“I am the queen of this kingdom,” he declared, throwing his chin up and squaring his shoulders. “Princess Elizabeth will never take that from me.” He kept staring at me. I searched desperately for a proper response.
“Well, you look much younger than she does,” I offered weakly.
“Sara, don’t be superficial,” Edgar said. “That’s your generation’s greatest weakness. You only care about what’s on the exterior. In the sixties, we concerned ourselves with greater things.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. You apologize all the time. It’s the mark of a woman who doesn’t know who she is.”
“Well, you’re right about that,” I agreed pleasantly. “Would you like me to start the coffee for the guests?”
“You haven’t started the coffee yet? What am I paying you for? Go do it, now!”
I abandoned Elizabeth’s photocopies and scurried down to the kitchen, where I hid for most of the remainder of the day. I churned out more tea and coffee than an entire kingdom could consume. The two hundred now-enlightened middle-aged white people who filed through at lunch left more caffeinated than was probably legal. I served them with an obsequious manner, taking care to offer them an array of vegetarian snacks and, controversially, roasted chicken drumsticks (“People need fucking protein,” Edgar had snapped when I timidly ventured that most of the attendees would be vegetarians).
As I cleaned up and the guests began to depart, I heard a woman in a flowing purple dress thank Edgar for the event.
“That girl you’ve got working for you is just lovely,” said the purple lady.
“She’s my personal assistant,” Edgar said. “But she’s more like a daughter to me. I’m teaching her so much.”
“I wish I’d had a mentor like you when I was her age,” the woman said.
“So do I,” Edgar said. “I had to teach myself everything I know.”
“To be quite frank,” the woman said, dropping her voice, “I wasn’t very impressed with that writer woman’s workshop. Arthur, the rabbi, and the minister were lovely. Perhaps next year you can give a lecture instead.”
“Oh, I’m no public speaker,” Edgar said. I looked over and saw him actually blush with happiness.
As I squeezed more organic dish liquid on another Pottery Barn plate, I knew I wasn’t going to come back to the Blessed Sanctuary. And in that moment, for the first time since I’d begun working there, I felt something that might be described as inner peace.
At dusk, I went outside to ask Edgar’s permission to leave for the day. He nodded, barely seeming to notice me. He and Arthur were standing together with arms slung around each other’s waists, laughing gently at something Elizabeth was saying. Elizabeth’s sister Mary was laughing, too. All traces of anger had left Edgar’s face. He and Arthur looked like an older couple enjoying themselves immensely at a high school reunion. Or maybe they looked like a pair of medieval royals, grateful to dispense for a moment with the duties of state and simply enjoy themselves with members of their inner circle at court. I left them there, King Arthur and Queen Edgar, and drove out of their kingdom and into the real world.
The next day, I called Edgar and told him I’d decided to enroll full-time at the local community college. I asked if he’d like two weeks’ notice. He said it wasn’t necessary, and without a trace of anger in his voice wished me well. I returned his good wishes in kind.
The community college thing was a lie. I went out on the job hunt again and found a gig back home in Flemington at a “health bar” inside a twenty-thousand-square-foot mega-gym. My primary job was to make smoothies, a task at which I excelled. I also served espresso shots to juiced-up Jersey muscle-heads and wheatgrass shots to anorexic, farty, “vegan” trophy wives. My favorite customers were the cardiac rehab patients who met their physical therapists in the special mini-gym for medical cases and then stopped by my bar for a bagel with cream cheese and a mocha latte with whole milk.
A couple of months later, while I was filling out new college applications (some schools actually let you apply in May for the next semester), I got an e-mail from Jason, the intern who had mysteriously disappeared. He asked how I was doing, and if I was still working at “that place.” He said he’d wanted to get to talk to me more, but he’d done his best to avoid Edgar at all costs, and that meant avoiding me, too. I wrote back that I was doing well, and that I’d, thankfully, left the Blessed Sanctuary behind. We exchanged a few more e-mails, and he invited me to meet him in New York for the day.
I hadn’t had a meaningful interaction with a boy in nearly six months. This fact alone was enough to make my brain circuits override my trepidation about New York City. I told Jason I’d see him that weekend.
I took out the cassette tape I’d used for the first time I drove to the Blessed Sanctuary, the one with Enya and Gregorian chanting and me saying soothing inspirational things. It didn’t seem quite right for this trip. It seemed a little too . . . cheesy. And boring. And like it was designed for someone I didn’t relate to as much anymore. So I made a mix tape of Liz Phair songs interspersed with my voice. “This is fucking awesome!” I said into the tape recorder. “Look, you’re on the train! Look around. Look at the windows. You can see outside. You’re safe. You can get off the train at any stop and then take the train back home. You could call a local taxi service anywhere and have them drive you to Flemington. You took your medicine today. You’ve got your journal with you. Did you bring your giraffe, Mary? Of course you did. See, you’re fine. I’m so proud of you.” It meshed rather well with Liz Phair’s expletive-laced lyrics. I rode the train listening to the cassette player on headphones. And I made it in just fine.
Jason met me at Penn Station. He was cuter than I remembered, and looked way more relaxed. We greeted each other enthusiastically, and began walking down to Union Square. He was going to show me the L train, which would take us to a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Williamsburg.
“It’s where all the punks and artists live now,” he told me as we wandered past rainbow flags and leather boys in Chelsea. “Manhattan’s too expensive. Even the Lower East Side. Everybody’s moving out there.”
On the L train, he asked me why I’d dropped out of school.
“I went kind of nuts, I guess,” I said. “I got really depressed, and I just didn’t want to leave my house ever. I had all these panic attacks.”
“That happened to me in high school,” he said. “It sucked.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Is it okay that we’re on the train? We can get off anytime you want and just walk.” He was looking at me in such a matter-of-fact way, it was as if he’d just asked, “Do you want to grab some lunch?” There was no pity, no fear, no concern. I’d never seen someone look at me like that when I first talked about my weird mental problems. He looked at me like I was normal.
“I’m okay, actually,” I said. “But thank you.”
We got to Williamsburg pretty quickly. It was a neighborhood of warehouses and humble row houses. Here and there we passed an open garage that had been turned into an art studio or a ramshackle bar. We walked past a bread factory with a Dumpster outside, where a vat of discarded dough rose in the hot late-spring sun. The smell of yeast mingled with the exhaust from the delivery trucks and the odor of tacos from a nearby cart. Men dressed like nineteenth-century Polish villagers strode by, yammering on cell phones. Women in ankle-length skirts and wigs pushed baby carriages down the sidewalk. Punk kids with liberty spikes on their heads and jagged black tattoos on their arms rode past us on souped-up bicycles. Girls with short hair and chunky-rimmed granny glasses drank cans of beer on their front stoops.
What shocked me the most about Williamsburg was the sky. It was enormous. It was almost as wide and bright as the sky back home in Flemington. I’d grown up a Manhattan tourist, rarely venturing beyond the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the north and Times Square to the south. We never went farther east than Park Avenue. I hadn’t known you
could be in New York City and see this much sky. I could breathe here.
We climbed up a ladder to the top of this warehouse he knew about and sat drinking iced teas in the sun.
“So Edgar is awful,” Jason blurted out, as if he’d been waiting the whole time to say it. “You know that, right? I’m not, like, a homophobe.”
“Totally fucking wacky,” I said. “He flipped out on me so many times.”
“You know why I had to leave?”
“Why?”
“He said I didn’t make enough eye contact when I spoke to him. He said I didn’t talk to him as much as I talked to Arthur. I was there to talk to Arthur. I had an internship for credit, and my job was to help Arthur with his lecture business—booking, events planning, scheduling, writing, all that stuff. I planned to be there for four months. Edgar kicked me out after one. Every day, it was something else about how I didn’t look at him enough or talk to him enough or offer to help him enough. I didn’t know I was supposed to help him. I’m not good at building things. I’m a nerd.” He was speaking in a rush, barely stopping to breathe.
“I had a bicycle there. I brought it with me. He wouldn’t let me use it. I had to ask him to drive me every time I wanted anything from town. He would spend the whole time telling me about how I had problems with authority, and how my generation was selfish and I was a perfect example, and how he knew I just wanted to use friends and throw them aside and I couldn’t deal with a boss.” He cringed at the memory. “It was so scary. It was seriously really scary every day.”
“And Arthur didn’t do anything?”
“Dude, that guy is nice but he did so much acid back in the day. I don’t think he’s all there.”
“I know,” I said, and sighed. “Jesus. I thought Edgar was weird to me.”
“No, he liked you. But I felt so bad when you got there. I wanted to warn you, because I knew he’d be crazy to you, too. I called my dad and told him what was going on, and Edgar caught me and freaked out. He said, ‘Ooh, you really get off on criticizing people, don’t you, you little asshole?’ It was so fucked up!”
I felt bad for the guy. He clearly had some kind of Edgar-induced PTSD.
“My dad said he was shocked. He said I could come back and get an internship in the city. I got out of there. I would’ve just ridden my bike away with my stuff on my back, but Edgar drove me to the bus station. And he said the craziest shit to me the whole time. It was like he wasn’t even talking to me. It was like he thought I was someone else.” He twisted his hands nervously.
I put my hand on his back.
“Jason,” I said. “You’re free now. And he’s still back there, and you never have to go there again. Neither do I.”
“I’m so glad you left,” he said.
“Me, too. I learned some stuff, though. Like how to make coffee for two hundred pretentious hippie fucks.”
We laughed together, and fell into a companionable silence. I looked at the Manhattan skyline, with the new, big empty space downtown like a gap where two front teeth used to be. The view was still beautiful, maybe even more so because you were acutely conscious of what was missing and it made you appreciate what was still there. The Chrysler Building shone in all its Art Deco glory, and the Empire State Building, and the bridges and the tugboats.
“I could maybe live here,” I said, breaking the silence.
“You should come to NYU,” Jason said with an eagerness that warmed something inside me. “You’d love it.”
“My grades aren’t good enough,” I said.
“You should try anyway. We could hang out. My friends would like you and I bet you’d like them.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
We ate dinner at a Malaysian place in what used to be a lamp factory. He took me back to Penn Station, and I hugged him good-bye.
“We should do this again,” he said.
“Definitely,” I said.
I walked down to my train, and rode all the way home without listening to my tape. I never saw him again.
Chapter Seven
Best Little Psych Ward in Carolina
I ended up in Asheville, North Carolina, the way a lot of people have historically ended up in Asheville, North Carolina: I went crazy. Because of its various rehabilitation institutions, Asheville has long been a destination for the addicted, the depressed, and the clinically insane. In 1936, author F. Scott Fitzgerald placed his reportedly delusional wife, Zelda, in Highland Mental Hospital in the Montford section of town. In the early days of her residence there, he famously stayed at the luxurious Grove Park Inn and chased young tail all over the hills. She spent time in and out of Highland over the next several years. One night in the spring of 1948, she was locked into a room where she was scheduled to receive electroshock treatment. A fire broke out in the kitchen and spread throughout the building, and she burned to death, as did eight other women.
Before it became a mental-health oasis, Asheville’s real claim to fame was tuberculosis treatment. By 1912, when famed osteopath Dr. William Banks Meacham built the popular Ottari Sanitarium, Asheville was already known as a “health resort” for the TB-afflicted. The Ottari was more like a hotel than anything else. It had mahogany furniture and fancy Persian rugs, and the whole place was built in the Spanish–mission style. Meacham lost everything during the Great Crash of 1929, and the building was sold and converted into apartments. I once visited my favorite professor from Warren Wilson College there. She was a hot lesbian with an equally hot pro soccer player for a girlfriend.
I’d always wanted to go to college in North Carolina. For one thing, it was right next to South Carolina, where we spent a week’s vacation each summer. For another, it was packed full of history and pretty scenery and friendly people. Those academically competitive New Jersey teens who do not get into good schools in New England often end up at Chapel Hill or Duke. We’d visited Duke and Chapel Hill when I was in the ninth grade. Duke just seemed like a younger version of Princeton, in a shittier town. (Durham has come a long way since the mid-nineties, when I first visited. It’s now home to some of the hottest restaurants in the South.) By contrast, Chapel Hill seemed fun and exciting, and there were handsome boys everywhere. But back in high school, my grades hadn’t been good enough for Chapel Hill’s rigorous admissions standards for out-of-state students. After Emerson, they still weren’t good enough. I set about looking for another North Carolina school that appealed to me, and found one five hours west of Chapel Hill, up in the Blue Ridge section of the Appalachian Mountains.
The college was called Warren Wilson, and its advertising materials read, “We’re not for everyone . . . but then, maybe you’re not everyone.” That was enough to get me interested. It appealed directly to my twenty-one-year-old narcissism. I’m not everyone, I thought. I’m me. I’m special. They already get that and I haven’t even applied yet!
Surprisingly, that tagline was actually correct. Wilson wasn’t for everyone. Sure, it had a hippie aesthetic like Hampshire or any one of those crunchy schools, but at Wilson you had to work. Not necessarily academically—I learned a lot when I was there, but I wouldn’t call the curriculum rigorous. No, you had to literally work. Like, with your hands. Everyone on campus was assigned to a work crew, and if you didn’t work at least fifteen hours per week, you risked getting booted out of school.
The work crews were numerous, and I read through the list with a combination of excitement and confusion: Auto Shop (what kind of college had an auto shop?), Plumbing, Painting, Blacksmith Shop (was this some Colonial Williamsburg shit?), Maintenance, Carpentry (ooh, Jesus-y), Locksmith Shop, Landscaping, Chapel (ooh, extra Jesus-y), Farm (farm? They had a fucking farm?), and dozens more.
Not only did you have to work on one of those eighteen thousand crews, you also had to complete a hundred hours of community service in order to graduate. This was about as different from Emerson College as you could get. Back there, “community service” was about as popular a concept as discount
shopping. Emerson College was full of people who focused with laser-like intensity on only one thing: their outfits. Even with all its hippie trappings, this college Down South seemed like a place where you could actually learn applicable life skills. Plus, it cost about 40 percent less than Emerson did. I applied and got in. I even did a solo road trip to visit Asheville, and I immediately fell in love.
When I met with the admissions counselor, it was on the porch of an old farmhouse in a rocking chair. She told me that the school had originally been founded as a Presbyterian mission school for poor farm boys in rural Appalachia, and had later expanded to include girls. It eventually became a college for aspiring teachers, and then added other courses of study. In 1952, it quietly desegregated, two years before Brown v. Board of Education. It was one of the first undergraduate colleges in the South to do so.
I enjoyed hearing about the school’s history. I’d like to say it made more of an impression on me than the pickup trucks with the shirtless farm boys in the back, or the swimming hole with the rope swing and the naked hot girls and guys sunning themselves. I’d like to say that, but I can’t.
I came back brimming with stories of how awesome my new school was going to be. I left out the parts about the hot naked people and left in the parts about history and work and all those other buzzwords parents like.
My mom and dad were excited but nervous. Asheville was eleven hours away by car, and a middle-of-the-night emergency call would be a bit more difficult to handle. I assured them that wouldn’t happen. With the advance assistance of the Warren Wilson Counseling Office, Dr. Morrison, and a lovely female talk therapist I’d been seeing, I located a psychiatrist in Asheville (there seemed to be thousands) as well as a psychologist (there seemed to be tens of thousands). I also found a pharmacy where I could pick up my prescriptions.
“I’ll be fine,” I told my parents as I loaded up my car one early August morning. “Really. I promise.”
“We know,” said my dad.
Agorafabulous! Page 15
