None of us had words for what we needed, or the pain we felt, and so we drank, and we rubbed one another raw with our frustrations, our crushes, our competitions, our need to always, always, always be together, and our irritation that none of it was helping.
Graduation day arrived. Due to the enormity of our loss that year, Senator Ted Kennedy had agreed to speak. The Secret Service men scattered throughout campus gave everything a strange, dark vibe that didn’t seem entirely at odds with the mood that lurked beneath the festive graduation ceremony. Grammy came, with Mom and Craig and Andrew. My dad didn’t even send a card.
Craig once again backed my car up to the bridge that led to Kendrick. It was all over. The best place I’d ever experienced was also the place where the worst thing I’d ever experienced had happened. I couldn’t imagine how anyplace else could compare. But I’d decided to transfer to Bard for my final two years and was eager for a new start.
A summer at home in Maine certainly wasn’t going to be the answer. Nothing had any flavor or color. I worked as many shifts as I could pick up at the Anchor Inn and got myself down to Portland as much as I could, but even that seemed flat and dull now. I didn’t just want something to happen. I wanted the same thrill I’d found at Simon’s Rock: the inflamed conversations and hours of perpetual motion jokes it was possible to have with truly brilliant, weird, damaged people, my people.
I was at least grateful for the relative lack of tension around the house, especially compared to the previous summer. Mom and Craig had both been supportive and kind in the aftermath of the shooting, which I appreciated. Even more than that, my mom especially got all that had been lost, not just the lives but also the miracle of this oasis we had found. I was still fiercely independent and always eager to run off to the next adventure, and with Andrew still only seven, I continued to feel that the three of them formed a complete family without me. But after the year I’d had, a part of me just wanted to stay at home forever, where it was safe. And so I was glad for these few months when I didn’t have any choice but to be there, during which the impending unknown was momentarily delayed.
By the time I drove down to Bard at the end of the summer, I was cautiously optimistic. Through a paperwork snafu, Bard had assigned me a Simon’s Rock friend, Beth, as a roommate. Maybe I actually could have broader creative horizons in a new place that wasn’t shadowed by the shooting, but with friends who understood what I’d been through. I felt good about this new stage of my life. That lasted for about a day.
I was entering my junior year of college as a seventeen-year-old kid who had survived a school shooting nine months earlier and had received only the most cursory counseling for that trauma. I mostly dealt by smoking as many cigarettes as I could in a day and drinking as much as possible at night. The school was populated with brilliant, artistic kids, many of whom would have been a lot cooler if they hadn’t been obsessed with acting like we were living in the East Village.
Leaving my room always felt fraught. I was shy. My skin was bad. I didn’t feel like my clothes or my comebacks were right. I didn’t want to care, but I did. When I crossed the quad, I felt self-conscious, and I hurried with my head down, smoking, trying to act hard even though I felt anything but. I still adored conversation as much as ever, the joy of landing the perfect zinging remark, and I sometimes rallied and stormed the talk at a meal or party, loving how everyone laughed and got stirred up by an idea I threw out. But, like the revelry of a perfect buzz, I could only keep it up for so long.
My real savior at Bard was my classes. My fall semester writing class was with a New Yorker named Peter Sourian. He took a shine to my writing and me, and this small kindness was a lifeline. He always started each workshop by reading the day’s story because he believed it was helpful for us to hear our work read aloud by someone else. The first time I was critiqued, he was a few lines into my story when he paused.
“You were read to a lot as a child, weren’t you?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “Why?”
“I can tell by your love of language.”
It was one of the first times I’d encountered the idea of “being a writer” as an inherent talent made up of qualities I might naturally possess or be able to cultivate.
Sitting at one of the round polished tables in the arts building, the autumn leaves shaking free of the trees outside as we discussed fiction and literature, I was happy.
When we returned to school after the Christmas holidays, Beth and I moved into an insanely great room in Manor House. It had a small antechamber in which we kept our desks, and a short door that led out to a turreted balcony overlooking a vast field, the river somewhere down below. It felt full of possibility, and I loved the room deeply.
Not long into the semester, Claire showed up. She and her boyfriend had just split. She was already breakup skinny, and she seemed to get smaller even though we smuggled her peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches out of the dining hall several times a day. For the next few weeks, she slept on the narrow space of floor in between our twin beds. Eventually, she got a job near campus and moved in with a Simon’s Rock friend.
Despite her troubles, Claire was still my source for much that was cool. She made me mix tapes featuring riot grrrl bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile. She was the person who made me a tape of Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, which was like my journal but witty and badass. That year she gave me another gray Memorex tape, marked with a band’s name and album title, but no song listings; another installment in our ongoing attempt to understand love. It was the tale of a relationship coming apart, confessional and dark and sexy. The male singer’s tone was deep and knowing and said as much as his lyrics. I was smitten and listened to the tape again and again, his voice leaking into my bloodstream, his words admitting to dark secrets of the male psyche I’d first gotten a glimpse of through my dad. It was a relief to hear them spoken out loud.
I had become deeply obsessed with Courtney Love and her husband, Kurt Cobain, and the music of Hole and Nirvana, as well as their whole aesthetic and philosophy and love story. I collected every article, photo, musical recording. I dreamed about them, loved them. I was in our room in Manor in early April when I heard Kurt Cobain’s body had been found with a shotgun nearby. Kurt was one of the matchless ones. He was just like us, but he was also so much better than us. He was that rare doting dad, that courageous artist who’d made something beautiful from darkness. He was exceptional, too exceptional in the end. And now he’d left me, too.
My own dad had started writing to me again. But for once, his letters fell flat. He still didn’t ever really acknowledge the shooting. His incessant desire to make plans with me without any specific follow-through was beginning to wear thin. In the past, there had been moments when he had paused long enough, in his letters, or on the phone, to ask me how I was. Those moments were fewer and farther between now. After everything that had happened since our fight in the parking lot, it was hard to imagine catching up.
For my senior year, Beth and another Simon’s Rock friend, Sarjan, and I moved off campus, into an old farmhouse. Oliver resurfaced, and we had long calls on the house phone, which I cradled against my neck while I sat at the kitchen table, drinking and chain-smoking. I lived on cigarettes and gin, resolute in my avoidance of all fat and most food. All I wanted was to be skinny and in control, and as my hip bones jutted through the fabric of my favorite striped dress, I had a clean, strong feeling.
One night when I was tipsy on the phone with a very drunk Oliver, he surprised me. “You should come see me,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
I was eighteen. I had my own car. He was only a few hours away. We had been declaring our love to each other, and then not talking, and then talking again, for three years at that point. Beth did not want me to go.
“I have to go,” I told her. “I have to see what happens.”
She was, reasonably, afraid that he was going to hurt me, literally or figuratively. He
had told me about once pushing a girlfriend in front of a car. It was unclear whether this was true or not, but either way, he had said it. He was also the man who had gotten me through my last horrible year of high school, who had listened to me for hours when I felt like no one else would, who had given me hope that there was life beyond my limited horizons. As I got into my car, Beth stood in the driveway with me.
“I can be there in four hours,” she said. “Call me. Call me.”
“I’ll be fine, Beth.”
I smoked and smoked and smoked on the drive down. The slightly run-down house I pulled up in front of looked like as if it had been ground down by generation after generation of careless students drunk on cheap beer.
My meeting with Oliver was instantly weird; not bad, but not familiar the way I had expected it to be. He seemed smaller than I’d anticipated, not shorter exactly, but regular size after my immense imaginings. In my letters I’d been able to ask him to come down to my level, to reassure me about his intentions, to make me feel valued and not at all like the silly stupid girl I always feared I was. In person, I was too scared to ask. I wanted to draw close, but I didn’t dare. He stared at me, not giving anything away. We didn’t know where to look, what to say, where to sit.
“Let me give you a tour,” he said. “We can stop at the liquor store.”
He drove me around his town in his car, pointing out the places that felt tender and familiar to me because they had been featured in so many letters and phone calls. The tour was a good idea, something for us to do, somewhere for us to look. He stopped at the liquor store and emerged with a bottle of his favorite whiskey, Canadian Club. We went back to his house and got drunk. Fast. The more I drank, the more I wanted to be close to him, and the more frustrated and hurt I became when nothing physical happened. I knew it was something disappointing about me. He’d told me how he’d longed for this, but here I was, and he didn’t want me. Finally, he came for me on the couch. We kissed. And kissed. He pulled at my dress.
“How’d you get so skinny?” he asked.
After years of worrying he wouldn’t think I was pretty enough if we ever met, I took this as a compliment. I was happy. Until I woke up in the morning—my head, and the sun, and the air crashing down on me—and I realized we hadn’t had sex. We hadn’t made any tender declarations of love. He had rejected me, after all. He wasn’t touching me or even looking at me. He was totally closed down. “Oliver?” I said, unsure what to ask.
“You should go.”
I sat up as if he had slapped me, and was already moving away. It felt as if spikes were being driven into my head, and my heart hurt just as badly. He was sending me away almost as quickly as I’d arrived. I staggered up, trying to get out of there before I started to cry. No matter what, I thought, I couldn’t let him see me cry. Oliver sat on the steps of his porch and watched me drive away, a not particularly friendly look on his face.
I was sick with hangover and disappointment and shame on my four-hour drive back to Tivoli. I chain-smoked, listened to Hole, and held on to my steering wheel as if it could hold me together. Beth was at the house waiting for me, as she was there for me every day that year, a life raft of comfort in a world I found increasingly inclement. Oliver and I never really spoke about what had happened. I was too embarrassed to admit I’d wanted more, and even though I still loved him, it no longer felt safe to do so.
That fall we started our senior year. On the one hand Beth, Sarjan, and I couldn’t have asked for more. We were three close friends living in our first apartment, and we spent hours sitting in the kitchen, talking, smoking, drinking coffee, weaving a web of comfort around ourselves after hard days on campus and as we questioned what to do next. On the other hand, we never really found a way to fit in at Bard, which wasn’t giving us much confidence about life postgraduation. In the spring, I’d be a nineteen-year-old college graduate. The great big world I’d been in such a rush to go out and meet suddenly bore down on me.
But I had one sure thing onto which I could pin all of my hopes and dreams, and which felt like a lance against my deepest fears and insecurities. Every year the school, which was known for its writing program, chose the most promising writing student entering the senior class. The award was named for the school’s most famous former teacher: Mary McCarthy. The previous year, I’d been chosen. At first I hadn’t believed it. But then I’d felt as if a sunbeam were lighting me up from inside. My time at Bard had not been easy for me. My drinking and bad romantic judgment had crested one night at a party, when I’d climbed into bed with my latest obsession and he’d purposely burned me with a cigarette. Afterward, Beth gave me some tough love: “You’re lucky you’re a girl. If you were a guy, the shit you do would be scary.”
I knew what she meant. And she was right: I was not feeling in any way strong or clear. But I had poured everything into my writing, and my teachers had recognized this. I was on the right path.
chapter eight
ANYWHERE BUT THERE
My dad began sending me a flurry of letters, always setting the groundwork for an upcoming visit that never came. He continued to move forward, no thought spared for his past behavior or the possibility it could have affected me. I was fed up as I read his latest card.
“Fuck him,” I said, lying on Sarjan’s bed. “I’m so tired of all of his bullshit about his gambling and his back and all of his problems. It’s all he ever talks about.” I felt myself moving into a stage of my life where I knew for sure that I existed without my dad. It was unsettling, but also a relief.
Although the power dynamic had shifted slightly, it wasn’t enough to change the pattern of our relationship. I still diligently wrote him back, earnestly responding to every plan he suggested, telling him which bus station was near my apartment, and when I would be on break. Everything seemed without consequence anyhow. Nothing that I wrote or said made him get on a bus and come see me.
Oliver drifted in and out of my life. Now that I’d met him, and our connection hadn’t bloomed into whatever I’d thought it might be, the yo-yoing felt like a definite rejection and caused me more pain than ever. When Beth was home, she kept an eye on me, sometimes checking on me from her window, which because of the way the house was gabled looked into my room. She took the paring knife out of my hand the night I carved Oliver’s initials in my ankle, trying to release a little of the impossible pain within me with a manageable physical pain. When she saw that I had passed out with candles burning in my room, she came in and blew them out so I didn’t burn the house down.
Claire had settled in New Orleans and was living alone in a studio apartment in the French Quarter, and Beth and I decided to visit her for Mardi Gras. Lulled by an enjoyable reunion I’d had with Matt over New Year’s, I’d agreed to let him come meet us in New Orleans, even though he and Claire maintained an uneasy friction in the best of times, and were bound to get on each other’s nerves with all of us crammed into her apartment.
On the first night, he and I snuck out of Claire’s apartment, went down to the enclosed courtyard of her building, and had sweet, familiar sex against a wall. After the social stress of Bard, it was so nice to be around his constant good-natured affection. And then, without reason, he confessed that he’d been fucking that girl Maxine while we were dating, and many of our classmates had known and assumed I had, too. I’d believed him when he’d said he loved me, when he’d asked me to move to Tennessee and marry him. I pushed away from him, sick with disgust and shame at letting myself get played like that. He’d made a fool out of me, despite how loving he’d always been toward me. No one could be trusted.
“Go,” I said, backing across the courtyard. “I don’t want to see you right now.”
“But, Sarah,” he pleaded.
I could excuse so much, forgive nearly to infinity, let a man storm my castle even when it was clear I shouldn’t, but once I pulled up the drawbridge, it was done. I understood why he’d slept with Maxine. I had been aloof and sometimes mean, and s
he’d doted on him and made him feel valued and seen. I could forgive him for that. I couldn’t forgive him for betraying me so publicly while privately—and relentlessly—declaring his love and devotion to me.
When he was gone, I sat stunned, smoking on the balcony overlooking the glittery Mardi Gras parade floating down the street outside Claire’s apartment. I started drinking. It became one of those drunk nights where everything felt sparkly and possible. The Rebirth Brass Band was playing their usual Preservation Hall show. The music was fierce and good and free. We danced, and it was everything we’d wanted the adventure to be. Partway through the sweaty set, Claire and I ducked outside and sat down on the sidewalk. There was a way we could talk together, our minds meeting with a feral hunger for information and experience. We both understood each other intrinsically, and it felt good to have a moment alone together even as everything was changing.
“I can’t believe I’m graduating,” I said. “I have no idea what I’m going to do.” In less than three months I would graduate from college with a creative writing degree, and it was beginning to dawn on me that the world at large didn’t give a fuck about my Mary McCarthy Prize.
“We should move somewhere,” Claire said.
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Portland, Oregon.”
“Okay,” I said before I had time to get scared or doubt that we could do it.
We shook hands, and it was decided. When I graduated in May, we were going to move to the other side of the country, to a place I had never been, and build a life that I couldn’t imagine yet. But that didn’t matter. I had a plan. With my best friend. I felt a huge weight shift, not off me entirely, but it wasn’t so heavy anymore.
Much of my extended family came to graduation. We had a big dinner. It was wonderful, being acknowledged for how hard I’d worked. More than that, the madcap dream Mom and I had embarked on in the name of my sanity had actually paid off, even with the shooting, even with the darker moments my family didn’t know about.
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