Show of hands—who’s arrived at college and by the end of the first semester you’re like: What the hell am I doing here?
I called my mother and told her I was switching majors. Something more realistic. Something with a future. “Oh, honey, that’s wonderful!” she said. She’s totally supportive, even when I do things that are bat-shit crazy. “Did you do your plus and minus thinking?”
I most certainly had.
“And?”
“I’m going to major in philosophy.”
The day before, in ethics class, we’d started Aristotle. Three hundred eighteen-year-olds and Aristotle. We sat in this giant lecture hall, the professor talking in front while TA’s ran up and down the aisles with microphones. I watched the one I was dating. He wore very tight jeans. He had a very nice ass. I was not the only one watching him. I wondered if I was the only freshman he’d invited back to his apartment.
The discussion that day concerned the true nature of the self. “Aristotle wrote that one’s actions define one’s true self,” said the professor, down at his podium.
I wrote actions in my notebook.
“As in, a knife’s true self would be defined by cutting.”
I wondered if a knife could have a true self.
“So consider,” the prof went on, “what actions define your true self.”
Hands shot up around me, and my TA handed the mic to a guy in John Lennon glasses, which in 1993 were most definitely a thing. “Professor,” he said, his voice oh so academic. “Shouldn’t we first define truth?”
A personal essayist spends a fair amount of time with this question, much of it in our own heads: What really happened? Why can’t I remember that part? Who was the guy in the blue shirt? That was a great shirt. I bet I could find that shirt online. And so on, ad nauseam. I also find myself occasionally in the position of answering this question publicly, as though there’s a succinct definition. As though philosophers and poets haven’t been tangled in its nuance for years.
Sometimes, I talk about emotional truth, how Gregor Samsa didn’t want to go to work so he turned himself into a bug. I’d wager there are people reading this right here/right now who really, really don’t want to go into the office today. How big is that want? Can you turn yourself into a bug? Into a unicorn? Into a cloud and float away? I think those ideas are beautiful. I think they’re profound. I think they’re true.
18
There was one class I liked—Italian. It was small, only twelve students. We knew each others’ names. We talked: dreams and plans and questions. We rode language like a wave.
18
I stayed in Boston that summer to work at the restaurant, and on our days off, Meg and I and our friend Joy went to Martha’s Vineyard. We’d catch the Peter Pan at South Station to Vineyard Haven, then a ferry to the island. Joy let me borrow her purple-tinted sunglasses and I remember looking out at the ocean, the sky, the sand, thinking: This is a postcard. This is a deodorant commercial. Everyone should wear purple sunglasses. Everything is perfect. I didn’t know such a world existed outside of the movies: sparkling ocean, multimillion-dollar beachfront houses, spit-waxed convertibles, pink-and-green cardigan sweaters tied loosely over tanned shoulders and shoes that cost twice my rent, bodies in bikinis and board shorts throwing Frisbees, and picnic baskets specially made to keep white wine cool in the sun. We existed at the edges, crashing in the woods with island squatters living in tents. I wore nylon grandmother slips from the Value Village Thrift and pretended I was in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. We hitchhiked from beach to beach and showered in the ocean. We were always salty. We were always sunburnt. We were always high. The first time I did mushrooms, I lay in the sand with Joy’s lap as a pillow, watching clouds make shapes.
“Why are you crying?” she asked. Tears dripped into my ears. Somewhere nearby, Meg was dancing. Meg was always dancing. Someone had a drum. Someone always had a drum.
“I’m scared,” I whispered. “What happens when this ends?”
19
New country, new language, new school: an international study abroad program in Florence, Italy. Churches and castles and villas, angels on the ceiling and demons on the roof. Here were the real-life versions of what I only knew from books: the Duomo, Ponte Vecchio, and Boboli Gardens; the Birth of Venus, Last Judgment, and Michelangelo’s David; Dante, Boccaccio, and Italo Calvino. Every day between school and home I’d walk down Via Roma, looking at the store windows with their beautiful dresses and beautiful shoes. I never went in. Ten years, I promised. In ten years, I’ll be back. By then I’ll have money. That’s when you have money, right? Twenty-nine? Thirty? I’ll walk into those stores like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.
It was 1994. The exchange rate was 1,569 lire to 1 US dollar. Italy just barely lost to Brazil in the World Cup finals and I was shocked to discover how deeply I could care about sports. I studied European literature, fighting with language and dancing with language and listening to language. I studied Italian politics and was terrified of how little I knew about the world. Silvio Berlusconi had recently been elected prime minister; I thought how silly it was that a media tycoon with zero political experience was suddenly running a whole country.
19
I’d been there two weeks when my American boyfriend showed up. We rented a flat at the outskirts of the city and suddenly I was Living with a Man. No rushing to make it home by curfew, no sneaking out the window when our parents got home early, no roommate walking in on you in the dorm—just us, in our Italian flat with the roaches and the grappa and our grown-up double bed. I’m an awful sleeper, then and still. I lay awake, watching the red digital numbers on my alarm clock thinking: If I fall asleep right now I can get two hours. If I fall asleep right now I can get one hour and forty-seven minutes. If I fall asleep right now . . . These days, I get up—write, read, binge watch Netflix, you know the drill—but back then I watched him sleep.
He’d be deep in some dream, eyeballs twitching behind closed lids, body heat notched twenty degrees. This guy slept hot; in my memory I see steam. He’d sweat, throw the covers and sheets to the side, splay out on his back in a big X across the bed. I’d trace his muscles with a fingertip: shoulder bone; biceps, triceps; his chest a number three lying horizontal rising up, then down, up, down. I’d press my palm into his skin, feeling his heart throb. I imagined reaching into his rib cage and grabbing it, a fistful of blood and pulse and goop like that scene from Temple of Doom. Mola Ram is chanting, summoning Indy’s heart out of chest suspended across that fallen bridge. I actually tried it once, lying over him as he slept, my hand tensed like a bird’s claw, nails digging into his flesh, whispering words I’d made up to sound like Latin. I thought: If I want it hard enough. I thought: He crossed the ocean for me. I thought: If he wakes up and sees me like this he’ll think I’m crazy and fuck—he’d be right. It was crazy not to trust him. Crazy to be scared. Crazy to feel so alone next to someone you love, a million miles in the inches between you.
19
Three months late, alone in a bathroom stall in a hostel in Rome. I peed on the stick. I waited the three minutes.
Twenty years to the day and I still feel those minutes in my bones.
19
On a table at the gynecologist’s office, naked from the waist down. The doctor told me to take off my pants and when I asked for the paper robe, he repeated himself slowly: “Pant-a-lon-i,” and pointed at my legs. “Uhm . . . toga?” I asked, pointing at the white paper that covered the exam table. I was far from fluent. Maybe I’d used the wrong word. Maybe I’d asked the wrong question. Maybe this was yet another thing I didn’t understand: the language, the culture, my body, my heart. The pregnancy test had been positive. The week since then was autopilot, one foot in front of the other: catching a bus back to Florence from a school field trip to Rome; telling my boyfriend, who climbed fully dressed into the shower, which seemed like a logical response; asking one of my teachers to help me find a doctor (“Ho dolori menstruali,” I l
ied); walking through the door of what seemed like someone’s personal apartment with its antique furniture, love seats and low light; and finally—the table.
“Sono incinta,” I told the doctor. I’d looked up the word “pregnant” in my English/Italian dictionary along with the appropriate verb conjugation for “do not want.” “Non voglio essere incinta.”
He leaned me back on the table and got between my legs. I wished he was a woman. I wished I could ask questions. I wished my mom was there. I wished I had a paper robe. I wished it was out of me.
He said something in Italian.
More Italian.
More Italian, ending with: “Non sei incinta.”
I pushed up on my elbows. “No?” I said.
He nodded and took off his gloves.
“But—” Wait. What? It was too fast, too confusing. I searched my Italian vocabulary and gave up immediately. “I took a test,” I said in English, miming a stick with my thumb and pointer finger. I should have been relieved, but instead I was terrified—can’t move, can’t cry, breath locked. He hadn’t been down there for very long. What if he missed something? What if I wasn’t explaining it right? What if I was—I was—wasn’t I? “It said pregnant,” I told him.
His accent was heavy. “The test is wrong.” Then he got up to wash his hands and said a long string of Italian ending with pantaloni.
I hadn’t moved, still on my elbows, naked from the waist down, my knees wide. “Are you sure?” I said. “Sicuro?”
“Sono sicuro,” he said.
More Italian.
More Italian.
More Italian, ending with a question mark and he snapped his fingers in front of my face. That’s when I cracked, crying and exposed on that fucking table. “Non capisco!” I said, I don’t understand what you’re asking, I don’t understand what’s happening, I don’t understand my body, I don’t know who to talk to, I don’t know what to do, I’m so, so alone, and I’m so, so afraid.
He picked up my pants from the love seat and laid them over my thighs. “I ask, do you want medicine?” he said, gently now. “Medicine for birth control?”
I nodded.
I closed my legs.
I put on my pants and went back to class.
19
In Italy I could buy alcohol. I bought a lot.
19
In Italy I cleaned houses. I cleaned a lot.
19
In Italy I wrote in a journal. I wrote a lot. I didn’t call myself a writer yet. I thought you had to accomplish some unspoken, insurmountable list of requirements before you could use the word: publication, recognition, MFA. I remember hours in an Internet café, looking at college websites. Do you remember that pressure? That panic? Where do I go, how do I afford it, is my application good enough, am I good enough, as if the entirety of our lives could be decided just like—snap your fingers—that. I found a place in downtown Chicago that housed creative writing in its School of Fine and Performing Arts. It seemed so radical: to teach writing not as an offshoot of an English degree but as an art unto itself, like painting and music and dance. They offered me a fellowship for transfer students and voilà—deal sealed. Chicago! Nelson Algren! Chaka Khan! Lake Michigan! Which I loved from the Michigan side and could now have with a city attached! A city with museums and theaters and rock clubs and poetry and also I could take the Amtrak to see my mom and do my laundry and why it seemed easier to take my laundry on a four-hour train to Ann Arbor instead of a block away to the Laundromat is beyond me but whatever! I was nineteen! Also! A boy I knew lived in Chicago and maybe we’d end up together! Maybe it was fate!
It wasn’t.
The city was.
19
Before I left Europe, I spent a couple of months backpacking by myself. Mostly I stayed in hostels but occasionally met up with people in bars or cafés who I’d travel with for a while, crashing at their flat or in their tent. I ended up in Cannes ’cause I wanted to see the film festival, not realizing that I needed, you know, tickets, or something to wear besides hiking boots and a giant backpack loaded with quite literally everything I owned: clothes, sleeping bag, knife—you could travel with knives back then—a few books, and my journal. Instead, I put on my bathing suit and went to the beach: white sand, turquoise water, the whole nine yards. There I met two French boys, a cute one who spoke a little English and a really cute one who spoke none at all. “He buy beer!” said the cute one, pointing at the really cute one, and the really cute one pointed at me and said, “Run, Forrest!”
After a mostly indecipherable conversation, I understood that:
the really cute one thought I looked like Jenny from the movie Forrest Gump or
he thought I was Jenny from the movie Forrest Gump (?) and
he wanted to buy me a beer.
And what you need to understand is:
I’m saying really cute but
what I mean is total fox and
I hadn’t had sex in three months since
the American Boyfriend left and
I was heartbroken because
I loved him
even though it was hard
even though it was sad
even though I knew it wouldn’t work.
It is possible to hold all those feelings at once.
Also
he was the only person I’d ever had sex with and
I didn’t think I could have sex with someone I didn’t know or
someone I didn’t love but
I was wrong.
Yay, France!
Drinking in the sun!
By the ocean!
In the sand!
Of course he could buy me a beer!
Or two!
Or five!
And by the time we were sloshed and back at his hotel, my skin had scorched red, my bathing suit firmly tattooed on my back. It was this black strappy number and when Total Fox got me out of it he said a lot of French very quickly and put cold washcloths all over me.
He was very sweet.
It’s a lovely memory.
I’m so glad it’s mine.
20
There was a flash summer storm when we drove into Chicago, Laura and I in her tiny beater and Heather in the U-Haul packed high with stuff from our parents’ homes in Michigan. The three of us were fast friends, introduced to each other the month before and now bound together by: What the hell is happening? The rain was a faucet and the wipers were shit. As we crossed the Skyway, Jesus Christ Superstar played on the cassette deck. Picture it: crawling through the rain for a half mile over a steel truss bridge, wind whipping, lightning not off in the distance but right fucking there, thirty-nine lashes and Jesus screaming in the background. It could not have been more ominous. If we’d been the tiniest bit superstitious, we might have turned back.
But then? The Chicago skyline, lit up through the wet and the dark and the bullshit of everything we were leaving behind.
Come Questo
Here is a memory: not in my head, but in my bones.
I’m scrubbing the floor, deep red terra-cotta tiles that have to be cleaned with a special red terra-cotta stain sold in expensive tins the size of my palm. I was given the tin and the tiny brush. I was instructed to push aside the furniture, to pull back the rugs, to get down on my hands and knees. “Pulisce come questo,” he said, demonstrating how I was supposed to scrub—precise, rough, inch by inch, room by room—and then he sat at his desk, supposedly returning to his very important work.
Except he didn’t work.
He watched me.
Despite the miles I’d put between myself and Michigan, I was still the same girl, scared and ready and green as hell. I’d needed extra money so a teacher from my study abroad program helped me find side jobs: filing here, babysitting there, and a part-time housekeeping gig an hour outside the city. I took the bus through Tuscan hills, nose to glass. There were olive groves. Cypress trees. Whole fields of sunflowers. Drop-off was a dirt road, then a hike up to a
hidden hamlet of villas, all cobblestone and secret stairways. You could see the Apuan Alps in the distance. It was so beautiful. It was so perfect. There’s no way it could be real.
It took four hours to clean the house top to bottom. Two stories. Three bedrooms. Covered loggia, dark wood furniture, windows thrown open to da Vinci–type views. There was always espresso, the expensive kind in teeny cups. There were always peaches, velvet and dripping. There were books, stacks and stacks, all hardbound and well loved. I’d dust the covers and flip pages: Italian, French, German, English, and other languages I couldn’t then recognize. They belonged to the men who lived there. Three of them. They did research and wrote. I’d been told they were students, but they were all older than me by what seemed like a decade so I figured it might be doctoral work. I didn’t know if one of them owned the place and let the others live there, or if they rented together. I could have asked—I had enough Italian for simple conversation and if they could read English, they could speak English, right?—but small talk felt off-limits, like a line had been drawn in the sand.
We said ciao.
Grazie.
La prossima settimana?
Si pulisce come questo.
I dusted books and wood and heavy frames around oil paintings. I washed dishes, wiped windows with vinegar, and pulled weeds between cracks in the cobblestone. I scrubbed the toilet and the tub and my reflection in the bathroom mirror. I swapped old bedsheets for new bedsheets and loaded laundry in the washing machine and hung it to dry in the perfect sun and for the most part? It was fine. I worked hard, was paid well, and had time in my head to conjugate verbs.
Except.
At first, I thought he wanted to make sure I was cleaning the way he’d told me to clean: his house, his cash, his rules. But as time went on, I knew that wasn’t it.
The Wrong Way to Save Your Life Page 8
