Falling Apart in One Piece Read online

  We used to sit on the big front porch of our house, gently rocking the porch swing as she talked to me about Life. Much of my mother’s conversation about her youth and her past was tinged with regret. She struggled with a sense of loss for not having graduated from college, since she’d dropped out to support my dad, and over not having found work that she felt used her smarts and potential. She regretted not having lived out her dreams—the dreams she had for her career, her intellect, her self that had nothing to do with having children and a family. She talked about the complicated undertow of her relationship with my father, the ways in which she didn’t feel valued by him (and I inferred the converse on my father’s behalf, making precocious judgments about the ways people, despite their best intentions, don’t quite fit together). She urged me to find my own path, and to make sure my life belonged to me fully before I gave it to someone else. But my mother wasn’t doleful; she was very strong, a creative and dynamic personality, interested in everything, whether learning how to cane a chair by hand or taking on a local retailer for bad customer service. I thought she possessed magic, even though she also carried so much sadness. In these many conversations my mother taught me the power of will.

  I learned to put up my radar to sense gathering storm clouds in both my parents, becoming the air-traffic controller in my family. I thought I had it all figured out—the set of his jaw that meant my dad had had a long day at work; the slight sigh my mother would give when she felt like picking a fight—and I’d play my parents off each other. I’d reassure my dad that I was comforting my mother; I’d tell my mother that I was calming down Dad. Meanwhile I’d be kicking my younger brother, Scott, under the table if he was chewing too loudly, or, with my eyes, begging my brother Gregg—five years older than me and tired of the family drama—to be quiet when he talked back to Dad. What my role actually was in all this doesn’t matter; a child’s sense of security had been born, based on a vulnerability I could barely tolerate: I must be in charge at all times.

  I examined my parents’ personalities and decided that what each needed most the other was simply unable to provide—they did not meet in their soft places, but instead clashed in their hard places. I felt sorry for them for being so ill-suited; it was hard to see two people I loved and depended on not be able to connect. I packaged up my own loss and fears surrounding their storminess and stuffed those feelings deep down inside me until they took the shape of a powerful sense of responsibility. Responsibility for my parents. For everything that happened in my family. For everything that happened around me. It didn’t always feel safe in their marriage, and as I got older, I wondered what the point of risking an unhappy marriage would be. It didn’t seem at all possible to me that you could find a person who would continue to change with you as life unfolded; life was too unpredictable. But unpredictable wasn’t scary to me, not then. Unpredictable meant the world was full of possibility, possibility just waiting for me.

  What did feel safe amid life’s tumult was making plans, being in control. The upside of being the daughter of two strong personalities was that I never lacked confidence in my own opinions or my own abilities. I could read before kindergarten, started school early, went to reading classes with the grade above me, and generally got the impression from teachers that I was very interesting, which spurred me on to new levels of precocity. At the age of seven, in second grade, I started telling anyone who would listen that I was going to be a magazine editor when I grew up. When I was eleven or twelve I even interviewed the imaginary adult me for a magazine that I made with white paper, colored pencils, and a stapler. It was the first of many magazines I would make with my bare hands. I drew a picture of me: I was wearing an emerald green surplice-wrap dress and had colored my blond hair a bold shade of red. In the accompanying interview, I spouted all kinds of irresistibly breezy bon mots about how wonderful and fascinating and rewarding my life was. This was the language I had picked up from all the magazines my mother read: Glamour and Redbook and others she plucked from the racks at the supermarket or drugstore checkouts. There was going to be no time for marriage in this independent, wildly satisfying life. I knew I wanted to be a mother. (I planned to adopt two siblings from foster care.) It was the husband I could do without.

  I zoomed through high school on the twin engines of hubris and adrenaline. Thus propelled, I could almost pretend that my lurking doubts and insecurities weren’t there. I made good grades, edited the school paper, and participated in way too many extracurricular activities, afraid of missing out on something. But I always felt the pressing anxiety of figuring out what was happening in any room—what motives were at play—intellectualizing the ordinary insults of teen life as a way of surviving them. I searched for what people wanted, whether it was recognition or friendship or humor, so I could give it to them and feel I’d earned myself a place. When I graduated I was entangled in a complicated relationship with a serious boyfriend, but I had serious plans: I was headed off to college to get myself ready for a life that would be big enough to satisfy me and my mother. After a few crazy weeks and high-drama, long-distance visits, he and I let each other go.

  Four years at Washington and Lee University in Virginia (as a member of the second class of women); a custom-made major incorporating journalism, English, and business classes; a semester in Paris writing a thesis titled “L’internationalisation d’Elle et de Marie Claire”; a coveted summer internship at Mademoiselle magazine in New York City; a senior thesis on magazine start-ups, which included a business plan for a general-interest magazine about design . . . Boom, boom, boom, I was lining up and knocking down achievements. I was a crazed student, working too many hours a week at a part-time job, taking too many classes (I graduated with almost a full year’s worth of extra credits), sleeping very little. But my desire to succeed—and my fears that I wouldn’t—were so strong, I didn’t know how else to do it except to be firing all cylinders all the time. I was fueling the engine the only way I knew how in order to launch my real life with extreme momentum to make it everything I’d dreamed. I did not see marriage in that sparkling future.

  And so, of course, in that funny way that life works, I was the first of my college friends to head down the aisle.

  I started falling in love with Chris just a year after I had graduated college and moved to New York City. I had met him during the previous summer, when I was interning at Mademoiselle magazine. During my internship I was tormented not by the editors I worked for, as in The Devil Wears Prada, but rather by the other assistants, who turned up their noses at my wardrobe of full skirts and chinos (which I had adopted when I got to W&L, shedding my 1980s mall chick look). They acted as if I was maybe ten pounds too heavy and a few degrees too uncool to be seen sitting near them. Chris was still a film student at NYU, with the de rigueur longish hair and the clunky black boots of that tribe, and I met him because he was friends with a high school friend of mine. He was terribly cute, but he was also shy, hiding his big blue-green eyes behind wavy strands of light brown hair that kept working their way out of his ponytail.

  We didn’t talk much that summer, but when I moved back to New York to get a job for real a year later, we began running in the same crowd, catching each other’s eye across the room. We started having hours-long phone conversations two or three times a week, me taking the princess phone I shared with my roommate across the living room and into the bathroom, because she was so sick of hearing us talk about everything and nothing. I was completely charmed by the juxtaposition of his quiet, gentle nature and his cleverly vulgar sense of humor, and entranced by all his ideas of what his life would be: screenwriting, filmmaking, sharing his imagination with the world. I said to him one night on the phone before we’d even kissed: “You expect great things, don’t you?” As a maker of plans and a dreamer of dreams, I could offer no greater compliment.

  A few days later, at a party in his tiny apartment, Chris and I found ourselves alone together in the kitchen. We talked, and mooned, and ki
ssed at last, and then kissed some more. From that night on we were together pretty much constantly, to the chagrin of both our roommates. I was completely attracted to the way that Chris was unlike anyone I’d ever met: he was a just-left-of-the-mainstream guy, but, with his big heart and easy affection, he was no angry, cynical rebel. He was an outsider in the same way my older brother is: smart, determined to be self-determined, uninterested in what people think he should be or in following a typical path. I admired that bravery in Chris, as I always had in Gregg. I wished I could care less what people thought of me.

  But even the dopamine rush that flooded my circuits in the first flush of infatuation wasn’t enough to mask a constant unease. I was thrilled to be with Chris, yes, but I was also afraid. I couldn’t afford to have this distraction now. After three long months spent hand-delivering resume packages to every major magazine publishing house, walking the length and breadth of Manhattan both to save money and to learn the city, I had landed the editorial assistant position I desperately wanted. Even better, the job was at Mirabella, a smart and gorgeous women’s magazine that had recently launched, and that had been the focus of my college thesis on start-ups. It was exactly the job I had set out for when I moved to New York City! I couldn’t believe my luck.

  I was working in a glamorous, all-beige office with a swooping, circular reception desk behind glass walls, assisting two brilliant and lovely features editors who were generous in showing me the way it was done. I was living in a teensy apartment in a graffiti-covered building in one of the grittiest downtown neighborhoods, because it was all I could afford. (My college friends who’d been raised in New York’s best neighborhoods weren’t allowed to visit me at my apartment.) I flitted in and out of after-work publicity events—book parties, music parties, launch parties, beauty parties—where I could eat free meals and drink free drinks to help offset the ridiculously meager wage I was delighted and honored to be earning. I had chopped off my long blond hair and hennaed it flame red (as planned), and saved up my money to buy a pair of thigh-high flat-heeled suede boots like those the impossibly chic fashion editors at the magazine were wearing. I had people to impress, ladders to climb, captions to write. Falling in love wasn’t in my plan!

  But I couldn’t resist. Chris was everything I hadn’t known I wanted: a long-haired rebel with a sweet and sensitive heart. A silly guy with serious dreams. Someone grounded and loving and kind. But above all, he was my safe place.

  After years of people’s being impressed or annoyed or flummoxed by my hyperconfident personality, I thought everything about me was big. I wondered if I was too big. But being in love with Chris made me feel small, in the best way, as if he could put me in his pocket to carry me around and protect me from the harsh, mean world. One night as we danced together in my East Village apartment (to Matthew Sweet’s alt-rock anthem “Girlfriend”), Chris swooped me up into his arms, something no man had ever dared to do with my five-foot-eight-inch frame, and he made it seem easy, like I was no burden, no trouble.

  I had never thought of myself as sensitive or vulnerable until I met Chris. I had no idea that underneath my confidence and braggadocio was a girl who was terrified that life might not turn out okay, that I might find myself trapped in regret like my mother. I hadn’t realized that I expected love always to hurt just a little—that competitive pinch in my family—until I felt loved with no conditions by Chris. He peeled away my tough take-no-prisoners exterior and revealed the soft part within—the part of me I would have told to buck the hell up if I’d known it was there—and he loved it, too. Plus, he could play the guitar. And sing! I remember the dizzy feeling I’d get watching him play for a roomful of our friends at parties, unself-consciously belting out “I Like the Way You Walk,” by the Hoodoo Gurus, while I sat there in my colored tights and wildly patterned Betsey Johnson minidress. It seemed like a miracle to me that someone could do that, and I felt my body churn with attraction. And he was smart and silly and funny and he thought all my crazy and grand plans for life were great and good and reasonable. Nothing I thought was too big for Chris. Unable to keep myself from trying to see the future, I visualized the life we’d live, fulfilling all our creative dreams and making up the rules as we went along, having two or three children with beautiful blue-green eyes, just like his, and building our careers in New York City and becoming everything we were meant to be.

  The love Chris gave me was a good, simple thing I could trust. I told friends that it felt like I was a balloon reaching up into the sky, and he was down there on the ground, firm and sure, gently holding on to me to keep me from disappearing into space. With Chris I somehow felt more real than I’d ever been in my life. It became impossible for me not to think about marrying him.

  And so even as I was falling head over heels, I was filled with dread, a sense that I was being fooled. I already knew this could never work out.

  I shared these fears with my mother, who was my closest confidante and friend as well as my roving unabridged dictionary and encyclopedia. I called her as many as three times a day some days from work, when I hadn’t been able to find a fact or piece of information I needed in the magazine’s reference library (in those days before the Internet replaced reference libraries as the main resource of editorial assistants). Our conversations, once the business at hand had been taken care of, were always far-ranging; they encompassed the doings of my everyday life as well as our musings on people and love and life in general. I tend to live my life out loud, to share every experience I have as I’m having it, with a full set of emotional footnotes about what it feels like, which I attribute to our shared lack of boundaries.

  After about a year and a half of being a couple, Chris and I started to talk about moving in together. We were already spending most of our time together at each other’s apartment, standing outside on freezing-cold nights waiting for the bus that would take us on our slow, sixty-block evening commute between my apartment downtown and his uptown. We felt certain we were going to end up together, married or not, but the finances of living in New York City were accelerating our decision. What was the point of paying for two apartments if we were only ever sleeping in one at a time?

  I dreaded telling my mother, who had always made it clear that she totally disapproved of living together before getting married.

  I also didn’t want to tell her because I was embarrassed—embarrassed to let her know that I was someone who had been fooled by love and comfort and company, despite all the proof she’d offered that my independence was my most precious asset. I called her, practically in tears, and tried to tiptoe toward telling her that it seemed logical for me and Chris to move in together (although it wasn’t logic that was making me want to do it), and that I knew that he and I would get married, when I was ready, later, down the line. She said, “Stacy, you and Chris know each other far better than your father and I did when we got married. So you’ll do what you think is right.” It wasn’t quite permission, but it was what I needed.

  So Chris and I started our apartment search in earnest, and after a few weeks we walked into the apartment I instantly knew would be our future home. It was tucked away on a picturesque block in the West Village, one of the oldest neighborhoods in New York. Normally the area would have been out of our financial reach. But the apartment was teeny-tiny—four hundred square feet, which contained a small living room, a bedroom barely big enough for a queen-size bed and a tiny dresser, an old-fashioned pink-and-gray bathroom, and a galley kitchen that didn’t even have a full-size refrigerator and was tucked into the hallway between bath and bed. When we got to the open house, there were already dozens of potential renters there ahead of us. But after a four-second lap around the place with Chris, who agreed the apartment was amazing, I was determined. I walked up to the real estate agent and said, “I am sure that this apartment was meant for me.” I handed her my business card, hoping that the fact that I worked for a magazine would make me stand out in her head. She informed me that there was alr
eady a taker for the place who had given her a deposit check, and that there were about eight people on the waiting list ahead of me if that deal fell through. I was crestfallen, but I thanked her and said that we had our deposit ready and all our references in order, and we could close the deal in a heartbeat. When Chris and I got home I cried, because I just knew in my bones that that was where we were supposed to start our life together; it fit the storyline in my head.

  The real estate agent called me two days later to let me know that the first deal had fallen through. And she said, “I’m not sure why I’m calling you, because there were a lot of people ahead of you on the list, but you just seemed so passionate about living here. . . .”

  A feeling of luck and optimism about my relationship with Chris started to replace the cynicism and doubt. And so I fell in love with Chris the way I do anything: full speed ahead and with nothing held back. Every conversation with him was filled with kisses and my trying to express how much I loved him. We talked about getting married all the time, and I was always speculating about when we would decide the timing was right, though Chris insisted that he would surprise me with the proposal.

  We fell into some comfortable couple routines, with me cooking dinner on weeknights, the two of us going for gut-busting Saturday brunches at Aggie’s down the street with our friend Alix, and Chris joining me for very late nights at the office at Mirabella, where I earned some extra money by transcribing interviews for one of the editors, who was writing a book. Chris and I sat near each other in the dark, hushed office, only the bank of lights above us aglow, the security guard prowling the floor every hour. Chris worked on his own writing while he waited for me to finish, and then we’d take the subway home together at 11 p.m. or midnight.