terrible. The only thing worse than this would be if I slept with him, then ran into him at the grocery store the next day canoodling with another woman over a cart full of wine, and pasta, and very expensive olive oil.

  Because “chemistry” is a code word for sexy. He rejected me because I wasn’t sexy enough.

  I knew it.

  My heart starts beating. Here comes the team of wild puppets. Anxiety and shame wash over me.

  I knew it! This is why I always get rejected by the men I really want. Because I’m not enough. There’s always some girl/object just a little bit shinier, just a little bit juicier, who promises just a little bit more of a thrill. It’s the same girl Freddie wants. The one they all want. And that girl isn’t talking about “getting attached.” She’s going for it. Why can’t I be that girl?

  But then I remember what Siobhan said. You have to act like you personally invited every single person, place, or thing into your life—and I imagine myself holding a gun to Paul’s head—so that you could see whatever part of the illusion it’s showing to you. I struggle for a good thirty seconds to reconcile what Paul is telling me with the intensity of the time we spent together. Could anybody fake that? Could they?! Suddenly, I’m reminded of that old line “Who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

  I felt your chemistry on my frackin’ thigh, dude.

  I’m going to believe my own eyes. I was there. I know what happened! It may sound elementary, but giving myself the authority to name my own truth the Truth is a quantum leap in evolution for me. It’s like someone just installed a thousand megs of RAM in my brain, the cursor has stopped spinning, and pages are loading at lightning speed. I throw the transmission into “drive” and tear out of the parking lot headed for the 2 freeway.

  Paul talks for the next four minutes straight—about how he had some initial concern over the exact nature of our chemistry, being sure that it included friendship but unsure if it went beyond that, and how he thought if he dated me at all he would probably have to marry me, and how he was “a silly goose” for not calling.

  I listen.

  To his contradictions and his paradoxes. To what he’s saying and what he’s not saying. But I have so much clarity about it—I may not know why he thinks we have no chemistry, but I do know it’s absolutely not true. And I can also accept that to his mind, for the time being at least, it is. And I can let that difference in perception just be.

  As I merge onto 134 East, this calm comes over me. And I hear myself do something I have never, in two-plus decades of dating, ever done. I let him go. Without anger, explanation, questions, or blame. Gracefully.

  “Oh.” I take a breath. “I understand,” I say, and I really do. I understand that we each have a different truth and both are valid. I don’t need to talk him into mine, because his version doesn’t mean anything about me. It’s just…his version. And that’s it.

  So now I’m all finished. Ready to hang up the phone. I tell him how nice it has been to meet him, how much I enjoyed our time together. “I wish all the very best things for you, Paul,” I say. “It was lovely to meet you.” I mean it, sincerely. “This is a small town. I’m sure I’ll see you around sometime. Probably when I least expect it!” I’m light and playful.

  There is stone silence on the other end of the line.

  In the silence, I become acutely aware that this man has probably brushed off dozens of women in this exact manner, with this very line—I just don’t think we had chemistry—and it’s likely that not one of them responded by wishing him all the very best things.

  “Okay,” I say. Now it’s me who’s singsongy. “Take care,” I finish. “Bye.”

  “Bye,” he says, confused. “Bye-bye.” He sounds like a little boy.

  It’s kind of hard to take the phone down from my ear and hang up. It feels like I’m letting go of the one man I’ve been looking for my whole life. But the second I do, this weird thought pops into my head:

  That is who I really am.

  EVER SINCE I SAW THE BALLOONS, I’ve been lying awake at night, listening for my dad to come home. And when he doesn’t, which is often, my mind can’t stop obsessing over and over about a single thought:

  My dad’s in jail.

  I’m not exactly sure where I got this idea. Probably in the ether, where the collective unconscious of a household hovers disintegrated, weightless, and unseen. Eventually it is absorbed by the people who live there and is metabolized as fears, hopes, dreams, weight gain, headaches. Or maybe it’s simpler than that—maybe it would have been obvious to anyone that my dad was on his way back to the penitentiary. I didn’t have to be smarter than a fifth grader to suspect that.

  In any case, it comes as no surprise, really, when one day Mrs. Turner, who lives on the corner of our block, knocks on our door to inquire about the article in the Minneapolis Star detailing my dad’s arrest.

  Yvonne opens the door. There stands Mrs. Turner in the small enclosed porch. She is not holding a casserole.

  “Oh, hello.” Forced smile. “I’m Susan Turner; my son Ronald goes to school with Tracy?”

  Ronald is notable for his horn-rimmed glasses and not much else. (Not to disparage Ronald. For all I know he’s an appellate court judge or something equally respectable by now.)

  “Yes?” Yvonne isn’t going to give this woman anything to w
ork with.

  “I saw the article,” Mrs. Turner offers, hoping Yvonne will want to assuage her guilt for bringing ruin to the neighborhood by coughing up information without having to be asked directly. “In the newspaper?”

  Mrs. Turner clearly has never met Yvonne. Because if she had, she would know that Yvonne has a special flat, dark gaze that is mostly awful but perfect for a situation like this one. And she doesn’t hesitate to use it.

  “Hmm,” Yvonne replies. “I don’t remember Tracy mentioning your son. What’s his name?”

  “Yes, well, she probably hasn’t.” Mrs. Turner is getting a little fidgety. Yvonne’s gaze will do that to a sister. “His name is Ronald.”

  “Oh. Huh.” Steely blue eyes. “Well, would you like to send Ronald down sometime? To play?” Yvonne can be such a scream when she wants to be.

  From the look on Mrs. Turner’s face, she would not like to send Ronald down to play sometime. She stands there in astonished silence.

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Susan. I’ve got to run.” Yvonne shuts the door, leaving Mrs. Turner standing out there, wondering what just happened. Once she recovers the chutzpah that got her onto our doorstep in the first place, Mrs. Susan Turner turns and slinks back to her big house around the corner.

  That’s the last we ever see of her.

  My secret is apparently out, but none of the kids are teasing me about it. In my new school I’m weird to begin with, so it’s not as though my dad’s transgressions are a threat to my social status. I have none to lose. My brand has pretty much become the Girl on Whom Jody Jeffs, the Queen Bee of Mrs. DiVito’s Fourth-Grade Classroom, Proves Her Dominance. Jody does this by ordering her lieutenant, Pamela Vigen, to kick my ass every day. Just a single kick. What long blond hair and supermodel height alone couldn’t do for Jody’s social profile, a single kick to my ass could. Really, I should’ve been honored.

  At home, the arrest and the trial are discussed ad infinitum but never openly. Instead, the name of my dad’s lawyer becomes like a mantra—on a continuous loop of every third word in every last conversation. Eisenberg this. Eisenberg that. Eisenberg here. Eisenberg there. The name is not so much uttered as it is intoned. Eisenberg is being paid a lot of money to defend my dad. And Eisenberg will surely come through. Of this, Daddy seems very confident.