A STRANGE THING TO DO

There was one other source of anxiety that would have been felt not just by me but by my parents as well that summer: just a few weeks before classes were set to resume, I was planning a trip to Portugal with my boyfriend.

My parents had agreed to let me go because I was an adult and possibly because I’d presented the trip to them as something other than what it actually was. “His father and stepmother have a house there, and they’ve invited me and about eight other kids to come and stay there for a couple of weeks.” That was mostly true. There would be a whole group of us there, all together, boys and girls. But in order to justify my going and to dissuade my parents from envisioning me as party to the kinds of carnal behavior that leaving the country with one’s boyfriend surely conjured in their minds, I’d had to assure them that my boyfriend’s parents would be there the whole time as chaperones, which was not true. Every time the trip was brought up, I was careful to mention that his parents would be there, that they were behind the invitation. Sometimes, I’d mention them just randomly as the property owners, which, I hoped, implied that they would be present the whole time, dutifully minding their property (and their son). I mentioned them so often that I began to feel a kind of nervousness about meeting them, though of course there was no threat of that because they wouldn’t be there. The fact that my parents never asked to be put in touch with my boyfriend’s father and stepmother stood out to me then as a sign that my story was credible; they must have believed it, I told myself, just as they must have trusted that my correspondence with my teacher was nothing to worry about. Of course, it may well have been precisely the reverse: my parents wanting to allow me my freedom and hoping, as they’d hoped with each of my siblings before me, that I’d use it wisely. Hence, my mother’s prayers all summer: We pray for Tracy and her relationship with her boyfriend. Hence the need, for full effect, for me to be within earshot of such prayers whenever possible. She hoped it might not be too late for me to choose to do the right thing.

My father was less subtle. After dinner one night, he held my gaze steadily in his and said, “We don’t condone what you’re doing.” He didn’t say more, and he didn’t need to. His words, and the look that accompanied them—not an angry or a judgmental one but one of frank honesty, like one adult addressing another—had hit home. I felt sorry that the choice I made—the choice I was desperate to follow through upon and the life I thought it might point me toward (a life of travel and of meaningful kinds of experiences and, finally, of the adult love I’d taken so long to really trust was available to me)—meant having to lie to my parents or live knowing I was the object of their regret. When I was really honest with myself, I knew it meant both lying and knowing, which put an uncomfortable damper on whatever else I’d set out to feel.

Because my parents didn’t approve of the trip—they merely allowed it—I’d had to save up the money on my own. I had spent two grueling weeks working on the dorm crew at the end of the spring semester—cleaning dorms and helping to prepare the campus for commencement and reunions. Not only was it backbreaking work; it was the kind of work that made me feel as if I were undoing whole chapters of the history of American racial progress. There I was, black, on my hands and knees, scrubbing the bathtubs that had been dirtied all year long by the children of the privileged class. Never mind that my own dormitory bathtub was just then being scrubbed by someone else, what the job forced me to feel was a kind of abject need and a subservience that I was without recourse to refuse. I left work with a kind of shame at what I had inflicted upon myself. But if I hadn’t, who would have paid for my plane ticket, and how much longer would I have had to wait to taste that bit of sought-after independence?

Back home, Wanda paid me a bit of money each week to clean her apartment (I did a lackluster job but not out of the same sense of embarrassment that had characterized my stint on dorm crew). I believe she took pity on me, having recalled how she, too, had gone against our parents’ better judgment in taking her own solo trip to Europe the year she turned twenty-seven. Mom and Dad had worried that she might come to harm, that she’d be opening herself up to too much risk, that she was wasting time and money when she ought to have been finding a real job. But Wanda had gone anyway, needing to feed her sense of adventure, needing to test out her appetite for the world, wanting to know who she would become once she set foot outside the confines of her familiar world. I remember how galvanized she’d seemed upon her return home. She glowed with a joy at what and whom she’d encountered, and with a different sense of herself, too. She had new clothes—gladiator sandals bought in Greece and bohemian chic clothes from France and Italy. Sometimes, she’d let me borrow an oversized Fiorucci belt or squeeze my feet into a pair of her tiny shoes. After I’d worn her London Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt to school several times, an older boy muttered under his breath, but audibly, “Never been to London.” I was crestfallen but only partly so, for if my sister had been off to see the world, it meant that one day I’d get there, too.

Michael had spent half his junior year of college in Austria. We still teased him sometimes about the calls that would come through from heavily accented girls looking for him, girls he’d surely made some impression upon while he was living in their country. He didn’t feel as strongly as Wanda or my parents that I ought or ought not to be making the trip. Once, when the subject of my plans came up, a friend of his from work, a woman, told me, “Spike said to me, ‘I can’t get over the fact that some guy is porking my sister.’ And do you know what I told your brother? I told him, ‘He is if she knows what’s good for her.’ ” And while I didn’t quite warm to the term “porking”—it turned my relationship into something sordid, a drunken punch line and nothing more—the comment reinforced the extent to which, no matter what I said, it was a given for everyone in the know that I was very likely to be having sex. Maybe that was Michael’s way of processing the mix of surprise and understanding that accompanied his discovery that I, too, had crossed over from a state of innocence.

Sex. Put like that, it sounds merely as if I had been initiated into the animal kingdom, had been activated in my biological destiny to move fully through the evolutionary cycle of birth, reproduction, and death. Sex. The noun that had hung over so much of my adolescence like a threat, like a plague to be avoided, like a snare waiting to snap me up as if I were a rabbit or a careless bear. Sex. The noun that encapsulated so many different kinds of verbs, all different shades of more or less the same thing: sleeping together, fucking, fornicating, being up to something, playing with fire, making love, living in sin. But also being caught up in the wordless feelings of elation and suspense and surprise that, I now knew, made everything—all of the longing and the waiting and the little anxieties about being wanted or not—worth it. Being alive and unafraid in my own body and feeling in control of how, why, and to whom I let myself go. It was a step into a world where the terms were less easy to pin down, where feelings and facts and opinions sometimes did funny things in response to one another, sometimes refusing to lie still. It was a world where, for once, I knew that what I thought I’d known all along, what I’d been taught to know, while still true in many ways, was not the only truth. Where, finally, I was flawed and implicated and awake to experience in a way that felt like a gift. Sex. What a strange thing to do, to want to do, and yet, what a strange thing, too, to get so bent out of shape about. What a strange worry to carry, especially if it’s not you you’re worried about but someone else. Sex. The thing that made me me as distinct from my parents and that made me finally feel older, finally mature in a way that nothing could undo.

It would have been nice to have had someone to talk to about it. Instead, I spent a lot of time thinking about what it all meant. I started to write a play in which a woman sitting up naked in her bed was having a version of this conversation with herself, describing what it felt like to lie down under the weight of her lover and feel the rest of the world slide off the edge of the bed. Then I began to worry that my mother might find the play and read it and be horrified by what she saw, so I tore it up and put it into the big black garbage cans along the side of the house.

And one other thing happened that summer. Despite my determination to make the trip and the cost it exacted upon my relationship with my parents, there was scant encouragement from my boyfriend, Andreas, that I should follow through on my plans to meet him and the others in Portugal. He spent part of the summer at home in Massachusetts with his mom and part in Germany with his dad. He didn’t call, seldom returned my calls; when he did, the line was gripped by a painful, static-fleeced silence. He sent me two letters in the course of three months, and while he did not tell me not to come, neither did he reveal any excitement at the prospect of seeing me again in August. For most of the summer, I was left to wonder if he was still my boyfriend at all. Yet I had so little experience with boyfriends and so little recourse to romantic advice that I convinced myself I ought to go anyway, that he must have been as excited to be reunited with me as I was to be reunited with him. At the very least, I had such an appetite to reassert my connection to the world beyond Fairfield and to the physical intimacies Andreas and I had only just begun to experience before the school year came to an end that I decided, helter-skelter, come what may, to go. And so I went.

In the San Francisco airport waiting for my outbound flight, I bought a pack of cigarettes and went into the smoking area to reacquaint myself with a social habit I would pick up and abandon a number of times before eventually dropping it for good. I’d had to temporarily quit while I was in Fairfield, but I was deep enough into the belly of SFO to feel home’s hold on me suspended. In the dense haze of first- and second-hand smoke, I breathed in thick lungfuls of relief. I sat next to one of those large, communal ashtrays full of sand and hours’ worth of spent cigarette butts. The large, ugly concrete object struck me as pathetic, stuck in place, just as I had been stuck at home, biding my time. It would have been nicer to be sitting and smoking on a couch in someone’s living room or outside on a bench with the fresh air blowing the smoke off and away, but my being there among the smokers and the ashtrays was freedom. It was me doing what I felt the urge to do, going where I felt the urge to go. Whether the feelings of having been stifled by the smallness of home were real or exaggerated—whether they were innate, a genuine product of my own heart and will, or artificial, like the conventions that tell us we ought to laugh at certain things and cry at others, things that, in reality, have no bearing upon our actual feelings—I sat in that smoking area feeling as though a tremendous yoke had been unfastened from around my neck. I was permitted again to listen exclusively to my thoughts and whims and to act in accordance with whatever they said. My thoughts and whims told me to finish my cigarette, and I finished my cigarette. My thoughts and whims told me to go to Portugal, and I was going to Portugal, with both genuine excitement and nicotine jittering in my stomach.

On the flight, I drank red wine with my meal. I tried to sleep, but the excitement prevented me from dozing off. Eventually, I made my way back to one of the smoking rows and struck up a sporadic bilingual conversation with an old man on his way to Lisbon. We drank what the Portuguese flight attendants called “white coffee,” and when his English broke down, I did a patch job with my passable French. I have no memory of what we discussed, only the feeling of jet-set sophistication and the white coffees and the smoke and the ever-shortening distance between Europe and me.

On the connecting flight between Lisbon and Faro, I noticed that there were some of Andreas’s friends in the rows. I knew two of them from school; a third was one of his childhood friends from home whom I’d heard of but never met. The realness of them put me in mind of my repressed anxiety. Surely they had been in touch with Andreas over the summer, and surely they already knew some of what I was waiting to find out. Was that a nervous shifting of the eyes? Was it embarrassment, pity, anything at all? I felt at once shy and determined to demonstrate how perfectly at ease, how unflappably confident I was. Moreover, I felt the need to show how very wonderful I could be—how smart and wry, perceptive and fun. It was exhausting, and finally I felt as though I could have slept, only by then there wasn’t time, and besides, sleeping didn’t strike me as a terribly appropriate way of reinforcing what I sought to project just then about myself.

Faro was parched and sat under a cinematically blue sky. The sand and the sandy hills reminded me of how California was supposed to be: golden. The constant sun cast everything in a radiant luxury, even the remote, dusty town with its pebbly roads that wound up and down through the hills, even the bare-bones unmarked cafés, where couples or groups of elderly men sat very still sipping from tiny cups of coffee and smoking. It looked to me like a town in an old-fashioned Italian movie, the kind where you can hear footsteps raking over gravel or echoing against the stone buildings when the characters walk.

I knew as soon as I saw Andreas that his feelings had changed. I could see it in his eyes and in his bearing. He’d been in Portugal for two weeks already, so he was tanned, and he looked leaner than I remembered. He stood there smiling a new, knife-sharp kind of smile. He welcomed all of us, the three boys and me, in the same way, as if we were his guests and nothing more. Perhaps it was merely an unimpeachable hospitality to which I was unaccustomed, something regal and cool, in his blood on the German side. But it felt like more. It felt like the continuation of our summer-long silence, only now it was loud, because I was in its presence.

The house struck me as a small villa, as far as I could tell, though it was my first villa, and I couldn’t be absolutely certain that’s what it really was. It was remote, a drive from the center of town along a narrow, winding road. It had grounds, upon which grew, among other things, fig trees (my father grew figs at home, and I recognized those unusually shaped leaves). There was a swimming pool adjacent to the kitchen, which was separate from the house, in its own cabana. The room Andreas led me to, and which the two of us would share, was obviously the room where his parents slept, with a large bed canopied in mosquito nets. What a pang it caused me to see something so luxuriously romantic, knowing that the romance I’d tried so lovingly, so doggedly to nurse was on its last legs. Still, that night, after the dinner that the whole group of us had prepared and stayed up late in the garden eating, Andreas and I made use of the big bed, trying things we hadn’t been bold enough to try upon one another months earlier in Cambridge. It was exhilarating and felt earned, affirmation of everything I’d hoped to claim upon my arrival. We talked, too, reinitiating ourselves into each other’s voice and life. I don’t remember, though, much of what we said. It was an evening that unfolded in a way that struck me as the exact opposite of the winter night when I’d lost my virginity, a night spent in my minuscule bedroom in the dorms, a room barely larger than the twin bed where we’d lain (for that reason, in part as a joke, I’d hung above my dresser a print of Van Gogh’s painting of his bedroom in Arles, which looked spacious by comparison). On that first night, things had happened slowly, timidly. It wasn’t rough or jokey or clandestine, the way sex had been made to seem, to me at least, by kids who had been doing it, or playing at doing it, back in high school and junior high. It had felt momentous and real. I’d enjoyed it. Though it had also weighed on me as something my parents and God would have frowned upon as wrong.

My first morning in Faro, as if in answer to my mother’s prayers, when I turned to Andreas hoping to begin again what we’d left off with the night before, he sat up and put into words what, deep down, I had known enough to fear: whatever had once existed between us was now over. He didn’t know why. And though I’d read countless novels in which love, courtship, and marriage constituted the central drama, I was so lacking in real-life knowledge about such things that I had no idea how to let him go with any modicum of grace. I had no idea how to grieve the thing that had felt so like a gift, like the beginning of my life as someone other than my mother’s child. I cried. I battered him with questions. I sulked, and I suffered through the better part of two weeks sharing the same bed with someone who no longer wished to be my lover. It alerted me to yet another function of sex, which is to open up new depths within the self that can be filled just as easily with elation as with a merciless, leaden sorrow. I finally understood why, apart from God and the Bible, my parents might have wanted me to wait, to keep myself safe from such extremes of feeling for just a little while longer. But instinctively, I also understood how important it was to let such pain in, to embrace it as another function of being an adult, and human, of striking our bargain with the world.

Pain. Somehow, it was never too far around the bend. When I was a child, I’d viewed its promise as part and parcel of the reverie of deep feeling. One day, I will house a tremendous heartache. One day, I will reel with a singular ecstasy. It was a lesson I learned from the stories of the ballet, and later it was books and movies and soupçons of gossip that sustained such a belief. But there was also the pain I shrank from, the pain that stood watching me, wanting to speak to me, to tell me what it knew about my parents and grandparents and the race of men and women I’d descended from. The pain that knew my name and that had something to teach me, something it wanted me to learn and never forget. Every time I saw it there in the periphery, I froze; I shut my ears, averted my eyes, turning instead to what I thought at the time was pain’s antidote: silence. I was wrong. I could see that finally. Silence feeds pain, allows it to fester and thrive. What starves pain, what forces it to release its grip, is speech, the voice upon which rides the story, This is what happened; this is what I have refused to let claim me. Suddenly, I understood, though no one had taught me. I understood, because what I wanted, what I needed more than anything, was someone to listen to my story, someone to help me starve even this pain—this small, private pain—so that I could stand up and figure out how to go on.

The first time I told the story, it was over the phone to Conrad, quickly, in sobs and fragments. It solidified the reality of what had befallen me, and if I knew what was happening, it was likely that I would make it out okay. Telling the story bolstered my sense of hurt and anger and, the longer I considered it, my sense of having been entitled to something better. Yet it also tamed the pain, giving it a shape, a beginning, a middle, and, eventually, an end. I told the story to myself sometimes at night, looking back for all the signs, all the salient motifs, rehearsing for the ways I’d tell it again when I returned to school in a week’s time.

Here, the mother that I now am must stop and smile. My daughter, who is not yet in kindergarten, already knows some of the merits of telling one’s story. “When we tell our stories,” she and her classmates say to one another at their progressive Brooklyn preschool, “we make power.” They came up with that statement together, writing a play to perform for us, their parents. They even put it into a song, which means, with luck, my daughter will remember and come to truly understand what such a thing means. I had read novel after novel without realizing how often the narrator was doing just that: claiming the power to name and state and face the events, even the most awful events, making up a life. This has happened to me, and because I can see it, can call it up and face it again for you, can stand my ground while I sift through it for nuance and meaning, I am stronger. Telling my story, standing here and telling it to you now, is both a prayer for power and the answer to that prayer.

One afternoon that summer in Portugal, sipping vinho verde in a beachside restaurant, I met a young man and woman who were traveling together. They were in their twenties, just a stage or two ahead of me in life. They were from England, ambiguously ethnic—maybe Indian or Persian?—and the fact that they spoke English and that they were the first nonwhite people I’d met since my arrival provided me with an easy pathway to conversation. They were happy. When I laughed at their jokes, I realized it was the first time I’d laughed in days. I joined them at their table on a patio overlooking the sea, and I told them my story. The mood their company created urged me to tell it with less drama, less dejection, which, in turn, urged me to see and understand it that way. For their ears, the story became more matter-of-fact, less of an ongoing saga and more of a hard-and-fast occurrence, an event that had happened and been processed and had since ceased to reverberate.

They invited me to a disco. “Bring your friends, if you want,” they offered. “Bring your ex and you can make him jealous,” they’d joked.

It sounded like good medicine, and I was eager not only to see them again but not to disappoint them, especially after they’d managed to boost my spirits so effectively. I told Andreas and everyone else, and the eight of us agreed that we were up for a night out.

There wasn’t enough room for all of us in the tiny Fiat somebody had rented, so I rode in the car with the Brits. Andreas’s roommate and a girl the roommate had once dated but who had since gone back to being just a friend sat in the backseat with me. I remember the moment when the three of us, all at the same time, realized we didn’t really know these people, that they might not be who they said they were, and that they could be taking us anywhere at all, no matter what they’d told us or how nice they’d seemed. It was a fear I read on the face of the girl when she turned to look at me and a fear I mirrored back to her. Then, realizing there was nothing to do but wait and see where we were going and what happened when we got there, I leaned back in the seat and looked out at the night—a night that was at first pitch-dark and that gradually lightened as we approached the center of town, with its restaurants and nightclubs—and I felt, rising up out of my fear, the thrill of that nameless going. It was neither the end of one chapter nor the beginning of another but rather a deep, vacant, weightless Now that would last as long as it lasted and lead to wherever it led.