He sits in the driver’s seat of his green jeep, wondering what I’m so upset about while I cry behind my sunglasses. We park in silence, and he leads me back to his apartment like I’m a little kid in trouble. We shut the door, and he fills a Mason jar with water and tells me I’m the only person who has ever mattered to him. He says he knows I feel the same way, his face contorted in the only display of emotion I’ve seen since we met.
Finally, after three more attempts at ending it—at the beach, on the phone, via email—I sit with my friend Merritt at a sidewalk café in Park Slope. It’s a little too cold to be outside and we wear our sunglasses, shrinking down into our hoodies. I pick at my pancakes while she tells me, simply, “It’s okay to change your mind.” About a feeling, a person, a promise of love. I can’t stay just to avoid contradicting myself. I don’t have to watch him cry.
So I stop answering the phone, I stop asking permission, and soon he’s completely gone, like being grounded over Christmas break or some other terrible thing that seemed like it would last forever.
“When you’re my age, you’ll know how mysterious this all is,” he says.
He’s talking about love, and he’s only eight years older than me. I should have known. It was going almost too well, a bicoastal relationship. He called me every morning on his way to the beach to surf. I described the view from the window of my new apartment, snow falling on the neighbor’s garden, local cats whining from their respective fire escapes. I couldn’t always remember his face, so my visual for him became my feet, bare and pale and pressed against the wall as we talked for hours. “I wish you were here,” he said. “I’d take you for ice cream and show you the waves.”
I nodded. “I’d like that.” Or I’d like to like that.
But here I am at his birthday party, all wrong in my mother’s black dress, face red, braid greasy, heels sinking into the soil of his friend Wayne’s backyard. The girl who is DJing has eleven buns in her hair, and he is standing by the hot tub talking to another girl in a romper, and I know, as much as I have ever known anything, that my arrival isn’t what he’d imagined. Maybe he never really imagined it at all. The next day he takes me on a day trip up the coast that should be romantic but feels like a hostage situation. As we wait in line for fish tacos, I hope against hope that no one can hear him speaking, and if they do, they don’t judge me for it. I want more than anything to be alone.
I head home, and having concluded this chapter I am able to relax for the first time in months. After all, desire is the enemy of contentment. From the bathtub, I call Audrey. “It isn’t going to work,” I tell her. “I think he thinks he was being really deep by dating a chubby girl.” Later, we will find out he was simultaneously courting an actress from television’s The West Wing and that he bought her a cactus.
Audrey starts to laugh. “What a goon. He’s lucky to know you, but too stupid to ever realize it.”
“I still love you,” he says, “but I have to go my own way.”
“So you want to break up?” I ask, trembling.
“I guess so,” he says. I fall to the floor, like a woman in the twelfth century fainting at the sight of a hanging in her town square.
Later, my mother comes home from a party and finds me catatonic, lying across the bed, surrounded by pictures of him and me, the mittens he bought me at Christmas folded beneath my cheek. I am crippled by what feels like sadness but what I will later diagnose as embarrassment. She tells me this is a great excuse: to take time for myself, to cry a bunch, to eat only carbohydrates slathered in cheese.
“You will find,” she says, “that there’s a certain grace to having your heart broken.” I will use this line many times in the years to come, giving it as a gift to anyone who needs it.
1. “She’s chubby in a different way than we are.”
2. “Don’t worry, no one will remember this when you’re dead.”
3. “No, please don’t apologize. If I had your mother I’d be a nightmare, too.”
4. “It’s all right. Honesty has never really been your thing.”
5. “Maybe you should open a store? That would be a good job for you!”
6. “Holocaust, eating disorder. Same difference.”
7. “I Googled him and ‘rape’ autofills after his name.”
8. “But it’s different because I actually have a dad.”
9. “Come on, please let me pay for lunch. You don’t have a job!”
10. “There’s a chapter about you in my book.”
11. “There’s nothing about you in my book.”
12. “Oh, hey, your boyfriend tried to kiss me while you were off getting a smoothie. I mean, either that or he was smelling my mouth.”
13. “Have a nice life, bitch.”
I WAS AN ONLY CHILD until I turned six.
I figured, knowing what little I did about reproduction and family planning, that this was how it was always going to be. I had heard the kids at preschool discussing their siblings or lack thereof:
“My mommy can’t have another baby.”
“My daddy says I’m just enough.”
“Do you have brothers or sisters?” my teacher asked me on the first day of preschool.