That summer was the beginning of my realization that I was a very, very naive little flower. With terrible geography skills. (A few months later, when I did live in Manhattan, my dad bought me a compass so that, when I popped up out of an underground subway station, I’d know which way was north.) I rented a room, which came with a kitchen efficiency, in a house belonging to a woman whose sister worked at Newsday. The husband worked for the sanitation department in Queens and was gone early every morning. I dated a man at the paper who was eight years older than I was and an avid swing dancer; I remember being at his apartment the night JFK Jr. died and wondering if we should go in to the office. I wrote a story about Itzhak and Toby Perlman’s summer music camp on Shelter Island, where, the entire time I was interviewing him over lunch, Itzhak sat balancing a spoon on his nose.
Moving to New York—to Long Island—was like pulling the first wisp of a string that ends up unraveling the entire rug down the road. Long Island was suspiciously similar to the suburban South, with its four-lane highways lined with Home Depots and Michaels stores, and Newsday was known to be a pretty conservative newspaper. But I couldn’t be a lemming anymore; there weren’t that many people like me to follow around. I had to grow some legs (lemmings technically have legs, guys, but they are extremely short) and figure out my own path. Spiritually, culturally, politically. I was starting to see that there was a big world out there. Bigger than Hoboken, I assure you. Is that clichéd and simplistic? Yes. It’s also absolutely true. I was so terrified of stepping out of the warm bath of my life and onto the cold tile of the unknown that I’d knocked on the door of the Christian Coalition in not–New York City because I knew I could speak the language, and my mom would be proud. Left to my own devices, I chose to plant myself smack-dab in the middle of people who weren’t going to challenge any of the assumptions I brought with me. I should have been tipped off by the fact that my boss was Jewish that following Jesus wasn’t the common denominator for the staff of the Christian Coalition. Passing conservative legislation was—and those aren’t the same thing. But, eventually, through a job I thought I was too good for, in a place that was across the East River from where I really wanted to go, God led me to New York, where I found my true voice. Sometimes he works like that, with twists and turns and the Midtown Tunnel. You just have to follow.
THREE
THE BREAKUP
MY HUSBAND, MICHAEL, AND I STARTED dating like we were trying to swallow each other whole. Two days after we met at a friend’s apartment and shared a cab home—where I kissed him and might have literally tried to swallow him whole—he took me out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant a block from my apartment. He was wearing pleated khakis and a knit Polo shirt that had blocky stripes in navy, hunter green, red, and yellow, like a collared shirt you’d see on a second grader in his school photo from 1986. I remember thinking, “I can change that.”
In short-lived dating experiences up to that point, the little things loomed large. One guy I went out with thought it made sense to place his oversized couch at an angle in the middle of his studio apartment, because it was too big to fit against one wall. Another spent a summer revealing, date after date, that he owned no other shorts but jean ones. These weren’t deal breakers; they were shopping challenges. But, to me, they whispered, “Exit, Stage Left.” So when Michael showed up looking like he belonged in a Sears catalog ad, then mentioned that he still lived with his parents, I was surprised to be thinking, This is it. When you know, you know.
After dinner on that first date, we climbed the stairs to the roof of my building, which was easily accessible through an emergency exit door that was never armed. There were a few other people up there, so we opened the beers we’d bought on the way home and sat on the ledge overlooking Second Avenue. The neighbors left. It was getting late. “What do you want to do?” I asked. “Well, I told myself that when those people left, I was going to kiss you,” he said, like he needed to psych himself up, which might have given me pause if I’d actually been listening to him instead of wondering how much sweat was visible down the sides of my polyester tank top. “Yep, sounds good to me,” I said. This is the story we tell our children, not the fact that we’d kissed before, sloppily in the back of a cab on the first night we met. We tell our kids how their dad pursued me relentlessly, inviting himself to an event for alumnae of my all-girls’ high school at a bowling alley two days later, so we didn’t have to wait for the weekend to see each other again. We tell them how, a couple of months into dating, he rerouted a trip he was on to fly to North Carolina for an engagement party I was attending. How it was as if I’d shown up with a koala bear—so cute! So playful! So rare to a room full of Southerners. (“Wait, you grew up there? In New York?”) Our kids love the story about how I took Michael to Six Flags in New Jersey for his birthday, thinking it would be a fun surprise, and how he didn’t bother to tell me that he got sick on roller coasters until after we finished a particularly hairy one, and he threw up into a trash can.
My mother couldn’t get over it, that I’d found this smart, sweet, adoring man in the big city—who, in her words, looked like a fraternity boy from Ole Miss. “He’s so normal!” she said, as if women in New York City gave birth only to fully grown Italian butchers or Billy Joel. It was the night he first met my parents that I told Michael I loved him. We had returned to my apartment after dinner. It was winter, and I was wearing knee-high black boots that were stiff, tight on my calves, and a considerable pain to get off. He kneeled beside my bed, grabbed the toe with one hand and the heel with the other and tugged and shimmied each boot off. I flopped back onto my duvet, blood rushing back into my legs. “Oh my gosh. I love you,” I said. “You’re welcome,” he said back. The next day, I said it again, because I wanted to be clear that it wasn’t just for helping me with the boots. “I know,” he said. It was a couple of weeks later, on a ski trip to New Hampshire, when he turned to me one afternoon and said, “I love you too.” A few days after we got back from that romantic weekend, I broke up with him. That’s his favorite part of the story to tell our kids: “And then your mother broke my heart.”
. . .
As women all over the world know, sometimes you have to walk away from the love of your life for his own good. Sometimes a little space is all he needs to change those few things you need him to change—it’s only a few, and honestly, it shouldn’t take that long—before he comes back, new and improved to your specifications. It’s so simple, really.
Here are the things Michael was:
A good dancer.
Funny in a way that also showed he was smart.
Happy in the spotlight but also able to share it.
Confident.
Affectionate.
Honest.
Definitely in love with me.
Good looking, if you like pasty. (I did.)
A good driver. (Crucial; I was terrible.)
Here are the things he was not:
Living on his own. (If your parents had an apartment in Manhattan with two spare bedrooms, would you pay rent?)
Sure of what he was going to do with the rest of his life. (He was twenty-two.)
Skilled at praying out loud in groups. (He grew up Catholic; it wasn’t a thing.)
Acquainted with contemporary worship songs, like my favorites, “Shout to the Lord” or “Mighty to Save.” (See above.)
Comfortable attending a men’s Bible study. (Ditto.)
Ready to get married. (He was twenty-two.)
My mother has a small devotional book, Daily Strengths for Daily Needs, by Mary W. Tileston. It’s about six inches wide and has a sunny yellow hard cover. Each day has a short Bible verse and meditation. It was first published in 1884, so the readings can be a little stodgy, but it is my mother’s favorite. Whenever I picture her in my mind, she is sitting in a club chair in our living room in the early morning, before anyone else is awake, a swing-arm lamp spotlighting her lap, reading her Bible and that book. Her copy is a pale, buttery cream
, faded from decades of use. The binding is loose, and even the waxy coating on the cover has lifted, hanging on like a half-molted snakeskin. Every page is covered in notes about trips, births, deaths, and engagements that occurred on that date. It’s the closest thing we have to a family archive. My mom gave my sister and me our own copies, but I rarely pick it up. It reads like the King James Bible to me, familiar but too much work to parse. For some reason, though, on January 31, 2001, I did. And through the words on that page, God told me very clearly to break up with my boyfriend. Sure, maybe I went looking for a sign. Maybe I had already decided that breaking up with Michael was the only way to get his attention. Maybe I wanted a nudge. People do the same thing with horoscopes. Printed on that page was an excerpt from Psalm 23 with a short poem by Henry H. Barry underneath it.
In “pastures green”? Not always; sometimes He
Who knoweth best, in kindness leadeth me
In weary ways, where heavy shadows be.
So, whether on the hill-tops high and fair
I dwell, or in the sunless valleys, where
The shadows lie, what matter? He is there.
I took this as a signal to plunge ahead into the sunless valley, where I was positive that our love would be tested and strengthened. I only wanted him to mature a little—which included, I don’t know, going to law school and embracing the kind of evangelical faith I’d grown up with. Was that so hard?
That winter, Michael was working as a tennis pro at a club in Connecticut. His parents had a house in a woodsy, secluded area of Fairfield County, and Michael would often spend the night there rather than drive back into the city. Every once in a while, I would take the train up after work. A Wednesday night was rare, but I told him I needed to see him, and he picked me up at the train station with the same look he’d get if a waiter brought us an unexpected, free dessert. Heeeeey, lucky me. Then he noticed I was crying.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I am here to break up with you,” I answered.
There was a long pause. “Should I still go pick up the Chinese food I ordered?”
We stopped by Panda Palace in a strip mall near the train station, picked up the food, and drove to his parents’ apartment in near silence, me sobbing quietly, him thinking this was all a weird misunderstanding. In the living room, while we ate, I laid out all the ways that he was not living up to what I considered potential husband material (subtext: I was already perfect in every way). I explained that while he was so much fun, he was immature, and I needed a strong moral partner, someone who understood how important my faith was, who would just please, please read the J. I. Packer book (Knowing God) I’d bought him earlier that month, so we could discuss it. Plus, God had spoken to me that morning, so there was really no way around it. When I finished, he leaned forward on the couch and rested his elbows on his knees. Then he lowered his head and said, quietly, “Okay, but I was pretty sure you were the one.”
The nerve.
I walked slowly to the bathroom that was off of the kitchen, sat down on the toilet, and slid the cafe curtains that were hanging on a thin, brass rod on the window next to me back and forth, trying not to scream. You were the one. How could something be so excruciating and hopeful at the same time? I felt vindicated, and then I felt furious. I wanted to take it all back, and I also wanted to slap him, punish him, for being manipulative.
“I’m going to take a train back to the city,” I said as I walked out of the bathroom.
“Seriously? It’s late.”
“Yep. I need you to drive me to the station.” (Courage!)
In the parking lot, I heaved and sobbed on his shoulder, hugging him goodbye as if he were going off to war. And then I boarded the train, too brightly lit for the time of night and my swollen, stinging eyes. When it pulled into Grand Central Station close to midnight, I called my parents from a pay phone at the end of the platform to tell them what had happened, bawling into the greasy receiver as the last of the passengers filed out of the tunnel. My kind and patient mother showed enormous sympathy, affirming all of my feelings, calming every sputtering breath with soft words. She did this, even though I know she was thinking I’d destroyed the best thing that ever happened to me and might now die alone.
I woke up the next morning, puffy and miserable. At work I wrote an email to my closest friends, announcing the breakup and my noble commitment to God’s calling in executing it. Everyone was proud of me. It was so hard, and I was being so strong. Then, a few weeks after the breakup, the inevitable backsliding commenced. A friend set me up on a date, and the guy was, as my favorite Karen Walker quote from Will & Grace says, “dumb as a box of hair.” When he mentioned over dinner that there was a lot of sushi on the platter, and he usually ate a smaller portion, I said, quietly, “That boulder is much too large. I could lift a smaller one,” a quote from Bill Murray playing out-of-shape Hercules on Saturday Night Live. “What? I don’t get it,” he said. “Oh, I know, it’s kind of an obscure skit; it’s not a big deal,” I said, chuckling. “Doesn’t sound funny,” he said. Shortly after dinner, I made an excuse for needing to be home and got on the subway uptown. Walking from the train, down East 52nd Street to my apartment, I suddenly felt like I was going to fall apart, literally: an ear dropping to the sidewalk, then one arm, my shoulder blades sliding out of my torso, because what had held me together was sitting in his parents’ apartment thinking I was the one. So I called him.
“I just had the worst date.”
“Don’t move. I’m coming over.”
Fifteen minutes later Michael turned onto my street in his dirty, hunter green Jeep Cherokee. I watched him roll down the window and tilt his head halfway out, his blonde hair flying back in the cold air, then settling as he slowed to a stop. “Get in,” he said.
. . .
That night—and, as it would turn out, many, many nights after—Michael drove the perimeter of Manhattan while we cried and debated the future of our relationship. He’d make the block and go west, across town to the West Side Highway, and turn south. We would drive past the Lincoln Tunnel and the new Chelsea Piers sports complex, with its driving range that extended out into the Hudson River, a rectangular net the size of a cruise ship glinting under stadium lights. Then there was Battery Park, a cluster of high-rises built on dirt that was dug up and relocated to make room for the World Trade Center. There was the World Trade Center, still. We would pass all those downtown buildings, reaching the end of the island, where it seemed like you could either nose down under the water, into the Battery Tunnel to Brooklyn, or drive straight off the tip of Manhattan. Except we didn’t. Michael would go left, a hairpin turn or two, and then we were flying up the FDR Drive on the other side, following the East River uptown. There was the Brooklyn Bridge, gorgeous and milky brown in the dark, and the Manhattan Bridge, the only one with subway cars running along its belly. I would ask where across the river was Williamsburg and Long Island City. I was still so terrible with geography, of knowing where Brooklyn and Queens met, of which bridges led to which neighborhoods, and Michael knew everything. This was his hometown. If we slowed down enough, I’d try to see into homes along East End Avenue that still had their lights on, their bay windows rimmed in copper that had gone green like the Statue of Liberty. I’d always think the people living in the grand, turn-of-the-century buildings on the opposite side of the island, along Riverside Drive, had it better, because they got the sunsets. Michael sometimes cut north into Inwood, where his parents grew up, a skinny strip of Manhattan that’s like an index finger pointing toward the Bronx. We drove along dense parks that might as well have been forests in the dark and past clusters of housing projects on the Lower East Side. “Never take the Manhattan Bridge from Brooklyn if you need to get on the FDR,” he said. “It dumps you out halfway across Chinatown.” Sutton Place, with its neat cul-de-sacs suspended over the highway, gave way to the Upper East Side, and then Spanish Harlem. Every two minutes, we were in a different city. It was what I
loved about New York so much, the feeling of entering a new world every twenty blocks. On those nights, I got all of them, over and over: down the West Side Highway, past the Battery Tunnel, around the bend, up the FDR Drive, across the Harlem River Bridge, down the West Side Highway. To me, we were lassoing the universe.
After we’d circled the island a few times, while I cried and questioned everything—and Michael patiently pointed out that most of what I was crying about could be easily solved with time and a few compromises—we would park, lower the front seats back as far as they would go, and make out for an hour or two. This went on for months. Drive, cry, park, make out.
I fell more in love with the city and the man on those nights. We—the three of us—laid the groundwork for a lifelong commitment, wasting gas.
So it was a huge relief in April, four months after I broke up with him, that Michael announced he was picking me up for a real date, and we were getting back together. He had a speech, he said. I don’t remember a word of it, only that we agreed to visit lots of different churches—Catholic, Episcopal, Presbyterian—to find one where we both felt like we could flourish. And that he was moving out of his parents’ apartment and in with his friend Vivek. I remembered something my mother had told me in the midst of the breakup, when I was lamenting the differences between our Catholic and Protestant backgrounds.
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