Baby Steps (4 page)

It happened because a group of us were hanging out in my mother's living room, giggling at the sound of chanting emanating from the back room where my mother was meditating. It was a running joke in my house; because of the heavy influence of hippie spirituality, my friends liked to make everything into an Indian chant:
“Ice cream tastes so good,”
my friends would say in dreamy, singsong voices.
“It feels so good in my stomach, I think I want some moreasana.”

It was embarrassing, this strange environment that was my home, but it was also all that I knew. I laughed along because we were the sort of high school group who did everything together, and our internal ridiculing was always affectionate, if cynical, in the way only teenagers can be cynical. We were also one of those groups of teenagers in which everyone was paired up, like in that movie
St. Elmo's Fire.
All except for me and this boy, whom I'll call Adrian.

Adrian and I didn't necessarily like each other, although he was incredibly cute. I didn't relate to him. There was something restrained about him. He was from a conservative Middle Eastern family and I think he was just a bit slower in the ways of love than the other boys. I was slower than the other girls, even with my freewheeling hippie mother, but we just didn't click. It's not that we disliked each other, however, so when the peer pressure for us to hook up became
overwhelming, we dutifully trudged upstairs, kissed awkwardly, and then he applied the obligatory hickeys to my neck as proof. We did the deed, and when it was over in seconds, we were both mortified and struck dumb, unable to talk to or even look at each other.

When we came back downstairs, my friends were satisfied. In fact, they cheered. I was
not
satisfied, and neither was Adrian. I tried to make a joke and he ignored me. He had completely shut down. This made the situation worse. So much for my
Splendor in the Grass
fantasy. We weren't in love. Hell, we'd barely touched each other. And we both knew we'd been hoodwinked by our peers. We recoiled into ourselves. I sat on the couch, arms crossed sullenly, and then we both proceeded to pretend it never happened.

But I couldn't deny the hickeys. The next morning, I noticed them with fresh humiliation. Makeup didn't work, so I put on a turtleneck sweater. It was a warm spring day, but I couldn't figure out a better solution. I managed to slip out the door unnoticed, but after school, when all my friends came over again, my mother came into the kitchen and her eyes locked on my strange fashion choice.

“Come here right now,” she said to me.

“Why?”

“Come here right now,” she repeated with greater force. She sounded tired.

I heaved myself up off the couch, where I was sitting between two of my girlfriends, pathetically trying to catch Adrian's eye and having no success. “What?” I said sullenly.

“Why are you wearing a turtleneck?”

I blushed furiously but tried as well as I could to play it cool. “I just like it. I like the way it looks.”

“Uh-huh. Let me see your neck.”

Shit.

My mother hooked a finger into the ribbed knit of my sweater and peered down at my neck. Considering how I felt at that moment, Adrian might as well have sucked the letters S-L-U-T into that little indentation over my collar bone.

“Why do you have hickeys on your neck?” she asked me. Her voice was calm and even.

“Adrian and I made out.”

“No, no, no,” she said. I started to protest but she held up a finger. “If you are having sex, we are going to Planned Parenthood right now.”

“I didn't!”

“Lis.” She said it in that voice that told me she saw right through me. “I told you once and I don't want to ever have to tell you again: If you lie to me, you get in trouble. If you tell me the truth, I can help you. If you think you're grown up enough to have sex, then you're grown up enough to tell me so we can handle this.”

I could sense my friends in the living room, hanging on every word. I glanced behind my shoulder.

“Send them home,” she said.

As my friends filed out, their heads down, some of them smiling sheepishly with that at-least-it's-not-happening-to-me attitude, I tried to hold back the tears. I could feel the confession welling up in my throat. When the last of them exited our kitchen and my mother shut the door, I burst into hysterical tears.

“I did it! I'm sorry! I hated it! He doesn't even like me!” I couldn't even get myself to say the word “sex,” I hated it so much. I was absolutely certain I would
never have sex again.

My mother didn't say anything. She just took my hand and pulled me out to the car and let me cry all the way there.

I'll never forget what that building looked like. It was nondescript—rectangular, brick—but what I saw was a distinct aura of
shame hovering over the roof and billowing into the parking lot, the kind of place you drive by and think,
Those sorts of people go in there.
The kind of place liberal mothers took their wayward daughters to get birth control pills. And now
I
was one of
those
people.

I tried to act like I didn't care and none of it mattered, but that experience kept me from having sex again for two more years, even though I was now officially on birth control. I waited until I had a real boyfriend who actually loved me, and we'd dated for months first. Then I decided
that
was my first time. It was the perfect do-over.

The memory of that early experience still stings a bit, but much less so because of the way my mother handled it. She never shamed me. She never made me feel less than anyone else. She just did what had to be done, and knowing I could tell her the truth was a huge relief. It instilled a sense of responsibility in me. “Your body is a gift,” she told me. “Be careful whom you give it to.” And I was careful after that because she was right.

Lisa Loverde-Meyer was what you would call a bona fide “hippie chick.” She was also a rebel, a truth teller, a spiritual seeker, and my best friend. She had eyes even bluer than mine, under long eyelashes, and a space in between her two front teeth, which my daughter inherited. She was Italian and looked it, with long brown hair and olive skin.

My mother grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, with a mother who looked like a 1950s movie star. My grandmother was a dressmaker and she owned a dress shop where she sewed custom clothes for rich southern ladies. She aspired to appear richer than she was: elegant and upper class. My grandfather, an immigrant of Italian descent, gave her the surname Loverde, but my grandmother told everyone it was a French name. She pronounced it
loo-VERD,
adding her own little inflection to suggest what she believed a French accent would be.

My mother always felt like a fish out of water in the South. When she discovered the hippie movement in the 1970s, she was relieved and finally at home. All she ever wanted was to live a creative life as a writer, a simple life without societal pressures. Unfortunately, my father had the exact opposite desire.

My father is German, and his father was a POW in World War II. After the hardship that comes with all of that, my father wanted to live the American dream: success, money, achievement. When he met my mother, he was in New York on a short visa where he was working for a bank, and he passed by a transcendental meditation lecture my mother was guiding on behalf of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. She had traveled the world with Maharishi since she was eighteen. My father saw her inside and immediately went in and joined the lecture. They started dating and he started meditating. Soon, she accompanied him back to Germany, where I was born.

But although they had that immediate connection, their long-term goals weren't the same. My father, like so many Europeans who grew up during the war, has considered earning a good living an immense priority. There was always that underlying sense of foreboding, like if you didn't work hard enough, you would starve. He has also always been a seeker and a romantic soul who has a mystical, philosophical nature. He loves poetry and opera and the fine arts, and he still meditates, but because he grew up poor and came to the United States to pursue his dream, his outer needs outweighed his inner needs. I sometimes wonder if he would have been someone entirely different if he had not been from Germany and not grown up during the war, but this is who he is. It explains why he was attracted to my mother, and ultimately, it explains why it didn't work. But before it all fell apart, they moved to Westchester County in New York to live the life my father wanted.

Westchester is horse country, with white clapboard houses on rolling green hills, horses grazing in the front yard, and dirt roads along which cars drive at a snail's pace because the most important thing in Westchester is the horses, and a speeding car could spook them. People carve their own pumpkins in Westchester. They use hand-knit napkins for their afternoon tea parties on the terrace or in the rose garden. There is a certain expectation and a certain prestige to Westchester. It's an antiquated place, where those who can afford to live there, who don't want to live in the city and are willing to commute, can live in paradise. It is high-end country living at its best. It is the pages of
Martha Stewart Living
come to life.

My mother identified with some parts of it: the country life, the animals, and especially the flowers. She was a talented gardener, and she made our home beautiful as she struggled to maintain a certain decorum and sense of achievement my father required in order to rise in his profession. They both wanted me to have every advantage as well, and my father believed this was the best place to raise a child. My mother must have agreed, but for her, it was an uncomfortable place, despite the flowers. Her flower-child sensibilities just couldn't relate to the materialism of that life, nor to the sense of achievement so seemingly required. It wasn't her way. She was never a career woman and had no desire to be one. She wasn't interested in status. Her way was to putter in her beautiful garden and live in the moment.

Still, she gave it everything she had. My father needed an ambassador to throw elegant parties for his colleagues when he was a young lawyer, and she did her best, but it was not to be.

I remember the silhouette in the doorway: my father, in his casual weekend clothes, holding a suitcase. My boxer, Romeo, nosed my father's knee and my father petted him firmly, decisively, on the head.

“Don't go,” I said. I already knew he would. Both my parents had talked to me about it. But this was Saturday. I didn't get to see my father
during the week because he would leave early in the morning and didn't get home until late at night, but on Saturdays, we went riding together. I always looked forward to Saturdays, so how could he be leaving now? The horses would be confused if we didn't show up at the stable. “Don't go,” I repeated.

“It's all right,” he said. “You'll come visit me next weekend.”

As he turned and walked down the drive, I ran to the doorway where he had just been standing, and when he looked back, he must have seen
my
silhouette, clutching each side of the door frame. “Don't go!” I called to him. He just waved and smiled a tight smile. I watched him put his suitcase in the trunk, get in the car, and drive away.

In that moment, I didn't know that I'd ever see him again. Was he gone forever? I sat down on the front step with my chin in my hands and tried to make sense of the brokenhearted feeling I felt welling up: that my father had left and might never come back. And he never did—not to move back in. Once in a while, he would pick me up for the day or the weekend, and I would wait on the front step for him so he didn't have to come into the house, so he and my mother wouldn't argue. I would sprint down the driveway and jump into the backseat of his car and we would do something together, but it was never the same as when he had lived with us and I had been secure in the knowledge that he would always be there.

When I was eight years old, my parents were still “separated” but in couples counseling. My father had moved to the Essex House in New York City. One weekend, when I was staying with him, he had a heart attack on Central Park South. He was taken to the hospital, and when he found out he was going to need open-heart surgery, he thought he might die. My mother came to his bedside, and as is so common during life-threatening situations, truths came out, dirty laundry was aired, and there was no going back. Every relationship
has water under the bridge, and in a crisis situation, the levy often breaks. That day marked the real end of their marriage, and he never came back to our home to live with us.

In many relationships that come to an end, there is somebody who is surprised, and somebody with one foot already out the door. My father had one foot out the door, and although he said he wanted to come home, there was no coming home because he was already gone. The writing was already on the wall.

I was emotionally shattered and angry, and I felt betrayed by both of them. Within a year, he had remarried and started another family, and this seemed drastic and cruel from my young vantage point. At the time, I couldn't begin to see my stepmother's beauty, brilliance, or depth. All I knew was that she was taking my father away. I was angry at all of them, but especially my mother and father; my father for leaving, and my mother for being unable to keep him. My father for starting another family I imagined he must love better, because it seemed to me that he chose them over our family. My mother for being so raw, so emotional, so unguarded, and for having no boundaries between us when she was falling apart.