Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986)

by Tomlinson, Sarah

  “Sarah, I have to tell you something. I haven’t been honoring the contract.”

  “Okay,” I said. I felt my mouth go dry.

  “I haven’t been honest with you,” he continued. “I’ve been feeling distant from you, and our relationship, and I have been for some time. I kept thinking it was me, but it’s been a month, and so I have to assume that it’s not.”

  We talked for hours, with Robert getting up to bring me glasses of water, none of it enough to quench my thirst. We lay down on my bed, which he knew made it easier for me when I was emotionally stressed. He held me, and I cried. He was the man I was going to marry and have children with. He was the man who had promised me a forty-five-year honeymoon. But, as I told him almost immediately, if he needed to go, he had to go. He wouldn’t say he wanted to leave. But he wouldn’t let me back in, either.

  A week later, I pushed him to admit he wanted out. Despite looming deadlines, I managed about four hours of work a day. Around one in the afternoon, I forced myself to get up and go into the kitchen to make tea and eat an apple with almond butter, one of the only things I could force down. I sat at my dining room table and looked at the postcard of Marilyn Monroe I’d hung there when I’d first moved in—before Robert had bought me all of those books about her, before I’d made us her stuffing for Thanksgiving—and I’d think about how unlucky in love she was, and how unhappy. She’d spent her whole life fearing she’d end up crazy like her mother, and I thought about whether or not Robert had been right about my dad. And how Robert had gone away, and now it was only my dad who had stayed.

  chapter eighteen

  GOOD GIRL

  I was still on the outside of everything I wanted, feeling like it was other people who had the power to give me value—all of the lovers, editors, and experiences I had given myself over to for years, rather than owning myself. Never seeing that I had been at the center of my own big life all along.

  I was sad because Robert and I had broken up; because my dear friend Marya had just been diagnosed with brain cancer; because the script my film agents had been sure would sell had not; because feeling like my life had fallen apart at thirty-five was that much worse than feeling like my life had fallen apart at thirty-four. There was one circumstance that was better now. For the first time ever, really, I had money.

  This meant I actually had health insurance that wasn’t given to me by the state (thank you, Oregon and Massachusetts!). I went to see a gynecologist and got another ultrasound. The good news was my PCOS was gone. The other news, which he announced just as matter-of-factly, was that I had five years of fertility left.

  “I think I probably have seven years left,” I said to the doctor.

  “You have five,” he said. “Meet a nice guy and have a baby.”

  He was lucky I didn’t start crying right there. I waited until later in the day when I was home alone and my tea and wine were not far away.

  The therapist I’d found in the last weeks of my relationship with Robert to help me save the relationship, and who was now helping me handle the breakup, encouraged me to maintain appropriate boundaries with my dad: not letting him talk to me about his porn habits or make me feel guilty for not enabling him. And to get angry: at him, at Robert, at Leo, at anyone who had made promises to me he hadn’t kept. I wouldn’t say I succeeded at getting angry. But I found I was different in moments that sometimes surprised me. When Robert began e-mailing and texting me to check in, I e-mailed back and said I wasn’t ready to be his friend. It was a small but crucial step. Slowly, I began to feel better.

  No matter how much I changed and grew, it seemed as if my father was capable of spinning out in the same few areas indefinitely. There were times when he disappeared for a week or two. When I eventually coaxed him onto the phone, he revealed it had struck him how much went into raising a kid—the cost of shoes, the constant need to teach and love—and how completely he had failed my sister and me. His bottomless regret had made him feel so lousy that he’d dodged my calls. We had already had this conversation many times, and as much as I wanted his patience during my healing, I was incredibly frustrated that his guilt about having been absent from my life in the past had caused him to be absent from my life again. Most of all, he seemed incapable of seeing the pattern. It was hard to stay mad at him, though. Sometimes he came out with the loveliest assessments of our relationship, like “Sarah, I’m sorry I couldn’t be a better father to you, but I’ve had my own head so far up my own ass my entire life.” Other times, he’d been silent because he was worried about his health. He confessed that he’d been having trouble with his prostate and was obsessed with the fear that it was cancer. Eventually, he’d begin circling a topic that had become fraught between us.

  “I know we haven’t talked about it in a while, but I was wondering if you’d given any more thought to me coming out there,” he said. “You used to want me to come.”

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want him to move, it was that I had no idea whether I’d stay in Los Angeles, or for how long, and I didn’t want him or anyone else to be reliant on me. Always, I feared hurting his feelings or driving him away. But I knew, this time, I had to be honest.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea right now,” I said. “I need to focus on my own life. I might want to have a kid. I need to put my energy there. I need to take care of myself.”

  He let the topic drop then, but he returned to it again and again. Finally, I got fed up.

  “I won’t have this codependent relationship with you anymore,” I said. “I’m working really hard to be healthy, and I just won’t do it anymore.”

  He waited a beat.

  “I have cancer,” he said.

  “You don’t have cancer,” I said. “You haven’t had the test yet. You might have cancer. Well, I might have cancer, too.”

  I couldn’t believe he’d played the cancer card like that, especially when he knew about Marya’s diagnosis. But, then again, I could completely believe he’d used cancer in this way. That was exactly why my therapist had written down that list of books about narcissism and kept reminding me about the importance of healthy boundaries.

  I was frustrated with my dad, but I was also concerned. I knew my dad was scared. I felt for him, especially because he could be self-aware in this particular way that made his plight more sympathetic.

  “I’ve always been a hypochondriac,” he said. “I remember when I was a kid, we used to go swimming in the river, and they said if you swallowed the water you would get polio. One day I swallowed a whole mouthful, and for years, I was sure I had polio.”

  “Just wait and see what the tests say,” I said.

  My dad did have cancer. Prostate cancer.

  I tried to remain upbeat and patient as I called him after each of his doctor’s appointments and asked him a series of small, neutral questions in order to try to extract all of the information he’d been given that day. It was during these calls that I was struck by what a classic addict my dad was. For many addicts, the secrets they build around their bad habits are as succulent as the verboten substance or behavior itself. My dad was in the habit of withholding information and only giving up small nuggets at moments when he felt the revelation could be beneficial for him, often to manipulate. It didn’t help that he was naturally distrustful of all doctors as extensions of the epic global conspiracy that was keeping us all ignorant and poor and isolated, and maybe, even, taking our lives.

  “All of the doctors came in and gave their spiels because they all think their treatment method is the best,” he said. “The surgeon, he tells you that surgery is the best option, the only option. And then, no, the radiologist says that radiation is the best. And then, no, it’s chemotherapy that’s the best.”

  I tried to ask him about side effects and outcomes, anything concrete I could hold on to, but there was nothing like that to be gotten from him. He did confess that there was one question he really wanted to ask his doctor: “Well, I just want to know if it�
�s possible, because I think I gave myself the cancer with my marathon masturbation . . .”

  I missed the rest of what he said.

  I never pushed for one treatment option or another, simply waiting to see what he would decide. And when he told me he’d found a book by a man who’d cured his prostate cancer with diet and herbs, I was encouraging and supportive. When he told me that he’d asked his doctor for six months to try out this approach before he decided about any of the traditional methods, I remained positive. I wasn’t particularly surprised. He’d always said that when his time came, he wanted to go out into the woods and die alone. I’d supported this option in theory, and I’d always believed that everyone had the right to live and die with dignity, whatever that meant for them. But that had all been in the abstract. Now that my dad really did have cancer, and his mortality was on the horizon, we were forced to have some hard conversations.

  Our candor didn’t make it any easier for me to look on as my dad adopted the health regimen that was supposed to cure his cancer and then neglected to stick to it. Even though I was supposedly done being codependent, I hadn’t been able to resist going to Erewhon, the Los Angeles mega–health food store where I’d sought advice and support when I’d waged my holistic health campaign against PCOS. I’d asked a woman in the supplements department what she would recommend for prostate cancer. She told me that one of the most important things my dad could do for his prostate health was to bring down his weight. He knew this. He was supposed to be on a special diet. And yet, he kept bingeing on hummus and peanut butter.

  “You don’t know what it’s like, Sarah,” he said. “You’re disciplined.”

  “Only because I almost starved when I started out, so I had to write every day, and it became a habit. Only because I know I’ll go crazy if I don’t run and meditate.”

  I knew it was his own battle to fight, and there was nothing, really, I could do to change its outcome. Just as I had when I was a little girl, I listened and encouraged without registering my own opinion.

  “I can see all of the shit I’ve been running from my whole life coming down on me, and if I don’t deal with it, I’m going to die,” he said.

  He was scared. I was scared for him. And I was frustrated with him, too. I struggled to help where I could without destroying carefully constructed boundaries. My sister moved to America for four months that summer and took a college internship in Fullerton. Picking her up at the airport and driving her out to her new home, I could tell from the first few minutes that she was going to be miserable there.

  I drove down to have lunch with my sister, trying to be supportive, even though I felt I was barely keeping myself functioning. I invited her up to my apartment for the night. As we sat eating the snacks I’d put out, I gently mentioned something about our dad’s cancer. I didn’t want to upset her, but I also needed to talk about it with someone who could really grasp what we were dealing with, not just with the disease but also with his response to it.

  “You mean you know?” she said, looking shocked.

  “Yeah, he told me when he was diagnosed,” I said. “Why?”

  “He made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone,” she said. “And I told him I couldn’t do that because I tell my mother everything. But I didn’t think you knew.”

  We stared at each other, not in disbelief, exactly, but with a new understanding of what we were up against. Here it was, again, the addict’s mind at work, thinking he could control the outcome of the situation and our reaction to it, thinking he could make himself powerful if he released the information to us in small doses.

  Our conversation lingered on our father’s behavior. I wasn’t sure how much she knew about his past because she’d had so little exposure to him.

  “Do you know why your mother left our father?” I asked her.

  “Because of his gambling, and because she wanted to go back to Germany to be closer to her mother,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “My mom left him because of his gambling, too.”

  “For school, in Germany, the government pays, but I had to get proof of John’s income to show that he didn’t have any money, and so I know how little money he has.”

  I knew the specific figures weren’t important. If a gambling addict had a nickel, he’d risk it. If he didn’t have any money, he’d gamble whatever else he had, even his life.

  The conversation opened up to the subject of men in general, and the men we’d dated. Asmara was in America because she’d fallen in love with a young American man who lived in New York City, and she was going to be with him in the fall when her internship was over. I told her about my recent breakup, and about the many needy men, recovering and otherwise, who’d found a place in my heart.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “They’re sick men. How can they be a husband? How can they be a father?”

  “I don’t think of it like that,” I said. “For me it matters that people are working on themselves, like I’m working on myself.”

  She shook her head, as if maybe I were the lost cause. I didn’t take it personally.

  We also talked about travel and fashion and friends and vowed to make a trip around Europe together soon. We were both profoundly moved by the experience of suddenly having a sister. We both came from small families and had yet to start families of our own.

  By the end of the weekend, I was grateful for the time we’d spent together and the way it had helped me to see her as more than a competitor for my father’s love. When she left the next day, I felt exhausted and washed out in that clean, worn way, as if my insides were made of sea glass. It was a feeling I was becoming increasingly familiar with as I began letting go of more old pains and misconceptions, finding a way to be at peace with the faint scars they left behind. Scars, I was finding, didn’t preclude clarity or healing.

  I was so desperately unhappy for so many years, and I tried so many different remedies to make myself feel better—particularly coming out of my suicidal summer and many romantic woes—that it’s hard to say what helped and how much. I was seeing a clairvoyant, a body worker/yoga instructor, and a therapist, all with the intention of releasing the trauma and pain I’d stored in my body and my self, and building a new, stronger, and healthier foundation for that self. Ever the perfectionist, I’d always assumed that doing this kind of emotional restoration was like cleaning house, and if I worked hard enough, I’d eventually get to the bottom of my pain and release it all completely. My energy healer and two different therapists broke it to me in the lingo of their different disciplines that it doesn’t quite work that way.

  My relationship with my father, or my lack of relationship with my father during my childhood, was a trauma that was embedded in my core self. It was never going to go away completely. It would always be a part of who I was. But maybe that was okay. Maybe that was even a good thing. All of me—troubled and not—had contributed to my writing, and to the friendships I’d formed, and to the amazing life and adventures I’d been privileged to have.

  Maybe I didn’t want to get rid of any parts of who I was. Instead, the healers and friends in my life helped me enhance the positive sides of that self, increase my tolerance for pleasure and happiness, and reinforce my boundaries so I didn’t let my father—or anyone like him—take more than I really wanted to give.

  And slowly, remarkably, it started to come together.

  I poured my heartbreak into a new novel. I did a lot of yoga. I didn’t drink so much. And just as I was pulling myself up, I was visited by three men who’d flitted in and out of the past nine years of my life—Judah, Anthony, and Leo. Over the course of a month, I spent a night with each of them, talking about our histories, appreciating the genuine affection that existed between us after so many years.

  But I also had relapses. One night I ended up at the home of a very cute man I’d met at a party, very drunk, so drunk I shouldn’t have been driving, so drunk I shouldn’t have been there at all. He’d talked vaguely about h
is daughter and his “baby mama,” who was out of town. It was only when I was already on my knees in front of his chair that what he said reached me.

  He pulled back, alarmed. “I have a girlfriend. We have a daughter.”

  “What am I doing here, then?” I asked, embarrassed, angry.

  “Having a drink?” he said.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “You know that’s not what’s happening here.”

  We looked at each other for a long moment. He kissed me. Having decided to be bad, we indulged ourselves fully. In the morning, he woke me up very early because he had to go pick up his daughter from her grandmother’s house. As I dressed, hangover-sick, I fully registered what I’d avoided the night before: all around me were pink toys and dolls and the whimsical drawings of his little girl, a little girl much like I’d been. Only now, I wasn’t the little girl anymore, I was the interloper who threatened her entire childhood realm, her future happiness, even.

  Instead of wanting anything more from him as he walked me to the door, I had only one thought: Please be a good dad to your little girl.

  As I drove home, I broke it down. It was time to stop fucking around. I didn’t like the woman I’d been the night before. I made a vow to never be her again. Over time, with vigilance, it got easier.

  My dad and I grew closer again, but not too close. He told me about the time in his life right before we’d reconciled, and how he’d finally been able to take the risk and do the work to be a father to me. When I’d first moved to Boston for grad school, he was so consumed by his gambling that he’d been spending all of his disability check at the track each month and paying for his basic expenses by collecting cans. It had dawned on him that I might see him digging in a trash can some day, recognize him, and be horrified and embarrassed. When he thought about being back in my life, he worried that I’d introduce him to one of my friends and they would recognize him as the man they’d seen around the city gathering cans for money. He couldn’t stand the thought of either of these scenarios, but he wanted, badly, to have a relationship with me. And so he began rehabilitating himself, getting his gambling and his finances under enough control—with the intention of reuniting with me—so that when my letter of invitation arrived, he was able to respond fully. I’d had no idea his life had gotten so dark, and I was deeply moved at the effort he had made to turn things around so he could sit across from me and begin our new relationship.