“Please forgive me?” she said. She hugged me for a long time, and together we cried.
* * *
Mark asked a girl to marry him at the end of my freshman year. Abigail had gone to an exclusive Manhattan private school but ended up at Washington University rather than Sarah Lawrence or Smith after she’d secretly bailed on the SATs twice. She dressed in long flowered Putumayo dresses, or in plain mom jeans paired with seasonally themed sweaters, worn with the barest minimum of irony. She said things like yessireebobdoodle, and none of us could figure out if she was joking, but it seemed she wasn’t. Abigail’s younger brother went to an Ivy League school and was into juggling. Their family lived on Park Avenue.
When he’d first started dating Abigail, Mark had told Josh, who had told me, that she was rich. Really, really rich. The family apartment was a vast and gracious too-many-tastefully-decorated-rooms-to-count home in a prewar co-op building with high ceilings and huge living and dining rooms and a luxurious all-white kitchen straight out of a design magazine. The kind of place with fresh-cut flowers arranged in a vase on an oval table in an entryway, real artwork, and views of Central Park. Her parents were vice presidents at their respective investment banks. They served on boards and attended charity functions and had elite name-brand friends and business connections. Abigail’s mother came from money, but her father was self-made, Mark said. Which gave my brother hope that he might end up with a Park Avenue apartment someday, too.
But Abigail was sick. She was painfully, excruciatingly underweight. Her hair was so fine and patchy that she looked almost like a cancer patient. She skipped breakfast and lunched on apples or cantaloupe or celery and ate big bowls of steamed cauliflower or broccoli for dinner. She ran religiously or went to the gym, or both, every day. Mark worried about Abigail’s emotional sturdiness but had a warped admiration for the way she could control herself around food, mistaking her illness for discipline and willpower and health, and her obsessive running for athleticism.
Maybe Mark was in denial. I’d heard rumors from Josh that she’d been through treatment, perhaps more than once. Her problems struck me as tragic but glamorous. A serious eating disorder like that was something only rich girls could afford. Maybe Mark had the same thought. He loved her, sick or not. Abigail, Mark declared, was the kind of girl who wouldn’t nag or pester or criticize or dwell on the negative. She might even go camping. She was the kind of woman he wanted raising his children.
It was important to Mark, and to our mother, that I like Abigail and that we become good friends. Abigail wrote me letters on stationery, filling pages with her childlike bubble handwriting. She took me to the Frick and Shakespeare in the Park. After she graduated, Mark presented her with the engagement ring he’d been keeping in his sock drawer in Florida, where he worked for Procter & Gamble. Abigail’s parents gave Mark a watch from Tiffany. They were to be married the following May.
* * *
At the end of my freshman year, I came down with mono and had to leave school early and take incompletes, finishing two papers in the summer. On a drive into town to check my nearly empty bank account, I noticed the sign in a storefront office window advertising summer jobs for the environment. NYPIRG, the environmental and consumer protection group started by Ralph Nader, had opened their Long Island summer canvassing office in downtown Rockville Centre. I walked in and met the two young canvassing directors who ran the office. Joe was tall and greasily handsome and from the UK. Alex was sarcastic and funny and wore Birkenstocks. He was Asian-American and his family lived in Freeport, near the canals, the next town east on Sunrise Highway. He was going into his senior year at Columbia.
We were to knock on doors, fund-raise for the environment, and keep a cut for ourselves as salary. Against my mother’s protests about my safety and her concern that I wouldn’t make enough money, I took the job. (My father took my side.) It was easy for me, a nice Jewish Vassar girl, to ask strangers for donations on their doorstep. My first day out, my field manager, Miles, handed me a turf map and a couple of membership renewal cards. I came back to the pickup spot that evening with a thick stack of checks tucked into my clipboard, including one for a hundred dollars. Miles laughed, pleased. Alex and Joe promoted me to field manager and invited me to a training weekend at an old summer camp upstate.
Alex sat next to me on the drive up and packed a bowl, passing it around with his fluorescent lighter on top, and we got stoned driving through the darkness from the suburbs into the country, listening to Van Morrison’s Moondance album. We shared a blanket in the car and gradually allowed our hands to touch. That Saturday night, after a day of workshops and a vegetarian dinner, Alex found me sitting on the porch and put his arm around my waist. By morning we were a couple.
Alex wore tie-dye and listened to hip-hop and classic rock. He’d once had lunch with Ralph Nader, who, Alex reported, had personally told him to quit smoking. He was passionate about politics, and now he was passionate about me, too. Alex wrote me love notes and made me mixtapes and kissed me in front of everyone when the office closed and the regulars hung out and smoked in the back room. He told me that I was beautiful and that he would take care of me. He called me his koala bear.
Six weeks into our relationship, my parents went away on vacation. I’d been the one to convince Alex that we were ready. We took an old towel from the very back of the linen closet and put it on top of my bedsheet. He showed me what to do. Afterward, Alex said he loved me.
My mother found out that we were sleeping together from Josh, who was living at home that summer after his college graduation and told on me. At first she freaked out because she didn’t know Alex. How dare this boy have sex with you and not show his face here? After a few days, she calmed down. She and my father weren’t mad, exactly. They knew my brothers had been having sex with their girlfriends for years. At least I was in a serious-seeming relationship with an Ivy League–educated boy. It was probably a relief to her that I finally had a boyfriend, especially because my family had thought I might be more interested in women. My mother even brought me to her Park Avenue gynecologist to get on the birth control pill.
“There’s only so long you could wait,” she said on the way home from the doctor’s office. “I was engaged when I was nineteen.”
But Alex had to come to dinner. That was nonnegotiable.
The following Saturday, Alex showed up right on time in a button-down shirt, carrying flowers he couldn’t afford. To him I was a privileged Long Island girl. He hadn’t been brought up like me, with a family account at the pharmacy in town where I could charge maxipads and Advil without paying. He hadn’t gone to musical theater day camps and fancy college preparatory summer programs, even if I had paid for part of them myself.
When Alex made money at a part-time job, he shared it with his family. He majored in engineering not because he wanted to but because his parents expected him to get a real job and help support the family. Activism wouldn’t pay the bills, he told me. He was looking forward to making “forty G’s a year” after graduation, which sounded like a lot to both of us. Like my father, Alex was a child of struggling immigrants and the first in his family to attend college. Also like my father, Alex went to Columbia on a scholarship. His mother was a postal worker and his father a draftsman. They were Buddhists, not Christians, he told my mother as we sat down at the kitchen table; Alex and me on one side and my parents on the other, like we were couples with equal weight and power. Buddhist. That helped. My mother liked Alex well enough and said he could convert before we got engaged.
School started. We visited each other on the weekends when we had the train fare and the time off from studying. Seeing him after a week or two or three apart, I’d bury my head in the folds of his wool Guatemalan sweater. We’d make out in the library stacks, and he’d go down on me in my dorm room while we held hands. In the city, he’d cook me a stir-fry with oyster sauce in his communal dorm kitchen, or else we’d go to Ollie’s for wide chow fun noodles, or
to Tom’s Restaurant for eggs and toast, or splurge on guacamole cheeseburgers at the West End on Broadway and 114th Street. Walking huddled together against the bitter winter wind of Riverside Drive, we noticed the way the sidewalk glinted and shimmered after dark under the streetlight. On Sundays we had to say goodbye. This was before the Internet or cell phones, and long-distance calls were expensive. When we were apart, we mailed each other love letters until we could have another weekend together. Occasionally we’d argue in a late-night phone call, and then Alex would take the next train up to see me.
* * *
For Chinese New Year, Alex brought me to a holiday meal at a restaurant in Flushing, Queens. Around a large round table loaded with plates of food, I met his family. Neither his mother nor grandmother spoke much English, but they squeezed my hand and gave me red gold-embossed envelopes stuffed fat with dollar bills.
One Sunday, Abigail’s parents came to our house for brunch. The two sets of parents had never met. The day reminded me of the long-ago trip to visit Aunt Edna and her family deep in Brooklyn or Queens, except this time Abigail and her parents were the ones slumming it, and we were the poor relations. Since I went to Vassar and was growing familiar with the type, I was unofficially nominated the family emissary for the wedding season. At the bridal shower, in yet another intimidatingly decorated Upper East Side apartment, I mingled and made small talk about my major and study-abroad plans. As bridesmaid, I dutifully organized the bachelorette night out and went with Abigail for her dress fittings.
The wedding was held at the Waldorf-Astoria on the last day of May. Abigail looked lovely. She was twenty-three and Mark was twenty-five. My parents cried because my mother always said that a daughter is a daughter for life, a son is a son until he takes a wife, and they were losing him. It rained, and everyone said that was good luck.
I studied Alex at the reception. He pretended not to notice the unfortunate cut of my bridesmaid dress. Was I actually going to marry my first boyfriend? I wondered if I could ever make Alex mad enough that he might hit me.
* * *
Alex and I worked at NYPIRG again that summer. A group of us hung out. Miles was older than the rest of us. He was black and liked to rap and lived in Queens. One night during an after-work party, I asked him to clean up a beer he’d accidentally knocked over. Who was I, he said. His mother? His boss? Was I seriously going to disrespect him? I guess we were both in the wrong. I was insensitive, oblivious to the obvious racial dynamics, and he was quick to anger. But when the conflict escalated and Miles called me a bitch and a spoiled JAP and Alex remained neutral, I felt abandoned. I wanted Alex to stick up for me and take my side. I didn’t say any of that to him, though. Maybe I didn’t realize it.
At the end of the summer, Alex was offered a full-time organizing job with NYPIRG at the state university in New Paltz, right across the river from Vassar. Forgoing the forty G’s, and against his parents’ wishes, he accepted and moved into a one-bedroom on Main Street with a bay window overlooking head shops and new-age bookstores and the health food store that sold Japanese rice-cracker snacks by the pound.
A few weeks later I ended things, telling Alex I needed to “see other people.”
TEN
A METRO-NORTH COMMUTER train traveled from Manhattan to Poughkeepsie. My trips to and from school were punctuated by the glory of Grand Central Station and its turquoise ceiling constellations. Occasionally my father offered to drive me to Grand Central or all the way to Poughkeepsie. Though it was hard to turn down the ease of a ride, and we were getting along better these days, I preferred traveling alone. I liked the privacy of smoking a last cigarette outside on the sidewalk, where a businessman would offer a dollar to bum one off me, and a hot bagel smeared with cream cheese bought in a kiosk near the bathrooms. And then settling myself on the train headed north, my bags positioned overhead, looking out the window and listening to R.E.M. and contemplating the sun, the Hudson River, and the silvery gray of bridges and train platforms.
During those rides, the station names called out by the conductor became poem and prayer. Croton-Harmon. Tarrytown. Ossining. Peekskill. Cold Spring. The rocky ledge across the water slowly turning into small brown hills covered with bare tree fuzz in early winter. The dirty blue shivering river. An abandoned, crumbling hundred-year-old castle on an almond sliver of an island. Each mile away from my family offering another possibility as we entered the industrial country of the Hudson River Valley and pulled into Poughkeepsie. Up a staircase from the tracks below and down to the station with the long wooden benches and the dingy taxis waiting to take the other kids back to school.
When the dorms closed for school breaks, it was time for me to take the train from Poughkeepsie back to Grand Central and then the Long Island Rail Road home. Sinking back into my old self, I crossed town to the underground drudgery of Penn Station and faced the ride to Long Island with the weight of my backpack on my shoulders and my duffel bag on my arm.
When I walked into my house, I let out an uneasy sigh of relief. The family room with its thick carpet, where I could stay up late watching episodes of thirtysomething and Beverly Hills 90210 my father had taped for me. The usual food in the fridge, the individually wrapped part-skim mozzarella cheese sticks for me, my father’s Entenmann’s donuts and the Sara Lee pound cake that my mother liked, the Ellio’s pizza in the freezer, the English muffins and bialys. And on the kitchen table, a pile of newspaper articles he’d clipped for me. Upstairs, same as always, was my bedroom with the stuffed animals and drama club posters. I’d bring home my papers, and my father would compliment my writing and tell me that he couldn’t stand to have me away at college, that I would always be his baby.
Once or twice Franny took the LIRR to Rockville Centre in the summertime, and we’d smoke on my back stoop and go to the diner. She found the suburbs relaxing and exotic, a John Hughes movie come to life. More often, I’d take the train and stay with her in the city. I was learning how to navigate the subway. I’d take the 4/5/6 to the Met to complete an art history assignment, looking at the ancient sculptures downstairs and the European paintings on the second floor, running into other Vassar students. Or else I took the 1/9 from Penn Station up to Columbia (when I was still with Alex), or the N/R to Franny’s apartment. Sometimes Franny would give me scraps of paper with instructions about where to transfer to meet her downtown. We’d walk and walk and walk.
Franny’s mom and Sam rented a cheery one-bedroom on a high floor of an elevator building. Claire made us plates of cheese and bread and put an ashtray out on the terrace. We’d go drinking in the East Village or on the Lower East Side back when it was still seedy, usually ending up at the same dive bar we liked on Seventh Street and Avenue B. During Christmas break, we’d sit in a booth and drink slow pitchers of the cheapest beer on tap and talk to strange boys while white puffy balls of snow fell over Tompkins Square Park. Afterward we’d come back home and sleep together on the pullout sofa in the living room like children during a slumber party.
* * *
Back at school, Franny and I moved together to nearby singles in a dorm with an edgier reputation. Jewett House looked like a castle and came complete with a fairy-tale tower shooting up from the middle of the building, where legend had it that the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay had jumped off, only to be caught by a tree.
From the very beginning with Franny, I paid for things when she didn’t have the money—pizza, beer, takeout. Not all or even half of the time but enough so that I couldn’t help noticing. Franny waited for checks from her father to clear, bit her fingernails with worry, went for embarrassed meetings with financial aid officers. I wanted to help.
“I’ll pay you back,” she’d say.
“Forget about it,” I’d answer, but secretly I’d worry about my diminishing summer savings and whether this meant she was using me. But she gave me so much. Not just friendship but a new way of looking at the world, a dividing line. People she liked (arty, urban, understated), clothes she li
ked (ditto), subjects she found worthwhile (interpersonal dynamics, childhood memories, summer), food she’d eat (fruit, fried eggs, cheese sandwiches with vinegar), boys she’d kiss (that one oddly tricky to predict), parties she’d attend (most), activities she sanctioned (library or campus bar, yes, gym or dance party, no), her favorite word (satisfying). It was like being best friends with a magazine editor. She taught me how to dress, how to talk to men, what to eat, what not to, even how to write term papers. Franny missed every third class, handed in assignments late, yet received A’s and enthusiastic comments. She was quietly brilliant but too shy to raise her hand and participate in class discussions, something she had to explain to her teachers at the start of each term. She knew how to finesse a paper and find a through line, though, how to impress a professor with paragraphs that built to a crescendo.
We went to the Salvation Army to take advantage of the five-dollar all-you-can-fit-in-a-bag sale. We dressed up as each other for Halloween, me putting those barrettes in my hair. I went on anti-war marches and feminist rallies, and she went to her boyfriend’s, where they read Roald Dahl to each other before bed. We made the small circle around Sunset Lake, thinking ourselves on a country meander. We walked to the Vassar Farm, the muddy, open meadows and trails down the road from campus where the rugby team played. I’d wear exercise clothes and she’d bring her cigarettes. We passed a constellation of red outbuildings and barns. I announced that I wanted to live there when I was older.
“In Poughkeepsie?” she said, surprised. She was such a New Yorker.
The Hudson River Valley, I explained. Maybe a country house, I said, as if this were something I’d even heard of before college. I’d joined the equestrian club and was jumping horses—just inches off the ground, but still—at a stable in Rhinebeck.
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