When I was growing up, my parents liked taking in boarders to help pay the mortgage. They thought it was a nice, community-oriented thing to do; I thought it was creepy and an invasion of my privacy. I’d dash by the U. Rochester Ph.D. candidates or traveling Unitarian ministers so fast they’d never be able to tell me what a cute little girl I was. Then I’d run upstairs to my bedroom, barricade the door, and sit under my blankets writing frantically in my diary about how we had all these yucky people in our beautiful house and how I wished they’d die.
I was born a misanthrope or something, I think. I’ve always cherished solitude, looked at my fellow humans the way a perplexed anthropologist might study a violent cannibal culture. Problem was, sociability was a high priority in the Abrams family. We were trotted out to charity potlucks and faculty cocktail parties. We were told to smile, shake hands, and make adorable conversation with adults. This increased mightily our level of childhood suffering.
My little brother Mike and I didn’t think much of this. We don’t have a great deal in common, but we do share a recessive gene for shy stand-offishness. From the time either of us could read, we learned to carry a book or two around, so that at pivotal moments we could dive in and repress our outside surroundings.
Mike turned me on to the languorous joys of cannabis sativa when I started college. But he actually told me about something more important, during the summer I was six and he four. We were both taking swimming lessons, and he ran up to me with sudden, happy knowledge: When you really, truly stuck your face underwater and weren’t afraid to do it, he told me, you couldn’t hear anything on the surface anymore.
My Red Cross swimming instructors considered me a fast, competent swimmer for my age, but a little wimpy about getting my face wet. Now that I knew the big secret, I put aside my fears and learned how to swim with my face right in the water. Mike was right. You couldn’t hear a thing. And if I could have stayed under there for more than a couple of minutes without dying, I would have. That year, and for many years afterwards, I was a mermaid for Halloween.
In school, I was neither popular nor unpopular, in a way that is usually reserved for boring girls, and I was a middling-to-good student, so that the teachers didn’t pay much attention to me. The exceptions were the English instructors, who thought my unfriendly scribblings the mark of a budding writer and who kept on encouraging me to submit this poem or that essay to those damn contests sponsored by the state of New York, which no one from upstate ever wins. At the end of the day, I’d run home and lampoon these poor educators in my diary: "Mrs. Greensward thinks that she can use me to perk up her puny little life by having a published student. Whoo-eee! Plus her hair dye is looking a little lame these days. Maybe she needs a merit raise."
No one could really figure me out. In a late ‘70s-early ‘80s middlebrow youth culture obsessed with attractiveness, clothes, and body image, I certainly did as well as any of the popular girls. When you absolutely had to curl the bottoms of your hair into artificial sausage curls; when you wore painters’ pants with Top Siders, Levi’s plaid shirts with Lurex threads, and a sweater tied around your neck; when no one would take you seriously until you learned to flip your hands and say "But of course" in a way that told your listener they were the stupidest thing on earth----I was there, doing it with as much style as any of the J.V. cheerleaders.
But I was still an enigma. How dare I look and act like a Popular Girl---blond and wholesome, cute of butt, knew everything a high-school student needed to keep au courant---and retain this aura of morose intellectualism? I heard some whisperings about it: "It’s because she’s Jewish. Jewish parents raise their children differently, I guess."
None of these dark mutterings ever reached my TV-sitcom mom, though, who reigned supreme at the Guidance Office at Rochester North High School. My mom was progressive. She didn’t just talk about college applications and grades; she also talked about things like Losing Your Virginity and Abusing Alcohol and Drugs---in a progressive, mom-ish way, of course. Everybody loved her. She was the scourge of my high-school existence.
"Your mom is way cool, Sara!" my classmates would gush at me. "She’s so---nonjudgemental!" Or, once I had my teen novel published and was getting my month or so of local-girl infamy, "Are those characters based on real people? Did your mom, you know, tell you about anyone’s real-life problems?" The answer, of course, was no.
Furthermore, Mom was not nearly as nonjudgemental towards her own children as she was to random delinquents at Rochester North. Kids with "problems" like Mike’s and mine would be triaged to the bottom of the RNHS counseling heap. But she had us at home, where we could be watched, and analyzed, and the fiber of our character commented upon. Our characters were often found a bit neurotic, although nothing that couldn’t be cured with a big dose of mom-attention.
It was also my dear mother who got the ego-hammering idea of my applying to Harvard. Maybe she thought she could get me in because she was a guidance counselor or something. "But Sara, honey," she pressed, "think of all you’ve got going for you!" Which was, according to Harvard standards, not much: Varsity swim team, winner of the Avon/Flare teen book award, staff of newspaper and literary magazine, National Merit Semifinalist. But I was not naïve. Where was my 3.98 grade average? My summer in South America teaching indigent children to read? My triumph over a life-threatening disease? I knew that I didn’t have any way of transmitting all the shit that flittered around in my head and made me laugh to myself on the bus to any Ivy League admissions committee.
Even the shining star of my college application---the aforementioned Halls of Shame---quickly became a serious liability to my daily life. If I had ever wanted attention from the football players and cheerleaders, whose (exaggerated and fictional) misdeeds were chronicled for thousands of hungry teenage readers and moralistic adults across the country, this was the ticket. Unfortunately, the whole thing was taken as a roman à clef. I had 190-lb. linebackers, their pleat-skirted consorts, and assorted toadies waylaying me in the halls. I’d be at my locker, doodling something in magic marker on the metal. Suddenly a presence would loom hotly behind me, showering my back with golden Popular Clique rays. A harshly whispered question would prickle my ear: "You weren’t at Steve’s party! Who told you what happened?!", or "You’ll be sorry you ever wrote this. We’ll say some things about you your parents won’t like so much."
The more people up my ass, the more I just wanted to be left alone. Gregarious Mom noticed this too, and sent me to therapy with a friend of hers. I wasn’t a helpful client. I couldn’t explain, not even with the help of the Barbie dolls that lined her walls (she was a child psychologist). My real problem was that I couldn’t find the right bunch of friends. I didn’t quite fit in into any of the cliques. Call me picky, I guess, but I couldn’t imagine myself pledging undying fidelity to any of them. Alienation was my only refuge. Better to spend time by myself than be stuck with a group of people who found me weird or vice versa. Social people cannot understand this phenomenon without pathologizing it.
Going to college was a little better, but not much. Retrospectively, I should have gone to a school other than Boston College, and ditched the scholarship altogether. But fate, as they say, does work in mysterious ways; would I have been where I am today without four years of my pogrom-pierced heart cringing under those intimidating spires and being surrounded by cliquish Catholic country-club kids?
I lived for my humanities classes and my twice-daily trips to pool or weight room. BC was really trying to liberalize its image in the ‘80s, but there was still a large daily-Mass contingent that tended to throw a pall on some of the more decadent activities. Plus alcohol was everywhere. If you didn’t want to drink, people looked at you even funnier than they did in high school. So I went through a short and unhappy phase of being a little party-lush, just to see what would happen.
There was a guy, Paul, who loved me from afar. He was a vampire, one of those all-night DJs at the radio station, WZBC. He played house and goth, and dedicated songs to me at 2 a.m. Some nights I’d stay up late and listen to him bless Throbbing Gristle’s latest industrial track in the name of "Sara, the silent sophomore siren----please arise from your swim and stand stripped before my sombre stare." Paul was one of those black-wearing, pot-smoking angst machines.
I ended up going out with him. He was good looking, in that dark, skinny, morose way. And honestly, it was my first real experience with sex, not counting those drunken, inadequately protected "did I really want to do that or not?" forays. It was also the closest I had ever come to enjoying it. Paul really did his best---he read up on "women-pleasing" a lot---but I was not his, nor would I ever be anyone’s, most responsive partner. You can’t blame him for trying.
Paul had an interesting set of friends. They were smart and iconoclastic enough to adopt as compatriots, mostly deadbeat gothy poets with names like "Lydia" and "Kate." Paul was the one who was crazy about me, though; the others just had to accept his decisions. My last semester in college, when I worked part-time at the campus admissions office, he would sometimes pop up at the Student Service window with little gifts: two sexy rings to wear on the second and third finger of one hand; a provocative earring; colored condoms; a new poem dedicated to me. But although he really wanted to draw me in and make me one of his crowd, there were only so many clove cigarettes I could smoke and so much bruise-colored lipstick I could buy. I saw the end of our romance looming early on, but somehow we did not get there soon enough.
I kept being Paul’s girlfriend for a bit longer than was optimal (like a year or two more) because the dear was the essence of Slack, and he didn’t expect me to be otherwise. As long as I kept on writing, as long as I was willing to spend nights with him in his dingy, cramped apartment in a semi-industrial part of Somerville, everything was fine and he wouldn’t demand any more from me.
Peculiarly, this in itself was a kind of demand. I wearied of morphing myself to accommodate his image of me. Paul, for instance, had an effete horror of the outdoors and all kinds of physical activity in general. ("Eew, you’re going sailing? How bourgeois. I’ll just sit here and read Rimbaud.") This was, naturally, a large and personally insulting put-off.
It wasn’t Paul’s prissiness or affectations that lost him final favor with me, though. It was my stupid decision to move in with him. God knows I had spent enough time with him at his place; I thought I knew his personal habits pretty well. But I could still get away from them. Once I moved in, I was trapped in the Abode of Apathy. In the perpetual half-light of his second-story digs, I was inundated by cigarette-choked ashtrays, crusty coffee cups in unexpected and unwelcome places, avalanches of dirty laundry that stank with a faint acidic perversion of his normal scent, unpaid bills, undelivered phone messages, globs of razor clippings in the vintage-1950 bathroom vanity, and, neatly stacked in a corner, many many copies of the Boston Globe’s Help Wanted section.
I myself had just entered the world of 9-5 work. Within a month or two I had had my fill of coming home late in my 1990-style junior power suits to find my beloved slouched on the ratty couch with CNN or MTV on in the background and a cold bong drooling into the cushion cracks. My God, he was just like my brother Mike! What a reprehensible thought!
"Oh no," said my mother, when I told her I was breaking up with Paul, who had never been at the top of her favorites list anyway. Her groovy sympathy was more than a little feigned. The counseling Paul required, I had periodically inferred from her, went beyond even her job description. "What happened? What was the matter? It wasn’t---sex, was it? You don’t have trouble with...orgasms, do you?"
This was absolutely more than my dignity could bear. Especially since I was feeling guilty about the abrupt and undignified way I had dumped Paul. Without any windup to the pitch, I told him that I absolutely couldn’t live in his pigsty of a house anymore, I was moving out by the end of the month, and then I’d need some time to myself after that. End of discussion. I’d be sleeping on the couch---no, not the couch, it was too disgusting, I’d sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor---until I left.
Paul did not take this news like a man. He took it like the sissified, burnt out pretensoid I believed he was at the time. I spent an unpleasant number of nights curled into my sleeping bag on the cold hard floor as Paul paced back and forth in the next room, periodically opening the bedroom door a crack and begging, "Sara, won’t you come in? I cleaned it especially for you. Please? Sara?"
Never again, I swore. Next time I dated anyone---and it could be ten fucking years for all I cared---I was going to be involved with a mensch, a real self-starter with big bucks and a mission that other people could understand.
The next thing I did was call up my semi-friend Kathy O’Toole. Kathy was working in marketing or PR for one of the hospitals. She had a nice little apartment in Cleveland Circle, all decorated in white, with glass tabletops. And her roommate had just moved out. I wasn’t particularly in love with her, nor she with me, but we could walk together in the morning to the Green Line trolley in our cute work outfits, and have drinks together on the weekends. Besides, she took no truck with poets or any other kind of alternative lifestylers ("pervs"), and that was just about my speed right then.
Kathy herself would have loved to get married, but she had just been through a bad breakup and shared my general mistrust of men. So it was goodbye to Lydia and Kate and the others. They had been friends with Paul first, and they told me I was totally pigheaded in the way I had treated my long-term boyfriend and their friend since Freshman year, and thus I was undeserving of their sympathy. Besides, I should go to a therapist and talk to him or her about my "intimacy issues."
Fine. They could shove their multi-piercings, black nail polish, and copies of Verlaine and Anne Rice. I had outgrown that shit, if I had ever entertained any self-delusions of enjoying it in the first place. With good old level-headed Kathy at my side, I was going to embark on a new life. A life with self-protective celibacy as its goal. With long hours working at my new job at the BC alumni mag as its own reward. With stylish, conservative clothes. And lots of outdoor exercise. And moderation in all things. I’d live this way until I was stripped of all outside influences, until I knew myself so well that I could develop my own interests and philosophies without some person hanging over me giving me wrong-headed ideas.
"That’s great," said staid, dependable Kathy, who was suddenly contemplating how to have an affair with her office manager without getting canned. (Common sense took over, by the way, and she didn’t do it.) "But I have to ask you a really personal question everyone at school wanted to know anyway. Are you just doing this because you really like girls and you’re afraid to admit it?"
I icily declined comment.
I held out for a few years of this virtue: insurance-paid trips to the shrink, innumerable hours at the gym and pool, training to make the soul "Sit" and "Stay" in the temple of the body. I made intellectual forays into Ethics, Jungianism, and Understanding Your Macintosh. I whistled that old Shaker tune "‘Tis a Gift to be Simple" as I crawled into my cold narrow bed sans teddy bear, because even as a child I thought they were too trite for words.
Then I finally made a decision: Fuck This. My twenties were wasting away and I hadn’t had any "fun" in the conventional sense in ages. On the other hand, how was I going to be able to have any fun now anyway, saddled as I was with my new ‘90s morality?
I had a dream. In it I turned North and West toward Cambridge. A voice (a Jungian device, by the way---see how I was so taken in my own intellectualism?) came to me. "Go to Cambridge, Sara," it said. "Here you will find what will make you happy. Use Reason as your guide."
Yeah, whatever, I said to the voice. Now let me alone. But you know what? I went. Walked right into Mondo Espresso, as a matter of fact. Right past the blond kid with the funny clothes and the laptop.
Here begins my story as you know it.
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