Even though I was intent on seeming cool in front of my new friends, I was sure my dad could hang. And, as always, I really just wanted to see him. Actually, I wanted to impress him: if I hadn’t been able to woo him with the sweet girl I’d been, I would woo him with the wild child I’d become. Because Stephanie was friends with the opening act, we pulled up behind the venue where the bands loaded in their gear. My dad approached, sussed out the situation, and immediately had to get on top of it. He saw a skinhead with braces, bomber jacket, and shaved head, his neatly rolled blue jeans above oxblood Doc Martens.
“I didn’t know you hung out with skinheads, Sarah,” he said. “There’s a lot of ignorance and hatred in that culture. You have to be careful.”
“Not all skinheads are racist,” I snapped back. “I’m friends with S.H.A.R.P. skinheads, and they fight for equality and tolerance.”
“That’s still fighting.”
“Someone’s gotta fight for what’s right,” I said.
He stepped back a little, surveyed me and the pack of drinking, smoking kids.
“You know what, if you don’t want me here, I should go,” he said.
Just like that, I did not want him there. I wanted to be fifteen. I wanted to drink beer and kiss the cute guy I’d been eyeing from the opening band. I wanted to go up front for 7 Seconds. I stared back at him, not begging him to stay, for the first time in my entire life, not making everything okay for him.
“Fine, Sarah, I’m gonna go,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Bye.”
He walked off toward the street. I stood there, stunned. Maybe I hadn’t been particularly welcoming, but I hadn’t been actively trying to reject him or push him away. I didn’t have it in me to want to hurt my dad. I’d just needed him to acknowledge the sophisticated girl in the big city I’d become, after years of striving, largely out of my desire to be close to him. I hadn’t even stood up for myself. I had simply sidestepped my usual role. And by doing so I had betrayed him. He wasn’t walking away, like a parent would, to give me space. He was reacting out of his own chronic insecurities and issues, and I would not be forgiven. He would not see me again for the next ten years.
chapter six
THE SHOOTING
After my dad left, I threw myself into the pit by the stage. I went to where the heat and the noise and the boys were. I wanted to get slammed around and feel something on the outside that hurt more, or at least felt different, than how I hurt on the inside.
At the show’s end, I was sweaty and wrung out, my body high on the adrenaline of the music and contact. I wanted the feeling to go on and on. I asked for another beer. I went to the after-party. The dingy apartment with stacks of empty beer bottles in the kitchen, the crappy stereo playing lo-fi punk loud, the crowd of people laughing, talking shit, and drinking just the right amount of too much; I needed all of this to shut out everything I felt.
At the end of the weekend, we drove back to Simon’s Rock. I was hungover and sad. Instead of wanting to take a long, hot shower and climb into bed with a tall glass of water and my journal, I wanted more of everything, for the distraction to never stop. I didn’t ever want to pause and feel what had just happened. And so, for a long time, I didn’t.
A few weeks later, I got a card from my dad that read: “I’m terribly sorry about last weekend, I hope it didn’t upset you. I have been a compulsive gambler for on + off, mostly on, almost 20 yrs. I’ve completely ruined my life over it. For the last two or three months I’ve been trying to get myself together enough to come together with you. My final realization was that I couldn’t unless I quit gambling, because the only two things I was sure about was that I loved you + that I wanted to be honest with you. There was no way I could do that + still gamble. But quitting is not a cure-all. I just see how self-centered + really insecure I am, I don’t know what else to say, but I wanted to say something. Thank you, just being around you has a positive effect on me. Love Dad”
The adult I longed to be thrilled at the grown-up way he’d leveled with me. But it was both too much and not enough. I’d had friends whose parents were alcoholics. But I didn’t understand what an addiction to gambling meant. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t just stop. That part didn’t really matter, though. What mattered was the confession itself. This was his first truly honest letter to me, and I saw it as the beginning of something new between us, a deeper, stronger relationship. I didn’t want to jeopardize this by admitting how much he’d hurt me, so I wrote him back a gentle, conciliatory letter.
While I dug into my college adventure, a part of me continued to watch the mailbox. I kept expecting a letter, any day now; and then, any week. The fact that I sometimes doubted him now only increased my desire for our new closeness. I knew what he was capable of, and I wanted the good stuff all of the time. Instead, I got nothing. When he called me a month later and promised to visit me at school in a few weeks, I decided I’d believe it when it happened. Of course, it never did. He was once again gone, and his absence was his only consistent presence in my life.
I was older now, though, and really, I was more interested in boys than in my father. In mid-October, I gathered my courage and called Oliver. It was clear even to naive, fifteen-year-old me that his mental state had worsened, and it was hard for me to feel much more optimistic about his future prospects than he was. But I swooned when he told me that I was the most beautiful person he knew, and he’d fallen in love with me that summer. We talked about meeting up, and I held on to this dream, even amid my new life, more comfortable waiting on the promises made by a man who’d given me little to believe in than I was in my day-to-day reality.
My feelings for Nok had, for the time, mellowed to the point where we could be friends. He had a hard relationship with his dad, too, and we could talk for hours about our disappointments and anger, and our fear that these men had planted the seeds of their failings within us. We also talked about writing and love and life. I was fired up and wanted everything to happen all at once. Even though Nok had so many more advantages than I did—money and looks and natural talent and cool—he didn’t seem to want anything. This made me jealous, because he was cocooned in his not caring, a lot like my dad was, and it also made me crazy because a part of me was still in love with him, and I wanted so much more for him than he wanted for himself. It was easy to cling to my crush; wanting from afar was how I was used to feeling. At one point that year, Nok said to me: “Your depression is a badge you wear.” He was right, it was.
But now that I had the means to create the adventures I craved, I found I was a good instigator. We were seriously underage, and technically, there was a rule against us drinking or consuming drugs, but there was always a way, and I was drunk almost every night of my first semester, and sometimes high or tripping, too. Especially for a perfectionist, it was a welcome escape, the one time when I didn’t have to try to be good.
In early December, the band I had gone to see in Boston with Stephanie came to play at Simon’s Rock. I loved the feeling of being in the know when they rolled up and nodded their heads at me in acknowledgment. I loved knowing the words to the songs, knowing I had a place at the after-party. Drunk on cheap beer, I fooled around with a boy in the band, one I picked because he picked me. He was special because he had been up onstage, which meant he was better than the rest of us in some way and had a more direct link to the music I loved so much it often felt like the only thing keeping me sane.
He and I made out in his sleeping bag at the top of the stairs in a little nook where no one would bother us, and then fell asleep in an empty bed. For years, my friend Natalia and I referred to sex as “unzipping the sleeping bag,” even though I hadn’t had sex with him. Of course, she’d also fooled around with a guy in the band, but they really had unzipped the sleeping bag, and now he was obsessed with her. As was her boyfriend back home.
Natalia was also dating a cute skinhead boy from my grade. He hung out with a group of tough guys who had a mean
edge that didn’t seem anything like the S.H.A.R.P. skinheads I knew. I was friendly with one of the boys because we had a class together and liked the same punk bands. But I always steered clear of him when he was with his friends, which included a big boneheaded body builder, and a small, tightly wound Taiwanese-American kid, Wayne Lo, who had begun making statements in class about how people with AIDS should be quarantined in Canada and bombed.
My classmates and I were not having any of this kind of talk. We had fought hard to get to a place where it was safe to be ourselves, gay or straight or sexually ambiguous, liberal in politics as well as attitudes toward culture and love, and we weren’t allowing any hate into our paradise. So we ostracized the whole group, and they pulled tighter into themselves.
But Natalia liked having sex with her guy, and she wouldn’t give it up. I became like her lady in waiting, fascinated by every detail of her romantic life. No one ever got obsessed with me. I didn’t expect them to stay in contact after we’d made out. I didn’t even expect them to want to make out with me. What had happened with Nok had been an anomaly. The prompt ending had been what I should have expected all along.
Before it seemed possible, my first semester roared to an end on a frantic wave of all-night paper-writing marathons fueled by buckets of General Foods International Coffees and hot cocoa mix. I was supposed to see Oliver in New York City when I visited a school friend during break, but he never contacted me. When I confronted him, he broke off our relationship again. Back home on vacation, I was exhausted and moody, balking at any rules Craig tried to establish after my newfound freedom. He felt my attitude was bad, my lifestyle unhealthy for someone my age, and that I didn’t appreciate my mom’s hard work enough. I wasn’t exactly crazy about my own behavior, either, but I also felt ignored and misunderstood, and wanted out. I slept for hours, wrote bad poetry, fell in love with the director Hal Hartley’s films, and smoked in secret, nursing my heartbreak and recovering from the mad adventure of my first months away. My dad sent me his usual Christmas card but any real conversation between us had ceased. I wrote in my journal: “Just like him, I’m constantly having self-realizations and learning from my mistakes and flaws, but I never apply my valuable knowledge. We both continue blindly, making no real accomplishments in our struggle for some form of success or peace of mind. We’re both pathetic dreamers. This makes me believe I’m doomed by my genes, which is the same excuse my father makes for his failures. It’s really quite pathetic. I have to wonder if I’ll ever reach a place in my life where I’ll spend my time living instead of dreaming of living.” Happy sweet sixteen.
I celebrated my sixteenth birthday not long into our second semester. The girls on my hall got me a cake, which Beth decorated with a paper cutout of a cheerleader because she remembered me joking about my days as a junior high cheerleading squad captain. My friends went in on a carton of my cigarette of choice—Marlboro Reds—a gesture I found totally awesome. We partied up in Natalia’s mod, an on-campus apartment reserved for upperclassmen, and everyone came, which meant the world to me. I got drunk and had fun, happy to have hit a legitimate milestone, and to celebrate with real friends. But being close with kids who were as intense and sometimes as troubled as I was had a darker side. One of my best friends left my party, slit her wrists in her room, and was found just in time. She was expelled the following week.
Alcohol took the edge off my feelings. It allowed me to let go of my perfectionism and fear of failure; it made things messy, and that was okay. We all got drunk together. Having the best time and being silly was a good thing. When we were drinking, I felt closer to the way other people seemed to feel all of the time. It was a huge relief.
Sometimes when I was drinking, I’d even feel pretty and make out with a boy at a party. I never thought these boys would be my boyfriend or even like me. I was desperate for love, but all of the small intimate moments and admissions of vulnerability it would take to get there were just too much for me. At least I could be glad that these isolated incidents were proof that my life was blossoming.
That March I went home with my friend, Lucy, for break. A few days into the trip, we borrowed her mom’s car and drove out to see Lucy’s friend who lived in Sandwich on Cape Cod. The girl’s mom was out of town, and we thrilled at having the house to ourselves, to party, yes, but also just to have a brief, lovely respite from adults.
I liked Lucy’s friend, but it was instantly clear how much we’d moved away from normal teenage life during our time at Simon’s Rock. Yes, we had curfews and more vacations than regular college kids, but we were in college. At sixteen, I had already taken on thousands of dollars in student loans and was making decisions that would affect my future. But this was vacation, and I didn’t want to think about anything for a few days, and so we turned to the great levelers: music and booze.
Some of the girl’s friends showed up that evening—including a trio of cute skateboarders who looked at Lucy and me shyly until we’d all drank enough to turn the big sprawling home into our playhouse. I was always on the lookout for boys, always wanting something to happen, and I drifted toward a thin boy with chin-length hair as fine as corn silk. I can’t remember his name or even a time when I could. We made out and slept on the couch. He was very sweet, and I was grateful to him for it.
In the morning, his friends came tearing into the room. We sprang apart. Suddenly he was up and already moving away from me. I kept looking at my boy, wanting something from him, willing him to come to me, but he didn’t. The three boys laughed and joked about how drunk they’d been the night before, about other parties with people I didn’t know. I couldn’t bear it anymore and went outside to smoke. Lucy and I were sitting on the front steps when the boys whooped out of the house.
“Come back tonight,” Lucy’s friend called after them. “Bring more beer.”
They piled into their car and sped off. My heart sank. Sometimes it felt like every new experience only left me filled with longing.
“He didn’t even say good-bye,” I said.
“Oh, Pooter Bear,” Lucy said, using her nickname for me. “Boys like that have never met anyone like you.”
“Like what?” I asked, my tone indignant, even though I was also pleased.
“Like that,” she said, pointing at me.
I looked down. I was wearing big chunky silver rings, the black velvet miniskirt Mom had sewn for me, my Docs, and a green cardigan with ripped-out elbows.
“I’m not that weird,” I said.
“It’s not just that,” she said. “It’s everything. You go to college. You have opinions about things. They’re from a small town. They don’t know what to do.”
We sat inside all afternoon, drinking Diet Coke and girl talking. That evening, the boys returned. When they came in, though, it wasn’t the same. We were trying to recapture something spontaneous and fun from the previous night that now felt forced. We held our cans of cheap beer awkwardly, staring at one another from far away, until one of the guys suggested we shotgun them. It was like the night before, but not. I was drunk again, but in a different way, and whereas before I’d been happy with whatever happened the previous night, now I felt pressure, like if something didn’t happen with the boy, it meant he didn’t like me.
I got trashed and ended up puking, and then sobbing for an hour in the bathroom with the boy and his friends trying to take care of me. The boy I liked was patient and kind, but I was a mess, and finally Lucy took over. She got me calmed down and sobered up, at least a little. We all watched TV, and my boy and I started fooling around again. He pulled me up onto my feet, taking my hand, and that alone was enough to make me happy.
At the top of the stairs, the door to the girl’s mother’s bedroom was open, the bed neatly made, welcoming. This was a lot compared to a night crammed together on the couch downstairs. I paused, and then, as I knew I would, I went forward, as I always did. We climbed onto the bed together and the kissing soon became heavy.
I was a sixteen-ye
ar-old freshman in college. The closest I’d ever come to a boyfriend was my pen pal, Oliver. Nok was the only boy I’d ever kissed more than once. But I wanted this. His hands went under my top, and then he pulled it over my head. I didn’t tell him I’d never done this before. I didn’t tell him I wasn’t on the pill. I didn’t ask him about condoms or anything else. The details were fuzzy—except for the pain—even as they were happening. Luckily for both of us, we were accidentally well matched, both shy and mostly trying to be good.
In the morning, I drifted out of a hard sleep: first, my pounding head, then my ashtray mouth, then my queasy stomach, then my soreness where he had been. I couldn’t remember the details, but I was glad I had done it. I wanted to talk about how I felt about what had happened, but not with him. With Lucy, as soon as he left.
He had rolled away in the night, but his arm was still around my shoulders. Somehow, I knew he was a nice guy, and I was glad. I had already heard too many stories about how often that wasn’t the case. I snuggled closer to him, let his silky hair fall across my face as the room lightened around us. When he stirred, I was suddenly embarrassed. Was there blood? I hadn’t thought to look. What did he think of me?
I burrowed my face into the back of his neck. I could feel him smiling, and it made me smile, too. Then I pulled away. We both kept our eyes down as we got dressed, me searching the bedspread we had slept on, grateful there was no blood or any other sign of what we had done. I sat on the edge of the bed, not quite ready for it to be over. I wanted a kiss, but I wouldn’t ask for it. He sat down next to me, our bodies touching.
“So,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
I turned and dared to really look at him, his fine blond hair falling across his pretty face, so that he felt able to look at me, too.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
He laughed, and I laughed, too.
“Nice to meet you,” he said.
Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) Page 9
