Estranged

by Jessica Berger Gross

  An hour had gone by. Two.

  “You should thank me for saving you from a relationship with me,” he concluded.

  He said I used him as a buffer. Ben knew about my father. He said I wouldn’t let myself get to know other guys because of the abuse.

  He was right. I’d broken it off with Alex because he was able to love me, while I kept things going with Ben, who felt so familiar because he couldn’t.

  Though I recognized much of what Ben said as true, somehow what I took away from the conversation at the time was that I wasn’t pretty enough for him, that he wasn’t attracted enough to me, that he didn’t like me enough. That we would probably get married one day, but only if he couldn’t find someone better.

  After graduation, I returned home to live with my parents, as planned. I tried to shut my door and do my own thing as much as I could. Josh had left South Dakota and was living at home again, too. He got me a summer sales job at the bottled-water company where he was working. That summer I went door-to-door, business to business, from nail salon to auto repair shop on Queens Boulevard, until I’d sold one hundred Poland Spring watercooler contracts at fifty bucks commission each. When September came, I packed two big bags and flew to Tel Aviv, headed for the Israeli desert.

  That year I learned Hebrew, went hiking through nature reserves in the beautifully stark southern desert and up in the lush green hills of the north; I visited Jerusalem—that city of white, cool stone, with the music of the Muslim call to prayer sounding from the rooftops—and stuck notes to God in the Western Wall; I fell for and got dumped by a Canadian who was making aliyah and joining the army, and I called my mother from a pay phone crying, sure that no one would ever love me; I floated in the Dead Sea; I flirted with becoming religious and imagined carrying a baby on each of my hips and a prayer book in my purse, wearing a scarf over my hair and skirts down to my sandals; I mournfully made my way through the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem and its pile of children’s shoes and studied the intricate works at the Museum for Islamic Art; I got a job at a university as a research assistant to a sociologist, volunteered with a group advocating tenants’ rights for new immigrants, lived on falafels and tomatoes and cucumber salad and hummus and fresh-baked pita, moved in with and got (practically but not quite) engaged to an Israeli who studied desert mosquitoes and spent reserve duty in a tank, and told my parents I might never return.

  TWELVE

  MY EXCUSE FOR coming back to New York was Josh’s wedding. His fiancée, Rachel, had grown up on the north shore of Long Island. She’d gone to Cornell and NYU Law and lived in the city. Rachel and Josh had met as teenagers during a summer bike trip through Europe and reconnected after college.

  My parents bought me a plane ticket home. One-way. Maybe I was rushing into my new life in Israel. Ben and I weren’t speaking, but I loved him more than I loved my Israeli boyfriend, who couldn’t understand why I was so cruelly abandoning him. I felt that way even though Ben didn’t love me back. I needed time to think and wanted to try living in New York. Also, I missed Franny.

  After sleeping off my flight, I took the New York Times classified section and a pencil to the pool. On the phone, my mother had said there was no huge rush to find a job, but as soon as I arrived home, it was a different story. Neither me nor my parents could stand for me to live there with them. I dangled my legs in the water, circling entry-level possibilities.

  Josh and Rachel were married in a large affair at a synagogue banquet hall on Long Island. I wore a frumpy black dress with a bow around the waist and elbow-length sleeves that my mother had bought months before at a random dress shop in a Tel Aviv mall when she came to visit, because she didn’t want me to have to find something last-minute in New York. I’d agreed to the dress to get the afternoon of shopping over with. But after I returned home I showed it to Franny and knew at once it was all wrong.

  Mark was at the wedding without Abigail, who was supposed to be a bridesmaid. He said she wasn’t feeling well. I hadn’t seen my brother in a long time. We didn’t talk on the phone any more or exchange letters. I avoided him the best I could. Living in Israel had helped. This was the first time we’d hung out together since my graduation and only the second time since Cincinnati. He was graying and starting to look middle-aged, though he was just turning thirty.

  “I want you back,” he said to me. “I’m going through a lot right now, and I need my sister. I need you.”

  “Then go into therapy. You have to deal with what you did to me. That’s the only way to make sure you’ll never do it again.”

  “I can’t,” he tried to explain. “I already went for couples therapy with Abigail. I can’t do it for this, too. I have too much going on.”

  “But I need you to,” I said. “I can’t pretend nothing happened.”

  Mark looked down at his dress shoes for a minute, thinking, as we stood to the side of the dance floor. I wondered if I was being stubborn.

  “No,” he eventually answered, more dejected than steadfast. “I won’t do it.”

  My family soon learned that Abigail and Mark had separated after three years of marriage. Abigail stayed in New York. Mark returned to Stanford without her to finish his MBA. Josh thought Mark would be different now that Abigail was out of the picture, but I didn’t blame her for that snowy Cincinnati morning. I blamed my brother. He was the one who had betrayed me.

  * * *

  I found a job in Midtown and a studio apartment in the East Village. I fantasized about joining a political campaign or pursuing a career in publishing or the magazine world. Instead I told myself I should be practical, and settled into the first job I was offered, as an administrative assistant at the Jewish nonprofit Hadassah. At least I could get my own place. My father insisted on coming to help me decide between a cheap basement apartment near the Hells Angels clubhouse on Third Street, which he rejected as dangerous, and a tiny, slightly more expensive 250-square-foot studio above a Chinese take-out on First Avenue and Thirteenth Street. I needed his permission and their help because my parents would serve as guarantors on the lease. My father offered to pay the difference between the two rents until I got my first raise. I didn’t like the idea of continuing to be dependent on him, but didn’t understand I had a choice. I could have found a roommate or moved in with Kathy. Maybe part of me wanted to stay tethered to my parents.

  Franny was recently back from Mexico, where she’d fled a bad relationship. I could feel her pulling away; she hadn’t wanted to live with me, saying she couldn’t commit to a lease. She didn’t have a steady job or the money for rent, but I figured it was my fault—that I was no longer cool enough. I had an employee ID badge and a weeknight bedtime and work outfits scrounged from Loehmann’s and the discount rack at the Gap.

  From my office, I’d call to make plans for the weekend. Franny became harder and harder to pin down. “I don’t know,” she’d say. “I’m not really sure what’s going on.”

  So instead I’d stand in the back of a crowded bookstore reading, or at KBG bar by myself, or make the shame-faced solo walk to Kim’s Video and rent a movie, picking up a couple of sesame-seed bagels and a mini container of scallion cream cheese at my corner bagel store on the way home. Even after all that traveling, I had no idea how to be alone.

  When Franny did agree to meet, she’d sometimes keep me waiting on street corners. I’d check my watch and try not to be annoyed. Eventually she’d show up, ten or twenty or thirty minutes late.

  “Honey!” she’d call from across the street, waving, a huge scarf wrapped around her neck. “I’m sosososo sorry I’m late,” she’d say with a kiss on the cheek and an extravagant hug, and I’d forgive her instantly. We’d walk down the street arm in arm, and she’d teach me how to Christmas-shop at vintage stores. Or we’d head to a bar or party. Though she might make us hang out with those Vassar guys who ignored me, at some point in the night she’d turn back to me. Then we’d end up together, just the two of us, at an all-night diner, where we’d eat frie
d-egg sandwiches at dawn and things would feel back to normal.

  I rarely saw my brothers. Mark was in California and then went to Israel to work at a start-up. Josh and Rachel lived in the city, but we didn’t spend time together. One May, I invited them to my birthday party at a bar between Avenues B and C, and they showed up, Rachel straight from the office in her corporate lawyer suit, looking afraid of the neighborhood, whispering to Josh with her eye on the door. I was sure she thought my friends and I were some kind of aged-out juvenile-delinquent jokes in our vintage dresses and black boots.

  I saw my parents regularly, though. My father’s anger that had flared around my graduation seemed to subside, and I grew easier in his presence, no longer afraid. Every few weeks they drove in to take me out for a meal. I sat through these brunches and dinners and greedily pocketed the comforts of the free meal and the twenties they offered me afterward, plus the monthly $150 check to help with my rent. My mother continued to bargain-shop for me at Filene’s Basement on Long Island, returning my rejects like a personal shopper. (She gave me her used books, too, including a copy of an Oprah-pick novel dealing with family violence and abuse, Bastard Out of Carolina. Her book-club notes lined the margins. I couldn’t bring myself to read it, much less wonder if this was some sort of admission on her part.) They never gave my brothers a single dollar after college, she reminded me. I felt guilty and grateful for their help.

  They would call me and come see me and have me visit them and sometimes act like “normal” parents and sometimes make threats, and I would slide between rebellion and trying to please them. I tried to ignore the little things: my father during Mother’s Day brunch at Bubby’s in Tribeca, acting aggressive and rude to the waiter, my mother criticizing my hair, my dating life, my friendships. (She liked my Rockville Centre friends but disapproved of the ones from Vassar.) Sometimes we got along fine. On a fishing trip in New England, just my parents and me for a long early-summer weekend, my father had on the same hat he’d worn all those years before in Maine. I borrowed it for the weekend and wore his flannel work shirt. Mostly I avoided thinking about my relationship with them too much, imagining things would never change.

  * * *

  The banquet hall of the Midtown hotel was filling up with a stressed after-work crowd. It was a meeting of the ACPA—the Association of Celebrity Personal Assistants. After the cocktail hour, everyone signed a confidentiality agreement and placed their folding chairs in a circle. We went around: name, celebrity, horror story.

  Several weeks earlier, I’d sent my résumé in response to a newspaper ad for a women’s organizer position. Organizing women sounded infinitely better than my boring job at Hadassah.

  I got the call at work: “Do you know who Bella Abzug is?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said, only sort of lying. She was a feminist, I knew. She wore hats.

  “You’d be working as Bella’s assistant.”

  My interview with Bella was the next day. Her office at the Women’s Environment and Development Organization was filled with awards and framed photographs of Bella and Gloria, Bella and Hillary, Bella and Barbra. A former civil rights attorney, I learned, Bella had cofounded the National Women’s Political Caucus; helped shape Title IX legislation, which banned sex discrimination in education; and broken barriers with her bid for the U.S. Senate in 1976 and in New York City’s mayoral race a year later.

  “I would do anything to work here,” I told Bella.

  “You would, would you?” she asked. “I bet.”

  She glanced at my résumé and chuckled. “Vassar, huh? I went to Hunter College, myself.”

  Somehow, I got the job. My family couldn’t believe it. My parents bragged about me to work friends and acquaintances. My brothers were impressed. Bella’s former assistant, who’d quit to become a stand-up comedian, offered me two pointers: 1) keep a notebook and write down all of Bella’s instructions; 2) don’t take anything personally.

  Not taking it personally was hard. Bella wasn’t diplomatic when telling me I had no idea what I was doing. When she would call from her office—“Get me Lew Rudin on the phone!”—I’d fumble through her Rolodex. Bella would curse, demand, insult. She’d yell or shake her cane, frustrated at my ineptitude. “What are you, stupid?”

  As terrified as I was of messing up, I loved the feeling of purpose and glamour. I was a girl from Rockville Centre. Now I was holding Bella’s purse while she talked to Representative Carolyn Maloney outside a public hearing, or washing my hands in the bathroom next to Donna Shalala. I even got to call Gloria Steinem and invite her to Bella’s birthday party.

  But the thrilling moments were laced with anxiety. Small things threw me into a panic. Shirley MacLaine called. She was staying at Bella’s that weekend, and did I have a key? (I didn’t and felt awful about it.) Beside Bella at the United Nations, I sat with a copy of her remarks in my lap and prayed I had done an adequate job of assembling them. “Where’s the speech? These are the wrong pages!” she’d said, glowering, earlier that day. This was standard high-maintenance boss-assistant stuff, but Bella’s temper sent me running to the bathroom crying.

  I had migraines and stomach cramps. Some of my hair fell out. After three months, I started calling in sick. When getting out of bed became difficult, I went to see a doctor, thinking the problem might be physical. Did I have mono again? My doctor told me to quit. “I’ve heard stories about Bella,” she said.

  “I can’t quit!” I answered. “I’m going with Bella to the Democratic National Convention. She’ll write me a letter of recommendation for graduate school.” Working for Bella had made me more ambitious. I wanted to be like the slightly older women in the office who’d studied at Harvard’s Kennedy School and traveled to the Conference on Women in Beijing, and who took cabs and ordered Indian food for dinner.

  “I suggest you find a therapist who can help you make the transition,” the doctor replied.

  I picked someone on my insurance plan with a name and address I liked and told her about Bella and, afterward, about my father. Echoing my doctor’s advice, the therapist told me I had to quit. From my spot on her couch, I gave my excuses about graduate school and future jobs. From her black leather recliner, she convinced me, in her reassuring and assured way, that I had no choice. She said I was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder from the childhood abuse, and Bella was my new trigger.

  I gave my notice effective immediately, told the unemployment office I was being harassed at work, and went into weekly therapy. In that small hushed office in the Village, with the comforting sound of a noise machine and the view of a brick wall, I began to deal—truly deal—with my past. Not by offering up forgiveness to my parents, or by confronting them in any outward way at all, but by going inside and allowing myself to take in the seriousness and sadness of what had happened to me. It was grueling work. At first I could manage to talk for only a few minutes about my childhood.

  But my therapist urged me to search my past and recount specific episodes of abuse rather than hide behind my day-to-day problems. It was necessary to remember in order to eventually start feeling better, she said. Week after week I resisted. Any story I dredged up in her office meant nightmares and headaches and fighting off the desire to slit my wrists for the rest of the week. She persevered. Slowly I began to talk about the violence: My first memory of the pink handprint on my back. The wooden oar smacked across my brother’s body. My mother slammed against the refrigerator. The words my father hurled at me. The ways my mother disappointed me with her complicity. My therapist explained that sensitive child or not, rebellious teenager or not, I bore none of the responsibility for the violence in my childhood home. No victim of child abuse does.

  * * *

  It was summer 1996. I was depressed, but I had unemployment checks and unlimited free time. Franny was doing freelance textile design. Her offhand doodles would eventually end up as designs on plates at Anthropologie or as wallpaper patterns, but she booked jobs only when she wa
s really desperate for cash or saving for a plane ticket back to Mexico. Most of the time she just hung out.

  We became inseparable again. We were closest when we were between jobs, when we were depressed, when we were single. She stayed over a lot, sleeping in my bed with me. That summer we lived cheap. We took care of each other. Our friendship was once again daily and emotionally immersive. We ate bagels and falafels, freaking out when we were charged four dollars for the falafel platter rather than the two-fifty for the falafel sandwich advertised in the window on First Avenue. We flirted for late-night drinks at cheap bars. On mornings when I felt sad, she encouraged me to take a shower and a walk. We spent afternoons lying out on frayed beach towels in Tompkins Square Park.

  When night came, we’d pre-drink forty-ounce beers with Franny’s childhood best friend, Jane, at my place or Jane’s on the Lower East Side like we were still in college, then go to Ludlow Lounge or Max Fish or the same old bar on Seventh Street and Avenue B, or else a house party someone had heard about in Chinatown or in an apartment on Avenue D or somewhere in Brooklyn. Or we’d meet up with Vassar people at restaurants and bars we couldn’t afford and hope someone with a corporate job or trust fund would buy the drinks and order appetizers for the table. A couple of times Franny and I brought men we’d just met back to my apartment after the bars shut down. One guy came over, ostensibly to play Scrabble. We were all too drunk and tired to finish the game, and halfway through he suggested we go to sleep in my futon bed. But as he and Franny slept, I lay awake that early morning, staring at the knife set I’d inherited from Mark and Abigail, perched menacingly a couple of feet away on the single square foot of kitchen counter. Anything could have happened. After that Franny and I promised: no more strangers.

  * * *

  My parents warned me that pretty soon I’d have to quit the city and move home with them if I didn’t find a job. A Vassar friend told me about a position coordinating volunteers and volunteer programs at the 14th Street Y, a Jewish community center around the corner from my apartment. The Y was part of the Educational Alliance, a century-old Lower East Side settlement house. I got along so well with the social worker interviewing me, and we talked for such a long time, that we had to stop in the middle of our conversation to take a joint bathroom break. I got the job. The work wasn’t glamorous, but it felt solid and meaningful. My boss and I became close. She even found me a more affordable apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (which was still cheap back then).