Surprisingly for me, I was nervous about what Scott would think of John’s rotten teeth and how he talked loudly about topics other people found off-putting. I was so confident in my love for Scott, it never crossed my mind to worry what John would think of him. I was relieved when they fell into easy conversation, both charmed by the bright, inquisitive mind of the other. Sneaking happy side glances at Scott, I felt it was all possible, like we could really build a life in Boston that would make us both happy.
Scott was never great about returning phone calls to his friends and family, and by the time he’d been in Boston with me for five weeks, he hadn’t talked to his parents in almost that long. Eventually, they got him on the phone. We were both sitting on my bed as Scott listened to what his dad needed to tell him. Suddenly his whole body tensed. I sat up and put my hand on his back, growing increasingly concerned as he started to tear up.
“Yeah, let me talk to her,” he said.
By the time Scott hung up, he was already far away from me again. His mom had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and while her prognosis was good, his family and he had agreed he should go back west during her treatment. Given where we were in our relationship, I couldn’t just give up my apartment, my freelance contacts, my whole new life. He got himself on the next flight back. Our second honeymoon was over.
A week after Scott left, Betty called. She was really out of it and upset, but I couldn’t figure out exactly why. I didn’t know how to help her, even though it was clear how badly she needed assistance. When faced with all she required, and how little my dad and Mimi seemed capable of, I felt young and powerless. I also hated feeling beholden to her, because after my happy reunion with Scott, I was thinking more and more of moving back to Portland. My other grandmother, Grammy, had lymphoma, and it had spread to four places, including her bones. Mom was sad. I was sad. Nowhere felt safe. I wanted Scott to comfort me, but he was far away and in need of comfort himself.
By April, Scott was giving me less to hold on to. After barely returning my calls for weeks, he sent me an e-mail: “I’m in a weird head space, and I don’t feel like I can talk to you right now.” It was only fair. As much as I wanted to get back together, I’d since had flirtations with another guy. I wrote back a short message saying I respected his request, and he should take as long as he needed. But as I was writing, I got an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach, like I had nothing and no one in the entire world. I applied myself to our time apart like the straight-A student I’d once been, sure if I emerged perfect, we’d find a way back together.
Every time the phone rang, I was filled with hope: Scott. When I heard John’s voice on the other end, I was disappointed, which I never would have thought possible when I was a little girl. Betty’s condition had worsened and he was traveling to New York the next day. I didn’t feel up for the conversation and I had no advice or encouragement for him. Thankfully, he seemed to sense this and kept it short. He called me again from New York, understandably upset. While we had aimed to get Betty into the best assisted-living facility possible, even if it meant being a little less than honest about how much assistance she really needed, we hadn’t registered her rapid deterioration.
At the end of April, as I sat where I spent most of my time in those days—at my desk—Scott called me and said we needed to talk. I could hardly breathe.
“I need to end our relationship and get on with my life,” he said. “I’ve been unhappy over you for too long now, and it has only gotten in the way of my ability to get my life together and be happy.”
I cried, a lot. As much as I’d been prepared for this, I was completely devastated. I wanted to get away from his words. But I didn’t want to get off the phone, because when I did, he wouldn’t be my boyfriend anymore. He told me he’d been seeing someone, and even though it had ended, he’d been happier without me in his life. Even though nothing had changed—he was still in love with me, still wanted all the things we’d talked about having together, and still considered me his best friend—he had to move on. Even if I did plan to move to Portland that fall, it was too far away. I was lost, but I could see how important it was for him that he’d finally made some movement.
“I’m proud of you for doing what you need to do,” I said. “All I’ve ever really wanted was for you to be happy, and to be doing what you care about in life.”
There was nothing left to say, and we hung up. It was official. After five and a half years, we had broken up. Not only had I lost Scott, I’d lost my fantasy of escaping back to Portland, the small pond with the cheap rent and the dive bars. I had no choice but to be strong now. I vowed to turn my longing into places I’d seen, things I’d accomplished. I knew I had so much to offer, maybe more than Scott was able to see.
Betty’s social worker found her in her room, disoriented and frightened, in her own waste, apparently having been like that for several days. Instead of going to a retirement community, she went to the hospital. John rushed down to be with her.
“All she wanted was ice cream,” he said from a pay phone, his voice cracked and tired. “It was like she was a child again. And that’s all that mattered to her.”
John and Mimi quickly resumed their multidecade squabble. He spent the next day at his hostel, arguing on the phone with her—literally fighting about how to best handle Betty’s affairs, while both picked at the scabs created by the lack of overt love and affection Betty had shown them—and sulking at Mimi’s domineering personality and unnecessarily hurtful words. During all of this, Betty died at the hospital.
When John called to tell me, he was inconsolable over the fact that his issues with his sister had prevented him from saying good-bye to his mother, and now she was gone.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
The loss registered for me like something getting sucked out of the pressurized cabin of an airplane. Betty had been a force in my life, and I’d miss her eccentric zeal. I was glad she was at peace after a lifetime of struggle. But more than anything else, honestly, I was incredibly grateful that none of this had fallen on me, as it would have only a few months earlier.
John was already in New York City. He would stay and dispose of her belongings and make the arrangements for her remains. He would handle Mimi. While John wrestled with guilt that he had not been with his mother when she passed, the experience of helping her, even the little bit he’d been able to when she was alive, and taking care of her estate after her passing, had a visibly positive effect on him. Something had needed to be handled, and for once in his life, he had stayed and dealt with it. His steadfastness made me see him in a new light, too. It made me respect him, a feeling I’d never had before. I started thinking of him, and referring to him, as Dad again.
Finally, he was doing what a dad was supposed to do, stepping up to provide a buffer between me and something I wasn’t yet ready to handle. And so when we found out it would cost three hundred dollars to have Betty cremated, although I could have come up with the money, I didn’t offer to do so. My dad didn’t have three hundred dollars and couldn’t raise it. Mimi couldn’t or wouldn’t help. So my dad borrowed the money from Betty’s social worker.
Meanwhile, Dad went through Betty’s papers and made some alarming discoveries. There were department-store credit card bills charged up for thousands of dollars. Apparently, she had been entered in several jewelry-of-the-month clubs, and other extravagant purchases had been made on the cards as well. It was possible that an unscrupulous store employee had preyed upon her confusion at the end of her life, but my dad suspected Mimi. Their interactions soured further when he found the paperwork for Betty’s life insurance policies. She had two. One benefited Mimi, and the other benefited me. Dad would have only benefited if Betty had died through accidental death or dismemberment, which Mimi taunted him with, as if it somehow signified how little Betty had thought of him. The payout was only a few thousand dollars for both Mimi and me, but that was a lot of money for all of us. I needed that money, despe
rately, and I was afraid Dad would ask me for some, which my mom had always warned me to protect myself against. At the same time, I wondered whether I was selfish not to offer him any, even though it was Betty’s decision to divide the money as she had.
It became a given that my dad and I would see each other at least once a month for our regular outings to the Harvard Film Archive. At the beginning of the month, he mailed me a calendar and had me write him with my pick. He had been appalled by my lack of culture when it came to cinema, even though I’d taken several classes on the subject in college. He’d become a lifelong cineaste when he’d stumbled into a European film at age fifteen and enjoyed the sight of a woman’s bare breasts.
When my dad took me to my first Fellini film, La Dolce Vita, I was hungover and frayed, as usual, having been out late the night before. I was in no mood for a dad-daughter outing, but I knew I was the one with the power to disappoint now, and I couldn’t bear to let him down, so I rose to the occasion.
As Nico sulked onto the screen, all of my worlds came together in a way I found comforting and inspiring. I was transfixed by the story. It followed a journalist who longs to write a great novel but can’t because he’s too distracted by his job as a society reporter and the many affairs he is juggling. I could not have related more.
After the film let out, my dad and I walked amid the hushed glow of the Harvard campus, talking about Fellini’s gorgeous compositions and bittersweet comedy. When he said he’d walk me to the train, as I knew he would, I no longer resented his offer. Instead, I found the gesture thoughtful. As my father leaned toward me and listened closely to every word I said about my newfound passion for Fellini, I bloomed under his attention.
The autumn was hard. Mary started dating the guy I’d rebounded from Scott with, and I was deeply jealous whenever we were all at our apartment. Scott was seeing a new girl. I felt very much alone. He came through town with his band in November, and we fell right back together, even though his new girlfriend had said he could sleep with any other women on the road, except for me. For four days, I completely gave myself over to our reunion, just like I’d done with my dad as a kid. When he left, I was demolished.
My father had begun jotting down possible outings he might take me on, or questions he wanted to ask me: everything from details about how I was writing my novel, to how I felt about Scott’s absence, to what MySpace was and how it worked. One afternoon while we were eating in the food court at Faneuil Hall, my father pulled out his little notebook. I picked at the cookie we were sharing. He looked up, looked down at his writing, then looked up again, smiled shyly at me. “I wrote, ‘Tell Sarah she has a great laugh,’ ” he said.
Moments like these were impossibly sweet for me. Even just the fact that he was proving himself to be a reliable companion every other week was a revelation; the fact that he might actually love me and enjoy my company was nothing short of a dream come true. I began to trust him, and I started confiding in him, which involved a lot of heartbreak and anxiety, especially about my writing. Because my father didn’t drink and saw booze as an unhealthy form of suppression, I didn’t mention my own drinking, which I knew was excessive. I still wanted to be seen as perfect, and I definitely wasn’t ready for anyone to suggest I should stop.
We took a day trip on a boat that traversed the city’s islands with a picnic of clam chowder from Faneuil Hall. We cruised Boston Harbor on a windjammer. He even convinced me to get up early on a Sunday morning to attend a church service on Newbury Street because it had exquisite music by a live orchestra.
My father was deeply curious, and our excursions were often a part of his attempts to learn and make sense of, well, everything. On a beautiful autumn day, we met in Central Square, got picnic supplies at the natural foods co-op, and walked over to Mt. Auburn Cemetery, where we sat together amid the white birches and marble stones, which were stark against the glowing orange and crimson leaves.
Then he decided we should compare the legendary Mt. Auburn with the equally esteemed cemetery in my own neighborhood, Forest Hills. I mentioned that Anne Sexton was buried there, and he checked out a library book on the poet.
When he rang my bell on the morning of our field trip, I went downstairs to let him in, pausing to hug him, and led him upstairs to my apartment. As I gave him a tour, he looked around in wonder. I was twenty-six, and I shared a two-story apartment with a spacious living room and kitchen, and an extra front room/office/make-out room. My dad was fifty-six, and he lived in one small room in a boardinghouse with a bathroom down the hall.
He was halfway across the warped kitchen floor when he stopped, transfixed by the view of treetops and sky straight ahead. He put both hands out as if to steady himself on a surfboard, bent his knees slightly as if testing the give.
“Far out,” he said. “I feel like I’m floating in the sky.”
It was unclear whether he was having an actual acid flashback or not, but his enthusiasm was infectious. I laughed then, and on the many occasions after that when I walked into the kitchen and pictured him there caught up in his bliss.
We went to my local co-op and got a picnic and set out for the graveyard. As we walked, my dad drifted into a reverie about Anne Sexton, speaking as if he had a crush on her, never mind that she’d been dead by her own hand for three decades by then.
“She was just incredible,” he said. “Did you know she had a band? She started it with some of her students when she was teaching. They wrote songs, and she read her poems over the music. I would love to find a recording, just to hear what it was like. She was so angry, so unhappy, but so beautiful, too.”
When we reached her grave, where she was buried with her husband’s family, we saw that previous devotees had left a dozen small koans, stacked stones with a beautiful simplicity that moved me. We built one of our own. Then my father surprised me. He reached into the pocket of his cargo pants and pulled out his current notebook.
“I’d like to read a piece of one of her poems I wrote down,” he said.
I smiled at him, loving that he’d been inspired to make this gesture of respect. My friends and I, who made such a show of devotion to the bands and writers we loved, would have felt embarrassed to do something so sincere. His voice still had the lazy inflection of the Trenton hoodlum he’d been, but it was weathered by the decades in which he’d longed to be a poet, and when poetry had eluded him, he’d turned himself toward the puzzle of enlightenment instead. As we walked between graves and stands of ancient trees, I felt closer to him than I could ever remember having been. At the same time, I was incredibly proud of the independence I’d forged at such a great cost and was wary of a father figure, especially one who had essentially abandoned me for the first twenty-five years of my life. I dared a sideways glance at him and hoped we would figure it out.
chapter twelve
KRYPTONITE
I was at once heartbroken and on overdrive. I longed for Scott, and yet I was determined to suck every bit of marrow out of the life for which I’d sacrificed him in order to find myself. The unbending deadlines of freelance journalism gave me a convenient place to hide out when my feelings overwhelmed me.
Mary and I were out at my favorite local club, the Middle East, when she ran into one of the Globe’s staff music writers, Steve Morse, whom she knew from working nights at the Globe’s website. He stopped to chat. I told him I was a regular freelancer for the Globe and wanted to start writing about music. He was gracious and gave me an entrée to do my first CD review for the paper.
I loved covering music, but my central obsession was always my own writing. I felt guilty, that I never got enough done. I was sure I was falling behind. More than anything, I wanted to distinguish myself, to create a novel that spoke to all of the musicians and writers and artistic-minded friends I felt had literally kept me alive.
I usually had three or four articles going at a time, plus pitches for more work, and I always wrote up until the exact last minute before it was time to go mee
t my dad or anyone else. The next thing I knew, I was fifteen minutes late and still had to put on face powder. Then I was twenty minutes late and at the mercy of the bus or train.
I arrived, out of breath, sweating, and found my dad pacing in a slow diagonal, holding a plastic shopping bag with whatever he’d brought that day—free real estate listings or health food circulars that had caught his eye, a newspaper piece I’d written, a photocopied article about the film we were going to see. I hated being late, and I was cranky in that guilty way. His face opened up in an expectant smile. Suddenly, as if I were once again the moody teenager he’d barely known, I wanted to crush him.
“Did you have to wait long for the train?” he asked.
“No, I’m on deadline,” I said. “I shouldn’t even be here.”
“Oh,” he said, sounding hurt. “Are you working on a story for the Globe?”
“I’m always working on a story for the Globe.”
He stood there smiling, not provoked at all, and it was hard for me to stay mad. He never got upset with me for being late, and he was never anything but interested in everything that was going on in my life, even when I claimed it made me too busy for him.
One night, when I rolled up at seven fifteen, out of breath, my dad was outside, beaming.
“Sorry I’m late,” I said, already defensive.
“We’ve got plenty of time,” he said. “The movie doesn’t start until seven thirty.”
“But you said—”
“I said seven o’clock, so you’d be here early.”
I stopped short, shocked and indignant. And then I laughed. His solution was so elegant, and there was no judgment in his tone. Without having to scold me or complain about my tardiness, which only would have set me off, he’d gotten me there early for the film.
If I had previously worried that he might suddenly try to exert a father’s discipline or control over me, I soon relaxed and began to adjust to the father he really was, not the fantasy I’d created in his absence. It would have been hard to see him as a traditional father anyhow. When we grew close enough to talk about personal topics, including my breakup with Scott, his advice was unlike any I’d ever heard of a dad giving his daughter.
Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) Page 18
