Good Apple

by Elizabeth Passarella

  I wanted to be the woman who waited for a man to pursue her, but I was a) obnoxiously forward and talkative, and b) desperate. When I moved to New York in 1999, I employed a strategy in my crusade to find a boyfriend that I would call “the virgin surprise.” Any man reading this who thinks it’s a fun sexual adventure is going to be utterly disappointed—just like basically every man I met between August 1999 and August 2000. It went like this: On Saturday nights, my roommate Catherine and I would head to the West Village from our apartment on East 52nd Street. We didn’t have much of a dining out budget, and we knew we might need money for a cab home late at night, so instead of spending money on dinner, we would park ourselves at the bar of Tortilla Flats, a gaudy Mexican joint on Washington Street, buy a margarita, then fill up on free chips and salsa. Afterward we would head to Automatic Slims a couple of blocks down, where they played a steady stream of ’80s music and, depending on if the management or the cabaret police had come by lately to reprimand him for it or not, the bartender would let us dance on the bar. I would frequently wear a pair of snakeskin-print pants that I bought in the European section of the discount department store Century 21. I thought I was the stuff. And to be fair, in New York, I was slightly more the stuff than I’d been in high school and college, thanks to increased self-confidence (I had a good job; also, obnoxiously forward and talkative people were the norm here) and a Southern accent that some guys thought was cute. When a young man would show some interest, maybe buy me a drink or have a flirty conversation in a corner away from the speakers, I would play along until it got to the point where I thought he might kiss me, and I’d say, “But I’m not going to have sex with you.” And then I’d explain I was waiting for marriage. As if he asked. As I write this, I am newly amazed that I actually went on to have a few dates with several of these men—they surely thought this was a game, that they’d wear me down—but honestly, I thought the virgin surprise was like a shield, a force field of protection against any harm, physical or emotional.** Or maybe just a slim vestige of what Elisabeth Elliot would have wanted for me, which disintegrated the moment I climbed onto the bar at Automatic Slims and gyrated to “Livin’ on a Prayer.” One night, I went to a guy’s apartment. Correction: sublet; he was in the city for the summer working as an intern at an investment bank. I met him at the bar at Tortilla Flats, naturally, and felt immediately like we could be soulmates because he went to the University of Virginia (Southern!) and his name was Hunter, which was my roommate’s last name (kismet!). I followed him back to his sublet, waited while he took a shower (ew), and then, when he came out and I dropped the virgin surprise, he promptly walked me outside and put me in a cab. I wrote my number down with the only thing I could find in my purse: a lipliner. Note: he didn’t ask for my number.

  Eventually, one year after arriving in New York, a decent man did pursue me. He heard me telling an awkward dating story in the kitchen of a mutual friend’s apartment and noticed my hot pink pants—ridiculous pants were obviously my signature back then. He bought me a gin and tonic at the bar later, which I handed back to him to say there wasn’t enough gin in it (obnoxious). He offered to share a cab home with me, and when I turned to him and said, “I am not having sex with you,” he politely answered, “I wasn’t trying to.” Then, in the backseat, somewhere south of East 52nd Street, in defiance of Elisabeth Elliot and my mother and everything I thought I was supposed to do in letting a man make the first move, I leaned over and kissed him. Five years later we got married.

  TWO

  HOW I BECAME A DEMOCRAT: PART 1

  IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND HOW BIG a deal it is that I’m a Democrat, I need you to know that in college, I interned for Ralph Reed at the Christian Coalition. It was the summer after my sophomore year of college. I’d spent the previous summer living at home, working at a day camp while preparing for my older sister’s wedding (I was a terrible day camp counselor; I had the kids give me back rubs during quiet time), and I felt like I needed to do something exceptional that year that marked my path forward as an Important Journalist. Unfortunately, CNN didn’t answer any of my letters.

  What I should have done—and eventually did, a few years later—was go to New York. Wait, back up a little bit. What I should have done was applied for internships six months before, when most eager journalism students were scouring bulletin boards outside their classrooms to find opportunities as, say, copyediting interns at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. The following summer, after I had a year of my undergraduate journalism degree under my belt, I got my act together, but as a sophomore, I was still better suited to be a lazy day camp counselor than anything beyond a coffee-fetcher at a newspaper. Plus, New York was still fairly terrifying to me. I never saw myself living there and even made a dumb proclamation when applying to colleges that I’d “never go anywhere above the Mason-Dixon Line.” Really. What IS the Mason-Dixon Line anyway? Where does it hit? Who are Mason and Dixon? I definitely didn’t know when I made that statement. I applied to the University of Virginia. Was that above the Mason-Dixon? Other than being an amorphous boundary between North and South that took on a fabled aura, like the seventh circle of Hell, somewhere my people knew wasn’t a place you wanted to go, the exact location of the Mason-Dixon Line could have curved around Lexington, Kentucky, or gone all the way to Baltimore or stopped right above Dyersburg, Tennessee, for all I knew.

  I went to Washington, DC, to find a job for the summer because it was a big city that wasn’t New York, and it was where my dad’s friend Louis owned an adorable little house that he said I could stay in until I found an apartment. Louis’s house was a colonial-era, former post office in Falls Church, Virginia. The original portion, before someone added on to the back, was one room deep, and the stairs were so creaky that I’d try to skip as many as possible coming down in the morning in an attempt to be a polite, noiseless houseguest. Louis and my dad grew up together in Memphis, and Louis took care of me like I was his own daughter, which included him sitting in the kitchen every morning for a week or two saying things like, “The Washington Flyer would be crazy not to hire you,” and “Don’t be afraid to knock on doors.” And, God bless me, I did. At that time email was still relatively new, so I communicated with my would-be employers by writing letters and making cold calls and, finally, showing up at their doors. After getting nowhere—again, most internships had filled up months before, and I had zero connections—I decided that maybe I could take a slight sidestep from newspapers or television and, instead, put my skills to work at a nonprofit or political organization. What happened next was, in my memory, like Eddie Murphy in Coming to America deciding that the place to find a girlfriend fit for the throne was Queens, New York. It was as if I thumbed through the Yellow Pages . . . “Chick-fil-A . . . Chocolate Heaven . . . Christian Coalition! That’s me!” The next day, I showed up at the townhouse where their offices were with a backpack full of résumés and a sandwich Louis had packed for me. The woman who answered the door said an intern had just quit a few days in, and they could probably use me.

  When anyone asks me about that summer of my life, even now, the first thoughts that pop into my head are of the clothes I would wear (a lot of wide-legged, rayon pants) and the feeling of sweat pooling underneath my backpack straps as I walked from the Union Station Metro stop to work in the Washington, DC, heat. I would arrive every morning with pit stains the length of bananas—only, the right was always bigger, because I sweat more out of my right armpit than my left, always have—and slightly damp hair. My other vivid memory: I once walked into Ralph Reed’s office to deliver a phone message and found him with his bare foot propped up on the desk, clipping his toenails. But overall, my job was pretty boring. I’d cut out and photocopy news articles mentioning the Christian Coalition, staple things into piles. I don’t remember any of my fellow interns’ names—was there a Gary?—but I remember my boss, who was petite with long, poofy, curly black hair and reminded me of Elaine Benes from Seinfeld. Oh, and she was Jewish. Jewish! At
the Christian Coalition! My dad was Jewish, and somehow this confluence of Old and New Testament folk, of God’s chosen people working alongside gospel believers like me, felt inclusive and right. I was not yet aware of the close connection between certain Jews and the agenda of the Republican Party, and I was fervently on board with whatever Elaine was pushing, which, that summer, was trying to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts. There was a lot of office outrage over the perceived obscenity of Andres Serrano’s photograph Piss Christ, which had a crucifix submerged in Serrano’s urine. (Later that summer, I’d have dinner with a friend of a friend who was, if you can believe it, interning at the NEA. I started an argument about government-funded pornography—cribbed straight from my coworkers’ talking points—an argument I’d forgotten about until years later, when that woman and I both moved to New York and became good friends, and she used the story to introduce me to a room of women at her baby shower.)

  One might assume that at twenty years old, working at an extremely partisan organization like the Christian Coalition, I was into politics. That I had joined a young Republicans club on campus or at least read up on the partial birth abortion ban that went through Congress in 1995 and was eventually vetoed by President Bill Clinton. But I really wasn’t. I just liked to argue. In third grade my class took a personality test that was supposed to give you suggestions about your future profession. I don’t remember if it was to jump-start a discussion of careers or if the company was prototyping a new quiz and needed nine-year-old subjects; it definitely seems strange in hindsight. The test felt like a typical Myers-Briggs-ish thing, only it gave you actual, concrete jobs at the end, things like nurse or librarian or vacuum salesman. I got a split between two possible paths: lawyer or stand-up comedian. It tracks. My need to have my voice heard was unquenchable, and I would argue you up one wall and down the other, regardless of how passionate I felt about my position. For example, I remember having the following exchange with my friend Olivia, sitting in the breezeway of our high school, during a study hall senior year.

  Me: I don’t think I will have a career. I’ll stay home and raise my kids.

  OLIVIA: So why do you care about where you’re going to college? Why apply to the best place you can get into? Why go at all?

  Me: Because raising children is the most important job on earth, you are raising human beings, and you need to be knowledgeable about the world to do that. How could you believe that any job is more important than being a mother? (I mean, that’s true, but still, I was insufferable.)

  OLIVIA: What if you don’t get married?

  ME: What? Not get married? What do you even mean?

  With that, I huffed and walked to the senior den, a lounge reserved for, and whimsically decorated by, the graduating class, where a group was watching Days of Our Lives—the season when Marlena was possessed by the devil—during our lunch hour. The funny thing is, I wanted to have a career, maybe even as a lawyer or a stand-up comedian. I cared very much about where I got into college. And to this day, despite being a mother of three, I’m ambivalent about children. The point is, I saw in Olivia, our valedictorian, a worthy foe and got into it.

  . . .

  At eighteen years old, I wasn’t a diehard political partisan. What I was—and remained for many years after—was what so many Americans are: someone living in a sociopolitical bubble, where their family and friends and neighbors think pretty much like they do.* My parents didn’t put signs in our yard or bumper stickers on their cars; no one was especially politically active in our family. But we did watch a lot of Crossfire with Pat Buchanan and Michael Kinsley. For some reason, I take pride in the fact that I was watching Crossfire before lightweights like Tucker Carlson became part of the lineup. I got this from my dad, who didn’t acknowledge anything beyond the Jerry Orbach years of Law & Order. It’s starting to sound like my family actually was kind of political, isn’t it? Okay, let me just say this: my dad also religiously listened to NPR’s Morning Edition in the car on the way to school. Can you say that in 2020? A Republican listening to NPR every morning? The kids we carpooled with would have to endure not only the news, instead of the pop anthems of FM 100, but also long discussions between me and my dad in the front seat, wondering whether reporter Mara Liasson’s name was Mar Aliasson, Maralei Eson, or some other iteration. This was before everyone had a smartphone where they could look it up.

  So. That’s where I was coming from. I grew up in a conservative circle in Memphis, Tennessee, with parents (and friends’ parents) who voted Republican, and I worked for the Christian Coalition. Like most teenagers—and slightly fewer but still a lot of college students—I followed along with what my parents and community believed, like a lemming. I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, proving my lemming-ness, because I followed my sister without weighing a ton of options. There, it was more of the same: a general apathy toward politics, with the understanding that most of my friends came from similar backgrounds and had similar views. I voted for Bob Dole in 1996—I think; there’s a chance I may have been hungover or it was chicken fingers and Derby pie day at my sorority house and that bumped all other activities—and took a bioethics class where I wrote a paper on the right to life that I got an A minus on. Getting from there to where I am now was a gradual shift. My mother blames my slide into liberalism on two people: my childhood friend Vanessa and my husband. Vanessa went to Harvard Law School and became a civil rights attorney, working with the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta and trying to get people off death row in states like Alabama and Arizona. My husband just grew up with a left-leaning family in New York City. Both of them were, in fact, steady influences on my political views, opening my eyes to issues and ideas that never crossed the transom, so to speak, growing up. But the person my mom should really blame is the internship coordinator for Newsday, the newspaper on Long Island, New York, who offered me the job that got me, finally, above the Mason-Dixon Line.

  How I decided, after my asinine declarations as a teenager, that New York City was the place for me is another story. The point is that I was going to Manhattan, and I was going to work for a magazine, and life could take off or . . . something. As Sally says in the first few minutes of When Harry Met Sally, “I mean, nothing’s happened to me yet. That’s why I’m going to New York.” During my senior year I applied for a lot of different summer internships at magazines, hoping that would turn into a job, but anyone who has worked in magazines knows that approximately 12,742 people apply for every one position in the internship program at places like Condé Nast and Hearst. And in terms of applying for an actual job, the Human Resources directors would always say that it’s better if you’re already living in the city, you know, so you’d be available ASAP should something come up. And, unbelievably, there are 12,742 people who can afford to put a deposit down and pay rent in New York City without a job, waiting for that call. My parents were willing to help me out a little, but I needed a concrete assignment. Applying for the internship at Newsday was an afterthought. It wasn’t a magazine, and it wasn’t in Manhattan, but the man who came down to Chapel Hill to interview the applicants had lived in Memphis, and we really hit it off. I got the job. Then, because I was stubborn and convinced a suburban newspaper wasn’t quite grand enough for me, I turned it down. It was a temporary gig, I reasoned. I’d land something permanent in Manhattan once I was up there. The internship coordinator, because he is a blessed saint who cared more about a twenty-two-year-old’s career path than he should have and definitely deserved a raise, called to tell me that I was making a mistake. He said I was one of two people chosen to work on the magazine section of the paper (think Parade), and was I absolutely sure? I said okay, I’d take it. It’s here I should note that I thought Long Island was like Hoboken, a small enclave just across the river, a tiny button of civilization, a quick ferry or subway ride from the city. I repeat: I had no idea Long Island was an enormous landmass consisting of two whole counties that jutted out into t
he Atlantic Ocean, complete with the Hamptons dangling on the end. You can imagine how confused I was when the Newsday people set me up to live with a family in a town that they said was a twenty- to thirty-minute drive from the offices and that I would need a car.