Blue Plate Special (31 page)

But real, fancy, gourmet food was so far out of my reach, I couldn’t imagine ever getting to have it. I walked by French bistros and elegant Italian places and peered furtively inside, dying for anything on the menu—but even if I’d had enough money to eat there, I didn’t think they’d let me in. Some childish part of
me believed that good restaurants were for other people, real adults who knew how to order properly.

In the fall of 1991, I got a job as the receptionist at yet another Waldorf school, the Rudolf Steiner high school on the Upper East Side. It was there that I started my first real novel,
In the Drink
. It was, of course, semiautobiographical, about a personal secretary and ghostwriter who works for a thinly veiled countess. I spent my lunch hours inside at my desk, writing my novel on a borrowed word processor I brought every day from home, and eating chicken noodle soup with packets of saltines from the deli on Lexington Avenue. It was the only thing I ever ate for lunch on workdays—the broth, salty and rich and golden, the noodles, slippery and filling and warm, the tender chunks of chicken and carrot that gave pleasantly between my teeth, and the saltines, the perfect accompaniment, crunchy and as salty as the broth. I enjoyed this lunch as much as a medieval lord might have enjoyed a plate of perfectly roasted pheasant or duck. And indeed I felt lordly, eating my cardboard vat of hot, savory soup, letting the noodles slide luxuriantly down my gullet, slurping the broth, opening a fifth packet of crackers.

During the time I started
In the Drink
, I began seeing a therapist, as many people do in New York, and this therapist was very interested in excavating any buried anger at my mother I might have had, as therapists generally are. He didn’t have to dig very deeply to find a well of long-suppressed bubbling molten oil. He stuck a pipe in it and tapped it, and it gushed freely forth for the first time in my life. Soon, I was lying awake every night, drunk, my head stuck in a vise of seemingly bottomless anger, my guts roiling. I lay there like a live bug pinned to a corkboard, paralyzed and flailing at the same time. Finally, in my late twenties, I was experiencing what so-called normal adolescents are generally able to go through before they leave home. The timing was unfortunate, but then, I was a late bloomer, and this was my lot.

My mother was now living alone in a big-windowed cabin with a woodstove on a mountainside in Woodstock, and she had started a private psychotherapy practice in Red Hook that was becoming increasingly successful. She was free of Ben finally, after six years of marriage. I wasn’t in touch with him these days: his new girlfriend was two years younger than I was, and she was deeply threatened by my sister Susan’s and my presence in his life. She had forced him to choose between her and us. Of course, he chose her. This was a hard loss for me;
Ben and I had been close, and whatever problems my mother had had with him, he had been like a real father to me.

Since leaving Ben, my mother had begun calling me too often for my liking, in need of advice, reassurance, and support. I knew that if I didn’t call her back soon enough, she would be resentful and hurt, but sometimes I didn’t feel like talking to her until several days after I got her message. The needier she got with me, the angrier I got at her: how, I wondered, could she possibly feel entitled to demand anything from me when she had been emotionally unavailable as a mother since I’d hit puberty? I didn’t care now what she was going through herself in the wake of her divorce or that she was suffering deeply from the long-delayed effects of the hardships and her own lack of mothering she endured as a child. These things no longer concerned me. I had empathized with her all my life, taken care of her as much as I could, denied my own feelings in order to protect her, and tried never to upset or worry her. Now I was grown up, and so was she—for the first time in my life, I let myself feel all the things I hadn’t been able to when I was younger.

Finally, after a particularly guilt-inducing message on my answering machine, I boiled over and wrote her a letter, hard, angry, and forceful: I was her daughter, not her mother. I was done being her caretaker, and she had no right to demand that I give her anything at all. All my life, I’d tried never to ask anything of her emotionally, never to be needy myself. I was sick of feeling guilty and inadequate for not giving her enough support.

I sent it off, a ticking grenade in an envelope. My mother never responded to my letter, which must have exploded in her face, out of nowhere, although these feelings had been building in me for many years. She could have pointed out that she had helped pay for the therapy that had unleashed my rage at
her, and that she had never asked me to be self-abnegating with her. I had intuited as a small child a need and hunger in her for the unconditional support she’d always lacked, and had tried to supply it of my own volition. My mother would in fact have done anything to be close to me, and she had always tried to give me whatever I needed, even when it meant she had to go without herself. But I forgot all that now and sank into a burning, twisting black hole of pure and powerful rage.

Stubbornly I refused to contact her until she wrote or called me first. Months went by, and then a year. Just like that, we weren’t speaking to each other. This was a relief to me, in a low-down blackhearted sort of way.

Meanwhile, James and I had moved into a minuscule roach-infested studio apartment in the East Village whose rent was only $300 a month. Its two windows looked out onto a fire escape and dim airshaft. Its so-called kitchen was wedged into the tiny foyer: a cube refrigerator, a two-burner stove set into a counter with a tiny corner sink, and a battered set of metal shelves. On one wall were built-in shelves that held our TV, stereo, books, and opposite there was a futon couch that folded down at night. Next to the kitchenette was a small table with two chairs. The floor was covered with a ratty, stained beige carpet when we rented it. While James was away, I spent several nights after work ripping the carpet out and hand-sanding and polyurethaning the hardwood floor. I installed green and white linoleum in the tiny kitchen area and painted the walls a clean, warm off-white.

James was almost never there; his millionaire uncle owned a house in Rhode Island, and it stood empty most of the time, so James decamped up there as often as he could to work on his screenplays, and I stayed behind to eke out my living, half of which went to pay off my credit card debts and student loans, the other half of which went toward rent, food, and alcohol. Whenever I could, I took the train up to Rhode Island for the
weekend, a few days, as long as I could afford to stay. Instantly, as soon as I got there, I was relaxed and happy. I loved New England and never wanted to go back to New York—I longed to live there full-time in a little cottage near the ocean and write and take long walks and breathe sea air and eat fresh fish, and never go back to the dirty, noisy, crowded, expensive city again. I loved the wild warmth of the North Atlantic, the deep shaggy woods, the wry sense of humor of the people up there, and the feel of the air by the ocean—clean and briny, fresh and bracing.

We ate well in Rhode Island; it was the only time I allowed myself to cook and eat lavishly and really enjoy food. We bought fresh vegetables from the nearby farm stand, and peppery, oily smoked mackerel and fresh seafood from the fish place in Newport, and
vinho verde
from the Portuguese market in New Bedford. We sat on the wide, shady porch of James’s uncle’s house and drank bottle after bottle of the light, cold, slightly fizzy wine. We started with smoked mackerel with a baguette, then ate steamed corn and new potatoes, salads of pea shoots and tender butter lettuce and radishes, scallops poached in lemon juice, white wine, fresh herbs, and butter, and a fruit salad of strawberries and peaches. Sometimes we steamed a heap of clams, and sometimes we splurged and bought lobsters.

For a few years in a row, we went to the Cajun and Bluegrass festival in the middle of Rhode Island and saw Vassar Clements and a young Alison Krauss. For the second time in my life, I had jambalaya and remembered the first time I’d eaten it, at Ann’s dinner party in Iowa City. We drank big jars of lemonade with bourbon and passed the days in a pleasant haze of great music and gumbo, barbecued ribs, and crawfish. It was the most fun James and I ever had together.

T
oward the end of 1992, my sister Susan and I stopped talking to each other. We were both living in the East Village, only ten or so blocks apart. She was dancing professionally with two modern dance companies and waitressing in SoHo. She lived in a cheap, comfortable, sunny walk-up with her longtime filmmaker boyfriend and their two cats. She was thriving, making plenty of money, touring with her dance companies to Eastern Europe and India, and hanging out on her boyfriend’s film sets. She seemed, to me anyway, to have her shit together in a way that I profoundly didn’t. Whenever my sister and I had dinner together or ran into each other at a party, I could feel how disappointed she was in me, how much my current life of drunken flailing annoyed her, how embarrassed she was by my frank and unstoppable downslide. And she was angry at me for my anger at our mother. She tried to be supportive and understanding when I explained to her why our long silence had come about, but it was clear that she was unhappy about yet another rift in our splintering family and that she blamed me for inflicting more pain on our mother. And without me as a buffer, she had taken my place as our mother’s comforter and confidante.

Susan and I had some minor sisterly spat one day over a lunch of pierogies and borscht at a Polish place on Second Avenue, but it was the catalyst we needed to make official what had been happening for years in a subterranean way. We didn’t contact each other for so long after that, it became clear to me that we were not speaking to each other now, either. About a year later, I passed her on the street. I saw her, and she saw me, but neither of us said a word. It felt necessary and inevitable. It was, like my silence with my mother, a strange kind of relief for me.

By then, I had long since left my job at the Steiner School (or rather, after I was fired from it, or rather, after I was not
asked to return the following year) and had started doing secretarial work through temp agencies around Manhattan for seventeen or eighteen dollars an hour. Temping was freeing and pleasant at first: I loved not having a set schedule and working for temporary bosses who had a transient presence wherever I went. Every morning at home, and during my downtime at work, I worked on my novel. For the first time since junior high, it seemed to me, I was writing in my own voice, the same voice I’d used in eighth grade to make Kenny, my brown-eyed, pudgy crush, laugh in social studies class. Gone was the earnest Iowa Writers’ Workshop attempt to be Faulkner, to be Great. I didn’t care, suddenly, that I lived in a three-hundred-square-foot studio apartment with a cold, depressive, barely there boyfriend. I was having pure, subversive fun.

Very early, before I had to go to work, I would leap out of bed, having lain awake much of the night on a hamster wheel of panic and inspiration. I made myself strong tea in a large porcelain pot I’d bought in Chinatown, and sat at my little table and drank cup after cup as I read what I’d already written, despaired, edited, chewed my cuticles, and finally wrote another new page, then another. I was sure there must be some secret method, something all the other writers knew, some key to the kingdom I’d find if I only worked hard enough. I burned to write this novel. I
had
to get published. My thirtieth birthday had come and gone, and I hadn’t achieved anything. I was afraid I would soon explode in a white-hot burst of frustration.

Sometimes I felt electric with joy at the words that came from my fingers, but most of the time it was agonizing and terrifying. I was driven and frenzied and melodramatically manic-depressive—desperately sure one day that I’d never figure it out, clutching my head and hyperventilating, and the next day, laughing out loud as I wrote and walking through the city afterward feeling exalted.

All day at whatever job I had to go to, I took any opportunity
I could get to write edits and ideas as they came to me in the big hardbound notebook I always kept with me. At night after work, I read novel after novel in the bathtub, my brain on fire with Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald, Muriel Spark, Evelyn Waugh. I collected new words, looked them up in the dictionary, made lists of them: “adamantine,” “cloacal,” “hieratic”; each new word I acquired and used felt like a nugget of nourishment for the novel. I satirized ideas about things that had always flummoxed me, because I didn’t like them and wanted to articulate why—Freudian theory,
The Wasteland
, Easter. As inspiring good-luck touchstones, I held both
Jane Eyre
and the Kingsley Amis novel
Lucky Jim
in my head at all times.

My narrator, Claudia, whose circumstances were not altogether different from my own, but who was fictional and invented rather than autobiographical, was a helpful, comforting embodiment and extension of my own troubles; I made her problems much worse than my own, and so I was able to subsume my fears, channel them into my work. Like Claudia, I was completely alone in the world, severed from my family, almost friendless, a hermit, essentially single since my boyfriend was in Rhode Island (sleeping with some other woman, I found out later). And maybe because I was so free and alone, because absolutely no one was watching, I was now truly writing, and writing well, for the first time in my life. I was discovering how good it feels to invent characters and set them in motion, how the parts of my life that were messiest and most difficult to fix could be wrangled, shaped, and made useful, artful, fictional. My novel was like a live thing in my mind that demanded to be fed and tended to and nurtured constantly. Its needs eclipsed everything else. And no one else was going to do this for me. I was luckily naturally suited for this sort of stubborn, solitary, obsessive work, but there was never any guarantee of payoff, and the idea of failure gave me cold sweats in the middle of the night.