The Ramblers (13 page)

“Thank you for being human.”

A
nondescript brown paper bag sits outside her apartment door. She lifts it and is hit with the familiar, sweet scent of oatmeal raisin cookies from Levain, her all-time favorite bakery. She hasn't had one in ages. Slipped inside of the bag, Smith finds a sheet of Sally's new stationery with her soon-to-be triple-barreled name—
Sally Anderson McGee.
Words are scribbled on it.
I'm sorry, S. Forgive me.

It's not that simple,
Smith thinks tersely, walking inside, tossing the bag to the floor, grabbing a pen from her purse. This gesture is so incredibly Sally. The last thing Smith wants is to stew unnecessarily, but what happened at the restaurant hurt her. She saw a different side of her sister. Maybe the wedding's getting the best of her, she hopes that's all, but that Sally across
the table was distant and distracted. Smith flips over the card and writes her own words:
Maybe you haven't noticed, but I don't eat these anymore.
She contemplates dropping them outside her sister's apartment just next door but stops herself. She doesn't want to be that person. She takes the cookies to the kitchen and places them on the counter and then retreats to the bedroom, where she changes into her Monday evening uniform: a ratty old Yale sweatshirt and a pilled pair of sweats she's had forever. She sits in her bay window, staring out at the treetops, and waits to dial her coach.

Talking to you, I'm sensing a power-strip metaphor,
Laura said during their consultation call almost a year ago.
So many people plugging into you for a charge—your parents, your sister, Clio, your clients—but what do you do to charge yourself, Smith?

Smith was dumbfounded. More than thirty years on this planet and it took this woman all of thirty minutes to come up with this? Who cared if she charged a hefty fee and she would never meet her in person? Worth. Every. Penny.

Smith did wonder at first if it was a bit strange to have these sessions by phone when she lived in a city teeming with therapists and experts and coaches, but she decided that there was something nice, and deserved, about curling up at home for these therapeutic calls. And she knew herself, too; she'd be more open and less self-conscious on the phone.

But what was Smith doing to charge herself, Laura wanted to know. Then,
nothing
. She was working eighteen-hour days, racing between clients, sleeping poorly, eating crap and gaining weight, trying and failing to hold it together after her breakup with Asad. Everyone was worried.
She
was worried. Worried enough to hunt down a life coach. Even ever-optimistic Bitsy suggested she might want to “see someone” and ever-practical Dr. Sally suggested she might want to “take something,” but Smith wasn't going to be yet another New Yorker racing for therapy or pills for what she honestly believed was a fleeting moment of crisis. She was stronger than that.

But even Smith knew she needed help from someone objective outside her circle, someone who could offer some guidance. She got Laura's name from a client and though initially very skeptical, she did copious research about life coaching and found its core beliefs compelling: that people are essentially creative, resourceful and whole, that there is no assumed pathology. She got over her skepticism quickly and found its core beliefs compelling: that people are essentially creative, resourceful and whole, that there is no assumed pathology. She learned that the job of a coach is to listen deeply, ask powerful questions, challenge assumptions and evoke wisdom that the client holds inside herself within a space of nonjudgment, that coaching is an empowering, supportive process with tangible, transformative results. All of this was right up her alley. Still, Smith was a bit dubious and concerned. The profession was new and still largely unregulated. Anyone could call herself a coach without formal training, and “life coaching” had a bad name for many. You had to be careful.

Before their first session, Smith meticulously filled out an Intended Goals Sheet and a questionnaire, with questions like:
If someone was giving a speech about you fifteen years from now, what would you want them to say? Who would you be and what would you do if no one was looking?

Laura told her she could just jot notes, but Smith treated it like a proper assignment and wrote and wrote, even editing her answers as if she were to receive a grade at the end.

Smith picks up the phone, stares for a moment at the receiver and then looks around her quiet home. She dials and Laura answers, beginning the way she does each week.

“How has the week been since we last spoke? Were you able to complete this week's goals?”

Smith doesn't answer.

“I'm noticing some silence, Smith. Can you try to explain that silence to me?”

Smith laughs. She
laughs
. The sound of her own laughter is a foreign trill, a near-cackle, edged in almost cartoon darkness. “I'm sorry, Laura.
I don't even remember what my goals were. Things kind of fell apart in the last twenty-four hours. I don't even know where to start.”

“Start at the beginning. And remember, Smith, that this is a safe place, that I am granting you permission to not know the answers. There are no gold stars here. Just give me the quick and dirty version of what happened. No editorializing.”

Safe place. Permission. Gold stars.
These words, usually fine, seem like jokes today. What is she doing spending good money on this nonsense? Does she really think that speaking to a stranger on the other side of the country will fix this shit?

Smith forces a deep breath and begins. “Okay. Well, first I woke up on my bathroom floor in a bridesmaid dress I don't remember putting on. I'd gotten sick from drinking late into the night with a guy. Then I apparently e-mailed Asad in the middle of the night telling him how I didn't need him anymore and he responded telling me that he and his wife are pregnant, which was like a dagger. Oh, and Clio's moving out to live with Henry and I just got in a fight with Sally. Apparently, she's known about Asad having a baby and didn't tell me. I haven't written
a word
of her wedding toast. Oh, and for the grand finale, I made a poor woman cry at the Container Store a few hours ago. It's been a day.”

“Wow. That's a lot, isn't it?”

Yes, Laura. It's a lot.

“Well, I'm hearing a lot of things coming up in what you're saying. Clio moving out. Your ex having a baby. Your sister getting married. All of these, Smith, are
huge
triggers. And triggers make all of us do things that might feel very out of character. I invite you to get quiet, to breathe and acknowledge yourself for everything you're dealing with, because it's a lot. Remember, it's okay to give yourself a little room for imperfection. Be
where you are
in terms of whatever feelings are coming up. You know that expression ‘Wherever you go, there you are'? Just be there. Can you tell me what you'd like to focus on, what's most important to you to look at and get curious about today?”

Smith pauses. She's hit with an image. She and Tate on the couch, her legs draped on his lap.

“I told him a secret,” Smith says.

“Who?”

“The guy.”

“Who is this guy, Smith?”

“I went to Yale with him. I didn't know him that well then. We didn't run in the same circles.”

“And you told him something, Smith? A secret? Are you willing to tell me what you told him?”

A secret. That's what it was, what it is, though it hasn't felt like a secret because she hasn't been thinking about it, about the fact that she's been hiding something from her family, from the world, even from herself.

“I had an abortion freshman year of college,” Smith blurts out.

“Thank you for trusting me with that information,” Laura says. “How did it just feel to tell me that, Smith?”

“I don't know. Kind of scary, I guess.”

“It makes sense that it was scary. And did you tell anyone when it happened? Who was there to support you?”

“Just Clio,” Smith says. “I barely knew her, but somehow I knew she was the person to tell.”

It was Clio who asked if Smith might be pregnant, who walked with her to the pharmacy to buy the test, who waited outside the bathroom stall in the dorm and guarded the door so no one else would come in. It was Clio who sat with Smith on the bottom bunk in their closet-sized bedroom while a stunned Smith cried. It was Clio who listened, not a flicker of judgment in her steady blue eyes, as Smith marched rationally through her options and concluded that she would end the pregnancy. It was Clio who walked with her that damp morning to her appointment at the clinic and waited in the grim, fluorescent-lit waiting room for it to be over. It was Clio who hovered without in
truding in the days, weeks, and years that followed, always asking if Smith was okay.

“How do you think you knew that, Smith, that Clio was the best person to support you?” Laura says.

“I don't know,” Smith says. “I just knew.”

From the moment Clio walked through the door of their dorm that first day, Smith sensed that there was something special about her. Bitsy and Thatcher were quick to judge when Clio arrived all alone, with no parents and few belongings.

Smith and her parents were already settling in the dorm. Bitsy was all aflutter, unpacking things Smith had urged her not to buy. Throw pillows and silver picture frames and bedding far too fine for a college kid. Thatcher paced in the background, huffing and puffing about sundry gripes, including that the dorms at Princeton were superior. When Clio walked through the door, Smith noticed how her parents' eyes drifted to her new roommate. Their judgment was conspicuous and embarrassing. Smith cringed when Thatcher asked Clio where her parents were, and even more so when Clio fumbled with her answer.

From the beginning, Smith felt an urge to protect her new roommate. Though it would take Clio several months to open up, it was immediately clear to Smith that this girl was a completely different breed from the girls she'd grown up with—that she'd been through hard times, that she'd survived something meaningful, that she had it in her to be a true friend. About all of this, Smith was very much right.

“She's always understood me better than anyone else. Far better than my own family. Not telling them was one of the best decisions I ever made. They would never have understood. Anderson girls are not the sort to get knocked up at eighteen. My father wouldn't speak to me for a week after I voted for Obama. Can't even fathom what my little freshman news would have done to him.”

“It makes perfect sense to me that you didn't tell your parents, that you tucked it away. We've discussed how your parents cherish appearances, how you feel you must be Perfect Smith for them, right?
That sometimes you feel their support of you, financial and otherwise, hinges on you being a certain version of yourself?”

“Yeah,” Smith says, thinking about this. “But it's exhausting, Laura. I live here in this apartment and I make sure not to upset them too much, but it's stifling. It's not healthy. And I've been carrying around this secret for all these years and maybe it's affecting me more than I thought and I feel kind of
angry
that I've had to hide this. And now Asad's having a baby. I was so stunned this morning. I literally felt sick, but now I'm not as upset, which kind of surprises me.”

“I know you know this, but in terms of the abortion, you experienced something many college girls experience,” Laura says. “Not to diminish what you've been through, but it happens.”

“Yeah, that's what he said last night. Tate. He was just so cool about it. He asked me something I can't stop thinking about now. He asked me if I ever regret my decision.”

“Do you?” Laura says.

“I don't think so,” Smith says, noticing a catch in her voice that suggests that even after all these years, the topic is an emotional one. “I don't regret it, but when I think about it, it does make me sad. That it happened at all. That I had to go through that. That I didn't even feel like I could tell anyone in my family. And I
want
a family, Laura, and sometimes I wonder if that was my chance, if I blew it. But most of the time I don't even think about it at all. I had convinced myself that I was over it, that it was just this thing in my past, but then there I was last night telling Tate. And then I wake up to this baby news. It's kind of uncanny.”

“Why do you think you told him?”

“Vats of alcohol?” Smith says, laughing, but her laughter quickly tapers. “I don't know. It just came out. There's something about him.”

What is it, though? A lack of pretense, for one. Tate's been through hard things and he's honest. She's never seen a man be that vulnerable. Asad was a stoic and Smith thought she liked that, his macho toughness, but now she's not so sure. Tate was sweet last night, en
dearing and
open,
and Smith realized at some point in the night that she'd stopped trying to be her best self and was just herself, struggling and insecure about certain things. And, yes, the alcohol certainly pushed her along, but she just felt like even if she didn't see this guy again, she wanted him to
see
her, to know something about her. She felt safe.

“He was so open with me about his own life and I guess I just felt comfortable?”

“
Yes.
You felt comfortable
.
I want to hear more about that. Who were you being in that moment you told him, Smith?”

Who was she being? She was being an idiot. She was being everything she isn't—messy, carefree. But she was also being herself, the self she doesn't usually let people see, the self she's worked so doggedly for all of these years to control, to box up.

“Someone who was free? Imperfect? Alive?” Smith says, the words just tumbling from her.