Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) (16 page)

For my senior year, Beth and another Simon's Rock friend, Sarjan, and I moved off campus, into an old farmhouse. Oliver resurfaced, and we had long calls on the house phone, which I cradled against my neck while I sat at the kitchen table, drinking and chain-smoking. I lived on cigarettes and gin, resolute in my avoidance of all fat and most food. All I wanted was to be skinny and in control, and as my hip bones jutted through the fabric of my favorite striped dress, I had a clean, strong feeling.

One night when I was tipsy on the phone with a very drunk Oliver, he surprised me. “You should come see me,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

I was eighteen. I had my own car. He was only a few hours away. We had been declaring our love to each other, and then not talking, and then talking again, for three years at that point. Beth did not want me to go.

“I have to go,” I told her. “I have to see what happens.”

She was, reasonably, afraid that he was going to hurt me, literally or figuratively. He had told me about once pushing a girlfriend in front of a car. It was unclear whether this was true or not, but either way, he had said it. He was also the man who had gotten me through my last horrible year of high school, who had listened to me for hours when I felt like no one else would, who had given me hope that there was life beyond my limited horizons. As I got into my car, Beth stood in the driveway with me.

“I can be there in four hours,” she said. “Call me. Call me.”

“I'll be fine, Beth.”

I smoked and smoked and smoked on the drive down. The slightly run-down house I pulled up in front of looked like as if it had been ground down by generation after generation of careless students drunk on cheap beer.

My meeting with Oliver was instantly weird; not bad, but not familiar the way I had expected it to be. He seemed smaller than I'd anticipated, not shorter exactly, but regular size after my immense imaginings. In my letters I'd been able to ask him to come down to my level, to reassure me about his intentions, to make me feel valued and not at all like the silly stupid girl I always feared I was. In person, I was too scared to ask. I wanted to draw close, but I didn't dare. He stared at me, not giving anything away. We didn't know where to look, what to say, where to sit.

“Let me give you a tour,” he said. “We can stop at the liquor store.”

He drove me around his town in his car, pointing out the places that felt tender and familiar to me because they had been featured in so many letters and phone calls. The tour was a good idea, something for us to do, somewhere for us to look. He stopped at the liquor store and emerged with a bottle of his favorite whiskey, Canadian Club. We went back to his house and got drunk. Fast. The more I drank, the more I wanted to be close to him, and the more frustrated and hurt I became when nothing physical happened. I knew it was something disappointing about me. He'd told me how he'd longed for this, but here I was, and he didn't want me. Finally, he came for me on the couch. We kissed. And kissed. He pulled at my dress.

“How'd you get so skinny?” he asked.

After years of worrying he wouldn't think I was pretty enough if we ever met, I took this as a compliment. I was happy. Until I woke up in the morning—my head, and the sun, and the air crashing down on me—and I realized we hadn't had sex. We hadn't made any tender declarations of love. He had rejected me, after all. He wasn't touching me or even looking at me. He was totally closed down. “Oliver?” I said, unsure what to ask.

“You should go.”

I sat up as if he had slapped me, and was already moving away. It felt as if spikes were being driven into my head, and my heart hurt just as badly. He was sending me away almost as quickly as I'd arrived.
I staggered up, trying to get out of there before I started to cry. No matter what, I thought, I couldn't let him see me cry. Oliver sat on the steps of his porch and watched me drive away, a not particularly friendly look on his face.

I was sick with hangover and disappointment and shame on my four-hour drive back to Tivoli. I chain-smoked, listened to Hole, and held on to my steering wheel as if it could hold me together. Beth was at the house waiting for me, as she was there for me every day that year, a life raft of comfort in a world I found increasingly inclement. Oliver and I never really spoke about what had happened. I was too embarrassed to admit I'd wanted more, and even though I still loved him, it no longer felt safe to do so.

That fall we started our senior year. On the one hand Beth, Sarjan, and I couldn't have asked for more. We were three close friends living in our first apartment, and we spent hours sitting in the kitchen, talking, smoking, drinking coffee, weaving a web of comfort around ourselves after hard days on campus and as we questioned what to do next. On the other hand, we never really found a way to fit in at Bard, which wasn't giving us much confidence about life postgraduation. In the spring, I'd be a nineteen-year-old college graduate. The great big world I'd been in such a rush to go out and meet suddenly bore down on me.

But I had one sure thing onto which I could pin all of my hopes and dreams, and which felt like a lance against my deepest fears and insecurities. Every year the school, which was known for its writing program, chose the most promising writing student entering the senior class. The award was named for the school's most famous former teacher: Mary McCarthy. The previous year, I'd been chosen. At first I hadn't believed it. But then I'd felt as if a sunbeam were lighting me up from inside. My time at Bard had not been easy for me. My drinking and bad romantic judgment had crested one night at a party, when I'd climbed into bed with my latest obsession and he'd purposely burned me with a cigarette. Afterward, Beth gave me
some tough love: “You're lucky you're a girl. If you were a guy, the shit you do would be scary.”

I knew what she meant. And she was right: I was not feeling in any way strong or clear. But I had poured everything into my writing, and my teachers had recognized this. I was on the right path.

M
y dad began sending me a flurry of letters, always setting the groundwork for an upcoming visit that never came. He continued to move forward, no thought spared for his past behavior or the possibility it could have affected me. I was fed up as I read his latest card.

“Fuck him,” I said, lying on Sarjan's bed. “I'm so tired of all of his bullshit about his gambling and his back and all of his problems. It's all he ever talks about.” I felt myself moving into a stage of my life where I knew for sure that I existed without my dad. It was unsettling, but also a relief.

Although the power dynamic had shifted slightly, it wasn't enough to change the pattern of our relationship. I still diligently wrote him back, earnestly responding to every plan he suggested, telling him which bus station was near my apartment, and when I would be on break. Everything seemed without consequence anyhow. Nothing that I wrote or said made him get on a bus and come see me.

Oliver drifted in and out of my life. Now that I'd met him, and our connection hadn't bloomed into whatever I'd thought it might be, the yo-yoing felt like a definite rejection and caused me more pain than ever. When Beth was home, she kept an eye on me, sometimes checking on me from her window, which because of the way the house was gabled looked into my room. She took the paring knife out of my hand the night I carved Oliver's initials in my ankle, trying to release a little of the impossible pain within me with a manageable physical pain. When she saw that I had passed out with candles burning in my room, she came in and blew them out so I didn't burn the house down.

Claire had settled in New Orleans and was living alone in a studio apartment in the French Quarter, and Beth and I decided to visit her for Mardi Gras. Lulled by an enjoyable reunion I'd had with Matt over New Year's, I'd agreed to let him come meet us in New Orleans, even though he and Claire maintained an uneasy friction in the best of times, and were bound to get on each other's nerves with all of us crammed into her apartment.

On the first night, he and I snuck out of Claire's apartment, went down to the enclosed courtyard of her building, and had sweet, familiar sex against a wall. After the social stress of Bard, it was so nice to be around his constant good-natured affection. And then, without reason, he confessed that he'd been fucking that girl Maxine while we were dating, and many of our classmates had known and assumed I had, too. I'd believed him when he'd said he loved me, when he'd asked me to move to Tennessee and marry him. I pushed away from him, sick with disgust and shame at letting myself get played like that. He'd made a fool out of me, despite how loving he'd always been toward me. No one could be trusted.

“Go,” I said, backing across the courtyard. “I don't want to see you right now.”

“But, Sarah,” he pleaded.

I could excuse so much, forgive nearly to infinity, let a man storm my castle even when it was clear I shouldn't, but once I pulled up the
drawbridge, it was done. I understood why he'd slept with Maxine. I had been aloof and sometimes mean, and she'd doted on him and made him feel valued and seen. I could forgive him for that. I couldn't forgive him for betraying me so publicly while privately—and ­relentlessly—declaring his love and devotion to me.

When he was gone, I sat stunned, smoking on the balcony overlooking the glittery Mardi Gras parade floating down the street outside Claire's apartment. I started drinking. It became one of those drunk nights where everything felt sparkly and possible. The Rebirth Brass Band was playing their usual Preservation Hall show. The music was fierce and good and free. We danced, and it was everything we'd wanted the adventure to be. Partway through the sweaty set, Claire and I ducked outside and sat down on the sidewalk. There was a way we could talk together, our minds meeting with a feral hunger for information and experience. We both understood each other intrinsically, and it felt good to have a moment alone together even as everything was changing.

“I can't believe I'm graduating,” I said. “I have no idea what I'm going to do.” In less than three months I would graduate from college with a creative writing degree, and it was beginning to dawn on me that the world at large didn't give a fuck about my Mary McCarthy Prize.

“We should move somewhere,” Claire said.

“Where?”

“I don't know. Maybe Portland, Oregon.”

“Okay,” I said before I had time to get scared or doubt that we could do it.

We shook hands, and it was decided. When I graduated in May, we were going to move to the other side of the country, to a place I had never been, and build a life that I couldn't imagine yet. But that didn't matter. I had a plan. With my best friend. I felt a huge weight shift, not off me entirely, but it wasn't so heavy anymore.

Much of my extended family came to graduation. We had a big dinner. It was wonderful, being acknowledged for how hard I'd worked.
More than that, the madcap dream Mom and I had embarked on in the name of my sanity had actually paid off, even with the shooting, even with the darker moments my family didn't know about.

My father, again, did not attend, and he did not send a card. His letters always promised our reunion would happen, always in some future that was constantly being pushed back. I had too much pride, and enough of Mom's natural Protestant reserve, to keep me from just showing up on his doorstep, no matter how much I wanted him. Now, though, I wanted him less than ever before. Having everyone fuss over my graduation threw into stark contrast how incapable he was of even the most basic manners, let alone real affection or genuine closeness. It hurt. But I was also beginning to see him as the Boy Who Cried Wolf—the Dad Who Promised to Visit—and like those villagers, I no longer believed.

I went home to Maine to finalize what I would bring with me cross-country, and to say good-bye to my family. On the morning I prepared to leave, Craig came out to the driveway and stared into my car. “Where's Claire going to put her stuff?” he asked.

“In there,” I said, pointing, even though there wasn't much visible space.

Craig started pulling shoes out. “Do you really need so many shoes?”

I shrugged, glad for his attention and assistance, but trying to act like I didn't need either on the eve of the big adventure I'd longed for, always.

Finally, it was time to say good-bye to Mom. I was nineteen years old, I had saved just shy of three thousand dollars, and I was setting out on a cross-country drive in the time before cell phones. She was remarkably Zen about the whole thing. I'd recently begun to appreciate all of the values Mom and I shared: how she'd ridden a bus down to join me freshman year when I'd marched on Washington in support of reproductive rights, how she took me to see movies that mattered to me—
Howards End
and
The Crying Game
—and read the same books—
The Secret History
—which we loved to talk about. I knew I'd miss her, as much I also knew I needed to go.

She always really shone when it came to special-occasion gifts and cards, and she had given me a beautiful ring when I graduated from Bard, along with a letter. It said that while she sometimes wished I had slowed down and enjoyed myself more instead of always rushing to grow up, I had turned out so well that it had obviously been for the best. She said she didn't worry about me because she could tell I had a good head on my shoulders, but if she could give me one piece of advice it was this: “Beware of needy men. They will only bring you down.” I loved receiving the letter, loved being spoken to like the adult I was desperate to be, and valued the feeling of closeness between us.

Now I was going far away, and I didn't know when I'd see her again, probably not until Christmas. I had to go, but I felt the same way as I had when I'd left for Simon's Rock; a part of me wanted to stay small and live there with her forever. She hugged me. I started to cry. “I love you, Mom,” I said.