Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) (29 page)

Suddenly, it was as if he'd just come to with his hand inside my underwear. I felt him mentally pull back from me and his role in the situation, and then he pulled back, literally, and stood quickly, like he wanted to get away, too.

“I'm going to get something to eat,” he said.

I stood and followed him out onto the street, focusing so hard on stepping one foot in front of the other that I had no mental space left for words. I wanted to run, but I didn't know where I was, and I was beyond reading signs, or using logic. Worst of all, if I let him see I was afraid, he might realize the power he had over me. I had to hold it together until we got to a street I recognized, and then I could get away.

He didn't talk to me, and I walked a little behind him, hating him and yet feeling so grateful he'd pulled himself back from the brink.
Finally, we walked out onto Mass Ave, and there were lights and people going in and out of the 7-Eleven. He stopped just outside the door and turned to me. I didn't stick around long enough to find out what he was going to say or do. I turned and walked away from him up Mass Ave toward my apartment.

When I got a few feet away, I fell down on the ground, landing on the palms of my hands and my knees. For a split second I rested on my scraped skin, so humiliated I wanted to cry. But I pushed myself to walk without looking back, even though I was bone-sure he would come up behind me at any moment, put his arm around my shoulder, and try to force me back to his place. When I got to the next block, I started to feel a little better, but I still didn't look back until I'd reached the block before my apartment. There were not as many people here, and if he was behind me, I didn't want to turn onto my street, because I would be vulnerable there, and because he would know where I lived. My heart racing, I willed myself to look back. The man was nowhere in sight. I started to shake, but I didn't stop, not until I'd reached my apartment and locked the door. I crawled into bed without washing my face or brushing my teeth, needing to be safely cocooned in my blankets.

I considered myself profoundly lucky that I'd drunkenly stumbled into a nice guy, or a bad guy who was so drunk that he really just wanted a taquito. Either way, I saw it as a warning. I didn't talk much about what had happened, as I was embarrassed by it, and because nothing, really, had happened. I pulled back from the friend who'd left me in the cab with the guy. I began to leave clubs and parties earlier. I lined up rides. I drank a little less.

But even after a normal night out that fall, when I'd supposedly had fun, I came home alone, got down on my knees, rested my head against the carpeting, and screamed a silent scream, unable to even call out in my frustration, for fear I might bother my upstairs neighbor. Something was wrong, but there was always another show, another party, and I was supposedly having the time of my life.

Scott's
band came through on tour just before Christmas, and they planned to take four days off in Boston. This was his third visit since we'd broken up, and we'd fallen into a routine of falling back together. After his show, we rushed to an Irish pub, J. J. Foley's, and the retirement party for my mentor, Steve Morse, who had assigned me my first CD reviews for the
Boston
Globe
. Steve had just arrived at the bar after going to see U2 play, and there was a rumor the band was going to show up to thank the music journalist who had helped break them in America by giving them an early rave in the
Globe
.

After I greeted Steve, I paused near an older man in a woven tie who was standing alone in the middle of the room. I started talking with him to be polite, but then I realized he was Paul McGuinness, the band's legendary manager. I charmed him with the story of how Mom was such a big fan that we'd almost gone to the band's Slane Castle show as a family, and coaxed stories out of him in turn. We were laughing like old friends when the bar's barometric pressure shifted. Just like that, next to me, stood Bono.

Even in the straw hat he was wearing in those days, he was several inches shorter than I was. He beamed up at me from behind his purple shades as the three of us made small talk about Steve and what a contribution he'd made to the music scene. Then, it was as if the atmospheric disturbance had spread out around me. A pint was handed to me, to hand to Bono, and then another, and another. He smiled graciously as I passed each one to him and lined them up on a shelf behind him. Steve greeted his old friend.

“This is my protégée, Sarah,” he said. “She'll be the one asking you questions now.”

Bono took my hand and kissed it. “I look forward to it,” he said.

I glanced over to where Scott was waiting for me to join him.

Later that night, Scott told me he was going to marry his girlfriend and then took me to bed. When we were alone together, it was as if no time had passed, and I was able to forget what he'd said and how it had
made me feel. But the visit, and all of our conversations, had developed a bittersweet inertia.

When I drove him to meet up with the band a few days later, I wasn't as devastated as I'd been all of the previous times we'd said good-bye. But as he turned and waved before he went inside, it hit me: I still loved him and wished he would stay. I couldn't really imagine him being a part of my new life now, and yet I couldn't fully accept that my life had gone on without him.

T
hat winter was a stressful time for my dad. He'd just been informed that the rooming house where he'd lived for the past ten years was being sold. When he began looking for alternative accommodations, he found that the small disability check he received from the government was not going to be able to afford him an apartment anywhere in Boston, or even in the suburb where he lived. He needed to get on the federally subsidized housing program Section 8, which would allow him to live in an approved apartment rent-free. But the waiting list in most communities in and around Boston was two to three years long. He began applying, but it wasn't looking good for him to get accepted before he had to leave his current living situation.

My dad invited me to visit him at the rooming house only once. I was nervous as we passed through the narrow hallway to his room, afraid of what I might see, and how it might make me feel about him. He had complained to me about a variety of characters seemingly ripped from a Bukowski story, who drank and fought and schemed in the rooms around him. It was undoubtedly a depressing place, but it was also relatively well kept and orderly, and he clearly felt comfortable there, pointing out this and that special feature as anyone might do at his home. I was relieved that no one cursed or screamed or harassed us while we were in the hallway, and when he opened the door to his room for me, I was happy to see it was tidy and snug, filled with towering stacks of books and movies and notebooks, much like my rooms
always were. His only friend, Bobby, who wanted to meet me, was funny and kind, a Joe Pesci–type man. Bobby managed the rooming house, which made my dad's living situation there much better than it would have otherwise been.

I could see why my dad was anxious about leaving this place and nervous he'd end up somewhere he didn't like nearly as much. On the other hand, if he was proactive and got approved for Section 8 housing in the right community, he could set himself up for the rest of his life. I had just been given Craig's mother's car, an old Dodge Omni with fewer than twenty thousand miles on it, and my dad and I decided I would drive him out to look at several towns where he thought he might feel at home. His only requirements were that his new community be a place where he could take his long daily walks and be near an isolation tank or hot tub, which he planned to use as part of his meditation program. Invented by the scientist John Lilly in 1954, the isolation tank could be used to speed up my dad's metaphysical work, he hoped, as he tried to achieve enlightenment without LSD and actualize a vision of his. He had never told me about the entire vision, as he claimed it might be too much for me to handle, but he hinted at it regularly. I chose not to press him for details, as I was irritated by such moments when he withheld information from me, as if he were a spiritual Svengali.

My dad had asked me several times to show him my writing, and I'd given him an essay about Auntie Mimi serving juice, which he'd enjoyed. So in advance of our day trip to Amherst, I sent him the first few chapters of my novel. But then he canceled our first planned outing because of his bad back, leaving me with the same feeling of powerlessness and frustration as when I was a little girl. On the day of our second attempt, we hit the highway, and my dad settled into the passenger seat and retrieved my pages.

“Well, Sarah,” he said. “I have to start by saying it's a little disconcerting to read a story where a character with my name dies on the first page.”

I whipped my head around to look at him while trying to stay focused on driving. It had never occurred to me that the name of my heroine's boyfriend, who died on the first page of my first novel, was the same as my father's name. I had begun writing the novel when we were estranged, and the name John had not even had a conscious association with him at the time.

He stared at me, waiting for my response.

“I honestly didn't realize I'd done that until just now,” I said.

“It's okay, Sarah,” he said. “I'm not mad at you. It's cool. Whatever you do is cool with me. I just had to tell you how I felt when I read it. I can see you're a talented writer. I can also see how angry you are. Your character Maddie is really angry. But that's cool, too. However you are is cool with me. I just, I wonder if that's why you haven't published it yet. All that anger can be hard for people to take.”

Now I couldn't look at him, not even a little. It was one thing to be critiqued by my friends who were writers, or by the other students in the classes I took. But I couldn't get past what felt like an uncalled-for personal attack in order to begin to consider whether his assessment was true or not. Luckily, my dad rambled on to other topics.

As he began talking about his ex-girlfriend Phyllis, who was also a writer, I relaxed my grip on the steering wheel. He described how the two of them had left notes for each other when he'd worked the overnight shift as a cabdriver, because they often had such opposite schedules that they wouldn't see each other for days.

And then he described how she had suddenly left him all those years ago.

“I went out of my mind,” he said. “I mean I worked out this whole plan, I don't even know if I should tell you this. I don't want to scare you.”

I looked over at him, intrigued.

“I was going to kidnap her. I mean, I was really going to do it. I don't know what I was going to do to her once I had her. I just couldn't stand the thought that she'd left me. For someone like me who was
always looking for a mother, that was the worst thing that could have happened, to be left all alone. I used to go by the place where she worked. I used to drive by her house. I really couldn't stand it. And so I worked out this whole plan where I was going to use duct tape to hold her. Of course, I never did it.”

My dad's confession didn't frighten me. It had always been his ability to detach that had worried me, so hearing him admit to an overabundance of feeling was a relief. And hearing him talk about how he'd longed for a mother and father when he'd been in foster care, how Betty had never really talked to him about anything, only tried to control him, drew a line between the lack of parenting my dad had received and the lack of parenting he'd given me. He suddenly didn't seem so powerful, just a taller little boy who had many of the same longings I did.

When we arrived in Northampton, we went directly to the apartment complex. “I don't know,” he said. “It looks depressing.”

It didn't look any worse to me than so many worn-down and weathered brick buildings all across the region. And given how hard I worked to barely pay my own rent, a part of me bristled when my dad complained about his government subsidies. The idea of having someone pay for my lodging and food was my idea of heaven, while my dad called himself a nonunion philosopher and was known to spend three hours meditating, four hours walking, and the rest of the day watching Fellini and reading Freud. But again, I didn't think to recall my mother's advice about needy men, or how she'd come to give it to me. My blind spot regarding my dad and the patterns he'd created in my romantic relationships with men were so inherent to who I was at that moment in my life, it was difficult for me to see them play themselves out.

I didn't say anything, and we drove into the downtown area and parked. Walking the upscale streets, my dad flinched a little at the windows we passed; the other residents reflected back at us in the glass of the fancy stores.

“I don't know,” he said.

We went into a used bookstore, but even this wasn't enough to make him feel as if he'd found his spot. Now I was worried. It was one thing to turn his nose up in theory. I got it. I did. I had left rural Maine not only because I'd been hungry for a big life, but also because I'd grown tired of being viewed as a freak. But the boardinghouse was going to be sold, and if he didn't find an alternative, he would be out on the streets. My dad had prepared himself for this eventuality by spending several nights in homeless shelters, and he said he'd been fine, but it wasn't something I wanted to think about. He was almost sixty years old. Boston had brutal winters. Even if the citizens of Northampton weren't quite ready for him, it was surely better than homelessness. But I knew it wasn't my decision to make. And so, I just hoped he would choose a new home.

Like my dad, I was struggling to figure out where I was meant to be. I'd nearly moved to New York City the year before, only staying in Boston to write a weekly music column. But now, so much of what I'd loved about my life in Boston was gone. When I'd first moved there, it had been the big city of my childhood dreams, and I'd loved exploring its streets and writing about its happenings. But after six years, I felt as if I'd walked down every street, and I wanted the kind of life that could stay big even as it became more stable. It felt as if everyone had moved on but me. Something had to change.