Foxhole for One
On walking the wilds of a 1980s Greater Boston adolescence.
This essay is looooong. It reveals more of my backstory than I’ve revealed online, and it takes place in 1980s Boston, with all that implies. Frankly, I feel anxious putting it out there, but after much back-and-forth, I’ve decided it may serve more than my own navel.
Because of the nature of the material, I thought it best to publish it in one fell swoop. With all the country’s tsuris siphoning your attention, you may wish to read it in installments or with a stiff drink.
Then again, you may find solace in the reminder that the good old days were also pretty bad.
I woke thinking about Mrs. Muzzi, which is not how I expected to start this second edition of The Flaneuzy.
The Muzzis lived three blocks down from us on Watertown Street, the Newton, Massachusetts stretch of Route 16, a very long, very minor highway that connected fifty miles of towns stretching west of Boston. Back then, Watertown Street also separated the haves and have-nots of our town —the wealthy Jewish families on the Hill; the working-class Italian and Irish families in what was called the Lake.
Appropriately, my Jew-ish family lived right on that border. Bernie, my father, was a dead-ringer for Woody Allen—do with that what you will—but Sari, my Sioux-Scottish mother, had only converted to Judaism in an ill-fated attempt to appease his mother. (Nothing was going to sell my bubbe on a six-foot-tall blond shiksa.) More to the point, we were commie Jews, not capitalist Jews, scraping by on his community college salary while she dragged us kids to the Allston pads of her unmarried girlfriends and he spent the weekends prowling Cambridge record shops.
The Newton public schools were fantastic, but neither of my mill-town-raised parents were built for the burbs.
The Muzzis lived in a single-family the same size as ours. But if our house was jumbled, underlit, piled high with programming manuals and newspapers and record albums and cat shit and dirty dishes and unfolded laundry and broken appliances and unopened mail and dogeared novels, theirs was a study in Windexed surfaces and plastic-covered plaid furniture and impeccably vacuumed shag carpeting, with a wood-paneled television colonizing a whole wall and a single book case of Reader’s Digests cowering in a corner. Once in a pique of boredom while the grownups barbecued and the younger girls played Candyland, I scoured every recess of their house for something else to read. The search produced nothing but a seemingly uncracked bible.
The father, Joe, looked a little like an aging Frankie Avalon—Bugs Bunny teeth, residual teenybopper slouch, a slick pompadour so unilaterally black that at age 10 I knew it was a bottle job. Like most of the men in the Lake, he wore only velour track suits or designer three-piece suits.
The daughter, Andrea, wore Bermuda shorts and polos every day; her thick, bristly hair was tamed by a brush cut that highlighted her physical similarity to her father. She was such a dully obedient child in every other way that her gender nonconformity read as inevitable rather than subversive.
The mother, Janice, was perpetually tan and perpetually smoking. Her square, pug features were so deeply wrinkled that she looked decades older than her 35 years; her raspy Boston accent was thick even for our side of town. She also had the best legs in the neighborhood—surprising, since you rarely saw her anywhere but her front porch, calmly pulling on her cigs as she clocked everything with her incurious, unblinking gaze.
In my memory she was always clad in a tennis skirt and a short, chubby rabbit fur though the climate of late 20th century New England suggests this could not be so. You get the picture: a piece of work.
All three members of this family had small, hawkish eyes that peered out from heavy brows, this I remember clear as a bell. Like seeks like, even when you should be running for the hills.
Andrea was my younger sister Jennie’s age, and though the two never seemed particularly enthused to see each other, all through elementary school they played together most afternoons. In high school, the girls drifted apart. Jenn ran track and I’m not sure what Andrea got into though I doubt it involved much mischief. I seem to remember her working register at Fox Pharmacy but that may be my unconscious wanting to get the word “fox” into this story.
Our two families had nothing in common except for the girls’ friendship and a sort of desultory, fish-out-of-water glamour exuded by Janice and my mother. In our 1980s Massachusetts neighborhood, that was enough to merit dinners at the Muzzis’ a few times a month while we kids were young.
Not once did the Muzzis come to our house, and I suspected they gossiped about it the way they gossiped about everything else. My parents would not have cared if it were true. They weren’t the type to keep up with the Joneses, let alone give a shit about what they had to say.
Unlike Janice, my mother read a lot, had attended college in the 1960s, and harbored excruciatingly specific opinions about everything, though she rarely deigned to share them with anyone but her best friend Miriam, from whom I get my real middle name. (I came up with Ruby in my 30s.) Back then, my mother loomed over everyone, a redwood oak with gorgeously carved cheekbones and blue-gold eyes that widened more when she was annoyed than when she was afraid—an excellent subterfuge I use today.
Most people in our town—especially the women on the Hill—thought my mother dumb. Because she went out of her way to seem that way to avoid anything she found dull, I called her stupid like a fox.
Now I’ve gotten that word into this story two times.
The reason I am doddering on about the Muzzis is because I keep waking with Mrs. Muzzi on my brain. Actually in the wee hours of this morning she was sitting on the edge of my bed, still wrapped in that fur of hers, puffing away on a cig while fixing me with her unwavering stare.
In a flash I remembered the last time I’d seen her alive. It was 37 years ago, the last weekend of September, and I was on the tail end of a seven-mile exodus from Route 16’s Mount Auburn Cemetery after leaving the absolute worst man I ever dated.
Earlier that day this guy had laced my pizza with LSD, though he didn’t cop to it until I started seeing ghosts rising from the graves.
I was 17 and things at home had gotten bad enough that I’d moved into his crummy South Boston apartment though I still had a year of high school to complete. This guy had a Beatle’s mop of dark hair, played bass in a psychedelic punk band, and fancied himself a surrealist. He made me a lot of mixtapes, wrote a lot of songs about me, and left a lot of lemon meringue pies on my doorstep until the minute I said I loved him back.
By the time he dosed my pizza, he’d already bedded two of my friends and punched me in the face, though we’d both agreed the punch had been my fault. I’d gotten that bright idea when I’d gone to my mother for advice. She’d put down her newspaper and said: “Well, geez, Lisa. When your father hits me there’s always a reason. What did you do?”
Maybe this walk is showing up in my memory because I’m furious like a fox. There are so many reasons to be furious right now.
Until that day in the cemetery, I’d never admitted I had inherited the family gifts. Oh, I embraced my father’s braininess, even his predilection for puns. But when it came to my aunt Jenny’s ability to predict the future or my cousins’ abilities to see ghosts or, let’s face it, my mother’s ability to read a room (and anyone to filth), I copped to nothing. My father was a professor of mathematics and computer science, and though puberty had driven a stake between us, I was still too much of a daddy’s girl to cop to anything as anti-rational as extrasensory abilities.
So what I noticed I kept to myself or, more often, denied, which left me enormously vulnerable. In shutting down your intuition, you shut down the rest of yourself—survival instincts, especially.
This is how I, a third-generation psychic, ended up tripping my balls off in one of the most historically haunted cemeteries in New England.
In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. “I have come to this lonely place and here is this other," was the substance of the thing felt.—Sherwood Anderson
Now that my youth is firmly behind me, I watch that 17-year-old girl walking into the cemetery and want to reach through time and space to yank her back. Maybe that’s why I am writing this. Maybe that’s why Mrs. Muzzi keeps showing up.
I’m not sure if that girl would have let me stop her, though. I’m not even sure I would have become the woman who could offer help if I hadn’t kept walking that day.
For sure I would not have walked so many other streets and shores and subway platforms, worn so much lipstick, taken up so much space.
Before he’d graduated from high school the spring before, I would lie all day in the arms of this man, let’s call him Matt. We would glide—on books and music and film, in rivers and oceans and creeks, in that current unique to young people lucky enough to feel lucky. We were filled to the gills with the enchantment of our connection.
That crazy-beautiful mantra uttered only by adolescents: I could die today and this would be enough.
Which is to say: Of course were were doing drugs. Tons of weed, sometimes hash, definitely speed. Once or twice heroin. Just never, at least in my case, LSD.
Something in me knew LSD would unleash a torrent that would never stop.
Like me, Matt had a gentile mother and a Jewish father, though all evidence of the latter had been erased from his grand, sprawling house on the Hill. Not once did he discuss their divorce, nor the woman with a Joe Muzzi haircut with whom his mother shared her bed. Secretly, I was fascinated, though I never pressed him on this or any other topic.
Before Matt’s mother kicked him out the following summer, everything was an adventure in hedonism. Why drink orange juice when you could have mango-pineapple-blueberry with tequila? Why watch sitcoms indoors when you could screen A Clockwork Orange, Hard Day’s Night, and Betty Blue on your lawn? Why eat oreos when you could fix chocolate chip pretzel butterscotch sundaes with hot fudge and sliced bananas and slivered almonds? Mindful of every calorie I consumed, I didn’t always partake, but in those early days, grateful to be feted, I’d sometimes relent.
Together we’d wander through the endless meadows and emerald gardens of the Hill, all those pines and maples shielding us from glare you couldn’t avoid in the overly paved and crowded Lake. On the grand expanse of his porch he set up a turntable and blasted everything he deemed necessary for my edification.
One day he piped out the entire Velvet Underground catalogue and I grokked how Nico’s appeal might eclipse that of Edie Sedgwick, though I’d been obsessed with the book Ciao Manhattan since stumbling upon it at a yardsale when I was 10. At age 28, Edie had died already used up, but Nico was not just art but artist—subject and object, capable of regenerating herself.
It was a distinction I shoved in my back pocket as I preened for Matt beneath bangs cut straight across like the German singer’s, pursing what I told myself was a ripely disappointed mouth.
Jesus, Lisa.
I never shared what I was reading, writing, and watching, because I knew he never cared to know. Matt liked his girls feminine but not laboriously so; after we kissed the first time, he made me throw out all my tubes of lipstick. He wanted someone he could feel like a genius for discovering: a showpiece, never a centerpiece. Someone who was clever, but not so she could outfox him.
There’s that word again.
All too often, he spoke bitterly of females who were not receptive enough. Don’t act like a woman, he would say. I like you as a girl. Even at 16, this rang an alarm deep inside me, but I let him natter on, grateful for the reprieve provided by his world, the clean line of his jaw. I kept my trap shut about the As I did my best to earn.
Perhaps because his mother was guilty about shacking up with a woman—the 1980s were a very different time—she never said anything about Matt’s goings-on until his graduation. Certainly he never bothered to hide his tracks. Roaches sat in ashtrays around the house, cases of beers and bottles of wine disappeared nightly from her basement, homages to psychedelia papered every surface. She also put up with my constant presence after witnessing my father come at me in a way I can’t bring myself to describe all these years later.
Sometimes while Matt’s band rehearsed on his sound-proofed floor, I wandered through the lush order of the rest of his house—room after room of velvet couches and gold-spined first-editions, gleaming mahogany tables and old-money rugs. There were two libraries. A sewing room. A sitting room. A movie room.
Eventually I’d curl up in one of those empty libraries and read, luxuriating in all that space and quiet. I suppose that’s what I loved most. Having somewhere to unfurl, not just flee. Even now those afternoons are cast in warm amber.
With few exceptions, his group of friends had loads of freedom and bank. One was the son of famous child psychologists who regularly dropped acid with him as an experiment in open parenting. Everyone else had at least two lavish households, having emerged from the Kramer v Kramer wave of divorces ten years before with two sets of holidays and parents too consumed by new love lives to notice how their kids were plundering their vast resources. None of these Hill kids were AP-track students. A skepticism about intellectualism was part of their punk-rock ethos, and the assumption that the world was already their oyster stripped them of any hunger to perform well. Instead they spoke a patois of high and low references—Herman Hesse and Brave New World spiked by Jolt Cola and Monty Python—as they drove around in midcentury Mercedes, decked out in psychedelic prints and velvet suits rescued from their parents’ closets and Cambridge thrift shops. Perfunctory politics and no-fucks absurdism filtered through hippie and beatnik and no-nuke subcultures. Which is to say: privilege.
En masse his friends trooped around town and into the city—what we called every part of Greater Boston that could be reached by an underground subway. Generally groups flooded me with too much information, but this one’s many-layered jokes and self-referential mythologies lived within the moat of what I saw as Matt’s magic.
In the middle of the night I’d steal out of my parents’ house into his olive Beemer already bulging with these punkrock peacocks, everyone blinking fast on Vivarin and coke, banging on leather upholstery as the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime shook the doors. At I-Hop on Soldiers Field Road we’d wolf chocolate chip pancakes and black coffee until pink streaked the sky, then loop back home, a carpool of mild subversion. At the Brattle, drafty and grand, we ogled Jack Nicholson’s Head and Lynch’s Eraserhead. At the Middle East Café we attended my first all-ages show: Dinosaur, later to become Dinosaur Jr.
Chemistry layered upon chemistry—hormones and hash, what ho!—everyone moshed, up and down, side to side, against that wall of distortion above which floated J Mascis’ whine. I shimmied off to the side—Edie in my limbs, Stax Records in my hips—moves that didn’t match the music nor Matt, only the demons I’d barely held off growing up. I was free, at least until I felt someone watching with a scrutiny that made me rear back, self-conscious once again.
“That girl is such a nothing,” the person said.
It was Allegra, the queen bee of this surreal, surly hive—her halo of heavy dark hair bleached in a striking contrast to her heavy dark brow and rosy blot of a mouth. Privately I admired the effect as well as her generous ass but she always glowered when I came around.
“She tries to be weird to seem like she has personality but she’s vanilla as Twiggy,” she was saying to Matt, who wasn’t roused to defend me, was only nodding judiciously through fogged Lennon shades. I knew she was speaking loud enough to be heard over the music so I turned to face her.
Doing a slow scan of her breasts, belly, and hips, I raised my eyebrows, then smirked—as if she were too much, not that I was too little. As if I didn’t desire her as much as the boys did.
She flinched and turned away.
Channeling Sari was so effective I didn’t feel anything but an icy pulse in my throat and wrists. I saw my mother tearing down the models in the ads Miriam designed for her graphic artist gigs. I saw Mrs. Muzzi trash-talking every other mother in the neighborhood. I saw my father holding forth at the dinner table about what other chicks he’d like to fuck.
I danced some more.
Send me great love from somewhere, else I shall die.—Thomas Hardy
Alone Matt and I dipped into the galleries of the Isabelle Stuart Gardner, down the Fens, past the ghost of my art student mother twenty years before, lolling in the sun with Bridget Bardot beehive and half-shuttered eyes. We went to the MFA, then crossed Storrow Drive, glittering like the Charles by which it flowed. We took the Orange Line all the way to Revere Beach where we stared at steel waves and bought pineapple sodas and loose joints from Portuguese-speaking vendors roaming the trash-strewn beach.
In meadows and movie theaters we kissed and caressed beneath his ironic tees and old-man coats, my thrift-store dresses and enormous Levis. “We’ll live in this moment forever,” he’d whisper.
And in some ways we do. A part of me is still untangling that 16-year-old’s knot of desire and desperation, the inside of my wrist as charged as my nipples and netherlands. “This arm, this arm,” he’d croon, stroking it like a precious metal.
Also like an endangered beast.
YOU ARE LOVED, Matt wrote in a note he slipped into my pocket the day I turned 17. I pinned it to the inside of my coat and wore it every day.
Then he graduated, and his mother sold their house so she could officially move in with her girlfriend. There was no way she was going to allow him to invade her loveshack, but he had no other plan. His friends had finagled their way into what my dad called rich-kid colleges—expensive bastions of bohemia—but even among that crowd Matt was a bona-fide ne’er-do-well.
Looking to save as much cash as possible that summer, I worked at one ice cream store, then another after I got fired when Matt was caught doing whippets. I also worked as a bus monitor for a local transportation service for developmentally disabled adults, though of course that wasn’t the word used in 1980s Greater Boston.
Most of the drivers doubled as weed dealers, so I didn’t loathe the gig as much as I loathed how sad my presence made some of the women feel. The more the men with Down Syndrome mooned over my long pale hair and limbs, the more they ignored their girlfriends. “I hate Lisa,” Mary, the female ringleader, would cry when she’d see me slouched in the front seat. I’d sigh in unsolicited solidarity.
Matt and I spent that summer sticky on whatever mattress we could find, and what had been sweet soured fast.
Awash in guilt, his mother agreed to finance an apartment in Boston’s South End, which in 1988 was still broken down and beat up, populated only by liquor stores and bodegas with gates upon gates. In that neighborhood, it was easier to find H than fresh vegetables.
I was living with him more than I was living at home. It had come to that after my father had caught us in their bed. Rather than run interference, my mother had refilled my birth control prescription and sent me packing. After that, I was Welcome Matt.
Summer was officially over, but no one had told the weather. Though 90-degree temperatures in September were still rare, even with the fan running full-blast, we were sweating in his apartment that Saturday.
“Let’s go to Mt. Auburn,” he said, his forehead beaded after fetching donuts from the corner store. I grimaced at the thought of another long journey on the MTA. Already I was taking two busses and one subway to school every day, though he kept saying I should drop out and get my GED.
Then I considered the shade of the cemetery’s towering trees, its stately calm, and nodded.
Before entering its gates, we stopped across the street for mushroom pizza, and he made a big deal of waiting on me, of setting me up in a booth and spicing our pie with oregano, parmesan, chili pepper flakes. I was so charmed by the good omen of his gallantry that I ate all of it.
When we walked back into the hot sun, a nausea struck that felt like more than the shock of food hitting my normally empty stomach. Matt smiled when I mentioned it. “Yeah, I laced the pizza.”
Both of them felt it: that day was an island,
strewn with rocks and lighthouses and lovers,
in the generous ocean. On the mainland,
People went about their business, eating the Times, glancing through coffee and oatmeal, as they walked the gangway into an original dream of attentiveness, as if a day’s pleasure could concentrate them as much as suffering,
as if the seawall were a banquet without
surfeit, as if they could walk hand in hand
with no one nearby, as if silence and blue
wind became an Atlantic cove to float in
and the air centered itself in small
purple butterflies flitting among the weed flowers.
In the darkening city they returned to,
their privacy completed the cafés of strangers.
-Donald Hall
When I think of Matt, and in writing this essay I’ve thought of him more than I have in decades, I always think of this poem. What we shared was magic though it took my youth to understand he was not.
That magic was the first real home I’d known. Of course I didn’t know how to leave it when he cheated on me, punched me in the jaw, fucked me when I was passed out over that long, ugly summer.
It was a different story when he dosed me with LSD.
For months Matt had been dropping acid every day, and until then I’d avoided tripping with him though I understood each demurral rendered me less of a cool girl in his eyes. I’d read the biography of Mark Vonnegut, Kurt’s son whose latent schizophrenia had been liberated by the hallucinogen. I feared what it would liberate in me.
Matt claimed it gave him a psychic radar, and in fact that summer he and the other acid punks seemed to share a sixth sense, laughing at the same invisible stimulants, double-taking and triple-talking in a ghoulish simulcast.
I knew from my family line what kind of burdens could accompany that gift. But now I was on this trip—his trip—and though a metallic fear seized me, I decided to make the best of it since I didn’t have anywhere else to go.
Through the cemetery gates we strode, and I saw why he’d chosen this destination. Perfectly manicured lawns studded with stone gargoyles and tombstone spires rose on all sides of the entrance path, a platform to a world in which the dead reigned supreme. Even without psychedelics you would have felt outside of time and space.
With its high-profile residents, all founding fathers and Freedom Trail revolutionaries, Mount Auburn suddenly seemed menacingly austere.
“But ravishing,” Matt said aloud, and I knew without looking at him that whatever we were doing had begun.
A drug reverb—is that column really tall or are the drugs tricking me or am I tricking myself because I know I am on drugs?—set in immediately.
“What’s the plan?” My voice sounded like a bird’s.
“We’re not supposed to have a plan.” His sounded like a tunnel.
The colors of this universe were not brilliant so much as garish, spilling over us as we moved into what more and more felt like his dream and my nightmare.
I looked up, then down. I was tinier than mitochondria, taller than the Prudential. The ground began rolling toward me, sea crests of fussily disapproving topiaries.
Two figures appeared—a stocky, short man with cauliflower ears; a tiny woman with turned-up hair and nose. Both were clad in torn, muddied 18th-century garb—stained breeches, waistcoats, petticoats. He tipped his top hat, she curtsied; they both roared while I stared, agape. I looked at Matt but he was gazing at the horizon.
“You’re not sharing us with him,” said the man in a strange accent, neither American nor British.
“Nay, nothing with him,” said the woman.
“Is this right?” I asked.
“Actually, this acid is strong. I may have dosed us with too much.” Matt said, unperturbed. How had I never noticed his crocodile smile? Four hundred rows of reptile teeth, all the better to eat my heart and brains.
Then I heard his words, lurid and yellow, and all other color drained from the world. Nothing swelled, nothing shrank. It just pooled in the relentless, pitiless sunshine, death rays lying in wait.
It’s not that I couldn’t breathe. It’s that there was no oxygen and no carbon for someone like me. I had thought I was a living being but was realizing in that moment that I was merely another unwanted soul, possessed by a person who did not give a whit about what I wanted or needed.
“I took the liberty of introducing you to this brave new world without your consent,” Matt said. “I knew you’d never dare to enter it otherwise.” His words formed neon signs I couldn’t read because I could no longer read anything.
I hadn’t considered how much worse my life could get because I’d never considered the possibility of not being able to disappear into a book. Now I couldn’t see because I had no eyes. I couldn’t hear because I had no ears. I was nothing, a bottomless black hole into which Matt was pouring all his vitriol.
He watched me. His gaze was not sympathetic. It was triumphant.
I stood up to walk away and fell to my knees in the sinkhole that was—aha!—warm welcoming earth. Grass was growing for the sole purpose of burying me, and I didn’t mind. At least it loved me enough to provide shelter.
From the knolls droves of people were rising—yellow teeth, yellow eyes. Was yellow the only color I’d ever see again? In and out of focus these figures shimmered, sunlight fracturing limbs as long as shadows, stopping motion, stopping time, each of them yammering on a radio frequency audible only to themselves. Static layered maddeningly upon static as they stood on each others’ shoulders and climbed through each others’ legs, eager to convey messages to people long gone, all intent lost to the ether.
I watched Matt wag his finger, as pedantic as my old man as he went on and on about how unbecomingly conventional I had become—you are all about grades, external approval, control. I embrace grassroots, natural phenomena, intuition.
Oh, the irony of him holding forth on this subject, oblivious to the army of spirits forming battalions as he spoke.
Some had been dead for decades, others for centuries. A few had been dead for a millennium at least, or so they suspected; they had passed over long before this cemetery had been built. Not all of them spoke languages I recognized but I understood everything they said.
In fact I knew everything they knew as they moved through me, but that wasn’t much. It was as if each spirit was driven by one endlessly unsolved mystery, one fundamentally unquenched sadness, and that burden kept them lodged in between worlds and planes.
From a distance of at least four light years and a thousand lives Matt colonized me with words as if I were enemy territory. Which apparently I was, at least to one person. It seemed he’d had another girlfriend all summer, one he wouldn’t leave me for but was everything I was not. I saw her as he talked, animated by the disclosure of his betrayal: Curvy figure, curly dark hair, a hunger as great as his.
Everything I secretly admired; everything I secretly desired.
They’d been together all summer whenever I’d been working and he’d not been shtupping my erstwhile friends. They’d even dropped LSD together. She can handle going with the flow, he was saying. She’s not hung up the way you are.
Serenaded by a choir of cackling ghosts, I marveled at the spectacle of his cruelty, the great pleasure he was taking in shattering what was left of me.
For now I was watching transcendentalism and Buddhism writ large and literal, everything a part of everything else, the distinction between trees and me as arbitrary as the distinctions between rock albums and granite rocks, between Acts of Congress and Shakespeare’s acts.
All along, I saw, those boundaries had existed to make us feel safe, and now this toxic chemical running through my system had zapped them like flies. I’d always assumed everything was part of me and I was part of everything else. Now, as these lost souls streamed through me and this cad, this hapless fuck I’d been calling my boyfriend, rambled on about how replaceable I was, I saw there was no I at the eye of this storm.
I mean, the veil had not just been lifted, it had been yanked off, and everything that usually stayed in its lane was running wild—molecules of carbon and oxygen and nitrogen were writhing orgiastically, binary code and radio waves couldn’t find one frequency so much as every frequency. And here I was with zero resources to handle this onslaught because my very notion of self had been erased while a throng of disembodied spirits warbled their sadsack swan songs.
Yes, everything was everything, but that reality wasn’t beautiful. What in fuck’s sake had Kesey’s electric kool-acid trippers been on about? Everything was thick, oily, bottomless; a five-dimensional grave; a black hole.
I had no senses. I had no filter. I had no me.
And still Matt railed on about how I couldn’t hack it. Though, as I watched his words dance around me, I was beginning to grasp it was him who was clinging so steadfastly to his ego self that he didn’t register he was on a leaky raft hurtling toward that black hole.
Then I understood what he was really saying: This girl is not going to leave me for greener pastures. This girl will never make me feel small.
And I saw that he was the black hole, someone who threw others under a magic bus to protect his dream of who he was.
Get off the bus, Lisa. It was Kesey’s Fetchen Gretchen right beside me. Get off the bus.
And now I was realizing this wasn’t a movie, that I couldn’t dream my way through it nor read my way out. That my parents were too wounded to love each other or themselves, let alone me. That Matt could only love a mirror he’d never stop trying to crack. That I was going to die from starvation and drugs and loneliness; would never get out of Boston, which I sorely needed to depart.
That no one was looking out for me but me, and really there was no me at all.
I began retching into a bush, which burst into green flames and flew away. My whole life I had feared vomiting, had feared the act would expel precious organs. Now I did not worry because I had nothing—was nothing—to lose.
Could I make it out of this cemetery? Could I make it home? And exactly what was home?
Not this stupid spoiled man. Not this stupid spoiled dream.
In a flash I knew I had to walk back to my parents’ house, where I would toe the line for the rest of my senior year, do my schoolwork, eat three squares a day, apply to college, and get the fuck away from him and them and everything else that I’d been pretending could love me back.
For now something was growing while the ghosts watched, quieted. A small kernel of every-color was expanding into dimensions not even Madeline L’Engle had written about. What had been a black hole was concentrating into something I’d never seen before.
It was a foxhole for one.
Matt was still talking, but his words were being drowned out by an opera that was growing louder and more lyrical. It was the best piece of music I’d ever heard and it went exactly like this: Get out of this cemetery now.
My hosts, the small man and woman in 18th century gear, were nodding. “Aye, go.”
So I stood up and walked away from Matt, still scolding me as yet another black hole rose to reabsorb him. Alone I walked through the cemetery gates, then seven miles down the street on which I’d lived for most of my life. Past the bus stops and supermarkets and dry cleaners and diners of Cambridge and Watertown. My feet in their shitty sandals began to blister, then bleed, but I walked on. The face of every person I passed melted off, but I walked on. Every tree caught fire. Every streetlight blew up.
I walked on.
The late-summer sun began to drop, and still I walked, past the sausage factories and pasticcerias and Italian flag-painted hydrants of the Lake, past the swings of my elementary school’s playground. The acid was burning my face, my brain, my heart, but something ancient in me knew to keep walking.
Then I hit the Muzzis’ house.
On the front porch sat Joe and Janice, great gams dangling as if not a day had passed since those barbecues when the girls were small. She waved me over. Wild-eyed, I wondered if it were possible she wouldn’t be able to tell I was off my gourd.
“Haven’t seen you around lately,” she said, pulling on her cig. “Where ya been?”
“Um,” I said. Joe was invisible to me—a sketch in disappearing ink—but she was a gleaming X-ray, a lifetime of nicotine and diet soda and rage coursing neon-yellow through her skeleton. Even now I can remember staring at this woman, this wife and mother, this neighbor hurtling alone through time and space, dead within a year, never quite alive.
It was the first time I’d seen cancer in a person; the first time I’d fully accepted our family’s dubious gift as my own.
“Um,” I said again.
“Jesus, kid,” she said, half-smiling. “Get it together.” It was the last thing she ever said to me. It was excellent advice.
By the following summer, I was gone for good.
So was she.
Thank you for sharing this with us and for your vulnerability. 💜
absolutely STUNNING.