Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) (10 page)

I was still corresponding a few times a week, almost constantly, with Oliver. A few months in, our letters became affectionate. He told me I seemed mature for my age (complete teenage-girl bait) and wished he could say good night in person. He called me in mid-­January. I liked his runaway cackle, which made me feel like a genius when I set it off. I liked that he knew about cool bands like Operation Ivy and had been to way more shows than I had. I liked that he was opinionated and strong-willed and not afraid to disagree with me.

A week before my fifteenth birthday, he sent me a note wishing me a “Bappy Pirthday,” and saying he enjoyed talking to me very much. It was rendered in a pig-Latin-type language; deciphering it only added to the intrigue. He also mentioned that he'd pled guilty to possession with intent to deliver psilocybin, stemming from an incident in which he'd received hallucinogenic mushrooms in the mail. I took this in stride, the daughter of the father who often referenced his 120 acid trips.

Amazingly, I got into the private school of my choice in Pennsylvania. Mom spent several weeks looking through the papers. I was in an agony of anticipation, my whole life hanging in the balance. My
dad had still mostly disappeared from the picture, but I sent him a note with an update. I received a newsy postcard from him in mid-February. “Pleasantly surprised to get your card. Glad to hear about George School + that you're happy. And thanks for the warning that they might contact me. Did you get the CD's I was concerned I didn't pack them well enough. Let me know please. Love, Dad.”

Another card from him on March 1 began, “Just wondered if you got my card, figured this would be a good way to find out.” I had not answered his card in the ensuing two weeks. He wanted an answer immediately and had included a postcard with a box for “yes” and a box for “no,” so I could check one and send it back to him. I took the rest of the card's content at face value. “I am doing well, I started physical therapy 3x a week for 3 weeks today. I have been doing ­psycho-therapy twice a week for a couple months. I feel better. How are you? And school doing? Have you decided where your going yet? My court case is finally coming up this month, 4 years since the fact. I have my fingers crossed. Hope to see you soon. Love to Sue + the family. John.”

I checked the box for “yes” and sent the card back, happy he was suddenly keen to be in touch with me. I eagerly awaited his next letter. And waited, and waited.

Meanwhile, my relationship with Oliver grew more intense. As his letters inched toward romance, they also included musings on whether other people wished they could start over, and how he hoped I never felt as crumbly as he did. Even when he confessed to having made a “lame-ass” suicide attempt, it only drew me toward him. I often felt pretty crumbly myself, and I valued that he trusted me enough to confide in me. This was exactly the kind of
big
emotion I reveled in—the kind of help I would have offered my father if I'd been old enough to understand his struggles—not the trite bullshit of high school. It felt as if I were experiencing the grown-up life I was so hungry for, like Oliver's interest in me was a sign that I did have value, even if most of my classmates couldn't see it. Plus, Oliver could still be silly and
tender and obliquely flirtatious in a way I liked and could just barely handle, saying it was too bad I lived so far away—or he'd probably ask me out, although I might hate him if I met him or not like the way he looked—and encouraging me to find something, anything, of value. Walking the halls with his voice in my head, I was linked by his stories to this bigger, smarter, more grown-up reality. Once there, no one would call me a dyke, or stab me with hateful looks, or distrust me because I read books for fun or liked music that sounded like noise to them. Once there, I would be the perfect, fantasy version of myself. Maybe I would even be happy. At least I'd be living.

M
om had no choice but to tell me that we couldn't afford the private school's tuition. I ran upstairs, slammed the door, threw myself down on my bed, and sobbed. I was exhausted and heartbroken after two years of applications and soaring hopes and dashed dreams and dragging myself through long days at a place that hated me as much as I hated it.

A smattering of college brochures had trickled in, but I hadn't paid attention, as I was so fixated on my prep school dreams. Mom happened to see one that looked promising: a brochure for an early college in the Berkshires called Simon's Rock. I read it. If I got accepted, I would be allowed to
drop out of high school
after my sophomore year and begin taking college courses the next fall. Mom told me that she'd always planned to help me attend college, and while we couldn't afford private high school with its more limited financial aid, if I got accepted to Simon's Rock with a scholarship, she would find a way for me to go. I had never wanted anything so much in my entire life, and I don't think I will ever want anything that much again.

Even the application was magical. They asked us to write an essay on Plato's “Allegory of the Cave.” Plato! Here was something extraordinary. I sent off my paperwork and waited for Simon's Rock to set me free and let my real life begin.

It wasn't long before I got a letter inviting me to an interview and introductory day at the school. Mom agreed to drive me down. I was ecstatic, and she was excited on my behalf. Finally, here was a perfect solution. Not only would it free me from the confines of Lincoln, it would challenge me intellectually, which Mom was determined to see happen if she could.

On the appointed day, we drove down to the campus in Western Massachusetts, almost into New York state. We turned down Alford Road, drove a few miles, crested a hill, and descended into a slight valley. On the left was a big red barn, which was the school's art center. On the right a little gravel road with a small, tasteful sign that read
SIMON'S ROCK COLLEGE OF BARD
. As we drove onto campus, we passed a guard shack on the left and came upon a cluster of low buildings with clean modern lines and breezeways. I was nervous, worried about making the right impression, not just with the administrators, whom I wanted to think I was intelligent, but also with the other students, whom I wanted to think I was cool.

As I stepped out of the car, I saw a thin, pale boy with bright green dreadlocks. Both of us were too shy to smile, but we exchanged the kind of small nod that acknowledged our kinship. There wasn't a redneck or a jock or a bully in sight. I loved it all. At the end of the day, Mom and I were both high on the place, its pretty peacefulness, its broad-minded community and high-minded academic ideals. But first I had to get in.

If I had checked the mail with reverence before, now it was the only moment in my day that actually mattered. As soon as I walked in the door from school, I threw down my book bag and raced to the dining room table.

“How was your day?” Mom said from the kitchen.

“Fine,” I
said, sorting through the mail. Nothing.

If no one was home, I ran the grassy path to the mailbox, picturing the letter with the school's seal waiting for me in the wooden mailbox. Nothing.

One day when I walked in, Mom watched me carefully from behind the counter.

“What?” I said.

“You got a letter from Simon's Rock,” she said.

“Really?” I said. “What did it say?”

“I didn't open it,” she said. “It's addressed to you.”

I held the envelope in my hand, my finger under the flap, and paused. She cradled the tomato she was slicing and smiled at me. I opened the envelope, took out the paper, and read:

“Dear Sarah, we are pleased to offer you . . .”

I looked at Mom, stunned, overjoyed, terrified, everything all at once.

“I got in,” I said.

“You did?” she said. “That's great, Sarah. Congratulations.”

I could hear everything in her voice that I, too, felt—the relief at having survived these two awful years, the joy at this wonderful place we had found that seemed just perfect for me, and the uncertainty at exactly what that would mean.

M
y dad had continued to be silent that spring, but he sent me a letter in early June that opened: “I had a dream about you last nite + when I woke up it was as if I had been with you. It was nice. It made me wonder how you were doing? Did you receive my books? What if anything you think of them? Enclosed is a card to let me know. I always wanted to get a James Dean card in the mail.” For the first time in a year, he talked about coming to visit, in his usual specific but elusive way: “I have a round trip to Brunswick ticket good until June 19th, I've been waiting til I accumulate some money but that might not happen, I'm
going to see if they'll extend the time on it . . . Whot da ya think?” He also mentioned that Morrissey was playing at Great Woods that summer. “Does that still hold any interest for you? Let me know. Love, John. Hello to everybody.”

I dutifully sent off the James Dean postcard the next week, my text written in the neurotically neat all caps I had adopted after briefly mimicking my dad's script, written in a spiral, to be arty. I didn't mention Simon's Rock, but told him school was out June 13 and, yes, I was going to see Morrissey. “I'll call if I'm around in Boston. Maybe we could see each other.”

That June, Oliver's letters yo-yoed between affectionate declarations of how much he liked me and increasing blackness—but always accompanied by intelligence and humor. His letters were missives from somewhere important. And he continued to talk to me in an adult way I craved about love and sex, mentioning his own experiences, and wondering if I had experienced either, and if I could understand how much they changed things. I hadn't and couldn't, but I wanted to know.

I never questioned why a twenty-two-year-old man would want to take time out of the fabulous, busy experience I so aspired to in order to talk to a fifteen-year-old girl. But the scenario was perfect for my dramatic, dreamy sensibilities. Since we were separated by age and distance, I didn't have to worry about the details of fooling around or losing my virginity. It was much easier to be thrilled when he confessed secrets about his troubled romantic life, which he'd never told anyone else, or joked about us moving to the woods and living there, and how I'd hire him as my maid—or marry him—when I was rich.

I received a letter in which he declared his love with all of his usual silliness and charm. I was ecstatic, swept up in what felt like my first love. Almost every day that week he sent me a letter, some hinting that he might have violent tendencies—or at least fantasies—because of inadequacies he felt, but mostly lovely insinuations of the feelings we didn't dare speak. We talked on the phone for hours, me going on excitedly about my plans for school that fall. He was no longer taking
classes and had yet to earn his degree, but I still thought of him as a college student and was excited to join his world. Even though I was only fifteen, I had leapt ahead and was going to meet him where he was.

I was happier than I'd been in years, maybe ever. And then, I began to hear less from Oliver that July. It was a familiar feeling, as if the tide of his attention and affection was suddenly going out without any warning or explanation. I could only assume what I always did with my dad: if there was no specific reason, the fault must be mine.

At least I had Simon's Rock. I'd gotten a summer job at the one restaurant in our village, Anchor Inn, which opened for the season on Memorial Day and was packed with tourists through Columbus Day. I was obsessed with earning enough money to ensure nothing would prevent me from going to Simon's Rock and worked as many shifts as I could. As my mom had explained to me from the start, while boarding school was not financially viable for high school, they were committed to helping me attend college. As long as I took on the maximum loans, and a work-study job, and Mom took on a loan, too, it was going to be possible. Even as entitled and emotionally farsighted as I could be at fifteen, I knew enough to be extremely grateful.

As I counted down my final shifts at the Anchor Inn in late August and began packing up my belongings in preparation for my attendance at Simon's Rock's “Writing and Thinking Workshop” for all incoming freshmen, I received a two-line letter from Oliver: He was a lost cause. I should forget about him.

I shook. I cried. I sent him impassioned pleas, telling him that he was no loser, that he was special, that I loved him, and so there was hope; there was hope as long as we had each other. He didn't write back. That was it. He was gone. I was devastated. The problem must be me, just like I'd always known it to be.

Suddenly, after I had waited and waited for what felt like forever, the summer was over, and it was time for me to leave home. I dyed my hair purple, determined to make an impression from the first moment I arrived. I woke up at six in the morning on the day of my departure,
covered my freckles as best as I could, carefully painted on my black eye makeup, and loaded the last of my possessions into Mom and Craig's Toyota Tercel hatchback. Mom had to work that day, and while Andrew was a cheerful, obedient kid who never caused trouble, he was only six and couldn't be left home alone, which meant Craig was driving me the six and a half hours down to school.

I stood in the living room as Craig took the last of my bags out to the car, giving Mom and me a final moment of farewell. I looked at Mom. My eyes filled up.

“Let me get a picture,” she said.

She'd always taken a picture of me on the first day of school, and here it was, the last time she would ever do so. My eyes brimmed over. I managed a cloudy smile, my arms crossed over my chest. I hugged Mom good-bye, feeling the grief of rootlessness, as if I no longer had a home, wanting to run back up to my childhood room and never leave. But I knew I had to go, and that I was incredibly lucky Mom was letting me do so under such extraordinary circumstances at such a young age. It was as if she'd seen how stuck I was and, instead of forcing me to stay small out of fear, or showing the kind of love that diminishes a person just to keep her close, she'd handed me the reins to my life along with a challenge: if I thought I was so smart, which she fully believed I was, then I should prove it, read some books, wrestle over their meaning with people who were smarter than I was, put something of real value on the line in my life.