Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) (24 page)

My father had begun jotting down possible outings he might take me on, or questions he wanted to ask me: everything from details about how I was writing my novel, to how I felt about Scott's absence, to what MySpace was and how it worked. One afternoon while we were eating in the food court at Faneuil Hall, my father pulled out his little notebook. I picked at the cookie we were sharing. He looked up, looked down at his writing, then looked up again, smiled shyly at me. “I wrote, ‘Tell Sarah she has a great laugh,' ” he said.

Moments like these were impossibly sweet for me. Even just the fact that he was proving himself to be a reliable companion every other week was a revelation; the fact that he might actually love me and enjoy my company was nothing short of a dream come true. I began to trust him, and I started confiding in him, which involved a lot of heartbreak and anxiety, especially about my writing. Because my father didn't drink and saw booze as an unhealthy form of suppression, I didn't mention my own drinking, which I knew was excessive. I still wanted to be seen as perfect, and I definitely wasn't ready for anyone to suggest I should stop.

We took a day trip on a boat that traversed the city's islands with a picnic of clam chowder from Faneuil Hall. We cruised Boston Harbor on a windjammer. He even convinced me to get up early on a Sunday morning to attend a church service on Newbury Street because it had exquisite music by a live orchestra.

My father was deeply curious, and our excursions were often a part of his attempts to learn and make sense of, well, everything. On a beautiful autumn day, we met in Central Square, got picnic supplies at the natural foods co-op, and walked over to Mt. Auburn Cemetery, where we sat together amid the white birches and marble stones, which were stark against the glowing orange and crimson leaves.

Then he decided we should compare the legendary Mt. Auburn with the equally esteemed cemetery in my own neighborhood, Forest Hills. I mentioned that Anne Sexton was buried there, and he checked out a library book on the poet.

When he rang my bell on the morning of our field trip, I went downstairs to let him in, pausing to hug him, and led him upstairs to my apartment. As I gave him a tour, he looked around in wonder. I was twenty-six, and I shared a two-story apartment with a spacious living room and kitchen, and an extra front room/office/make-out room. My dad was fifty-six, and he lived in one small room in a boardinghouse with a bathroom down the hall.

He was halfway across the warped kitchen floor when he stopped, transfixed by the view of treetops and sky straight ahead. He put both hands out as if to steady himself on a surfboard, bent his knees slightly as if testing the give.

“Far out,” he said. “I feel like I'm floating in the sky.”

It was unclear whether he was having an actual acid flashback or not, but his enthusiasm was infectious. I laughed then, and on the many occasions after that when I walked into the kitchen and pictured him there caught up in his bliss.

We went to my local co-op and got a picnic and set out for the graveyard. As we walked, my dad drifted into a reverie about Anne
Sexton, speaking as if he had a crush on her, never mind that she'd been dead by her own hand for three decades by then.

“She was just incredible,” he said. “Did you know she had a band? She started it with some of her students when she was teaching. They wrote songs, and she read her poems over the music. I would love to find a recording, just to hear what it was like. She was so angry, so unhappy, but so beautiful, too.”

When we reached her grave, where she was buried with her husband's family, we saw that previous devotees had left a dozen small koans, stacked stones with a beautiful simplicity that moved me. We built one of our own. Then my father surprised me. He reached into the pocket of his cargo pants and pulled out his current notebook.

“I'd like to read a piece of one of her poems I wrote down,” he said.

I smiled at him, loving that he'd been inspired to make this gesture of respect. My friends and I, who made such a show of devotion to the bands and writers we loved, would have felt embarrassed to do something so sincere. His voice still had the lazy inflection of the Trenton hoodlum he'd been, but it was weathered by the decades in which he'd longed to be a poet, and when poetry had eluded him, he'd turned himself toward the puzzle of enlightenment instead. As we walked between graves and stands of ancient trees, I felt closer to him than I could ever remember having been. At the same time, I was incredibly proud of the independence I'd forged at such a great cost and was wary of a father figure, especially one who had essentially abandoned me for the first twenty-five years of my life. I dared a sideways glance at him and hoped we would figure it out.

I
was at once heartbroken and on overdrive. I longed for Scott, and yet I was determined to suck every bit of marrow out of the life for which I'd sacrificed him in order to find myself. The unbending deadlines of freelance journalism gave me a convenient place to hide out when my feelings overwhelmed me.

Mary and I were out at my favorite local club, the Middle East, when she ran into one of the
Globe
's staff music writers, Steve Morse, whom she knew from working nights at the
Globe
's website. He stopped to chat. I told him I was a regular freelancer for the
Globe
and wanted to start writing about music. He was gracious and gave me an entrée to do my first CD review for the paper.

I loved covering music, but my central obsession was always my own writing. I felt guilty, that I never got enough done. I was sure I was falling behind. More than anything, I wanted to distinguish myself, to create a novel that spoke to all of the musicians and writers and artistic-minded friends I felt had literally kept me alive.

I usually had three or four articles going at a time, plus pitches for more work, and I always wrote up until the exact last minute before it was time to go meet my dad or anyone else. The next thing I knew, I was fifteen minutes late and still had to put on face powder. Then I was twenty minutes late and at the mercy of the bus or train.

I arrived, out of breath, sweating, and found my dad pacing in a slow diagonal, holding a plastic shopping bag with whatever he'd brought that day—free real estate listings or health food circulars that had caught his eye, a newspaper piece I'd written, a photocopied article about the film we were going to see. I hated being late, and I was cranky in that guilty way. His face opened up in an expectant smile. Suddenly, as if I were once again the moody teenager he'd barely known, I wanted to crush him.

“Did you have to wait long for the train?” he asked.

“No, I'm on deadline,” I said. “I shouldn't even be here.”

“Oh,” he said, sounding hurt. “Are you working on a story for the
Globe
?”

“I'm always working on a story for the
Globe.
”

He stood there smiling, not provoked at all, and it was hard for me to stay mad. He never got upset with me for being late, and he was never anything but interested in everything that was going on in my life, even when I claimed it made me too busy for him.

One night, when I rolled up at seven fifteen, out of breath, my dad was outside, beaming.

“Sorry I'm late,” I said, already defensive.

“We've got plenty of time,” he said. “The movie doesn't start until seven thirty.”

“But you said—”

“I said seven o'clock, so you'd be here early.”

I stopped short, shocked and indignant. And then I laughed. His solution was so elegant, and there was no judgment in his tone. Without having to scold me or complain about my tardiness, which only would have set me off, he'd gotten me there early for the film.

If I had previously worried that he might suddenly try to exert a father's discipline or control over me, I soon relaxed and began to adjust to the father he really was, not the fantasy I'd created in his absence. It would have been hard to see him as a traditional father anyhow. When we grew close enough to talk about personal topics, including my breakup with Scott, his advice was unlike any I'd ever heard of a dad giving his daughter.

“I think you should take a lot of lovers,” he said.

I didn't respond, or even look at him, embarrassed to find myself blushing, even though I prided myself on being able to talk tough with my male friends.

“The younger the better,” he continued. “That way you can figure out what you want and don't want.”

I nodded my head instinctively. On a purely intellectual level, it made perfect sense, and it was basically what I'd been doing in the wake of my breakup.

“I mean you have to be responsible. You have to take responsibility for your relationships. Otherwise you're just an asshole.”

I laughed. Not only at his frank way of speaking, but at the idea that I'd ever be such a master of romance. I could take a lot of lovers, sure, but I was terrified that each and every one of them was going to abandon me. And that insecurity was fueled by obsessiveness, even about men I didn't really like enough to want to stay. I was fucked up. I knew that. And my dad knew it. But we weren't quite ready to look at how I'd gotten that way or what could be done about it.

As my dad and I warmed to each other, he often complimented me, even about things that weren't obviously positive. I discussed the breakup with my dad, saying that if we could just find a way to both make ourselves happy in the same place, then we'd be able to enjoy all of our love and mutual attraction.

“A lot of people would have given up by now,” my dad said. “They'd already have moved on to multiple other relationships that would have just re-created the same problems they had in their first
relationship that didn't work out. But not you. You're really sticking to it, and wrestling with it, and you're determined to figure out what went wrong and how to learn something from it.”

I smiled shyly at my dad as he spoke. I did want to discover something through what had happened with Scott. Now that I was over my fixation with the other man I'd kissed, I was deeply ashamed of how I'd behaved and how much it had hurt Scott. I wanted to get to a place where I knew myself better, was taking more responsibility for my life, and not causing so much collateral damage. I was convinced if I was honest and courageous about who I was and what I wanted, Scott would forgive me.

I wrote him an impassioned love letter, telling him that he was the only man for me, and letting him know that I would be there on the other side of whatever he was going through. And then I waited for his reply. And waited.

He e-mailed me a few times in January and left me a message on my birthday, but he never mentioned my letter, and I was too afraid to ask. In February, my phone rang at eleven in the morning. It was Scott. Although it was eight o'clock in Portland, he was still up, and very drunk. He said it was a beautiful letter, he still loved me, he still wanted to be with me, but he had another girlfriend. I chose to focus on everything before the “but.”

The night after I had this conversation with Scott, I went to a show downstairs at the Middle East. I'd been trying to at least distract myself with other guys in the wake of Scott's return to Portland, even if my heart still belonged to my first true love, but I'd yet to meet anyone who'd even begun to compare to his charm and intelligence. That night, I was introduced to Anthony, a tall, lanky young man with a thicket of dark curls and chestnut eyes. As soon as we met, we were instantly flirting. Our wits easily dovetailed, and his presence numbed out the painful memory of Scott's call.

The next time I saw him, he told me he needed a place to live, and I hooked him up with some friends whose house was my main hang out
in Jamaica Plain, giving me easy access to him. When he brought me up to see his room a few weeks later, he surprised me. He was funnier and smarter than I'd anticipated, and I hadn't expected him to be so perceptive about the kinds of tiny nuances I noticed but most others didn't. When we were alone together, he turned to look at me. Laughing, he tugged his earlobes.

“What's up?” he said.

Only then did I realize he was mimicking me—I was tugging my own earlobes. I quickly stopped, half-embarrassed, half-flattered he'd been watching me so closely.

“It's something I do when I'm nervous,” I said, demonstrating.

“Are you nervous now?” he said, his voice devilish as he yanked his ears again, and then he kissed me, hard. We ended up talking and kissing until dawn.

A week later there was a big party at Anthony's house. I walked into the kitchen and the whole room erupted into a chorus of “Duchess.” Everyone in that group of friends had a nickname, and mine was “Que Sarah, Duchess of Rock,” soon shortened to “the Duchess,” which, of course, I loved. The room was already noisy, and smoky, and full of people and laughter and music. He grinned at me, and I felt the promise of an imminent rendezvous. After a few beers, I made my way to his room. He turned, pouch of tobacco in hand, and kissed me. It was still new and exciting, and yet, I knew his body a little bit now, and I felt entitled to lean into him and put my hands in his thick, dark hair.

We fell onto his bed. His pleasure, when I got him off, made me happy, made me feel powerful and sexy. He pushed me back and tugged down my jeans and underwear.

“I'm reciprocating,” he said, laughing.

He put his lips on me with gentle attention. It felt as if his mouth had been made for this. A sigh escaped me like a silk scarf fluttering. When I came, in only a minute, maybe two, it was fast and hard, like I had seen it be for boys. When he pulled away, I realized my shoes were still on. I lay there for a delicious moment before I stood and dressed.
His room was neat and cozy, like the cabin of a ship, and I didn't want to leave. He smoked a cigarette, sitting on the edge of his bed. I closed my eyes and drifted.