It was there, sitting in the hot, cluttered living room one afternoon, that a scene rose up within me, as vivid and full of emotional resonance as any of the sense memories I had of my past. This new scene felt equally real; it was as if it had already happened, and yet, I knew it was in the future. In it, I was driving somewhere in Los Angeles in a new car, the windows down, cutting through the twilight city with confidence and calm, beautiful, strong, happy, the opposite of how I felt now, and most of all alive.
Somehow, I knew this vision was inside of me, which meant that it would happen if I could just hold on.
When I got back to my house, I sat on my bed and took a deep breath. I called my mom and told her everything about my hotel fantasy. She was understandably upset, but it was Craig’s response that really moved me.
“You can’t let that happen again, okay?” he said. “You have to tell us.”
He tried to convince me I should come back east and go with them to my mom’s family reunion, which was happening at Grammy’s old house the next month. I told him I didn’t have enough money and was worried I’d be self-conscious about my special diet. He laughed at how he and my mom had been drawing sidelong glances for being mostly vegetarian for more than three decades and that they’d pay for the ticket.
“Just come home,” he said.
My father made me promise that if I ever had such dark thoughts again, I’d tell him. So did my friend Cathy. My friend Jodi cried when I told her. Even if I still had trouble wanting to live for myself, maybe I could live for them. Finally, as my period came regularly, and my Chinese doctor beamed at me each week, I started to feel better.
The Kentucky Derby had come and gone, and my dad had not won us the money for our house in Los Angeles. In fact, he had never even placed his bets the day of the race, or if he had, he’d never mentioned anything about it to me. I knew from long experience that gamblers only acknowledged their bets when they were winning, and if they didn’t bring them up, it was better not to ask. Of course I was aware it had been unlikely, but I was disappointed nonetheless. Not so much that we hadn’t won the money—it would have been nice, sure, but I’d never had any money, and I’d always assumed if I ever made any, it would be through my own writing. I was let down because if the plan was going to work, my father was going to have to finally believe in himself. After years of listening to him talk his big talk for a time, and then suddenly stop talking because he’d lost interest or given up, I wanted him to actually follow through on something. And after years of believing in him, no matter what, and even when he didn’t believe in himself, I wanted a little payout, not specifically of the financial kind.
I knew better than to bring any of this up with my father, and so I let the topic wane. In the meantime, he had raised the possibility of moving out to Los Angeles, which I thought was a great idea. I knew the general interest in health food, meditation, and mysticism would make him feel right at home, and because he’d been approved for Section 8 housing, the move would be fairly easy for him.
“I’m just going to come out to California for a year or two,” he said. “I’m going to find a tank or a hot tub and do my work there. And then I’m going to find a place in the woods. Maybe in Vermont or New Hampshire. Maybe even get a piece of land. What I’d really like is to build my own house. There are some books I’d like you to look up.”
As I listened to him happily plan for just the kind of healthy, DIY life in the woods that he’d opted out of when I was a baby, I waited for the moment when he realized the irony of this, how sad it was that, thirty years too late, he finally wanted and felt capable of the choice that would have allowed us to remain a family. And then I realized he’d never get it. He was so used to thinking only of himself, that’s how it’d always be. And so I would have to learn to think of myself first, too.
“Sure, Dad,” I said.
I could hear him shuffle papers on the other end of the line.
“There’s one called Back to Basics,” he said.
“We had that book when I was growing up.”
“You did?” he asked, simply pleased with the synchronicity.
“Yeah, it was a pretty iconic book for the back-to-the-land movement.”
“Oh, far out, well, if you could see how much it would cost to get a copy, that would be great.”
Dad continued to be obsessed with film, and he loved to hear stories of my adventures in Hollywood. When an indie actor who’d just gotten his big break on a popular network sitcom took me on a date, my dad watched all of his movies, even many that I’d never seen. A few months later my dad gingerly raised the subject.
“I have to ask, since you haven’t mentioned him, do we still like him?”
“We still like his movies, but we don’t like him as a person,” I said. “He never called me for a second date.”
My dad laughed, and that’s how it went.
Another time, I told him about a friend who was working on a film with a major Hollywood actor who had his young mistress on the set with him, even though everyone knew he was married. The mistress had happily gone on and on about how much she liked a woman he’d once been married to, and no one could figure out why she wasn’t more sensitive, until they realized the girl was so young that the first marriage predated her.
“I just don’t understand it,” I said. “I mean, his wife is gorgeous, and she’s an amazing actress, and she seems like a total badass. I can’t understand why he would choose to spend his time with this woman who doesn’t know anything. Sure, sex is one thing, but he still has to talk to her.”
“I’ll tell you why, Sarah,” my dad said. “Men want control. They want to be with a woman they can control. And so the younger she is, the less intelligent she is, the less money she has, the better they feel about themselves.”
As I was a single thirty-four-year-old woman, this wasn’t exactly encouraging news for me, especially since I still felt like my dedication to writing had—to some degree—cost me Scott. But at least my dad was in the trenches with me. That Christmas when I went home for my annual visit, my dad met me in Cambridge. We had lunch and, still talking animatedly about cinema and the feature script I was writing, and meditation, and Asmara, we went for a walk around the neighborhood. There’s a kind of high I get from a really good conversation, all of my synapses firing just right, surprising connections blooming as topics morph and grow, and that feeling of intense well-being that comes from connecting deeply with another person. I had it that day, and as the midafternoon sun warmed the winter air and softened the snow, I felt uplifted and very happy.
My father and I stood facing each other. I looked at him in his brown winter coat and his black winter hat, which he kept neat to make them last, and because he was the grown-up version of the teenage boy in the Trenton projects who’d had his clothes hand tailored. He smiled at me, and I saw his broken brown teeth before he reflexively closed his mouth, covering them quickly.
“I love you,” I said.
He looked at me, his face wide open in surprise.
“I love you, too, Sarah.”
It was the first time I could remember either of us saying the words to each other out loud. But I left the momentousness of the occasion unspoken. It felt too tender to examine.
I hugged him, and he hugged me back, and maybe I wasn’t really a little girl anymore, but he was still big enough to feel like my dad.
That spring, I had a whirlwind three-month romance with a pedal steel player, Leo, who warned me not to fall for him and then took me to honky-tonks and home to meet his mom for Shabbat dinner. I’d gotten my own bungalow with an extra room I could use as an office. Leo helped me to move in and took me back to his place because I had no bed, vowing to come back and help me set up my bed frame. Although we e-mailed or spoke on the phone every day, updating each other on his recording projects and my writing gigs, he began to avoid making specific plans, as he’d once been eager to do.
I had bought a bottle of Veuv
e Clicquot to toast my new apartment, and I opened it with the forced air of a bon vivant during one of our phone calls, as I asked him to come help me with my bed, once again. I hated my nagging tone, hated myself for not just going into the bedroom and putting my own fucking bed together. As I listened to his excuses, I walked to the sink and poured out the glass of bubbly I was drinking, and then the entire bottle of expensive champagne. He was leaving me. I had no control over that. But I had control over everything else. I knew I had to stop drinking at the very moment I wanted it most, or else this new heartbreak might pull me under. Ten years after my breakup with Scott, I had given away my heart, again to someone who didn’t want it.
We’d only dated for three months, but I had given myself to it completely, and I was bereft. I went to see a shaman in Topanga Canyon. She laid her hands on me and told me that I had never really let Scott go, even though he’d moved on years ago, and that beneath that heartbreak was the sadness of the little girl I’d been.
I had just been asked by a friend to write a piece for a reading about a book that had impacted me deeply because I’d either loved it or despised it. I surprised myself by writing about Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which Claire had given me years ago in the wake of the shooting, and the piece became about the shooting itself. I stood up in front of a small group of friends in a supper theater in Hollywood and shook and spoke Galen’s name out loud through a nearly closed throat for the first time in years.
Now, alone in my two-bedroom bungalow, I felt all of this, each layer of sadness calcified into its own unique patterns and built upon the one below, and for once, I just allowed myself to be sad. I didn’t drink. I didn’t rush out and find another boy to kiss and make me forget about the one who had just broken my heart, or the one who had broken my heart so badly I’d hid it away for nearly a decade.
I was so sad it scared me. I didn’t think about dying like I had the summer before. But this was no way to live. That’s when it hit me: I’d been drunk for nearly twenty years, since my falling-out with my dad when I was fifteen, since the shooting, and in the wake of my breakup with Scott, and this was the first time I’d let myself feel everything I’d pushed back with all that booze. I went to a sweat lodge, because my friends in LA encouraged self-exploration through such means, which made me hope I’d eventually fix myself. When the spirit animals came and I was allowed to ask my question, I asked about my father, and the shaman told me that sometimes when things are too hard for us to do them for ourselves, we do them for someone else, and that when repairing my relationship with my father got too hard for our sake, then we could heal ourselves for others—for the children I would someday have, who would be free of the legacy of addiction and abandonment. Someone on the other side of the fire from me pointed at my shirt. “Look, you sweated in the shape of a heart.”
I looked down. There was a giant heart in the center of my chest. I smiled.
During all of this, my dad stayed close beside me, even though he was far away. There wasn’t much he could do, but he never left me alone, and that was something, particularly for him. We always had our weekly call scheduled in advance. But on days when I was really sad and lonely, I broke down and called him on his cell phone.
“I don’t have many minutes left,” he said. “Let me go into town and call you from a pay phone.”
An hour later, my phone rang. He had left his apartment, walked two blocks to the main street, taken a bus to the subway, taken the orange line to Downtown Crossing, transferred to the red line, and ridden out to Alewife station, the only pay phone left of the many from which he used to call me. Once there, he stayed for as long as I needed to talk, even if there was nothing really to be said. The world was very black and white for him when it came to me. He wanted me to be happy. “I fully support you getting everything you want,” he said to me, again and again and again.
But he also cited a book he’d recently reread, Carolyn Cassady’s Off the Road, about her relationship with Neal Cassady and her affair with Jack Kerouac.
“If you want to talk about unconditional love, I can’t think of a better example than how Carolyn felt for Neal,” he said. “She accepted him for who he was, and she loved him anyhow. I mean she didn’t try to change him at all. I think it was a result of the spiritual work they were doing, and you can see in her writing how it really helped her.”
He sent the book to me and pointed out particular passages he thought would be useful. I had mixed feelings about my dad’s advice. When he advised me to emulate a woman who put aside her own needs to love a man who was exceptional, yes, but who was also clearly a selfish, narcissistic womanizer who was maybe a little crazy, I felt that my dad was telling me to love him, no matter how he had let me down or might do so again. And sometimes I resented this greatly, especially because the closer we became, the harder it was for me to understand how my father could have been capable of abandoning me so completely for all of those years.
And I had a new concern now. For decades, I had thought my dad was the key to all of my unhappiness, and having a real relationship with him would heal everything. But I felt just as rickety as ever. How would I ever go from intellectually understanding the ways in which my relationship with my dad had created negative patterns within me to actually changing those patterns?
My father had said I could ask him anything—say anything—to him. One day, I screwed up my courage while sitting in my living room.
“Dad, I have to ask you something,” I said.
“Okay, Sarah.”
“I think it would just be really helpful for me to know, all of those times when you said you were going to come see me, and then you didn’t, what were you thinking?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“When you called me to cancel, what were you thinking? Was it because it was too much for you to handle? Or your back was bothering you? Or you didn’t have enough money? I mean, did you dread calling me, or did you not even think about it?”
“I can’t remember, Sarah,” he said, his voice cold. “That was a long time ago. And you’re a grown woman now. Don’t you think it’s time you started taking responsibility for yourself instead of blaming everything on me?”
“Okay,” I said.
But I got off the phone with him as quickly as I could, afraid I might cry. I knew the past was as painful for him as it was for me, but he had never spoken to me like that before. I was shocked. And then I was mad. He had fucked up for the first twenty-five years of my life, and now he was going to put a time limit on how long I was allowed to take to heal? I called bullshit on him, at least in my own mind, where it was safe. Even as angry as I was, I wasn’t going to risk pushing him away again.
The pain forced me to deal with stuff I would probably have put off under sunnier circumstances. I sought answers, or at least solace. I read Eckhart Tolle and was moved by his words about trauma and how a person’s wound magnetizes the pain of every negative experience, making it worse than it would be for someone with a sturdier foundation. I went with a newly sober friend to Al-Anon meetings and felt deeply comforted by the premise that we are allowed to be in pain for as long as it takes us to heal. A friend became a disciple of an Eastern religion, Johrei, whose practitioners do public service by clearing the energy of those who go to their temples. I had my energy cleared again, and again. I had moments of happiness and peace, and then, more sadness.
One day that summer, I was driving in LA while talking with my father. In the midst of one of his endless, endlessly entertaining monologues, he brought me up short.
“You’re a good girl,” he said.
Just like that, tears pressed hard against the backs of my eyes, threatening to spill.
Something strange happened inside of me, like the moment a wall of icicles melts, setting off a cascade of falling ice that’s beautiful to behold.
“You’ve always been a good girl. Even when you were running around with Judah, you were a good girl. And you�
��re a good girl now.”
My tears came on hard. I wasn’t crying because it was something I’d always needed him to say to me. I was crying because I was finally able to believe him. My dad’s constant presence in my life for the past nine years, and the loyalty my friends—old and new—had shown me during my bleakest hours, had been the foundation from which I had launched my growth. But something in the wild adventure itself, in my new life in Los Angeles—and my ability to weather all of the hardships it had precipitated, and the ones I had finally attacked related to my own sense of lack—couldn’t help but make me begin to feel more confident, and more worthy, and it was such a relief.
chapter seventeen
DADDY ROLLIN’ IN YOUR ARMS
That fall, one of my favorite musicians, Conor Oberst, was playing one of my favorite venues, Pappy & Harriet’s, out near Joshua Tree. I booked a room at the Pioneertown Inn, just behind the venue. I filled my car with my computer and notebooks, the zebra throw Marya had given me, mineral water, and snacks. At the last minute, I threw in a bottle of red wine, just in case, even though I’d mostly been sober all summer.
Like my father, I loved to drive, and I loved road trips, and usually my spirits lifted as soon as I got away from the traffic that encased the city. But on this day, I didn’t feel my usual sense of adventure. Instead of being inspired by the amusing signs and offbeat businesses in the small towns along the way, I was brought low by all of it. I couldn’t imagine living in any of these towns. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere, really. It was all futile, the endless repetition of day-to-day life, with people all alone in their houses, eating junk food and watching TV. I couldn’t see any point in any of it. As I approached the turnoff for my motel, I passed a gun shop. Ever since the shooting, I could hardly stand to look at the facade of a gun shop, let alone think about entering one. This time, I craned my neck, curious about what was inside. I could go in there and get a gun, and I could take it to my motel, and I could shoot myself in the head, and all of this would be over, and I wouldn’t feel so sad or be so fucking pathetic all of the time.
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