Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things

by Amy Dickinson

  My childhood changed in that moment. I was the daughter of someone who’d convinced me that everyone not connected to him was a loser. By leaving, he put us in that category. Jane, always the grounded center of our home life, spent the warming evenings that spring sitting on our front stoop, listening to the peepers on the creek and smoking, as she played a Seals and Crofts record over and over on our stereo. She was quiet and sad. Her sisters—my aunts Lena, Millie, and Jean—pulled in close. I would hear them talking at the kitchen table. I suspected they were giving her money. Buck had taken our mother’s inherited farm and mortgaged it without telling her. Jane was forced to sell everything in our barn—all of the equipment, the milkers and milk pails, and even the leftover hay—in an auction held in our driveway.

  I watched from the house as our neighbors and some Amish farmers from Pennsylvania bid on our belongings. Jane told me to go ahead and run into the barn and bring out anything I wanted to keep. I found an old Victrola record player in the barn’s granary and put it in my room. I still have it.

  Up until the time my father left her, Jane had been a full-time farm wife and had never held a paying job (after her teenage years). Now she went to work as a typist in an office at nearby Cornell University. My father charged my mother with “cruel and inhuman treatment” as a way to get a quick divorce, but he said he didn’t mean it—it was just the only way to get the goddamn thing done.

  Buck mainly kept his distance after that, although from time to time in high school I’d hear that he was surfacing locally. When I was sixteen and performing in a community production of The Music Man, I learned from some of the adult cast members that Buck was drinking with them at the local bowling alley. “He’s a riot!” they said. I just nodded. He was a riot, all right.

  My father married Joan, the woman he left my mother for, adopted her children, and then left them three years later. He picked apples in Nova Scotia. He started a business making cattle harnesses. He sold silos. He moved around, eventually establishing himself in a dying factory town on the Allegheny River in Pennsylvania. After Jane and Joan, he married Jeanne, and then Jean, and then Pat. He met women at church, taverns, diners, or the community center, and also through mail-order dating services found in the back of farming magazines.

  My mother graduated from her role as the passive witness to Buck’s failed ventures. The out-of-focus face in our family photo gained definition. The utility bills got paid. She bought a working car. Being separated from my father’s chaos became her liberation. The year I graduated from high school and went to college, Jane quit her typing job and then got her undergraduate and graduate degrees at Cornell, later becoming a professor there before retiring from teaching at Ithaca College.

  Jane was eventually able to leave our farm, when she unexpectedly inherited a house from our neighbor, John Sager. It happened in 1982, when I was twenty-two. The small Greek Revival style house was 500 yards up the road from our broken-down dairy farm, with its rambling, drafty house and enormous barn, which was in the process of falling down. John was a bachelor farmer. He had never married or had children. He grew his own food and cut his own wood and made a small living as a local “dowser” (also known as a “water witch”), finding wells with forked divining rods. John was well over six feet tall and had huge hands, like a smithy.

  When we were growing up, my sisters and I would walk or ride our bikes past John’s house on our way to Main Street several times a day. If he was outside working, he would welcome us into his small, crude kitchen to let us splash water into our cupped hands and drink from his big metal hand pump. John’s house had no indoor plumbing, and he heated it with a wood-burning stove. We were particularly fascinated by his one-hole outhouse, which stood next to his small barn.

  John showed us how he held his forked divining rods in his giant hands and how the point of the stick jammed toward the earth and vibrated when he found water. John said he had so much magnetism in his big body that he couldn’t wear a watch; its hands went haywire when strapped to his wrist.

  Later, when John got very old, my mother would leave casseroles or pies on his porch or invite him down the road for supper. She was looking out for him, in the way that people do.

  One night when I was sixteen, John walked down to our house through a blizzard and ate with my mother and me. Our farm had failed and all of my siblings were gone. It was just the two of us now, rattling around in our house. The blizzard was howling, and my mother offered to drive John the short way home after supper. As he was getting his coat and scarf, he said he had something important he wanted to talk to her about. I left the table but decided to eavesdrop from the next room. I heard John say that he had decided to leave his place to my mother when he died. She was stunned. She protested, naming other people she knew he was close to. John said that he wanted her to have his house because he knew she loved it and knew she would keep it.

  Jane always told us that her friendship with John began when she was a young child, spending her summers on Main Street (like my daughter Emily, my mother grew up in DC and lived in Freeville during the summers). Jane said that, starting when she was about five, she had a habit of walking down Main Street in the mornings and visiting several households on her way to John’s house, which was always her final destination. She would sit with John and his spinster sister, Georgie, on the porch while they read the comics aloud to her. Georgie and John saved their newspapers all through the winter to read to my mother during the summers while they sat and drank their coffee together.

  Fifty years later, John told my mother that he and Georgie had decided together to leave their place to her and that their decision was final. Georgie had been gone for decades; this fateful choice was made when Jane was in her twenties.

  After John’s death, this inheritance was the lucky good fortune that enabled my mother to finally shed our hundred acres and its complicated memories of my father’s desertion, debt, and failure. She installed plumbing and heating in John’s house and undertook a passionate wallpapering and painting campaign. After surviving married life with Buck, where he kept her off kilter and moving sometimes twice a year (just ahead of the bounced rent check), Jane craved stability. She also seemed to love change—as long as it was confined to the small seven-room house.

  Jane carved out a small back bedroom in the unheated upstairs of the house, and Emily and I would stay there, bundled under a thick layer of quilts during our Christmas visits. Even after I spent my divorce money on my own house on Main Street, Jane’s sweet house remained our daily destination.

  Occasionally during my visits home from whatever city I was living in, my mother and I would see an unfamiliar vehicle cruising slowly down the street as we sat on her porch drinking coffee. Over the years my father drove through Freeville in a painted-over laundry van, an army jeep, a lime-green International pickup truck, and a Cadillac. If he saw my mother’s car in the driveway, Buck would pop in for a cup of coffee. I have a small collection of homemade business cards he presented over the years for his harness business, his silo selling, and his home-bottled honey. Jane’s house in Freeville seemed to be on the outer ring of his sales territory.

  During his visits, Buck’s attention span lasted for the length of one cup of coffee. He would spill out his line of malarkey about whatever nonsense he was up to, and then he’d leap up suddenly and leave.

  Jane often said that if Buck hadn’t left her, she would have landed in a trailer somewhere in the hills and would still be waiting for him to come home. I can only wonder about a parallel life with my father in it. I only know about the life without. Both of my parents provided stellar examples to me about what I wanted for my own life. I wanted to be the tolerant and forgiving mother Jane had been to me, and I wanted to avoid any Buck-like men at all costs.

  Chapter Two

  Romance: A Brief History

  I’ve fallen deeply in love only twice in my life: once when I was young and then again in middle age. Both experiences we
re joyful, intense, lusty, and crazy-making journeys into the wonderment of deep attachment. My first love involved a relatively brief foray into marriage and parenthood and ended in heartbreak. The second time I fell in love felt like a true forever-after.

  When I first fell in love, I didn’t ponder my moon tide of crazy emotions and think to myself, Wow, I feel giddy as a schoolgirl. It was the week before my twentieth birthday when love first crashed down on me, and I thought, This is what it means to be a grown-up.

  I entered this state perhaps more naïve than other girls my age, because I didn’t have boyfriends in high school. The only boys I did go out with went to other schools. This was a deliberate attempt on my part to keep my two selves separate. At Dryden High School, I was a striving and ambitious blur: cheerleading, competing in sports, participating in student government, and starring in the spring musical. Outside of high school, I was probably a bit of a mess. My basic philosophy about boys seemed to follow a “don’t poop where you eat” guideline, and I carefully limited my mild risk-taking to places where my local reputation as a Goody Two-shoes would be intact, even if I screwed up.

  In high school, our social lives were dominated by the various sports seasons and the few dances held in the cafeteria each year. Our sports teams played against the same small schools over and over, so you’d see the same cute boys on opposing teams several times over the course of a season. A rumor would circulate about a party, usually held in someone’s cornfield or barn, and a group of us would share a ride into the other school’s territory in someone’s rusty car. We’d park in a circle and shine our car lights into the center. There might be a keg in the back of someone’s truck or bottles to pass around.

  Alcohol mainly made me loud, repetitive, and vomit-prone, but occasionally it also made me brave enough to make out with somebody at one of these cornfield parties. I almost always regretted it later, but fortunately, because I didn’t go to the same school as the boy in question, I wouldn’t have to deal with the hallway drama. I only had to suffer through occasional awkward glances across the gym during an away game.

  During high school, I also sang in regional choirs, giving me additional opportunities to meet guys during weekend-long music festivals. These festivals were usually held on a college campus in Rochester or Buffalo and were attended by 250 choir and band kids from around the state. I was not a choir slut, exactly, but there were definitely girls and boys who fit into this category (sopranos and tenors, mainly). I fancied myself more the Make-out Queen of the alto section.

  The typical choir encounter went like this: We’d be intensively rehearsing a tricky Benjamin Britten piece. During a twelve-measure rest, I’d lock eyes with a sixteen-year-old baritone or percussionist. We’d stand near one another during the water break, sit together while eating our box lunches, swap sloppy kisses between performances, and promise to (but not) keep in touch.

  Fortunately, the boys I was attracted to were nice people, but aside from these clumsy encounters, I found the prospect of being in a romantic relationship of any duration pretty embarrassing. There seemed to be a code to courtship that I could never quite crack. First of all, in order to have a boyfriend, you had to want to have a boyfriend. I was deeply ambivalent about this. I had seen my two older sisters tangle with the drama of teenage dating. I saw how relationships could turn a person’s life inside out. It was hard to see an upside.

  Jane’s parenting, post-divorce, was a form of benign neglect. She cared, but she also seemed spent. My mother was a survivor of Tropical Storm Buck, picking through the rubble of her home life and trying to take stock of what remained. Jane was trusting and permissive, but she was also powerless regarding the rebellion that sometimes accompanied my sisters’ and my teen adventures. She had nothing she could threaten to take away from us. We had no money, no college fund to hold over a child’s head, or car privileges to threaten to revoke. Her brown Plymouth Duster was reserved exclusively to get her back and forth to work.

  All Jane had was her disapproval, but even that seemed in play. She wasn’t like some of my friends’ parents, who lived their lives one way and hypocritically advised their children to make different choices. Jane’s attitude seemed to be “What the hell do I know?” She only spoke to me about boys and sex once, and in typical fashion, she alluded to the topic indirectly. I was sixteen, and a boy was on his way to pick me up in his car. “Ahem,” Jane said. “I knew that boy’s father in high school. I want you to call me if you want me to pick you up. It doesn’t matter where or when. Understand?” Ummm, not really. And yet I still got the message.

  After high school, I attended Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. I was seventeen and had never been away from home. I had also never spent time in a city. I suspected fairly quickly that Clark and I were a mismatch, but I threw myself into college life with gusto, all the while wrestling with bouts of debilitating homesickness. I ping-ponged back and forth between playing field hockey for the school, starring in theater productions, and crying in my dorm’s stairwell. I worked in the college cafeteria, scraping plates as they came through on a conveyor belt. After the dinner service had ended and the plates stopped coming through, I washed enormous, industrial-sized cooking pots. Washing giant pots in the big stainless steel sinks in the kitchen reminded me of washing milking machines with my sisters, in the milk house attached to our barn.

  My cafeteria supervisor, James, was ten years older than I was. I first met him when I exited the cafeteria accidentally by way of a fire door. Piercing alarms interrupted the meal service. I stood frozen in the open doorway as several hundred students applauded, until James came with his keys and turned off the alarm.

  By Christmas, James and I were dating. By Easter, I was fairly certain that he and I were (also) a mismatch. I didn’t love him, but he was so nice, funny, mature, and kind to me that I selfishly stuck it out. Plus, he was cute, well liked, didn’t have homework, and had the keys to the cafeteria for occasional late-night snacking.

  James drove me around Worcester in his old Toyota. After work, we would go to an all-night diner and sit in a booth drinking coffee, while my butter-covered corn muffin sizzled on the grill. James and I dated through my sophomore year, when he encouraged me to consider transferring to another school, which he thought would be more challenging for me. I applied to Georgetown, was admitted, and fairly quickly broke up with him. James went to a friend of mine for an explanation and solace. Two years later, I went to their wedding. They have been married now for thirty years.

  My mother took me to Washington for my college orientation at Georgetown. I was nineteen. During a welcome session on the school’s sweeping lawn, Jane lay back on the grass, rested her head on her purse, and dozed in the sun. I took this as a sign that this new school would offer a soft place for me to fall into. My mother had spent her childhood in Washington when her father worked at the Department of Agriculture. I think we both felt at home there.

  At Georgetown, I was riding on scholarships and the work-study program. I worked hard to prove myself worthy at the challenging school and behaved the only way I knew how—by flinging myself at everything. I sang in the gospel choir, the show choir, and the madrigal choir. I fell in love with the broad, leafy avenues of Washington and got a weekend job taking tickets for the midnight show at the Biograph Theater on M Street. For the first time in my life, I stopped relying on my sisters as a feminine backstop, and I met and made solid female friends.

  The guys on campus were a far cry from those ruddy boys in their rusted Chevy Vegas I knew back home or the older man from Worcester. These boys came from Greenwich, Shaker Heights, and Grosse Pointe. They wore pastel-colored cashmere sweaters tied around their necks and sported boat shoes and stiff L.L.Bean canvas coats in the fall. They switched to duck boots and Brooks Brothers cashmere coats in the winter.

  Andrew was the one I fell hard for. I spotted him on the first day of my junior year. We shared one class together and worked in the same college of
fice. He was tweedy, quiet, witty, and cool. He was so handsome he was hired to model the fall fashions for the Georgetown Shop, a preppy clothing store where some of the boys on campus had accounts. I could feel my eyeballs burning whenever I glanced his way, which was often. I immediately cast Andrew as Hubbell in my mental production of The Way We Were and engaged in a full-out assault to get his attention. I careened between the only two behaviors I knew: attention-hogging verbal razzle-dazzle in Shakespeare class (sample: “Professor, methinks I doth have a question…”) and inadvertent spaz—once actually falling over and pulling down an entire filing cabinet onto myself, in front of him.

  In short, I behaved the way you might if you were trying to repel someone. But it’s a true fact that when it comes to attraction, we do what works for us, and this worked for me. By my twentieth birthday in November, Andrew and I were a couple.

  He was a polished New Yorker who summered in Southampton, which he and his family referred to as “the country.” (As someone who has spent time in both places—the country and the Hamptons—I can testify that the Hamptons are to “the country” as Paris Hilton is to Minnie Pearl.) During many weekends of the first winter we were together, Andy took the train home to New York, where he would escort debutantes to cotillion balls at the St. Regis and the Pierre. He owned his own tuxedo.

  My relationship with Andy was both passionate and sweet. We loved reading the same books and going to the movies together. We seemed attracted to the obvious contrasts between us. I was intrigued by what I perceived as his wealth and prep school polish; he seemed to find my small-town upbringing and gothic tales of farm life charming. Our perceptions of each other were based only on our own descriptions, with the glossy overlay that happens when you decide you love every single thing about someone and are oblivious to the dull slap that reality delivers later on.