“I didn’t know that,” I said. “About irrigation. I thought all farmers had to irrigate.”
“In general, the climate here isn’t ideal for wine grapes; the temperature is, but the precipitation and the water table aren’t perfect. Our land happens to be better than most. We grow the grapes on a hill to catch as much water as possible as it runs down. The count knew what he was doing. He picked the best spot in Sonoma. The drought . . . well . . . it was certainly a problem, but we’re doing better than most. And now, we’ve got more water than we know what to do with.”
I nodded. I didn’t know what else to say. Everett didn’t seem to be a person who was uncomfortable with silence, so I respected that. I just scratched Tannin behind the ear and his contented sighs filled the car for the rest of the trip to the bus station.
CHAPTER 6
On the bus ride back to Berkeley, I mostly stared out the window at the arid California landscape. As we left the fertile Sonoma Valley, we were surrounded by dry-looking, almost desertlike hills. Rocky crags plunging into deep valleys. It was in direct contrast to the flat fields of my youth, filled with corn and soybeans as far as the eye could see. Not to mention the urban jungle of New York City: One of my favorite parts of the ride into the city from Ditmas Park was when the Q train would go over the Manhattan Bridge. First you would see Brooklyn office buildings, then the glory of downtown Manhattan, and if you looked to the left, you would see the Statue of Liberty. Small in the distance, welcoming us all into her city. I said good-bye to her on my last ride into the city. Maybe I should have known then that I wouldn’t go back. Now I was on my way back to Berkeley to say a different kind of good-bye.
Normally, I would have called Ethan about twenty minutes before the bus pulled into the depot to badger him into picking me up. He would resist at first, saying he was busy with something amorphous, but eventually would give in and often would arrive at the bus station with a coffee or a seltzer, depending on the time of day. In his heart of hearts, he liked taking care of me. As I was thinking about what to do after I got off the bus, my phone buzzed. A little iota of hope popped up that it was Ethan until I looked at the screen. My mom. I did not have the energy to talk to her, although I was less afraid of talking to her than I was of talking to Ethan. But since I had the option of speaking to neither, I put the phone back in my pocket and let the call go to voice mail. She always left a voice mail no matter how many times I told her that I could see that she had called. I waited until the message popped up and listened to it.
“Hannah, it’s your mother. I think you’re graduating soon, so I wanted to say congratulations. You’re such a smart girl. I know you’ll love that fancy job you got in New York City. I just wanted to say good luck and I wish you the best. I know you’ll be happy. Give us a call when you can. We love you.”
I sighed. My mother had never made a major choice like this; she had been in Winthrop her whole life, same job, same house. She might be able to feel sympathy, but she would not be able to empathize, no less advise. She would also be confused. She had liked Ethan when I brought him home for Christmas after our first semester together. She thought he was polite and she liked the flowers he brought for her. My high school and college boyfriend, Eric, had only ever brought over laundry to do, although my mother had liked him anyway because once he had mowed her lawn. She had been a bit suspicious of Ethan before she met him. She knew his family was rich, and that made her insecure about her house, but he made her feel at ease right away by coming in, kissing her on the cheek, and offering to fix the door on the china closet that was not closing right (only after she complained about it). She was afraid that I was quickly becoming an old maid at twenty-eight, and bringing home Ethan that first Christmas helped to alleviate her fears. I think, like all good parents, she just wanted everything to be settled for me. She had blamed me when Eric and I had broken up. Her view was that I moved to New York and left him behind. But really, he wanted to stay at the restaurant in Iowa City where we both worked, and New York scared him. He said he wouldn’t even come to visit me, and I wasn’t going to wait around for him. So, I left. My mother said after I was gone, he came to the house, weeping, and sat in my childhood bedroom for about six hours. She claimed I was a fool to let him go. She blamed me for that breakup and would blame me for whatever happened with Ethan. Therefore, I wasn’t going to call her back just yet.
When the bus arrived at Fifth and Mission in San Francisco, I decided that I couldn’t bear to ask Ethan for his help this time, so I schlepped my bag and my backpack onto the BART and took the train back to Berkeley. I walked in the door just after seven and Ethan was sitting on the couch, unshaven, wearing a Hanes T-shirt with yellow armpits and sweatpants. A beer and an empty plate with cheese residue sat in front of him on the coffee table and a basketball game was blaring on the television.
“I’m back,” I said. I dropped my things near the front door and headed straight for the kitchen. “I’m starving,” I said. “I didn’t have lunch.” Nervous talking. Stop it, Hannah. Ethan didn’t respond. The kitchen showed signs of a frozen pizza being heated and eaten, but no remnants were visible.
I made a quick peanut butter sandwich with the Wonder Bread I had put in the freezer for just such an emergency. Bread was always getting moldy in our apartment because we would buy fancy bread at the farmers’ market and then not have time to eat it. So one week, I went to Safeway and bought a loaf of Wonder Bread. I put the whole loaf in the freezer and it was a revelation. I could defrost a slice whenever I wanted. And since Ethan thought it was disgusting, he would never eat it. I spread peanut butter on one slice of bread and folded it into a half sandwich, trying to compose myself before I went back to the living room to get my bag.
Another one of my house rules was that suitcases should never be left packed. Maybe it was because when my mom brought my father’s bag back after his truck crash, she left it packed in their bedroom for almost three years. We never even really unpacked it, but after three years, Drew and I moved it to the back of her closet one afternoon when she was on a long shift. I headed back to the front door to get my bag to put the Sonoma things away immediately, even though I knew I was going to pack everything up in a few days. When I went into the bedroom to sort everything, I found the bed unmade and Ethan’s still-packed suitcase sitting on the floor next to the bed. I gritted my teeth. He knew that drove me crazy, and I was sure he did it just to get under my skin.
* * *
—
I put my clothes in the hamper, placed my shoes back in the shoe rack, and carried my toiletry bag through the living room on the way to the bathroom. As I passed by the couch, I said, “Don’t you want to do the laundry from this trip so you can get ready to pack up? For New York?”
“I want to talk to you about what you’re going to do about the winery,” he said.
“I have to put all of this away and then I have to finish that paper for applied innovation,” I said.
“I’m surprised it even matters to you,” he said.
“The paper? Why?” I asked. He was staring at me, so I brushed at my face. I had peanut butter on my lips. I licked it off.
“Because you’re throwing your future away. Why would you care about grades?”
“I don’t want to fail,” I said.
“That sounds like not caring to me,” he said.
“I care,” I said.
“But you’re going to stay here and work in a winery.”
“Yes,” I said.
He looked back at my notes for my paper, searching for an argument that would make sense. “And what about us? Do I still go to New York?”
“Of course you should go to New York,” I said. “You’ve already started developing your app with Graham and Jesse. It wouldn’t make sense for you to stay here. And who knows what is going to happen in the future.”
“How can you say that so flippantly? All of a s
udden, we’re going from moving in together in New York to living on separate coasts,” he said.
“I’m not being flippant. I’m just trying to be sensible. I want to try this thing out here. And if it doesn’t work out, I can move to New York.”
“But you’re giving up the job you worked all through grad school to get. I feel like this is about something else. Is this about that guy who worked at the winery? The son?”
“Not at all,” I said. “He’s going to New York too. You can hang out with him if you want to. I’m going to be in a winery with two middle-aged people who don’t understand the Internet.”
“This just feels like a breakup,” Ethan said.
“Well, it isn’t,” I said. Being home did remind me of all the fun that we had together, and about the time he had taken care of me when I had the flu, the time he had stayed up late into the night helping me memorize a speech for Business Communication. I didn’t want to break up with him, but I also didn’t want to be in New York with him this summer.
“Maybe it should be,” he said.
I could feel tears forming in my eyes. I blinked them away. Took a deep breath.
“Why?”
“You’re not choosing us,” he said.
“Aren’t I allowed to explore what I want? I’m only thirty years old.”
“I was three when my parents were our age.” This was something I had also thought about. I was nine when my parents were thirty, Drew was eleven, and Ethan was apparently three. My father didn’t go to college or graduate school; he just got a trucker’s license. My mother got pregnant, and then, when she had a small baby, she got an associate’s degree and took nursing courses while she worked in a doctor’s office as a receptionist. And thank goodness she had done that, because she was a widow by age thirty-two. My parents lived in the town next to the one where they were born and would stay there until they died. I wanted to explore, and I knew I could fit it all in. Sometimes when I thought about it long enough, it made me angry that there’s a tight timeline for women, that we have to figure things out by the time we’re in our late thirties. What if it takes longer than that? I couldn’t change biology, but I was only thirty and an opportunity was in front of me. I wanted to take it.
“So? It’s a different world from when we were born,” I said. “We have more opportunities.”
“Hannah, I don’t want things to change. I know I always had ideas about how things would be. About where my life would be when I was in my thirties. And when I met you . . . I thought this was going to be something. And now nothing is settled. I wanted—”
“I don’t know what I want anymore,” I said, cutting him off.
“Okay,” he said. Now it looked like he was going to cry. “I guess for now we should just focus on getting through the next few days.”
“Right,” I said. “Focus. One day at a time. It’s like a twelve-step program.”
“Except I don’t feel like I’m recovering,” he said.
“It’s a metaphor,” I said.
* * *
—
I went to bed first that night, like I always did. And he snuck into the bedroom, trying to be respectful and not wake me, like he always did, but he always woke me. I always pretended that he didn’t. He put his back to me, like he just wanted to go to sleep. I turned over and put my arm over him. “I do love you,” I said. “I’m just really confused.”
“I love you too.” He sighed.
* * *
—
The week passed by in a blur. We respectfully slept in the same bed, not crossing the centerline. We finished up our classes and wrote papers and edited each other’s work like we’d been doing all year. Tyra came by to gloat about getting my job at Goldman, but the fact that she was so happy made it hard to talk about my own conflict. I wasn’t sure if our friendship would ever recover. Ethan and I packed up the apartment together and hired a storage company to come and take our things away. We would figure out what to do with them when the summer was over and I decided what to do next. We packed suitcases with what we would need for the summer. We went to graduation and had dinner with Ethan’s parents at Chez Panisse. My mom and Drew couldn’t make it, because Drew couldn’t leave his school so close to the end of the year and my mother wouldn’t travel alone. Ethan felt bad that I didn’t have anyone to celebrate graduation with, and he nicely shut his parents down when they started asking when we would get engaged. He turned the conversation neatly to the renovation of their Scottsdale kitchen, and that consumed his mother for almost half the dinner. Ethan sold his car to a fellow Haas grad who was going to be working at Google.
On Sunday, May 14, at four A.M., we got out of bed and packed my car in silence. The street was deserted, all the lights off, and I imagined we were the only two people left in the world, walking up and down the steps of our building. It was like we both were making it take longer than necessary, neither one of us quite ready to go our separate ways. It was almost too quiet to talk. We passed each other sheepishly in the hallway. Ethan cleaned the bathroom mirror one last time and checked to make sure all the burners on the gas stove were turned off. We locked the front door together and walked down the stairs one final time, hand in hand, not speaking.
We settled into the car. He flipped on the radio, but I flipped it off. Then he flipped it back on again.
After a long silence, he said, “One thing.”
I took a deep breath. I didn’t really want to hear the “one thing.” I muttered a little “Hmm?”
“Where am I going to live?” he asked.
“What?” I asked.
“I can’t afford that apartment you rented on my own. Also, you should try to get your security deposit back so you can pay back your signing bonus.”
“Your parents’ place? Your friends Graham and Jesse?” His parents had plenty of room and were never even in their Park Avenue apartment. They spent the summer in the Hamptons and the winter in Scottsdale. He had lived there before he went to school. I didn’t think it would be a problem for him to do it again.
“I was hoping to be independent,” he said. “I am thirty years old after all.”
“It’ll be fun,” I said.
He put his head in his hands. At that moment, I had a flash of regret at what I was doing. My decision was hurting him, and it hurt my heart. But there was also a fine line between looking out for myself and feeling like a selfish person. I had read enough articles in women’s magazines about how women sacrifice their own happiness in order to keep from appearing selfish. Was what I was doing selfish? Maybe. But it was also what I needed to do. I had decided long ago that I was allowed to be selfish because so much of my childhood was stolen from me.
* * *
—
We pulled up to the airport and I popped the trunk. The sun still wasn’t up and the lights of the departures lane created a little illuminated cocoon around the car in an expanse of darkness. He got out of the car and retrieved his suitcase. I lowered the window and he leaned back through. “I guess this is it,” he said.
“I’ll talk to you soon,” I said. “This isn’t good-bye.”
“I’ll be waiting,” he said.
I closed the window, watched in the rearview mirror as he entered the airport, and drove away.
CHAPTER 7
After dropping Ethan off at the airport, I felt a bit adrift. It was too early, really, to head to Bellosguardo. It was an hour-and-a-half drive to Sonoma and it was just after five A.M. I had been invited for dinner, so I needed to find something to do for at least part of the day. All of our classmates had scattered. The roads were empty. I felt like the only person in all of San Francisco.
When I was a little girl, I made mix tapes for myself of my favorite songs from Casey Kasem’s weekly Top 40 on the radio. I wanted so badly to have a copy of “Killing Me Softly” by the Fugees so that I
could sing along over and over again. And even though the songs on my mix tapes had been taped off the radio, I was proud of them because they were in a specific order, an order that nobody else had. I liked to lie on the plastic lounge chair in the backyard and listen to the tapes on my father’s old Walkman, the yellow one that was supposed to be for sports. I would listen and think, I am the only person in the world listening to these songs in this order right now. What were the odds that someone else wanted to listen to “Killing Me Softly” and then “Me and Bobby McGee” and then “Who Will Save Your Soul” and then “Tainted Love,” a song my sometime babysitter, Julie, from down the street had always liked? I adored the idea of being the only one doing something. Of being unique. At age eleven, all I should have wanted to do was fit in; something about the fact that I loved to read books and to make radio mix tapes, and the uncool clothes that my mother bought me because they were affordable, just didn’t allow that to happen. In retrospect, I was cool. At the time, I felt just strange.
Now, at five A.M., with no old home to go back to and no new home to get to yet, I felt like the only person on earth. So I headed to Golden Gate Park to watch the sun rise. The park was on the way to Sonoma, but if the weather was nice, it wasn’t a bad place to spend time. I was a pretty good sleeper—insomnia hit me in only the most stressful of times—so it was rare for me to see the sun rise. I pulled into the parking lot and got my running shoes out of the trunk. I was already wearing my gray-and-black running pants and flowy gray running tank top underneath a cowl-neck tunic, more out of comfort than out of any plan to exercise, but now I was glad I was. The running clothes looked just like the Lululemon ones that I coveted but were from the remarkably more affordable Old Navy. I took off the tunic and put it and my clogs in the trunk. I laced up my pink-and-gray Brooks running shoes from Nordstrom Rack. I left my music in the car and decided just to be alone with my thoughts. Running had always been the way I processed what was going on in my life. I had started on the track team in high school. I was never very good, always near the back of the pack, but I liked the other people on the team and nobody seemed to begrudge my slow pace. I never complained about the workouts and I slowly got in better shape. I never was fast, but I learned to love the feeling of running, the calm it brought to me. I’d fallen out of the habit a bit in graduate school, partially because of stress and partially because I spent most of my free time with Ethan, but I was going to get back into it this summer.
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