Girls in Trouble: A Novel

by Caroline Leavitt

  Six months after she got the job, on a hazy spring day, Sara’s parents came to visit. They hadn’t been thrilled by her new job or the sound of her new apartment, but she was sure when they saw it, when they saw the work she was doing, they’d be happy. She spent the whole morning scouring the apartment, buying fresh flowers. She casually left some catalogs around, the high-fashion ones that she had written all herself, the Vogue that had her ad in it for the Stretch Your Imagination campaign.

  At ten, the buzzer rang. She buzzed them in and opened her door wide. She heard Jack complaining before he was even halfway up the third flight of stairs. She heard Abby panting, making jokes, and then there were her parents, looking just the same. Both of them had arms full of packages that they immediately set down.

  Sara hugged her parents hard. “What do you think?” she asked happily.

  They stared incredulously around. “The bathtub is in the kitchen,” Abby murmured, trailing one hand along the plank covering it. “What kind of nonsense is that?”

  Jack pointed to Sara’s closet. “The bedroom’s here?” he asked, opening the door to Sara’s clothes and then quickly shutting it, his face closed, defeated. “What do they charge for a place like this?” Jack walked around Sara’s apartment, as if he were measuring it. Foot for foot. He turned to Sara, amazed. “This floor has a slant.”

  “That’s part of its charm—” Sara said, and Abby threw up her hands.

  “I love my apartment,” Sara said firmly. “I’m very happy.”

  Abby got busy, taking things out of the bags. Shampoo, soap, potholders. A set of sheets and a comforter. “All things you need,” Abby insisted. “Maybe I should have mailed them earlier but I wanted to bring them myself, help you set up.”

  “Thank you, but I have those things,” Sara said quietly. “And I am set up.

  “Not the right kinds of things, I’ll bet. And I’d put that table by the window, honey, not where you have it. You’ll get better light.” Abby started to move the table over. “No, no, I like it there,” Sara protested, and Abby smiled, and kept pushing the table, and Sara gave up.

  Jack sat down on the edge of Sara’s futon, wincing when it made a creaking noise. “I admit I’m a little concerned here.”

  “You don’t have to be.”

  “I’m your father. I’ll always be concerned.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I thought you were happy at school. I thought things were working out.”

  “I’m happy,” she said. She lifted up the catalog to show them. “Look, I did this whole catalog!” she said. “Everyone at Madame’s loved it.” Abby winced, but Jack tilted his head, reaching for the catalog. “Every page is mine,” Sara said.

  Jack leafed through it in silence and then set it down. Sara cleared her throat. “How about if we get something to eat?” she said finally.

  They went to Da Silvano’s in the Village. Sara had been saving to treat her parents, wanting to show them just how all right she really was. The restaurant was pretty, and as soon as they walked in, Jack looked more like himself, his eyes bright, his head aloft.

  “Well, this is nice,” he said, nodding at the gleaming silverware, the white tablecloths. After a glass of wine, he put his hand on Abby’s, he leaned over and kissed her cheek.

  Sara tried to eat slowly, because she knew she wouldn’t be eating like this again, she could never afford to, and she wanted to remember every bite.

  She was relieved her parents didn’t talk about her during the meal. Instead, Jack told Sara he had a new client, a fashion designer who worked only in fluorescent colors and couldn’t understand why her business wasn’t booming. Abby talked about her work, too, about a little girl whose teeth came in black because her parents were feeding her all the bread and butter and sugar she could eat. She talked about the new neighbors who had four poodles. And she told Sara she was reading the collected works of B. F. Skinner. “So I can talk about your work with you,” Abby said.

  “I’m not in school anymore, Mom.”

  “But you will be. You’ll go back.”

  “My work is copy writing.”

  “Maybe for now. But not forever.” The busboy came to clear the table when they were finished. Jack sat back. Abby beamed.

  “I really like my job,” Sara said pointedly.

  “Well, I really liked being a hygienist, too, when I first started,” Abby said. “And then by the time I stopped loving it, I was too tired to go back to dental school.”

  “No,” Sara said. “You’re wrong about me.”

  “Are you still rebelling against us?” Abby said. “Is this what this is?”

  Sara blinked. “Rebelling?” She shook her head. “I’m not sixteen. This is my job, Mom. This is my life. I’m doing the best that I can.”

  Abby carefully blotted her mouth. “I want you to do better.”

  In all, Sara’s parents stayed only three days. They didn’t do much, mostly ate at different places, or walked around, and when they left, Sara felt both relieved and yearning for them to stay.

  Sara went inside her apartment. Her parents hadn’t taken home any of the catalogs she had written, hadn’t even looked at them. Sara sat down and leafed through one. There was a corduroy coat. “Sheared Genius.” Everyone at work had gone crazy over it. It made her grin remembering how much fun she’d had thinking it up. She sat quietly, looking through the catalog, admiring her work, until she was tired enough to sleep.

  After the first visit, Abby began to call her more often, every Friday, wanting to know how Sara was doing. They talked for a while and then Sara would always ask for her father, and he would always somehow be out. “Why doesn’t he call me?” Sara asked.

  “He hasn’t called?” Abby said. “Why, that’s terrible.”

  “Is he there? Can I speak to him now?”

  “He’s visiting a new client. He’ll call tonight,” Abby said.

  And then Sara would get off the phone and stay in that night, not go to a movie, and still the phone wouldn’t ring.

  Finally, one day, she called him at his office. “Daddy,” she said, and there was that silence again.

  “Hi, sweetie,” he said. “Can I call you back?”

  “No. You never call me back.”

  She heard his sigh.

  “Are you mad at me? Are you disappointed?” she asked.

  “Honey, no. Of course not.”

  “Did I do something wrong?”

  She could hear the hum of the wires. “Dad, tell me the truth.”

  “I’m glad you have a job,” he said. “I’m happy you have friends. I just feel—” He didn’t say anything for a moment. “I feel that I’ve failed you somehow. That I didn’t do my job as a father.”

  “Dad. You didn’t fail me.”

  “I never wanted lots of kids. Just one so I could do it really right. One I could concentrate on, give all my time and devotion to. I saw how the other fathers were, how they came home too tired to throw a ball with their kids, how it was always the mothers you saw at the PTA, at the zoo. Never a father. And that’s important, especially for a girl. They’ve done studies on how it affects self-confidence, did you know that?”

  “I’ve read them.”

  “Remember how I came on your class trips, how I was the only dad?”

  “Yes.” Sara remembered the zoo. The circus. The swan boats. A sea of skirts and just one pair of pants, her father, sitting beside her on a narrow open boat with a painted swan head and back feathers. She was so proud she could have died. He showed her how to crack the peanut shells before she threw the nuts to the hungry ducks. He hummed “The Men in My Little Girl’s Life” to make her giggle.

  “I want you to go back to school. I want you to have a real profession. A decent apartment. I want you to start dating nice men and get married, find someone who’ll take care of you.”

  “I take care of myself.”

  “I feel like you’re not living your real life. The life you were meant to have. I don’t want
you waking up at forty finding you missed your chances.”

  “I’m happy, I told you. I don’t ask myself how I’ll feel at forty.”

  “Well, maybe you should.” In the background, Sara heard other voices. “Look, I have to go. But I’ll call you. And I love you. You’re my—” He hesitated. “My baby girl.”

  She held the phone tighter. “I love you, too,” she said finally.

  Abby began to write to Sara. She sent Sara stories about how Sara’s old friend Judy was studying to be a cardiologist. Robin was now the youngest full professor Stanford had ever had. She sent Sara college catalogs. School and loan applications. She sent love. “From me and your father,” Abby promised.

  Sara didn’t go back to school that year. Nor the next year or even two years after that. She still missed Kaysen, but sitting in Kaysen’s office and talking seemed to belong to a whole other life, one that she couldn’t return to. Although she half-expected to run into Kaysen, she never did. The people she would have run into from her classes moved on to graduate schools in other states, and her friends stopped asking her when she was going back; they accepted her life the way it was. And so did Sara.

  In the spring, Madame gave her a huge raise and she found a bigger apartment on West Twenty-fourth Street. She was busily packing for her move, digging out her shoes from the back of her closet, when she came across all the years of gifts she had bought for Anne.

  She sat down on the wood floor, unable to move. She rested her chin against one of the packages, swallowing hard. She hadn’t bought gifts for her daughter in a long while. What was her daughter doing now? What kind of a voice did she have? Did she like to sing? Did she dance? Did she have any memory at all of Sara? Would George and Eva ever tell Anne about Sara or had they erased her from their lives? If Anne somehow walked right in front of Sara, would Sara even recognize her now, or would Anne be like one of those computer-aged pictures you sometimes saw on the back of a milk carton? “The longer you wait, the harder it is,” Abbv had said.

  Jolting to her feet, Sara got herself a glass of water, gulping it down. She couldn’t bear it. Kaysen was wrong. Dive into the pain, Kaysen kept telling her. Sara had told that to her own patients when she had had them. But it was wrong advice. It was dangerous, because you didn’t necessarily find buried treasure when you dove. You could dive so deep embolisms formed. You could bring something back up with you from the depths, thinking it would fade away in the light of day, but instead, it would gain new life, transforming, and you’d find yourself drowning, even on the driest land, and there’d be nothing to save you. And time didn’t heal you. That was the big lie. Time stretched so that some days pain was far from you, and other days it was close as your own heartbeat. The best you could hope for when it came to pain were scars, healing so you could get used to them. And even then you had to do everything you possibly could not to reopen the scars, not to make them fresh again, because then you might bleed and bleed and never stop.

  Ten years had passed since she had last seen Anne. You had to know when it was time to let go, and how you did it was up to you. One of her patients wrote the name of an ex-boyfriend on a piece of paper and burned it. Another, suffering when her husband left her for her best friend, told Sara that the only thing that had helped her was to have a ceremony for her lost marriage, saying a little prayer, releasing a clear helium balloon into the sky, and as soon as the balloon disappeared into the sky, she had felt better. She hadn’t wanted to consider those stories when she had been told them, hadn’t wanted to think what they might mean to her. These are my patients, not me, she had thought.

  Sara got a big black garbage bag from a cabinet and tenderly laid the presents inside. She wouldn’t take these gifts with her to her new apartment. And she couldn’t leave them here, caught like ghosts, whispering their secrets to the next tenant.

  Sara dragged the bag to Saint Mary’s on the Upper West Side.

  It was her favorite church. Big and stately, with two angels carved into the cornices, and a heavy wood door. There was a small marquee as if the church were a theater and every week they posted the sermon, which always made Sara grin. “God’s rap is music to our ears. If you want to run the race, why not walk with Jesus?” Sara hesitated and glanced around. The church was empty. No one on the street was paying attention to her. She climbed the steps and set the bag down. She dug out the card she had written. “Please help these gifts find good homes.” Like abandoned babies, she thought. Like something out of Abby’s Girls in Trouble stories, only this time, it wasn’t a story at all, it was her real life and she was scripting her own ending.

  She stood on the steps. It was a clear, cool night, and the sky was sprigged with stars. She touched the bag, just for a second. And then she turned, and without looking back, she began the walk back home.

  chapter

  ten

  Sara was walking home from work, layouts and catalogs tucked in her bag. It was still light and she was taking her time, traveling out of her way so she could go up to Central Park first before she started back downtown, needing a fix of greenery. As soon as she got into the park, she felt better. Bikes whizzed past her, and the soft smattering of sound hit her like light dappling a window. She breathed deep, trying to relax, to get herself in the right frame of mind before she had to go back to her apartment and work. All that morning Hal had been on her case, yelling at her because she hadn’t come up with a new name yet for the not-so-best-selling Grecian Swimdress, a homely, girdled bathing suit with a skirt draping to the knees. “You think a new name is going to make it sell better?” Sara asked. “Why can’t we just make a decent, pretty swimsuit to sell? This suit looks like we’re punishing these women for wanting to go to the beach.”

  Hal gave her fish eyes. “You and your new campaign had better be in my office by Monday morning,” he warned.

  She passed an old couple on a bench, holding hands, talking, and yearning clenched her stomach. She slowed her steps. What did you have to know to make something that miraculous last through your life? She glanced back at the couple. The man rested his head on the woman’s shoulder, and the woman sighed with pleasure, like a cat in the sun.

  Sara kept walking. Better to think about swim dresses.

  Sometimes ideas came to her right away, zinging into her mind, and other times, such as now, it was like pawing through sludge for a dark brown jewel you had lost. Everything she thought of sounded absolutely wrong. Mermaidens. Dives. She laughed at herself.

  She should go home, should start her work for Madame, but she couldn’t tear herself away yet. She kept watching and then she was in front of the kids’ playground. She leaned on the fence. A little girl was playing with a balloon, NO ADULT ALLOWED IN WITHOUT A CHILD. She stepped back, retracting her hand from the gate. She sat down on a bench and suddenly, despite herself, she felt shaken. She told herself she was just tired, just overworked, and then she covered her face with her hands.

  “Hey, are you okay?”

  She looked up. A man was standing there, in jeans and sneakers.

  “I’m fine—” she said.

  “You don’t sound fine,” he said doubtfully. “Your voice is quavering.”

  She stood up. The concern on his face made her embarrassed. “I’m fine,” she said.

  “Are vou sure?”

  She nodded. Kids squealed from the playground. The balloon bobbed. “Yeah.” She slung her purse on her shoulder. “I’d better get going.”

  “Okay if I walk you a little? Just to make sure you’re okay?”

  She glanced up at him. “I don’t know you—”

  “Well, I’m Scott. Scott Fields,” he said.

  “Sara,” she said, and then she joined him.

  While they walked, she sneaked glances at him. She liked his straight nose, and his long black hair, liked the way you couldn’t tell what color his eyes were because they kept changing in the light, from green to brown to hazel.

  “So,” he said, looking at her s
uddenly, as if he were trying to read her. “Student?”

  She shook her head. To her surprise, she heard Abby’s voice whispering in her ear: “Tell people you’re a writer and stop at that,” and for the first time, Sara felt shamed by her job. Well, Abby wasn’t here, and Scott was, and Sara dug into her bag and pulled out one of her catalogs. A woman poised in white flowing trousers. “Wear the Pants,” the headline said. “Making Fashion into a Plus.”

  They stopped walking and he looked at the catalog. “Madame!” he said.

  “You know the catalog?” Sara said, surprised.

  He leafed through the pages. “Sure do,” he said, “my mother’s bible.” And then he looked at her quizzically. “Wait,” he said, confused. “You’re a plus-sized model?”

  “No, no, I write the copy!”

  “You’re kidding!” he said, delighted. “Wait until I tell my mother! She’ll go nuts!”

  “It’s fun,” she admitted. She glanced at his shirt. “The white stuff,” she laughed.

  “Do my sneakers.”

  “Set the pace with stepped-up styling that sneaks up on you.”

  He laughed, glancing down at his shoes. “Did you always want to do that, to write?”

  She shrugged. “I was the only little girl who wanted to be a shrink. Guess that was one of those dreams I gave up.”

  “No, no, you didn’t,” he insisted. “I mean, in a way you still are a shrink. That catalog does more for my mother than a bottle of Valium. She looks forward to it. And I bet a lot of other women do, too.” He helped her put the catalog back in her bag.