Estranged Read online

  Our dance teacher taught us yoga, leading us through the sun salutations. With Ann, we explored Alexander Technique body scans and constructive rest. On the floor of the fire hall, a community space in town, we closed our eyes and visualized ourselves at peace. I pictured a green meadow with tall grass, a laundry clothesline with clothespins and freshly clean white sheets hanging, and a wooden swing under an old tree nestled beside a pond. And me there pumping my legs high. In acting class, we practiced the Meisner technique and the Method, and sat in a circle with the lights dimmed, reading Under Milk Wood aloud. We analyzed and memorized Shakespeare’s sonnets and hung out on the porch. We had music class in the Presbyterian chapel next door. We marched in the town’s July Fourth parade. On warm afternoons we bought ice cream cones at the Sweet Shop. We took naps. We went on cookouts. Once we took a day off from rehearsals and went on a field trip to a state forest. It was my first time on a hiking trail. At the end of the steep walk was our own natural water park. We slid down the rocky waterslides into cool rushing water and dried off on smooth, hot stones.

  A boy named Elijah liked me. Unlike the other suburban kids who came from Ohio or New Jersey or Massachusetts, or the prep school students from Manhattan, Elijah was an African-American boy from the Bronx. He had a body like a dancer’s and his eyes were always lit. Elijah wanted to be my boyfriend. But I was shy and scared, comfortable only with unrequited crushes. I didn’t know how to like a boy who liked me back. We were cast as the young lovers in an eighteenth-century Italian play. Our director dressed us like 1950s teenagers, with me in a poodle skirt and oxford shoes and Elijah in dark cuffed jeans and a black leather jacket. Onstage, I put my arms around Elijah’s neck, and he rested his hands on my hips. We shared my first real kiss. My grandmother watched from the audience, horrified.

  * * *

  The downstairs hallway in my parents’ house was lined with posed, framed portraits of my brothers and me taken by photographers on school picture day or at Josh’s bar mitzvah or our uncle Alan’s wedding. I stood at the end of the hallway and stared at myself in the gold oval mirror that hung at eye level. It was an antique, or at least something old that my parents had picked up, the kind of thing that had seemed luxurious and precious when I was younger. Now I considered myself, alert to the bump on my nose, inspecting my profile from each angle, willing the bump to stop growing, trying to tell myself it wasn’t as bad as I thought. My mother noticed me looking at myself in the mirror and came in from the kitchen.

  “There’s something you can do for that, you know,” she said. “I’ve never told you this. But when I was sixteen, I had my nose fixed.”

  Her mysteriously ruler-straight nose instantly made sense.

  “Daddy and I would be happy to pay for you to have one, too,” she continued. This surprised me. They wouldn’t pay for the drama club trip to London or the school exchange trip to Spain, and I figured a nose job had to be at least as expensive. “Insurance might even cover it. You’ll be old enough in a year.”

  “What’s wrong with my nose?” I said, pretending I had no idea what she could possibly be talking about. “You think I need a doctor to cut my nose off?”

  It was bad enough to have a nose with a gigantic bump on it. It was a million times worse to have my own mother say I was ugly enough to need plastic surgery.

  “It’s called rhinoplasty.”

  “That’s so anti-Semitic,” I ventured. “You’re a self-hating Jew!” She meant for this to be a helpful, even caring suggestion, but it felt like more rejection.

  “I didn’t say anything was wrong with your nose,” she answered carefully, clearly annoyed but not ready to give up. She’d been waiting a long time for this conversation. “But they can shave off the bump. And it will help your allergies. Let’s just go see the ear, nose, and throat doctor and see what he has to say. You can do it in the summertime. Nobody will notice.”

  Maybe my mother was right. I knew a couple of other Jewish girls in school, friends of mine, who had done or were contemplating doing the same thing. I had a bump on my nose. A doctor could fix it. Maybe it wasn’t the worst idea. Then why did the suggestion make me feel ashamed and worthless? Why did this feel like another act of violence? I could practically hear the cracking sound my nose would make when it was broken during the surgery. I tried to picture my post-op face bloodied and bandaged, the summer weeks spent in my room watching reruns and recuperating in hiding with the air conditioner on full blast, and imagined myself at the mercy of my parents’ care.

  I’d never been to a doctor other than a pediatrician. Both my parents came to the ear, nose, and throat man, who examined me and said I had a deviated septum and that most of the surgery costs would be covered by insurance. My mother was encouraging but wasn’t going to force me. It was my nose and my decision. Of course I wanted to be better-looking, but the idea of having plastic surgery seemed crazy to me, completely against everything I believed in. Wasn’t the inside what mattered? Even if I did hate my nose, wasn’t it my job to learn to love it? And learn to love myself?

  “I won’t do it,” I announced after thinking it over for a few days. “There’s nothing wrong with my nose.”

  “That’s fine,” my mother said, trying to hide her disappointment. “It’s up to you.”

  * * *

  Around this time my father and I sat across from each other in the kitchen. I was reading my social studies textbook, and he was flipping through Newsday.

  “Daddy?” I asked. “Do you think I’m beautiful?”

  I definitely didn’t feel beautiful. I had braces on my teeth and felt chubby (again) and awkward (still).

  He gave me a once-over, evaluating me. Was he trying to be objective? Scientific? Honest?

  “Do you think I’m beautiful?” I asked again, insisting that he answer. I needed to know the truth about myself.

  “No,” he said, appraising me, shaking his head. “But you are well groomed.”

  He probably forgot the conversation the next day. But his words burrowed into my brain. If my father didn’t think I was beautiful, I was certain nobody else would.

  SEVEN

  “I’M GOING TO put a PINS on you,” my mother announced from the other side of the screen door. I was smoking a cigarette down to the filter on our back porch, my designated smoking area ever since I’d turned sixteen. My parents detested my smoking but let me smoke outside anyway because it was better than having me sneak cigarettes out my bedroom window and burn down the house. My mother was reading the parenting book Toughlove and had just about given up on me. “You’re out of control,” she said as I lit another.

  My mother was heavier now, with short wash-and-wear hair and a permanent frown. After teaching she spent her afternoons on the couch, switching between Oprah and Donahue while grading and eating pretzel rods and chocolate Kisses straight from the bags. PINS, or persons in need of supervision, I’d later learn, is actually an early-intervention government program for troubled youth that aims to prevent foster placement or juvenile detention, but my mother said that PINS meant she’d be relinquishing her parental rights and leaving me to be a ward of the state.

  I was an honor student and in advanced classes. I was a virgin, for God’s sake. Kathy, who was still my best friend, was captain of the cheerleaders. But according to my mother, I was also a back-talking, occasionally-pot-inhaling, frequently-lying-about-my-whereabouts weekend drunk. My mother said I was bad, bad to the bone.

  Josh and Mark, away at college, were no longer around to witness my parents’ fights alongside me from the upstairs railing, or to keep me safe in their bedroom.

  “Maybe I’ll tell,” I said. She knew exactly what I meant.

  Weeks before, we’d faced off on the same back porch, the screen door again shut between us. She’d been carrying brown paper grocery bags heavy with food in each arm and had called me to the door from the family room to help.

  We’d argued. I can’t remember why or about what.

&nb
sp; “Fuck you,” I might have said. Or maybe I called her a bitch and told her how little I thought of her or cared what she thought of me. (Though I did care. Of course I did.) Whatever I’d mumbled, whether under my breath or straight to her face, that afternoon, it was enough.

  My mother put down the bags, opened the door, and slapped me across the cheek. This was the first time, the only time, and it stung.

  Oh, how I hated her. In that moment I believed every awful thing I’d overheard my father say. She was dumb. She was a prude and a hypochondriac.

  “Maybe I’ll tell,” I repeated now.

  “Do it and you’ll be out on the street, living in the gutter,” my mother vowed. I pictured myself sleeping on the edge of the road between sidewalks and cars. “I’d like to see how far you’re going to get without us paying for college.”

  She was right, I figured, and so I said nothing. I had nowhere else to go.

  * * *

  I didn’t know if I was a person in need of supervision, but I was definitely a mess. By eleventh grade, I was assigned a later curfew and started going out more regularly on the weekends and getting rides home from friends, which meant more freedom. But I didn’t have proper boundaries; I couldn’t tell a good decision from a bad one. If I was over at a friend’s after dinner and someone suggested we drive into the city and the guy with the car had been drinking and was shady to begin with—say he blew up small rodents in his backyard for fun—I said yes and went along anyway. If we then drove straight to Washington Square Park and bought dime bags from seedy dealers and rolled our joints and smoked right out in the open and came home way past curfew and high, so be it. If Monica and I were staffing the Students Against Drunk Driving office and the boys were watching porn, I could yell at them for being sexist pigs, but I didn’t know how to simply, politely, ask them to turn the TV off. If we saw a mother at the mall with her toddler on a leash, I would scream at the mom like a returning soldier raging with PTSD.

  We drank cheap beer or wine coolers or hard alcohol, whatever we could cadge from an older sibling or a friend home on college break or who went to community college and still lived in town, or buy at the drive-through liquor barn that didn’t ask any questions if you had a fake ID. Almost all the kids in my town drank, or so it seemed to me at the time. As long as you didn’t get killed in a drunk-driving accident or in trouble with the police at a keg-party raid, it was okay. For me, the goal on a weekend night of partying was clear: Dress cute, get drunk, and hook up. I dreamed of having a real boyfriend, but any chance I had, I blew.

  One homecoming weekend, I met an older boy practicing skateboard maneuvers on the asphalt. His hair brushed past his right eye; his wallet and keys were attached to a chain looping from his jeans. He played me the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense and Little Creatures while we drank lemonade in his backyard. I’d been forcing myself to listen to the alternative radio station WLIR like it was my homework, so I could keep up with the conversation at a pair of picnic tables called the commons out by the school parking lot, where students were allowed to smoke. The music was starting to grow on me. I liked the Smiths and the Police and Depeche Mode’s Music for the Masses. But when he pressed play on the song “Psycho Killer,” I was hooked right away. He asked for my phone number and suggested we walk to school together, but I just couldn’t deal. I didn’t like anyone who liked me.

  Another older boy named John, who sometimes hung out with the high school drama kids and freaks, had a Mohawk and silver piercings up each ear and went to Nassau Community College. I’d just gotten my braces off. When I told John I’d never been kissed without them, he pulled me close and ran his tongue against my newly straightened teeth. One night we watched a movie at a friend’s house, and he caressed the back of my neck with an intoxicating combination of soft lips and tender fingertips while the other teenagers in the room sat there as if nothing were unusual. John called me, and held my hand in front of everyone even when we weren’t drinking, and took me to the drama club semiformal. When we were apart, I played “Just Like Heaven” by the Cure over and over in his honor. But John had a long-distance on-again, off-again girlfriend away at college. They were “taking space” and seeing other people. I couldn’t handle the ambiguity. When John asked what was wrong, I said it had to be her or me. He cried and left, and I never saw him again.

  I made do with random guys. I would let almost any boy with skateboarder hair (who would never call me, who maybe didn’t even remember my name) pull me onto his lap and eventually lead the way to a basement couch or a second-floor bedroom where he’d push himself on top of me. We’d dry-hump until he rubbed me raw, his jeans burning the skin of my legs, covered only by a black stretchy miniskirt and tights ripped at the knee. He’d suck on my skin and leave hickeys on my neck to prove he’d been there. But first there would have to be a kiss; I required that much. And that kiss would be enough to let me rewrite the encounter in my head, to imagine this as the beginning of a romance. One night a close friend’s serial-cheater boyfriend followed me into the bathroom. When the guilt rushed over me, I forced myself to ignore it and concentrate instead on the urgency of the illicit boy’s kisses, the way he backed me against the bathroom wall and pressed himself up against me, feeling for my breasts with one hand while locking the door behind him with the other.

  That February, I went to visit my brothers in St. Louis and stayed with Josh at his frat house, Sigma Nu, which was having a big Saturday-night keg party. (Josh had followed Mark to Wash U.) One of the frat boys was an upperclassman whose hair fell past his chin. He kept having to push it behind his ears. Zach fit my image of an artsy college guy, even if he was living in a frat house with my brother. Josh told me I didn’t have a chance. Zach had a girlfriend.

  At the party I got wasted. Eventually Zach noticed me. It was freezing outside near the kegs, but we smoked a cigarette and started talking, and then he kissed me. He took me to his room, and we started fooling around while his roommate lay passed out on the next bed over, Zach’s sheet of hair hanging over my face our only suggestion of privacy. And then his fingers, one and then two and then three, began probing the inside of my vagina. Which felt weird and painful and way too personal, but I didn’t know how to make it stop. This was what I had wanted, wasn’t it? Or was supposed to want? The next morning Josh was mad at both of us (Zach and me—mostly me) and said I had to spend the rest of the trip at Mark’s off-campus apartment.

  I came back home and told my friends the story as if it were something to brag about. Zach’s long hair. The dismissed girlfriend, the strange fingers down my underwear. How he’d tucked me into the top bunk with a blanket and I’d slept there for the few hours between hooking up and sunrise. I left out the part about how the bed had been spinning the entire time, and how he’d taken the bunk below instead of holding me afterward, and how Josh’s fraternity brothers said I was a slut.

  * * *

  When I did well in school, I took my accomplishments for granted. If I got a bad grade, I beat myself up. Sometimes I felt like a worthless piece of shit. Sometimes I hated myself so much I wanted to rip off my skin. And other times I felt a sort of mysterious, unauthorized inner confidence.

  My favorite subjects were English and social studies. I was a feminist, and I believed in socialism and communism once I heard about them. I wrote poetry. I wanted to be an actor or playwright or director or run political campaigns. But my parents said these dreams were unrealistic. We didn’t know people who wrote books (other than Andy’s mom) or plays or made films or were activists. Perhaps, then, I could grow up to be like Mr. Goodman.

  But my parents always said the biggest mistake they ever made was becoming teachers. Whatever you do, they said, don’t become a teacher.

  Maybe I could become an English professor like Gary on thirtysomething. I didn’t care about making money, but my parents swore I would change my mind about that once I grew up.

  “Professors make even less than teachers,” my mother said. �
��And it’s impossible to get a job.”

  Well, maybe I could be a psychologist.

  “You’ll need a 3.8 or higher in college to get into graduate school,” my mother told me. We both knew that didn’t seem likely given my math grades, despite my father’s attempts at tutoring me, sessions that ended in yelling and tears. “You’d have to take statistics.”

  “You’d make a great lawyer,” my father said.

  * * *

  Arguing was one thing in school; there it was a matter of expressing my opinion, and that was stressful enough. In fifth grade, Julie and I debated in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment and lost the class vote when our opponents’ mothers brought in pamphlets warning of co-ed bathrooms. But I resented having to stand up for myself and defend my beliefs at home, where it was all about taking sides and every debate got personal and ugly fast. Even a family game of Scrabble could turn cutthroat and mean.

  Mark and Josh were away at college, but on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur or Passover, they would sometimes drive home and our grandmother would come in from Queens and we’d all sit down together. When our grandmother had the energy, she’d bring her two-day pot roast, the family favorite. My parents cooked, too, or ordered in Happy Hostess catering, and my mother baked banana and pumpkin breads. We sat in the dining room on high-backed chairs, ate off my mother’s wedding china, and debated until the inevitable fight ensued and someone left the table crying.

  Usually it was my mother and father and brothers and grandmother on one side and me on the other. I had to stand up to them. I couldn’t just let their comments go, I couldn’t just sit there and not say anything. They believed in a free market, supply-side economics, and a strong military. People on welfare were lazy. When it came to sex and dating, my mother and grandmother were the biggest hardliners. Being gay was unnatural, suspect, and pretty much immoral. Having any kind of sex other than the heterosexual married kind was a problem. If a straight woman lived with a man before getting married, he’d never propose. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Besides, women who had sex before marriage, or at least without an engagement ring, were sluts. My grandmother wasn’t a yeller but nodded along. My parents said I provoked and pushed. I did. I’d ask my mother if she’d rather I end up with a black Jewish lesbian or a white Christian man.