Agorafabulous!

by Sara Benincasa

  I stared at it in shock. Were the admissions people particularly cruel? Didn’t they know that a short, polite rejection letter was kinder than some big envelope full of reasons why you didn’t get in? Unless . . .

  I left the rest of the mail in the mailbox and rushed inside. I sat in the middle of my sunny kitchen floor and opened it.

  “Dear Sara: We are pleased to inform you . . .” And that was all I needed to read.

  “Oh my God!” I shrieked, as if I’d won a sweepstakes. I jumped up and down on the floor, on my couch, on my bed. I performed a series of awkward yet enthusiastic high kicks. I considered doing a back-flip but remembered I had never done one previously, and that didn’t seem like the sort of skill one spontaneously exhibited on command. And then I called Tom.

  “Hey, what’s up?” he said in the way he always did, and I almost burst with happiness.

  “I got into Columbia,” I said.

  “What?” he said, his voice rising an octave and squeaking at the end.

  “I did. I got in.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know, because I’m fucking smart?” I was shocked at myself for actually saying the words that had leaped to mind.

  He was quiet for a moment.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to jump on you like that.” Oh, no. Now he’ll be angry. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. Please don’t leave me. Please don’t ever leave me.

  “No,” he said. “You’re right. I deserved that.”

  What?

  “Congratulations,” he said. “That’s amazing.” He sounded wistful and sad and actually proud.

  “I’m not going, or anything,” I assured him. “I just wanted to see if I could get in. And I did, so now I can always say I got into Columbia. We can frame the acceptance letter and put it up in our bedroom!”

  “If I were you,” he said, “I’d really think about what the best choice is for you. Not for me or for us, but for you.”

  Something was wrong. Everything was right, but somehow something was wrong. He never spoke to me like this. Like an equal.

  “Oh, I want to come home,” I said, fighting the rising anxiety inside me. “Columbia would be too expensive, anyway. I mean, I can’t afford that.”

  “Yes, you can,” he said in the same weird, quiet way. “You can take out loans.”

  “Well, I’m not going,” I said resolutely. “I’m really not. Besides, I’ve already asked you to do a year with me living far away. I promise I’ll never move far away from you again.”

  The next day, I e-mailed the department head at Teachers College at Columbia and offered my thanks, but explained that I wouldn’t be coming to school in the fall. The day after that, Tom broke up with me.

  “Why are you doing this?” I sobbed, even though I knew there were a million reasons why.

  “Because this isn’t working,” he said. “You and me. We’re not good for each other. It hasn’t been good for a long time. You know it, too. And now you’re going to give up your dream to come back here and live with me, even though we make each other unhappy? No way. You can’t.” He was crying, too.

  Alongside the pain, I felt an enormous surge of relief. I ignored it.

  “But we were going to get married,” I wailed. “And have a house, and a dog, and a kid. And now I don’t even know what I’m going to do.”

  “You’re going to move to New York City,” he said. “And your dream is finally going to come true.”

  The next day, puffy-eyed and weak, I called Columbia and asked if I could please come to their school anyway. They kindly said yes, and advised me that I’d better move quickly if I wanted to get those $60,000 in loans. I said I’d see them in a couple of months. Then I called Western Carolina University and politely un-accepted their offer of admission. As I spoke to the woman from WCU, my voice cracked a little.

  “You okay, honey?” she asked.

  “I’m just going to miss Asheville,” I said, sniffling. “I’ve missed it all year out here and I thought I was gonna be home in a couple months, but now it turns out I’m not.”

  “Well, honey,” she said. “We’ll still be here. You can always come and visit, you know. But if I were your age and I got the chance, I’d give New York City a try. You only get one shot at this kinda thing.”

  I thanked her and hung up.

  The last couple of months in Texas were a whirlwind of preparations. I thoroughly enjoyed my drive back East, stopping in Asheville to stay with friends for a few days before I made it up to New York. I managed to avoid Tom, which wasn’t hard at all because he wasn’t exactly trying to hang out with me. I moved into an apartment with two women I met through Craigslist, and delighted in the two dogs and the cat with whom I also shared my new place. They didn’t belong to me, so I didn’t have to do anything other than cuddle them, which was ideal.

  Then there was Teachers College, the most obviously-named graduate school in the world. It sat just north of Columbia’s main campus, a labyrinthine pile of bricks and stone. I busied myself with selecting courses, buying books, and learning the geography of the Upper West Side. Night classes began, as did my daily student-teaching assignment at a public middle school in Manhattan. And sometime in mid-September, I realized with a start that I hadn’t had a panic attack in . . . in . . . I couldn’t remember how long. Not when Tom had dumped me, not when I’d said good-bye to my colleagues, not when I’d driven alone through midnight summer storms in Texas, not when I’d sat in the front passenger seat of my mom’s car and barreled through the Lincoln Tunnel, not when I’d discovered my apartment of choice was a rather steep walk-up. I hadn’t even panicked on the day I met my perpetually disapproving cooperating teacher, the woman charged with mentoring me while educating thirty-five precocious New York City seventh-graders. She had the bitterness one only finds in certain older teachers, the ones who’ve been in the system far too long and who still nurture a wish that they’d done something else. She watched my lessons with a sour expression on her face, but somehow it didn’t throw me.

  No matter how stressed or tired or uninspired I felt, I didn’t panic. I was too busy to panic. If I wasn’t downtown at middle school, I was uptown at grad school. If I wasn’t uptown at grad school, I was doing homework in my bedroom. And if I wasn’t actually at one of these three sites, I was on the subway en route from one to another. I had discovered that subway trains generally didn’t get stuck in one place for over four minutes, and that in New York City there was always a Starbucks with a bathroom when I needed it. I might have to wait in the store while a drunk woman took a shit on the floor beside the toilet, but I would eventually get access to that toilet.

  To my enormous surprise, I found the strange manic pace of life in New York oddly soothing. Perhaps my anxiety was not only crowded out by my daily obligations but by the wild quirks of my fellow New Yorkers. On any given block in New York, I was bound to be, if not the sanest individual, at least not one of the craziest. And there were more of “the craziest” than any other type.

  I did not, for example, shit on any floors in public or private spaces. I did not walk down the street screaming about the coming of the Messiah, the Devil, or the ice-cream truck. I did not engage in fisticuffs with an imaginary pugilist beside the strawberry stand at Union Square Farmers’ Market. For the first time in my life, I was too busy to worry about anything unrelated to lesson plans, adolescent social development, and the New York City Board of Education’s benchmarks and statistics for success in English, grades seven through twelve.

  One night in September, I went out to a pub near Columbia with some new friends. During the dinner, Tom called me and promptly apologized for everything he’d ever done wrong in our relationship. He was almost certainly drunk, but I enjoyed the moment nevertheless—at first.

  “Oh, we both made mistakes,” I said magnanimously, out on the street where I wouldn’t interrupt my friends’ heated debate about charter school funding. “And you really did m
e a lovely favor by breaking up with me. Now we’ve both moved on to better things. I’m living in the world’s greatest metropolis and making a difference each day in the lives of little children, and you—what exactly are you doing, Tom?”

  “Just working, you know,” he said. “Seeing a nice girl. Playing touch football with my buddies. Man, I’m happy to hear you’re doing so well, Sara.”

  “Good to hear,” I said faintly. “I have to go now, and do significant things. Good-bye, Tom.” I hung up the phone and leaned against the building.

  SEEING A NICE GIRL? Who the FUCK had given him permission to “see” a nice girl? It had only been four months since we’d broken up! Did he have no sense of propriety? Was he an emotionless death robot sent from another planet to destroy my entire existence with a single phone call? What kind of a cold, evil bastard moved on from the greatest love of all time within four fucking months? I wanted to throw up. I wanted to punch a fist through a storefront window. I wanted to find the girl he was fucking and kick her repeatedly in the teeth, and then push him into a bubbling vat of something terrible and oozey.

  Aside from a brief rebound dalliance in Texas with a twenty-year-old hippie who believed he’d been abducted by aliens as a child, I hadn’t gotten back into the world of opposite-sex relations. I certainly hadn’t been on any dates or “seen” anyone “nice.” This meant that even though I was doing some interesting things in a cool city, Tom was winning. He was winning. And this was one thing I could not abide.

  I needed to have sex with someone. Probably a series of someones. Or have a series of sexual encounters with a single someone who would then become a non-single someone because he would be my only someone and I would be his. The only problem was that I didn’t know any straight young men in New York.

  Well, that’s not entirely true. There were two straight young guys in my program at Teachers College, but one of them only dated Jewish girls and the other one was caught up in a not-so-secret secret affair with a classmate, who reported to a friend of a friend that the gentleman in question had an enormous penis. I’ve never been a fan of big dicks, so this piece of information did not engender any lustful thoughts in my heart. I possess a vaginal model that takes a while to adapt to the shape and size of a particular phallus. It is made of a substance not unlike memory foam. When my equipment hasn’t been used in a while, it returns to its factory setting. The lack of flexibility may be pleasing to my partners, but I often find it uncomfortable. I am told that upon having children, it will become as accommodating as a wind tunnel, but I’m no closer to that event now than I was at twenty-four. I preferred that my reintroduction to the world of cocks come in the form of an interaction with a medium-to-small member of the species.

  My savior came in the form of Andrew, a guy I’d briefly crushed on at my first college, Emerson. He was a senior when I was a freshman, and he’d been kind and quirky and smart and weird, and he was very good at writing. Back then, he’d had a long-term girlfriend, and I’d never entertained any serious thoughts of dating him. But when I ran into him at a pretty little bar in Brooklyn one night, I discovered that he was (A) newly single and (B) not opposed to talking to me at great length while I flirted shamelessly. I gave him my phone number, or maybe I asked for his, and somebody called somebody else, and eventually we set up a date.

  I wasn’t actually certain how to go about doing it on the first date. I assumed someone invited someone else home, and maybe a stop at the drugstore for condoms was involved. I wasn’t uptight, but I’d never really enjoyed the non-oral type of sex—I was usually too tense, even after many months with Tom. I suppose it was a holdover from my seventeen years as a devout Catholic, when I regarded the prospect of a dick near my pussy with the same enthusiasm an ordinary human might reserve for a gun pressed to the back of her skull.

  With Andrew, it was easy. We had a lovely dinner at a tiny French café on one of those Brooklyn streets where all the shops are aggressively adorable and the people look like the cast of a deliberately multiethnic GAP commercial. I avoided alcohol but encouraged his consumption, as I’d heard that getting the other person intoxicated was a good way to ensure that sexytime would ensue. We strolled along the promenade and held hands, and finally we sat on one of the wrought-iron benches and started making out. He was a good kisser, and I had flashbacks to when I’d thought he was so cute in college in Boston, long before I’d even heard of the town where I’d eventually meet Tom. I’d noticed Andrew in the fall semester then and it was the fall semester now, six years later. The air was crisp with the scent of dying leaves—my favorite smell in the entire world. Leaves are possibly the only things on earth that smell better as their corpses decay.

  After kissing him for about twenty minutes, I pulled back and looked at Andrew conspiratorially.

  “Would it be weird,” I began, “if I asked you if we could go back to your—”

  “Not weird at all!” he said quickly, and we both laughed. He stood up and offered me his arm like a gentleman. I took it, feeling like a genteel Victorian lady or at least a really classy fin-de-siècle whore. Together we paraded down the streets of his precious Brooklyn neighborhood, pausing casually to point out extravagantly useless items in cutesy shop windows (“Look at that pink unicycle!”) as if we weren’t totally on our way to a hot grown-up fuck session. I finally understood the modus operandi of those aging anorexics on that show with all the shoes and handbags and Detective Mike Logan working deep cover as a millionaire douche. I was going to have sex, and this was the city! I felt alive and vibrant and reasonably attractive. And I had shaved my legs, even above my knees.

  Andrew shared an apartment with two good-looking guys who had been in a few of my classes in Boston. I’d been intimidated by them back then, because they were part of a very cool circle of writer-boys who wore slouchy vintage garments and wrote interesting poetry and short stories. They did hilarious things like invade Old Navy en masse and commence reading aloud the works of Richard Brautigan until they were asked to leave. They worked hard in restaurants and bars and spent their savings to self-publish their work, which they sold in bookshops around the city.

  Andrew and I exchanged greetings with his roommates, who were polite enough to appear happy that I’d come home with him. Perhaps they genuinely were glad for their friend—he’d gotten out of a stressful long-term relationship sometime in the past year, and I didn’t get the impression it had been an easy breakup. At some point the roommates made their way to their respective bedrooms, and Andrew and I got on with the business at hand.

  His room was small and had lots of books. I think I remember banging my head on a bicycle that was hanging from the ceiling. It was dark and not at all unpleasant, and we had gotten all the way to the part where he was actually inside me before I realized that something very terrible was happening.

  It wasn’t the sex that was bad. He seemed perfectly capable in that realm, and I probably made a reasonable contribution. But in that moment, I was privy to a great revelation, and I suppose revelations always arrive at rather inconvenient times. Moses probably had something on his daily agenda other than standing around listening to some fiery bush, and Mary likely had some weaving to finish when Gabriel interrupted her with the announcement that she was knocked up. And so it came to pass that I was in the middle of my very first grown-up pre-appointed New York City fuckfest when I was struck by The Truth: I had never felt lonelier in my entire life.

  There I was, twenty-four going on twenty-five, a woman of reasonable intelligence and sophistication, with a funny, sensitive, artsy, non-sociopathic straight boy doing very adult things to my nether regions, and I felt horribly alone. Because as kind as he was, he didn’t love me. And as desperate as I was, I didn’t love him. I probably could have gotten there quickly, if he’d asked me on second and third and fourth dates and told me I was beautiful and held my hand in front of his friends, but none of that was going to happen. I’d been having sex for nearly four years, but this w
as almost certainly going to be my first-ever one-night stand.

  There is as yet no book of etiquette on behavior during a one-time romp betwixt the sheets. Emily Post never addressed it, and I’m fairly certain Judith “Miss Manners” Martin would turn her nose up at the question. But I am positive that I broke one sacred (if unwritten) rule of conduct: I began to cry.

  Picture, if you will, the tableau: a reasonably cute, consenting, single twentysomething brunette in missionary position beneath a reasonably cute, consenting, single, dark-haired twentysomething fellow on a reasonably non-squeaky IKEA bed in a reasonably clean apartment in a reasonably hip neighborhood in a reasonably legendary borough in a reasonably immortal city. Nothing in this scenario begs the question, “But which person will sob uncontrollably in the midst of the other’s orgasm?”

  Andrew paused in his labors, justifiably alarmed at my sudden change in demeanor.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, horrified. “Oh no, did I hurt you?”

  I thought about Tom, and how much I missed him and still loved him. I thought about school, and how much I didn’t want to be a teacher. I thought about writing and how I hardly ever did it for fun anymore. I thought about my body, and how I still hadn’t lost the burrito weight I’d gained in Texas. I thought about how I hadn’t had a panic attack in a long time and how I (mostly) wasn’t afraid to leave the house or get on an airplane, and how I was living on my own—something that had seemed impossible back when I was learning how to eat an entire meal again—and how I was still unhappy.

  I sobbed, “This . . . just isn’t . . . how I thought it would be.”

  I’m pretty sure he thought I was referring to his dick. Which, incidentally, he promptly withdrew from my undercarriage. We both looked at it at the same time and saw that it was wearing what appeared to be an Elizabethan ruff. And while my vagina is a cave of many wonders, it does not contain a Shakespearean costume closet. The condom, it seemed, shared my poor sense of timing.