Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) (20 page)

“This is my favorite part of the day,” I said every night I fell asleep beside him.

I
was still baffled as to how to be a writer, but I was trying. I signed up for a creative nonfiction class at the local community college. I attended readings and befriended writers. I began to write. Short stories. Essays. I sent them to literary journals, collecting my rejection slips as the successful writers I admired had once done. Mostly my day-to-day life revolved around Scott, and for a time, I was comfortable with that.

On the other hand, I was getting frustrated with waitressing. I wanted to learn more about writing and publishing, but there were few jobs in those fields in Portland. I got a job temping at a cool real estate office. Upon learning I was an aspiring writer, one of the Realtors said, “Oh, you should meet my client, Win. I just sold him the Tin House from Ursula Le Guin's story, and he's going to start a literary journal there.”

This was big news. Despite my love for Scott, I was really starting to feel stuck. Marya had gotten accepted to law school and departed for her new life. Claire had moved back east and got an apartment in
Brooklyn with one of our old Simon's Rock friends. They had been two of my primary outlets for talking about books and culture and had shaped my tastes in important ways. Marya had gotten me into cutting-edge fiction like
Infinite Jest,
and although I'd had trouble with it, I read every word out of respect for her. It was this accomplishment that landed me a job as the first copy editor at Portland's new literary journal,
Tin House,
where my first task was to edit a story by none other than David Foster Wallace. Not long after that, I got a paid internship at the
Oregonian
's website,
Oregonlive.com
, and I learned how to write HTML code and post articles about entertainment-related topics. My favorite part of the job was that they let me write articles about local readings and interview authors such as Kevin Canty and David Sedaris, who sent me the most charming thank-you letter after our meeting. I'd found a larger community of writers and thinkers, and I wanted to join them. I began to feel isolated and left behind in Portland, that familiar dread of being unable to stay and afraid to go.

Scott respected my friendship with Claire, but he was not crazy about her. She had the kind of erratic, high-maintenance personality that made many men uneasy, especially him, because he considered that kind of behavior bullshit. And he had seen the havoc she could wreak on my emotional state. She regularly called from the East Coast and questioned my life in Portland on every level: Was I writing? What was I writing? Was I getting the stimulus I needed? The support? Where could I possibly go in such a small city? What could I achieve? Even though Scott was supportive, wasn't his band, his music, his desire to stay in Portland coming before my need to grow? She was asking from a place of love, but she had an intensity that could feel judgmental.

By the end of our calls, my responses grew monosyllabic, and I was often crying. Scott gave me my privacy, but as my sobs grew audible, he was unable to resist checking in on me. When I hung up, I threw myself down on the bed.

“Why are you friends with her when she makes you feel so bad?” he asked.

“
Because she's my best friend.”

I couldn't tell him that part of the reason I was crying was I knew Claire was right. A rift was growing, and I would have to deal with it eventually. I think Scott sensed that she urged me to want more than I could have in my life with him.

That Christmas, when I was twenty-two, I traveled east and was again due to have lunch with Betty and Mimi. Arriving outside Mimi's apartment building a bit early, this time I called in advance to make sure she was receiving company. And even having been welcomed by her on the phone, I was nervous as I rode the elevator up and rang the bell. Although she was sixty, her face was hardly touched by time, her skin smooth and bronzed. She had brassy blond hair and precisely lined lips and eyebrows. It seemed that maybe she had not left her apartment in several days. As she welcomed me, I slid sideways past a chrome clothes rack parked in the narrow hallway, through a wispy curtain, into her living room.

“Let me get a look at you,” she said.

Meanwhile, I wanted to get a look at her apartment. The antiques Betty had encouraged me to covet were crushed against one another, arranged for space rather than effect: cluttered with stacked baskets and clusters of picture frames, many featuring photographs of Mimi. Small decorative tables had been called into active labor, loaded with a half dozen lamps. “I forage the neighborhood for discards,” she explained.

I followed Mimi through the tunnel of cleared floor to her bedroom, which opened from the living room. Under glass atop her dresser were pictures of me as a child, some photographs I'd never seen before. There I was as a baby with my father and mother, later in a black gown, graduating from college. I felt an eerie sensation, like I'd been living in a snow globe my aunt could have reached out and shook anytime but didn't. She pointed a manicured nail to a photo of my father with a dark, bushy beard. “That was taken when John traveled to San Francisco in the sixties,” she said. “He went from being an acid freak to a Jesus freak in six months.”

I had not seen my father in seven years. Facts had always been hard to come by in this family, so I basked in the relative normalcy of Mimi's candid stories.

Through the bathroom, and into the kitchen, I met her cat, Lovey. Mimi prepared to style her hair, plugging in her hair dryer over the sink. I sat in a chair, one of the few empty surfaces in the room, and my aunt offered me something to drink: water, juice, or beer. I admitted I was “out late with my friends” the night before and opted for water.

“Oh, if you had too much to drink last night, you need a beer.”

“No, really, water would be great.”

“A beer will make you feel better.”

Laughing inside, I agreed. Mimi opened her refrigerator and pulled out a can of Schlitz. I laughed outside, too, when I saw that women on the Upper West Side, or at least this woman, drank the same cheap beer I'd overindulged in during college.

“Do you want ice in that?”

“No, thank you.”

“I always put ice in my beer so I get rehydrated while I'm drinking.”

She poured us each a glass of beer, hers with ice. As she styled her hair, she leaned over and looked at my feet.

“Let me see your shoes,” she said.

I held up one of my Beatle boots, mystified.

“Betty never likes the shoes you wear,” she said. “Those look better.”

Her comment reminded me to be nervous of Betty, who had criticized more than my clothes to my face, telling me to lose weight, put on more makeup, comb my hair.

The building bucked a little, as the elevator rose toward our floor.

“Hurry, finish your beer so your grandmother won't see us drinking,” Mimi said.

“I'm over twenty-one. I can drink.”

The look she gave me just made me drink faster, even though the elevator was a false alarm. A few minutes later, the elevator again
lumbered toward us. Mimi turned off the light in her kitchen, so Betty wouldn't see what we were drinking.

When Betty arrived, I sat on the couch with her while Mimi finished primping.

“You look nice,” Betty said. “Your makeup is perfect.”

Does she need to have her cataracts removed again?
I wondered, but with relief.

“Bring us some juice, Mimi,” Betty called out. “Sarah and I want juice.”

With obvious patience—in stark contrast to the snide remarks my father and Betty had made about her—Mimi came into the living room, a smile on her face.

“I have apple juice,” she said, smiling at me.

Turning to Betty, she asked, “Did you take your medicine this morning?”

Betty waved away her inquiry. “Bring us some apple juice.”

Mimi returned with two short glasses filled with ice and juice. She set one glass down on the coffee table in front of Betty and handed me the other.

“Drink your apple juice, Sarah,” she said, beaming at me.

I took a sip and tasted Schlitz over ice.

So that was my auntie Mimi.

B
ack home after the holidays, I was increasingly eager to leave Portland, exhausted by waitressing and frustrated by my attempts to find a rewarding job related to writing. Scott really, truly did not want to live anywhere else. But we were deeply in love, and I couldn't imagine my life without him, as I told him—and myself—again and again. I decided that if I went away to graduate school for journalism, it would be a temporary fix. Once I had my degree, I'd be better set up to get a rewarding job in Portland or a city Scott might be ready to check out by then. Long distance would be really hard, but it seemed doable.

Of course a plan that makes sense intellectually can still hurt your heart. When it came time to fly to school in Boston in the fall of 1999, I arranged for a ride from a friend. I was afraid if Scott took me to the airport, I wouldn't be able to make myself get out of the car.

The night before my flight, I had more packing left than I'd thought, and I was frantic. Scott stayed in our extra bedroom, growing morose as it became clear we weren't going to get any good time with each other, and then I would be gone, and we wouldn't see each other for at least six weeks. Finally, exhausted, I went to make the bed, but I couldn't find any sheets.

“I'm done,” I said, leaning into the office. “Have you seen the sheets, so I can make the bed?”

“I don't know. You must have packed them all.”

“I didn't. I'm sure of it.”

We were both tired and sad, and the tension ratcheted up between us. I turned and went back into the bedroom, feeling icky and awful. I hated to make anyone upset, especially Scott, and I was incredibly sensitive to anything that felt like a rebuke, particularly on the night before we were going to be apart for so long. I dug up a sheet in the closet we had shared, but it was covered in the strange blue mold that sometimes grew in the house. I brought the sheet to my nose. It smelled earthy, not entirely clean. But it was fine, and I was too tired to care. I made up the bed and lay down alone, feeling like I was being punished for my ambition and my hunger to see the world, like it was costing me the love that felt like a home of my own. I was wide awake when Scott lay down. He didn't touch me. I started to cry, needing my favorite part of the day, but knowing I'd been the one to give up this ritual, even just temporarily.

I knew if I went away without us having sex, it would feel like a wedge had come between us, especially because in the past, Scott and I hadn't been able to get enough of each other: in his car, and my car; on the couch and in the stairway of our house, even though our roommates were home; in the stairwell under the Morrison Bridge on our
way back from a party; once in the middle of the Hawthorne Bridge when it was closed for construction. And now, we weren't even letting one centimeter of our skin brush up against each other.

Too soon, it was time to get up. The friend who was taking me to the airport waited downstairs, with a bottle of orange juice and a bottle of vodka. I held the vodka in my hand, too sick with sleeplessness, and too hungry for success, to take a drink. I sobbed as she pulled away from my home. As I had told Scott again and again as my departure date approached, I still loved him and wanted my future with him as much as ever, but I also needed more than Portland could give me. I knew there was no turning back. I had outgrown that time in my life, as good as it had been, just as I'd outgrown paradises before: Simon's Rock, and before that, the land. There was nothing to be done but to move forward and hope the deep, true love I felt for Scott would help him to come with me somehow.

At school, I missed Scott terribly. I missed his bratty sense of humor and the nonchalant care he took of me. I missed the routines of our life together. I threw myself into school. At least I liked the challenge of conquering a new way to write. Seven years into my decision to become a writer, I remained obsessed. But sometimes journalism felt like working in a factory. Luckily my inner perfectionist was always eager for the A, and so I forced down my unhappiness and worked as hard as I possibly could.

I was very aware that I was once more in my father's city. It had been eight years since I'd seen him, and we had long ago given up the pretext of planning visits. I had no expectations left for him to disappoint. I had certainly never anticipated any financial help when I'd taken up my plan for graduate school, and I wasn't expecting him to treat me to cups of coffee. Still, I was drawn to him as with almost no one else. After I'd been living in Boston for a few weeks, I sent him a postcard telling him I was there. It was impossible not to want him to surprise me, but I didn't let myself hope. I wasn't even sure I'd get an answer. He did eventually write me back, and we began a sporadic correspondence,
but any mention of visiting was vague. By Christmas, we had lived nine miles apart for four months. He hadn't made any effort to see me, and was clearly not going to see me for the holidays. It was the closest we'd been to each other, geographically, since I was two. Clearly, this didn't mean as much to him as it did to me.

D
uring our time apart, Scott relented. He would be willing to come to Boston and try it out for one year, after which I would agree to move somewhere else if he really didn't like it. I was so happy I was high. I was getting everything I wanted. I had that deep feeling of peace that comes at the end of a very hard time. After the past twelve months of scrimping and studying and counting the days, I was ready to be happy, my career and my love both moving forward.

I flew to Portland to spend Scott's last days there with him before we drove cross-country together. I had loved driving the northern route with Claire five years earlier, and I was ready for the cute his-and-her scenes pictured in so many romantic comedies. But Scott didn't seem to be enjoying himself, and I had no idea why. We were together. This was our adventure. This was our new life.