think of those walks I know I took in New Jersey with Grandpa before my mother left. Did they even happen? Or were we actually in Florida, walking through a campus?
Later, Eli lies on the bed we share. He has a headache, having drunk too much. I know I should feel compassion. I should put a cold washcloth on his forehead, get him some water. But I’m too upset about Bill’s comments, about being pulled back to that terrible time in my life. I want Eli to take care of me right now, not the other way around.
“You shouldn’t have drunk so much,” I tell him, frustrated.
“I’m aware of that,” he mumbles.
“It’s not like you’ve never drunk wine before. You should know your limit.”
“How is your telling me this helping anything?” He groans and rolls over, away from me.
I lie on the bed next to him, feelings swarming in my chest.
“You never want to talk,” I say.
He sighs, annoyed. “I have a headache,” he says. “For God’s sake, just leave me alone.”
And that’s when I start to cry. Part of me is crying for real, thinking about that difficult time in my past. But the other part of me hopes Eli will feel sorry for me. He’ll turn over and put his arms around me, give me the kind of attention I crave. He doesn’t do that. He gets up, wincing as he does, and closes the door behind him. I lie there, the pain of his abandonment creeping through my body. I think of myself as that desperately sad girl in Florida, on the cusp of tremendous loss, walking among the grounds of a school she doesn’t know. That lost girl grips my ribs, hooks her bones behind mine. She wants so much to be loved, to believe someone, anyone, will love her enough to stay. Will I ever be free of her?
As our sophomore year begins, Eli starts to get fed up with me. I drive too slowly and then too fast. I am too concerned about how I look, and then not enough.
I have started on a new birth control, suggested by my mother, and for the first week of each month, I throw up in the middle of the night. I also get one cold after another, and then a series of urinary tract infections. I’m in bed often, always recovering from one thing or another. Eli is unimpressed. He sees my illnesses as a sign of weakness, as more ways I’m too precious. I need to toughen up. I don’t doubt him. It’s my first long relationship. I haven’t learned yet that people bring their baggage along and then dump it over their partner’s head. I figure he’s found more about me that is unworthy, more that is not good enough. I try to be better. Our sex takes a turn, as well, and not just because I am sick so much. Where at first I felt safe and free, I start to feel angry. Something happens when he touches my breasts in a certain way, or if he moves his hips just so. I don’t like that he thinks he should get something from me, from my body. I want to push him off me and run. I can’t stand the feel of him sometimes.
“What is the matter with you?” he asks again and again as I lie curled in the corner of the bed.
“I don’t know.”
He sighs angrily and stomps out of the room. But it’s true. I really don’t know, and because I don’t know, I start seeing a therapist.
Deirdre is in her mid-twenties, a graduate student interning for her master’s degree. She has straight, mousy hair, blunt cut to her chin. Her features are round, her cheeks bright with rosacea. Even with so little experience, she has perfected the therapist gestures—
the slightly cocked head, the gentle nods, pencil poised above her pad, like now as she waits for me to answer her question.
“Just angry,” I tell her. “I don’t know how else to describe it.”
“Do you feel like you want to hurt him?”
I shake my head no. Sometimes I do, but I know this is too dangerous to say. She told me at the beginning of the session if she had reason to think I would hurt someone, she would have to breach our confidentiality.
She writes on her pad, then asks if someone in my past hurt me. I shake my head.
“Force you to do something sexually you didn’t want to do?” she asks.
The obvious question. Anyone who is raped or molested will have issues with being touched again. But I walked willingly into all my sexual experiences. And those times I didn’t really want to, I didn’t try to stop them. It could be said I even encouraged them. A slut in every way. I look down at my hands, which are gripped together, and shake my head again.
She asks about Eli and our fights.
“I just wish I didn’t feel so needy all the time,” I tell her.
“Tell me about your neediness.”
I look out the small window, wondering where to begin. A squirrel rounds the trunk of a tree outside. Wind shakes the leaves, which are beginning to brown. After a moment, I start at the beginning. I tell her about Mom leaving and growing up in Dad’s apartment. I tell her how my neediness feels ugly, a gaping red sore I don’t want anyone to see.
“You don’t like being vulnerable,” she says. I shake my head. I had never thought of it that way, but I suppose it’s true. Being vulnerable makes me feel out of control, and when I’m out of control I’m unsafe, too aware anything can happen. I can be left. I can go unnoticed. I can be disregarded, like I’m not even there at all.
One weekend, visiting Maine, Susan pulls out a box with baby photos of Eli. The three of us sit on the floor and exclaim over his adorable blond curls and pudgy body.
“I was so cute,” Eli says.
“You really were.” I put a hand on his knee.
“You were almost too cute,” Susan says. “People would stop us on the street, commenting on it. You started to expect their attention.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” he says.
“We were spellbound by you too.” Susan frowns, looking down.
“We allowed you to get away with everything. We held you through your tantrums. We didn’t give you any boundaries.”
Eli rolls his eyes. “Here we go,” he says to me. “Here comes the psychoanalyzing.”
But I am intrigued. I want to know more.
“It’s our fault you have so much anger,” she says. She looks at him imploringly, wanting something, but Eli will have none of it. Eli puts the photos he’s holding back in the box. “Whatever, Mom,” he says.
“Don’t shut me out,” Susan says, her voice a little hysterical. I look away, embarrassed for her. “Let’s talk about this.”
But Eli gets up and goes to his bedroom, and I follow him. “I hate it when she does that.”
I sit beside him on the bed.
“I’m angry because I’m angry. Why does there have to be a reason for everything?”
“Maybe she’s right, though,” I say. “At least she’s accepting blame.”
He stands and starts yanking off his sweater. “I’m sick of her taking blame. I’m sick of her being such a fucking doormat with me.”
I bite my lip.
Over the next few months, Eli and I fight more and more often about our sex life, which is dwindling down to almost nothing. He reminds me his ex-girlfriend loved sex. She experimented with lots of positions, wanted to do it in public and all the time. I try to explain this is unlike me. I used to want to have sex all the time too. I never used to feel so protective, like I don’t want anyone touching me in that way. But this only makes him angrier. By winter break, we decide to spend the vacation apart and see what happens. Eli lands a two-week-long internship in marine biology in Florida, and Mom wants Tyler and me to spend the holidays with her and her boyfriend, Donald, in the Berkshires, where my grandparents own a condominium. So after Eli and I say good-bye, I drive to join my family.
Mom takes us skiing and shopping at antiques stores and boutiques. We decorate a Christmas tree and wrap presents for each other. We’re Jewish, but for reasons I never fully understood, Mom doesn’t want to be, so we’ve always celebrated Christmas. Christmas morning, I unwrap a box from Mom that has two piles of cotton inside labeled with the words “right” and “left.” She breaks into laughter.
“Get it?” she says, too loudly. “You said you wanted bigger boobs.”
She’s referring to a few days before when, trying on a top, I commented on the fact my chest couldn’t fill the spaces meant for breasts. I didn’t mean I wanted big breasts, but as usual she’s misconstrued the situation and
