Estranged

by Jessica Berger Gross

  I placed volunteers in jobs around the agency, from a community center in a housing project to a nursery school near Delancey Street. We ran a service matching volunteers with elderly women and men who needed help getting to the supermarket and to doctors’ appointments. We started a tutoring program for high school kids, and a summer reading program for younger children that met in a community garden. Franny, Karen, and Kathy all came and tutored every Thursday night.

  Around the time I started my job at the Y, I met David. He was a friend of Jane’s roommate. They were part of a tight group of guys from Queens who had all gone to Hunter College High School, an Upper East Side magnet school for gifted kids that was supposed to be one of the best public schools in the country. David was raised in a pricey neighborhood called Jamaica Estates, had gone to Dartmouth, and worked as a programmer for the hedge fund D. E. Shaw. One day he was supposed to take over his father’s successful sheet-metal factory in the Bronx. He seemed like the nice Jewish boy my mother had been praying I’d meet. I liked David because he was sarcastic and self-deprecating and well read and good-looking in a bearish sort of way. I tried not to notice that he looked kind of like my brother Josh.

  We traveled to Costa Rica and walked through cloud forests and bathed in hot springs by a dormant volcano. In New Hampshire we hiked from hut to hut in the White Mountains and stayed at a cabin in the woods. (We didn’t know enough to bring groceries from the city and made do with canned beans and white bread from the closest general store as we swatted off blackflies.) I fasted with his family on Yom Kippur and met them for Sunday dinners at restaurants around the city.

  David was generous, always convincing me to let him pay, or at least pay more, since his salary was several times mine. Officially, he lived with roommates in Manhattan, but he usually slept at my railroad apartment in Williamsburg. He said that after we were married, we’d have a brownstone in Brooklyn and a house in the country. I could do whatever I wanted, he promised—nonprofit work or writing. We went to a bedding sale at ABC Carpet, and he bought me a duvet cover and pillowcases. “You deserve nice things,” he told me. “Money is more important than you think,” he added, sounding like my parents. Instead of being grateful, I turned angry, unable to accept his well-intentioned gift. I exploded. Did he think I was a prostitute? I asked him. Did he not think I could take care of myself?

  Soon enough, I grew resentful of David’s money and decided there must be something wrong with him. He wasn’t skinny like Ben. He was too negative. He lacked passion about work. On a weekend trip to Vermont, he offhandedly mentioned wanting to be a sheep farmer, something that seemed perfectly reasonable to me but to David was just something you say while driving through the country. I picked on him for not going after his dreams. (How, exactly? Go to sheep-farmer school? Buy a flock?) I needled him for the occasional nights when he went out with friends for things he knew I wouldn’t approve of—strip clubs, coke—and about his overbearing mother, who spent her days shopping and seemed nearly as manipulative as my own.

  We began fighting, yelling and screaming so loudly that my landlady had to bang on the door to my apartment and tell us to be quiet. I was applying to graduate school in public policy. David said I needed to stay in New York with him, that I couldn’t survive graduate school problem sets or loans on my own, and that we couldn’t survive a long-distance relationship. I was angry; I cursed him. I pushed him. He held my wrists down tight.

  After a year and a half of dating, we broke up. I knew I had to figure myself out—to learn how to behave better and expect more—or else I’d end up in a relationship like my parents’. In the lonely weeks that followed, I quit smoking and found a yoga center where we sang Hindu chants to a harmonium before practicing our poses. But outside the yoga room, I felt empty when I wasn’t busy with work or relationship or friend drama. A hipster volunteer in my tutoring program had been flirting with me. When I called and mentioned my breakup with David, he asked me out. I casually made the plan for New Year’s Eve so I wouldn’t have to be alone that night, and to make David jealous. (We were talking off and on.) The hipster and I went to a Brooklyn loft party and kissed on the sidewalk at midnight. I’d forgotten the heat of beginnings. Back in my bedroom, he tore my underpants off. The next day David called, wanting to see me. We went for cheeseburgers. He hadn’t meant the things he’d said, he told me. He’d been an asshole and was sorry. We should get married.

  I wasn’t ready for that. I needed to see what life was like away from David, away from my family, and away from New York. But even in leaving my family, I needed them. Mark was living in San Francisco, and when I went out to California to visit UC Berkeley, I stayed with him. It felt weird and wrong to be spending time with him after Cincinnati. Nothing had changed in the years since our conversation at Josh’s wedding. I wasn’t worried about my physical safety, but I definitely didn’t feel safe emotionally or okay about our relationship. I stayed with him anyway. I told myself he was still my brother. And it wasn’t like I could afford a hotel. I’d flown there on Mark’s frequent-flyer miles. We were on our best behavior. We walked around the Mission and took photographs of ourselves in front of the mural art. He took me for good sushi. I tried to act normal. I wanted to be able to forgive Mark. I wanted to be someone who could forget and move on.

  In the end, I didn’t get into Berkeley or Harvard, but I heard back with acceptances from Columbia and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Madison offered me a full fellowship. Columbia, where David wanted me to go, would mean getting to stay in New York but taking on serious student-loan debt. And so I gave up my apartment, said goodbye to my friends, and made plans to head to the Midwest.

  Franny and Natalie slept over on my last weekend in Brooklyn. Franny read our tarot cards, predicting that everything would work out fine for me, but I wasn’t so sure. We held a sidewalk sale of my already secondhand furniture and old clothes. The next day we got up late and went for cheese omelets at the Polish diner that used to be on Bedford Avenue before Williamsburg turned chic. Then my father came to get me.

  THIRTEEN

  “HOW DARE YOU keep me waiting?”

  My father was fuming. He slammed the car door shut behind him, revved the engine, and started screaming at me. I was fucking ungrateful, that’s what. And I could have been raped. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  He’d been sitting in the parking lot of a suspect potential apartment rental on the outskirts of Madison while I’d gone inside to talk to a would-be roommate, a conversation that had lasted longer than expected. Twenty-six years old, and still my father was yelling and cursing at me. But I’d needed a ride out to Wisconsin, and since I didn’t have the money to rent a car, or a friend with a car and a week to spare, I’d relented and agreed to let him take me. The road trip was typical of our relationship. We’d had some unexpectedly and unnervingly good talks, some awkward conversations skirting the difficult contours of our shared history, and plenty of tension-filled silences. At night in a motel room somewhere in the middle of Ohio, I slept fitfully. The sound of his snores from the next bed kept me awake.

  I’d arrived in Madison not knowing a soul and with very little money. After the fight in the parking lot, I missed David and wondered if I’d made a mistake by leaving New York. Still needing a place to live, I went to dinner at a housing cooperative I’d heard about right on the lake. Martha’s was a huge, happy, rundown brick house filled with students, self-proclaimed socialist-style “workers,” and assorted activists, vegans, dreamers, and single moms. Dirty, contented children ran barefoot while we sat down to a home-cooked vegetarian feast. After dinner, some of the housemates cleaned up, while others relaxed on one of the three painted porches outfitted with swings and hammocks and plants that doubled as ashtrays, or traded shoulder massages in the living room. When my father, who was leaving the next day, stopped by after dinner to pick me up, even he thought the whole scene was great.

  Plus, the rent was cheap. For $250 a month an
d time spent on “work jobs” like child care, cooking, and cleaning, I’d be given room and board: a prepared dinner every night, Sunday brunch, homemade bread, a pantry stocked with dry goods, and a refrigerator busy with eggs, loose tofu, thick slabs of Wisconsin cheese, and local produce. The house had a living room filled with old couches, guitars, and bikes, and a ready-made social life. I showed up for brunch the following morning and arranged an interview for after dinner. A four-person quorum of housemates assembled in a bedroom and asked me, “What do you do to fight racism in your everyday life?” and “Do you have a problem with nudity?”

  I moved in, relieved to say goodbye to my father. Martha’s became my home. We were ragtag, borrowing each other’s clothes, and Dumpster diving. There I found a group of unconventional and independent-minded friends who helped me realize that growing up in a dysfunctional family doesn’t mean you have to become a fucked-up adult. Equally eye-opening was that living on several hundred dollars a month—easily managed between my fellowship, cheap grad school habits, a string of research assistant jobs, and a small student loan—meant I was no longer financially dependent on my parents.

  Many of my housemates had rougher and much more hardscrabble upbringings than mine, or at least had families with less money. Some came from working-class areas or rural towns. They seemed to be managing fine without the suburban privileges I’d taken for granted. Once my graduate program started, I made friends with other East and West Coast types, but I preferred to spend the weekends with my Martha’s friends. I taught free yoga classes in the living room and spent my afternoons studying at a cooperatively run café. I met a guy named Jay, who’d grown up poor and was working his way through his BA; he wore round John Lennon glasses and striped railroad-conductor overalls and didn’t talk to his family at all, he said, which both unsettled and impressed me.

  * * *

  A few months after moving into Martha’s, I flew back to New York. My Vassar friend Natalie was having a black-tie wedding at the New-York Historical Society. I’d heard the flowers had cost as much as a year’s tuition at Vassar. I arrived at Claire’s apartment that late-September Saturday afternoon with my dress in a shopping bag. It was a deep pink Nicole Miller gown that the bride had helped me dig up for fifty dollars at a designer discount store before I’d left for Madison. Natalie had asked me to read a passage from the Song of Songs at the ceremony.

  Franny seemed different. She wore her black eyeliner heavy and smudged, and she had on a filmy and uncharacteristically dramatic black dress of her mother’s with a translucent light green cape over her shoulders. She was very skinny, ten pounds under her normal thin, and was living in a sketchy-sounding apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. I must have seemed extraterrestrial, with my talk of econ problem sets, of chocolate peanut butter ice cream cones eaten by the lake, of late-night bike rides and housing co-op kissing parties. Franny and I sat at a table with guys I’d met freshman year. They ignored me, and this time Franny did, too, spending most of the reception outside smoking with them or off in the bathroom.

  I went back to Madison, and Franny wouldn’t return my calls; I didn’t call so much after that. A couple of months after Natalie’s wedding, I hitched a ride with some friends who were going to a labor protest in New York, and drove all the way from Madison in a packed car filled with our marijuana smoke. We ended up drinking at Jane’s parents’ brownstone in Chelsea. The Vassar guys I’d never liked came over, and Jane and Franny huddled in a corner, retelling old stories about childhood and camp. Another time, Franny and I sat in the kitchen of her apartment with two bottles of wine and two packs of cigarettes, even though I’d quit, and ordered Chinese takeout. But Franny was distracted all night and wouldn’t tell me what was really going on with her, and I left the next morning feeling hurt and lonely.

  * * *

  Never mind her. There was a whole world outside of New York, I told myself. In Madison, I began to slowly change my life. Moving into Martha’s allowed me to put more emotional distance between my family and me. In grad school, I slogged through the required classes for my program, economics and statistics, government and social welfare policy, and signed up for some classes that actually interested me—a creative writing workshop, a literature class where we read Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, beginning ballet, and a couple of sociology courses on social inequality. At a café on State Street where a fellow co-oper added free extra espresso shots to my lattes, I reunited with a friend from my Nepal trip whom I hadn’t seen since Kathmandu. At Martha’s we hosted parties where I kissed men, women, and college boys. I babysat a housemate’s baby, helped cook dinner and do the dishes for thirty, and harvested vegetables at a community-supported agriculture farm right outside the city. I dated a guy who worked at the revolutionary bookstore; an undergrad who’d hiked the Appalachian Trail; an activist; a history postdoc who criticized my thrift-store clothes. In spring and summer and fall I biked around town. In winter I walked up Bascom Hill and let snowflakes freeze my eyelashes. I smoked a couple of drags of a joint each night before bed to calm my nightmares.

  My life tumbled uncontrollably forward. Maybe this was the way my parents had lived their lives, too. I wasn’t in therapy anymore; I’d given that up when I left New York.

  My father called and offered me a reliable extra car that had been my grandmother’s before they moved her to a nursing home. I took it, rationalizing that I needed the car to drive to Iowa, where I was planning to spend the summer working in a Des Moines housing project for the I Have a Dream Foundation. I was conducting a participatory program evaluation, which meant doing a lot of interviews. With my clipboard and questions, I sat in orderly kitchens, was welcomed into TV-blaring living rooms, and hung out on sticky-hot midsummer stoops. In the evenings I read on a porch swing or went for bike rides. One Saturday night I went on a date with an Iowa City artist I’d met back in New York who drove two hours to see me. We got burgers and beer and spent a magic hour waiting out a thunderstorm in the backseat of my car.

  * * *

  In the middle of the summer I left Iowa for a week. Mark was getting married at the Tower of David in Jerusalem. (How else to top the Waldorf?) Tamara was a tough, sexy woman with olive skin and a pixie haircut. She’d grown up mostly in Australia, but her parents now lived in a ritzy suburb of Tel Aviv. My parents said I had to fly in for the wedding. They bought my plane ticket and booked me a room at their hotel.

  I took my assigned place under the chuppah with the rest of the two families as Tamara circled Mark the requisite seven times. My new silky black dress grazed my ankles. Swept up in the evening, I kissed my brother on the cheek after he broke the glass. But I’d never forgiven Mark for hurting me. After the reception, I came down with a fever.

  Before school started up again, I flew to San Francisco for Mark and Tamara’s California wedding party at a Napa Valley vineyard. I had on another new dress my mother had bought me, this one long and flowered. Monica, my girlhood friend from Rockville Centre, was living in San Francisco, and this time I slept over at her place. We showed up to the party high and late. I hated being there, hated having to smile and look pretty and sound intelligent and fake my relationship with my brother, especially among his Stanford MBA friends. These people respected and admired Mark, as I once had. One couple had flown in all the way from Japan to be there. What would happen if they knew the truth? If they’d seen him slam me against the bathroom wall? That weekend a knotty lump on the back of my neck grew inflamed, making me jittery with pain.

  On the plane ride home to Madison, the pain kept getting worse. I swallowed too many Tylenols and Advils, ordered a drink, and looked forward to the joint waiting for me at Martha’s. But over the next few days, I couldn’t keep up with the sharp ache and went to see a doctor and then a specialist. He said I’d developed a cyst inside my throat and another at the back of my neck. The specialist removed them both that day, even though I’d come to the appointment alone and driven myself. Th
ey were benign but could recur, he said, handing me a prescription for painkillers. I wanted to know what had caused the growths. My Madison yoga teacher wondered if something metaphorical was stuck in the back of my throat. Words? Was there anything I needed to say that I hadn’t let myself? The specialist, on the other hand, said it was probably HPV, perhaps something I’d picked up when giving a blow job.

  * * *

  Then, in a sociology seminar on social change, I spotted Neil. Legs crossed, glasses and goatee, hiking boots and flannel shirt, tattered paperback of whatever ethnography we were reading that week, discussing the Chicago School, whatever that was, with quiet confidence. He was auditing the class and showed up when he felt like it. Neil was “promising,” which in his case meant he’d already had articles published in some of the best sociology journals and been summoned to give a job talk at the University of Chicago. I paid attention, but only a little.

  After the class ended, Neil emailed and asked me out for coffee. We spoke on the phone to make arrangements. I loved his voice and made note of the calm, careful way he listened when I spoke, and how good I felt after talking to him. Not manic and elated but grounded and appreciated. This was something new. I was interested. Very interested. I borrowed a housemate’s jeans and put on a fitted purple shirt I splurged on at Urban Outfitters, along with the well-made black cloth coat Natalie had advised me to buy on sale before leaving New York.