Let's Take the Long Way Home (11 page)

For reasons that probably have to do with temperament and heritage both, I had spent a lifetime cultivating a little too much independence. Absurd or commendable, a lot of this behavior was unnecessarily severe. I’d hitchhiked long distances alone in my twenties; for years I’d swum the Wellfleet ponds after Labor Day, when they were deserted, until an early autumn thunderstorm convinced me this was a bad idea. Such feats, I privately held, were heroic in correlation to the amount of suffering invoked. Even after I stopped drinking, I never wanted my solitude to limit my range, so I signed up for work assignments that took me to Wyoming or London or anywhere I hadn’t been—gritting my teeth at the difficulty of such pursuits, plowing ahead because I thought I should be willing to bear the pain and isolation in order to glean the adventure.

But as much as I complained about my solitude, I also required it. I put a high price on my freedom from obligation, of having to report to no one. My sister, contentedly married a thousand miles away, laughed whenever I expressed the fantasy of holding out to find the right man to marry. “I don’t know, Caldwell,” she would say, resorting to our old adolescent habit of using surnames for each other. “I don’t think you could do it. You’d need a pretty long leash.”

The truth was that I had always fled. The men I didn’t marry; the relationships I had walked away from or only halfheartedly engaged in—there were always well-lit exits, according to building code, in every edifice I helped create. “Let’s face it,” a male friend, single and in his forties, said to me one day about our unpartnered status. “Neither one of us got here without a lot of fancy footwork.” I laughed at the time, but I was unsettled by how astute the comment was, and more obvious to him than to me.

AFTER THE CAB HAD
dropped me at my apartment that winter night, I hugged the dog and called Caroline’s answering machine, to let her know I had made it. It was after eight p.m. and I didn’t really expect to talk with her. “I’m home, I’m all right,” I said. “Don’t bother picking up. I’m heading to the store—I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

Twenty minutes later, I was loading groceries into my old Volvo when an out-of-control driver came veering through the parking lot at high speed and plowed into the back of my car. It happened so fast that I later remembered only a blur of white movement, then flying through the air. The Volvo had taken a bullet for me: The impact of one car into another had sent me flying like a billiard ball. When I came to, I was on my hands and knees on the pavement, yards away from point of impact; I had blood spewing from my chin and I was cursing. A
group of people were standing around me. Somebody called 911; another disembodied voice claimed to recognize me, and gathered what was left of the spilled groceries to take to my house. When the EMTs arrived and strapped me to a backboard, I started arguing with them about cutting off my jeans and Lucchese boots. By the time I got to the hospital, I was giddy with adrenaline and telling jokes: that false pride of the trenches.

I was on the backboard for an hour waiting for an X-ray; by the time they released me, it was eleven p.m. My injuries were not serious—stitches in my chin, sprains and contusions but no broken bones—but I hollered in pain when I tried to put weight on my leg. Overwhelmed by more dire emergencies, the hospital staff gave me a cane and called me a cab. In the three hours I had been there, never once did it occur to me, with a phone four feet away from where I lay, to call Caroline or anyone else for help.

Or I should say that when it did occur to me, I dismissed it with the defensive sangfroid of crisis. It was Sunday night; I knew Morelli would be at Caroline’s, spending the night. I didn’t want to wake them, and I knew if I called they would feel duty-bound to come to the hospital. Pleased by my self-reliance, I half stumbled, half crawled up the stairs to my apartment.

But when I got inside, when I was in my living room at midnight, with Clementine nosing my bloodstained jeans, I broke down. I had phoned my parents back in
Texas, who were expecting word that my plane had arrived safely, and lied through my teeth. They were in their eighties, my dad was in the first stage of Alzheimer’s, and I saw no need to alarm them. Then all my derring-do collapsed and I dialed Caroline’s number. My voice broke when she answered. “I’m all right, I’m all right,” I kept saying, an insistent preface to the story so I wouldn’t scare her. We stayed on the phone until she had convinced me to find something to eat and get into bed.

My car, a ten-year-old Volvo, had been totaled. The next day, Caroline came to get me and we drove back to the store parking lot; she went inside the market to grab some essentials for me while I tried to start the car and get the registration. Ten minutes later, she came out to find me standing, glazed-eyed, near the place where I’d landed; there was a pool of dried blood on the asphalt. On the drive home she was unnervingly quiet, and finally she blurted out the reason. “I keep thinking that if I had just picked up the phone when you first called,” she said, “this never would have happened. Three minutes later, and you’d have been out of the path of that car.”

I knew this inner dialogue of self-blame; it was treacherous and unwinnable. Caroline was worried not just that she’d failed to intervene with the stupid calamities of fate, but that she was somehow responsible—that her isolationist tendencies had put me in harm’s way. This was the sort of mind-set we could both engage in, and so I postulated the opposite: If she
had
picked up, I
insisted, I might well have been just walking out of the store, and in the car’s direct line of fire.

For all the gritty education this incident provided, its one indelible moment, there long after the bruises were healed and the car replaced, was the one I had told Caroline about that afternoon: the thought that went through my mind when I was midair. The world appears with ferocious technicolor during crisis, and a decade later, I remember the visual arc of my body being airborne, my sight line about two feet higher than normal. But what I remember most was the territorial assault I felt, the indignation, while I was sailing through space.
How dare you
, the body and mind felt in furious accord.
I’m in the middle of a life here
. I was outraged because I had been working on this story line for years, and I knew it was not yet finished.

AFTER I HAD LIVED IN THE EAST FOR A DECADE
, long enough to winnow the realities from the dreams, I was driving down Brattle Street one winter night at the start of a storm, when the snow was surfing the currents of a soft wind, and I had the dissonant thought that I could grow old here—something I had never thought about anywhere before, and certainly not during a New England winter. But Cambridge had reached out to me from the beginning. I loved the ornery brick-lined sidewalks
and self-contained serenity that the town projected: all that formidable history bumping into pear blossoms and street musicians.

I had danced around the idea of owning property for years, usually as an alternate reality to wherever I was. I fantasized about a little piece of land in Truro, on the then desolate end of Cape Cod. I thought about a small house in Austin where I could spend winters, or a farmhouse outside the city with room for a couple of dogs. As the search had grown more realistic, I began looking at houses all over Greater Boston, exhausting myself with possibilities or mooning over properties I couldn’t afford. I was like a wolf circling its parameters, looking everywhere but the epicenter of my life.

The false starts probably mirrored my tendency toward flight and longing. Leave Texas, then miss it forever. Love your family from two thousand miles away. Refuse to marry, then spend your life complaining that you should have. The ingrained trait that my mother had called brooding had a free run when it came to where I imagined I belonged. I could explore alternate universes to my heart’s content within the world of geographical could-have-beens, where the endings were always kinder and the real estate cheaper. “I should have stayed in the Panhandle, and I’d be happily married to some rancher and have five or six kids,” I once announced to my therapist, who typically did not laugh out loud at such pronouncements. “I think the operative word here is ‘happily,’” he said, always
ready to scorch an illusion when he could. As a follow-up joke he sent me a map of the actual town of Happy, Texas, a little place of about seven hundred people south of Amarillo. I kept the map of Happy on my study wall for years, to remind me of the Elysian Fields we all envision.

“SCRATCH A FANTASY
and you’ll find a nightmare.” This was one of Caroline’s favorite sayings, spoken originally in regard to a mutual friend, a woman who had chased a dream life abroad and wound up trapped and unhappy. Then the saying became code for all those seemingly perfect lives being lived someplace else, with better jobs or partners or inner states. Whenever I would say (in winter or traffic, or on a bad day), “Why do we live here?” Caroline would respond, instantly, “Fresh Pond and Starbucks.” Starbucks wasn’t yet on every corner in America, but Caroline was shorthanding for the ineffable whole: the surly poet on the corner, or the river at dusk, or the store with the butcher who knew us by name. We lived here for each other, and for everyone else we loved within twenty miles, and for all the good reasons people live where they live. They need the view of a wheat field or an ocean; they need the smell of a thunderstorm or the sound of a city. Or they need to leave, so that they can invent what they need someplace else.

According to our mutually mythic pasts, I was the exile and Caroline the child who had stayed. I’d fled the
bleak farm and ranchlands of the Panhandle, made it to Austin five hundred miles south, and lived in San Francisco for a couple of years before finally heading for the East. Caroline had grown up in Cambridge, a few blocks from the Radcliffe quad; when she left for college, she went to Brown University in Providence, an hour away. She came back to Cambridge four years later and had strayed only so far as a couple of neighborhoods from her childhood home. Her familiar was my exotic—her Cambridge was my Amarillo—and it seemed part of the price of urbanity, like growing up in Greenwich Village, that it was too cool a hometown to flee. The year after her parents’ deaths, Caroline had bought an attached Victorian house in the middle of Cambridge, with wide pine floors and an exposed brick chimney and ten-foot ceilings. More than a century old, the place was all angles and elegance, with comfortable mission furniture and Lucille’s toys within carefully organized reach. I lived a few miles away, in a light-filled second-floor apartment I had rented for a decade. Much of the ambivalence I felt about setting down roots was softened by the sense of shelter I knew Caroline’s house provided her. When pragmatism finally won out over inertia, I began the Sunday open house slog through scores of property listings—the standard heart-of-darkness journey that accompanies house hunting. And Caroline, intrepid soldier, went along for the entire march.

Financial limitations aside, a property search for a single
woman can be a nerve-racking expedition, complete with blueprints of the status quo. I found that residential real estate, particularly in New England, was an illustration of demographics: Single-family houses were just that, colonials and Victorians built with nuclear families in mind. Every time I visited one, my stomach sank and I felt an overwhelming fatigue. Formal dining rooms, upstairs bedrooms? I wanted to weep from estrangement. The architecture-for-singles had its own problems, diminutive spaces and features that seemed a subtle punishment for going it alone. There were oppressively small houses with low ceilings and cramped rooms. Or apartments in old three-deckers or large apartment buildings, which meant you gave up a yard and privacy and parking for an affordable mortgage.

Caroline and I dissected every angle of this morass. I would drive home from Sunday open houses, spent and empty-headed, and call her for a reality check, or she would meet me at the appointed place and march through the rooms, cheerful and skeptical at once. Did I really want to live in this gorgeous third-floor aviary, she would ask, with my bum leg and a sixty-pound dog? It was the season of bidding wars and land rushes, and places were selling in a day or an hour—one manic agent had called me at nine-thirty at night, wanting me to bid on a place I hadn’t even seen. I’d been in this queue of desperation (and lost) a couple of times, only to be outbid by those with more money or less sangfroid than I.
The high stakes of real estate hunting fed my anxiety; the market in those days was like a game of musical chairs, with everyone frantically trying to get situated before the music died.

In early spring of 2001, I made an offer on a little house in the suburbs with a large, overgrown yard; Caroline had climbed up the back fence the day before the open house to get a look at it. Then I panicked at the last minute. I saw my future unfolding before me with years of manicured streets and quiet New England reserve, and the picture horrified me. As nebulous as they may have seemed from the outside, my criteria had been honed by years of considering what I
didn’t
want—and by the outlines of what my spirit craved. What I wanted was a dorm for grown-ups, someplace with flowers and dogs and people who looked like I felt. A colleague had articulated this netherland of intuition for me. She was a young, hip African American lesbian with a couple of body piercings, and we had talked endlessly about the perils of real estate for single women and about where we each belonged. “Let me put it this way,” she said. “On the day I move in, I don’t want to be the most interesting thing happening in the neighborhood.” Her wry acumen came back to me the day I signed an offer on the house in the suburbs. The well-appointed agent shook my hand and said, “You seem so
interesting
!” Two days later, I took my interesting self out of the deal.