Flirting with Danger (21 page)

I knew I couldn’t go back into war zones. My armor was no longer in place and I had no more stomach for war, which always seemed to be about the same thing. Nobody ever wins. It never works. Whether an army is defeated or victorious, the wounds to the soul are the same.

Finally the war passed. I was able to resume my rehabilitation. In the evenings I watched sitcoms to reconnect with my countrymen. How could I live here and converse meaningfully with the natives if I’d never seen an episode of
Seinfeld?
Other simple things had great meaning to me, like being able to take time to shop around for car and health insurance instead of frantically choosing the first one I could find. Cleaning up my internal and external world went hand in hand. I threw out clothes, shoes, and books I had been lugging around forever.

A few weeks after I moved into my new place, I went into the closet to look for something. I noticed a cardboard box. It was taped shut, still unopened from my transatlantic move. I must have glanced at it dozens of times, but this time something made me want to open it. It was full of musty letters. I pulled everything out of the box and let myself drift into the past. There were stacks of letters from my college boyfriend Michael, my grades from Duke University, and letters from my college roommate Karen while I was doing a semester in Moscow. There were letters from men all over the world: an expatriate living in Tokyo who seemed to have exiled himself to Japan much as I had to Russia, an Italian whom I met on a plane en route to London—soulful, imploring letters from men I could barely remember, from would-be suitors whom I
had kept at arm’s length. Overlapping loves, none of whom I really gave myself to.

I read them all, scanning each letter for scraps, evidence about who I was, scouring each line for another clue about myself. If I kept reading, I thought, maybe I’d come into focus. Who was this girl who ran away to Russia at twenty, who decided to throw her lot in with a country considered the enemy by her homeland, who felt so ill at ease in her own skin that only by going to what felt like another planet could she temporarily dull her discomfort?

I reread the yellowed newspaper clippings about the divided-spouse cases like mine. They described the tragedy of Americans married to Soviets who were barred from leaving the country. It read like ancient history. It made me feel like a fraud. I wondered if I was ever really in that marriage. I liked the high drama of two superpowers being involved in my life; it made me feel fleetingly important, but it didn’t seem real. Who was I? A cruel and careless lover, as described in some of Michael’s letters, or the passionate, warm, rare woman he wrote about in others? Was I the wise, philosophical friend my roommate wrote of, always at peace and self-assured on a journey of discovery to Russia? Or was I a troubled girl running as far away as possible from a family torn apart by cancer and bitterness? Was I running away from my pain or was I chasing adventure? I looked through the dusty, handwritten, scribbled lines for evidence of me. I stared hard at the photos of this girl sitting alone on the Great Wall of China, shivering in the snow in Red Square, and floating in the Dead Sea.

I was a girl who had used the chaotic and painful experiences from her own home to understand an enemy nation eight thousand miles away. I was a woman in the middle of her own personal struggle who still got through college and built a foundation for an
extraordinary life. I was a woman who, no matter how many relationships she botched up, still had enough hope to try again. I was the cruel girlfriend and the loving and compassionate one. I was wise and philosophical, and I was a lost soul. I was merely human.

I couldn’t repack the box. I left the letters and photos scattered on the table. Let them breathe for a while, I thought. Let these old wounds get some air. To heal.

Dunkin’ Donuts

W
hen I was fifteen, I got a job at Dunkin’ Donuts. I served coffee to the local police force and assorted strays who would hang out at the Formica counter. I was a flirtatious teenager with attitude. I loved all the attention that my short pink-and-white uniform helped attract, even if it was just from a bunch of cops and construction workers.

My best friends at work were Lois and her mother, Lorraine. They had been working behind that counter for years, first to help Lois’s son through college, and then to get him through law school. Lois was in her forties, although a hard life and lots of cigarettes seemed to have added a decade to her face. Lorraine was in her sixties and could have passed for eighty. They were tough, chainsmoking women who cussed and swore and acted as though they had little use for anyone, especially anyone male. But they were endlessly kind and mothering to me. Lorraine, her face hardly visible
under a large colony of warts, barked and snarled at the customers as she shuffled up and down the counter, dragging her lame foot. They were terrified of her, but she always spoke gently to me. Sometimes Lois would work double shifts because Lorraine wasn’t well. The sight of Lois’s nicotine-stained fingers tugged at me. I knew her pack of Kool cigarettes helped keep her awake through the overnight shift covering for Lorraine, but I worried about her health.

I loved the job. I gave great service, usually with a large dose of sarcasm. If anyone bugged me, anything might end up in their coffee. Lorraine and Lois had taught me how to handle the public. I loved the paycheck too, and it usually disappeared fast at the mall, where I went with my girlfriends to buy jeans, halter tops, and purple mascara, the kind of necessities that adolescent girls craved in the seventies. I looked forward to my afternoon shifts at Dunkin’ Donuts. Above all, it was a way to get out of my house. My father was dying of cancer and my parents spent so much energy fighting each other that there seemed to be little left to battle the disease. It wasn’t talked about. Confusion, instability, and pain hung silently in the air, and I could feel it permeating my body whenever I walked through our front door. The bank was in the process of foreclosing on our house, giving some solidity to the amorphous sense of doom. Dunkin’ Donuts felt like a refuge.

I remember staring out the window, imagining myself coming back someday to this small town as a big celebrity, pulling up into the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot in a fancy car and being somebody famous instead of the girl behind the counter pouring coffee.

One day while I was at work after school, a cute guy came in. He wasn’t some loser, like the usual blue-collar type I flirted with casually. He had long hair, looked earthy, and was in his thirties. He drove a van. We talked about what I was reading in my high school
honors English class as he had a glazed doughnut and a cup of decaf. He started coming by occasionally. I started watching for his van to pull into the parking lot.

One day he asked if I wanted to go for a drive with him after work. I was thrilled at the invitation. I could not believe such a cool older guy would have any interest in me. Even Lois, who didn’t trust any male, thought he seemed a step above the usual clientele. I punched my card in the time clock, put a sweater over my waitress uniform, and hopped into his van with him. We drove awhile and talked. I felt grown-up just being in a guy’s car. He headed to the woods near the university and asked if I smoked dope. “Sure, I’ve been smoking since my freshman year,” I said. He drove to the middle of nowhere and stopped the van.

“Let’s go back here and have a beer,” he said, steering me toward the back of the van where there was a small table and a bed.

“Do you live in here?” I asked.

He didn’t answer; instead he started kissing me and touching my breasts through my pink uniform. I was surprised and a little nervous, but I liked the attention. I didn’t stop him.

He unzipped my dress and pulled it up over my head. I started getting scared. Before I knew what was happening, he was pulling down my underpants. I didn’t know what to do so I lay there, paralyzed, holding my breath.

I felt something hard and strange pushing at me, something alien. I had never even seen a penis before, having had only sisters. The texture of his pubic hair against my thigh frightened me. It came as a shock to me that a penis even came with pubic hair.

“What are you doing?” I asked him, trying to pull away.

“I’m balling you.”

I was more offended somehow by the choice of word—it seemed so crude and unromantic—than by the fact that I felt I couldn’t say
no. We were far from anyone. I didn’t believe I could stop him. I had willingly gone with him. I had allowed him to touch me. I was afraid to make him mad. I closed my eyes and went away, somewhere deep inside where nobody could hurt me, and let him do it to me. I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t know how to stand up for myself. I had never known my feelings mattered. I told myself it didn’t matter. I wasn’t there anymore.

He never came into Dunkin’ Donuts again. Lois asked me once whatever happened to the nice guy who used to hang around. “He seemed to like you so much,” she said. It left me deeply confused, though I was so young at the time I didn’t even understand my own confusion. I even wondered, with some hope, if he might want to be my boyfriend. But I never saw him again. I was ashamed to tell her I had somehow managed to frighten him away. I was too embarrassed to tell her or anyone else about what happened. So I said nothing. It took almost fifteen more years and more men I didn’t know how to say no to before I realized my first sexual encounter had been a rape.

One afternoon many years later, when I was in my late twenties, Lori and I were recounting our sexual escapades to each other. I told her that I had often felt as though I was not a willing participant in sex. It was always something I thought I had to do to earn love. I told her about that day in Dunkin’ Donuts. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, and it was only as I started telling her that I understood the weight of what I was saying.

It took another decade to understand that the place I had disappeared to that day in the woods was the same place I went whenever I was sent to a war zone as a correspondent. And I came to realize that it still happens; it is where I go when anyone gets too close to me. I disappear into that numb place where I can be safe and untouched. A very old part of me resides in that place, hunkered
down and buttressed by defenses. Locked away, this part of me taunts and torments, casting stones in the shadows of my mind. In the light, it gives me knowledge and strength. It is as though there is another person who emerges from that place. She is my original, true self. She went into hiding for a few decades because her first experiences with the world were frightening. But it feels safe to come out now.

The Blind Date

W
hen I arrived in California, at thirty-eight years old, I called everyone I knew and told them I was interviewing husbands. Lori offered her usual practical advice: “You need to treat this like a job,” she said. “Use all your sources. Be a reporter. Research their pasts. Be methodical. Slash and burn.”

I had a profile in my mind of the kind of man I wanted to meet: a Rhodes scholar, well-off, worldly, gorgeous, and a hunk, with a great sense of humor and lots of heart, and no ex-wives, children, or mother. But my screening process was still faulty enough that I’d also consider the guy pouring coffee at Starbucks. Anyone who showed any interest tapped into my hunger for love. It was a hunger that I was beginning to nourish on my own. Now that I was spending much of my days writing, the memories I retrieved and wrote about were my new companions as I walked the beach with
Max. But the quiet let me realize how much I wanted a human companion as well.

Friends introduced me to all types. I met a few on my own. I figured that regular dating would be a whole new experience compared with the madness of meeting men on the road. Things could go forward at a more normal pace. It didn’t have to happen all at once. I knew I would be in the same place the next week and even the next month. I could get to know someone in real time, instead of just meeting once or twice, then filling in the rest with my own fantasy. I could be more discerning. I had time to breathe in all the love I had in my life. I had my sisters, my friends, and Max. I finally felt comfortable with myself.