Estranged

by Jessica Berger Gross

  One night in our Brooklyn apartment, in the midst of my depression, when I felt like I had nothing to give him, Neil made our favorite spaghetti dinner and asked me to marry him, hiding the ring in a cheese grater. Neil was undeniably good. He was as kind as he was smart. Kinder. I loved him. And I knew this was what I wanted, a life together. We kissed and cried, with wonder about all that was to come. I felt a little less sad and a little more hopeful. But I couldn’t even call my parents to tell them we were engaged. And I hadn’t been in touch with Franny for a year or two. The next day I sat alone on our stoop and admired the ring in the morning light.

  SIXTEEN

  NEIL APPLIED FOR jobs and accepted a one-year teaching position at Williams College. The country sounded good, like a psychiatric institution–lite. I was worn out and couldn’t function in Brooklyn anymore, emotionally or financially.

  We rented a carriage house in a small town in upstate New York, over a mountain pass and across the state line from Williamstown, Massachusetts. There we could have an entire house for half of what we’d been paying for a one-bedroom in Park Slope.

  Once a week I held a children’s story time at the library down the road. As the weather turned colder, we warmed ourselves with homemade chili and piles of books. In the mornings I started writing, and in the afternoons and evenings I taught yoga around town. The trunk of my station wagon loaded with mats and blankets and foam blocks, I taught at the college, and in pay-what-you-wish classes in drafty community centers, and subbed at a ritzy Berkshires spa. Neil taught and finished his dissertation. He began receiving invitations to campuses across the country to give talks at sociology departments looking to hire assistant professors for the following year. We planned a tiny late-spring wedding. But depression and anxiety held me tight in their grip.

  * * *

  Then, on a quiet and solitary November weekend, when Neil was flying home from a job interview in California, the phone rang. I ignored it. I didn’t know anyone for a hundred miles. Voice mail picked up.

  My father.

  “I’m in Williamstown. I’d like to meet for coffee.” He told me he was staying at the 1896 Motel and left a room number.

  I was taken aback by his voice, the reality of it. This was the precise scenario that made me drench my bedsheets with sweat at four in the morning—me alone, my father coming for me.

  “I need to see you.”

  How had he tracked me down? And why, for God’s sake, had I stupidly suggested we live in this remote rural town rather than near the college?

  “We need to talk.”

  I panicked. My pulse raced, my body suddenly on high alert. Neil was on a plane, unreachable for hours. The view out my study window of quiet woods turned dangerous and foreboding. Maybe it was the still-unfamiliar rural setting, or the all-too-familiar sound of his voice, or my depression. Maybe I was having a PTSD reaction, but I felt sure I was in mortal danger.

  This time, I thought, my father is going to kill me.

  I imagined my father with a knife. A gun. Or even his bare hands. How humiliated he must be for what I’d done to him and how I’d ruined our family. How he’d make me pay.

  I called Kathy. She’d been there for me since seventh grade. She’d know what to do. I could barely get the words out. I couldn’t find enough space between my hyperventilated breaths to explain about the voice mail, about Neil being away, about my fears. Were they misplaced? Had I gone crazy?

  “Go,” she urged. “Leave the house.” Just in case.

  Neil had our good car at the airport, and I didn’t know how far I could make it in the rusty old Volvo station wagon we’d bought when we moved to the country. And where would I go? I grabbed my cell phone, threw on my bulky winter coat and boots, and went to knock on the door of my landlord, who lived in the main house on the same property. Matthew Milburn was a retired physicist. We’d never spoken much, but he seemed trustworthy.

  “My father,” I said, and began to tell him my story. All my life I’d avoided this very shame, of the knock on a stranger’s door asking for help, the admission that my own father had hurt me and might again.

  “Is he dangerous?” asked Mr. Milburn. I thought of how my father used to commute to his office in Long Island City with an ax tucked underneath the driver’s seat. But that was twenty years ago. In the message he’d sounded eerily calm and determined, like a father who missed his daughter and would do anything to see her.

  “Is he dangerous?” Mr. Milburn pressed.

  Was he? I hardly knew anymore. To me he was. I knew what it was like to have my back against the stairs, trapped with no place to run. Or to have him pounding on my locked bedroom door. I could still feel his hands on me.

  “My counselor said I should show you how much I cared by driving up. I want to see you, talk to you,” my father had said in the message.

  But why hadn’t he asked my permission before coming? And how had he managed to pick the one weekend when Neil was away? Had he planned it this way?

  “I think he might be,” I told my landlord.

  “Don’t worry,” Mr. Milburn reassured me. He seemed ready for anything. He even had a bomb shelter in his basement.

  We’d spend the remainder of the afternoon at home, Mr. Milburn decided, and then head down the road to his girlfriend Gwen’s place for dinner. He handed me a throw blanket, pointed me toward a worn leather sofa, and left me alone, staying close by in the office across from the den where he’d settled me. My therapist, for whom I’d left a this-might-be-an-emergency message, had me call her in New York once an hour to check in. She told me to wait there for Neil and then find someplace else to sleep for the night. I sat with the cell phone on my lap, willing Neil to come home.

  At ten minutes before six, Mr. Milburn collected me and put me in his car, and we drove down to his girlfriend’s place, past the dairy farm I walked to on my morning constitutionals. “You’ll like Gwen,” he said, as if we were on our way to a dinner party.

  Gwen was ten years younger than Mr. Milburn, silvery-gray-haired and well mannered and kind, cultured and Connecticut-y, while I was a sobbing, snotty Jewish mess in sweatpants with tissues stuck up my sleeves. In her dining room I cried into my graciously prepared plate of pasta. She asked about my father. I was shaking at her table, so we couldn’t exactly avoid the topic. I didn’t know which was worse, admitting to this refined stranger that I’d become a bad daughter, or that I’d come from such awful parents. To my relief, Mr. Milburn soon piled me back into his car and returned me to what now felt like my new safe house on his couch.

  Mercifully, Neil pulled up the driveway. I’d fallen in love with a bookish professor, but it hadn’t escaped me that Neil was once a cop.

  “Thank God you’re home,” I said, and briefed him in a rush of words.

  “I don’t want to freak you out,” Neil said, “but we should probably stay in a motel tonight.”

  We drove north, checking in to a sterile room in Bennington, Vermont. Neil tucked me underneath the thin baby blue fuzz of a polyester motel blanket. Without decent cell reception, or maybe to shield me, he made calls from the pay phone in the parking lot while I turned up the television in the room. Neil phoned the local police station in New York and the Vermont police near the motel to alert them and ask about a restraining order. We were told that if my father bothered me again, he could be arrested for harassment.

  What about my mother? I wanted to make sure my father wasn’t going to take my refusal out on her when he got home. I asked Neil to call her and make sure she was safe. That call Neil made from our room. I wouldn’t get on the phone, but I could hear my mother on the other end. “Safe?” I heard her say. She wanted to kill herself. My father wasn’t the problem, I was. How could I not talk to her? Not talk to my brothers? My mother said she was beside herself. I was the one hurting her, not him.

  * * *

  After that day I decided to change my life. Each morning I forced myself to meditate or bundle up and take a col
d country walk. On my yoga mat, during long drives, in kitchen conversations with Neil, late at night when I couldn’t sleep, while reading Eastern philosophy or writing in my journal, I contemplated the meaning of forgiveness. The real kind that has to do with acceptance and moving forward, not the bullshit forgive-and-forget package of lies I’d been trying to swallow for years.

  A nearby junk shop had a big sign: Be good, feel good, do good. I adopted the saying as my new motto and created a plan for getting my life together. I’d go after my dreams, I swore. I’d live a life my family hadn’t imagined possible for me. It wasn’t easy or simple, and some days I couldn’t stand myself and wanted to die, but each day I forced myself to try. I sat down at my desk and began working harder on my writing. A few months later I had my first short piece published. It was a slight accomplishment, a book review in a yoga magazine, and I was paid fifty bucks, if that, but seeing my byline on glossy paper thrilled and encouraged me. Through those long winter months, I started taking care of my body with solitary sun salutations and sessions on the elliptical at the college gym. By spring, the daily routine of writing and teaching and getting enough exercise and sleep had started to heal me. And I’d pretty much quit drinking. My skin glowed, and I was forty pounds lighter from months of healthy eating. Best of all, I woke up in the mornings feeling hopeful. Somehow I’d made it through the dark tunnel of depression. Maybe what I’d needed all these years was to just leave. My biggest regret was not having made the break sooner.

  * * *

  Franny called. It had been a long time since I’d heard from her. We’d lost touch while I was in Madison. She never answered her phone and wouldn’t call me back when I left messages. So it felt like a miracle when, two or three years later, the phone rang on a mild late-April evening. Franny sounded good, clearheaded. I was elated that she’d found me.

  “I only drink once or twice a week now,” she said. “And only two drinks, nothing more. I’ve even gone to a couple of meetings with a friend.”

  “Wow, that’s great,” I answered, not knowing what to say. It was great.

  We talked for a couple of hours. Neil cooked and brought me dinner to eat outside on the lawn where I’d taken the phone. Franny was in Los Angeles. Temporarily, she said, staying with her father.

  I was getting married at the end of May, I told her. A small garden wedding on the lawn of the place we rented in the country, a few days after my thirtieth birthday. Would she come?

  She had no money for a plane ticket, she said, but wanted very much to be there.

  I hesitated before asking Neil while we watched television in bed. Would he fly her in?

  He would. He knew how important Franny was to me.

  Six weeks later I drove to the train station in Hudson to pick her up. I rolled down the station wagon windows and felt the warm air on my bare arms for the first time since before winter. Everything felt possible again.

  Franny came off the train, and we hugged one another hard for a minute or two before widening ourselves out again. Holding hands, arms in a circle, assessing each other. She looked me over. I had fallen in love, been to therapy. I had highlights in my hair and a tiny diamond ring in my nose placed in the long-ago Kathmandu hole, and another on my finger. She was thin, too, but not from sun salutations and country walks, like me. More like a sick person who’d been through cancer treatment and was emerging on the other side, shaky, but with a greater awareness of being alive. She smelled different. Musty. I was shy with her, nervous to ask too many questions about how her last years had been. I worried.

  She was still Franny, though. Familiar. Ethereal. I loved her without question. We went back to the house and Franny wrote out place cards, calligraphy-style, in black marker. She was our witness the next morning in town when we signed the wedding papers. I had on white jeans and a white T-shirt and a thick wool cardigan, and Franny took our photograph in front of the town hall. That afternoon we bought our wedding flowers by the bucket from a farm across the road, and Franny arranged them into bouquets and vases.

  Our wedding weekend was simple and lovely, magical, even, at least for me, filled with wildflowers and friends who’d come up from the city, driven in from Boston, or flown in from Wisconsin and California to stay with us, or at a shabby inn down the road, or to camp at a nearby campground. But it was unusual in one obvious way. We didn’t have parents or siblings surrounding us under the Indian tapestry we used as a make-your-own chuppah. The closest Neil had were his aunt and uncle and two cousins; the closest I had were Franny and Kathy and the rest of my friends.

  Though a lingering part of me longed for parents to walk me down the aisle, I felt my family’s absence mostly as a relief. Another, hidden part of me half wished I’d had a proper wedding, the kind my mother would have wanted and planned for me. I shooed those thoughts away.

  At the ceremony I wore a white tea-length Morgane Le Fay dress with short puff sleeves, my one extravagance. Neil was in a seersucker suit, his hair a mess of curls. Franny, in a borrowed black dress from the sixties, read a poem suggested by her father, “A Sweet Flying Dream” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

  Afterward, Neil and I sat at a table set for two under the white reception tent, kissing as our few dozen guests clinked utensils to wineglasses. We had a vegetarian buffet and a vegan chocolate cake with a bear bride and groom on top. We danced to Sade and Krishna Das. Neil understood me, and I could be myself with him. Waking me in the early morning from a father nightmare, he would urge me to focus on the good in our lives, on the grass beneath my feet and the leaves on the trees. “Here,” he would say, taking me into the woods. “This is what’s real.”

  At the end of the weekend, I was saddest to see Franny go. She was headed to the city. Her mother was living in London by then. I put a bunch of rolled-up twenties in her palm, like my parents used to do for me.

  After the wedding, Neil and I moved to Los Angeles so he could take a job at the University of Southern California. For our honeymoon, we took turns driving cross-country through plains and mountains, stopping in national parks and cowboy towns with actual tumbleweed, this time heading all the way west, watching the big sky weave through sunrise, high noon, sunset, and starry night.

  SEVENTEEN

  WE RENTED A place in a hippie canyon neighborhood off the Pacific Coast Highway. The apartment was an open and ramshackle studio with two tiny closet-like spaces that we used as his-and-hers offices, a loft bed, and a small kitchen set on a platform. Outside was a bathtub with a view of the mountains. From our door you could hike right up into the dry light green hills, walking by yards with horses and skirting snakes on the path, and I did most afternoons before dinner. Our landlord was a Jewish Hare Krishna who lived upstairs, and we had to sneak when we wanted to cook fish. I was making next to nothing, teaching yoga and trying to write. Neil was working on his first book and teaching at USC.

  What I wanted more than anything was for us to have a family of our own. A baby, I dreamed. A baby, a baby, a baby. This, my new mantra, was all I could think about. I was only thirty-one and my period was regular, so I never imagined I’d have any trouble, but a friend who had children suggested we start trying anyway. And so I dutifully tracked my ovulation and timed the sex we had, reaching my legs to the ceiling afterward. It took me six months of trying.

  When the pee stick said positive, I was elated. But I was frightened, too. Could I be a good enough mother? At an office in Beverly Hills for my first prenatal appointment, I sat in flip-flops, waiting for my turn.

  * * *

  Only there was no heartbeat. The doctor came in to explain about miscarriage. Eight weeks pregnant, or not pregnant, with an empty placental sac in my womb, I registered the comfort of the nurse’s arm as she drew my blood, and felt hollowed out by the after-hours D&C. My baby. I was beyond consolation.

  That spring, several months later, I wrote to my mother. It had been almost four years. Experiencing motherhood, however briefly, had made me want my mother. And
what did I owe her? I wondered. Over email, I reached out to her about the idea of a relationship in which we might maintain some sort of distant occasional contact. I wrote that I knew she was sorry and that I worried about her. But I was still angry. She wrote back and said she’d seen a counselor who helped her become “more assertive and attuned to my own needs.” She said she had failed me, it was true, but she had also loved and nurtured me. She said her therapist had helped her learn that “I was in some ways too good for this world for I didn’t see how most humans most often act out of self-interest.” What? She wanted to build a new relationship, she wrote, but it would have to be about healing and new beginnings. She couldn’t let me or my anger destroy her.

  I understood, sort of, but didn’t write back. It felt completely and utterly impossible. I was her daughter. I was supposed to take responsibility for her now that she was getting older. Only the part of me that should have cared about her no longer existed; this had died, too. I didn’t want her anymore. My anger was all that was left. I had nothing else for her.

  But it turned out my mother had something she wanted to offer me. A year or two later, Neil received an email from her. My parents were retiring and selling their house. They’d spend winters in Florida and the warmer months in an apartment in Queens. But first they were cleaning out the Rockville Centre house, including my old bedroom. Did I want what was left of my things?

  I had left my parents’ house that August Sunday years before, not realizing I would never once be back. Before the estrangement, I’d been living in a series of cramped and temporary spaces and hadn’t moved my childhood memorabilia along with me. I thought I’d given those things up the day I left. Sentimental as I was, I had mourned the last remains and artifacts of my childhood, but it had never occurred to me to simply ask my parents for them.