Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) (19 page)

“Okay, have a good practice,” I managed to squeak out.

Don't ask him to come over later. Don't ask him to come over later.

“What are you up to later?” he asked.

“I don't know. I have the night off. I might do some writing.”

“I'll call you later. Maybe I can come over after practice.”

And just like that, I was glad again. By the time I walked him out, I was exhausted from the constant abacus of adjusting my emotions, trying to stay one step ahead of my insecurities, but I was also ready to be happy, almost.

Scott and I started dating, and suddenly, the whole city became my family. He was a central figure in the city's small, tightly knit punk-rock scene and took me everywhere, introducing me as his girlfriend to all of his bandmates and friends. Dozens of bartenders and bouncers and strippers and musicians, and the guys and girls who hung around the scene, looked out for me, and I loved the instant feeling of belonging.

My relationship with Scott unfurled almost effortlessly. After we'd been hanging out almost every night for nearly two months, I went to see Scott play at EJ's. I'd already grown accustomed to the routines of band life. I was used to hanging around after he played until all of the bands were done, and he'd helped load out the gear into the band van before we could leave. Given my high level of anxiety, it was a relief for me that we had quickly gotten to the point where I could assume we were going home together. So, on this night, I ordered a beer as his set ended. As Scott finished loading gear, I followed him onto the sidewalk in front of the club, already looking for his car.

“
Hey, Sarah, I need to talk to you for a sec,” he said.

My adrenaline spiked.
This is it. He's breaking up with me. I knew it was too good to be true. I knew I'd do something stupid and scare him off.

“That's cool,” I said. “I totally get it.”

I started to walk away. I knew better than to get upset or fight him on his decision. Any display of emotion on my part would only turn him off more. He grabbed my hand and pulled me into a little cubbyhole in the side of the building, leaning in close to me.

“What's up, crazy?” he said, looking down at me with a tender smile.

“You're breaking up with me, so I figured I'd find my own way home.”

“What are you talking about?” he said, laughing, but not meanly.

“You said you wanted to talk to me.”

“I just wanted to stay alone at my place tonight. I'm totally beat. I've been at your house every night this week, and I need to catch up on my sleep.”

“Oh,” I said. I was relieved, but not completely. I still had that fear that any time apart would be enough for him to realize he'd made a mistake and end it.

“Are you cool with that?”

“Of course,” I said, forcing myself to rally.

“I don't have practice tomorrow night, so we can hang out after work.”

Adjusting to the emotional intimacy of a relationship wasn't easy for me, and the more I liked Scott, the harder it got. I didn't know how to be, or who to be. It never occurred to me to be myself. Not that I was ever faking it exactly. It was sort of like how makeup didn't hide my freckles but made them more manageable. I was just trying to be my more manageable self.

Weirdly, Scott seemed to like everything about me. He even loved my freckles. He claimed he'd inherited this from his mom, who had a thing for his dad's freckles.

Having weathered some trauma as a kid, Scott was the kind of self-reliant person who assumed most people were jackasses, and he was better off taking care of himself. (My eleven-year-old self had finally found her kindred spirit.) But when people gave him a reason to trust them, he was incredibly loyal and fun loving.

He'd had more of everything than I'd had: more sex, more ­relationships—including two girlfriends he'd lived with—and more of the basic kind of life experience I was trying to catch up on fast. He had a modest job but always had enough money and made me feel that he was happy to treat me to breakfast or a beer. While I worried about whether or not I'd be a good, published writer someday, he was already a really good guitar player. Everyone in the city's punk scene seemed to know him and want him in their bands and at their parties. But he never took himself too seriously, and he'd be the first one to throw on a fluorescent green wig and ham for the camera with a face that joked: “Aren't I pretty?”

The only thing I seemed to have that he didn't was a college diploma, as he'd dropped out of Evergreen after his first year. I was actually embarrassed for having gone to college, convinced that my new punk friends would think I was a snob, and I edited it out of my brief life history. Scott told me I was nuts, and that he was proud of me for being intelligent. All of his love and healthy self-esteem couldn't help but have a good effect on me, and he started to wear me down with the idea that he wasn't leaving anytime soon. I started to feel the same way and began to think about putting down real roots in Portland.

One night, after Scott and I had been dating for a little more than two months, I was at EJ's, waiting for his band's set to begin. I was at the back of the club, drinking a longneck Bud and playing Guns N' Roses pinball. As it blared “Welcome to the Jungle,” I dug in hard, my arm muscles tensed, straining to keep the ball from the gutter. Scott came up behind me and stood close, nuzzling against my neck.

“Hey, what's up? Are you guys playing soon?”

“
I love you,” he said.

I turned to him, one big smile. “I love you, too.”

The ball zipped down between the flippers and was lost. We looked and looked at each other, and he kissed me and stood close for a long breath before walking away.

I pulled the trigger of the gun to launch a new ball. As it sailed up into play and the machine wailed at me, I started to cry. I was so happy and relieved and grateful. Tears streamed down my face as I effortlessly arced the ball through the game, again and again and again, playing the best round of pinball I'd ever played. I was in love.

Not that life didn't keep on happening. I'd had my period on the first night I spent with Scott, and then I didn't have it again for months and months. We went out and bought a bottle of Jim Beam and a pregnancy test, drinking Jim and gingers until we felt fortified enough to take it. As we waited for the results, I was afraid to look at Scott, afraid of scaring him off. But he didn't look away. He looked right at me. “Whatever happens, it'll be all right,” he said.

I wasn't pregnant. So I went to Planned Parenthood and completed that crucial step in any midnineties relationship: I got tested for HIV. I was clean and went on the pill. We began our life together, a reassuring source of stability when so much else felt beyond my control.

Sweetwater's Jam House remained shuttered while they prepared to open in a new location. When the café I'd been working at went out of business, I began collecting unemployment. My check was $78 a week and my rent was $268 a month. This meant I could just barely afford to buy myself packs of the Old Golds I'd started smoking, and occasionally, a tallboy of PBR from the Korean market across the street. But things were still tight. One morning after Scott had stayed over, he came back from the bathroom and found me picking up change that had fallen out of his jeans.

“What are you doing?” He laughed.

“Nothing,” I said, too embarrassed to fess up.

“Do you not have any money?” he asked gently.

“
My check comes on Friday.”

“I don't like the thought of you walking around with no money. What if something happens?”

I shrugged. It wasn't like I had a lot of other options. He handed me five dollars.

“If nothing else, buy yourself a coffee or something.”

I was deeply moved by his act of generosity, and the fact that he had really seen me.

Scott and I had been dating for four months going into the holidays. Even though I did my best approximation of cynical and Goth, and faced down the anniversary of the shooting eleven days before Christmas each year, I still loved the occasion as much as I had when I was a little girl. When Scott invited me to Christmas with his family, I was nervous just thinking about it, but also giddy with joy. This was a big deal, a step I'd never taken with a boyfriend before.

I didn't think much about spending my first Christmas away from home. I was twenty, after all, finally an adult. I would be fine. A week before Christmas, a box arrived in the mail from Mom. A few nights before we were scheduled to drive up to Scott's parents' house in Port Townsend, I had him over and said I was going to do my little Christmas. As usual, we were drinking bourbon. The first thing I pulled out of the box was my childhood Christmas stocking—red felt with goofy googly eyes and a hat. I loved that stocking. I loved Christmas. I loved my mom. My eyes started to mist up.

“Are you okay?” Scott asked.

“Yeah, sure, great.”

I reached for a narrow wrapped package from the top of the stocking and held it in my hand, my heart crumbling with homesickness, tears flowing freely.

“This is my toothbrush. I get a toothbrush every year in my stocking.”

I was crying too hard to unwrap my new toothbrush.

“That's it,” Scott said. “I can't stand to see you this sad. I'm putting you on a plane home for Christmas. I don't care how much it costs.”

“No, no, I want to stay with you,” I said through tears.

“Are you sure?” he asked, looking genuinely worried.

I nodded my head and started tearing through the Christmas packages as quickly as possible, as if I were ripping off Band-Aids.

“I know what will cheer you up,” Scott said.

“What?”

“Christmas specials. Let's go to the video store.”

“Really?” I said. I knew Scott, like most grown men, was not quite so into Christmas, or Christmas decorations, and definitely not into Christmas specials.

He was already putting on his leather jacket. We were soon curled up in bed at his house watching the special he had known would make me happier than any other:
The Nanny Saves Christmas.
I was very happy. And he, well, he was happy that I was happy.

I made a batch of Grammy's holiday nougats—like Mexican wedding cookies with a powdered-sugar coating—and the hippy cookies I'd loved from the land—made with whole wheat flour and honey—wanting to share my own history with Scott's family. We arrived at a big comfortable house where Scott's parents, three younger siblings, and the family dog all greeted me warmly. It was a lot compared to the quiet Christmases at my house growing up, and I instantly felt timid. But they were lovely. Scott's mom drew me out in conversation, and his dad made the kind of bad jokes dads are supposed to make. We had crepes on Christmas morning and watched
A Christmas Story.
At night, Scott and I quietly had sex on the pullout couch in the spare room.

That January, Sweetwater's opened its new location, a ten-minute walk from my apartment. I was tired of being broke and bored and couldn't wait to get back to work. On the first day of training, a tall, stylish woman with close-cropped hair said something offhand that threw me back to midcoast Maine.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Portland,” she said.

I stared at her in confusion. We all lived in Portland.

“Portland, Maine,” she clarified, laughing.

Her name was Marya, and she was two years older than I was, but we had hung out in Portland during the same years, and we knew many of the same people. Talking about home with her, it was okay to be a little homesick, and okay to be where I was now, living a life that was actually starting to make me happy. Like me, Marya was fiercely competitive, even when it didn't really matter, and we alternated who had the most sales and who sold the most specials. After a busy night, we both liked a shot of Gosling 151 rum with a Maker's Mark and soda back and a cigarette. We were fast friends.

Waitressing was good for me. I could be very shy, and while I wanted to look and be perfect at all times, my skin still broke out and made me self-conscious, and so it was good to have a job where I had to deal with it and go interact with people anyway.

Between waitressing and my first real love, I began to settle into my life in Portland.

I was spending quite a bit of time with Scott's family, and his dad was a welcome antidote to mine. He was handsome like Clint Eastwood, and had a gentle ease about him. Although he'd wanted to be a musician, he'd become a pharmacist to support his family. When Scott's parents visited us in Portland, they always took us out for a sushi dinner, during which his dad never failed to eat a mouthful of the spicy green horseradish, slap the table, and exclaim: “Wasabi!” It was comforting.

That July, my lease ran out. I wanted to move in with Scott. As always, I was focused on pressing forward, growing up, and I knew this was the next important step. Scott was more wary about the decision. He'd lived with girlfriends before and knew it was a serious undertaking. His reluctance hurt my feelings, and for the month the subject was up for debate, our interactions were fraught. I weighed each of his words as if they were measurements of how Scott felt for
me and how committed he was to our relationship. He raised the subject one night in June.

“I've been thinking about it a lot, and I'm ready for you to move in,” he said.

Of course, as soon as he gave me what I wanted, I was petrified.

“Are you sure?” I said.

“Yeah, that's what you want, right?”

It was what I had asked for, yes, but what I really wanted was a little more complex. I wanted Scott to promise he'd love me forever and never leave me, and I wanted him to mean it. Anything less than his complete devotion was scary for me. At the same time, I was twenty-one years old. I was in love for the first time. I knew there was a whole world out there, and that Portland, Oregon, might not be my ideal hometown. As I moved in, a vague unease grew within me. We went down to the basement for the beautiful antique bed frame he'd inherited from his grandmother and assembled it in our room. As I lay down next to Scott that night, he curled himself around me, winding his legs through mine, pulling me close to his chest, entwining his arms around me, as if trying to touch every inch of my skin with his. I felt deeply, purely happy.