Girls in Trouble (27 page)

D
uring Sara’s first year in New York, everyone thought she was doing great. Her parents couldn’t brag enough about her. Jack hung a Columbia school banner in his office; Abby insisted on wearing a Columbia sweatshirt to their beach club. “Columbia!” they repeated, as if they couldn’t believe their good fortune.

Sometimes, Sara couldn’t believe it, either. For the first time in her life, everyone around her was as smart as she was—if not smarter. Every A was a badge of honor rather than shame. And she loved New York City. In SoHo a tourist asked about museums and she knew what to tell him. The waitresses at her local diner knew her by name.
I’m part of something,
she thought happily.
I belong here.

In New York, too, Sara began to date. She immediately got herself on the pill, and she tried her best to be careful about whom she slept with, and if nothing ever took, she told herself, well, she just needed to give herself time for that to happen, too. There was Doug, who grew quieter and quieter on their dates until, one night, he interrupted a story she was telling him with an exasperated sigh. “Do you always have to talk?” he asked. There was a history major named Paul who decided to go back to his old girlfriend. And just last week she had stopped seeing an artist named Robert because he had run his finger over her stretch marks in bed,
making her instantly freeze. She hadn’t known what to do, what to say, and then he had said, critically, “It’s hard to believe a skinny minnie like you was once a heifer.”

“Why do you even like that type?” one of her friends asked Sara about Robert, but Sara knew it wasn’t that she was drawn to a type as much as she was desperately trying to escape one. She thought that if she dated men as different from Danny as she could find, she would stop yearning for Danny, would stop seeing him in her dreams, whispering her name. It was like the habituation tinnitus patients sometimes did, using a new sound to blot out the old one, until the old one disappeared.

If only it would work. The day she stopped seeing Paul, she came back to her dorm and caught a scent of something so strong she had to brace her hand along the door. Patchouli oil. What Danny and she had both worn. What she didn’t wear anymore. Sara jammed her key into her lock and quickly went into her room, shutting the door.

She grabbed for the phone, calling home, feeling like a little kid needing approval. No matter what she told her parents now, they were enthusiastic. She could have said she bought canned tuna on sale at D’Agostino’s and her mother would kvell for hours about what a smart girl Sara was. How thrifty. How adult. “I stayed in all day,” she told them.

“Great! You got studying done!” Abby said. “Nothing wrong with that.”

Sara tugged on the phone cord. She swore she still smelled the patchouli. “Mom—” she blurted. “Does any mail ever come to the house for me?”

“I know what you’re talking about,” Abby said. “And if it had I would have thrown it right out. Those people were evil. And that boy was responsible for a lot of pain.”

“It wasn’t all his fault.”

“You’re doing all right now. He’s probably pumping gas. You wait. The right man will come along for you. But you get your degree first. Stop thinking about the past. There’s nothing you can do about it except make yourself more miserable.”

Sara bit the edge of a nail. “I know,” she said.

“Nothing but wonderful things from now on for our little girl,” her father told her.

“Well, it’s wonderful, but it’s hard—” she started to say, and he interrupted her.

“Just stop at
wonderful,”
he said sagely. “That’s all we want to hear.”

“You’re in a whole new place,” Abby told her. “And you’re a whole new person.”

Sara grew her hair longer, from her shoulders to just past her breasts, using colorful shoelaces or bandanas as headbands. She pierced her ears, and wore large complicated-looking earrings. While scouring the Village, she found a pair of hot-pink cowboy boots for just ten dollars and she wore them everywhere and with everything. In high school, she had worn mostly black or drab colors, but now she dressed in flamboyant gauze skirts and embroidered peasant tops, and when she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw the whole new person Abby had mentioned. Holding her skirts out wide, smiling at herself, she bowed with a flourish.

She told no one what had happened in her past. Not friends, not the occasional men she saw, and not the therapist she saw, a gently probing older woman named Kaysen. “If you bring things to the surface, they lose their power,” Kaysen told her, but Sara knew that that was what happened in an ideal world, in theory but not in practice, that sometimes bringing things to the surface gave them a wingspan you might never clip. “The way to get free of pain is to dive down into it. To acknowledge it,” Kaysen said. Kaysen had cropped grey hair and vivid blue eyes, and her earrings were always tiny, glittering studs, like the eyes of an animal. “Dive,” Kaysen advised, but Sara knew that to dive was dangerous until you knew you could swim.

The day Anne turned two, Sara bolted awake, blinking at the morning light. She didn’t have to glance at the Women in Science calendar she had on her wall to know what day today was, and how it would make her feel. The only recourse was to get busy, to crowd her day with so much activity time might speed up, and the day might pass.

Her legs swung out from the bed in an arc. Her hand reached for the
small white phone and she called one friend after another, but they were away or doing something with boyfriends or simply not at home, and in the end, she grabbed her jacket and went out herself. She wasn’t sure where she was going, so she ended up walking and walking, down to the nineties, past the fifties, not feeling jelly-legged until she reached Macy’s on Thirty-fourth, and then she went inside. Maybe she could treat herself to something, even if it was just a pair of tights in a striking color. Maybe afterward, she’d treat herself to a movie.

Macy’s had rearranged the store again. The red carpeting was now blue and there were flowers everywhere. A woman tried to spritz her with perfume and Sara waved her hand and went up the escalator. “Hosiery?” Sara asked a clerk, who pointed to the corner.

Sara walked past men’s shirts, past ladies’ shoes, and suddenly, she found herself in the baby section. Rows of little dresses, little corduroy pants in pastel colors. Stuffed plush bears and tigers. They all hit her like a shock. For a moment, she couldn’t move. Shoppers brushed past her. A salesgirl gave her a pointed, inquisitive look. “May I help you?” she said, and Sara politely shook her head no. Leave, she told herself, go outside to a movie, to a restaurant, see some friends, but instead, her hands were drawn to the clothing, her fingers found the fur on the stuffed toys and couldn’t stop patting it. Two years old, she thought. Her baby was two years old. Was Anne having a party with hats and a real cake? Were there relatives crowded round? What did Anne look like now, would Sara recognize her, and what did she
sound
like? What words was she forming:
truck, bunny, Mommy.
Her heart opened and shut like a door.

Sara felt like she was hypnotized. She grabbed the first dress on the rack, a blue gingham, and walked with it to the counter. She couldn’t make herself put it back. “What a darling dress!” the saleswoman chirped and rang up the dress. “Gift wrap?” she asked, and when Sara just stood there, the salesgirl tenderly folded the dress into a box and wrapped it. As soon as she reached for the gift, Sara’s hands started shaking.

She walked away, tightening her grip. The bag swung, so big and cumbersome it knocked against her legs. /
didn’t forget you,
Sara thought. /
never forgot.

By the time she got home, she knew she was being stupid. What had
she been thinking? What was she going to do with the dress? She had no money to hire a detective, and even if she did, she knew no one would give Anne to her. She had no job yet. And she had broken the law. She sat, staring at the package. Throw that thing out, Abby would tell her. Now, none of that, Jack would say. Instead, she tucked it back into her closet, behind her winter boots. Then she grabbed her things and went out to a movie.

I’ll never do that again,
she told herself, but she couldn’t seem to help it. On Anne’s third birthday, she reminded herself that she wasn’t going to do anything foolish again. Remember how blue she had felt coming home with a gift she’d never be able to give Anne? She planned out her day, all activities that would place her nowhere near a store: dates with friends, studying, and then, on her way to a movie, she passed a store window filled with toys and she felt pulled to go in, and by the time she came out, she had another wrapped gift for her daughter, a blue velvet teddy bear with a pink ribbon around its neck.

It became a habit, a private joke that wasn’t funny. For Anne’s fourth birthday, she bought her a paint set.
Four years old,
she thought. What four-year-old would go to her now? She had read once that babies could pick out their mothers from a crowded room just by their scent, but Anne was no baby anymore. She could pass her daughter on the street and they would be strangers.

She always felt the same desperation, the same grief. How was she better than the case studies she read about in her psychology classes? The girls who cut themselves to release the pressure they felt building up inside of them, the girls who starved and vomited to have some control? She wouldn’t do this anymore. She couldn’t. And if she couldn’t throw Anne’s gifts out, she could at least keep them out of sight in her closet.

She finished school, and started grad school, still at Columbia. Sara was in her second year, majoring in clinical psychology, when she started interning as a counselor, sharing a tiny office in the same building as Kaysen, her therapist. Students got the people who couldn’t afford the real therapists, who came in off the street and paid sliding scale. A lot of the people came once and that was it, so Sara had no idea whom she helped and whom she
didn’t, though she liked to imagine people didn’t come back because she had taken away some of their pain for them, because she was good at her job. Her hair reached to the middle of her back now, and for work, she tied it in a knot. She traded in her big earrings for small studs, polished her shoes so they gleamed, and bought herself a few good dresses. It didn’t matter if the clothes weren’t really her, it was even better that they weren’t because it wasn’t good for patients to know too much about you, to get too invested or distracted. Therapy was all about them, not you.

“You’ve got it all together, don’t you,” one patient accused, looking at Sara up and down. “Bet you never even get a run in your hose, do you?”

Sara smiled serenely. “Why would you think that?” she asked.

Sometimes, though, it was harder than she had thought, listening to peoples’ problems, keeping her distance. “Don’t get involved,” Kaysen told her. But how could you help it? Yesterday, a teenage boy had burst into tears because his girlfriend had left him, and it was all Sara could do not to scoot over to him and put her arms around him in comfort. The day before a woman came in terrified because she had just had a biopsy and was afraid it was terminal. Her pain was so palpable, Sara started to hug her own body, until she caught sight of the woman watching her, alarmed, and then Sara put her hands casually to rest on her knees, and the woman relaxed.

In any case, people really didn’t want to be told what to do. Sara’s job had more to do with what she didn’t say, with how she listened or asked questions that would make clients keep talking. Half the time what was the most effective was simply mirroring back what people said to her, making them feel they had been heard, that their sorrow had been seen and validated, if not solved. “You’ll make a fine therapist,” Kaysen assured Sara.

One day, a woman named Nicole came in. It was Sara’s last appointment of the day.

Nicole couldn’t have been much older than Sara, and she was in jeans and a white sweater, her blond hair cropped like a boy’s, and the first thing Sara noticed were her hands, the nails bitten raw. Boyfriend, Sara thought. Parental problem. She liked to guess, to see if her instincts were sharp. As soon as Nicole sat down, in the straight-backed chair instead of the comfortable
one, Sara made a note on her pad. She waited to see if Nicole would make eye contact with her, and then, staring into her lap, Nicole sobbed.

Sara stayed calm, serene. “Tell me how I can help,” she said.

“My baby died,” wept Nicole, and Sara felt a sudden fissure inside of her, like a crack in thin ice. She sat up straighter.

Nicole talked nonstop for nearly the whole session, about how beautiful her baby girl Clare had been, how everyone said so, how she couldn’t walk down the street without people stopping in admiration. She talked about how she and her husband used to stay up nights just watching Clare sleep, and on one night, when they hadn’t, Clare had died of SIDS. Nicole stopped talking for a moment. She tilted her head as if she were listening to something. “I see her everywhere,” Nicole said. “Can you imagine what that’s like?”

Sara was beside herself, but she fought to look calm. She willed her voice to be measured, in control. “Tell me how you’re handling this,” she said. She asked about Nicole’s support systems, she recommended a group of other mothers who had lost children. She talked about grief being a roller coaster, and then the session was over.

“I can’t forgive myself,” Nicole said, balling Kleenex into tiny fists on her lap. “I see her! I keep seeing her!”

“You didn’t cause this. No one did. Sometimes things just happen.” Something flickered along the wall and Sara glanced over. There, just for a second, Sara saw the ghost baby, too, in the corner, stretching, starting to stand. Startled, Sara blinked and the baby disappeared. “It’s not your fault,” she repeated.

Nicole didn’t take her eyes from Sara. Drawing in a breath, she stood heavily and then noisily blew her nose. “You believe that, don’t you?” Nicole said in wonder.

“I do.”

Nicole swiped at her eyes and took in another deep, measured breath. “Then thank you,” she said, swiping at her eyes. “This helped. I think it helped.”