myself. I close my eyes, knowing this. There is nothing I can say, nothing that will change the sickening truth of what I did. I’m as disgusted with myself as they are. The three of them walk away.
I find John to let him know he’ll need to get another ride, and I speed home, crying the whole way. Back in the apartment I immediately call Eli, who tells me he’s coming down to see me. I stay awake, smoking cigarette after cigarette, until he arrives at three a.m. and holds me until I have to leave for the cruise four hours later.
Part Two
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GLASS WALL
8
Where before I felt tentative with Eli, I’m now fervent. I cling to him like a lifeline, like the only solid thing in a sea of sand. I’ve allowed every other valuable thing to pass through my fingers. My friendships, my self-respect, my relationship with my sister. Maybe Tyler and I are too different to be friends, but we shared a childhood. We survived together. I could have at least had a comrade. When I was a little girl I used to love animals. I used to whimper over every smashed squirrel on the road, outraged at human carelessness. I used to run in front of strangers on sidewalks, stopping them so they wouldn’t step on an ant. “It’s alive and you’re alive,” I used to exclaim, adamant in my conviction. I wanted to be a veterinarian, or maybe a wildlife biologist. I imagined myself comforting a dog as I pulled sharp burrs from its paws, or in the wild somewhere, like Jane Goodall, coming to know some special animal the way she knew chimpanzees. But somewhere along the way I let that go too, lost to boys. Everything lost to boys. I won’t allow it again. Something has shifted inside me. Suddenly I see what I’ve done, the way I behaved with the Jennifers, all those boys who never cared about me.
I’ve been grasping at nothing, running in circles, trying desperately to fill the emptiness inside with nothing but air. If I think about it too much, I feel shame, so much shame. So I don’t. I focus my thoughts on moving forward, with Eli.
I want to change, and I believe all I need to do is want that. I need only to love Eli. It never occurs to me that it’s not really about him, not really about the boys. All I can think to do is to resolve: No more boys, no more grasping onto them as they turn away from me. I can feel the restlessness inside, the wanting always fluttering just below the surface, but I decide to ignore it. I can choose to turn away from my need, like so many boys have before. I don’t want to own it anymore. Don’t want anything more to do with it. I move to Maine that summer to be with Eli, and to be away from the ruins I’ve left behind in New Jersey.
Eli’s house is small and simple, heated in the winter by a woodstove. Only in the past year, Eli tells me, did his father build stairs from the first floor to the second. Before that they climbed an old ladder to get to the bedrooms. Worn, knotted rugs cover rustic wood floors. The rooms smell like burning wood, even in the summer. I love the simplicity, the sparseness. I love the idea that a family doesn’t need so much stuff to be whole, that perhaps there are other ways to feel full.
I also love Eli’s mother. Susan is a painter who is studying to be a psychotherapist. She wears her husband’s old shirts with jeans and almost always has paint on her hands. She cleans herself up only on days she takes her mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, out to lunch. My own mother is endlessly concerned with her appearance, wearing carefully applied makeup, Ralph Lauren, and Manolo Blahnik, always seeking others’ approval, even mine. I know it’s wrong to compare them, that there’s no point to it, but I do it all the same.
Susan paints daily. Some days she lets me enter her studio and see what she’s working on.
“It’s nice to have a girl around,” she tells me one day after emerging from her studio. She puts water in the kettle so we can have tea. I take a seat at the table, happy to hear I’m welcome.
“Living with a bunch of boys is fun, but I don’t think every woman could do it.”
“They’re smelly,” I say.
She laughs. “True. They’re also not talkers. This house can get very quiet.”
“Except for the grunting.”
She laughs again and I smile, loving that I’m making her laugh.
“No one around here wants to hear what I have to say.”
“I do,” I say, and I mean it.
Susan is working on a series of portraits called “Kylie’s Crow.”
Each one shows a crow in varying iridescent blacks, blues, purples, and greens perched on a tree outside a window. Kylie is a terminally ill girl Susan counsels each week, and Kylie tells her she sees a crow at her window every so often. The paintings are Susan’s attempts at capturing that crow. As Susan recounts this for me, her eyes tear, and I am deeply moved by how sensitive she is to this girl, to the world’s tiny details.
Once, Susan calls me to the window to see a fox in their backyard. I’ve never seen a fox before. Its fur is a fiery orange, its tiny nose twitching. We watch quietly as it creeps through the long grass.
“He visits us every so often,” she tells me. “It always feels like a gift to see him there.” Her face is lit up, open. I understand entirely what she means, that shocking color of fur, the lightness of his step. It seems otherworldly that he is actually there, in front of us, letting us see. “He’s beautiful,” I say. She smiles at me. “You’re not a city girl at heart, are you?”
I shrug, unsure.
“No. You belong in the country, where you can be yourself.”
I watch as the fox bounds back into the woods, realizing she’s right, wishing I could live here forever.
Susan takes walks every day, and when Eli would rather sleep off a hangover or watch TV, or when he’s busy chopping more wood for the stove, I go with her. She tells me about her family.
“My sister once confessed she didn’t know why I painted the things I did,” she tells me. “She said good art is of landscapes.” Susan laughs.
“As though all the other brilliant work out there—Picasso and Degas, Jackson Pollock, Paul Klee—none of that is good art.”
I laugh with her. I know some of those painters because of my mother, and I really want Susan to like me, to think of me as her equal. No one’s ever talked to me like this, like another adult. Susan walks on, quiet now. Sometimes when she grows silent like this I feel intrusive, as if despite saying it was nice to have me around, she actually prefers the silent house of men. After a bit, though, she continues. “It was a mean thing to say to me. Painting is my life’s work. She basically said what I do is shit. My sister was so often thoughtless like that. Finally I had enough.”
I think about my mother and the insensitive way she sometimes treats me. As though reading my thoughts, she says, “What about your family? You never mention them.”
“I keep hoping if I don’t mention them, they’ll go away,” I say, and she laughs. But I describe them, relieved to finally tell someone how difficult things have felt. She listens, nodding to let me know she understands.
“My mother used to paint,” I tell her.
“Really?”
“Yeah, but it’s different,” I say. “She left it behind to be a doctor.”
“Still,” Susan says. “Your mother must know what it feels like to capture something—a moment, or a feeling. All people who make art want to express what’s inside.”
I consider this. It’s hard to think of my mother this way, as someone who connects to her core. I feel disappointed, but I’m not sure why.
Susan glances at me, seeing my doubt. “You never know what’s going on inside someone. When my mother developed Alzheimer’s, she started inadvertently peeling back years of protective layers. She used to wear a hard mask whenever I was near, always keeping me at bay. Now her face lights up when she sees me. There’s something beautiful in that, in the way something as terrible and destructive as Alzheimer’s has given her a chance to be herself again, and us a chance to recover our relationship.”
Susan has tears in her eyes and she doesn’t look at me. I can see there’s something else she’s not sharing.
