Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986)

by Tomlinson, Sarah

  I had recently become interested in any clues I could find as to the ways of the grown-up world. The movie that best expressed how I felt, Pretty in Pink, reached the theater in our nearby town during the spring of my sixth-grade year. I hated my freckles, and I knew Mom’s freckles had also persisted until she was a teenager, so I made a daily vigil to the mirror to see whether mine were lightening. They were not. And then I was gifted with this movie where the opening credits played over close-up shots of Molly Ringwald putting in earrings and applying lipstick, her freckles quite clearly visible, as she’s revealed in all of her redheaded glory to be the kind of beautiful, cool girl who was desired by her male classmates. Maybe my freckles weren’t so bad after all.

  The movie was a revelation. Molly’s character had a complex relationship with her father. She was a nerd—she studied diligently, aspired to go to college as a way out of a life she felt stunted by—and yet she knew about fashion and music and culture. She was my hero. I not only saw the movie at the theater on Friday night, dressed in my pink mock-letterman sweatshirt and fake pink pearls, I also went back to see it on Saturday night. I bought the soundtrack, which was my first exposure to so many amazing alternative bands—Echo & the Bunnymen, the Psychedelic Furs, the Smiths—and the whole new world of the urban underground.

  If Pretty in Pink was how I envisioned my life—even though the characters were a good seven years older than me, drove cars, drank booze, and had sex off camera, the film depicting my aspirations, About Last Night, had come out the summer before. When Betty had suggested we go see a movie during her visit, I didn’t mention its R rating.

  Even Betty realized at some point that perhaps this movie was not intended for a ten-year-old, maybe during the hot sex scenes between Rob Lowe and Demi Moore, or the charged postcoital banter about whether or not an “I love you” spoken at climax counted as the real thing. She leaned over to me in the darkened theater.

  “Did you know this movie was going to be like this?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, not shifting my eyes for fear of missing a single nuance.

  I was still too young for the sex, really. I was there for everything else. I wanted to live in a big city where I did interesting work and had cool friends and lovers, and every day shone with the heightened sense of importance that life in small-town Maine lacked.

  When Betty visited the summer I was eleven, she decided I was ready for my first manicure, at the beauty school where she went to get her hair and nails done because of their discounted prices. Craig had always cut my hair at home. This was a new and glamorous experience, even if there was really nothing fancy about the fluorescent-lit room with its linoleum tiles. Sitting nervously across from a redneck beauty school student with dramatically feathered hair, I watched as she gently tilted my filthy cast—I'd broken my wrist riding my bike on the first day of summer vacation—to dip my nails into the sudsy water, and so begin the process of grooming me into a lady.

  My dad and Eva actually came to visit again that summer, during the same week the Big B and I were together in Portland. Betty took the four of us out to lunch at the most wonderful restaurant in the world—DiMillo’s floating restaurant—located in an old boat moored to a dock in Portland’s harbor. It floated! There was not a single leaf of kale in sight, except for under the sliced cantaloupe used as a garnish on the plate, and even I knew you didn’t eat that (unless you were a glutton like Betty). I was allowed to order whatever I wanted, and I was going to eat fried clams and French fries.

  Best of all, my dad was sitting across from me, looking subdued, his face bare of the big beard he’d sported throughout my childhood, his broad shoulders folded into his dress outfit—a newer plaid flannel shirt—his unruly, thinning hair mostly tamed. Next to him, Eva wore the bright, quizzical expression of a foreigner who needs to pay attention to follow the conversation. It was pretty much the perfect day.

  Only my dad didn’t go in for perfect days in the traditional sense. He reached into his backpack and pulled out plastic bags of prepacked food.

  “We’re on a macrobiotic diet,” he said.

  Eva nodded.

  “What?” Betty asked sharply, either because she was old and couldn’t hear, or because she was old and couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  “It’s a principle of eating,” my father began, instantly launching into a lecture on the ideals of the macrobiotic lifestyle and why it was the best choice, not only for him and Eva but for Betty and me, and the people at the other tables, and even the waiters, and every single other person in the entire rest of the world. He always did his research and was a great talker, so his argument was convincing. Betty was as likely to become macrobiotic as she was to get a face tattoo. I was not having any of it, not today. I’d seen my share of brown rice in my regular life as a hippie kid. My vacations with Betty were all about eating all of the prohibited foods I could, and then eating more.

  I was actually relieved by my dad’s digression, though, and perked up as I fell into my familiar role as his best listener, ever. Up until that moment, he’d been shut down in his mother’s presence. He was always so convinced she was about to publicly humiliate him or try to manipulate him into doing something he didn’t want to do—as he felt she’d been doing since he’d gone to live with her out of foster care at age ten—that he’d been pulled up inside of himself almost completely as we sat there. For the long minutes he’d been silent and closed down, I’d anxiously observed him, as on edge as I was whenever I read a tense scene in a book, hating any conflict, even unspoken.

  As Betty and I were served our fatty dead qi on a plate, my dad and Eva tucked into their seaweed-wrapped rice balls.

  “What is that?” Betty asked, her tone sharp.

  And then she lost interest, attacking her meal with the fervor of a once beautiful woman who had long trafficked in the favors of men, and had therefore been on a diet her entire life, and was now going to eat every French fry the universe put in her path.

  My father gazed into the middle distance in his usual intense way—he raised spacing out to an art form—before turning to look at me.

  “So, Sarah,” he said. “We have to tell you something.”

  I smiled, still innocent enough to be unaware that when the adults “have to tell you something” they are never offering you a trip to Disneyland.

  He looked at Eva. She smiled encouragingly. He smiled back at her. Looked at me. “We’re going to have a baby,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said, not able to fake happiness, not even for my father.

  Here was another baby with two parents, another baby at the center of a family that did not include me. Each of these families contained a finite amount of space, of time, of money, of love, and there would never be enough left over for me. As far as I was concerned, I was the only person who could be relied upon for anything, and it was better if I accepted it up front. Soon after this, I began fantasizing about getting my own apartment, in Portland, or even better, Boston. In my dream life, I was at the center of a vibrant world of new experiences and people, dipping in and out of our interactions without ever needing anything concrete from them.

  My sister, Asmara, was born in a birthing tub in the living room of my father’s Somerville apartment the following January, just before my twelfth birthday, when my brother was eighteen months old, and his constant need for care seemed to dominate everything at home. My father sent me a card with the news and the explanation that her name meant “love” in Indonesian. I didn’t hear much from him after that. Twelve years after my birth, he had not changed at all. It didn’t take even a year for Eva to reach the same conclusion Mom had reached in two—that raising a baby with a man who was as much in need of mothering as any child was actually harder than raising a baby without him.

  That fall, Eva took Asmara home to the Bavarian town of Garmisch-­Partenkirchen, eighty minutes outside of Munich by train, where her own mother lived, and raised her there. My father did not sha
re his reaction to any of this with me at the time. After Eva left, he simply disappeared once again. I still waited for him, but this time, I was also waiting to get out.

  By the time I was thirteen, music had become my tether to the big, sparkly world beyond my hometown, which had begun, more than ever, to feel like my bell jar. I had just entered my freshman year of high school. The novelty of a new school and classmates had worn off a few hours into my first day. Bored by my classes, oppressed by the small-minded meanness of my classmates, I was miserable.

  Home life also tested my patience. My favorite movie of that time was Labyrinth, starring a young Jennifer Connelly as a fifteen-year-old girl named Sarah, who felt her father and stepmother unjustly expected her to care for her baby brother. And so, she wished the goblin king, played by David Bowie, looking gorgeous in blond, bird-of-paradise hair, would take her brother away. One day, my brother drove me past the breaking point. Not by being bad, but by being cute, and being a toddler who needed patience from me. I had never been more of an impatient, impetuous perfectionist than I was at the age of thirteen. I drew on Labyrinth as the ideal alternative to our current life.

  “If I had the choice between saving you and being David Bowie’s goblin queen, I would choose David Bowie, and you would be a goblin forever,” I snarled.

  Andrew began to cry, more upset by my tone of voice than my words, which were essentially meaningless to a three-year-old.

  “I don’t know why you’d want to go with David Bowie,” Mom said, picking my brother up and soothing him on her hip. “He’d just give you diseases.”

  That shut me up. Her tone wasn’t mean, even though I had certainly warranted at least a minor comeuppance for being a brat to my brother. Clearly, I was in over my head in the adult world, no matter how much I tried to pretend otherwise.

  On those nights when I was trapped at home, I felt ready to burst the seams of my skin. After dinner, I went up to my room, threw myself down on my bed, and stared through my skylight at the vast pearlescent dome of the twilight sky. A molten fury rose up. It wasn’t anger so much as pure energy, the desire to run and never stop. I sang along to Sinead O’Connor, aching for such power: “I don’t know no shame. / I feel no pain.”

  In the silence after the tape ended, I could hear the wind in the trees and the flat, dry voices of The MacNeil/Lehrer Report on the television downstairs. Ripping myself off my bed, I put on my Walkman and turned it up loud. I was hungry for anything angry, sexy, wild—the darker and more shredded with feedback and profanity, the better.

  As I clomped down the stairs, I shouted in the general direction of Mom, who was playing with Andrew in the living room: “I’m going for a walk.”

  The music worked its magic, making me feel that much more alive: “If you got some big fucking secret / Then why don’t you sing me something?”—“Little Angelfuck / I see you going down on a fireplug”—“One day something funny happened / But it scared the shit out of me . . .” The angry lyrics gave me an air of bravado I didn’t naturally possess. Blasting the sound of the big wide world into my very being, I paced the quiet country road that ran past the land, walking down to the harbor and back, feeling like I could tear up the asphalt with my desire for everything ferocious and free.

  I wanted life to be bigger, louder, deeper, more intense. Punk rock was all of these things, so listening to it leveled me out. It made me feel normal, which was a relief. Not that I wanted to be normal. I wanted to be extraordinary. But while I worked up the guts to try to do something, anything, even though I had no idea what that might be, it helped to hear others release their barbaric yawp; the music let me know the tumult within me was an echo of larger forces, of intelligent life in the universe; I was not alone.

  Although I loved punk, the band that inspired my deepest ardor was the Cure. In 1989, they released their eighth album, Disintegration, which voiced every dark, romantic longing in my overly dramatic mind and heart. They were touring to promote the album that fall, billing their Massachusetts show as their last ever; their swan song. I had to go.

  My father hadn’t been up to visit since his last trip with Eva, and his few letters were largely filled with mentions of his new family or questions about mine. Better than the notes, though, were the cassettes he sometimes sent. As my primary access to the counterculture that existed beyond Maine, he was supplying me with the oxygen I needed to survive, as he’d always done.

  My desire to see the Cure show trumped my usual discomfort at asking my dad for anything bigger than a cassette. I was still a little nervous about making any demand on him, but I wrote and requested that he drive a friend and me from Boston to the show, about twenty minutes outside of the city. He agreed right away.

  It was as if all my waiting by the window had been rewarded. And now that I had the power to go places, if he would not come to me, I would go to him. All he had to do was stay put, and we would be the companions I had wanted us to be for so long. It never occurred to me to be cautious. I was so hungry for my father, and the validation I thought a big life would give me, that I was willing to risk everything in their pursuit. Because I valued time spent with my father—and now, time spent in the lustrous world at large—more highly than anything else, I almost didn’t care whether these experiences were bad or good. Yes, good was better, but bad could be okay, too; at least it was something. I was already learning the kind of tricky thinking that would allow me to pursue whatever I wanted, relentlessly, without any concern for the consequences.

  chapter four

  DISINTEGRATION

  Feeling oppressed by the daily routine of my high school life—rising in the bleary early dark, riding the bus to school, enduring the long, tedious hours of entrapment—I focused all of my attention on the gilded adventure glinting in my near future: the Cure concert. The day of the show, my friend Donyelle’s parents dropped us off on the stretch of Mass Ave near Berklee College of Music, and we got sucked into the great maw of the city. A black man with long dreadlocks sold incense on the street. The dusky, fruited scent made my stomach dip with anxiety, reminding me I was in my father’s city, and I was about to see him for the first time in more than three years. We wrestled our way along the crowded sidewalk to the corner of Newbury Street, where the epic two-story Tower Records held court.

  As we rode the escalator up, up, up, as if toward heaven, I was soaring with anticipation, wide open to every new band name I needed to pretend I already knew while filing it away to be researched later. Every T-shirt could identify its wearer as a member of the special tribe I was eager to act as if I’d already joined, even though I was learning everything on the fly, dizzy with the effort of trying to incorporate so much new information into who I was. I felt opened up in a way it wasn’t normally safe to be in my hometown, able to admit how deeply I cared about music and art and the desire to express some of what was deep and raw and real in life, which was just beginning to kick me from within.

  Even though I somehow never doubted my father would show up, I was anxious as we waited for him. This concert was important to me, yes, plus I was seeing my dad for the first time in years, which always made me excited in that fizzy, nerved-up way.

  My dad pulled up in the white Toyota sedan Eva had gifted him when she left for Germany. It was instantly as it had always been: the smell of incense, the notebook of tightly filled pages of ­affirmations—none of which had happened, but which he still believed in, as he believed in the track, as I believed in him. He seemed smaller, and his eyes quickly shifted away from mine when I tried to study his face, but he looked the same, and we quickly settled into our old way of being together.

  My dad didn’t do small talk or ever temper his mood in the slightest simply because he was in the presence of someone else, which he rarely was anyhow. The advantage to this was that we never wasted time circling each other uneasily, even when we hadn’t been together in so long. He just opened the floodgates, and I rode the wave.

  “I hope my back h
olds up at the show,” my dad said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I haven’t wanted to upset you, Sarah.”

  Without moving my head, I tried to see how much Donyelle was picking up from the backseat, and how she was reacting, in order to try to puzzle out what she thought of my dad, and by extension, what she thought of me. We had been friends a long time, since grade school, when I had taken ballet lessons from her mom, and she now shared my passion for finding a way out into the big, wide world beyond Maine. She was thankfully oblivious to my concerns, a normal teenage girl who was simply happy to be on her way to a concert, her long, brown hair whipping in the wind.

  “That’s why I haven’t been in touch much lately,” my dad said. “But it’s been real bad. Sometimes I can’t sleep. When it’s real, real bad, I can’t sit down. I can’t drive a cab or deliver packages. I can’t work anymore. Sometimes all that helps is to walk. I walk for miles and miles around the city until I’m too tired to walk any more.”

  I watched him nervously, waiting for his hand to grip the flesh of his waist. I felt guilty that I needed a ride to a concert, which was probably going to cause him pain.

  We made our way into one of the venue’s acres of asphalt lots and parked. My dad planned to wait out by his car during the concert.

  “Have fun,” he said, not thinking to warn us to be on our guard, or to behave, as other parents might have done.

  Everywhere around us were Goths so skinny or rotund they were like characters from a fairy tale, all draped in velvet capes and antique lace that looked as if it might evaporate in the cool night air. Oceans of skin so pale it was nearly translucent were scarred with lipsticked mouths as red as soft, seeping wounds.