Straight Up and Dirty: A Memoir (28 page)

ONE OF THE BELOVED ITEMS IN MY BEDROOM IS A MONOGRAMMED
desk chair I purchased when I’d first moved in. A gold, cursive K is embroidered on the back of the linen slipcover. It has a kick-pleat skirt that dusts the floor, more of a dining-room chair than something suitable for a desk. In its own small way, seeing that K every day makes me feel stronger. “That’s you, Stephanie,” I remind myself. Then I shut up, sit in it, and begin to write.

Writing a list of my happiest moments wasn’t as easy as I’d expected. Others might conjure images of their wedding days, births of their children. I couldn’t. Sure, I’d witnessed the happy, quiet moments of others, watching a young girl pull the brass ring from the carousel, waving it in delight for her mother to see. But when I drew within myself to my happiest moments in life, they weren’t about what I’d observed. They were about what I’d accomplished.

At ten years old, I’d spent the summer swimming at my parents’ club. I timed myself in fifty-yard increments. Breathless. Waterlogged. Laps until it hurt to hoist myself from the pool. “You’re just wasting your time,” my cousin Electra chided from the edge of the pool. “You’re too fat to be fast.” Then she skipped away to the shuffleboard area to gorge on Italian sausages and yellow rice by the plateful.

At a formal end-of-summer awards night ceremony, I sat with the other children my age waiting for our swim coach to be invited to the podium. The swimming awards were saved for last, after they’d covered golf, tennis, and diving. When our coach announced the final award, my eyes were closed tight in prayer, fingers crossed. I was so busy chanting,
Please say it. Stephanie Klein. Please
, that I didn’t hear him say my name.

“Stephanie, don’t just sit there,” Electra hooted over the rising applause. Was that right? Had I really received the most prestigious swimming award of the night?

“You’ve worked really hard to earn this,” my coach said into my shoulder as he hugged me. “You should feel very proud.”

STEPHANIE KLEIN: MOST VALUABLE PLAYER was engraved on a shiny golden trophy the size of my torso. I’d been undefeated that summer, earning our club more points than any other competitor. I needed both hands to carry the trophy back to my table. They’re the first tears of joy I remember shedding. When I got home that night, I put the trophy on my nightstand and awoke several times to touch it in the dark. I nestled into my sheets, smiling and gripping my covers, as I fell back asleep.

As I got older, achievement continued to fuel me. I’d rehearse solos and choreograph dance steps in my socks, slipping on the living room floors, practicing each night. Seeing my name printed on the school bulletin board beside the leading role in
Oklahoma!
charged me with an intense yet contained sense of accomplishment. Over dinner, I spoke with a Southern accent. “Why yeeeeeees. Some more peas would be just love-LY, Ma’am.” I walked differently, pulling my shoulders back, my hands balled into fists. YES!

When other kids were at Friendly’s dipping French fries into their sundaes, I was home working on the next academic assignment, striving for good grades. When the thick acceptance letters to the colleges I really wanted to attend arrived in the mail, I hugged them. I raced to my bedroom, threw myself onto my bed, and kicked my feet wildly as I squealed into my pillows.

The moments that gave me the most joy were the culmination of work, suffering, and sacrifice. The harder something was for me, the more adamantly I was told I couldn’t do it, the tastier the victory was when I finally did. If it took courage, perseverance, or strength, it meant more when the validation arrived.

I’d grown to associate accomplishment with joy, even when it was for others. I volunteered to tutor Aidina, a young girl living in a family homeless shelter who’d been classified as “slow.” Teaching her to read was a long, arduous journey for both of us, but the day she read her first words aloud, all by herself, I felt a profound smile commandeer my face. She looked up after she read them, her mouth agape. We stared at each other in fixed astonishment, as if we weren’t sure it was real. I looked over my shoulder. Did that really just happen? I grabbed Aidina by the arm and yanked her through the house, making each person we came across listen to her read. She and I jumped up and down, hugging tightly in all the rooms of the house. Seeing her radiate confidence made me euphoric.

Remembering these pointed moments as I wrote them from my K chair turned me into a blubbering mush, and I’ve never been one to want anything having to do with blubber. I couldn’t stop smiling as I wrote the list, even when I wiped the stray tears from the corners of my eyes. My muscles collapsed, and I could linger on each memory, knowing no one could ever take it from me. It was mine. Something I’d earned. A permanent fixture in my core. But I had to work hard for each of those items on the list before I came to value my achievement. It’s exactly what I thought love was, what a relationship was. I associated strife as something that would always lead to happiness. A labor of love. If the relationship came easily, it didn’t seem worthy.

Then Linus pawed at my thigh, indicating he wanted up on my lap. “Come on up,” I said in the baby voice I used when I spoke with him. I flipped him onto his back, cradling him in my arm as I rubbed his warm belly. This was love, too. I remembered the first night I’d taken him home with me. He fell asleep on my chest, his warm puppy breath in my face. I loved his Woodstock yawn, the smell of his corn chip paws, the sounds he made as he crunched his food. This wasn’t earned. I added his name to the list. My love for him extended beyond a mere moment of recognition. There had to be others. I was resolved to find them.

I phoned Dulce. “I love
you
. I just added your name to the list. I needed to say that.”

“And I love you. How’s it going?”

“Eh. This shit doesn’t happen overnight, right? So I guess I’m good today. That’s enough. It sucks that it takes so long, but whatever. It’s better than it has been. Want to know the worst part? I’m now that girl who says ‘one day at a time.’ Just kill me now, for real.”

“You’ll be fine,” Dulce yawned.

“Goodnight, love.”

It was the first time I’d said “I love you” to a friend.

Growing up I heard Lea say it constantly to anyone who’d listen. I remember overhearing her tell one of her camp friends, “I love you,” over the phone and thinking, “Oh my God. She tells her friends she loves them?” I envied it. In contrast, I never touched my friends or expressed any of my feelings toward them. Telling a friend “I love you” was like having sex for the first time. It was a big deal for me.

Today, it’s hard to keep me off my friends. I now tell them I love them aloud, not often, but purposefully. I’m not afraid they won’t know how to respond. It’s not about vulnerability, about who says it first, as it had been for me with men. The only fear I feel now is that they won’t know their worth to me. It’s why I make a point of saying it.

For some, the L-word means marriage, babies, and always. It means you’re ready to spend forever together, with a drawer of mismatched socks, compromising vacation plans, beside someone who’ll always tell you the truth, even when it hurts like a snapped bone. For me, “I love you” means I want to work on preserving this, right now. The only guarantee I have faith in is within myself, knowing whatever happens to me, no matter who leaves, I will be okay. And I don’t need a trophy to validate that because I know it through me, the way you know hot from cold.

I KNEW FROM COLD AND RESOLUTIONS IN JANUARY. THE
Valentine’s Day cards were in their slots at the ready. My father’s wife Carol invited an estate lawyer to their home to negotiate her parents’ wills. It was an act of love. On the somber occasion, along with the raspberry Linzer tart cookies and Huggy Bear Tea, she offered the lawyer her “trophy” friend, Lulu.

“She’s single and fabulous, and here’s her most flattering misleading photo. She’s really older and much more zaftig in person, and that lighting is a godsend.” Okay, that might have been her inner monologue pulling overtime. Carol thrust Lulu’s photo into his lap as if her friend were a classic seven apartment, new on the market. Lulu had been single, without one offer to buy, for four-plus years. You could almost hear the
Fiddler on the Roof
soundtrack.

I imagine he flashed an ingratiating smile and tucked her number into his inner pocket with a false promise to phone Lulu later in the week. But when later in the week arrived, flowers were delivered…to my father’s house. A note was affixed to the cellophane-wrapped arrangement: “Thank you for introducing me to such a fantastic woman.”

My father and Carol were dumbfounded. Carol kept rereading the card, rubbing her manicured thumb over the words. She played yenta, calling each of her friends whom she’d tried (and failed) to set up previously. “Ya see,” she boasted, “I’m not wrong all the time.” Yeah, and the sun shines on a dog’s ass every once in a while.

“Stephanie, that’s what you need,” she phoned me to say, “a man with class.” Yes, I needed a great many things, but looking for it hadn’t been working. “Who needs to look? I have a few very nice ones for you.” No way. I don’t do blind dates. It’s bad enough that the two being set up suffer, but now there’s a third who gets dragged into the misery. Even if I had been agreeable to a set-up, Carol’s idea of “very nice” meant an “oy”ster who had a Lexus SUV lease on life. I could never enjoy foreplay with a guy who said “fakakta.”

“Thanks, but no thanks. I thought Dad told you I’m off the sauce.”

“What do you mean? You’re not dating?”

“No. I’ve resolved to work on myself for right now. I still have guys e-mailing me through the online dating sites, but it’s just not a good idea. You know I haven’t been on a date since I broke things off with Oliver over two months ago?” I said it more as a realization than a declaration. “I’m proud of myself, actually.”

“Well, good for you.” If it were her own daughter saying she was swearing off men, she’d have mentioned a clock and eggs while tapping her wristwatch. But with me, she said it—I was sure—because of what my father must have communicated to her about me. The way some parents live vicariously through their child’s wedding or education, my father wanted me to be fulfilled without a relationship, for the both of us. Because we’re the same that way. I didn’t just inherit his mannerisms, red hair, or affinity for storytelling. I am emotionally built the way he is. Needy. That’s why it’s so easy for us to communicate with each other. He knows exactly how I operate because he thinks the way I do. He wants me to outgrow it for the both of us. So do I.

“Well, when you are ready again, you just let us know. I’m telling ya, classy guys.” Oh, yes. I was sure. My idea of class was a bit different from Carol’s. Mine was of the 101 variety.

I WAS SIGNED UP BUT NOT AT ALL READY FOR MY PRINCIPLES
of Black-and-White & Color class at the International Center of Photography. I had the SLR camera but needed to purchase the textbook, which meant a swing-by at Barnes & Noble.

Normally, a tramp through the bookstore felt lovely and delicious, as if I’d come at pudding time. I was dressed to absorb time there, settling in, cozy amid the rows of thick, glossy photography books. I wrapped an oversized stone cashmere cable-knit ’round my waist, giving the hand to the “never wrap a sweater around your waist ’cause it adds ten pounds to your ass” theory. I was ready to enjoy the exploration behind corners and between turns. I loved how the bookstore housed the ability to discover and learn something new, the capacity to be inspired, to latch onto a blooming interest, to want more.

It was close to impossible for me to walk into that empire and not want to touch every table, drink a latte, and see just how much of my wardrobe had made it to the “not” side of the
What’s Hot & Not
sections of the latest magazines. I picked up a thick issue of
InStyle
, warmed my hands for the ready, and made an intentional crease, past the first twenty pages of advertisements. And damn it, the January issue went there, like everyone does.

If you’re single-without-prospects, do yourself a favor: don’t open any magazines through January and February. March, if you read the from-our-last-issue letters. Especially the cooking ones. Beets cut into the shape of hearts, pink peppercorns, roasted red pepper sauce. Everything becomes pink. Sometimes people ask me what my favorite color is, and I’ve always wondered, what kind of question is that? I mean, who really has a favorite color after the second grade? Well, let me tell you something. I’m beginning to get it. Because, if there are favorites where colors are concerned, then PINK is my favorite color to HATE. Any magazine I thumbed through had red pages with pink hearts, even those tattoo, fishing, and trucker’s magazines were going there. For the love of God and all things black and moody, go away. Taunt someone else.

I hate hearts. Chocolate. All the dumb cards. Leave me alone. Want to hear the worst part? Barnes & Noble had actual display TABLES that made me want to shit out all my tenderness. The displays were littered with hearts in many colors, though they all taste the same: like chalk. Books of
New Yorker
cartoons, sexual foods, then the red devil pens and heart key chains. Pink glossy gift bags with fuchsia feather handles. Oh, it was official. It was that time of month for the next two months. I didn’t think it could get worse.

Love coupons. That was worse. Since when did we get so cheap about sex? Now they make coupons for it? I didn’t use coupons for waffles or toilet paper, soap even, but I’d tear one out for sex? Prophylactics, yes. Perforated, no. That’s just so wrong. The coupons weren’t just for nights of triple Bs: beer, backrub, and blow job. They promised enslavement to laundry, dishes, and taking out the garbage. Aren’t you supposed to do these things for each other without coupons? Yet, there they sat for consumption on the romantic table at Barnes & Noble. I didn’t always feel this way. I’m sure I liked the holiday in fourth grade when they gave us something fun to color. Doilies to glue.
Candy
. Valentine’s Day isn’t for adults. It’s for teenagers and children, for restaurants, florists, and lingerie sales. Adults should show and share love, daily, not when the magazines and card stores say so. It just so disingenuous, and I’ve had enough of that in my romantic relationships, thank you.