My father, again, did not attend, and he did not send a card. His letters always promised our reunion would happen, always in some future that was constantly being pushed back. I had too much pride, and enough of Mom’s natural Protestant reserve, to keep me from just showing up on his doorstep, no matter how much I wanted him. Now, though, I wanted him less than ever before. Having everyone fuss over my graduation threw into stark contrast how incapable he was of even the most basic manners, let alone real affection or genuine closeness. It hurt. But I was also beginning to see him as the Boy Who Cried Wolf—the Dad Who Promised to Visit—and like those villagers, I no longer believed.
I went home to Maine to finalize what I would bring with me cross-country, and to say good-bye to my family. On the morning I prepared to leave, Craig came out to the driveway and stared into my car. “Where’s Claire going to put her stuff?” he asked.
“In there,” I said, pointing, even though there wasn’t much visible space.
Craig started pulling shoes out. “Do you really need so many shoes?”
I shrugged, glad for his attention and assistance, but trying to act like I didn’t need either on the eve of the big adventure I’d longed for, always.
Finally, it was time to say good-bye to Mom. I was nineteen years old, I had saved just shy of three thousand dollars, and I was setting out on a cross-country drive in the time before cell phones. She was remarkably Zen about the whole thing. I’d recently begun to appreciate all of the values Mom and I shared: how she’d ridden a bus down to join me freshman year when I’d marched on Washington in support of reproductive rights, how she took me to see movies that mattered to me—Howards End and The Crying Game—and read the same books—The Secret History—which we loved to talk about. I knew I’d miss her, as much I also knew I needed to go.
She always really shone when it came to special-occasion gifts and cards, and she had given me a beautiful ring when I graduated from Bard, along with a letter. It said that while she sometimes wished I had slowed down and enjoyed myself more instead of always rushing to grow up, I had turned out so well that it had obviously been for the best. She said she didn’t worry about me because she could tell I had a good head on my shoulders, but if she could give me one piece of advice it was this: “Beware of needy men. They will only bring you down.” I loved receiving the letter, loved being spoken to like the adult I was desperate to be, and valued the feeling of closeness between us.
Now I was going far away, and I didn’t know when I’d see her again, probably not until Christmas. I had to go, but I felt the same way as I had when I’d left for Simon’s Rock; a part of me wanted to stay small and live there with her forever. She hugged me. I started to cry. “I love you, Mom,” I said.
“I love you, too, Sarah,” she said. “Be careful out there. Call us.”
“I will.”
She walked me to the door, and as I got into my car, she waved to me from the doorway of my childhood home, the home we had built with our own hands, the home we were going to live in forever.
Claire and I were driving, driving, driving. We had decided we would stop in all of the cities that interested us on the northern route to the West Coast and move to whichever city we liked the most. It was amazing to me that all of this had always been out there, waiting to be seen, and I had never even known to want it. Now I was going to go everywhere, meet everyone, try everything. First up: Toronto. We could have easily stayed in Toronto forever, but we didn’t think we’d be allowed to just move to Canada. So we kept on to Chicago, where things got real.
Claire and I had developed a method for traveling in which we took turns being the one in charge. It was exhausting and demoralizing to have to ask for directions, and to always feel like the loser who didn’t know how anything worked. In Chicago, it was thankfully my day off. She got us to the Art Institute of Chicago. Sitting in the coffee shop after perusing the exhibits, she said something about art that miffed me because, as usual, it felt like she was implying she knew more than I did. Even though she was probably right, and I almost never talked back to her, this time it was too much. I accused her and her family of being snobs. She, understandably, didn’t take this well. We sat staring at each other in silence. Thousands of miles from home. Thousands of miles from where we were going, not that we even knew where that was. With a person whom, in that moment, I didn’t like, and who didn’t like me. We both had very strong personalities, but because I was so good at being the loyal listener, we normally fit together well. Now, suddenly, we didn’t seem to fit together at all. I had never felt so alone. There was no choice but to keep going. We got up, not looking at each other, and resumed our trip.
By the time Chicago was safely in our rearview mirror, our rift was repaired, but emotional turmoil always simmered below the surface of our friendship. Although my mom usually stayed out of such things, she once—after reading an article on the subject—told me she thought Claire and I had a toxic friendship. Sometimes Claire seemed impossible to please, and I’m sure she felt some version of this about me, too. We were like each other’s best worst boyfriends, ever.
We pulled into Seattle, which loomed large for me because of Kurt and Courtney, but we weren’t quite sure. We drove down to Olympia, which Claire was big on because of Kathleen Hanna, but still, we weren’t sure. We drove further to Portland, which seemed a little more manageable but had a few drawbacks. It was small, and we quickly dubbed our new lodging the hostile hostel. We skulked across the street to the Safeway and bought cigarettes and the Gummi Savers Claire ate the way I smoked. In a nearby park, we wrote a list with the headings “Portland” and “Seattle” and the pros and cons of each city. The main distinction was that Portland had more all-ages venues and hangouts, which would impact our social life, since I was only nineteen and Claire twenty.
“I guess we’re moving to Portland,” Claire said.
“I guess so.”
We found an apartment in a West Coast–style structure, the kind of low-slung two-story apartment building that resembled a cheap motel, which was all new for a couple of East Coast girls like us. New was good. We were into new. After we paid our security deposit, broker’s fee, and first and last months’ rent, neither of us had the money to pay the next month’s rent. The building manager took a shine to me and gave us pans, dish soap, and paper towels, but we needed jobs, soon. I walked the neighborhood, applying for restaurant work, and Claire hit up the city’s many coffee shops. We pooled our money for groceries. For breakfast and lunch, we had peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. For dinner we had store-brand pasta with jarred tomato sauce. To drink, we had either milk because it was nutritious, or Kool-Aid because it was cheap. We sat in our apartment for hours, Claire painting her nails bright pink, me sitting on the linoleum kitchen floor smoking, blowing my smoke out through the screen door. I could tell that she was sometimes frustrated with my morose, melodramatic jags. Scouring the city’s alternative paper, the Willamette Week, she found possible adventures. She got us out to a screening of Repulsion, an art performance by Miranda July, and a gig by the band whose singer, Judah, I’d had a crush on since Claire had gifted me his definitive album at Bard. I was scared about money and my writing and wanted to stay home and get drunk, which just made me withdrawn and sad. But Claire was prone to her own jagged mood swings, so she never called me out.
Upon arriving on the West Coast, I had become obsessed with the Modern Lovers Greatest Hits album. When I felt overwhelmed, I drove over the Hawthorne Bridge, into downtown Portland, and back over the Burnside Bridge, again and again and again, my windows down, smoking, listening to the song that perfectly captured that moment: “I go to bakeries all day long, there’s a lack of sweetness in my life.”
The longing in Jonathan Richman’s voice felt like a magnet that gathered up all of the metal filings in my heart: the homesickness, and free-floating nostalgia and grief over what I had chosen to leave behind, and the longing for something new and better, and the wo
rry that maybe I didn’t really belong on the East Coast anymore, and maybe I didn’t belong out West either, which meant I didn’t belong anywhere I’d found.
I got called in for an interview at a Caribbean restaurant, Sweetwater’s Jam House, which had opened in an old hamburger joint in Northeast Portland. They assigned me shifts on the spot and sent me home with a container of delicious red beans and rice, simmered with cinnamon sticks and coconut milk, which Claire and I devoured as a welcome diversion from our usual fare. Claire was simultaneously hired at a local coffee chain, Kobos, and she was soon bringing home day-old pastries, which seemed incredibly decadent after our stripped-down diet, and fresh juices, which probably kept us from getting scurvy.
In my journal I looped back again and again to anything that might give me an excuse to return to the East Coast. Meanwhile, there was no way I was going back because that would have meant failure, and failure was absolutely not an option.
When I went home at Christmas that year, I visited friends in New York City and made plans to see Betty. She was still the same madcap city girl she’d always been—her hair just as dark and sleek, her lips just as bright red, wearing a jaunty velvet hat and leopard-print blouse. And yet time was creeping onward. She’d had her lids lifted a few years back, but her eyes seemed less bright, sometimes confused. She walked slowly and had difficulty catching her breath after decades of smoking. It was hard to watch her stop in the midst of a busy sidewalk in Manhattan and let the crowds break around her, whereas before she would have had a rude quip for anyone who jostled her. But she still loved New York City, the city she had come to sixty years earlier as an eighteen-year-old orphan with dreams of turning her beauty into a glamorous, posh life. Even with all of the difficulties she had faced, she didn’t resent the city for the more difficult path it had unfolded for her and showed the remarkable adaptability that marks a true urban dweller.
Since retiring, she’d gotten her exclusive address on West End Avenue by moving into a city-run social services program that paired senior women with unwed mothers. She had regular meals, scheduled events and outings, and a social worker. And she was only a few blocks from her daughter, Mimi, who had managed to hold on to her rent-stabilized prewar apartment on West End Avenue for twenty years. I had never met Mimi before, but Betty had arranged for us to have lunch.
I picked Betty up and we shuffled slowly down to Mimi’s block. As we reached the building, the doorman stepped forward to let us in, recognizing Betty. She acknowledged him, not so much with friendly familiarity but as if he were her regular porter at the Ritz, where she’d been living en suite for decades.
We took the elevator up to the eighth floor. It was small and slow and rickety, and I felt nervous as it rose, mostly because I was well aware of the colossal force of nature that was Auntie Mimi. She had always sent me affectionate cards and small gifts, but I knew she and my father had been estranged for years. He called her a gold digger and claimed he kept his distance to avoid her manipulation. Betty was extremely proud of Mimi’s beauty, sending me pictures: Mimi had a fine, striking bone structure and the fabulous blond hair of a Prell model. And yet one of the highest compliments Betty gave Mimi was: “She has a lot of nice antiques. You should get on her good side.”
I let Betty lead the way, very slowly, down the hall to Mimi’s apartment, where we were to rendezvous for lunch. When we reached the door, Betty knocked. There was no answer, no movement behind the door. Betty knocked again. Still no answer.
“Mimi, open the door. It’s Betty. Sarah is with me. And we want lunch.”
Betty’s voice was loud and nonmelodious. It carried. I slunk into myself, teenage style, glancing around me at the other doors in the narrow hallway of what had clearly become a very affluent building. Betty knocked again and again. Then, to my horror, she turned and knocked on one of the other doors in the hallway. The woman who answered was well put together even in her house clothes. Her smile was strained.
“Hello, Elizabeth,” she said. “Are you here to see Millicent?”
“Yes, we’re supposed to have lunch. This is my granddaughter, Sarah. Isn’t she tall? She’s visiting me from Portland. She went to Bard, and she’s a writer. We were supposed to meet Mimi here at one, but now she isn’t answering her door.”
“I’m sorry, but I haven’t seen her today,” the woman said.
“Can we use your phone?” Betty asked.
“Of course, Elizabeth,” the woman said, stepping back to let us enter.
We moved through her tasteful, impeccably decorated apartment with its end tables and accent mirrors and walls and walls of books and entered the living room. Betty sat down in a chair near the telephone, and the woman and I sat on the couch.
“She’s a psychologist,” Betty said, pointing to the woman. “She went to Columbia. Her husband’s a lawyer.”
I nodded politely, feeling like I was objectifying the woman, because I knew Betty’s observations were really pointing out how well Mimi had done for herself to end up with such upscale neighbors. I appreciated the woman’s kindness now, and in the many moments when she had clearly been drawn into helping Betty and Mimi with their domestic dramas, reluctantly I was sure. But I was embarrassed. Eventually, Betty gave up on Mimi, and she and I went to lunch alone.
“Mimi must have forgotten,” Betty said.
“Yes, she must have,” I said.
I didn’t know why Mimi hadn’t been able to handle a simple lunch with her mother and niece, any more than I knew why my dad hadn’t been able to handle so many moments with his daughter over the years. But if that’s how Betty wanted to play it, that’s how I would let it be played. Mimi had forgotten about our lunch, the end.
Betty smiled at me.
“After lunch, we’ll go to Macy’s. You should wear more makeup. And comb your hair. Do you have a comb in your purse? You should always keep a comb in your purse.”
“Yes, Betty.”
That afternoon, Betty rammed her way through Macy’s, literally pushing men and telling them to get out of her way as I slunk along behind her, and mortifying me by talking at great length about my bad skin with a woman at the cosmetic counter. I did the trick I’d mastered of pulling up inside myself. As much as I thrilled at the department-store glamour and her extreme generosity, being there with her didn’t feel good. But it was the closest thing I had to being with my dad, and that still meant more to me than I would have cared to admit.
That March, Claire came into the kitchen one night. She had an expressive body and face that magnified every emotion to the nth degree and radiated it with intensity. Right now, she looked unhappy and resigned, as if she had to take out the trash.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she said.
“Do what?” I asked, looking up from my journal.
“This,” she said, nodding her head around our apartment. “I can’t live like this anymore,” she continued. “You’re so unhappy. And I can’t be around it anymore.”
I was too embarrassed to look at her. But I also knew how hard that must have been, so I forced myself to meet her gaze and nodded. “What do you want to do?”
“I found a place,” she said. “I move out at the end of the month.”
“Okay,” I said.
I was totally freaked out, but simultaneously relieved. As long as I lived with Claire, I was bound to the promise we’d made each other on that long-ago night in New Orleans. But now that she was moving out, I was free. I just had to figure out what that meant.
chapter nine
MY FAVORITE PART OF THE DAY
I asked around at the health food store where I worked and found an open room. The spacious three-bedroom apartment had a big sunny kitchen and a giant claw-foot tub, and was decorated with vintage furniture and art: everything in late-sixties bright green and orange, accented with house plants, and prints of those freaky kids with the big eyes. I could feel that something was happening here, a life full of energy and creativity and humor, b
ut all expressed in a way that was totally foreign to me, and I wanted to join.
My new house mom, Shelly, was an older badass bass player from Seattle who drove a banged-up late-sixties Chevy Nova with a baseball bat under the seat for when guys disrespected her. She became like my mentor from some kind of punk-rock Big Sisters program. Her boyfriend, Bryan, was a young, angel-faced drummer who had just moved to the city from the suburbs. Needless to say, within a few months I owned my first pair of black vinyl pants. I did lights at their shows, which I got into with a fake ID I’d acquired from a friend. My world was being opened up inch by inch, and I couldn’t get enough.
Shelly worked at the coffee shop in the little slice of heaven known as Powell’s Books. She trawled the Asian markets and cooked up big pans of vegetarian curry, which she was kind enough to feed me when we happened to be home together.
Shelly and Bryan took me out the first night I used my fake ID at a club called EJ’s to see the Weaklings and BlackJack, a band known for playing a blistering twenty-one songs in twenty-one minutes. And they were there for my first minor romantic disappointments in my new city—the few dates and kisses that went nowhere.
No matter that I hadn’t really connected with any of these men; their departure made me feel abandoned and at fault. I felt worthless and low. Although I had gotten myself out of my small town, found my life’s work as a writer, graduated college, and gone to meet the great wide world, none of my accomplishments touched the deep lack my dad had created within me, or altered the way it played out with men. It was almost as if I craved these rejections as proof of the failings I knew to be true of myself.
The other bedroom in our apartment was vacant, and a coworker, Raina, expressed interest. We decided that she would come see the room one night, and then we’d go out for drinks. When she knocked, I was still getting ready, and I threw a ballet sweater on and ran downstairs. When the door swung open, I was surprised to see that above Raina’s fire-engine-red hair, dramatically penciled-in eyebrows, and bright red lipstick was a tall, lanky guy with a shaved head wearing a Bill the Cat muscle shirt. I showed Raina and Scott the room. Then we had beers on the front porch, and I noticed that Scott had the kind of understated confidence that made me want to lean in closer to hear what he would say next, which usually proved to be something sarcastic and clever. I came out to find them talking close, but I couldn’t exactly tell whether they were together or not. I let it go. We drank a bunch and went to the club Satyricon for more, and at night’s end, Scott and Raina folded me, very drunk, into a cab.
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