by Amanda Stern
I feel, quite suddenly, relieved. Aram is giving me an out with Taylor. I realize I’ve wanted out for a long time. “I want you,” I say.
“You can think about it,” he says.
“I don’t need to think about it.”
I got myself into this, and I want to get myself out. I want to be the one saving myself.
* * *
The next day I get rejected from Hampshire. I can’t even get into what is other people’s safety school. Aram tries to convince me I’m not an idiot, but I decide to take matters into my own hands. I write Hampshire a letter, appealing their decision. I tell them about all my accomplishments and how I excel at theater and playwriting and aren’t my ambition and my drive amazing? Apparently not, because they reject me again.
I write a monologue about the exchange and include it in the script of our play, which Gwen has been sending out to producers. Out of nowhere, an actual producer picks it up and decides to produce it off-Broadway, at a theater on Forty-Second Street.
Holy crap. A play that I cowrote, and am starring in, is going off-Broadway. None of us can believe it. We’ve been working on this play-in-monologues for months, and we’re proud of ourselves. Ha! Screw you, Hampshire. Now that I’m going to be a famous actress, I don’t care about Hampshire, or any college. All I care about now is my career. I should get back in touch with Tatum and invite her to the opening, so she can see how famous I am. People who have seen our rehearsals start to talk about the play, and my piece about getting rejected twice from the same college is getting the most attention. It’s strange to be rewarded so fully for suffering a now-public humiliation.
During a school assembly, the principal makes an announcement about the play, but as friends and teachers congratulate me, I can no longer access my earlier glee. I have never been in an off-Broadway play. Every smile or mention is yet one more mounting expectation that feels insurmountable. My only expectation is that I’ll fail. At first I count the days, but then I realize the days are forcing themselves onto me and I can’t slow them down. Countdowns don’t take over my body as much anymore since Aram and I got together, but now they’re back and I think they’re worse. A twitch settles under my right eye and stays there for days. My breath comes in small batched doses, metallic and misty like Kara’s new asthma inhaler. I am not just in the world, I am inside it, embedded inside the scorched core of reality, where feelings roast themselves in bright orange, and the temperature hovers at 5,700 degrees.
The previews are only two weeks away. The zipper that holds the world in place has been opened, and I feel myself being pulled toward it. I don’t know what’s on the other side. I might fly through at any time. All our plays have been at the acting school, but this is a real theater with plush seats and a raised stage and actual lighting. People have to buy tickets! I don’t think I’m good enough to be a professional actress, a professional anything. I feel like I’ve trapped myself again, about to expose my entire interior self to the world, including my parents, my classmates, my siblings, and strangers. And when it’s all over, I will have to break up with Taylor, and I don’t know how.
It’s a week before the show. It’s two days before the show and I can’t go to school, I’m too paralyzed by fear and dread. I feel mortified now that I wrote about Hampshire and everyone will know I got rejected twice because I’m so dumb. What have I done?
Eddie offers to teach me how to breathe, because he sees that I can’t. His Mohawk is long gone, and instead of firing up Bauhaus, he burns incense. In the past year, he’s gotten into chanting and meditation and something called macrobiotics, which means he eats food that smells like unshowered feet. He’s been studying yoga in India, and that’s where he learned to breathe. I lie on his bedroom floor, but as he tries to talk me through the stages, I can’t even hear his voice. My brain is too loud and my body can’t focus, and my temperature has been too high for days. I’m pretending to do whatever he says to do, but it’s useless. His instructions aren’t strong enough to counteract my body’s instructions. Even my skin is afraid; I can feel it trying to crawl off me. My clothes are rubbing against me all wrong and nothing seems to fit me, not even my own body. My body has shrunk, but my clothes don’t feel bigger; they feel like burlap against my skin.
The day rounds the corner to 2 p.m., then 3 p.m., and then the dark starts painting over the sky and I can feel it trying to reach me, to brush me into the night like one of its stray hairs. Tomorrow is the first preview. I can’t go through with it. This is the actual real world, a world I am ill-prepared to join. Everyone will see that I’m not good enough.
Then, despite my mental clawing to keep the night from passing, it’s suddenly time to go to the theater. I haven’t eaten in days, but my stomach is full. Under the marquee I hurry past the rest of the acting kids, who are cheering and posing for pictures. I don’t want any reminders of what is going to happen in three hours. My mouth is dry and my lips are vibrating and I know I will forget my lines and fuck up, and everything I’ve ever tried to hide will spill out of my body in front of everyone I know. And paying strangers, too.
In the dressing room I try to do Eddie’s breathing, but I can’t remember a thing. My mother offers me a beta-blocker, but I don’t want to take it because I don’t know what it will do. I can’t stop throwing up. The lights dim in the house. I stand in the wings, and when the music goes on I’m afraid my heart is going to eject itself from my chest. Then my cue comes and I send my body down the aisle and onto the stage and start my monologue and I can hear my mouth being dry, but on the line that’s supposed to be funny, people laugh, and suddenly my mouth moistens up, and I feel like my body and I are reconnecting. The audience is on my side. I relax.
The preview goes perfectly. Onstage, opening night, I bow twice, once as an actor and then again with Graham, as writers. Like meeting Aram, it’s this applause I feel like I’ve been waiting for my entire life. All this time I thought I wanted to be an actress, but it’s the writing that matters most to me, not the performing. The run of the play is amazing and awful and I can’t wait for it to end.
When it does end, I know I need to cut Taylor out of my life. Aram talks me through how to do it. Instead of confronting Taylor directly, when the show closes, I just stop showing up at the town house, and when school lets out I leave through the smoking exit, out back. When Taylor calls me, I don’t answer. When he throws pennies at my window at night and yells my name, I lie on my bed and shake, terrified he can see me, that he’ll climb up the side of my house and look at me through the window and my face will give away my truth that I’m afraid of him, that I’m in over my head and have been for years, that I’m not the girl I’ve pretended to be, and that he’s not the hero I wanted. I miss him and I don’t. I feel free and trapped. I realize that while I still want to do coke all the time, I need to stop.
And so, when I finish the last of what I have, I do stop, not understanding about withdrawal, not realizing that my skin will take on the agitation of my internal self, or that my cravings for the drug will feel unendurable, sending me into spasms that swing between rage and despair. I stay in my bedroom, alternating between a fatigue so deep my bones won’t lift and a feral lather, biting my sheets and throwing wild tantrums on my bed, shocked at the thoughts I have that involve stealing and selling my mother’s jewelry for more drugs. I do not want to be that person. I tell my mom I have the flu and she sends up soup and medicine as I use all my willpower to remain in my bedroom until the cravings subside. It takes about a week, and no one pays enough attention to recognize the specific strain of my “flu.”
The Dread, the Relief
My mom has rented our house to a famous film director and his family. I feel conflicted now about seeing his movies. I’m on my way uptown to meet my mom when I run into Haruko again. Last thing I remember, she was set to break up with Connery, and I assume that’s what she did.
“I have the best news!” she announces near the mailboxes.
; “What’s that?” I ask.
She puts her hand on her stomach. “I’m pregnant.”
“Oh my God. Whoa. Wow.”
“Yeah, I know. Connery and I are getting married.”
“Oh. Wow. Okay. Um…are you happy with that decision?”
“Oh yes! Babies change everything. Marriage too. I’m on cloud nine.”
“Good for you,” I say, even though I mean “poor baby.”
Since Frankie was in my life, however briefly, the idea of having a newborn baby has become less appealing. What I really want is a Frankie, which means finding an already existent kid who needs a mother figure. But then my grandmother Puggy died and left a little money to each grandchild. Kara pointed out that it was enough for one round of IVF. I made the mistake of mentioning the idea to my mom, who has heard me wonder aloud many times whether or not I should have a baby on my own. She suggests I make another appointment at the fertility clinic, despite hearing about the previous visit, and despite the fact that I’m still ambivalent about having a baby on my own. I know she wants me to have a baby, but how do I know what I want until I have it? I didn’t know I wanted a Frankie until I had one.
“What if I have a baby and regret it?” I ask my mom.
“You won’t.”
I close my eyes, preventing myself from growing visibly angry. What if Melissa dies? What if Baba dies? What if we lose this house? What if something bad happens when I leave? My whole life the answer has always been the same, but “It won’t” is not an answer; it’s not even true.
Before I can come up with a response, we’re summoned into the doctor’s office. He has the results of my blood test, and it is bad news. I can feel the heat rising, its burn in my chest. Loss. Even when I’m ambivalent, news of loss bumps me out of the world.
“With your blood results, I can tell you that you have less than a one percent chance of getting pregnant, even with IVF. It’s not uncommon for women your age to come to me and think we can make miracles happen, and we can, just not the miracles you expect, or even want.”
There it is: I missed it. There had always been time, and now time is gone. All my ambivalence and anxiety led me here, ensuring I would never be able to make the family I wanted. I’m the one who held me back; this is my fault. I will never have a biological child. I will never know what a child of my genetic material will look like. I won’t have the experience my siblings had, my friends have, my mother had. I don’t have a child because I waffled, and I don’t have a partner because I waited each time when I should have left. Decisions meant loss, and so I didn’t decide and now the decision has been made for me. I can’t have children. I can adopt, or get an egg donor, but I cannot make my own baby.
The dread is gone, lifted; in its place is sadness, but also relief. The decision has been taken from me; now I can’t choose the wrong thing because there is no longer a choice. I missed the window. Was I so afraid to make a mistake that I unconsciously did this on purpose? After all, if I really wanted a baby, wouldn’t I have made it happen somehow?
When I look at my mother a grief wells inside me. I look away, so I don’t find myself dissolving into a fetal ball on the office floor. I manage to wait to fall apart on the street outside, where my mother hugs me and doesn’t know what to say.
When we part I walk for a while, all the way across town toward Sixth Avenue, each block a sample of upcoming seasons to walk through. The crisp first breath of winter, fire smoke followed by a shocking pocket of warmth, and then I look up, called to the sky, a lifelong reflex. It’s not yet four thirty and the sun is beginning its descent, and my body responds with a tightening of dread in my chest. Dread that every evening will find me suffering from countdowns for the rest of my life. Why does this still happen to me? My body has always reacted to the sun this way; the sky and I have a private relationship that is not mine to end. What does it want from me? What is it trying to tell me? I try to do what my therapist has trained me to do, to follow the feeling to the very beginning, to when I first felt it, and identify the association. Of course: It’s telling me that soon it will be bedtime and I’ll have to leave my mom. That soon I’ll have to go to my dad’s. It’s telling me that the day is dying, that things are ending and all the distractions of the day are quieting, creating more space for me to worry about all the ways I have to say good-bye.
But I am not a child anymore. Can I change my association to the sky? What if I simply decide it’s the best time of day and not the worst? I look at the sunset and tell it, You are so pretty. You don’t scare me. And for a moment, it doesn’t—and I feel released and in control of my feelings. Until I accidentally blink the moment away.
* * *
A few nights later, my little sister Rebecca calls to tell me she’s pregnant. I feel knocked a few feet deeper into my new reality of having “missed it,” but through the pangs of jealousy I’m excited for her. We talk about names and discuss her worries and the due date, and when we hang up, I surprise myself by not bursting into tears. I’m embarrassingly proud of this.
A few days later I receive a call from my dad. Immediately I worry something else bad has happened. The last time he called me in the middle of the day, it was to report that my grandmother Puggy, his mother, had died.
“Dad, hi. What’s the matter?” I ask.
“Everything is fine. I just thought I’d call and see how you were. I’m sure Rebecca’s news wasn’t easy for you to hear.”
I’m about to protest about how happy I am for her, insist that it’s no big deal, but I am so caught off-guard, so touched by this small act of attentiveness, that as I start to say, “I’m fine,” I burst into tears, something I haven’t done in front of him since I was small. And he sits with me there, on the phone, listening. As I realize he’s not going to crack a joke at my expense, I feel a shift inside my body: I am no longer crying for the baby I won’t have. Now I am crying because the person I least expected has shown up when I most needed him. The exact person I’ve spent my whole life afraid to need.
Waiting to Move On
The only college that accepts me is in Vermont, a place I associate with death, and the first year is a disaster. Just when I’ve stopped doing drugs, everyone else has started. They drop acid and try to burn down dorms. They take mushrooms and crucify animals. I call Aram and Jonathan every day. Aram makes me feel better on the phone, but each time we hang up I am alone again. When I invite Jonathan to come visit he refuses, citing each horrendous incident I’ve described over the last three months. I agree to accompany him to the AIDS clinic for testing over Christmas break. He’s worried, and I don’t think he should be even after he confesses the myriad escapades around the city to which I’ve been ignorant. Every few weeks I write Taylor nasty, vile letters I never send, blaming him for who I almost became. I imagine the not knowing, the squirm of discomfort as he tries to make sense of what happened, why I stopped talking to him, and the reversal of power fills me with a charge, reminding me I’m nobody’s bitch. I wonder if that’s how he felt with me, when he used to have the upper hand.
As the end of December nears, I realize that Jonathan hasn’t called me back in a few days—last we spoke, we were trying to make plans for the trip to the clinic. When I call I get his machine. I tell his machine when I’m coming home and tell him to let me know when and where to meet him. For the next week and a half, I call Jonathan and leave him messages, each one increasingly more concerned and mad.
“Why aren’t you calling me back?” I ask. “Are you okay?”
“Did you die?”
“Oh my God, maybe you died and I’m yelling at your machine for not calling me back, when you can’t call me back because you’re dead and now whoever hears these messages is going to think I’m a terrible friend for berating a dead person for not calling me back. Call me back!”
I call Paul and ask if Jonathan’s okay. He is. I ask if he knows whether Jonathan made an appointment to get tested for AIDS. He did. Paul thought I was goi
ng with him. He agrees to call Jonathan and see what’s going on. Paul never calls me back. Now I’m leaving messages for both brothers to call me back, and neither does. Why are they ignoring me? I can’t figure out what I did wrong.
Finally, I’m home, and soon so is Aram, and we do our tradition of going to Rockefeller Center to watch the tree lighting and go to a movie and eat chestnuts from street vendors. He doesn’t know either why Jonathan isn’t responding, so he leaves a message, too.
“I bet he’ll call me back,” Aram says, confident. I wonder if this is karma for dropping Taylor. Is this payback for unceremoniously cutting someone out of my life? I feel sorry for putting Taylor through this, but not sorry enough to reach out to him. And besides, I didn’t do anything to Jonathan; I’m hardly a bad influence. But Jonathan doesn’t call Aram back. He is just gone.
* * *
It takes me a year and a half and three colleges before I settle on a school. After the horrors of my first school, I decided to take classes at the New School and live at home, but that’s no better: I fight all the time with Mom, who treats me like four-year-old Nina’s full-time nanny. Finally I land at the University of Rochester, which is bland and generic, but I’m tired of transferring around and decide to stay put.
In the spring of 1991, Aram and I are in France. He has just finished his junior year abroad at Oxford, and we’ve decided to spend a week together in Paris before our summer jobs begin in New York. We have spent the past year dating other people. Or rather, he has spent the past year dating other people, while I waited for him, white-knuckling through the year, hoping that every phone call was not our last. Now that he’s had his interactive experience with the physical landscape of British girls, and relieved me of my fears by choosing to remain monogamous, the idea of dating others has stuck in my head and I wonder, Should I do the same thing? I love Aram more than I thought a person could love, and while we have amazing conversations, and laugh more than we fight, there’s an entire body of things he’d rather not talk about, things having to do with me.
