Blue Plate Special (18 page)

Then I slowly peeled and carefully sectioned the grapefruit and bit off one end of each and teased the little striated fluid-filled sacs out one by one, then ate the collapsed outer skin. This went on for as long as I could make it last.

While I ate, I looked down at my journal and wrote. I wrote and wrote and wrote; I was so lonely and hungry, and writing was an outlet for the voice in my head that ran on and on and on like a stream in the dark. I wrote about how lonely I was and instantly felt less so.

The summer after my junior year, I went back to Jerome. Shortly after I got home, my mother and sisters and I took a road trip to California to drop Susan off in San Francisco, where she was spending the summer as an intern with the San Francisco Ballet.

While we were there, we saw my father for the first time in almost six years. My mother had found him through Ruth Ann, our former neighbor on Acton Street, who casually mentioned that he was back in the Bay Area; she sang in a chorus with him. My mother looked him up in the phone book and called him, just like that; and just like that, he picked up and seemed happy to hear from us and said he would like to see us.

We arranged to meet him at a restaurant called the Edible Complex, which he chose. He was already there when we arrived, sitting at a table in the front patio. He saw me first, since I was the tallest, and said, sounding a bit baffled but proud, “You’re beautiful!” He took in my sisters and added with the same proprietary surprise, “You’re all beautiful!”

He still had a beard and a scraggly ponytail; he still looked like the photo on the old driver’s license I’d kept under my pillow for so many months. And he was as affable, charming, and distant as ever. I could hardly bear the intensity of my feelings for him, and I could hardly talk to him or look him in the eye. Here he was, my father again, after all these years of my
thinking about him, imagining that we were so much alike, feeling allied with him as a source of comfort and strength, believing somehow that one day, we would be father and daughter again. That had been a fantasy father, I realized with lurching disappointment.

Seeing my parents together again was disconcerting and sad, too. They had both changed so much since Berkeley days, back when we all went camping together, back when we were a family. Then, my parents had been easygoing, young and carefree and glamorous. Now, my father was grizzled and wayward. My mother had been through another painful marriage and hard divorce; she looked as beautiful as ever, but she was beaten down inside, I could feel it constantly. They were no longer friends—my father’s violence and departure in the cop car almost six years before hung over the table like a cloud of smoke. And I had called the cops on him; I had been the one who had caused him to go away.

When my mother asked my father point-blank where he’d been all these years, he said something vague about driving a truck in Greece and Turkey. I suppose we told him about ourselves. Throughout the meal, my heart thudded slowly and I shook with nerves and I could hardly pay attention to what was said. I felt like weeping. When we all said good-bye, my father parted from us as if we were old, long-lost acquaintances of his that he had been glad to see again in a fond, removed sort of way but wouldn’t much miss now that we were saying good-bye again. My mother and sisters and I drove off, feeling sad, troubled, and unsatisfied. The next day, we took Susan to the ballet school and left her at her new dormitory. That summer, she saw our father several times while she was in San Francisco. He gave her tennis lessons, took her to lunch. He was his usual charming, affable self with her, but she never felt quite at ease with him. He made her feel shy. She could never fully trust him.

W
hen my mother and Emily and I got back to Jerome, I found a job working as a chambermaid at the Poco Diablo Resort in Sedona. I hitched a ride to and from work every weekday with Jim, who drove to his office in Tlaquepaque, an upscale adobe plaza of restaurants and shops and professional offices. All day, I scrubbed toilets, made beds, vacuumed, collected tips from dressers and coffee tables, and fended off the occasional weirdo. After two months of very hard work, I ended up saving the vast sum of seven hundred dollars, which covered the part of my tuition at Green Meadow that my mother had somehow paid the year before. I handed over the cash all at one go to her, and then we toasted my joy at leaving that awful job behind with a bottle of champagne.

My mother turned forty-one that summer; I turned seventeen, Susan fifteen, and Emily was twelve now, going into seventh grade. My mother and Emily had lived peaceably together the past year, but my mother was still having a hard time of it. Many people in the town, seemingly so bohemian and open-minded but really as narrow and conventional as anywhere else, still judged her for leaving Jim and continued to shun and avoid her. She’d had a heartbreaking affair with a man she’d fallen in love with who had left her, and was alone again, still trying to get her private practice going, working hard on the Talley House, smoking a lot of pot and listening to records all day as she stripped and refinished wood, and painfully missing her two older daughters.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my mother was beginning a slide into a protracted breakdown that would last on and off for the next decade. She had seemed so stalwart and brave and invincible to me throughout my childhood, but now that my sisters and I were teenagers, leaving home, leaving her, she was no longer propped up by the scaffolding motherhood had
afforded her. Her painful childhood and past caught up with her; the present was hard, too. She became increasingly absent, more and more caught up in her own internal storms.

Emily was ripening into a precociously sultry beauty and had become a prodigy on the piano. She was an eccentric loner. Always warmhearted and quick to champion the underdog, she befriended poor lonesome Father John at the Catholic church down the street. He was a sweet, humble old man, but when he died, an enormous collection of women’s left shoes turned up in his basement.

Susan was succeeding as a ballet dancer, but she was painfully anorexic and living far from home, as lonely and out of place in her new life as I was in mine.

Jim, for his part, was also lost and forlorn and sad. He still loved us, but he wasn’t our real father, and no amount of trying on anyone’s part could make him so.

For months after seeing my father, I felt devastated, heartbroken, in a way I could neither articulate nor acknowledge, even to myself.

During my senior year, Tommy stopped pestering me for the most part; his hugs now seemed less urgently aggressive, anyway. But he continued to pester one of my friends. She told me he wouldn’t stop forcing her to give him hand jobs, although she’d asked him to leave her alone. She also told me that her father and another relative had molested her as well.

Who could we tell? They were all doing it. Almost everyone in that supposedly spiritually righteous community knew what was going on, but no one said or did anything to stop it; there was never the slightest sense that they thought they were doing anything wrong, having sex with the teenagers they taught, mentored, and hosted. Tommy was far from the only one. One of my other teachers had had a long affair with a former student that had started when he was her teacher; two other male teachers (married, with children) had sex with two sixteen-year-old girls at some drunken party.

It wasn’t only the men. A female teacher was involved in a longtime liaison with a recent graduate that had started when he was in high school, and another female teacher had slept with a boy in the class above mine. Almost all these teachers were married; many of them had kids who were students in the school themselves.

I was flat-out shocked by this, but many of the students
seemed to be complicit in these affairs. It was almost fashionable, like a trend. All the same, it felt as though the adults around me were falling apart and behaving like adolescents, as if there were no sense of grown-up responsibility or accountability or dignity. But there were notable exceptions to this lack of generational distinctions. Several high school teachers actually managed not to have sex with us. In fact, they behaved as if their job were to teach us.

One of those was May Eliot. She stood out as a bright light for me in that place. She seemed hardly older than I was—I thought she was probably in her early twenties, when she taught me English—but she was fierce and intimidating. It never occurred to me that she even had a sex life, she was so proper, so formal. One night, I dropped a late essay off at her house. When she answered the door, I saw that she had a guest for dinner, a man. I averted my eyes quickly: I sensed that she was very private, and her personal life was totally separate from her work life. It was a vast relief to have such clear boundaries set by one of my elders.

She was also an inspiring, brilliant teacher. For our senior play, May had our class put on
King Lear
. I played Regan, one of the evil older sisters, and by all accounts, we pulled it off, a bunch of seventeen-year-olds, because May was determined that we could and willed us to. In her class, we wrote creative essays, stories, and poems and shared them with one another, as we would in a writing workshop. Her criticism was fair and strong. Her praise was rare and hard-won and always gave me a rush of confidence.

May did not take any special interest in me—that wasn’t the source of her influence on me or of my gratitude to her. She simply showed me in her clear, uncompromising, impersonal yet warm way that there were still a few adults who hadn’t lost all sense of propriety.

Meanwhile, normal life went on among us kids. My closest friends that year were twin Jewish boys named Seth and Jason Silverberg who lived in a big, sprawling house in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. I went there on Friday nights for Shabbat dinner, Passover seders. Their house was full of their mother’s pottery, rugs and pillows and couches, books, a piano, a big table in the big dining room where we did our homework together on school nights.

Our class spent many nights in the Silverbergs’ basement rec room, lying around on couches and listening to the White Album, the Eagles, Led Zeppelin, and Supertramp, drinking vodka mixed with anything we could find. There were the usual adolescent heartbreaks, worthy of a French farce: Sara, whose older sister Jessica was Seth’s girlfriend although he had a crush on Amy, who had a crush on Jason; Jason had a crush on me; I had a crush on Christopher; Christopher had a crush on Gina; Gina was off at college because she had graduated the year before, but eventually they got together, and I was officially heartbroken.

My crush on Christopher was deep and painful and obsessive for my entire time at Green Meadow. Whenever he tried to talk to me, typically I couldn’t answer or look him in the eye. Every so often, we made out; I suppose that is the term for the rolling around and groping and pawing that happened. I was virginal and petrified and much too in love with him to allow anything real to happen. I identified with and envied him more than I lusted after him—he had all the qualities I lacked and desperately wanted to develop: confidence, autonomy, a backbone, a strong sense of self. I was insecure, introverted, self-conscious, and shy. My crush on him propped me up, but until I could develop those things in myself, I would never be able to connect in a real way with someone I was in love with. I knew it at the time and it made me jumpy with frustration,
with anxiety and impatience to grow up and leave adolescence behind.

At the very end of senior year, when it was safe to do so because we were all going our separate ways after graduation, I succumbed to Jason, who was easy to talk to, enamored of me, and not at all intimidating, but I could never return his feelings or take him seriously. It was the same old thing, all over again. We became sexually involved, but only to a point. I couldn’t give myself fully to him. I wasn’t ready to give myself fully to anyone, and I saw no point in rushing into full-on sex.