Summer, 1985

The day after finals ended and summer break began, I made the unpretty ten-hour drive from Oberlin to New York City with a friend—I can’t remember who, but there must have been at least one person in the car with me that day, because I never made that drive alone. Whoever it was, I do recall that we took turns at the wheel and, as was my custom, stopped at the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania McDonald’s—the vague halfway point of the trip—for lunch. It was 8pm before we got through the Lincoln Tunnel, but as usual—and even though I was exhausted from the drive—the city’s streets dazzled me. That is the corniest word, but that is how New York always made me feel back then: dazzled by the messy infinite frenetic possibility of it all.

My mom felt the same way about New York—she was born in Brooklyn—and had been spending an increasing amount of time there. Eventually she would move back permanently, but for the present time she had rented a small alcove studio on West 67th Street, not far from the park. It had been my plan to find a shopgirl job and spend the summer in that apartment, as I had the summer before. But then Dad got sick, and plans necessarily changed.

So the new plan was for me to spend a week in New York before heading to Houston, where I would stay until it was time to go to Bennington, in July. The ostensible reason for the trip to New York was to hand my car off to a friend who was going to take care of it while I was out of town. But the real purpose of this week in the city, honestly, was to simply delay the inevitability of going to Houston. I was due there imminently, because my stepmother, a very nice lady who was a shoe buyer at Marshall Fields, had to leave home for a week on a work trip. I was to stay with Dad, and accompany him to his daily radiology appointments at M.D. Anderson, Houston’s excellent cancer hospital.

I spent the week in New York smoking weed with friends and hanging out in Sheep’s Meadow, getting a new, shorter haircut, going down to Soho to shop at Agnes B on Prince Street, and also to visit my friend Margaret, who had a summer job at her grandfather’s posh art gallery on West Broadway. Late one afternoon, the day before I was set to fly to Houston, I picked Margaret up at work. We went around the corner to Raoul’s on Prince Street, and took a couple of seats at the bar.

The town of Oberlin was in those days dry except for beer, so I knew nothing about hard liquor or how to consume it. At Raoul’s, I ordered the only drink I knew, the one I ordered no matter what the hour, a screwdriver. I drank so many screwdrivers that night, in fact, that it became the only time I was ever cut off at a bar. I had gotten drunk and then weepy, and I’m pretty sure the tears are what got me 86-ed.

I kind of couldn’t stop crying once I started in those days; I wasn’t close to my dad, but despite (or more likely because of) our distance, I was bereft over his situation. I felt somehow that if I could do my best to inhabit his pain, to feel it as deeply as he felt it, that it might repair him, and then possibly repair us. I was too young to understand that’s not how things work.