Neither of us had ever been to Europe before, and much of the trip was lovely, but we had totally different definitions of how much was the right amount of everything—walking, sightseeing, sex—and returned to Boston feeling further apart than ever. We tried to go back to normal. I didn’t let myself think about the moments we weren’t in sync, and just kept looking forward to the moment when we connected again.
Scott and I had begun seriously talking about moving in the fall. Our two best choices seemed to be Portland, which would make him very happy, and New York City, which would be good for my career. But we couldn’t decide.
Scott and I were in real trouble, and I knew it. In all of those years, we’d only had two fights. Now, as both our fifth anniversary and the end of our lease loomed, I made out with another guy. It didn’t change the fact that Scott and I still wanted to be together, but we began to fight all the time. Scott told me how he’d always been sure I was going to move back east, how he’d never been able to trust in my commitment to Portland or him, how cold and passive-aggressive I could be, how he’d needed my love and kindness so badly when he’d moved and had felt utterly bereft and alone when I’d withheld it.
“Fine, I’m a terrible person,” I said. “I’m terrible. I’m awful.”
It was what I had always known to be true, and now I had proven myself right. He was going to abandon me, as I’d feared from the start. But Scott didn’t want to leave. Horribly, he found that, as unhappy as he was with me now, he couldn’t imagine being happy without me. We panned through the rubble—the ineffable, impossible differences in our personalities and goals and lifestyle preferences—until we found the gold: we both still loved each other so fucking much. But. We kept coming back to this: I wanted to live anywhere but Portland, where Scott felt most at home, and where I felt most stagnant and stuck. If he wouldn’t move somewhere new with me, I would stay in Boston, even if he left for Portland.
“Please come with me,” he said.
“I can’t,” I said, feeling like I’d lose everything if I went backward, my writing, my self, my future.
“Then let me stay,” he said.
“You can’t,” I said, my heart breaking. “You hate it here.”
John surprised me by sending me a note and following up with a call to make plans. If he was going to be back in my life, I knew there was something important I had to tell him. But as always, I was nervous about anything that might seem like a demand.
“I know it’s probably not my place to say, but you might want to think about going down to New York to see Betty,” I said. “The last time I had lunch with her, it was clear she’s not doing well. She asked me to be the executor of her will, which I’m not sure I feel comfortable doing. I mean, I’ll do it. But it’s a lot, and I’m not sure if it should be me. So . . . I don’t know. I guess I don’t know how much longer she has.”
“Wow,” John said. “Okay.”
There was a long pause. I waited for the hammer to come down. I knew John would never lash out at me, but he was deft at the more serious power move: absence. I hated to think my concern for Betty might cost me my budding relationship with him. But she had done so much for me, and even though she was hard to love, I respected her like a force of nature—an Estée Lauder tornado—and I couldn’t stand to think of her coming to a lonely, unpleasant end because of my cowardice.
“Okay, I’ll call her,” he said. “I’ll figure out a way to get down there. Maybe we could even go down to visit Betty together. It’ll mean dealing with Mimi, but that’s okay. I didn’t want to face her, so I’ve been avoiding them for years, but maybe it’s time.”
I realized with relief that his silence hadn’t been the result of anger. Sometimes it just took his brain a little while to process things, as if all of the acid and the many years he’d spent alone had gummed up the works a bit.
John and I made plans for our next visit. He was very curious about me, as he’d always been intrigued by my life during the brief moments he’d been in it. He wanted to know what I was writing about, and what Scott and I liked to do in Cambridge. We agreed to meet up at an Indian place Scott and I frequented in Central Square. When I first walked in, the sheer force of my dad’s presence again stopped me short. This man, whose absence had torn such a hole through my life, had a physical form, too.
As soon as I sat down, he started talking.
“I had an amazing meditation today,” he said, his voice booming through the quiet restaurant where businesspeople and MIT professors were savoring a quick hot lunch. Heads turned. He didn’t notice. I did, but I’d spent much of the past ten years with punks, and I was sanguine about being stared at. “I’ve been doing deep breathing with a snorkel. And this morning, I did it for two, three hours, and I had this breakthrough.”
I smiled at him and sipped my water. So here it was, the reality, not the fantasy: This was my dad. He was still a great talker. I began to relax and feel easy in his presence . . . until it was time for me to leave.
“I’ll walk you home,” John said.
Again, I balked. I was the girl who’d wanted to live on my own at eleven, largely because it had seemed like the best way to have him in my life, and I didn’t want to let him swoop in and be the big man now. But I still felt incredibly shy around him, especially when it came to telling him no. For a big guy—six foot one and more than two hundred pounds—he was as skittish as a small animal. I felt the need to be gentle with him.
I was cautious when I mentioned the possibility I might move to Portland that fall.
“If you go back to Portland, maybe I’ll move there, too,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. We’d eaten lunch together twice after not having seen each other for nearly ten years, and he was offering to move across the country with me. The last thing I needed was any more pressure on my decision. I stopped telling John what was going on with Scott, especially as I didn’t really know, and when I did know—that he was going back to Portland, and that I was not—it was too devastating.
Mom and Craig had planned to take Andrew and me to Ireland that summer. Initially, we had thought Scott would come along, too, but we’d nixed that idea just in time. Our lease wasn’t up until September, but since I would be gone for those last two weeks of August on the trip, we decided Scott would pack up his belongings after I left and that when I returned, he would be gone.
Everything in the final days was like breathing, and talking, and walking through mud. My suitcase was packed, and I had to go meet my family. Scott sat on the couch, giving me the same look he had when I’d cheated on him. It hurt.
“Sarah,” he said, his voice breaking.
I didn’t want to go. I couldn’t stay. I picked up my suitcase, and as I walked out the door, I sobbed. I cried all the way to the airport. I got on a plane and spent the next two weeks being soothed by the fact that there was a whole world out there, where my problems were small and meaningless. And, surprisingly, being comforted by the presence of my family, something I’d never really felt comfortable with before. It was the first extended time we’d spent together since I’d gone away to Simon’s Rock ten years earlier, and I was moved by how kind they were to me during my first heartbreak. Craig had planned our trip meticulously, with plenty of literary attractions for Mom and me—Ireland loves any excuse to hang a Yeats plaque, and I love any excuse to read one—and the kind of destinations that best captured my imagination. We stayed at a genuine castle and ate the best fried oysters in Belfast. We had fun. It was the first real family vacation we’d ever taken together, beyond camping trips and vacations to visit extended family, and something became clear to me. Mom and Craig had sacrificed a great deal to live a life that was meaningful to them, much like I’d been doing in service to my writing, and I’d learned so much of value from the childhood they’d given me—focus, perseverance, follow-through—that was just as valuable as the inventive, bohemian streak I’d inherited, and overtly celebrated, from my dad. I was finall
y able to feel really grateful, for everything that had been mine while I’d been waiting at the window for my father to arrive.
Andrew and I shared a hotel room during our trip, and for the first time in our lives, he’d grown up enough that our ten-year age gap wasn’t as noticeable. We did the things siblings are supposed to do—occasionally rolling our eyes at our parents being dorky in the front seat of the car, and watching TV together in our hotel room at night. I was genuinely moved when he surprised me with a UK-only CD single by a band, Supergrass, whose first album I’d given him the previous Christmas. We were still very different. And all three of them were more alike than they were like me—I was happiest pushing myself toward some new extreme or telling stories at the center of a gaggle of friends, and they were all quieter and calmer and steadier—but we shared a passion for music and culture and ideas, and a curiosity about the world at large. For the first time in my life, I felt grateful for my brother, and really included in our family.
I missed Scott terribly, questioned my decision a million times, and obsessively fantasized about a happy reunion in New York City or Los Angeles or Seattle, anywhere that wasn’t Portland. But I also wondered about the man I’d kissed, whether he would see me now that I was free. In that wondering I knew, as hard as it was, that I had done what was right.
Returning to our apartment and finding Scott and his guitars and all of his possessions gone was impossible, but it was already done. I did that grief thing where I concentrated very hard on putting one foot in front of the other. My friend Mary and her boyfriend had just broken up, and she and I moved into a big three-bedroom apartment in Jamaica Plain with another friend. When I drank a few beers in the kitchen with Mary, a full pack of cigarettes on the table between us, our conversation endless and soothing, there was a moment when the pain receded. By the time I went to bed at three or four in the morning, I floated, any pain I had felt earlier bandaged in the lovely, familiar gauze of alcohol.
John and I began spending regular time together. He was living in a rooming house a few miles north of the city, and he did not have a phone, so we wrote each other frequent letters; he’d then go to a pay phone and call to confirm the plans we’d made.
In the days leading up to our next scheduled lunch that fall, I again waited for him to cancel. When I arrived at the restaurant, I was surprised to see his familiar shy smile and sloping shoulders waiting for me. It was only after we’d had a few of these dad-daughter dates that I began to relax enough to really savor our time together.
John was still very much the man who had revealed cosmic secrets to me about John Lennon and Wilhelm Reich. He was not surprised by the September 11 attacks and believed they were the beginning of worse global problems.
“There’s too many people, too much corruption, too much ignorance and greed,” he said. “It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. I don’t want to scare you, Sarah, but there’s gonna have to be a mass purge of the population before we can move forward. We’re entering the Age of Aquarius, the age of enlightenment, but not everyone’s gonna get there. It’s a choice we all have to make. Only those who choose to live in a new way will survive.”
I was resistant to his conspiracy theories, though not because my worldview was much sunnier. “I don’t think the powers that be really need to work so hard to hide their greed, or their indifference to the common good,” I said to him. “I mean, look, it’s all around us.”
“I’m just saying, it could become impossible to get back and forth across the country,” he said. “It’s time to decide who you love and choose to be with them.”
Although I questioned the specifics of John’s worldview, I believed him on a cellular level, as I always had. The fact that he’d been returned to me suggested my faith had been valid all along. He was my dad. He knew best.
But I was haunted by John’s words. I knew as surely as ever that Scott was the one I loved, but now he was so far away. A solution seemed farther and farther away, as well.
My first few phone calls with Scott were really hard. He was wary of me, and I understood why, but this felt so fundamentally wrong. We hadn’t technically broken up. I still wanted to work on things, but he was having a harder time with the idea, since it was unclear what we were working on, especially as we were both uncompromising on the geography front. He agreed to let me come visit in October, and I booked a flight for the end of the month. Our reunion was sweet but left us no clearer on what to do.
Mary and I fell in with a whole group of local garage rock bands and ended up traveling down to New York City for a show at a club on the Lower East Side. While in the city, I arranged to have lunch with Betty and Mimi. Although I was never certain whether Mimi would join us as planned, I went to her apartment at the appointed time. There she was, still regal with her bleached-blond hair and full makeup. The three of us made our way, slowly because of Betty’s emphysema, to a neighborhood Chinese restaurant.
“Free wine,” Mimi said when we sat down.
I looked at Betty nervously. She’d gotten sober forty years ago, but I still felt uneasy drinking around her. On the other hand, it was hard to say no to Mimi. As Zen as I managed to be when I was out with John, it was impossible not to feel self-conscious with these two. Mimi was fighting a remarkably successful war against her age, having somehow figured out a way to get Medicaid to pay for her liposuction and plastic surgery. She could have passed for her late forties, even though she was two decades older. She liked to be looked at, and admired, and signaled the waiter over to us with dramatic flair. With age, Betty’s voice had only grown louder and more cutting, and heads turned to stare. I was on edge, girding myself against Mimi’s manipulation and Betty’s criticism of my appearance, and yet, I was touched by their interactions.
“Did you take your medicine this morning, Betty?” Mimi asked.
“I took it,” Betty said, literally waving away her concern.
“Do you have to go to the bathroom?” Mimi asked her.
“I’m not a child,” Betty said. “Do you have to go to the bathroom?”
When Betty did get up to use the restroom, Mimi leaned over to me.
“She’s incontinent, so I have her wearing maxi pads. It helps.”
I smiled as neutrally as possible. I was grateful Mimi was there to give Betty the help she clearly needed, even in her own unique way. At the same time, I could sense it probably wasn’t just paranoia on Betty’s part that made her distrust her own daughter.
After lunch, we went back to Mimi’s apartment, where Mary met me. Seated on the chair Mimi had gestured her into, she glanced down at the item resting near her seat and did a double take. I did, too. It was a prosthetic leg. Mimi had liked the look of it when she’d found it in the street, so she brought it home and painted the toenails bright red.
On another trip my Dad and I made to New York City together in an effort to get Betty into assisted living, the miraculous happened. Mimi’s health was not good, causing her to be in a wheelchair. Betty was leaning on her walker more than ever. But we managed to have lunch together—Betty, Mimi, my dad, and I—and everyone came out unscathed. Sitting at the table with them, watching my dad to see whether these female relatives he felt so persecuted by would say something to make him bolt, worrying about Betty’s health and yet still wary of her sharp tongue, surrendering to the completely unpredictable diva that was Auntie Mimi, I somehow felt intrinsically comfortable in that strange, ineffable way of family. I had longed for my dad and anything related to him for decades, and now he was here with me, and weirdly, these near strangers were my people.
Next, my dad and I took Betty to a doctor’s appointment. Betty was, as ever, pure Betty.
“Why would you ever start smoking at thirty?” Betty’s doctor asked.
“My looks were gone, so it didn’t matter,” Betty said.
I was twenty-five. Apparently, I didn’t have much time left.
At lunch after the appointment, Betty did her b
est to eat her hamburger, even though her poorly fitting dentures popped in and out of her mouth. It was clear the moment for assistance was now, and I was glad I had my dad to help me.
Scott came to visit after Christmas, and although his stay had a few rocky moments, we enjoyed our time together. My period had remained irregular, and I had been diagnosed with an endocrine disorder, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). It wasn’t explained to me very well at the time; I was just put on the pill to regulate my cycle. It worked, which was a relief after more than a decade of my body doing its own thing. This also meant we didn’t have to worry about birth control. I hadn’t been with anyone else, and I didn’t ask whether he’d given us a reason to use condoms again. I did my best to pretend nothing had changed.
No matter the underlying tensions between us about what would happen next, or how consistently we avoided talking about it, Scott and I seemed to fit together just as well as we always had. He was extremely affectionate and sweet with me, and we still felt very much like a couple. And yet, neither of us knew how to bridge the geographical divide between us. We got drunk the night before his scheduled return, conveniently causing him to miss his flight. Without having decided, we’d decided. Scott hit it off with two of my new friends and started playing music and working with them. His view of Boston improved, now that he was earning money doing something cool and maybe forming a band.
John came out to Jamaica Plain to have coffee with Scott and me. My relationship with John had been so new and tentative before that they’d never met. Even now, it was so baffling to have John meet my boyfriend that it seemed as if we weren’t ourselves. We were characters in a romantic comedy starring Craig T. Nelson as the dad.
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