“Hey, what’s up? Are you guys playing soon?”
“I love you,” he said.
I turned to him, one big smile. “I love you, too.”
The ball zipped down between the flippers and was lost. We looked and looked at each other, and he kissed me and stood close for a long breath before walking away.
I pulled the trigger of the gun to launch a new ball. As it sailed up into play and the machine wailed at me, I started to cry. I was so happy and relieved and grateful. Tears streamed down my face as I effortlessly arced the ball through the game, again and again and again, playing the best round of pinball I’d ever played. I was in love.
Not that life didn’t keep on happening. I’d had my period on the first night I spent with Scott, and then I didn’t have it again for months and months. We went out and bought a bottle of Jim Beam and a pregnancy test, drinking Jim and gingers until we felt fortified enough to take it. As we waited for the results, I was afraid to look at Scott, afraid of scaring him off. But he didn’t look away. He looked right at me. “Whatever happens, it’ll be all right,” he said.
I wasn’t pregnant. So I went to Planned Parenthood and completed that crucial step in any midnineties relationship: I got tested for HIV. I was clean and went on the pill. We began our life together, a reassuring source of stability when so much else felt beyond my control.
Sweetwater’s Jam House remained shuttered while they prepared to open in a new location. When the café I’d been working at went out of business, I began collecting unemployment. My check was $78 a week and my rent was $268 a month. This meant I could just barely afford to buy myself packs of the Old Golds I’d started smoking, and occasionally, a tallboy of PBR from the Korean market across the street. But things were still tight. One morning after Scott had stayed over, he came back from the bathroom and found me picking up change that had fallen out of his jeans.
“What are you doing?” He laughed.
“Nothing,” I said, too embarrassed to fess up.
“Do you not have any money?” he asked gently.
“My check comes on Friday.”
“I don’t like the thought of you walking around with no money. What if something happens?”
I shrugged. It wasn’t like I had a lot of other options. He handed me five dollars.
“If nothing else, buy yourself a coffee or something.”
I was deeply moved by his act of generosity, and the fact that he had really seen me.
Scott and I had been dating for four months going into the holidays. Even though I did my best approximation of cynical and Goth, and faced down the anniversary of the shooting eleven days before Christmas each year, I still loved the occasion as much as I had when I was a little girl. When Scott invited me to Christmas with his family, I was nervous just thinking about it, but also giddy with joy. This was a big deal, a step I’d never taken with a boyfriend before.
I didn’t think much about spending my first Christmas away from home. I was twenty, after all, finally an adult. I would be fine. A week before Christmas, a box arrived in the mail from Mom. A few nights before we were scheduled to drive up to Scott’s parents’ house in Port Townsend, I had him over and said I was going to do my little Christmas. As usual, we were drinking bourbon. The first thing I pulled out of the box was my childhood Christmas stocking—red felt with goofy googly eyes and a hat. I loved that stocking. I loved Christmas. I loved my mom. My eyes started to mist up.
“Are you okay?” Scott asked.
“Yeah, sure, great.”
I reached for a narrow wrapped package from the top of the stocking and held it in my hand, my heart crumbling with homesickness, tears flowing freely.
“This is my toothbrush. I get a toothbrush every year in my stocking.”
I was crying too hard to unwrap my new toothbrush.
“That’s it,” Scott said. “I can’t stand to see you this sad. I’m putting you on a plane home for Christmas. I don’t care how much it costs.”
“No, no, I want to stay with you,” I said through tears.
“Are you sure?” he asked, looking genuinely worried.
I nodded my head and started tearing through the Christmas packages as quickly as possible, as if I were ripping off Band-Aids.
“I know what will cheer you up,” Scott said.
“What?”
“Christmas specials. Let’s go to the video store.”
“Really?” I said. I knew Scott, like most grown men, was not quite so into Christmas, or Christmas decorations, and definitely not into Christmas specials.
He was already putting on his leather jacket. We were soon curled up in bed at his house watching the special he had known would make me happier than any other: The Nanny Saves Christmas. I was very happy. And he, well, he was happy that I was happy.
I made a batch of Grammy’s holiday nougats—like Mexican wedding cookies with a powdered-sugar coating—and the hippy cookies I’d loved from the land—made with whole wheat flour and honey—wanting to share my own history with Scott’s family. We arrived at a big comfortable house where Scott’s parents, three younger siblings, and the family dog all greeted me warmly. It was a lot compared to the quiet Christmases at my house growing up, and I instantly felt timid. But they were lovely. Scott’s mom drew me out in conversation, and his dad made the kind of bad jokes dads are supposed to make. We had crepes on Christmas morning and watched A Christmas Story. At night, Scott and I quietly had sex on the pullout couch in the spare room.
That January, Sweetwater’s opened its new location, a ten-minute walk from my apartment. I was tired of being broke and bored and couldn’t wait to get back to work. On the first day of training, a tall, stylish woman with close-cropped hair said something offhand that threw me back to midcoast Maine.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Portland,” she said.
I stared at her in confusion. We all lived in Portland.
“Portland, Maine,” she clarified, laughing.
Her name was Marya, and she was two years older than I was, but we had hung out in Portland during the same years, and we knew many of the same people. Talking about home with her, it was okay to be a little homesick, and okay to be where I was now, living a life that was actually starting to make me happy. Like me, Marya was fiercely competitive, even when it didn’t really matter, and we alternated who had the most sales and who sold the most specials. After a busy night, we both liked a shot of Gosling 151 rum with a Maker’s Mark and soda back and a cigarette. We were fast friends.
Waitressing was good for me. I could be very shy, and while I wanted to look and be perfect at all times, my skin still broke out and made me self-conscious, and so it was good to have a job where I had to deal with it and go interact with people anyway.
Between waitressing and my first real love, I began to settle into my life in Portland.
I was spending quite a bit of time with Scott’s family, and his dad was a welcome antidote to mine. He was handsome like Clint Eastwood, and had a gentle ease about him. Although he’d wanted to be a musician, he’d become a pharmacist to support his family. When Scott’s parents visited us in Portland, they always took us out for a sushi dinner, during which his dad never failed to eat a mouthful of the spicy green horseradish, slap the table, and exclaim: “Wasabi!” It was comforting.
That July, my lease ran out. I wanted to move in with Scott. As always, I was focused on pressing forward, growing up, and I knew this was the next important step. Scott was more wary about the decision. He’d lived with girlfriends before and knew it was a serious undertaking. His reluctance hurt my feelings, and for the month the subject was up for debate, our interactions were fraught. I weighed each of his words as if they were measurements of how Scott felt for me and how committed he was to our relationship. He raised the subject one night in June.
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I’m ready for you to move in,” he said.
Of course,
as soon as he gave me what I wanted, I was petrified.
“Are you sure?” I said.
“Yeah, that’s what you want, right?”
It was what I had asked for, yes, but what I really wanted was a little more complex. I wanted Scott to promise he’d love me forever and never leave me, and I wanted him to mean it. Anything less than his complete devotion was scary for me. At the same time, I was twenty-one years old. I was in love for the first time. I knew there was a whole world out there, and that Portland, Oregon, might not be my ideal hometown. As I moved in, a vague unease grew within me. We went down to the basement for the beautiful antique bed frame he’d inherited from his grandmother and assembled it in our room. As I lay down next to Scott that night, he curled himself around me, winding his legs through mine, pulling me close to his chest, entwining his arms around me, as if trying to touch every inch of my skin with his. I felt deeply, purely happy.
“This is my favorite part of the day,” I said every night I fell asleep beside him.
chapter ten
DON’T WAIT UNTIL YOU’RE PERFECT
I was still baffled as to how to be a writer, but I was trying. I signed up for a creative nonfiction class at the local community college. I attended readings and befriended writers. I began to write. Short stories. Essays. I sent them to literary journals, collecting my rejection slips as the successful writers I admired had once done. Mostly my day-to-day life revolved around Scott, and for a time, I was comfortable with that.
On the other hand, I was getting frustrated with waitressing. I wanted to learn more about writing and publishing, but there were few jobs in those fields in Portland. I got a job temping at a cool real estate office. Upon learning I was an aspiring writer, one of the Realtors said, “Oh, you should meet my client, Win. I just sold him the Tin House from Ursula Le Guin’s story, and he’s going to start a literary journal there.”
This was big news. Despite my love for Scott, I was really starting to feel stuck. Marya had gotten accepted to law school and departed for her new life. Claire had moved back east and got an apartment in Brooklyn with one of our old Simon’s Rock friends. They had been two of my primary outlets for talking about books and culture and had shaped my tastes in important ways. Marya had gotten me into cutting-edge fiction like Infinite Jest, and although I’d had trouble with it, I read every word out of respect for her. It was this accomplishment that landed me a job as the first copy editor at Portland’s new literary journal, Tin House, where my first task was to edit a story by none other than David Foster Wallace. Not long after that, I got a paid internship at the Oregonian’s website, Oregonlive.com, and I learned how to write HTML code and post articles about entertainment-related topics. My favorite part of the job was that they let me write articles about local readings and interview authors such as Kevin Canty and David Sedaris, who sent me the most charming thank-you letter after our meeting. I’d found a larger community of writers and thinkers, and I wanted to join them. I began to feel isolated and left behind in Portland, that familiar dread of being unable to stay and afraid to go.
Scott respected my friendship with Claire, but he was not crazy about her. She had the kind of erratic, high-maintenance personality that made many men uneasy, especially him, because he considered that kind of behavior bullshit. And he had seen the havoc she could wreak on my emotional state. She regularly called from the East Coast and questioned my life in Portland on every level: Was I writing? What was I writing? Was I getting the stimulus I needed? The support? Where could I possibly go in such a small city? What could I achieve? Even though Scott was supportive, wasn’t his band, his music, his desire to stay in Portland coming before my need to grow? She was asking from a place of love, but she had an intensity that could feel judgmental.
By the end of our calls, my responses grew monosyllabic, and I was often crying. Scott gave me my privacy, but as my sobs grew audible, he was unable to resist checking in on me. When I hung up, I threw myself down on the bed.
“Why are you friends with her when she makes you feel so bad?” he asked.
“Because she’s my best friend.”
I couldn’t tell him that part of the reason I was crying was I knew Claire was right. A rift was growing, and I would have to deal with it eventually. I think Scott sensed that she urged me to want more than I could have in my life with him.
That Christmas, when I was twenty-two, I traveled east and was again due to have lunch with Betty and Mimi. Arriving outside Mimi’s apartment building a bit early, this time I called in advance to make sure she was receiving company. And even having been welcomed by her on the phone, I was nervous as I rode the elevator up and rang the bell. Although she was sixty, her face was hardly touched by time, her skin smooth and bronzed. She had brassy blond hair and precisely lined lips and eyebrows. It seemed that maybe she had not left her apartment in several days. As she welcomed me, I slid sideways past a chrome clothes rack parked in the narrow hallway, through a wispy curtain, into her living room.
“Let me get a look at you,” she said.
Meanwhile, I wanted to get a look at her apartment. The antiques Betty had encouraged me to covet were crushed against one another, arranged for space rather than effect: cluttered with stacked baskets and clusters of picture frames, many featuring photographs of Mimi. Small decorative tables had been called into active labor, loaded with a half dozen lamps. “I forage the neighborhood for discards,” she explained.
I followed Mimi through the tunnel of cleared floor to her bedroom, which opened from the living room. Under glass atop her dresser were pictures of me as a child, some photographs I’d never seen before. There I was as a baby with my father and mother, later in a black gown, graduating from college. I felt an eerie sensation, like I’d been living in a snow globe my aunt could have reached out and shook anytime but didn’t. She pointed a manicured nail to a photo of my father with a dark, bushy beard. “That was taken when John traveled to San Francisco in the sixties,” she said. “He went from being an acid freak to a Jesus freak in six months.”
I had not seen my father in seven years. Facts had always been hard to come by in this family, so I basked in the relative normalcy of Mimi’s candid stories.
Through the bathroom, and into the kitchen, I met her cat, Lovey. Mimi prepared to style her hair, plugging in her hair dryer over the sink. I sat in a chair, one of the few empty surfaces in the room, and my aunt offered me something to drink: water, juice, or beer. I admitted I was “out late with my friends” the night before and opted for water.
“Oh, if you had too much to drink last night, you need a beer.”
“No, really, water would be great.”
“A beer will make you feel better.”
Laughing inside, I agreed. Mimi opened her refrigerator and pulled out a can of Schlitz. I laughed outside, too, when I saw that women on the Upper West Side, or at least this woman, drank the same cheap beer I’d overindulged in during college.
“Do you want ice in that?”
“No, thank you.”
“I always put ice in my beer so I get rehydrated while I’m drinking.”
She poured us each a glass of beer, hers with ice. As she styled her hair, she leaned over and looked at my feet.
“Let me see your shoes,” she said.
I held up one of my Beatle boots, mystified.
“Betty never likes the shoes you wear,” she said. “Those look better.”
Her comment reminded me to be nervous of Betty, who had criticized more than my clothes to my face, telling me to lose weight, put on more makeup, comb my hair.
The building bucked a little, as the elevator rose toward our floor.
“Hurry, finish your beer so your grandmother won’t see us drinking,” Mimi said.
“I’m over twenty-one. I can drink.”
The look she gave me just made me drink faster, even though the elevator was a false alarm. A few minutes later, the elevator again lumbered toward us. Mimi t
urned off the light in her kitchen, so Betty wouldn’t see what we were drinking.
When Betty arrived, I sat on the couch with her while Mimi finished primping.
“You look nice,” Betty said. “Your makeup is perfect.”
Does she need to have her cataracts removed again? I wondered, but with relief.
“Bring us some juice, Mimi,” Betty called out. “Sarah and I want juice.”
With obvious patience—in stark contrast to the snide remarks my father and Betty had made about her—Mimi came into the living room, a smile on her face.
“I have apple juice,” she said, smiling at me.
Turning to Betty, she asked, “Did you take your medicine this morning?”
Betty waved away her inquiry. “Bring us some apple juice.”
Mimi returned with two short glasses filled with ice and juice. She set one glass down on the coffee table in front of Betty and handed me the other.
“Drink your apple juice, Sarah,” she said, beaming at me.
I took a sip and tasted Schlitz over ice.
So that was my auntie Mimi.
Back home after the holidays, I was increasingly eager to leave Portland, exhausted by waitressing and frustrated by my attempts to find a rewarding job related to writing. Scott really, truly did not want to live anywhere else. But we were deeply in love, and I couldn’t imagine my life without him, as I told him—and myself—again and again. I decided that if I went away to graduate school for journalism, it would be a temporary fix. Once I had my degree, I’d be better set up to get a rewarding job in Portland or a city Scott might be ready to check out by then. Long distance would be really hard, but it seemed doable.
Of course a plan that makes sense intellectually can still hurt your heart. When it came time to fly to school in Boston in the fall of 1999, I arranged for a ride from a friend. I was afraid if Scott took me to the airport, I wouldn’t be able to make myself get out of the car.
The night before my flight, I had more packing left than I’d thought, and I was frantic. Scott stayed in our extra bedroom, growing morose as it became clear we weren’t going to get any good time with each other, and then I would be gone, and we wouldn’t see each other for at least six weeks. Finally, exhausted, I went to make the bed, but I couldn’t find any sheets.
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