Two weeks after that fight with Carol, I left. It was one of those rare, beautiful circumstances where I didn’t consider a decision at length; I knew just what I had to do. I told my friends my moving date, and eighteen of them showed up to whisk my belongings from my cramped bedroom to the new place. I didn’t even have to pack. I felt loved, but I also knew that my move was exciting for them: I was the first person we knew to go out on her own.
Rumford was out of my school district, but my guidance counselor said that if I didn’t change my mailing address, I could quietly finish out my senior year without changing schools. I had just enough money to live on my own; to my Social Security income I added paychecks from a part-time job at Viewer’s Choice Video, the micro-chain that Mom and I had rented from in Bridgton. A guy from school soon came in and told me I was known as the “hot movie store girl” among the skater boys in Rumford. I felt proud when he told me this, and powerful, but when he left, I suddenly felt more exposed, standing with my back to the plate glass window that separated me from the parking lot.
* * *
As soon as I moved out, Carol and Carroll appeared more regularly at school events, offering easy smiles and congratulations after plays and award ceremonies. Their hugs had the clutch of apology. When I came by to pick up my mail, I drank coffee with Carol in the kitchen, and she asked after Danielle and my other friends. My uncle, formerly taciturn and cranky, now gave me a kiss on the cheek each time I walked out the door. I was as happy for the kindness as I was for the ability to leave.
My apartment was cute, but it was on Pine Street, which sat just a couple of blocks from the mill. The sky was never fully dark at night, instead glowing orange with floodlights and smoke. When people discovered I lived on Pine, they invariably asked, “Which end?” The section near the hospital was respectable, but as you moved west, the buildings fell progressively further into disrepair, until you reached the welfare apartments closer to the river. My place was right in the middle, a tough call between “good” and “bad” Pine. My life, too, seemed to straddle that border.
There was a man who lived on the bad end of Pine whom I seemed to see too often. He’d be walking down the street or shopping at the grocery store and I’d think, There’s that guy again. Days would pass, and he’d cross my mind for no real reason; I’d tell myself I was just being paranoid, but then I’d see him later that day. He came to the movie store often and was always too friendly, and he rented videos only from the porn room in the back. My coworkers teased me, said this washed-up older man was my “boyfriend.” My “secret admirer.” I didn’t tell them that he looked a bit like my father.
One morning I woke up and walked out to my car, and there was an unrolled condom hanging from my antenna. Two days later, my friend Jessie confessed, laughing at her prank. “Good one,” I said. “Yeah, good one.”
I never had any trouble from that man, but his resemblance to Tom disturbed my sense of security. I had been so fully severed from the girl I was the last time I saw Tom—from a distance, that day at the courthouse six years before—that even the thought of seeing him again confounded me. I’d see this echo of my father around town and idle fantasies would run through my head: that he really was Tom, and was just waiting for me to recognize him and say hello. And only that girl I’d been when I was twelve, the girl who had lived through all that fear and sadness, a person who now seemed so distant and abstract, would know if it was him. It wasn’t really Tom I was looking for; it was me. If someone from my former life could recognize me as that same girl from long ago, I’d know she hadn’t died along with Mom.
* * *
As I finished up the school year and kept working my video store job, I waited for college admission decisions to roll in. I’d applied to six colleges that fall and was admitted to all but one, Harvard, where I was wait-listed. I didn’t want to wait for them to make up their mind about me, so I called and told them to remove me from the list. The woman on the phone was confused, and then surprised—she had never gotten such a call. But if they weren’t sure they wanted me, I no longer wanted them. I’d walked through that beautiful brick-and-ivy campus a few times with Glenice, longing burning in me even when I was only ten years old. But I knew I’d never enjoy it as the poor kid who’d barely gotten in. I still wanted to be wanted, and this time I wasn’t going to settle for just being tolerated.
I wanted to be bold and adventurous and attend school in a big city, but I ended up choosing Davidson, a tiny liberal arts college in small-town North Carolina. For years afterwards, I regretted my failure of nerve, but now the choice makes perfect sense. When I visited the campus, the weather was warm and lush, and the buildings were stately and impeccably maintained, from the neoclassical library to the small brick hut where students brought their laundry to be done for free. The admissions office could offer me generous financial aid, because most of the students’ families could pay the full tuition. The curriculum would be challenging, but nothing else about the place would be. Ultimately, I wanted to be safe.
At Dirigo graduation, I stood for a moment alone, in a momentary break between hugs from friends and hectic photographs taken by Carol and Carroll and Gwen and Glenice. I looked out over a shining green lawn, and suddenly and painfully couldn’t comprehend that Mom wouldn’t come rushing up a moment later, to wrap her arms around my neck, imprint my cheek with her sticky strawberry lip gloss.
34
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