I discussed it with Beth and Claire and a few other friends, feeling guilty for being a terrible sister, and also for letting my father down. But I couldn’t find it in me to say yes.
“I’m sorry, Dad, I just can’t,” I said. “It’s too much.”
I had feared his wrath, prepared to be defensive in return, but he was extremely neutral, as usual, so I got defensive about that—what, didn’t he really need me? Apparently, he didn’t. He found her accommodations that he could, barely, afford.
When we met for lunch, he spent hours going over his preparations for her arrival, which did not help my jealousy. He did a dry run out to the airport on the subway to make sure he would be able to get there in plenty of time to pick her up on the day her plane arrived. He even went to the American Express counter there and got information about exchanging money, in case she needed to do so. He obsessively revised his list of outings he was going to take her on, and he requested my presence for at least two dinners and one trip to the aquarium. I agreed but resented it.
I knew better than anyone else what my sister was going through as she tried to build a relationship with our dad. As her older sister, I should be nothing but supportive. And I was supportive, really I was. I just couldn’t share him with anyone, even her, given how little of his love and attention there’d always been to go around.
I was a few minutes late when I rushed into the Ethiopian restaurant my dad had carefully chosen for dinner because, like my sister, it was named Asmara. My dad stood up when I walked in. A smile nearly broke out on his face, but he was too self-conscious about his teeth. My sister stood, too. She was lovely, like a dark-haired, Bavarian Brigitte Bardot. My father beamed at her as if she were a movie star. I suddenly felt sweaty and windswept and could hear the Big B’s voice in my head: “Comb your hair! Put on more makeup!”
There was something inherently familiar about her. Dad has a type, I thought, as I noticed her figure was curvy in the same places as mine. And yet she was a stranger. As she endeavored to answer my questions about her flight, she grew flustered.
“But your English is very good,” I said, trying to encourage her and let her know how impressed I was with her courage in coming to America to meet her family.
As we ate, my father pulled back a little and looked at both of us.
“I’m just so happy,” he said. His voice cracked, his eyes misted over, and he stopped speaking and looked down. “The fact that I’m here having dinner with my two daughters. It’s more than I ever could have expected.”
I smiled at him, hushing the dark nasties in my heart, letting him have his moment. He had earned it. Whenever I told friends or acquaintances how I was rebuilding my relationship with my dad, I inevitably happened upon someone who got a wistful look on her face as she wondered whether her own dad would ever be capable of such a thing, and then a crestfallen echo as she realized he would not.
Asmara studied him and then, maybe uncomfortable or embarrassed, looked away. I softened toward her. I had been lucky to know my father as little as I had as a child. She hadn’t even had that. She’d never met Betty. Would probably never meet Mimi. I had no reason to be jealous.
When I later met them at the aquarium, my sister seemed exhausted and stressed. I had spent enough time with my dad to know that feeling well. When he went to the bathroom, I pulled her aside, feeling disloyal to him but wanting to help her.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s just, John, he can be so much the child.”
“Yeah, I know. He’s just so happy you’re here. And he doesn’t always know how to behave. But I hope you know I’m here for you if you need anything.”
“Thank you,” she said.
We quickly stepped apart as my dad rejoined us. When we walked through the North End, looking for an Italian restaurant for dinner, I felt closer to her, like maybe I’d found an ally. But as much as she and I were alike, we were also very different. While her mother had repeatedly taken her to an ashram in India as a child, she was very rooted in her Bavarian upbringing, with its lack of rebel counterculture. When I spoke about my novel, she looked at me. “But what will you do if it does not sell?” she asked honestly.
Kill myself.
“Write another one,” I said. “Many writers never sell their first novel.”
I was glad to have met her. But I also felt glad to get away, not because of her but because of my father, who was clearly enmeshed with her.
“I’ll give you Asmara’s address so you two can write letters,” my dad said as I made my farewells and prepared to walk home. Write, I would be happy to do. I just wanted a little distance from how I felt when I saw them together.
Although I never could have admitted it to her face, Asmara’s question about my novel had been on point. I’d contacted nearly a dozen agents, several of whom had been interested in reading the opening of my book. As I sent it off to them, I was buoyed with hope. But just as quickly, I was overwhelmed by polite rejection letters and despair. Cathy gently tried to suggest that maybe, just maybe, I shouldn’t be too hard on myself because I’d essentially sent out a first draft of my book, and everyone knew the publishing world was incredibly competitive and maybe, just maybe, if I revised it a bit more, I’d have better luck. I appreciated her kindness and her courage to tell me the truth, even when I was glowering at her about how it didn’t need to be revised. Either all or nothing, I thought it needed to go in the trash.
That fall Beth and I both rented our own studio apartments, mine in Cambridge. Mom and Craig visited soon after, and they brought me housewarming gifts, and my brother put together my new desk chair. I loved my neighborhood. Now I could stay out at the bars until last call every night and stumble home. And I did. Often it was fun, but things were getting darker. Two years earlier, when I’d first started as a music journalist, I’d been drinking a lot, but with my roommates, good friends, and casual acquaintances with whom I shared a great deal of affection, sometimes even with my editors, who always made sure I got home safe. Now many of those friends had moved away or were in relationships and leading quieter lives.
One night, I was out with a female friend who liked to drink even more than I did. We did shots, which I didn’t normally do, and she left me in the back of a cab with a straitlaced, heavyset man she’d met outside the club. I suddenly felt very drunk. I was going in and out of focus, and then I was in the guy’s apartment. The shadows of tree branches climbed the walls in the dim room. I didn’t know what street I was on, or who this guy was. This is how girls disappear, I thought. This is how girls die.
I was afraid, really afraid, as I’d only been once before in a decade of partying, often on my own. I’d always been a part of a web that had kept me safe—all of those bouncers and bartenders who were like older brothers to me, and the girlfriends who kept an eye on each other. I wanted to get away from him, but I didn’t want to make a scene for fear of embarrassing him.
He was close to me. His hand traced up my leg and under my skirt. His fingers slid inside my underwear, which embarrassed me because they were old and ratty—even though I didn’t want him or this—and then he was touching me. I didn’t want it. I didn’t know what to do. I was so drunk I had lost coherent thought and language. The shadows fell across our bodies like the long claws of a big animal. I was trapped.
Suddenly, it was as if he’d just come to with his hand inside my underwear. I felt him mentally pull back from me and his role in the situation, and then he pulled back, literally, and stood quickly, like he wanted to get away, too.
“I’m going to get something to eat,” he said.
I stood and followed him out onto the street, focusing so hard on stepping one foot in front of the other that I had no mental space left for words. I wanted to run, but I didn’t know where I was, and I was beyond reading signs, or using logic. Worst of all, if I let him see I was afraid, he might realize the power he had over me. I had to hold it together
until we got to a street I recognized, and then I could get away.
He didn’t talk to me, and I walked a little behind him, hating him and yet feeling so grateful he’d pulled himself back from the brink. Finally, we walked out onto Mass Ave, and there were lights and people going in and out of the 7-Eleven. He stopped just outside the door and turned to me. I didn’t stick around long enough to find out what he was going to say or do. I turned and walked away from him up Mass Ave toward my apartment.
When I got a few feet away, I fell down on the ground, landing on the palms of my hands and my knees. For a split second I rested on my scraped skin, so humiliated I wanted to cry. But I pushed myself to walk without looking back, even though I was bone-sure he would come up behind me at any moment, put his arm around my shoulder, and try to force me back to his place. When I got to the next block, I started to feel a little better, but I still didn’t look back until I’d reached the block before my apartment. There were not as many people here, and if he was behind me, I didn’t want to turn onto my street, because I would be vulnerable there, and because he would know where I lived. My heart racing, I willed myself to look back. The man was nowhere in sight. I started to shake, but I didn’t stop, not until I’d reached my apartment and locked the door. I crawled into bed without washing my face or brushing my teeth, needing to be safely cocooned in my blankets.
I considered myself profoundly lucky that I’d drunkenly stumbled into a nice guy, or a bad guy who was so drunk that he really just wanted a taquito. Either way, I saw it as a warning. I didn’t talk much about what had happened, as I was embarrassed by it, and because nothing, really, had happened. I pulled back from the friend who’d left me in the cab with the guy. I began to leave clubs and parties earlier. I lined up rides. I drank a little less.
But even after a normal night out that fall, when I’d supposedly had fun, I came home alone, got down on my knees, rested my head against the carpeting, and screamed a silent scream, unable to even call out in my frustration, for fear I might bother my upstairs neighbor. Something was wrong, but there was always another show, another party, and I was supposedly having the time of my life.
Scott’s band came through on tour just before Christmas, and they planned to take four days off in Boston. This was his third visit since we’d broken up, and we’d fallen into a routine of falling back together. After his show, we rushed to an Irish pub, J. J. Foley’s, and the retirement party for my mentor, Steve Morse, who had assigned me my first CD reviews for the Boston Globe. Steve had just arrived at the bar after going to see U2 play, and there was a rumor the band was going to show up to thank the music journalist who had helped break them in America by giving them an early rave in the Globe.
After I greeted Steve, I paused near an older man in a woven tie who was standing alone in the middle of the room. I started talking with him to be polite, but then I realized he was Paul McGuinness, the band’s legendary manager. I charmed him with the story of how Mom was such a big fan that we’d almost gone to the band’s Slane Castle show as a family, and coaxed stories out of him in turn. We were laughing like old friends when the bar’s barometric pressure shifted. Just like that, next to me, stood Bono.
Even in the straw hat he was wearing in those days, he was several inches shorter than I was. He beamed up at me from behind his purple shades as the three of us made small talk about Steve and what a contribution he’d made to the music scene. Then, it was as if the atmospheric disturbance had spread out around me. A pint was handed to me, to hand to Bono, and then another, and another. He smiled graciously as I passed each one to him and lined them up on a shelf behind him. Steve greeted his old friend.
“This is my protégée, Sarah,” he said. “She’ll be the one asking you questions now.”
Bono took my hand and kissed it. “I look forward to it,” he said.
I glanced over to where Scott was waiting for me to join him.
Later that night, Scott told me he was going to marry his girlfriend and then took me to bed. When we were alone together, it was as if no time had passed, and I was able to forget what he’d said and how it had made me feel. But the visit, and all of our conversations, had developed a bittersweet inertia.
When I drove him to meet up with the band a few days later, I wasn’t as devastated as I’d been all of the previous times we’d said good-bye. But as he turned and waved before he went inside, it hit me: I still loved him and wished he would stay. I couldn’t really imagine him being a part of my new life now, and yet I couldn’t fully accept that my life had gone on without him.
That winter was a stressful time for my dad. He’d just been informed that the rooming house where he’d lived for the past ten years was being sold. When he began looking for alternative accommodations, he found that the small disability check he received from the government was not going to be able to afford him an apartment anywhere in Boston, or even in the suburb where he lived. He needed to get on the federally subsidized housing program Section 8, which would allow him to live in an approved apartment rent-free. But the waiting list in most communities in and around Boston was two to three years long. He began applying, but it wasn’t looking good for him to get accepted before he had to leave his current living situation.
My dad invited me to visit him at the rooming house only once. I was nervous as we passed through the narrow hallway to his room, afraid of what I might see, and how it might make me feel about him. He had complained to me about a variety of characters seemingly ripped from a Bukowski story, who drank and fought and schemed in the rooms around him. It was undoubtedly a depressing place, but it was also relatively well kept and orderly, and he clearly felt comfortable there, pointing out this and that special feature as anyone might do at his home. I was relieved that no one cursed or screamed or harassed us while we were in the hallway, and when he opened the door to his room for me, I was happy to see it was tidy and snug, filled with towering stacks of books and movies and notebooks, much like my rooms always were. His only friend, Bobby, who wanted to meet me, was funny and kind, a Joe Pesci–type man. Bobby managed the rooming house, which made my dad’s living situation there much better than it would have otherwise been.
I could see why my dad was anxious about leaving this place and nervous he’d end up somewhere he didn’t like nearly as much. On the other hand, if he was proactive and got approved for Section 8 housing in the right community, he could set himself up for the rest of his life. I had just been given Craig’s mother’s car, an old Dodge Omni with fewer than twenty thousand miles on it, and my dad and I decided I would drive him out to look at several towns where he thought he might feel at home. His only requirements were that his new community be a place where he could take his long daily walks and be near an isolation tank or hot tub, which he planned to use as part of his meditation program. Invented by the scientist John Lilly in 1954, the isolation tank could be used to speed up my dad’s metaphysical work, he hoped, as he tried to achieve enlightenment without LSD and actualize a vision of his. He had never told me about the entire vision, as he claimed it might be too much for me to handle, but he hinted at it regularly. I chose not to press him for details, as I was irritated by such moments when he withheld information from me, as if he were a spiritual Svengali.
My dad had asked me several times to show him my writing, and I’d given him an essay about Auntie Mimi serving juice, which he’d enjoyed. So in advance of our day trip to Amherst, I sent him the first few chapters of my novel. But then he canceled our first planned outing because of his bad back, leaving me with the same feeling of powerlessness and frustration as when I was a little girl. On the day of our second attempt, we hit the highway, and my dad settled into the passenger seat and retrieved my pages.
“Well, Sarah,” he said. “I have to start by saying it’s a little disconcerting to read a story where a character with my name dies on the first page.”
I whipped my head around to look at him while trying to stay focused on
driving. It had never occurred to me that the name of my heroine’s boyfriend, who died on the first page of my first novel, was the same as my father’s name. I had begun writing the novel when we were estranged, and the name John had not even had a conscious association with him at the time.
He stared at me, waiting for my response.
“I honestly didn’t realize I’d done that until just now,” I said.
“It’s okay, Sarah,” he said. “I’m not mad at you. It’s cool. Whatever you do is cool with me. I just had to tell you how I felt when I read it. I can see you’re a talented writer. I can also see how angry you are. Your character Maddie is really angry. But that’s cool, too. However you are is cool with me. I just, I wonder if that’s why you haven’t published it yet. All that anger can be hard for people to take.”
Now I couldn’t look at him, not even a little. It was one thing to be critiqued by my friends who were writers, or by the other students in the classes I took. But I couldn’t get past what felt like an uncalled-for personal attack in order to begin to consider whether his assessment was true or not. Luckily, my dad rambled on to other topics.
As he began talking about his ex-girlfriend Phyllis, who was also a writer, I relaxed my grip on the steering wheel. He described how the two of them had left notes for each other when he’d worked the overnight shift as a cabdriver, because they often had such opposite schedules that they wouldn’t see each other for days.
And then he described how she had suddenly left him all those years ago.
“I went out of my mind,” he said. “I mean I worked out this whole plan, I don’t even know if I should tell you this. I don’t want to scare you.”
I looked over at him, intrigued.
“I was going to kidnap her. I mean, I was really going to do it. I don’t know what I was going to do to her once I had her. I just couldn’t stand the thought that she’d left me. For someone like me who was always looking for a mother, that was the worst thing that could have happened, to be left all alone. I used to go by the place where she worked. I used to drive by her house. I really couldn’t stand it. And so I worked out this whole plan where I was going to use duct tape to hold her. Of course, I never did it.”
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