Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things Read online

  During school vacations, I took the Greyhound bus home to Freeville, with its layover in Scranton, and he went home by train to the Upper East Side. We wrote each other letters full of descriptive longing and called each other late at night—he sitting on the floor of the hallway of his father’s seven-room pre-war apartment and me from my mother’s old desk in the living room of our drafty farmhouse. I would sit and silently finger the keys on her powder blue Selectric, typing out phantom messages as we talked.

  Andy and I stayed together through college graduation, geographic separation, and two breakups of several months’ duration. Each time he broke up with me, I felt utterly heartbroken, walking the Washington streets in the rain and writing extensively in my diary.

  Three years after graduation and just when I had recovered from our most recent breakup, Andy traveled to DC and stood underneath my apartment window. He asked me to please come down to the street, and then he asked me to move to New York. I eagerly quit my lonely job working solo as the overnight editor at NBC’s Washington bureau and moved to New York, feeling not one moment of hesitation. We lived in a tiny basement apartment on the Upper West Side that had a little fireplace and a shady garden full of leggy impatiens. We worked for competing news stations in New York—he in front of the camera as a reporter and me on the production staff of a network news show. One night after work, while waiting at a bus stop on Sixth Avenue, I turned around and saw that every single one of the dozens of television screens in the Crazy Eddie store was tuned to his station, featuring a close-up of his face on that night’s newscast.

  I was desperate to get married. I wanted to seal this deal. In retrospect, I think I was trying hard to get ahead of Andy’s next departure. Plus, I loved him.

  Andy and I engaged in months of passive negotiations, full of heavy hinting (on my part) and resistance (on his). One Saturday afternoon I went to a salon and got my first-ever expensive New York haircut. They asked me if I used “product” (no) and if I wanted a sparkling water (also no). What I wanted was the Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail haircut. I even brought a picture with me.

  After what I can only describe as a vicious weed-whacking, the stylists in the salon seemed to know things had gone south. They gathered to gush over my new look, which I felt was actionable and worthy of a segment on Judge Judy. But because I was spending too much money on something undeserving, I became a silent and sullen co-conspirator in this hair crime. An hour and $110 later, plus tips (I am an inverse proportionate tipper), I left the salon looking like Meg Ryan’s slutty low-foreheaded cousin Tammy.

  I did the hair fail walk of shame back to our apartment, darting through back alleys and hiding behind Dumpsters until I reached our brownstone. I stood outside the apartment door, sniffling, unable to enter. From the hallway I heard Andy walk to the door.

  “Did you forget your key?” he called through the door.

  “Don’t open it!” I whimpered. Through the closed door I told him about the hair disaster.

  “Well, how long do you want to stand in the hallway?” he asked.

  “Forever,” I said. When I finally entered the apartment, I picked a fight with him and essentially said that we had to get married or I was leaving.

  “Uh, okay, we can get married if that’s what you want,” he said.

  “Andy,” I said, “I will love you forever.”

  “That’s nice,” he said. “I really appreciate it.”

  We told my mother during a rare visit of hers to New York City. We took her to lunch at the Plaza and shared our news with her. Jane seemed happy about it but was a little quiet. Through the restaurant’s massive windows we could see Central Park South. Horse-drawn carriages stood at the ready as the snow drifted down. “It’s like Edith Wharton,” my mother said, and I knew exactly what she meant.

  Andy and I took a day off from work and went shopping for engagement rings up and down Fifth Avenue. That afternoon, a gypsy cab jumped a curb and plowed into a bunch of pedestrians near where we were. Andy had to run off and cover the story for that night’s newscast. We abandoned our ring search. At some point several weeks later, I bought a small emerald ring from a vintage dealer in Rockefeller Center, where I worked, but I only wore it briefly. Something about it felt not-right, and I was embarrassed that I’d bought it for myself.

  I remember my mother trying to talk to me about how in many relationships, it was her perception that one person seemed to like the other person a little bit more. I knew she was talking about me, but I didn’t care. We had a beautiful wedding on Block Island and traveled to London for our honeymoon.

  The marriage was over before our fifth anniversary. By then, we were living in London full-time. He was climbing the broadcasting ladder as a network correspondent. I wasn’t working but instead was living the life of a prosperous expatriate housewife. Going to art galleries, browsing up and down the Kings Road, and meeting people for lunch consumed a fair part of my day. Soon enough I was pregnant with Emily. We bought an apartment on a leafy square in Earl’s Court, filled it with antiques and chintz pillows, and prepared to start life together as a family.

  But something was off from the start. I was lonely, with near-crippling homesickness and a feeling of almost overwhelming nostalgia for a life I hadn’t even experienced yet. I felt a sort of wistfulness that came from looking both forward and back but not at what was right in front of me. Andy traveled constantly. His job was to cover disasters and conflict throughout Europe and the Middle East. When he was home, he still acted like he was away. I began to withdraw as well.

  Aside from some lovely moments nuzzling our baby, our family never hit its stride. On the surface, we tended to get along very well, because we basically buried our problems by buying things and decorating. We swept all of our tougher feelings under antique kilim area rugs. All the same, as our apartment became ever more lovely and pulled together, I felt Andy drifting and our relationship starting to pull apart. We talked very easily about the headlines of the day, but he seemed detached and uninterested in things I was starting to find fascinating—namely everything having to do with babies and children. I didn’t hide my own frustration and disappointment. I was panicking. I felt like a spoiled brat for wanting what I wanted, which was a romance both secure and enduring, as well as everything else I thought went along with it—namely children and domestic happiness. Not only had I never had this, but I had also never even witnessed it. My own parents’ marriage was, I supposed, terrible before my father left my mother with four children to raise and a barn full of Holsteins. All of the young couples I knew were just like we were—busy buying things and talking about babies and granite countertops. I could only imagine what a good love would be like.

  No one knows how to make love stay. Still, Andy chose a cowardly way out by finding someone else, and then telling me about his infidelity, and then leaving me standing on the street in London as the cab pulled away with him in it. We parted peacefully, but just as I had been during our breakups while we were dating, I was utterly heartbroken. I took Emily, then two, and moved back to Freeville.

  It was March, the dismal season of freeze-and-thaw and driving cold rain. I didn’t know where we would ultimately live, so I left our possessions in storage in London. Rachel had gotten a head start on life as a single mother and was living with her daughter, Railey, in a little bungalow in Freeville. Rachel displaced five-year-old Railey from her twin bed and turned the room over to Emily and me. At night, I would lie next to my daughter and stare at the silhouette of my niece’s prodigious collection of toy horses. I pictured Emily’s toys and her baby bed, stashed away in a shipping container with no forwarding address. I tallied up my losses as I listened to the rain pound down on the roof.

  Andy said he would take my calls, in case of an emergency. I was instructed to communicate only through the network’s London switchboard. I tried this once, although it wasn’t really an emergency, and Andy’s disinterest was so humiliating that I decided never to do
that again. I didn’t have a car, so in the afternoons Emily and I walked down Main Street to Jane’s house. My mother and I drank coffee and looked at the daffodils in her garden, while Emily played with the old wooden blocks that had been left over from my grandfather’s childhood. My toddler breached the generations by making her blond-haired Barbie ride shotgun atop a hundred-year-old tin stagecoach. My sisters and aunts gathered around me, and my mother petted me like a cat. Jane had always liked my husband. I knew she would miss him, too.

  Three months later, I cashed in my divorce settlement and spent it on the down payment of the house on Main Street for us to use during visits home. Then Emily and I moved to Washington, DC. Andy moved to Moscow.

  Chapter Three

  Dating Blindly

  I’ve had several fresh starts in my life, but the one I took with my two-year-old daughter didn’t just feel like a transition—it felt like a Hail Mary. Emily and I moved into a small apartment in a sprawling Art Deco apartment building next to the National Zoo in Washington. At the time, the building was slightly down-at-the-heel and full of elderly people. Most of them were long-retired functionaries who seemed left over from the Eisenhower administration (Lyndon and Ladybird Johnson had lived in the building in the 1930s, when he was a junior congressman). After we moved in, I realized that Emily was literally the only child in the 200-unit apartment building. Every day as we walked through the lobby on our way to the store or the zoo, we would run a gauntlet of elderly cane-wavers and walker-thumpers. My little girl got a lot of outside attention.

  Apartment buildings are really a lot like small towns. Over the course of the day, you have many glancing connections with a revolving cast of characters. We said hello to Charles the doorman, Damon the maintenance guy, the postman, and the proprietor of the little convenience store in the building. In many ways, this reminded me of life on Main Street in Freeville. In the late afternoons before supper, Emily and I would walk through the National Zoo, which we treated like our front yard. Emily pushed her doll-sized stroller in her toddler way—circulating in a serpentine pattern that covered very little ground. I had always found this extremely irritating, but now I tried to stride less and stroll more. As a newly single parent in a new city, my instincts were to freak out and worry excessively about my future. But I wanted to slow down. I tried to let my little girl’s perambulations teach me how to do that.

  When I talked to my mother on the phone, I could tell she was avoiding pressing me on my life plans, but one evening she couldn’t stand it anymore and raised the big question of my future. Emily and I had been in Washington for a couple of months. The last of the boxes had arrived from London and were unpacked. I’d shoved a fan into the apartment’s window to try to suck in some cool evening air.

  “So. What are you going to do now?” Jane asked. Her question seemed to cover lots of categories at once: Work, Life, Love.

  “I think I’m going to stop trying so fucking hard,” I told her. I’m not sure this was particularly comforting to my mother. “Trying so hard” had always been my defining characteristic. Jane reminded me that she didn’t like hearing me use the F-word and left the rest alone.

  My life in Washington picked up from the running start I’d gotten during my time in college there. Several of my friends from school had settled in DC; I reconnected with them and was gathered into the fold. In our early thirties, everyone was having babies, so there was always something fun to do. Pool parties and birthday parties, nursery school field trips and trips to the circus dominated my social schedule. I tagged along on others’ family outings with a brigade of married moms, always with my daughter in tow. I didn’t know one other single parent. This seemed like a statistical impossibility, and on a trip home to Freeville, I pointed this out to my mother. I told her I feared I was living in a marriage cluster; it was like the water carried a contagion, creating an odd geographic pocket of fidelity. “Give it time,” she said. “The divorces are around the corner.”

  The divorces did, in fact, happen. For a thirty-five-year-old person, there are really only two segments of datable people—the newly divorced and the never-married. (Once in a great while, an age-appropriate widowed man would float past. These guys were snapped up faster than a drapey linen dress at an Eileen Fisher sale.) The newly divorced are often basket cases who can’t stop talking about their exes (I was in this category for a long time). I strongly sensed that the never-marrieds were not likely to start with me, a single mother who sometimes wore my heartbreak on my sleeve.

  We drove everywhere in my old 1967 Morris Minor, which I had shipped from England, along with the other spoils of my divorce. The car was a shiny jalopy with no radio, heat, or air-conditioning. In the winter, Emily and I froze as we slid on the car’s flimsy tires on DC’s icy streets. In the summer, it was a heat-conducting sweatbox. But the Morris was cute, and I quickly learned that my vintage car was man-bait.

  “That guy is looking at your car!” my friend Gay exclaimed as we stood outside her nursery school during afternoon pickup. “Go! Go talk to him!” Gay herself was an irresistible people magnet. Men, especially, seemed drawn to her. Within a few minutes of entering a crowded room with Gay, I would be elbowed closer and closer to the coat closet as a scrum of people vied for her attention. I noticed that Gay’s technique with grown-ups was really a version of what made her such a gifted teacher of young children. She focused completely on the other person, made flattering and insightful observations, asked great questions, listened attentively, and remembered telling details from previous conversations. My flirting technique, left over from the last time I had used it in college, was to babble incoherently about myself and then act prickly whenever someone tried to connect with me.

  Because of my divorce settlement, I wasn’t under tremendous financial pressure to work full-time. However, I applied to two jobs in newsrooms as assistants to busy and famous (male) journalists, who each told me that I was overqualified—with a twist. It’s not that I was overqualified professionally, necessarily (I had been out of the workforce for several years), but more that I was somehow overqualified personally. One gentleman explained himself by saying he would find it challenging to ask me to get a sandwich for him because I was older than his typical assistant and had a child at home. I told him that being a mother made me the perfect candidate because I was used to fetching things and could also wipe his nose for him if need be. He hired someone else.

  In the second case, when the journalist called to tell me I had not gotten the job, he also volunteered that he had instead decided to hire a recent (male) law school graduate instead of me because he simply felt more comfortable around him. “I mean, what if your daughter gets sick?” he asked.

  “Um… I don’t know, what if your daughter gets sick?” I asked him. My experience interviewing for jobs wasn’t that different from my experience trying to date. Both involved patting down my sweaty underarms in the ladies’ room before and then fearing I’d said and done everything wrong afterward.

  Eventually I was handed a job by a friend who personally passed it along and gave it directly to me. I became a temporary worker filling in for people on maternity leave at NPR. Thus began my career as a job doula for new moms, where I bounced from being a receptionist to being a booker. By the time Emily started kindergarten, I had landed a permanent part-time position as the commentaries editor for All Things Considered. My job was to find fresh voices to run on the program, and I admit to occasionally using my position as a way to try to meet writers I thought were cute. This never worked—not once—and yet it seemed like something that really should work. I had two friends who had met their romantic partners at book signings. How cool would it be to show up at a signing for your favorite (talented, available) writer, only to have him write his phone number along with the inscription in your book? This was the sort of adorable meet-cute I envisioned for myself, but it never happened.

  It is a tempting and romantic thought to believe that someone is out
there, waiting patiently for you, but in my case he was not. I bought new outfits for blind dates and fix-ups—always excited by the possibilities and always returning dejected to our apartment to pay the babysitter. I had two (very) brief relationships with two different men who each said to me, “You make me want to be a better man.” I thought, Well, that makes two of us who want you to be a better man!

  I did not find love around the corner. Instead, gradually I fell in love with what was there all along—my daughter, our friends, their children, my nieces and nephews, and the fun and overall peaceful engagement in work and family. Emily and I had a life in Washington and a life back in Freeville, where we spent holidays and summer vacations. But sometimes I dropped my guard. I got tired of making the effort to be happily alone.

  After the last day of school, I would pack Emily and our cat into the car and drive from Washington seven hours due north to Freeville. I worked on my editing and freelance jobs in the early mornings, and in the afternoons our chief occupations were riding our bikes to Jane’s house down the street and drinking lemonade with her on the porch. As the summers ticked by, my family members expressed surprise that I was still single. Jan and Roger set me up with a man they knew. I went on a movie date with a professor my age who seemed far more interested in his research than in me. Jane even got into the act, throwing a small dinner party featuring the one single man my age she knew. Each time, excitement was followed by disappointment.

  Every summer I enrolled Emily in a day camp, where at the end of each two-week session the campers put on a show. One summer when she was ten, I went to see their performance on a Friday night. It was a goofball mash-up featuring kids forgetting their lines and running into each other during the production numbers.

  There in the camp’s overheated old theater, I saw Bruno. Bruno was a remnant of my childhood. Like many people I ran into locally when I wasn’t expecting it, I had to source this particular connection from my mental Rolodex, gathered through time and the different places I had lived. And then I placed him: Schickel, Bruno. Birthplace: Dryden, New York. Family’s occupation: dairy farmers. Bruno and I went to Dryden High School together, but I hadn’t seen him in twenty years. On this night he was in the auditorium with his wife; their daughter Clare was enrolled in the camp.