Let's Take the Long Way Home (3 page)

I knew much of this from her book and some of it from what she told me that first long afternoon in the woods; I also learned that day that she had just separated from her boyfriend of six years—a large-hearted man who went by his last name, Morelli. The break turned out to be temporary, and after Morelli and I became friends, Caroline and I often called him “the last good boyfriend in America.” All of this piecemeal story—the narrative unfolding in the early friendship—belonged to a sinewy, solemn woman who seemed to me like the kind of person you’d pick to drive the tractor home in a hailstorm. She was tough, she was unassuming, and I suspect her stalwart reliability, which revealed itself to me in more than one crisis, came in part from practice: Having survived both anorexia and alcoholism, she had already walked through her version of worst fears.

I HAD JUST
navigated my own crossroads. I was in my early forties, at an age when the view from the hill can be clear and poignant both. The imagined vistas have become realized paths, and I think you may live in the present during those years more than any time since childhood. I’d spent my thirties in a big-city newsroom where adrenaline and testosterone were as pervasive as deadlines, and I’d recently given up a stint as book review editor to go back to my ordinary job as book critic for
The Boston Globe
. This transition, as well as the recent shifts in technology, allowed me to work from home and hang around with the dog, who quickly learned that reading was my equivalent of chewing on a bone. I had long thought that the gods had handed me work tailor-made for my idiosyncrasies: I was too opinionated to be a straight news reporter, too gadabout to be an academic. I was dreamy, stubborn, and selectively fanatical; my idea of a productive day, as both a child and an adult, was reading for hours and staring out the window. It was my good fortune that I had found an occupation requiring just these talents; now, with Clementine, I could spend whole days in near silence, reading or writing or speaking in the simpler, heart-sure vernacular of human-to-dog.

The first several months that Caroline and I knew each other come back to me with the scent of winter: the crisp, distinctively East Coast aura of snow and city
streets and radiator heat. I gave her fur-lined mittens in November on her birthday; a few weeks later, we both begged off other Thanksgiving plans, then cooked a roast chicken together after a day in the woods with the dogs. The weather got worse and colder and we adjusted our schedules accordingly: She taught me how to walk across frozen trails and sideways down steep hills, digging my feet into the terrain. I taught her the freestyle in an indoor pool, coaxing her to lay her face in the water to learn to regulate her breathing, while she stood there cursing me and shivering.

It seems to me now that Caroline was always cold. After the anorexia of her twenties, she had stayed on the thin side of normal, and she would show up for our walks swaddled in layers of fleece. As often as possible we headed for the woods or the reservoir, but sometimes in the evening, when the New England sun had disappeared at an early hour, we would sneak into the Harvard athletic fields, near where I lived at the time, so that the dogs could have an open space to run. The fields backed onto a public housing project, separated by a high, dilapidated chain-link fence. Getting onto the hallowed grounds was a two-person job: One of us lifted the fence where it had come loose over a ditch while the other rolled under it with the dogs, then held it up from the other side. Our trespass was illegal as well as rough—it was the kind of thing I had done all the time as a girl in Texas—and I was glad that Caroline was willing; for all
of her exploits in the drinking world, she still possessed a good-girl quality that I had never been able to muster. We’d stand there in the frigid dark, the dogs illuminated against the night sky by Clementine’s whiteness and the lights from the ball fields. It was like being encased in a cave of quiet and cold, and we stayed until we couldn’t bear it any longer, telling each other stories—Caroline in her new Ugg boots, shivering and smoking, with me getting an illicit, still pleasant whiff of the smoke (I had quit four years earlier). Sometimes we’d sink onto the ground and lean against the old tattered fence, letting the dogs rummage in our pockets for biscuits before they went tearing out into the dark again. We used to laugh that people with common sense or without dogs were somewhere in a warm restaurant, or traveling, or otherwise living the sort of life that all of us think, from time to time, that we ought to be living or at least desiring. But there was nowhere else I wanted to be, beyond sitting there on the hard earth under a night sky, watching the dogs and talking.

THOSE FIELDS WERE
also where we had our first misunderstanding, or confrontation, or whatever you call the seemingly trivial empathic failures that serve as a testing ground and gateway for intimacy. By the end of that winter, it was clear that we cared for each other and the routines we had so quickly established; less acknowledged
was the crucial place we were carving out in each other’s lives. For a few days I had been bearing a bruise in silence that had to do with our regard for each other as writers: something so core to me that it still gives me pause to remember my discomfort. As a reviewer for a big daily newspaper, I was the older and more seasoned writer; Caroline was the young turk at the alternative paper who’d enjoyed a rush of attention for her memoir. Because we had known of each other for a few years before we’d met, we had relied on that implicit assumption between writers of recognizing the other’s achievement; in most relationships, this commonality of purpose would more than suffice. But Caroline had never said anything directly about what I did or what she thought about how well I did it, though she had given me a copy of her memoir and asked repeatedly if I had liked it.

Now I see this in a different light: I believe she saw me as the one with more of the power and less of the ego needs or demands. That day in the field, I had no such insight. A long piece I’d written for the
Globe
had just been published, and I was exhausted. We were walking along and Caroline had muttered some acknowledgment about how hard I’d been working, though nothing about the essay itself. Finally I blurted out, “I have to ask you something difficult—I need to know what you think about my work.”

She looked at me aghast. “Oh my God,” she said. “I’ve turned into my mother. I assumed you knew how I felt,
but I never told you.” She rushed to reassure me, and we talked for the rest of the walk about what a swampland this was: the world of envy and rivalry and self-doubt (between women, and writers, and women writers), about insecurity and power differentials. We found out that day, fairly quickly, how great and complex our fondness was for each other; I also had my first sense of something central about Caroline that would become a pillar of our friendship. When she was confronted with any emotional difficulty, however slight or major, her response was to approach rather than to flee. There she would stay until the matter was resolved, and the emotional aftermath was free of any hangover or recrimination. My instincts toward resolution were similar: I knew that silence and distance were far more pernicious than head-on engagement. This compatibility helped ensure that there was no unclaimed baggage between us in the years to come.

As relieved as I was that day by the conversation, I was unnerved by my own vulnerability. It was as though Caroline and I had crossed into a territory where everything mattered and that we were in it together. “Oh no,” I said, half laughing but with tears in my eyes. “What is it?” she asked, concerned, and I said, “I
need
you.”

SHE WOULD SAY, I THINK, THAT THE NEED WAS GREATER
on her end. She was at the beginning of what would become a two-year separation from Morelli, with whom she’d been involved for years and whom she would later marry; she had recently lost both parents; and she saw me, probably through an idealizing lens, as a competent woman who had built a life alone. The more complicated truth was that I was also at a pivotal point: I’d given up a lot of what didn’t work, and drinking was only the beginning of the list. “You chose solitude,” another friend had told me. “Well, I think solitude chose me,” I said. “The old bride-of-Christ thing.” Still, I’d always been comfortable in my own company, sometimes to the displeasure of friends or romantic partners. My last love interest of any importance had ended, badly, a few years earlier. One of my closest friends from the past decade, an artist and filmmaker, had just left Cambridge for New York. I had a number of old and solid friendships, male and female
both, but these days most of the local ones belonged in the second circle of intimacy—the people you’d call when you were hit by a bus, but not necessarily if you’d merely sprained an ankle.

“Men don’t really understand women’s friendships, do they?” I once asked my friend Louise, a writer who lived in Minnesota. “Oh God, no,” she said. “And we must never tell them.” The fact was that I had been weaned on intense and valiant friendships among women, thanks to the milieu in which I’d come of age in Texas. I was in my early twenties during the heyday of the antiwar movement and the rise of feminism in the 1970s, which in Austin were closely linked. The women I knew there had burned the old rule book: the one in which women shopped instead of talked, competed for the silverback through any means, protected their fears and longings from one another as if they were professional trade secrets. I’d been part of an all-girl rock-’n’-roll band that got arrested together; we had relied on one another through whatever trials the decade presented, from medical school to drug addiction. When I left Austin for New England in 1981, intent on becoming a writer, what courage I possessed came in part from those passionate connections.

The women I gravitated toward in the Northeast had their own versions of the riotous years of the 1960s and ’70s, but the demands of adulthood had banked their fires. My friendships in Boston had a tendency to be
more distant, less profound. In the predominantly male province of the
Globe
newsroom, where I was hired in the mid-eighties, most of the women I knew were too busy covering wars or politics—sweet cost of victory!—to give much time to close interactions. My independence and solitude gave proof to this: Most of my emotional resources had gone into making my way as a writer, which had solidified my life and maybe even saved it.

I had also realized, gradually but surefootedly, that I didn’t want to have children. I had glimpsed this possibility early on, I think, even though I’d grown up in the conservative Texas Panhandle, where marriage and motherhood were as implicit as prayer and football. My parents had each come from large families—my father the ninth of ten, my mother the oldest of six—and their crowded childhoods had convinced them of the calmer luxury of having a small family. My mother, Ruby, had a younger sibling hoisted on her hip throughout her youth, and I suspect she was weary of the job by the time she left the farm, at eighteen, during the height of the Great Depression. She’d made her way in the workforce for a decade before marrying my dad, then waited until her late thirties to have children—a radical gesture for mid-twentieth-century America. She celebrated any route toward contentment: When my sister had her daughter, Ruby was out of her mind with joy; when I left Texas for the East and became a writer, she acted as though I’d climbed Kilimanjaro.

Whatever alternate paths my mother may have envisioned for me, feminism broadened into a four-lane highway. I knew a number of women whose emotional choices were closely linked to the idea of motherhood; because that wasn’t a piece of my particular dream, I was free to base my mating calls on love alone. As part of the great wave of women who no longer needed to marry for social or economic status or for children, I had liberated myself right into the wide, bland pastures of noncommitment. This was the good news and occasionally the bad. I’d made my little odyssey to the East alone and unencumbered, and I knew I’d avoided the yoke of an unhappy marriage or being hostage to someone else’s paycheck. On my better days, I could feel free and tough and proud of myself; on the bad ones, I was alone as hell. Sick of my Calvinist fortitude, an old friend in Texas sent me a postcard on which she’d scribbled a three-word imperative: “
LOWER YOUR STANDARDS
.”

Thrilling or tiresome, single women’s love narratives tend to be desultory stories: Reader, I moved on. I’d had several relationships through my twenties and thirties that ranged from high drama to cosmic misfires, but they belonged to the same era as my rabble-rouser freedom—they were fleeting and fierce, or faux revolutionary and unfulfilling, or decent matches with bad timing. Most of them were wrapped in the amber mist of alcohol, which meant that they rarely stood a chance of trumping my affection
for the bottle. With whiskey in the picture, it was always a ménage à trois.

Even for a while after I got sober, I had a tendency to choose passionately and badly. I laughed off the advances of a young reporter who’d been hanging around my desk at the
Globe
until he got a foreign bureau assignment; as soon as I learned he was heading for a hot zone in six weeks, where he would be stationed for years, I had an affair with him. Then I met a journalist for a big-city daily who lived five hundred miles away; when he told me he was suffering shell shock from a bad divorce, I decided we were meant for each other.