Heart of Glass (9 page)

I spent a week shuffling around the apartment in my bathrobe, crying, unable to sleep or eat or go to class. I felt weighted down by all the shit and the agony I was carrying around with me, as if someone were standing next to me and tugging on my clothes, but I also felt empty inside, stripped—physically aching for a way to understand how I'd been so stupid as to allow myself to get knocked up.

One morning four or five days later, Jenny came into my
room. She sat on the edge of the bed, handed me a cup of coffee, and reached over to gently stroke my hair. “So, Vend, this is your best friend speaking. I know it's been hard, but, you know, that's enough. You have to pull yourself together—you've had time to recover.”

I knew she was right. I nodded and sipped the coffee. Tough love with a warm beverage.

“It'll get easier—you'll see.”

I went down to NYU to speak to my adviser. When I explained to him that I had missed so much class and final exams because I'd become pregnant and had an abortion, he looked at me skeptically. I wondered how many times he'd heard this story and how many times it had actually been true. I couldn't help but cry a little, which embarrassed him. He grimaced slightly, as if in fear that I was about to launch into a monologue about my lady parts.

“Hmm, I see,” he said instead.

He offered to reschedule my finals for the end of the week.

The Friday before Christmas, I walked into a classroom and filled out the blue exam booklets. I knew the material cold and was confident I'd ace it. As I scribbled away, I felt a sense of triumph as well as an understanding that, although I adored the cinema, I no longer wanted to study it. I finished the essay question about Fritz Lang's film
Metropolis
, closed the booklet, and handed it to the TA sitting at the desk by the door.

Then I dropped out of NYU.

chapter four

HOUSES IN MOTION

My modest room at Ninety-seventh Street couldn't have been more than forty feet square. The single bed was pushed up against the wall where a padlocked black metal gate stretched across the one window, looking out on the air shaft. The apartment was on the seventh floor of the eight-story building, so I could just catch a glimpse of the sky. In a less glamorous version of Hitchcock's movie
Rear Window
, I had views inside other people's kitchens and bathrooms, accompanied by the teeming noises of crying kids, loud Spanish-speaking radio stations, hacking, phlegmy coughs, and flushing toilets. I regularly heard the couple above me having sex at night.

“Sí, sí
,
”
the man would begin to groan as he approached climax. After usually three or four more
s
í
's, it all came to a thumping, metal-bed-frame-squeaking end.

A battered dresser leaned against my wall next to the
bed, and homemade two-by-four bookshelves stuck out halfway up the opposite wall and reached the ceiling. The tiny closet contained more shelves, so I hung my clothes on nails pounded into the back of the door. Cramped, yes, but I was so happy to have my own room, where I could shut the door, be by myself, and not feel that someone—Michael or the NYPD—was watching me. While living with my mother, a closed door had often been an invitation for her to barge in—drunk or sober. Privacy then had not been an option. In a way, this little phone booth of a room was the first place I'd ever been able to call my own.

Since everyone else was in school, and I was now a college dropout for the second time, I took it upon myself to cook supper, pick up the milk and the mail, and to lug our laundry to the Chinese laundry on Broadway, where they put your huge bag of dirty clothes on a scale and charged you by the pound to wash it. I was always mystified by the meticulously folded and perfectly square block of clothes that they handed back to me, after I gave them our tickets. After the chaos of constantly moving and the emotional turmoil of Michael, it was fun playing house, and I relished each domestic chore except, of course, cleaning.

We were all about to take off for the Christmas holiday. Jenny and Pete would be going to her grandmother's house in Connecticut, before swinging up to visit Pete's family in upstate New York. Anthony, the Juilliard acting student, would be flying home to San Francisco.

That Christmas I was joining my sister and we were fly
ing to spend the holiday with our father, stepmother, and stepsisters in Minneapolis. I had visited Daddy that summer, but Robin had only seen him briefly, at Logan Airport in Boston, when he was between planes. Neither of us had seen our stepmom, Sarah, or her kids since we were little girls, before Sarah and Daddy had even been married.

Robbie and I arrived in the Twin Cities, where the temperature was below freezing, a few days before the holiday. My stepsister Jules was living in the guest room at the house, so we were booked into a nearby motel. The place was kind of a dump, with red shag carpeting and pilled pink chenille spreads on the twin beds. Paint-by-numbers landscapes of mountains and snow-covered pine trees hung on the walls. Because of the Minnesota cold, the floor of our room was heated, which led to a rather fantastic explosion of condensation and steam whenever we opened the door to enter our room or exit into the outside parking lot. We looked like a magic act appearing in a cloud of smoke or rock stars with smoke bombs going off around us.

Although our relationship had been strained at times, fraught with anger and recriminations in our teen years, my sister and I were the only constant in each other's life. We had been in touch, mostly by telephone and the occasional letter, while she was at college, sharing the PTSD fallout symptoms of our childhood—the anxiety, sleepless nights, weight loss and gain, and the overarching sadness we both grappled with. And so I was glad Robin was with me; it promised to be a surreal experience for both of us—but at least we
would be together. Our childhood Christmases were always punctuated by high drama (one year Mother had collected all our toys and presents in a rage and thrown them away in black trash bags because she deemed us ungrateful) or stony silence (sitting at the table eating gray, overcooked roast beef while Mother guzzled Chablis and chain-smoked). Most people approached the season expecting love, warmth, happiness, and familial harmony, but our Christmases seemed to be more about what you
didn't
receive, not getting what you wanted with all your heart. So Robin and I both pretty much hated the holidays.

Compared to our dreary yules of the past, Christmas at Daddy and Sarah's was like the Little Princess's (before she loses all her money and gets sent to the attic). Presents galore spilled from underneath a tinseled tree—my stepmother was a buyer for Dayton's department store in Minneapolis and had a knack for picking out the perfect gift. For me she'd chosen a snazzy pair of tan leather boots with corduroy sides and a trendy winter coat that was olive colored and had big pockets. Robin got a pair of pretty ruby earrings and was touched that Sarah had remembered her birthstone. After opening presents, we feasted on eggs Benedict washed down with Bloody Marys. It was a little disorienting for my sister and me, a totally new experience—this constant jovial feting of food, toasts, and treats. I'd catch Robbie's eye from across the room and smile, as if to say,
Well, this isn't so bad, is it?
And it wasn't, although it was also a bittersweet taste of all that we had missed out on.

My stepsisters, Jules and Mary, were just a few years older than Robbie and me. They were both caustic, wisecracking types and had inherited their mother's tall, handsome looks and her low, throaty laugh. The last time we'd seen them had been ten years ago, on the front steps of Daddy's apartment building on Humboldt Avenue, where we had stayed with him during the summer. We'd all sat on the steps and discussed our parents' romance.

“It looks like your dad is gonna marry our mom,” Jules, the older and more serious sister, informed us.

“Yeah, that'll be good.” I figured that now Daddy would have someone to look after him and not be on his own anymore. And we'd have sisters to play with in the summers. It would be like a real family.

“And I can babysit!” Jules smiled.

I laughed, thinking of all the fun we would have making tents out of blankets and chairs in the living room and having slumber parties, telling scary stories by flashlight.

But Mother had whisked us away before that dream could become reality—kidnapped us, really, furious that our father had found happiness—and our stepsisters, not us, had grown up with our dad. A part of me couldn't help feeling jealous of them, of the years we had lost, of not being a part of what seemed like a normal family. Especially compared to our twisted home life with Mother.

The table was set for Christmas dinner; instead of china, my stepmother preferred funky pottery dishes in vibrant colors of orange and blue that brought to mind New Mexico,
one of her favorite places, where she and my father tried to spend time during the brutal Minnesota winters. Steaming side dishes of potatoes and green beans were strewn about the table in mismatched bowls, and squat, fat candles burned in curly iron holders, casting the room in a golden haze. The standing rib roast sat on the table in front of my father, looking like the severed antlered crown of a mythical beast. We all took our places, and my dad raised his glass.

“A very merry Christmas to all,” he announced gaily.

“Merry Christmas!” we all sang.

“And I must say that I am especially overjoyed this year to have Wendy and Robin with us.” His eyes shone in the candlelight.

“Thank you, Daddy,” my sister and I replied in unison, just like the little girls we used to be.

My father carved the roast, and everyone dug in.

I looked at Robbie across the table and knew she was thinking the same thing: it just wasn't fair. It made me even more furious at Mother. Also, I desperately wanted to know why Daddy had chosen not to rescue us, or at least why he didn't show himself when he found out where we were. But our first Christmas together in ten years didn't seem like the time to bring it up.

Although our stepfamily did everything to make us feel wanted and welcome, everything was, for me and for my sister, tinged with sadness and a melancholy sense of loss. I was woefully aware of just how much we stuck out as the strangers in the room that evening when Robbie and I sat at the
dining table listening to stories about vacations, parties with wacky friends and relatives, and my stepsisters' kooky teen escapades, in which our dad sometimes figured as the savior and sometimes an accomplice. They were marvelous stories, and Robbie and I laughed out loud with the others at many of them, but a lot of the time we didn't know whom they were talking about because we simply hadn't been around. It was like watching somebody else's home movies. Robbie and I exchanged forced cheerful looks, putting up a front so as not to show how weird this all was to us. In a way, the sting of meeting our new family was worse than never having known them before. Like rescraping a badly skinned knee or the way a healed broken arm throbs when it rains, the pain had always been there, dormant, and was now being brought to life. Maybe it would ease over time—but for now it felt fresh and raw on the surface of my skin.

We went to the movies and out to lunch at restaurants where the maître d' always knew Daddy and Sarah by name, made a fuss over them, and gave us a great table. You'd think we were the royal family of Minneapolis or something. Sarah took all of us girls clothes shopping—something I could never remember doing with my own mother. We played games—poker and Trivial Pursuit—laughing into the night.

After one evening of playing cards at their house, Robbie and I went back to our motel, flopped down on the ugly bedspreads, and cried.

“This is so hard!” Robbie sobbed into her pillow.

“I know!” It was exhausting doing our sister act, feel
ing awkward and guilty about pretending we'd immediately bonded with our new family, and I had a headache from all the bourbon I'd drunk trying to keep up with everybody else. They were a tough crowd to match drink for drink.

“Who's that guy they kept talking about?” Robbie blew her nose loudly.

“I don't know.”

We finished our little crying jag, and I turned on the radio to see if anything cheery was on. The “Russian Dance” from
The Nutcracker
burst from the speaker. We had seen the ballet a few times at Lincoln Center during our privileged Manhattan early childhood. I turned it up and looked at her, smiling. Within seconds we were up on our feet, dancing to the music in our shabby little room, laughing and spinning each other around, doing our best Cossack imitation, and trying to forget that we had spent all day feeling like newly adopted orphans. I imagined people out on the snow-covered street looking into the window of our room and seeing two crazy girls, arms raised, giddily hopping up and down, screeching with laughter. We would have to make our own happy memories—and it was a start.

•   •   •

Back in New York, I settled into the domesticity of life at the apartment, in the bosom of my chosen family, Pete and Jenny. I happily helped with the cooking, making stews and curries from inexpensive cuts of meat I bought at the shady, smelly grocery store nearby. Completely different from the
spotless and fancy Gristedes from which my mother used to order over the telephone on the Upper East Side, the Red Apple, on Ninety-sixth Street, reeked of mouse droppings and freezer burn. Rat-catching cats who lived in the store pounced on the cockroaches skittering across the floor. The linoleum, missing tiles, was cracked and uneven, so that pushing your tiny cart through the narrow aisles was more of a strength exercise than a leisurely stroll through the dairy or meat section. The produce was droopy, cans of tuna and soup were past their expiration date, and only one checkout lane was ever open. But it was cheap and only a block away.

In a sort of zany American take on
Jules and Jim
, Jenny, Pete, and I were like a love triangle sans the sex, in my mind anyway. Cheap rent was an added benefit—I paid $175 a month and my share of the telephone. Even better—my insane mother didn't know where I was. I was off the grid.

I got a job working in the textbook department of the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. My boss was a thirtyish, whippet-thin gay guy named Rodney. He was like a skinny African American Paul Lynde, with a nasal, whiny voice and a lit Benson & Hedges menthol always sticking out of one corner of his mouth. He had a shaved head, favored earth tones, and wore oversized Swifty Lazar glasses with Coke-bottle lenses.

The job was easy: all you had to do was sit at a communal desk in the textbook department, wait for the telephone to ring from a school or a student, and take the order. Because the work was fairly mindless and Rodney was a pushover, we
could pretty much do whatever we wanted when the phone wasn't ringing—read, take frequent breaks to smoke in the loo, eat, or drink coffee—as long as we picked up the phone.

Another girl my age, Annie, worked there, too. A punk Snow White dressed in black, she had porcelain skin and dyed-jet hair and wore bright red lipstick. She had the mien I'd always dreamed of having: exotic and dark with a kind of mystery and edge. We were the youngest people working there by far; everyone else was sort of faded and middle-aged and had been there for years. Losers who had once had dreams of fame and fortune in New York but now were stuck in a crap job. Of course, Annie and I were just passing through and would be moving on to bigger things any day now.

She and I bonded over music and books and these sandwiches we adored at a nearby restaurant, Patsy's, called Steak Bunnies. She was from Maine and had a boyfriend and a second job as a salesgirl at the ultraposh department store Barneys a few blocks away. When I'd swing by to visit her there so she could sneak me some samples, she reminded me of the model Esme, whom I used to see working behind the counter at the Urban Outfitters in Harvard Square before she was discovered; they both had the same smoky looks.