Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986)

by Tomlinson, Sarah

  I knew how I felt—bereft—but I didn’t let it show. I took the cold plastic receiver and turned away from Mom, preferring to be alone within the sliver of personal space I wanted to believe I could control.

  “Hi, Sarah,” my dad said.

  My heart went sweet and sour like marmalade. I loved his voice, the languor of his slightly nasal New Jersey twang, like he couldn’t be bothered to close up the syllables. He flattened out the a’s in “Sarah,” saying my name as no one else could, his tone giving me value. He retained the dropped consonants of the teenage hoodlum who sang doo-wop in the Trenton projects, where he was one of the only white kids and got kicked out of ninth grade for his bad grades and truancy. His words were separated by spaced-out pauses, the synapses of his brain—and his world vision—altered by those 120 acid trips.

  “Bernie couldn’t lend me a cab for the weekend,” he said. Or maybe it was . . .

  “My cab broke down on Ninety-Five, and it won’t be fixed until next week.” Or . . .

  “I couldn’t get the money together to come this weekend.” Or . . .

  “My back is acting up. I can’t make it this weekend. But I’ll try to come next weekend. And if I can’t get up then, I’ll be up as soon as I can.”

  Never that he wouldn’t come to see me; always that he couldn’t, as if there were a barrier between Boston and Maine that made it impossible for him to reach me. Of course there was an obstacle, only I didn’t understand what it was at the time.

  I listened to him very closely, careful not to do anything to scare him off. I did not cry or yell or lie down on the pine floorboards and kick my feet. I did not tell him I had been standing at the window all day, believing in him, when even he did not believe, not really, in himself, and Mom did not believe, and Craig did not believe, and my cat, Molasses, did not believe. “I’m sorry, Sarah,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” I said, not quite convinced of the lie myself but pretty sure he was.

  “It’ll be great when I can get the cab,” he said in a rush, relieved to be on to the fun promises that were always really, truly going to happen next time. “We’ll go for a long drive. And we’ll stop at McClellan’s on Route 1 and get a fish sandwich. And we’ll drive up to Rangeley and go camping. I have a little tent we can use.”

  “Okay,” I said, clutching the phone, willing myself to hold on, just hold on.

  I never asked for an explanation of what was keeping us apart or pressed him to tell me why I should trust him. I simply believed him, the way my dad believed, insanely, after losing everything hundreds and thousands of times at the track, he would suddenly win one day, and it would be transcendent, everything he’d ever dreamed of on all of those sad, losing days. Next time he would win, he managed to believe. Yes, next time we would win, I, too, believed.

  My dad’s great, lumbering laugh erupted from him; he was glad to be free of his earlier anxiety about disappointing me, and to have gotten exactly what he needed from me. I was happy, too, because even though I hadn’t gotten what I’d wanted, I’d made him happy.

  If I didn’t say anything to scare him off, and I made myself smart enough and funny enough and pleasant enough, maybe I could keep him on the phone just a while longer, and maybe, just maybe, he would come see me soon. I would be a good girl whose father wouldn’t stay away for any reason in the world.

  But long distance was expensive, and money was always an issue.

  “I gotta go, Sarah,” he said. “This call’s costing a fortune, and I missed a shift this week because my back was acting up.”

  “Okay,” I said, pushing down the panic rising within me.

  “Tell Mommy I’m gonna send yous the money for last month as soon as I can. I’ll figure out when I can get up again, and I’ll send a letter with the dates.”

  “When?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

  “I don’t know, Sarah, as soon as I can. I have to go.”

  “Okay.”

  When I was sure he had hung up, I returned the receiver to its cradle and tried to fold myself back into reality, which seemed flat and stale compared to even just his voice on the phone. Around me were the roughly built counters, which were nothing more than open wooden boxes, really, topped with plywood, containing the big glass jars in which Mom stored brown rice and dried beans. This was my real life, but it felt like a cheap substitute for what I most wanted: my dad.

  When we moved to the land full-time in the winter of 1980, Mom gave up her job at the health food store in Augusta. I loved having her at home with me. Her days were largely devoted to the never-ending tasks by which we shaped the house into a home and stayed warm and fed. Throughout the morning, she would return to the kitchen and punch down her rising bread, a job I enjoyed helping her with, my small fists sinking into the dough, which was soft and sticky, pliant in a way that felt very much alive.

  Once the bread was in the oven, Mom could usually be convinced to play a game or do a puzzle with me. Craig didn’t like to play games or do puzzles, and he could be impatient with my little-girl whimsy, so we were not close. Instead, we were joined by a shared adoration of my mom. She made me a game out of small pieces of paper, each printed with a letter, which had a match hidden in the stack of squares. After we had played a few times, I knew my letters. I begged Mom to teach me to read, which fascinated me because I saw her doing it all the time. I wanted to be just like her, because she was beautiful and good at so many things.

  Mom and Craig had met at Davis & Elkins in 1969 and maintained the bohemian habits of their generation, growing a few pot plants for occasional consumption during our first few years on the land. From an early age, I knew the plants were illicit and sometimes snuck other kids back to the clearing where they sprouted. Briefly, during Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No campaign, I worried Mom and Craig would get arrested and be taken away. But, overall, the pot intrigued me, as did everything on the land. It was something the grown-ups did, and I was interested in everything the grown-ups did.

  My only issue with them smoking together in the evenings was that I wanted to watch TV like other kids, and instead, Mom and Craig preferred to listen to music and talk. They sometimes let me watch The Waltons as a compromise.

  One night, Craig turned off the television after my show was over, and a small orb of light hung in the center of the darkened screen for a long moment. When that faded, it seemed to sever any tie we had to the outside world. A rattling sound scattered across one of the skylights. My head jerked up, even though I was always terrified I would see a face looking down at me through the glass. There was nothing there, just more darkness.

  “It was only an acorn,” Mom said, smiling at me.

  Craig kneeled and slid out a record, handling it carefully the way he had showed me, even though my own hands were too small, and I wasn’t allowed to play the records yet. There was a faint staticky hiss and the album began: Peter Gabriel’s Security.

  I sat next to Craig on the floor and pored over the album cover for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, with its image of two suit-clad men shaking hands, one of them on fire. Craig lit a small purple glass bong. The room filled with sweet, musty smoke. He passed it to Mom. Her long hair fell around her face as she leaned down to inhale. Craig’s stereo speakers were large and powerful, and Peter Gabriel wailed amid a wash of electronic instruments. I became very aware of our place in the world, just the three of us alone together, tucked away in a small house amid a big forest on the edge of the immense ocean, and felt a deep melancholy I didn’t quite know what to do with.

  I loved the music deeply, consuming it as if it were food, tasting its flavors of genius, of madness, and of the vast, magic world just beyond the land. When I got bored of listening, Mom played Parcheesi with me, always letting me be the red player, because that was my favorite, even when I gave her first pick.

  Every night, Mom slid into my twin bed with me and read me a chapter or two from the books I already loved like family—Little Women and The Secret
Garden, or my favorite book from my childhood, The Year of Mr. Nobody, the story of a discontented middle child who feels alienated from his family and so invents an imaginary friend.

  With my Sesame Street comforter pulled up to my chin, my mom lanky beside me in jeans and her Guatemalan slippers, her bangles making their familiar music as she turned the page, I felt safe and content, maybe not entirely happy, but at least full of an uneasy peace that was a relief from my normal waiting state. Inside the world of the book, I could forget my own longing and lack. A few months into our new life on the land, I could read the easy authors kids learn first—Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein.

  Mom got a job and put me in a local day care. My only real, vivid memory of the place is how much I hated naptime, already eager for a life filled with constant activity and excitement. The heavy claustrophobia of insomnia rising, I knew I would not be able to sleep. But I was a perfectionist and a rule follower, never tantruming in front of anyone but Mom and Craig, and so I willed myself still.

  When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I quietly reached for a book. The adults who found me reading couldn’t really be angry since I hadn’t disturbed anyone. My mutiny was permitted. Reading became a reward for me, and finally, something I could control.

  As much as I loved reading, I would have preferred to be at home playing with my own toys, on the land with the other kids who were like me. Being out in the world was always a little fraught. We didn’t live like other people. We didn’t watch the same TV programs or eat the same food, and as much as my instinct was to fit in, I mostly liked how we lived. It was familiar, and it had an aura of old-timey adventure, like living in Little House on the Prairie. Going back and forth between the two realities—carob at home versus chocolate at day care, wooden blocks and tinker toys versus plastic, plastic, plastic—was like being bilingual.

  From an early age, I had a list of chores I was expected to complete each week. Instead, I was often hiding away upstairs, tearing through a library book. I hated getting in trouble, but I was like a drunk at the bar in the final minutes before last call, trying to squeeze in a few more precious sips.

  The one chore I didn’t have to be harassed about was checking the mail. As I stood on the side of the country road that passed by our house, I willed myself to yank open the wooden mailbox. Usually, it was just bills and seed catalogs for Mom.

  But sometimes, there was an envelope that smelled exotic yet familiar, its exterior marked with my dad’s distinctive handwriting, which I adored and tried to copy for a time in my teens—my name rendered with lowercase a’s nestled between a capital S, capital R, and capital H. When I was little, these cards were mostly addressed to Mom. I clutched the envelope to my chest and ran all the way back, always a little surprised when our house came into view amid the unrelenting trees, the skylights glinting in the mellow New En­gland sun. Mom was making a stained-glass window at the table, bent down over the pattern of blue and yellow flowers she’d laid out, her hair falling forward.

  “Mom, Mom, you got a letter from Dad,” I said.

  She looked up, her face tense, then smiled at me. “Here, I’ll open it,” she said.

  I held my hand on her bare arm, freckled like mine, as she tilted the card so I could see the painting of an old-fashioned woman holding a brown dog, and read:

  “Hi Sue and Sarah, Hope/Intend this catches up with yous. How does bringing Sarah down Sun the 21st or Mon. the 22nd sound and I’ll probably bring her back up on the bus, cause I just don’t have enough confidence in my bomb.”

  My heart leapt in my chest. I was going to see my dad. I was, wasn’t I? I looked at Mom, but she was focused on reading, not giving anything away: “If it sounds good to you call me collect from the land or otherwise I’ll call you Weds. morning. Good luck, good weather with your house, tell everyone I love them, John.”

  Mom gave me the card, picked up her soldering iron, and went back to work.

  “Am I going to Boston?” I asked.

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  It was like Christmas, Easter, and Halloween all put together, but better, because it was a wonderful surprise I hadn’t dared to let myself hope for. Now I just had to wait until his phone call to make sure it was really happening.

  “Why don’t you go outside and play?” Mom said.

  Ever since I’d learned to read, I wasn’t so into playing in the woods. I’d outgrown the idea that a little dirt didn’t hurt, and I always seemed to be afflicted with a sunburn, even when I’d barely been outside. But this was the refrain of my childhood, and I wanted to behave so nothing would get in the way of my time with my dad. I took my book—its constant presence like an extension of my body—out to the front yard.

  Everything on the land had a strong smell; the air never seemed to warm up completely, except for a few weeks in late summer, and in the short, cool afternoons, the earth’s odor was sharp and tangy with minerals. I lay on the grass, which was sweet and clean like the aftertaste of milk. It was so quiet I could hear the wind in the trees, a gentle whooshing noise that became hypnotic. There was something supremely lonely about the sound. In order to hear it, there must be no evidence of human life anywhere—no car engines or horns, no television laugh tracks, no human voices talking about the price of potatoes, no electric guitar solo from a classic rock song drifting over from someone’s radio. There was nothing and no one, a feeling like the end of the world, an absence and emptiness that created an early, unformed dread; I was all alone, as we were all alone, with nothing but the wind in the trees.

  chapter two

  JOHN LENNON’S COMING BACK

  Every sixth or seventh time my dad vowed to visit, as I stood waiting at the window, my vigilance paid off. There was a flash of yellow through the trees. He was coming. He was really coming this time. It had been more than a year since his last visit, six months since I’d last been down to Boston. He had promised to see me at least half a dozen times in between. But I had believed, and now he was here. Joy and terror filled me in equal parts. I ran outside to greet him, but then held back at the last moment, paralyzed with shyness and the sheer overwhelming fact that my father was there, suddenly, in the flesh. After I had gotten over my initial anxiety, I met him in the driveway.

  “Hi, Sarah,” he said, his lazy enunciation of my name familiar and beloved.

  “Hi,” I said, watching him closely for guidance.

  He squatted down to my height, and I breathed him in and felt his worn green T-shirt under the skin of my bare arms, his little notebook poking at me from his chest pocket. I tried to hold him tight, but my reach didn’t go all the way around.

  “My back’s been acting up all day,” he said, pushing himself to stand.

  His bad back was the number one reason he gave for canceling our visits, and I watched him closely now, afraid it would cause him to leave abruptly.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine, Sarah,” he said. “How are you?”

  “Good,” I said, scurrying ahead of him toward the house, which I felt proud of, as if it were a drawing I’d made and now had the chance to show off.

  He held back a little, and I slowed my steps to match his. When he caught up, I led him inside. Mom was chopping chickpeas in the blender for fresh hummus. She turned off the loud whirring blades when we came through the door.

  “Hi, John,” she said.

  “Hi, Sue,” he said, barely able to look at her. “How are yous?”

  “We’re good,” Mom said. “Sarah’s glad you’re here.”

  He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a bent envelope.

  “I’m sorry it isn’t more,” he said.

  She didn’t say anything, didn’t reach for the envelope. All of us were silent. He held it out to her. Finally, she took it from him, and I exhaled.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Do you want some lunch?”

  “Nah, I stopped and got a fish sandwich at McClellan’s on the way up. I think w
e’re gonna take a drive.”

  “Sarah, have some lunch first,” Mom said.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said, even though I loved to eat, hungry or not.

  All I wanted was to be alone with my dad. I thought he was somehow more special than the other dads who were a regular part of life on the land, because he lived in a faraway city, and he drove a cab, which was glamorous, big-city work, and if he could only be with me once every six to eighteen months, then his time must be more valuable than that of the other fathers, who shoveled the driveways and ate the tabbouleh at the potlucks during our regular day-to-day. He was like a touring rock star that only rolled into town when his adoring public and exciting lifestyle allowed him to get away.

  When my dad was with me, I was greedy about his time. His visits with the other families on the land—Lou and Dottie, who’d been my parents’ friends when they were together, and Penny, who lived in the house behind ours and shared similar interests and beliefs with my dad—made me restless. As we sat together on the bench in Dottie’s kitchen, where he sipped herbal tea from a chunky ceramic mug, I hated losing him to adult conversations I could barely follow. Nevertheless, I stayed close by his side.

  “Do you wanna go play?” he said, looking down at me.

  I shook my head, determined to wait it out. But as the afternoon dragged on, I became frustrated that his attention wasn’t on me. I reached up onto the table and pulled on his big, dad hand, trying to hurry him up. He looked down at me and laughed.

  “All right, Sarah, let’s go,” he said, making my heart leap.

  My dad’s visits always found us indulging in one of his greatest passions—driving. He’d held jobs he’d loved delivering auto parts to mechanic shops up and down the Delaware River and parking cars, not to mention his cab driving. I would think of this when I later read Kerouac, because of my dad, of course, always picturing Neal Cassady as my dad during the scenes in which he parked cars with maniacal zeal. My dad’s idealization of Kesey and Cassady and all of his counterculture heroes was the cover story for why he couldn’t get a real job with the “squares” or be anything like a steady father to me.