Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity

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. Anger, perhaps, or a deep pain she has to protect. I stay quiet, not sure what to say, not sure what she wants from me.

“Enough about me,” Susan says after a moment, shaking away the moment like a dog shaking off water. “Let’s talk about you. Tell me about your interests.”

I hesitate, stepping to the side as a car ambles slowly by.

“I guess I’m not sure yet.”

“There’s got to be something.”

“There is reading,” I say. I shrug.

“Reading is good. What do you read?”

I shrug again. “My sister sent me some novels I liked.” I don’t feel comfortable, like I’m trying to talk about something I have no knowledge of. So I’m relieved when she stops me and points to a dandelion that is twirling about, though there is little wind and nothing else around it is moving with the same force.

“Look at that,” she says. “How can anyone not think there is some great energy in the world, propelling things?”

She says things like this often, making me think. Susan makes us dinner most nights, but she refuses to do dishes because of her eczema. Somewhat proudly she shows me the inflamed, dry skin on her palms while Eli’s father, a quiet, gentle man, stands scrubbing at the sink.

“Oh, please,” Eli says, annoyed. “You could do dishes if you didn’t aggravate the eczema with paint.”

Susan doesn’t look at him. “Eli has eczema too.” She turns to him with her calm exterior, but I see that there’s something more volatile brewing beneath. “I’m so sorry about that, honey.” She reaches for his hand but he yanks his back.

“I’ll live,” he says.

Her face crumples, revealing things I didn’t know but are suddenly clear—how much she needs Eli’s love and approval, how insecure she really feels. She turns and walks from the room, but Eli doesn’t seem to care.

Eli works some odd jobs, cleaning and repairing boats, painting houses. Some days, if it’s something quick, he takes me with him. I sit in the grass in the sun with a book and observe. Eli is tall and muscular. He has ropy veins in his forearms and big, masculine hands. I love the way he looks, the size of him. When he hugs me, I feel safe.

One night he goes out with a friend while I stay at his house with Susan, drinking tea and talking. An hour or so after I’ve gone to bed I wake to him struggling with something in the room. I sit up, confused. He pushes a huge terra-cotta container with flowers toward the bed. It’s at least two feet around, the kind of decorative pot one finds outside a store.

“Look,” he says, laughing, clearly drunk. “I brought you flowers.”

“Oh, my God.” I cover my mouth, trying not to laugh. “You’re crazy.”

“Crazy about you,” he says. He crawls into the bed with me, his hands still covered with dirt from the pot. He reeks of beer. He wraps his arms around my middle and kisses me. He slips off my T-shirt and underwear, and we make love. Really make love, which I’ve never done before him. We kiss tenderly, look into each other’s eyes. He moves slowly, waiting for me before he comes. After, his breath even, his eyes closed, I tenderly brush a curl back from his face.

This is what it feels like to love a man.

Susan asks me to sit for her so she can paint me. I’m thrilled she thinks enough of me to want this. Each day, while Eli works, I sit for an hour in her studio while she paints.

When the painting is done, she gives it to me. The background is busy with flowered wallpaper. In contrast, my image is serene. I wear overalls, one strap falling off my shoulder, childlike. My expression is slightly sad. I try to see what she sees, who I really am. Eli takes me out on a sailboat to his family’s island. The sun sparkles on the bay. Little whitecaps scatter across the surface from the wind. The boat glides quickly. Eli shifts positions, keeping the sail taut while I sit back, admiring the scenery. Thick pines fill the many islands we pass. Osprey pass over the boat. Eli explains his mother’s family is wealthy.

“My mom won’t take any of the money,” he says over the sound of the wind. “It’s so stupid.”

“She’s mad at them,” I say.

He looks over at me. I can see the anger in his eyes. “She can do whatever the fuck she wants, but she should consider me. I’d like that money. I’m fucking entitled to it.”

I don’t say anything, knowing whatever it is it will just piss him off further. I close my eyes, letting the wind blow my hair back, feeling the warm sun on my face.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” he goes on. “You have money.”

He spits this last part.

“I’d take your mother over my family any day,” I say, defensive.

“You can have her. The two of you can sit around and bitch about your families all day.”

I press my lips together. He’s being mean, and I’m starting to learn it’s best to stay quiet when he’s feeling that way.

Eli anchors the boat, and we take the small rowboat waiting at a buoy to the shore. An old, white clapboard house sits on the island. Gray driftwood is piled around the grassy meadow, and pine trees cluster behind the house. Inside, Eli explains the house has no electricity. Candle sconces line the walls for light in the evening. An old generator runs the plumbing.

We climb on to the large driftwood, no longer thinking about our argument on the boat, and make love outside in the sandy grass. We walk naked through the pinewoods surrounding the house, just because we can.

I don’t ever want to leave.

The few times I do go back to New Jersey, I make Eli come with me. New Jersey is gray and busy. The highways are filled with cars, everyone heading somewhere in a hurry. I am continually edgy and twitchy here and afraid I’ll run into one of the Jennifers, but I never do. To combat the nervousness, I go shopping. It’s old habit when I’m back here, the best way to stave off unwanted feelings. The first time I take Eli with me to the mall, though, I’m embarrassed. I don’t want him to know this side of me, the side that wasted so many afternoons here, shopping for clothes with my father. For all the ways Eli feels gypped of the plush life he believes he’s entitled to, he also has pride about his family’s self-sufficiency. Perhaps because of what he didn’t get, he’s defensive about it. He gets mad when he sees things coming easily to other people. If he has to work hard, everyone else should too. So I’m surprised by the way his face lights up when, out of my guilt for being one of those people for whom things come easily, I offer to buy him clothes with my father’s credit card. Eli eagerly leads me into Eddie Bauer and Banana Republic where we rack up Dad’s bill.

To keep Eli with me, I also agree to quit smoking, and quitting winds up being much easier than I thought it would be. In August, Dad and Nora rent another house in Dunewood on Fire Island, and we all take the ferry once again. The ocean stretches out beyond the deck of our house. The warm sun beats on to the sand. I see details I didn’t notice last time I was here: the sparkling light on the water as the sun moves across the sky, tiny sand crabs that dig down into the sand when I try to catch them. Eli and I lie together on the deck with glasses of lemonade and work on our tans. Sometimes we hold hands. It’s strange to be here again, this time with a boyfriend. I watch the teenagers lying on the beach, none of whom I recognize from two summers before. There’s no sign of Justin, either, which is a relief. I don’t have that old anxiety as I walk along the boardwalks, the terrible whisper at my ear: Who will love me? Who will love me? Eli loves me now.

About a week into our time on Fire Island, a longtime family friend, Bill, comes to stay for a few nights. He and his now ex-wife used to be close with Mom and Dad when they were married couples. They were one of the ones with a loft in SoHo. Like most of Mom and Dad’s friends, Bill chose to remain friends with just one of them after the divorce. He chose Dad.

One night, sitting out on the deck and drinking too much wine, Bill tells me that following my parents’ divorce, my mother tried to have custody of Tyler and me given to my grandparents. As he speaks, his voice full of outrage at my mother for trying to keep us from Dad, I suddenly remember myself at eleven, visiting a private high school somewhere near where my grandparents live in Florida. The memory comes to me as though from a great distance. I get nothing but the image—the large Spanish buildings, the spiky green grass—no feelings, no thoughts. I can smell the moist, earthy air, can sense the bright sun in my eyes, my sister and grandparents beside me. I 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 used it to create attention for herself. She pulls Donald closer to look inside the box. “See? I labeled them left and right.”

Donald laughs, accommodating her.

I give Tyler a look, needing an ally, but she smiles at Mom.

“Come on, Kerry,” Mom says, seeing my expression. “Don’t be so sensitive.”

“I’m not being sensitive.” I crumple the wrapping paper.

“Your breasts are fine just the way they are,” she says. When I say nothing, she pouts. “You have no sense of humor.”

And when I still say nothing, she says, “You must hear about the outfit Claude is designing for me for my practice’s grand opening. It’s absolutely stunning. A black silk tunic and pajama pants. He’s sewing in beads from a bracelet Grandma got in Indonesia.”

Tyler nods. “I think you told us already. It sounds really nice.”

I wish I never agreed to spend break this way. Snow covers the ground and dark tree branches. Plows build piles taller than me along the side of the road, and because it keeps coming, Donald goes out in the morning to shovel the walkway to the car. Something about the snow, the quiet, the blankness, highlights my panic as I think about Eli. I decide I will do whatever it takes to keep him. I’ll have sex more often. I’ll stop needing so much from him. I know these thoughts are desperate, no different from the ones I had years ago with Heath, but I can’t help it. Faced with losing Eli, I feel exactly as I did then, as though I haven’t grown at all.

While Eli is in Florida, collecting specimens on a boat, I can’t talk with him, which makes everything worse. Anxiety knocks against my ribs, keeping me awake at night. I wish I still smoked, just so I would have something to calm myself.

At dinner, Mom talks about her new practice, how Donald, who is a brain researcher, is now going for his MD as well. When I bring up studying Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Mom gasps as though someone has grabbed her throat. I stop short.

“Did I mention yet the outfit Claude is designing for the grand opening?”

I set my mouth.

Tyler looks down.

“And the beads from Indonesia? The ones that Grandma brought back?” She looks at Donald. “You saw the sketches. Isn’t it beautiful?”

He nods. “It really is.”

“I was talking here,” I say.

“What?” Mom looks at me, innocent surprise on her face.

“I was talking about my Renaissance Literature class.”

“Oh.” She puts a jeweled hand to her throat, takes a sip of her wine. “I’m sorry. By all means, continue.” Her expression changes to feigned interest.

“Forget it,” I say.

“No,” she says. “I want to hear.”

“I don’t care,” I say, frustrated.

“OK, then,” she says. She glances briefly at Donald for approval, and he smiles, a condescending smile that says I’m the one being immature.

“I’m going to bed,” I say, though it’s only seven thirty. Mom frowns. “You need to learn to enjoy other people’s company.”

I don’t say anything. Silence, I’m learning, is my only defense. I gather my plate and take it to the kitchen. Later, Tyler comes downstairs to the room we share. I’m reading

Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories for a class in school, his fictional exploration of coming of age. Each story recounts a traumatic event, and I’m struck by Nick’s struggle to understand himself as a man in the face of each one. For all the times I’ve given myself over to them, all the energy I spend thinking about them, I still know nothing about men, about their hardships and hurts, the things that bring them to their knees. In my mind they’re still invulnerable and too powerful. They still have all the control. Tyler moves around the room, changing her clothes, looking for her own book. She is out of college now, and she lives in Chicago with her boyfriend. I want to ask her how she can stand it, being so far away, how she can trust he will keep loving her without being there to prove it, without his touch to know she truly exists. I don’t know whether she’s even thinking of him, if, like me, she can think of almost nothing else.

“Is it OK that this light is on?” I ask. I want to begin a conversation with her, but I don’t know how to start.

“That’s fine.” She takes off her glasses, rests them beside the bed, and gets under the covers. She rolls over.

“It won’t bother you?”

“Uh-uh.”

I hesitate, place a bookmark on the page where I’ve stopped.

“Tyler?”

“What is it?”

“Are you having any fun here?”

“I’m making the best of it.”

“I don’t want to be here.”

She sighs, still facing away from me. “But you are, so why not just go with it?”

“I don’t want to just go with it,” I say, annoyed now. She sighs again, annoyed too. “Are we done? I’m tired.”

I set my mouth. “Fine.”

I wait, my leg bouncing furiously on the bed, and soon her breath becomes long and even. I lean my head back and stare at the ceiling, too pissed now to sleep.

The day I know Eli is back in Maine, I call from a pay phone while Mom and Tyler are in the Price Chopper buying groceries. When he gets to the phone, he sounds different, distant.

“I miss you,” I tell him. “I’ll do whatever I need to make this work.”

“Winter break isn’t even over,” he says. “Let’s give it some time.”

“I don’t want to give it time,” I say. “I just want you.”

He doesn’t say anything. I wait, my heart sick, knowing something has changed. People walk by behind me, scolding children, pushing rumbling carts full of disposable diapers and Diet Coke.

“Kerry,” Eli starts.

“Oh, God.”

“There was someone there, in Florida,” he says.

“No.”

“She goes to Clark,” he says.

I squeeze my eyes shut, afraid I might throw up.

“Did you have sex with her?”

“No,” he says. “We spent some time together. And we kissed.”

I try to take a deep breath, but my lungs are too tight. I can’t stand to think of it, of Eli and some nameless girl, his face close to hers.

“It’s so easy with her. Relaxing.”

“Don’t,” I say, stopping him. I want to cry. I can feel it lodged in my throat, but it won’t come. The implication is clear: It’s too hard with you. You’re too hard. “Don’t do this to us.”

“It’s already done,” he says. “Before Florida it was already done.”

“But I love you.” For the first time I notice an elderly man is waiting for the phone. He stands back, respectful, seeing my face. He makes me feel even worse.

“I love you, too,” Eli says. “I just don’t think that matters enough anymore.”

When we are done, I walk quickly along the sidewalk. Gray snow sits in piles against the curb. The air is icy. I hadn’t noticed it while on the phone, but now it begins to seep into my skin. I like it, this physical sensation. It distracts me from the dull ache I feel. I stand at the entrance to Price Chopper. I cannot go inside. An old lady pushes her cart. A woman walks by with a little boy who jumps and jumps. It is all too ordinary. Too sharply different from the chaos I feel inside. So I wait for Mom and Tyler in the cold.

Back at school, I waste no time. Shawn thinks I’m cute, so I start with him. Then Alex. Then Greg. One of them, I can’t remember which, tells me I’m a femme fatale because I suck men in and then spit them out. He has no idea.

Eli takes up with the girl he met in Florida. The first time I see her, I want to slit my throat—or hers. She is beautiful, with porcelain skin and straight black hair. She’s the picture of old money, right out of a J. Crew catalog. She’s what I imagine the estranged part of Eli’s family looks like, the part that owns that island. I do my best to avoid anywhere I know Eli might be, but there are times I’m blindsided. When I catch glimpses of them together I feel physical pain, like someone has punched me in the gut. I take up smoking again, and more and more boys.

Nights I’m alone, I lie in bed, aching, hating my need, my big, nasty need, the thing that makes me unlovable.

A weekend at home. I sit around the apartment, not wanting to do anything. Dad offers to take me shopping, but even that sounds depressing to me. Nora makes me egg breakfasts with good bagels from the local deli. She sits with me while I read a book.

“Honestly?” she says. “He was too handsome.”

“This isn’t helping,” I tell her.

“I mean it.” She sets down her book and her red wire-rimmed glasses. “Miranda’s father was very handsome. So was the man I dated just after him. But they were also schmucks. Good-looking men think they can have whatever they want. They get coddled too much.”

I pull my legs up beneath me. “But I’m attracted to them.”

“We all are, honey. But take it from me. I stopped dating very handsome men a long time ago.”

“Hey,” Dad says as he comes out of his bedroom. “I heard that.”

Nora just smiles. “Don’t take it too personally, love,” she tells him.

Spring vacation, I get Dad to take me skiing in Taos, New Mexico. I have wanted for a long time to see the Southwest—the muted colors, the long, sloping mountains, landscape celebrated in the books and films by and about Native Americans I read and see in my classes. As we drive in our rental car from Albuquerque, I am not disappointed. The mountains are like sculpture, the sky an ashen blue. This is exactly what I need.

Chances are, my dad needs this too. Just a few months ago he lost his job as vice president of engineering at the company where he had been for thirteen years. Some kind of management takeover. He got a hefty severance, and as an innovative designer, he won’t have trouble finding a new job. But he’s quick to anger, and he also seems depressed. He was a head honcho in his last job, worked up to be vice president and had been offered the presidency many times. He had designed the company’s star products, and his staff admired and deferred to him. He had attained celebrity status in the world of water heating design. Years later, someone in the field will say to me, “That’s your father? That man is your father? Will you introduce me?” as though I just told him my father was Robert DeNiro. He was also losing a salary that had grown to tremendous proportions over the years.

Now he has to establish that somewhere else. At his age, he tells me, he shouldn’t have to reestablish himself in his career. Even though he’ll be footing the bill, taking this trip together is my way of trying to help him feel better, just like those shopping trips used to do for me. The day after we arrive in Taos, the Gulf War begins. We watch on the wide-screen television in the bar with the other resort guests as the United States bombs Iraq. We sip our drinks, wide-eyed for four days. And then it is done.

At dinner, eating dirty rice and ceviche, we discuss the war, its distance, its irrelevance to our lives. A child of the Cold War, I didn’t think I would experience real war in my lifetime, and if I did, I thought it would be monumental. This feels like a movie I just happened to catch on TV. Dad talks about the media and the ways in which what we saw about the war is shaped to make us feel good.

“We don’t know what really happened,” he warns. One night, a guy catches my eye. He smiles at me from the bar where he sits alone. On my way back from the bathroom, he touches my arm and invites me to join him. He has a strong accent, from France it turns out. He has been visiting for the past week, and his friends have gone home already. Tonight is his final night. Two hours later, François and I are naked in his room. We have sex three times before dawn, when he leaves in a taxi and I climb into the sleeping loft in Dad’s and my room and sleep for most of the day. Dad asks no questions, as usual.

The next night, I meet Amos. Amos works at the resort, so he takes me to the staff’s private hot tub where I give him a blow job before we fuck.

To my delight, I haven’t thought of Eli more than once the whole trip.

9

There is a new boy I like. I see him every other day when our classes let out at the same time. He has long, dark hair and unbelievably beautiful eyes. He sits on the campus lawn with a few other guys and passes around a joint. My friends, who I see more of now that Eli is out of the picture, tell me about him. His name is Leif, a music major. He plays guitar in a band, and they are pretty sure he doesn’t have a girlfriend. They walk over there with me, and almost immediately I can feel the energy between us, the promise of something to come. The night of my upstairs neighbor’s party, a party where I know Leif will be, I lie in my bed with my friend Bevin plotting seduction. I will use pot I took from my dad ages ago and haven’t smoked, and I’ll dress as hot as possible. We giggle, excited for me, excited for what might happen tonight.

When Leif walks into the party, I keep him on my radar, waiting for the right moment. And when he is alone a moment, filling his beer from the keg in the kitchen, I pounce. He follows me downstairs to my apartment to get high, and I take out a bowl and the bag of pot and hand it to him. We sit on my bed and he lights up and passes it to me. We chat about our classes, where we’re from. Even in the haze of getting high, I can’t feel calm. All I want is for him to kiss me, to put his hands on me. There is something about him, his scent, the way he looks. I don’t know. My desire for him is fierce. I could tear his clothes off. I could eat him off a plate. At each awkward silence, I wait, poised for that kiss.

“Listen,” he says finally, “I’m very attracted to you.”

I smile.

“But there’s a situation you should know about.”

My smile drops.

He explains he’s been seeing someone. He doesn’t think he wants to stay with her, but she’s his friend, and he should probably break up with her before anything else happens. I nod, trying to look calm. Inside, my heart is filling. He wants me more than this girl.

“Whatever you need to do,” I say. But as I do, I turn my body toward him, opening myself. He nods, his eyes on mine.

And then he kisses me. We move quickly, removing each other’s clothes. He moves over me, then in me. Our sex is crazed, animallike. And it doesn’t stop there. We have sex four more times before we finally fall asleep at dawn. Even asleep, though, we’re aroused, and we wake again and again for more.

At nine the next evening, we agree we should probably get some food. We joke about feeding other needs. We take a shower together, and then drive to a nearby Thai restaurant. The other customers politely chat, their napkins on their laps. They dip their chopsticks gracefully into their food. We, on the other hand, should be ripping raw flesh with our teeth, blood dripping down our chins. Or at least that’s how it feels after all the sex. We glance at each other shyly, trying to come up with things to say. There’s no way to get around the weirdness. Sure we shared bodily fluids, our most intimate places. But we’ve barely exchanged anything else.

When we get back, it’s close to one in the morning. Leif leaves to head back to his apartment. He’s explained that the girl he’s been seeing lives in the apartment above his with a group of three other girls, and they’ll all know he didn’t come home last night. It’s like a coven up there, he says. The four of them may as well be stirring a brew. But he has to face the consequences eventually. I watch him go and then climb into bed. The sheets smell like him. We didn’t establish anything about whether we’d see each other again. I stare up at the ceiling, unable to sleep, a tangle of desire inside. Three days pass, and I hear nothing. At night I can barely sleep; every sound is him. Twice I get up, pad into the kitchen, and open the door, sure I will see him there. But it’s just my roommates, or the wind, or strangers passing by. I tell Bevin I’ve never been with anyone so incredibly good-looking. He’s probably too good-looking for me. But she just frowns. “He’s not too good for you,” she says.

“Why would you say that?”

Then, on the fourth day, while cleaning, something great happens: I find a folded piece of paper under my bed. I open it to find lines of music notes scribbled across the page. Leif. From the student center pay phone, my heart bursting, I call him, and when he comes to the phone, I tell him about the paper. I don’t describe it, afraid he’ll determine it’s something he doesn’t need. I tell him it looks important, and he agrees to come by that evening to pick it up.

When he arrives, I’m ready. I’ve been ready for an hour. For days. Since the second he left me that night and I watched him lope away. My hair is perfect. I’m wearing an outfit that is both sexy and looks like I threw it on without a thought—well-worn jeans and an old T-shirt that hangs off one shoulder and reveals a glimpse of my stomach when I lift my arms. I lead him to my bedroom and hand him the piece of paper. He looks at it, but only for a moment. I see he’s not here for the paper. My throat is tight with anticipation.

“She was really upset,” he says. He sits on my bed. I sit beside him. I can smell him, his scent, warm and spicy. I nod my head, trying to look sympathetic. What I want to know is, Are you mine now?

“It’s been pretty bad, actually.” He leans his elbows on his knees. He runs his fingers across the fold of the paper. I am hyperaware of him, of his hands, his legs.

“What are you going to do?” I ask.

“I don’t know.” He glances at me. “I think I should just stay away.”

Stay away. My throat tightens. Stay away from me?

“There were so many times this past week I almost came back here.”

He looks right at me now.

“Really?” I’m overwhelmed, just knowing he was thinking of me. I’m so used to my fantasies being, well, fantasies. And here, he may well have been standing at my door like I had hoped. “Why didn’t you?”

He shakes his head. “I wanted to, believe me. It’s been bad at my place. I’ve been in hell every day, afraid of what she’ll do. Her roommates trap me when I get home and try to talk me into staying with her.” His brow is creased. He’s clearly stressed. “Do you have any more of that weed?”

I take it out, watch as he lights a bowl. He holds it out to me, but I shake my head. I can’t help but think of Eli and that girl, how he had said being with her was easy compared to being with me. I don’t like to think of Leif’s ex-girlfriend, feeling the kind of pain I felt with Eli, but I push that from my mind. Leif lights it a few more times, sucking hard until it’s all but cashed. As he blows out smoke, he seems to relax a bit.

“You could just stay here,” I try. “Until things blow over.”

He nods, shakes the bowl a little, and holds it up to the light.

“Do you have a paper clip or something?”

I find him a paper clip from my desk, and he rubs it in the bowl, separating the charred bits. Then he lights it again.

“It wouldn’t be a problem,” I say. “I could leave the front door open for you at night.”

I watch him, hopeful.

He nods again. “That might not be a bad idea.” He puts down the bowl and turns to me. The crease in his forehead is gone. His gaze is loose, his eyes red. And we start to kiss. We stay in bed again through the next afternoon. Our conversations are brief and pointed, the kind of conversations people only have when in bed together.

“You have beautiful eyes,” I tell him.

“No, you have beautiful eyes. And this part of you,” he says, running his hand along my hip. “I love this.”

He leaves to go to class, but this time he’s coming back that night.

I go to class too, feeling sexy, light, a girl others might want to be. Once, in the student center, I see the girl Leif left for me. Her eyes make little slits as we pass, but rather than guilt or fear, I feel elated. He chose me over her.

Leif and I have tons of sex, standing against walls, in locked bathrooms at parties, on the floor of my bedroom. We can’t keep our hands off each other. During the day, we part to go to our separate classes. I listen to lectures on The Faerie Queene, discuss symbolism in The Glass Menagerie, all the while aware of Leif’s scent still on my skin. At two or three in the morning every night, Leif comes into my apartment after working on music compositions in the studio, and he finds me in bed, waiting for him. Because I know he will come, the waiting is delicious, so different from what waiting has been in the past. My body is always aroused, just waiting. On Spree Day, a campus tradition when classes are canceled and all the students party, Leif and I go back to my room to have sex. Outside, I hear students yelling and laughing. Music streams from someone’s radio. Lots of kids take acid on Spree Day. Or they carry jugs of vodka and orange juice. They smoke joints right out in the open on the green. You can always tell which ones are tripping by their huge pupils. They look past you like you’re not even there. Leif strips off my clothes and then his. He presses his mouth to my neck. I close my eyes, all my senses alive. I can’t imagine being happier, more filled.

Sometimes I see Eli around campus. He is still with that girl, but it’s different now that I have Leif; it’s that easy to replace the spot Eli took up in my heart. He was my first real love, but I can speak of him as someone in my past. Leif is with me now. He plays gigs at parties around campus and in the Pub. We arrive together to parties, and guys shake his hand, ask him about his playing. They nod at me, his girlfriend. While he plays guitar, girls dance. They look up at him with desire, and it gives me great pleasure to walk up to him during his breaks and kiss him, knowing they’re watching.

A couple months after we start seeing each other, I go to the bathroom while at a party, and I’m horrified to see something small and crablike crawl up from my pelvis. I brush it off me. I’d been itchy down there, I realize now, but I hadn’t thought much about it. Freaked, I set out to find Leif.

Sure enough, we both have crabs. He tells me his ex had them when they first started sleeping together, but he thought they were gone. She got her revenge, I suppose.

We use his leftover crab shampoo that night and wash our sheets, and he finds some poison that works to kill them in the carpet and couch.

Just a few weeks later, though, I notice something else strange down there, little tags of pale skin. My heart pounding, I call my mother.

“Oh, Kerry,” she says when I describe it.

“What?” I ask, flipping out. “What is it?”

“I can’t diagnose without seeing it,” she says, “but it sounds like HPV.”

My heart stops. Three letters, just one away from a deadly disease.

“What’s that?”

She explains human papillomavirus to me. Genital warts. She talks about rates of infection and populations seeing the biggest increases while I grip the phone, feeling sick. When it comes to medicine, she’s always interested in telling me everything she knows. She doesn’t listen for what I really need right now, which is reassurance. Being a doctor, and the prestige that comes with it, is so immensely important to her, so much more important than being a mom. That’s not new information. She left Tyler and me to become a doctor. But her preference can still sting.

In the morning, Leif and I go together to the Planned Parenthood, where they take us into separate examination rooms. My nurse is tall and no-nonsense. She pulls the hot light down so it showcases my vagina and pushes at the folds of skin down there with her fingers. Then she slides in a speculum.

“Did you have sex recently?” she asks.

I nod. Of course I have.

“You shouldn’t have before you came here,” she says, her voice tight.

“Not since last night,” I tell her defensively. “And I took a shower this morning.”

She sighs, annoyed. “There’s still semen in here, making it difficult for me to determine what’s your fluid and what’s someone else’s.”

I press my lips tightly together, ashamed. I can’t even determine who gave me the warts. According to my mother, incubation for HPV is three months, so it could have been François or Amos in New Mexico. Or it could have been one of the guys I slept with before Taos. I don’t need anyone to tell me how bad that is, I can’t even isolate where I got them. I don’t need anyone else to tell me what a slut I really am.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Well,” she says, “we’ll just have to do our best.”

She does a Pap smear and then takes a small bottle out of a cabinet. She explains she’ll need to use some type of acid to burn off the warts, and I’ll need to come back for a few more treatments until they are gone. She also explains the Pap will reveal whether I’m in danger of cervical cancer, which some forms of HPV threaten to cause.

I close my eyes, scared, as she applies something to my labia. The acid stings like crazy, but I hold myself still, not wanting to further disappoint the nurse. When I sit up, she looks me in the eye. Her face is stern. “You shouldn’t have sex again until these are gone. Otherwise you risk infecting your partner.”

I lower my eyes, sick with shame.

I find Leif waiting for me, and we go out to my car. He’s happy because he didn’t get infected, and I’m relieved. If he had, I would have felt even worse than I already do. I lower myself slowly into the driver’s seat like an old person, my rear still sore. But I don’t complain. I got what I deserve. Mom calls later that day.

“How are you doing?” she asks. “I’ve been thinking about you. I know today’s the day you went to the clinic.”

“I’m OK.” I lie in bed, cradling the phone with my head. She can be caring like this sometimes, like the mother I’ve always wanted her to be. I think of what Eli’s mother told me about the Alzheimer’s releasing her mother’s more loving self. It helps me to know there is this part to my mother. There is a possibility that somewhere inside, if it weren’t for all her own hurts and insecurities, she might really love me. I close my eyes, wishing as I do at times she were here with me, smoothing my hair.

“Be sure to take care of yourself,” she says. “Is Leif there? Is someone tending to you?”

“I’m really OK,” I say again. “Leif is in his studio, getting a composition done before class. But I’m fine. Only a little sore.”

“All right. Don’t stay there all alone. Call a friend.”

“I will.”

We hang up and I force myself to rise. I turn on the CD player, which plays a Tom Waits song. I think about going somewhere. A coffee shop. The student center. Calling Bevin, maybe, like Mom said. But ultimately I just get back into bed. Some days nothing sounds good.

When summer comes, Leif goes home to New Hampshire to perform with his band, and I stay in my apartment at school. I have nowhere else to go, no friends left in New Jersey, no internship or job like some of my friends. I’ve allowed Eli, and then Leif, to occupy my entire life, enough that I have not begun to focus on anything meaningful in my life. In high school, Jennifer A once told me she aspired to be a housewife. She wanted to live the cliché, watching soap operas and eating all day. She didn’t want to have to perform out in the world. But I don’t feel like that. I love vibrant discussions about literature. I love to write. I sit in the front row of most classes with my hand raised. There are things I know I’m good at, if I’d only keep my focus there.

Seeing this discrepancy in my life begins to nag at me, like a child tugging on my sleeve. What am I doing? Why can’t I ever just focus on me? My therapist and I discuss this, and she encourages me to create something in my life that will hold my interest. So I apply for an August writing workshop and am accepted. As often as possible, I drive up to Leif’s to see him. His family lives in a big, sterile house in the country. The front yard is a long, lovely stretch of wildflowers, and at the end of the driveway, behind the house, woods encase a pristine lawn. Leif is so perfect to me, so surreal, it is hard for me to grasp the idea of him growing up here, with parents, in a small town, like any other kid. Leif’s father is friendly, also a musician. He works with computers, but in his spare time he sits with Leif and they work out phrases or play jazz. He watches Leif play with admiration and pride, and he admits he wishes he could play music rather than work in his field. Leif’s mother is different. She admires Leif’s talent and drive like his father, but she holds herself at a distance, cold and detached. I try to engage her in conversations, but she rarely wants to talk. We don’t think the same, like Susan and I did. I can tell she thinks I’m flighty with my interest in psychology. Or, who knows, maybe she’s worried I’m analyzing her. Either way, I can feel her disapproval of me. She thinks I’m not good enough for her son.

As soon as we are out of his parents’ house, Leif gets high. We meet his bandmates, he smokes some more with them, and I watch them rehearse or play gigs in town. We regularly get back to his house in the early morning hours, and then Leif sleeps until two or three the next day. He keeps his room dark to ward off daylight, and when I stay there I find I’m always groggy and often bored. I wake long before him and sneak down to the kitchen to find something to eat, thankful his parents are at work. When I grow bored enough, I crawl back into bed and nudge him to have sex, just for something to do.

When he does wake, he moves slowly. He gets himself something to eat, goes to the piano room, and plays with a composition he’s been working on. I follow him from room to room.

“Let’s do something,” I say, sitting on the piano bench next to him.

“Like what?” He leans forward and erases a note, writes a new one in. His handwriting is chicken scratch, but his musical notes are always neat and perfectly shaped.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Anything. Let’s go out for lunch.”

“Isn’t it too late for lunch?” He begins to play again. He really is very good.

“Then dinner.”

He grimaces. “I just got up. I don’t really want to go anywhere.”

I sigh, resigning myself. After a few more minutes of sitting I walk around the house, looking at art and photos on the wall. There is a traditional painting of a man on a horse, another of a bouquet of roses. I think about how different Leif is from this art, which is safe and straightforward, nothing beneath the surface. Leif is intensely creative. His music takes risks. I wonder how he fits in amid this family, if he shoulders the burden of being the family risk-taker, so they don’t have to. I can’t help but notice how he acts around them, always happy and even, but then as soon as he’s away he gets high or he sleeps.

I also don’t find any pictures of Leif as a child. When I ask him, he goes into his closet and takes down a shoebox of photos.

“I was fat as a kid,” he explains as I sift through the pictures of Leif and his friends. It’s true he was chubby, but he wasn’t so big as to be called fat.

“There are no baby pictures?” I ask.

He shrugs. “I suppose there are somewhere.”

I examine each picture, wanting more. “How could your parents have no baby pictures of you?”

He shrugs again, and I notice I’m annoyed. Annoyed he doesn’t demand more from his parents. Annoyed by the hazy film that seems to cover everything in this house, including him. I nod and put the photos back in the box, not wanting him to see my frustration. I wrap my arms around his neck and pull him to me. He hugs back, which makes me feel better. Connected to him again.

After the HPV scare, a small panic remains in my stomach. What if there’s something more going on? What if I have HIV?

Most of my friends have gotten tested. It’s the reasonable thing to do if you’ve had sex with more than one person, especially unprotected sex, of which I’ve had lots. One friend even gets tested every six months as a precaution. I nod along with them, but I’m a terrible hypocrite. I’ve slept with many more strangers than they have, and I’ve yet to get tested. I’m too scared. In the eighties, AIDS plagued gay men, IV drug users, and people receiving blood transfusions. It felt unrelated to me. Now HIV is showing up in the blood of more and more heterosexual women. We’re getting it at the fastest rate in the country.

On a Monday morning, I drive back to the same Planned Parenthood. I tell the receptionist why I’m there, and a young woman takes me into the back. As we walk, my heart beats so fast I feel like I might pass out. This woman is kinder than the last one. She’s young, not much older than me. Perhaps it’s more acceptable to get a voluntary test than to show up with an STD. She puts a warm hand on my arm as she guides me into a small, white room that has only a desk and two chairs. She sits across from me and sets a clipboard on the desk.

“I need to ask you some questions before we take your blood,” she tells me.

“Questions?” My voice quakes.

“These are standard questions we ask everyone. It’s mandatory counseling before the test.”

I bite my lip. “OK.”

She looks down at the paper. “Are you currently sexually active?”

I nod.

She makes a mark. “Do you currently have more than one sexual partner?”

“No.”

“In your sexual history, have you had more than five partners?”

“Um, yeah.”

“More than ten?”

I bite my lip again. “Yes.”

She doesn’t look at me, just marks her paper.

“In your sexual history, was there ever a time when you had more than one sexual partner in the span of a month?”

I take a breath, let it out slowly. “Yes.”

“Are you currently using birth control?”

“The Pill,” I say.

“Good.” She writes that. “What about condoms?”

I shake my head. What must she be thinking of me?

“In your sexual history, did you consistently use condoms?”

I shake my head again.

She makes a few more marks. “OK,” she says. “I need to advise you to use condoms every time you engage in intercourse. It’s the only effective way to protect yourself from disease.”

“I know that,” I say. I want to tell her I’m not stupid. I know everything there is to know about protecting myself. I’m well aware of how HIV and STDs are transmitted. But I also know my behavior defies my knowledge.

“Listen,” she says, perhaps hearing my defensiveness. “You’re not the only one who comes through these doors and tells me about multiple partners without condoms.”

I smile slightly. “I’m not?”

“God, no.” She smiles too. “It’s frustrating, though. I mean, if you know to use condoms, why don’t you?”

She stares at me. She’s not being condescending. This is an honest question. There are many more like me, and she wants to understand. I shake my head. “I’m not sure,” I say.

After, another woman draws my blood and tells me to set an appointment for fourteen days from then—fourteen long days—to get my results. Driving home, I think about the first woman’s question, wishing I had said more. I do know why I haven’t used condoms when I should have. In the moment, when I’m busy trying to make some guy mine, thoughts about death or disease are furthest from my mind. I’m too caught up in desperation, in filling what I can never seem to fill. It’s a terrible realization that I’m willing to risk my life to get to that place.

I visit Leif in those fourteen days, trying to keep my mind off it. He brushes me off, tells me my anxiety is irrational. But he doesn’t know the truth about my past, those two random guys in Taos, all those nameless guys before them. When the day comes, I’m a wreck. I didn’t sleep much the night before. Then I drank too much coffee to compensate. I stand in the waiting room, too jumpy to sit. I feel like I might throw up. That same woman, the one with all the questions, comes to get me, and as we walk down the hallway I try to interpret the look on her face. Is she about to tell me I’m going to die?

She opens the door to the same stark room and sets a folder in front of her as she sits. I’m going to throw up right here, in this tiny white room.

“Your test was negative,” she says.

“Oh, my God!” I say, relief flooding me. Then, “You really shouldn’t act so stoic on the way in here. You might send someone into cardiac arrest.”

She smiles. “I’ll work on that.”

“So I can go?”

“Just use condoms,” she says. “OK?”

I smile. I think about telling her what I came to in the car, the answer to her question last time. But I just want to get out of here now. Out of this ridiculously small room and back into the world.

“I will,” I say.

And then I do what everyone must do in this situation. I tell myself I will do things differently from now on. If Leif and I should split, I’ll use condoms. I’m nobody’s fool.

In August, I drive to Vermont for my monthlong writing work - shop, and all the anxiety I avoided by not doing something like this, all my fear about leaving the world of boys, fills me. I’m not nervous about my writing or being somewhere new. I’m nervous about being away from Leif. Out of his sight, I’m afraid I don’t matter. I hate admitting it. I still experience myself like I did in high school. Without a man loving me, I feel like I don’t exist. He has promised to visit me for the third weekend, and I’ve already begun to count down the days. The Vermont campus is beautiful. Purple and yellow irises cluster near huge, heavy oaks. Maple trees wave leaves as big as my hand. Mountains hover in the distance. After I settle into my single room, I go for a run, a new activity I have taken up under Deirdre’s advice. I run along gravel roads, thick greenery on either side. The sky is a piercing blue, the air hot. When I return I feel enlivened, sharp. I can do this, I think.

That first evening I meet the other workshop participants at a welcome dinner. There are only a few of us who are young, so we gravitate toward one another. One girl, Kelly, slinks toward me and whispers, “Where are all the hot men?”

I laugh. “All the hot men are painters and musicians. Writers aren’t hot.”

She smiles. “Speak for yourself.”

Kelly is a few years older than me, though she seems even older. She scans the room, her eyes dark. She wears red lipstick that extends just beyond the lines of her lips, and she holds her lips in a well-rehearsed pout. Maybe she doesn’t realize how obvious this is, how it looks like she’s trying too hard. I don’t know her at all, but I feel both sad and scared for her, seeing those lips. Before the dinner is through, two older men approach her. She opens her body toward them, and when they speak she lowers her head and widens her eyes. Another practiced move. I squirm inside, aware I have my own moves: big smile, wide eyes, cocked head. Days, I work on my first short story. It is about a girl who is struck mute in an accident. In my critique, the teacher tells me the character remains undeveloped. Her muteness doesn’t go anywhere. It stays static, which makes the whole story incomplete. I work on it some more.

In between I go running, allowing the fresh, flowery air to clear my head.

I think about Leif. Only seven days to go. I call him twice from the pay phone in the dormitory lobby. The first time he’s not home, and I leave a message with his mother. The second time, he sounds groggy, like he just woke up. We talk briefly about the workshop and his gigs, and then he has to go.

“I miss you so much,” I tell him.

“I miss you, too.”

I want to make him promise, but I hold myself back.

“I’ll see you in just five days.”

“That’s right.”

“You’re still coming, right?”

“I just said I was.”

“OK,” I say, not wanting to let him go.

“Right. I’ll see you then.”

And he hangs up.

I find Kelly and a few others lying on a blanket in the grass, and I join them. They’re discussing the writing life, submissions and rejections, magazines with which they’ve placed work.

“What about you?” one of the girls asks. “Do you send your stuff out?”

“I just started writing,” I say. “I’m not ready.”

“That’s good,” Kelly says. She stretches out her legs in the sun. She has less makeup on today, and you can see how pretty she really is, freed up from all that pretense and effort. “You should wait. Too many people send out their stuff before it’s ready.”

“That’s right,” the other girl says. “Too many are focused on publication, not the writing. But if you rush the process, the writing isn’t good. You lose the whole purpose of having written.”

“That’s one of the things I love about writing,” Kelly says now. Her eyes are lit up. “I love the surprise. You never know where it will take you.”

I listen, rapt, excited. This. I want this. The first thing, other than boys, that feels meaningful to me, that I can feel in my veins, can literally feel moving its way through me like a drug. I go back to my room to work on my story some more.

The day Leif arrives, I’m ecstatic. I can’t wait to get my arms around him, to get him near me. I pace my room, making myself wait to take my shower and get ready. It would be unbearable to be dressed too early. I try to read, but I can’t keep the sentences in my head.

As soon as he arrives, we strip down and have sex. Then we go out for some food. He comes with me to a poetry reading that evening, but he fidgets beside me. I know he has no interest in any of this. So after the reading, when I would normally socialize with the other participants at the reception, discussing the reading and our own writing, I go back to my room with Leif. He takes out his guitar and noodles around on it for a while. I lie on my bed and watch him, then take out a book and try to read. But that restlessness moves right in again as though it arrived with him, a package deal. When he leaves, I am just a tiny bit relieved. Kelly, who has been hesitant to workshop her story, brings in copies during the final week. Having finished my rewrite, I too hand out my story. Kelly’s is about a girl whose father gives weekly ear cleanings. The writing is suggestive and harrowing, and it’s clear something terrible and lascivious happens during these ear cleanings. We all rave, impressed. By now, Kelly is the talk of the workshop, but not for her writing. The way she walks, her pout. All the men whisper comments to each other, the same way the boys did back in high school about Jeannette. The girls keep their distance. I feel sad for her. She overwhelms her talent with this need for attention. Her talent isn’t enough. The second to last night of the workshop, Kelly shows up to the reading wearing a tight minidress patterned with big red cherries. We all watch as she approaches, flirts with, and then leaves with the author who read. Before reading her story, I didn’t see our connection. Now I get how much we’re alike. She is me in bold print. I can’t know for sure whether her story is autobiographical, but it gets me thinking about my own past, about the lack of boundaries in my family. Is this why I’ve handed over my body to so many boys?

The next day, the teacher reads my story aloud. Listening to her read, I’m amazed I wrote it. It’s actually good. She congratulates me for progressing so much in the short time we’ve been together.

“You’re a real writer,” she says.

Her words feel like salvation.

Senior year. I turn myself toward writing. I find a fiction tutor since my college doesn’t have a creative writing department, and I start pumping out stories. As Dad warned, truths begin to slip out now that the war is long over. The long-standing fires in Kuwait, our country’s backing out of supporting the Shiites. Angry, I join other students to march and rally for peace in the Middle East. I take on an editor position for Clark’s alternative, liberal newspaper. I don’t know as much as I should, but it feels good to get behind something, to channel my anger into something real. Leif moves into an apartment with a mutual friend and her boyfriend, and I find an apartment by myself. I try not to focus on the fact that the girl Leif lives with is stunningly beautiful. I don’t want to be one of those jealous girlfriends who doesn’t let her man have friendships with other girls, beautiful or not. But almost immediately, it starts to get to me. What I really hoped was he would want to live with me. Instead, he opted to live with the prettiest girl on campus.

“What about with the bathroom?” I ask him when I come to see his new place. “Does she come out of there in a towel?”

“I don’t know, Kerry,” he says. “I haven’t noticed.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I’m living with her and her boyfriend.”

I sit on his bed. I want something more from him, I’m just not sure what. To tell me I’m prettier? That he loves me only? That he’ll never love anyone else? I’m being stupid, I know, especially since I’m finding myself more and more bored with him. Our interests are too disparate. But this truth nags at me, making me cling tighter.

“Kerry,” he says, seeing the way I look, “this is ridiculous.”

“She’s very insecure,” I tell him. I wince inside. This girl I’m talking about is my friend. This is my friend whom I’m degrading.

“I don’t like her,” he says. “Can we drop it?”

I press my lips together, knowing he’s right.

Tyler’s getting married. Our father, in typical I-won’thear-it-if-it-makes-me-uncomfortable style for which we all make fun of him, calls me a month before her wedding.

“Tyler’s getting married,” he says with shock in his voice.

“I know, Dad. You do too,” I tell him. “We’ve all known for almost a year.”

But I can relate. It really is hard to believe. She’s made a point of being anti-marriage for a long time. A few years ago, when I told her I wanted to get married someday, even though our parents divorced, she said she didn’t.

“Mom and Dad never should have gotten married either,” she told me. “They were too different. Not at first, of course. But they went in different directions, like most people do over time. Humans aren’t supposed to mate for life. Patriarchal religions made that up so women would be under men’s control. Marriage is bullshit.”

But handmade invitations with sketches of herself and her fiancé, Gill, that say, “We’re getting hitched!” arrive in the mail. Leif and I fly to Chicago for the wedding, which is really just a small party at a local bar she and her fiancé frequent. My mother is there with her boyfriend. Dad and Nora are there too. My sister wears yellow cowboy boots and a black dress that shows off the many illustrative tattoos on her back. Gill is in a charcoal gray jacket with a turquoise bolo. They stand at the back of the bar in front of a painting of Spike Lee and thank everyone for coming to celebrate their union. Tyler looks happy, but also something else. Sheepish, embarrassed. I’m not sure what. I hug her and say I’m happy for her, but really I’m bugged. Maybe it’s because she’s doing this thing she was so clearly against. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t seem to be taking it seriously. Whatever it is, I feel angry with her, and also worried. When I tell Leif later, he shrugs and suggests I let it go. But I can’t. It’s all too familiar, her need for this security. She keeps it hidden behind her tough, anticorporate façade. She talks loudly about all the ways she’s getting screwed, about the environment, the government, everything but her real self. I know what that feels like, that kind of vulnerability. I know how scary it is to have it hang out there, how much I work to hide it too. In truth, I would marry Leif in a second. I would marry almost anyone in a second, if that would make me feel loved.

Just a few months later, Leif’s and my beautiful friend and her boyfriend break up, and Leif is left with no housing. I suggest he live with me, and though he is still hesitant, he agrees under one condition: We’ll keep separate rooms, like proper roommates. I hate that he wants this. He doesn’t want our lives to meld. But I am well practiced at taking what I can get.

The fact that his marijuana dealer just moved in one floor below me can’t hurt my cause either.

He takes the room I had set up as my office, but after a few weeks I work myself into that room too, and it becomes our shared bedroom. With Leif firmly in my grasp, I focus more and more on writing. I apply to MFA programs, my top choice in Arizona. Leif applies to music programs, including the same school in Arizona. On Spree Day, we lie in bed, listening to the excitement and music outside the window. Leif reaches for me, and we make love. But unlike last year, I feel restless. I lie beneath him, uninterested, wishing he’d hurry up. I want to get outside, into the world. I want to feel like I did last year, enlivened and full. I build a schedule. Every morning I wake at six a.m. On alternate mornings I write for three hours before my first class, and on the other days I run three miles around the indoor track at the gym. During the day I attend class, work at the local bookstore, and am back in bed by ten. Leif has a schedule too. He sleeps until noon, then goes to his studio until two or three in the morning, leaving only for classes or to grab a snack.

I like my days. I like that I feel productive and energized. Many nights, though, I wake when Leif comes home. I haven’t seen him all day. I watch him disappear into the bathroom and lie awake, listening. We haven’t had sex in weeks, living on different timetables. Moon shadows shroud the room. A car hisses by outside. I listen hard, thinking maybe I hear him masturbating. Years ago I used to do the same thing with my father, lying on the futon in his living room, thinking I heard him and his girlfriend having sex. Like those times, I feel slightly turned on, a voyeur to something I shouldn’t know, but I also feel terribly alone. When he comes to bed, I shift, wanting him to know I’m awake. I hold myself still, hoping he’ll move toward me, hoping we’ll make love, hold each other, anything.

But he turns away from me, asleep.

If things weren’t heading south enough, Dad calls to say he and Nora are splitting up.

“What’s the matter with you?” I yell, furious.

“Jesus Christ, Kerry. It wasn’t just me.”

“Why can’t you make anything work?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” he says. His voice is even, but I can hear his anger. My own anger sits in my throat like a rock. I know what happened. He doesn’t have to tell me. Nora finally had enough. Later, Nora calls.

“You won’t give it another chance?” I ask.

“Honey, your dad’s being good to me, considering. He’s helping me buy an apartment in New York. But we’re not going to be together.”

I shake my head, anger at my father creeping up. As usual he’s spending money to assuage his guilt. Why doesn’t he try to change himself instead?

“We’ll stay in good touch,” Nora tells me. “You’re still my almost daughter.”

But I know that’s unlikely, and when we hang up, I cry.

“What keeps you in the relationship?” It’s our regular weekly session, and Deirdre is asking how things have been with Leif. I haven’t told her yet about my father and Nora. I didn’t realize why I was so mad at him at first, but since the phone call it’s come to me. I’m terrified I’m destined to be like him, happy to have sex but unwilling to go much further. The tree outside is thick with bright green leaves. It’s spring, the time of year I usually feel sexual and alive, when I tend to meet new boys. For the first time I wonder what kind of tree it is. An oak?

Spruce? All this time I’ve come here and I still don’t know.

“What is that out there?” I ask. “An oak tree?”

Deirdre follows my gaze to the tree. She looks doubtful. She thinks I’m evading the question.

“Why do you want to know?” She watches me, waiting.

“I’m tired of it,” I tell her. “I’m sick of spending all my energy trying to get loved.”

An eyebrow raises. “Is that what you’re doing?”

“Isn’t it?” I want her to give me something here. She’s the therapist. Take this away, I want to yell. What was I doing here if she wasn’t going to change things for me?

“Is that why you’re with Leif?” she asks, more questions to answer my questions.

“I don’t know,” I say, annoyed. “Maybe. Yes.”

“And then what?” she asks. “What happens when you get it?”

I shrug. I don’t know what she’s getting at.

“Kerry,” she says. She leans forward, her eyes sharp. “This is where you always are. Trying to get loved. Waiting for something always out of reach.”

Tell me something I don’t know, I think.

“You just said it yourself. You’re missing your life, caught in this place that’s neither here nor there.”

I listen now.

“What is it that keeps you trapped in this place?” she asks. I just look at her, unsure.

The summer before Leif and I will drive out together to Arizona, I go to another writing workshop in New York. This time I feel less anxious about leaving him. I’m excited to throw myself into the writing world again. I have more confidence, too. My story, about a retarded girl who gets gang-raped, was chosen for first prize in my college’s short story contest. I’ve also placed two other stories with small literary magazines. I didn’t get in to Arizona, but I plan to move there anyway, maybe take a class or two from the program, write a lot, and apply again. Leif will be starting his program in the fall. Our relationship isn’t at its best, but it’s secure. We’re moving across the country together. That’s got to count for something.

The first people I meet when I get to the conference are Melissa and Jen, and instantly the three of us become friends. I tell Jen my story about the three Jennifers from high school, and we laugh at our old selves, at the way we cared so much about belonging, even though in many ways I still feel the same way. Within a day of arriving, there’s a boy. His name is Jason. He has dark eyes and messy hair. He smiles shyly when I catch him looking from across the room. He has a girlfriend, whose picture he showed me the first time we spoke, a girl named Leslie with long, curly blond hair. And, of course, I have a boyfriend. But this doesn’t stop me from thinking about him constantly.

At night, when we’re in our rooms I fantasize about him coming to me. I imagine a secret blossoming between us, the attraction too strong to control. During the day I try to time it so we’ll be in the same place, which isn’t easy since he’s a poet and I’m a fiction writer. I go for runs on the forest trails surrounding the campus, knowing he runs too, hoping we’ll have a chance meeting. For the first time since Leif and I got together, my senses feel sharp, heightened. I’m taken with everything—the way the sun dances against tree leaves, the purple irises lining a walking path. Everything appears rich with life, with meaning.

A few times Jason and I actually talk. Each time it goes something like this. Him: “How’s it going?”

Me: “Pretty good. How about you?”

Him: “Good.”

[Ten seconds of uncomfortable silence.]

Me: “You write poetry?”

Him: “Yeah, but I just started. I’m not any good.”

Me: “Oh, I’m sure that’s not true.”

Him: [Looks down at his shuffling feet.]

Me: “I’d love to read some sometime.”

Him: [Nervous laughter.]

[More uncomfortable silence.]

Him: “I better get going.”

Me: “Sure. Me too.”

Jen, who has a class with him, rushes back from her workshop one day to tell me he read a poem called “Temptress.” She tries to recount it, an obscure poem about being pulled somewhere he knows he shouldn’t go. We squeal and jump up and down. To Jen, my crush is meaningless. She knows I have a boyfriend, who will visit in just a week or so. For me my crush is something more. It allows that old anxiety, the pressure in the air that tells me I might get evidence that I’m worth something. This boy might want me, making me matter. All along I thought being loved by one boy would be enough. Love would free me from my desperation. Here I am, though, no different from when I was a teenager. Leif visits near the end of the workshop. We have sex in the small twin bed. Our movements are familiar, always the same. His hand on my breast, mine at his back. Then my leg, his neck. My hand goes to his hair, his mouth to my ear. Our kisses could be diagrammed—

tongue here, bottom lip there. There are no surprises. The day he leaves, we ride down the elevator together so I can walk him to his car. Our plan is to meet in New Jersey, at my father’s apartment, and leave from there for our road trip west.

As we come off the elevator, Jason is there. My heart stops, then picks up tempo. Jason smiles nervously at me and nods at Leif. It is only a moment, but Leif sees it. I can feel the tension as we make our way through the parking lot.

“Do I need to be worried?” he asks when we arrive at his car.

“About what?” I reach for his hand.

“Leaving you here.” He squeezes back. “With all these guys.”

“Honey.” I smile and hug him, smelling his familiar scent. I love him. I do. But like Eli said long ago, I don’t know whether that matters. Maybe nothing is ever enough for me. I push away the thought.

“You have nothing to worry about,” I tell him. He gets in his car, and I watch him wind his way out of the lot. I walk back to the dorm, anxiety tugging at me. Jason is out there somewhere. How far will I actually go?

The last night of the workshop is the departure reception. I take a breath and go toward Jason. Any fool can see how irrational this is. He’s still in college. I’m moving across country. We can barely hold a conversation together. We both have long-term relationships. But I’m not thinking like this. I’m all body. All need. Going to him is only about this moment. It is only about getting to that place inside. That place so many boys have touched, but then it slips away, eluding me again.

Jason smiles, but he also looks around, as though looking for an escape.

“Have I showed you Leslie?” he asks, reaching for his wallet. I stop him with my hand.

“I’ve seen her,” I say.

He looks at me, his mouth tight, and waits.

“You should come by my room tonight,” I say quietly.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s your room?”

“Camden Hall. Room 515.”

He smiles and nods at a guy nearby. It’s one of his friends. I look at the guy and he gives me a funny smile. Jason must have told him about me. About us and this little thing we have.

“Room 515, huh?”

I smile.

“All right,” he says. “Maybe I will.”

He goes to walk away, and I grab his arm, afraid he won’t really come. I quickly try to think of something else to say.

“It will be our little secret” is what I come up with. Later I lie in bed, waiting. There is a Lorrie Moore story in which the main character waits for her lover to arrive. She splays her hair just so on the pillow, pulls her nightgown down to reveal cleavage. She holds her position for hours, her back aching from pushing out her breasts, but her lover never comes. In the story, it’s funny. But I don’t feel humorous right now. I’m leaving tomorrow. Leif and I are about to start a new life in Tucson. I try not to think about that. Instead, I focus on each sound I hear, the elevator door opening and closing, footsteps shuffling along the carpet, voices, water running through pipes. I wait, my eyes open, until four a.m. But just like in the story, Jason never comes.

10

The first week in Tucson, I’m energized. Leif and I find a house to rent, and I land a job in the university bookstore. I wake at seven a.m. every morning, leaving Leif in bed, and ride my bike in the frosty air to the store. And when I get home in the early afternoon, the air now warmed by the sun, I try to write. I set up my office in the house, a whole room dedicated to my work. I unpack my books of fiction and books about craft, my Writer’s Market book and Handbook of Literary Magazines. I hang my favorite quote—“Tell me, what will you do with your one wild and precious life?” by Mary Oliver—

above my computer. Every other day I go to the gym and do my three-mile run.

But day after day, I can’t write. I walk in and out of the office to get more coffee, a snack, to listen to one of Leif’s jazz CDs for inspiration. At two thirty, when the mail comes, I perk up, hoping for something good—an acceptance from a literary magazine, a contest win, but usually it’s just bills and junk mail. When Leif comes home, I hang around him while he tries to hash out a composition on the piano.

“Take a walk with me,” I plead. Or, “Let’s go out for dinner.” But he usually shoos me away, wanting to work. Sometimes, friends he’s made in the music program come by, and I sit with them while they talk about scores and changes and composers, and I wish I had friends of my own. Even the bookstore where I work, the one thing I have going, begins to grate on me—all those students with their busy lives, all those people with a purpose. I call Bevin, who moved to Portland, Oregon, with a few of our friends from college, and complain. She suggests I come for a visit. My first night there, I meet a boy, and I know my life is about to take a turn.

His name is Zachary. Gorgeous, beautiful Zachary. At the club where Bevin takes me, Zachary dances up to me, and then against me, his pelvis grinding into mine. Right there on the dance floor he kisses me, a kiss I can feel throughout my body, just like in those first few months with Leif. I know I shouldn’t, but I open myself, my body like a hungry flower, gone unwatered for so long. I’m not surprised by myself. Not at all. In fact, I knew it was coming.

Bevin is pissed.

“Kerry,” she says when she pulls me aside. “What are you doing?”

“I know.” I grin, but Bevin doesn’t grin back. “I don’t know yet,”

I say to answer her question.

“What about Leif?” She stares into my face, maybe looking for the girl she thinks I am, not the real me, the one who carelessly flings away her boyfriend’s heart.

“I don’t know,” I say, annoyed now. I don’t want to think about it right now. I just want to feel what I’ve been feeling tonight. Back at Zachary’s house I can barely contain myself. I am lost in the old feeling, all body, all desire, all emptiness. We make it to his bed, but once there, I pull back.

“I have a boyfriend,” I say, breathless.

Zachary smiles at me. His eyes are a rich brown. A lock of his blond hair hangs in his face. “What are you saying?” he asks. “Do you want to stop?”

“No.” I laugh. “But I should.”

Zachary kisses me again. He strips off my shirt and puts his mouth on my breast. I feel like I might explode.

“Whatever you want to do,” he says between kisses. He doesn’t care. Why should he care?

“Just no sex,” I tell him. “Nothing to put my boyfriend at risk.”

He doesn’t answer, keeps moving down my body. Such a ridiculous rule. I’m not stupid enough to think this makes it OK.

Back in Tucson, I try to get back into my life. But days when I should be writing, I call Zachary, and when Zachary isn’t available, I call Bevin and ask her about him. With Zachary on my mind I’m permanently aroused. I initiate sex with Leif every night. But nothing, nothing will fill this pit of desire. Leif notices nothing different, and while this should be a relief, it bothers me.

A few days later, I fly out to my grandparents’ condominium in Florida for my mother’s second wedding. She has set up a joint celebration with my grandmother’s birthday. Donald, who when I first met him was scruffy and dressed in Levi’s and T-shirts, is cleanshaven and wearing clothes my mother has picked out for him. He even sounds like her now, discussing art and wine as though these were always his interests.

I’m tempted to tell Mom what I really think, that by controlling Donald she’s setting herself up for another fall. But I’m well practiced in keeping my real thoughts and feelings to myself with her, especially when her parents are around. They say things like, “Your mother has worked hard to get to this place,” and “Your mother has been through so much.” No one’s allowed to make Mom feel bad. I just nod and roll my eyes. Silence is still my main line of defense when it comes to her.

I spend most of my time in the clubhouse gym, running on a treadmill, trying not to think.

The day of the wedding, I get drunk. Donald and my mother read vows to each other while Tyler, Donald’s two daughters, and I stand beside them. Whenever I glance at Tyler I start giggling, so I will myself to look straight ahead. My uncle toasts them, saying how nice it is to finally see my mother happy again. In many ways, I feel bad for him. Mom’s the shining star of that family, the firstborn, which means a great deal in a Jewish family. She can do no wrong. My grandparents approve of everything about her, her taste, her knowledge, her choices in life. All attention goes to my mother, no matter what her brother might do. He is always in her shadow, always the one who should be more like his older sister. Like me, he’s always been invisible. My grandparents, following my mother’s lead, eat health food. They collect art and modernist furniture. They believe their choices are superior to others’ and that they deserve only the best. But since my uncle’s arrival in Florida, he and his family adamantly eat Nathan’s hot dogs most every evening, and they make snide comments about my grandparents’ “weird” art. If his parents’ favoring of my mother hurts him, he refuses to show that. He proudly flaunts how different he is. Maybe I shouldn’t feel sorry for him after all. After the ceremony, Mom gives my grandmother a pendant for her birthday that is supposed to represent a woman’s vulva. Grandma shows it off to me when I come over.

“Gorgeous,” she says. “Like a cat’s eye.”

I smile. “It does look like a cat’s eye, but it’s actually supposed to represent a vagina.”

“Really,” she says, studying it. “Your mother’s something, isn’t she? Where does she come up with this stuff?”

“She’s a gynecologist,” I say, as though this explains anything. Later, I hear her telling guests who admire it, “Isn’t it lovely?

Kerry says it’s a vagina.”

Back in Tucson, I start to itch. My arms, my chest, and my back break out with a strange-looking rash. Leif starts to feel it too. I go to a clinic and leave with a prescription to treat scabies. After I rub on the lotion, I look up scabies on the Internet and learn that little bugs have been living and breeding beneath my skin. Horrified, I scroll down to see how I could have gotten them. Sure enough, they are passed by prolonged skin-to-skin contact or from sleeping in an infected person’s bed. I think of everything I’ve surely infected in the past few weeks. I borrowed a bra from my mother. I slept in my grandparents’ guest bed. And of course Leif. I’m repulsed, disgusted with myself. These bugs on me are fitting. I’m a filthy person, dirtying everyone who comes too close.

“So that’s what this rash is,” Zachary says when I call him.

“How could you not go to a doctor?” I ask. “You’ve had it longer than I have.”

“I figured it would go away.”

“Good thing you gave it to me. You would have had it for ages otherwise.” I laugh, but only to hide my rage. I haven’t forgotten what boys like, the easygoing girl, the girl who doesn’t demand too much. I don’t want to push him away with my anger, to make him stop wanting me.

He laughs too. “We better have sex soon, in case I have some kind of venereal disease.”

“Name the time and place,” I say, getting what I wanted.

“How about now?”

Something flutters at my throat. “I’d like that.”

“So would I.”

When I call Bevin to tell her I plan to say I got the scabies from her bed, she’s furious.

“You’re making me out to be dirty,” she says. “Leif’s going to think I’m a slut.”

I don’t say anything, aware of who’s really the dirty slut.

“Fine,” she says. “But you owe me big-time.”

“You’re the best friend ever,” I say.

“No,” she says, still upset, “I’m not.”

My acceptance to the University of Arizona’s writing program’s spring term arrives the following week. Leif hugs me.

“All right,” he says. “This is what you’ve wanted.”

I keep my eyes on the carpeted floor, unable to look at him.

“What?” he asks, his voice changed.

“I think I need to go up to Portland for a while.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just until the end of the summer. Then I’ll start the writing program in the fall.” I peek at him and see the confusion in his face. My heart feels heavy, like a thick stone in my chest.

“Why?” he asks. Tears come into his eyes then. I want to throw something, scream. I don’t know what. Mostly, I wish I could cry too, but there’s nothing there. Just that thickness moving its way through my body.

“I’m not happy here,” I say. Hearing those words, hearing what he must be hearing, I quickly try to think of something else. “And I don’t want to start the program midway, when everyone already knows each other.”

“That’s not what you felt when we first got here. You would have killed to have gotten this acceptance.”

I look down again, deflated. The thickness has made its way to my throat, making it hard to speak. “I can’t,” I manage to say. The following evening, I pack up my car, and early the next morning, while Leif is still sleeping, I kiss his cheek and leave.

Zachary and I spend our first two weeks together in bed, and my condom rule from way back when goes right out the window. I force myself to call Leif, to act like nothing is happening, but our conversations are stilted. I’ve done irreparable damage. At the end of those weeks, I walk with Zachary through Safeway and we pass a beautiful girl. I see them look at each other.

“What was that?” I ask.

“What?”

“That look.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That look,” I say. “I saw you look at that girl.”

Zachary shrugs and makes a face, and I can tell immediately I’ve damaged us now as well.

Later he says, “Maybe you think this is something it isn’t.”

I look away, sick with myself. Sick of how I ruin everything in my life.

When Leif comes to visit a month later, I try to be enthusiastic. I drive him through the city, stopping at my favorite spots. I want him to see what I already love about Portland, the grassroots feel, the green spaces. But he says it’s just an old, industrial city. I touch him constantly, slip my arm through his as we walk, reach for his hand at a café table, wanting things to be the way they were. But he pulls away, or else he passively allows me to do what I want. After I drop him off at the airport, I curl up in bed and stay there the rest of the day. I’m such an idiot. I destroyed everything, pushing away one of the few men who’s ever loved me, and for what? For a fling with someone who couldn’t care less. A familiar frantic feeling courses through me, and I squeeze my hands into fists. I can’t lose him. I can’t lose him. When I call, though, my heart in my throat, he sounds distant, the full fifteen hundred miles away that he is. He tells me about the girl in his band who picked him up from the airport and surprised him with a plate of bagels at her house. And immediately, I know. The next time we talk, he confirms it. They’ve been sleeping together. Crying, I drive out to see Bevin at work. I don’t know what else to do. How else I will live. It is springtime, and flowering trees are at every turn. White and yellow dahlias and blue hydrangeas bloom in people’s yards. People walk down the street, laughing. None of it means anything to me. With Leif in my life, I could find other real sons to live. Without him, though, nothing I enjoyed before matters, not my writing, not a lovely summer day, not the stacks of uncracked books in the local bookstore. I grip my stomach, in physical pain from the grief I’ve caused myself. I’m a hollow shell. I’m nothing. Bevin, my amazing friend, uses the plane reservation I made months ago, before Leif and I broke up, to visit Tucson so she can gather up the rest of my stuff I left behind. While she is gone, I take early shifts at the juice bar where I work, just so I’ll be too tired to think. When I pick her up, I ask her not to tell me anything. She agrees, but when she says nothing I can’t stand it.

“Just tell me this,” I say. “Did he seem to miss me?”

Bevin doesn’t look at me. “He’s hurting,” she says. “I can tell you that.”

“Really?” This part I want to know. “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘I don’t understand how she could just write me off.’

Then he goes, ‘Get it? Write me off. She’s a writer.’ It was really sad.”

“But I didn’t,” I say. “I didn’t write him off. He went off with that other girl. I still wanted to make it work.” I hear the whine in my voice. I miss him. I want him back. And I feel misunderstood, even though I know there are few other ways to interpret what I did, leaving him like I did. “Do you think I should call him?”

Bevin shakes her head. “I wouldn’t.” When she sees my face, she adds, “I’m sorry.”

A few years later she will explain he was already living with the new girlfriend. Even though he was still hurting, he had moved on. Before I know this, though, I lie in bed and think about what I did. It is still too close to think too much about, the loss too raw. But knowing he hurts makes me feel just a little better. All that time we were together, I got so little from him. I have to wonder if I did this in part to see if he cared. To prove to myself I was loved. I don’t like seeing this about myself. It’s selfish and insensitive. Worse, it reminds me of something my mother might do, then claim herself as a victim. It’s also, of course, what my father did. Rather than just leave the relationship with my mother, he had to do something unconscionable so she had no choice but to want out too. All that sideways communication. How would I ever figure out how to make a relationship work?

When I can’t stand thinking about it anymore, I drive out to the coast. Seagulls sit on the craggy rocks. Pines, permanently shaped by the wind, bend into melodramatic forms. I breathe in, listening to the soft, rhythmic sounds of the ocean. In Ecola State Park I tie on my running sneakers and take a jog on the trail. Pine needles fly up beneath my steps. The sun plays patterns on the tree trunks. Birds whistle above me. I don’t want to be in pain anymore. I want to be done, to be left unburdened and naked, to tear the hurt off my body like layers of clothes. At the end of the trail I stop and bend forward, hands on my knees, to catch my breath. I’m not healed, but for this moment, I’m better.

A new friend, Terri, the manager of the juice bar, tries to help me unpack my life. She’s twelve years older than me and has been through two divorces. She has wisdom to share. We sit at coffeehouses and discuss my past, how I’ve made bad choice after bad choice, and the reasons why. When I describe Leif and the ways in which he was emotionally unavailable, hoping to defend my actions, Terri just listens. She sips her coffee and looks at me in a way I’ve come to recognize will mean she’s about to challenge me.

“What about you?” she asks.

“What about me?”

“Whenever I see something flawed about the person I chose, I ask myself how I’m that thing too.”

“So, if Leif’s unavailable, how am I unavailable too?”

“Exactly,” she says.

And I think some more.

Inevitably, though, I get distracted. This time, the distraction’s name is Matthew, and he’s a chef in the restaurant next to the juice bar. Matthew is big and kind. When we have sex, he lifts my body into the air as though I weigh nothing. But Matthew is in love with someone else, and within two weeks he explains this to me and asks the girl to marry him. Next is Kyle, whom I sleep with on the beach when we get out of town during a heat wave. Then Miles. Then Jack. Then Randy. Each one I hope will be something more than just sex, or at least relieve me of my pain about Leif. And the latter they all do, albeit briefly. In the years following, I will jokingly call this my summer of love. But in truth, there is no love involved at all. When Leif and I broke up, I applied to MFA programs again, knowing I didn’t want to wind up back in Tucson with a broken heart. Now I get acceptance letters, and I decide to go to the University of Oregon, where I’ve been offered free tuition and a teaching fellowship. So at the end of the summer, I move down to Eugene with Randy’s help, and find a small one-bedroom house. The owners planted nasturtium and calendula in the small front yard. There’s a lush butterfly bush near the door. It is the first time I’ve ever lived alone and, starting this new program, I’m hopeful my life will begin to feel better. In the first week, I make a friend, and we go together to a party. Some guy’s house.

A boy quickly catches my eye.

Goatee, long hair. We watch each other a while, exchanging smiles. In the kitchen, he approaches me, and when he introduces himself as Dennis, I hear an accent.

“Where are you from?” I ask.

“Germany.”

“Your people did terrible things to my people.”

He laughs. “You are Jewish?”

“Ostensibly,” I say. “Can I say I’m Jewish if I was brought up celebrating Christmas?”

“You can say whatever you want to say.”

“Really.” I smile, move out of the way while someone reaches behind me for a bottle opener. I think about all the things I’d like to say. I want him to take me home, to kiss me, put his hands on my body. He smiles back. But I don’t say anything more. When I leave that evening, he has my number. So I wait. By the fourth day, I’m so distracted from my classes, I decide to take initiative. I go to the Modern Languages building where he told me he studies, find his mailbox, and leave a note. “Are you ever going to call? Your creative writing friend.” And I write my number again, just in case he lost it.

This time he calls. We set a date, and he shows up at my house with wine and a small bouquet. Within the first hour we’re on the floor, peeling off clothes.

“I haven’t told you something,” Dennis says, pushing my hair from my face.

“Let me guess. You have a girlfriend.” I smile, but inside my stomach sinks. Why can I never choose the right guy?

“That’s a good guess.”

“Then what are you doing?” I ask him.

“Things aren’t going well, so we’ve agreed to take a break and see other people.”

I brighten, seeing an opening. As the night progresses, more is revealed. He still lives with her, and he still loves her as well. In the middle of the night, in my bed, he wakes up crying.

“I’m sorry,” he says when he leaves. “I’m not ready for this.”

But I keep pushing.

I call. I find him at school. We spend more and more time together. And we have more and more sex. Eventually, he moves out, giving me hope. But soon after the move, whenever we have sex, he won’t kiss me. He still speaks regularly with his ex-girlfriend. Once, I force a kiss during sex, pulling his face to mine, but he pulls away. The next day, when I ask him what we’re doing, he reminds me about the other girl.

“I’m not going to be in love with you when my heart is taken by her,” he tells me.

So I move on. Sean, Will, Trent. A few more whose names I forget.

By the time I meet Toby, I’m so far down, so full of desperation, I’d take anyone, anyone who will take me too. We meet when his band comes to a local club. During the band’s break we make eye contact. He’s very handsome with a broad chest and shoulders that make me feel like maybe he could protect me. We spend the night in my apartment, and I travel the two hours to see him every weekend after.

Toby works for a contractor repairing and restoring boats, but what he really wants to do is animation. He shows me reams of paper on which he’s drawn characters smoking weed and plucking buds off plants. I know he does bong hits throughout the day. But until he opens up his closet to show me an elaborate setup of five marijuana plants, I don’t realize this is his passion as well. He takes me to see three other places, in hidden meadows, where he’s planted eight more. The stacks of twenties I see around his room, money I naively thought he earned at work, begins to make more sense. Back at school, with Toby choosing to be with me, I focus once more on my writing. I bang out story after story. One I land in a well-known literary magazine. Another my professor chooses for an anthology. The discussions about writing that I engage in with my colleagues excite me. Ideas about form and narrative. I gather a new language with which to talk about my and others’ work, a language highly intellectual and academic. On the weekends, though, I drop all of that so I can be with Toby.

Not that we talk about much anyway. Mostly we just have sex. Good, hot sex.

When the program comes to an end, Toby and I find a place to rent in a Portland suburb. I set up an office for writing and start teaching at a local college. Toby sets up his plants. And very quickly, things begin to disintegrate.

First, Toby gets kicked out of the band. Then he loses his job. My adjunct positions don’t make enough to carry us, so he takes various daylong warehouse jobs through a temp agency, making close to minimum wage. Anytime I try to talk to him about getting a real job, he gets hurt and defensive. I know from watching my own father that job issues are hard for men. They cut straight to their sense of self. So I learn not to talk about it at all. He also starts smoking more. Almost every day I come home from teaching to find him in front of the TV with the bong. After I express my dismay a few times, he starts relegating himself to the basement. Often, as I open the front door, I see a flash as he races to get down there, away from me and what he will call my “constant judgment.” At night, he goes out with friends, leaving me steaming and alone. I call Bevin, who has moved back East, and vent. Terri and I meet and analyze the situation. The bottom line, though, doesn’t take a whole lot of analysis. I shouldn’t be with him. I know that. I’m not stupid. Yet I make no moves. I tell a friend, “If I weren’t so damn attracted to him, maybe I would leave.” And this is true. But I don’t tell her the real problem. There’s something deeply wrong with me if I’m so attracted to someone who can’t have a relationship, someone who can’t love me, who can’t even love himself. I’ve learned at this point there’s no shot I can receive, no pill I can take, no therapy I can be a part of that will give me the resolve to do the things I need to do to be loved. It’s a choice. A simple choice. I say I want intimacy. I say I want to be loved. But really, I’m petrified. The straight truth is, I don’t know if I have it in me, and I’m scared to find out that I can’t. When Toby gets home and into bed, he wraps his arms around me.

“Please don’t leave,” he says.

“I’m sleeping,” I mumble. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“I mean it,” he says. “I’d die without you.”

“Don’t be crazy.”

“I wouldn’t survive.”

Long after he starts snoring, I lie awake, unable to get back to sleep. One morning I wake up, sure I am pregnant. I’ve had pregnancy scares in the past, when I’ve had unprotected sex at random times during my cycle. But this is different. It’s a knowledge. It sits against my throat, making me gag when I brush my teeth. A month earlier I tried going off the Pill. While I struggled to own my body emotionally, I thought I could at least try to reclaim it physically in this small way. I wanted to know my body better, to get it back. So I tried tracking my cycles. But I screwed up somewhere. I know that now, looking at myself in the mirror, my eyes wide. I call Mom and leave her a message. I pace the apartment, wanting the phone to ring. I think about Toby, how I don’t want a baby right now. I don’t want to go through an abortion either. I know too many friends who had them, what a big deal it was. I don’t want any big deals. Big emotions. I don’t want any of that. Another knowledge flashes through my mind—I don’t want a baby with Toby—but I push it away. When the phone rings, I answer it on the first half-ring.

“Where are you in your cycle?” Mom asks when I tell her. She is all business, and right now I appreciate it. I don’t want to talk about anything emotional.

I tell her I’m right at the end.

“Too late for the morning-after pill,” she says. I press a hand to my forehead, scared.

“There’s something else we can do. A little secret of gynecologists.”

“I’ll do anything,” I say.

She prescribes a special package of pills and gives me the formula: one pill the first night. Two the next. Three the next. And so on until they’re all gone. The first night is fine. The next, I wake in the middle of the night and puke. The third, I’m so nauseous and exhausted from vomiting, I think I might die.

“I can’t do this,” I tell Mom.

“OK,” she says. “We’ll try something else.”

She prescribes a different pill I’m to take for ten days. On the first night, I cramp so badly I have to crawl to the bathroom, thinking I might throw up again. But the next night nothing happens. And on the seventh day I begin to bleed.

I sit on the couch, holding a hot water bottle against my belly. Toby and his friend are in the basement, getting high. After an hour or so I hear him call from the side door.

“I’m going out.”

I throw the bottle toward the door. It falls with a thud to the floor like something dead.

Nine months into the relationship, I drag Toby with me to a couples therapist. We sit on the soft couch in her office and hold hands, afraid. I tell her about Toby’s distance, his pot smoking, his inability to hold a real job. I don’t mention his selling because Toby warned me not to. And I don’t mention what I just found out recently. Toby sometimes has sex with men when he goes to clubs, but he doesn’t know I know. A friend of a friend who does the same thing told me. The therapist, an overweight middle-aged woman, nods and writes in her pad. When she asks Toby to talk, he says he’s tired of me always hounding and judging him and not accepting him for who he is. The therapist wraps up by explaining Toby is an addict and I’m codependent, fitting us into neat compartments. She tells a story about her own son who is an alcoholic and how eventually she had to make the decision to cut him out of her life. She tears up, and with the tears wobbling in her eyes, she looks right at me.

“You need to leave him,” she says. “And when you do, you will need me. So let’s schedule a session for just you and me.”

Toby looks down, probably thinking I will agree. “I’ll think about it,” I say, icy.

And I search for another therapist. I don’t want a therapist who clings to the same tired, old narratives about people and their tendencies. I want someone who can think beyond the obvious. I want someone brilliant. I want someone who, at the very least, will just listen, let me arrive at my own pace to what I already know. So I find one for just me. The first time I see her, I immediately like her. Not because she strikes me as extremely competent. Not because she doesn’t talk about her own life, though if she had, this would have been a deal breaker after the last one. I like her because she reminds me of Nora. Something about her expressions, and her calculator that is studded with sequins. I feel mothered by her. In our first sessions I talk about my parents and childhood. But by the third session, she wants to know more about Toby.

“You’re a creative, ambitious woman with a future,” she says.

“What are you doing with this guy?”

“He’s not that bad,” I say defensively. “I know he loves me.”

“Really?” she asks. “How?”

I don’t tell her about his midnight confessions, how he’d die without me. Besides, I know, love songs aside, not being able to live without someone is not love. It’s need. “Because he says so,” I say, just to answer her question.

She eyes me doubtfully.

“Relationships are supposed to be hard,” I say. “They take work.”

“True,” she says. “But they aren’t supposed to be this hard.”

Many days, I go to Terri’s apartment and hang out. We drink tea and talk. A different person might get frustrated with my inertia, but Terri enjoys dissecting the problem and helping me find answers. She isn’t looking to fix me, just to help me find my way out.

“He’s your father,” she tells me. “A pot addict and escapist, but also needy.”

I remember the time my father got into bed with me, how it felt too close. I know he wasn’t trying to be sexual. I knew that then, too. But his need was so big and careless, taking up space in my bed. Just like my mother’s. And Toby’s. Need and sex have always been confused for me.

I sigh and look out the window. Outside a studio apartment in the building across the street I see a for rent sign.

“I’m getting tired of it,” I admit.

That winter, to by and I fly to St. Louis where Tyler and Gill host Christmas. My dad meets us there too. It is the first time I visit Tyler there, and as soon as I step into the house I feel bothered. I can’t tell what it is, whether too many knickknacks and books fill the space too tightly, or the windows don’t let in enough light. Tyler is dampened, deadened. She moves slowly through the room as though being careful not to fall. She’s hard pressed to smile, and when she does it’s slow, measured. It doesn’t reach her eyes. I know she had begun to act like this when we were teenagers, after Mom left, but it’s worse now. A lot worse. It hurts my heart to think of who she was as a child, always jumping and twirling with energy. I used to watch her do the things I was too afraid to do, like swing upside down on the jungle gym or climb the apple tree in our backyard, my heart heavy with admiration and love. I would do anything for her if it meant she would give me just a little of her attention. I don’t show her, but my love for her is still fierce and unconditional, the way it is with all little sisters.

Toby brings weed for my father, and within a few hours of his arrival they step outside to smoke together. Terri’s observation hangs in the air, weighing it down even further, and by the time Toby and I are alone, I’m furious.

“I don’t appreciate you being my father’s drug dealer,” I say as I make the guest bed with the sheets Tyler left out.

“Here we go again.” He stands at the doorway, his arms crossed.

“You don’t get it.” I jam the corners of the sheet under the mattress. “This isn’t about you smoking your fucking pot. It’s about your total and utter insensitivity to me. You know how I felt growing up with him, how it felt like he was barely there.”

“Could we not have one of your therapy talks right now?” he says.

“I’m on vacation.”

“Vacation from what?”

His jaw tightens. “Fuck you,” he says, and he walks out of the room. I sit on the bed, tears in my eyes. I want to be compassionate. I really do. Toby told me stories about his childhood. His mother was mentally ill and refused to take medication. Toby came home from school each day afraid of what he’d find. Sometimes he’d find her rocking in her bed, speaking unintelligibly. For weeks at a time he lived on saltine crackers because his mother spent her Social Security checks on clothes or jewelry. Once she held a knife to her wrists and yelled, “You don’t love me!” again and again while he crouched, terrified, in the corner. Toby’s father, who left them when Toby was a baby, didn’t return Toby’s calls. In many ways I understand why he smokes so much. The pain of living can be unbearable for someone like him. My life wasn’t nearly as awful as his, but I know what it’s like to feel you have no parents, no roots to anchor you to the earth.

I feel sorry for Toby, perhaps more so than loving him. A few days into our visit, Tyler and Gill get sick with the flu. That heaviness in the air grows even thicker, and I’m desperate to get home. But the day we’re finally supposed to leave, an ice storm hits Portland, and the airport closes. Toby and I watch TV. We take walks in the neighborhood, passing the boxy brick houses that all look the same. Every few hours I call the airline, trying to work out how to get home. I bounce my knee. I can’t keep my hands still. By the time we get to the airport, the flights to Portland jammed with people whose flights were canceled, my anxiety about being trapped is so high that I feel like I’m going to cry. When we finally get home on New Year’s Eve, five days later than planned, I’m resolute. I can’t stay in this relationship anymore. Three weeks later, I move my stuff into the apartment across the street from Terri.

My therapist is thrilled.

“This is a good first step,” she says. “Now you can begin to do some real work.”

I nod, but I don’t tell her the whole truth. I still sleep with Toby every couple of weeks. I’ve also been sleeping with another guy, a boy from Tennessee who makes me beg to have sex with him and only sometimes acquiesces, who tells me I’m too sexual for him and I should really tone it down. I don’t want her to know the truth. I’m too ashamed by my weakness, my inability to sit with my pain. One afternoon, Toby and I see Steven Spielberg’s Amistad, and afterward Toby wants to eat. The plan is we’ll walk back to my apartment where I’ll wash my face since the movie made me cry, and then take his car to La Señorita for burritos. But by the time we get to my apartment, Toby says he’s too hungry to wait for me to run in.

“I’ll be two minutes,” I say. “Just let me wash up.”

“Do what you want,” he says, his tone biting and mean. “I’m going.”

Enraged, I get in the car with him.

“I can’t believe what an asshole you are,” I say.

“I have low blood sugar.” He pulls the car into the street and stops with a jerk at the stop sign.

“Then carry peanuts with you,” I say. “What are you, a child? If you know you have low blood sugar, grow up and take care of yourself.”

“I’m not going to have this conversation,” he says.

“Yes, you are.” I yank down the window, letting the cool air in.

“If you can’t wait for two fucking minutes for me to do something for myself, then you’re going to listen to my anger about it this whole car ride.”

“Get the hell out of my car,” he yells as we come to a red light. And suddenly it hits me. I don’t have to do this anymore. I left. Months ago. Yet here I am, allowing the same crap I allowed for too long.

“OK,” I say, my voice calm now. “I will.” I open the door and get out of the car. I walk away from Toby for good.