Raising Hope (23 page)

But they assured us it was to be expected, that we would walk into law school as one person and come out the other end as someone entirely different. We’d reason instead of feel; we’d fight back hard instead of sitting winded in the dust.

There were some people who entered law school longing for transformation. You could see it shining in their eyes. These were the people who, in another time or place, would have been martyrs, would have starved themselves to death for some cause. And the cause wouldn’t have been as important to them as the process of starving, the feeling of hunger sliding them into hallucinatory otherness. These were the people who studied ten hours a day, who took down every word of each class as if they were writing a transcript, whose book pages were streaked yellow from highlighting all but a sentence or two. These were the people who wouldn’t shower during final exams, who wore their dirt and wild-eyed expressions like badges of pride.

There were other people at law school for whom the transformation was easy because they were already on their way. They—mostly men—were people for whom every social encounter became an excuse to pick, to take issue, to start a fight. Todd Wilton was one of those people. I first met him at lunch with a bunch of other first-year students. He was—as usual—monopolizing the conversation as he discussed whether to continue two-timing his college girlfriend, Miranda, with a third-year law student or tell her the truth and break things off with her.

“What do you think, Sara Lynn?” he asked, pointing at me.

Without thinking, I stopped sipping my soda and said, “Well, honesty is the best policy.”

He smiled smugly and said, “Is it really? Is honesty really the best policy all the time?”

“It’s just an expression,” I interjected hastily.

Todd looked around the table to be sure he had everyone’s attention and then leaned across the table to me. “You,” he said, “should think before you speak in generalities like that. Remember, we’re being trained at law school to speak precisely. You said, ‘Honesty is the best policy,’ but I bet you don’t really mean that. For example, Sara Lynn, what if your best friend was wearing an ugly dress and she asked if you liked it? What would you say?”

“Todd,” I protested, “I was just using an old expression.”

“Answer the question,” he said, crossing his arms across his chest and looking like our law professors, who loved to back us into corners with their extravagant examples designed to show why our answers were as stupid as cow dung.

Hot shame coursed through me; I felt as if I had exposed my ignorance and should never, ever speak again. I took a deep breath and said, “I’d tell her the dress was ugly only if my words could do some good. Only if she hadn’t bought it or could still take it back.”

“Aha!” he said. “So you’d lie to her if she couldn’t take it back.”

“Yes,” I said, “because I’d be hurting her for no reason if I told the truth.”

“So you were wrong when you said honesty was the best policy?”

“No,” I said stubbornly, because it was the kiss of death ever to admit you were wrong. They trained you to believe that you had to fight on and on, even if it was apparent to everyone in the room that you were banging your head against a brick wall. We were learning it was sheer womanly weakness to give in and say, “I changed my mind. I see your point. I was in error.”

I should have said no to him when he asked me out during our third year of law school. I should have turned on my heel and run the other way. I should have listened to my instincts instead of being flattered by his interest. It wasn’t me he wanted, anyway; it was the girl who got nine job offers, the girl who seemed to have her future spreading out before her.

He broke up with Miranda to go out with me. I wouldn’t have it any other way. He’d stop me after class and corner me, asking, “Why won’t you go out with me?”

“Because you’re going out with Miranda,” I’d tell him, walking quickly and refusing to stop, clutching my books to my chest.

“I’m not,” he’d say. “We have an open relationship.”

I’d laugh. “I know all about your ‘open relationship.’ It means you see people on the side and hope she never finds out about it.”

“What’ll it take?” he said one day. “I’ll do anything. Do you want me never to see Miranda again? If that’s what you want, I’ll do it. I’ll do anything to go out on a date with you. One date. That’s all I’m asking.”

“Fine,” I said, looking up into his eyes. “Break up with her and ask me out. Then I might say yes.”

He called me that night. “Done,” he said. “I broke up with Miranda.”

“How do I know whether to believe you?” I asked, surprised he’d taken such a rash step for me.

“Ask Jody O’Connor,” he said. “Miranda’s probably told her by now.”

“I won’t ask her,” I said. “I don’t care that much.”

“Fine,” he said. “Word will spread. You’ll hear about it tomorrow. And I’m going out with you Friday night.”

He showed up at my apartment Friday evening with a dozen roses to take me out for dinner, and he said, “Pack a bag, Sara Lynn. We’re going away for the weekend.”

I buried my nose in the roses, and when I looked up I saw Todd in a different light. “Where are we going?”

“My folks have a place on Martha’s Vineyard. There’s an evening flight out of Logan.”

“Well, I can’t just take off for the whole weekend,” I said. “I have things to do. Besides, haven’t you ever heard of getting to know someone before you go away for a weekend with them?”

“Come on, Sara Lynn,” he said. “I’ve known you all through law school. I broke up with Miranda to be with you. I feel like we’re already serious with each other.”

I thought for about one second how romantic it was to have someone just decide, with a snap of his fingers, that he wanted to be serious with me. I thought of how pea green with envy those pasty-looking law school girls would be when it got around that I had been whisked away to an island for my first date with the newly eligible Todd Wilton.

“It’s against my better judgment,” I said, “but I’ll go.”

Todd smiled confidently, as if his success in wooing me were all but assured. He liked to win.

We were inseparable after that weekend. I was charmed by his decisiveness in courting me—the flowers that kept coming, the notes that appeared in my locker, the way he’d put his arm around my waist in front of everyone and brag that I was the smartest little thing he’d ever seen. “She got nine job offers, you know,” he’d say.

When we graduated, we didn’t move in together. Mama would have had a fainting spell at that one. “If he gets the milk for free, he won’t buy the cow,” she used to say. That’s what I was—a cow to be purchased.

He’d come over for dinner every night, though, and he’d talk, talk, talk about his job—the research he’d done that day, the smartly attired attorney for whom he worked, the way he’d made another new lawyer look bad when he came up with the case that saved the day. It was all I could do to stay awake when he went on about it. I could feel my eyes glaze over as I almost fell forward onto my plate.

But my eyes opened wider than they had in a long time when I walked to Faneuil Hall for lunch the day Conrad told me to prove I had a brain. It was one of those beautiful September days when the sun is high but not hot, the breeze is gentle, and the air smells crisp. I walked from my office without a coat, feeling the sun warm my body and wondering why I believed for a minute that the life I was playacting inside an office building was really living.

As I walked along the cobblestone street, I saw Todd kissing his old girlfriend Miranda on a bench where anyone in the world could see. I turned around, walked back to my office, and opened the law books stacked on my desk. At six-thirty, I put the argument I had written on Conrad’s desk and left for my apartment.

Todd and I had it out that night when he came to the door. I told him what I had seen and asked what I was supposed to think.

“Look,” he said, running his hand through his hair and pacing up and down my living room. “Look . . .”

“I’m looking,” I said pointedly. It was nice to have Todd in the corner, to see him squirm.

“I ran into Miranda on the street a couple of weeks ago and she asked me how my job was going.” He turned to me accusingly and said, “She was really interested, too.”

“Like I’m not?” I said, arching my eyebrows. “Like I don’t sit and listen to every little stapling of paper you do every day?”

“See?” he said, and pointed at me. “That’s what I mean. Miranda would never say something like that. She’s really interested. She’s . . . warm.”

“What am I? Cold?” I asked, my arms crossed over my chest.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “Yeah, you are, actually. Look at you now. You’re not even crying or anything.”

“Oh, is that what I’m supposed to do?” I uncrossed my arms and put them on my hips. “Cry my eyes out for you and beg you to choose me over her? Ha!”

He quickly changed tactics to break up with me before I could break up with him. He hated to lose. “I’ve already chosen. I’m marrying her. She’s everything I want in a wife.”

“That’s about right,” I said. “You want a little robot to simper at you and tell you how great you are.”

“Don’t say such things about Miranda!”

“Oh, please.” I laughed. “Since I’ve known you, you’ve done nothing but cheat on her.”

“I’ve changed,” he said quietly. “I know she’s who I want.”

“Well, then, you can get out of my apartment.” I marched to the door and threw it open.

“I hope we can still be friends,” he said, looking at me as if I were a client whose case hadn’t turned out quite as well as had been hoped for.

“Go to hell!” I said, and slammed the door after him.

Then I started to cry and cry, not because I wouldn’t be picking out china patterns and showing off a diamond ring, but because I’d been foolish enough to believe I wanted to marry a man who couldn’t even see me.

I quit my job the next day. I hated that job, just like I had hated law school, just like I hadn’t found one redeeming quality in Todd Wilton until he convinced me otherwise by sheer force of persuasion.

“I’m leaving,” I told Conrad Dalton. “I’m going back to New Hampshire to be with my parents.”

“Well, we’re sorry to lose you,” he said, but he didn’t sound like he’d waste one second before propping up another body to do the work I had done.

I didn’t want to set fire to my bridges and watch them burn, didn’t have the foolhardy guts to say, “I hate your goddamn job. It bores me to tears and so do you.” So I minced away, smiling and bowing to the end. “My parents are aging,” I said by way of explanation. “They’re aging and they need me.”

And then I got into my little red car and tooled up Route 93 back to Ridley Falls, with all my work clothes piled up in the backseat. Beautifully tailored silk blouses and straight skirts and jackets that made me look purposeful and serious and smart. Clothes I vowed I’d never wear again because I was tired of showing everyone I was something I was not.

The truth was, I had no idea who I was on that ride home from Boston. None. My years at law school, my months at my job, my affair with Todd, were a blur already. It was as if I were throwing out the car window onto the highway all those years of being molded into something I never cared to be. I didn’t want to be molded anymore; I wanted to be liquid for a while.

I wondered, on that drive back, what my parents would say to me. I pictured my mother’s mouth opening into a delicate oval and my father’s eyebrows drawing together. I pictured myself tossing my hair back and telling them I wouldn’t be marrying Todd, wouldn’t be toiling in anybody’s law firm, that I was through with Boston and everything that went with it. I pictured myself saying, “I’m here to stay, Mama,” willing her to see that her daughter was a person in flux, a person altogether different from the precisely defined wonder child she had worked so hard to create.

And who am I now? I can’t help but think about it as I park my car in the hotel garage and take the elevator up to the main floor. Who would I perceive myself to be if I were a stranger watching me approach the front desk?

I would observe my scoop-necked white T-shirt and my pink capri pants. I would note my light-pink-painted toenails in my white leather slide sandals. I would nod approvingly at the Kate Spade bag over my shoulder, the Cartier Tank wristwatch, and the Tiffany pearl earrings. I would imagine that the woman I was watching had everything she could ever want.

My head clears when I arrive at the garden I’m doing a piece on. It has to. I’m working now. I take all the confusion that’s been running around my head all day and put it outside me, outside the me who’s interviewing Irene Luger, the garden’s owner, and Harold Britton, the garden’s designer. We’re sitting on the patio enclosed by brick walls on which grow ivy and climbing hydrangea. The beds surrounding the stone patio contain a plethora of shade plants—different varieties of hosta, wild ginger, brunnera, ligularia. It’s very peaceful and very ordered. There isn’t even a stray blade of grass that’s dared to grow up through the spaces between the patio stones. It’s absolutely perfect.

Mrs. Luger (“Please, call me Irene”) is going on and on about the composition she’s created using variegated-leaved plants. “But, really, the importance of editing, especially in a small urban garden, cannot be overstated,” she says rather self-importantly. Mr. Britton sits next to her, smiling at her every word. He knows who butters his bread.

I don’t mean to sound so harsh, but I must admit I have a bit of disdain for these women (and men—I’ve met one or two in the course of my job) like Mrs. Luger who call themselves gardeners even though they’ve hired professional landscape designers to create their gardens and an army of worker bees to care for them. It’s not that I have anything against using professionals—in fact, I think it’s wise. It’s just that you don’t call yourself a doctor when you have your appendix removed simply because the organ operated on happens to be yours.

“Yes,” I say, smiling brightly. “You’re so wise to understand the importance of editing in the garden. It’s really what separates the merely pleasing gardens from the truly breathtaking ones.” Hmm. Guess I’m not the only one aware of who’s buttering the bread around here. Flatter the garden’s owner and she’ll tell all her friends how simply marvelous it was working with you, how you really understood what she was trying to achieve in the garden. Her friends, each with her own plot of land and gifted landscape professional, may well be your next piece for the magazine. You eat what you kill, after all. Have to keep those story ideas coming. I smile even wider at her.