Chapter 10
A Boy Is Why I Moved to New York, and a Boy Is Why I Left
I would never actually admit that to anyone, of course. I’d tell you that I moved to New York because I had always dreamed of living there, that I was going to get a job working at a magazine and live in a stylish apartment and try my hardest to make sure a handsome, single ad exec didn’t fall in love with me. “Wait,” you’d say, “isn’t that the plot of How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days?” And I’d admit that it was and tell you I moved to New York because that’s where my long-distance boyfriend and I agreed to move after college.
Since fifteen, I’d never not belonged to someone. I’d set my sights on Jacob on the first day of high school, when I was six feet tall and 126 pounds, twenty of which were metal braces that made my big mouth and puffy lips even bigger and puffier.
That boy, I thought, as my mother’s Geo Prizm pulled in behind his father’s 1985 BMW, will be my first boyfriend.
It was a lofty goal, given my physical appearance, but I put in the work and made it happen just fourteen months later. “I made my dreams come true!” I wrote in my diary, very impressed with myself, even though our first kiss had ended with our teeth smashing together so hard I was sure I’d chipped one. I was proud of myself for setting a goal and seeing it through. I’d spent the early weeks of spring, when the Minnesota sun warms our city to a balmy fifty degrees, laying on a towel in the backyard, shivering, but hoping for a tan. I’d sweet-talked my orthodontist into taking off my braces after just a year, promising to wear my retainer every night. I got highlights and let the bob I’d been wearing for the past twelve years or so grow out past my shoulders. I spent the summer learning how to wear makeup and scouring the racks at T.J.Maxx and Marshall’s for padded bras to make it look like I’d actually developed. And then I just hung around incessantly and broke down his defenses until he had no choice but to kiss me on the front steps of my parents’ house on a snowy November evening. It was Friday the thirteenth. I was the luckiest girl in the world.
We spent the next eight years or so perfecting the art of breaking each other’s hearts, then reuniting and finding new ways to hurt each other. Another girl, another boy, another big fight in an age when texting didn’t yet exist, so the best way to wake up soaked in regret was to leave a message on the answering machine he shared with his three roommates after slamming eight beers on a Saturday night off campus. I picked lots of fights. I liked the way it felt, casting him away and reeling him back in like some deranged fisherman. I liked it even better when he did it to me, when I could lie in my twin bed in southern Ohio, crying over a boy who had dared to kiss another girl in his lifetime, sure he’d never speak to me again.
You know the scene in The Shawshank Redemption where they let that really old guy out of prison after decades behind bars, and he’s so mystified by the free world that he wants to kill his boss just to get back inside? That was us after every breakup, so unable to navigate the casual-hookup culture of college that we’d just flee back to each other and the safety of our long-distance prison. I mean, relationship.
At twenty-two, I was sure that no man would ever love me aside from him, but I had a small inkling, somewhere under layers of low self-esteem, that I could, possibly, perhaps, maybe . . . be wrong? But I hushed that little voice, packed my two suitcases, and arrived in New York City with $400 in my checking account and no job.
My dad had given me $20 for cab fare from LaGuardia, and I watched in horror as the meter passed the $20 mark and asked whether the driver took credit cards. He did not, so Jacob had to run to the cash machine in the grocery store up the street to bail me out when I arrived at our apartment on a sticky September night.
I knew when I dropped my bags in that small studio in a run-down walkup in Astoria, Queens, with a malfunctioning lock on the front door, that we had made a terrible mistake rushing into grown-up life. But we’d signed a lease, so we spent ten months devolving from lovers to friends to resentful roommates who did things like throw out muscle shirts (me) and scream because our neighborhood’s power has been out for five days (him).
On a hot summer day, just before our lease was up, my best friend, Dave, and our buddy Jimmy walked over to our apartment from their place a few blocks away. I’d gathered up a few empty boxes from the CTown on the corner, but most of my things were stuffed into garbage bags and the two suitcases I’d brought with me nearly a year ago. Jimmy and Dave and I grabbed what we could carry in our arms and I left Jacob behind, ready to start over with a new apartment with some new girls in a new borough: Brooklyn.
IT’S A TESTAMENT TO HOW lonely and isolating New York City can be that I spent some of my prettiest, coolest years browsing the Internet for human males who lived within ten miles of me and my mattress on the floor. When I found one, Graham and I agreed, immediately, to lie about how we had met, which is always a great sign that you’re embarking on a healthy relationship.
For a while, we had fun. We went to every show in Brooklyn, we smoked pot and drank 40s on his rooftop every night. He painted a big white square on the side of a neighboring building, and his rooftop became a movie theater just for us. But while I had to wake up every morning at seven and go to an office and climb the corporate ladder, he had a more relaxed lifestyle and work ethic. Like, maybe he’d work. Or maybe he wouldn’t.
To be perfectly fair about my relationship with Graham, I was a really good girlfriend to him. I was moody and wanted him to read my mind. I loved getting too drunk and causing scenes in the hope that, like the plot of many music videos I watched in middle school, the drama would just help him realize how special I was. It would bring us closer to get in a fight in front of a taxi driver, you know? I was doing it for us. I demanded his absolute loyalty and unfailing adoration, while simultaneously seeking the approval and attention of any handsome, somewhat single male I came in contact with.
That apartment I was so proud of came with a very handsome neighbor. “Handsome” doesn’t even really describe him because he was so good-looking he actually terrified me. I would see him in the hallways and suddenly find myself a mute with a plastered-on smile. Mike made sunglasses and boats in his little one-bedroom apartment, which I only knew because he once invited me in to try on some frames.
“Who’s that guy I see with you sometimes?” he asked while I looked around his apartment and imagined knocking out the wall between us so we’d have room to raise our kids. I answered as honestly as I could.
“He’s just a friend of mine. He’s gay, actually.”
I didn’t break up with Graham for Mike—that would be insane, he had only ever said, like, three sentences to me. It’s just that I knew there would be other Mikes out there, and that I needed to be with someone like him: someone with drive and ambition and a face that made me nervous to look at.
New York was making me crazy. Or crazier than normal. I started listening to The Secret on audiobook, and walking miles to far-off subway stations to stretch out my commute. I drank too much. I was attempting to be a vegan. At night, I would find myself with “Pop Goes the Weasel” stuck in my head for hours, thanks to the ice cream truck that parked itself outside my apartment playing a tinny instrumental version of the song on repeat, beckoning the nonexistent children in my neighborhood to come and get some frozen treats. I was always uncomfortable: In the winter, I’d freeze on my walk to the subway, only to peel off the sweaty layers on the crowded train. In the summer, my hair would stay damp even after I blow-dried it, just from humidity and sweat. My apartment was filled with $5 bodega umbrellas, because I was never prepared when it started raining. But I loved it, right?
We were in the middle of a massive heat wave, so Graham and I broke up in his bedroom, the only private space with air-conditioning that we had access to. “I’m leaving New York,” I said, and I was surprised as he was to hear that.
The next day, he showed up at my door, contrite, holding his air conditioner in his arms.
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�You deserve to be comfortable,” he said. And even though I didn’t deserve it, I let him install his breakup air conditioner in my bedroom so I could enjoy seven nights of Freon-fueled dreams before heading back to the Midwest.
Graham stopped by while I was packing up all my Forever 21 outfits in air-conditioned comfort. He was there to convince me to stay. He promised to be the kind of guy I deserved, which basically meant he wouldn’t smoke pot all the time and instead just smoke pot some of the time and also have a goal or two that involved an adult future with marriage and children sometime before I was, like, forty-nine.
But it was too late for tempting promises like that. I was going back home, where for the price of my rent in Greenpoint I could afford to rent two apartments, with central air and cable TV and furniture that I’d bought firsthand. A place where instead of a logical form of public transformation, we all just got in our SUVs alone and sat idling on the freeway, inching off to where we want to go. The kind of world where we stack our empty dishes on the edge of the table to make life easier for our server. Back to my people, who wear shorts when the temperature hits forty degrees and go running when it’s zero. I was going to be close to lakes and forests and men who wear Red Wings because they actually work. Specifically, I was going back to my parents’ house in south Minneapolis and the Laura Ashley dream room I’d designed when I was eleven.
Living with my parents was not the happy family reunion I’d been hoping for. Even the best parents tend to be terrible roommates. Before my dad started emailing me apartment listings from Craigslist, I’d crawl into bed after walking around the neighborhood smoking American Spirits, and wake up to Steve grinding coffee beans and telling me to get my ass out of bed and get to the store to buy him some half-and-half.
Living at home was the pits, but Minneapolis felt good to me. New York teaches you to be addicted to discomfort, but Minneapolis (when it isn’t so cold you could die) makes it so easy to be comfortable.
One day when I went to check the mail, there was a note from the postman telling me to go to the post office to pick up a package. I found it annoying that he would leave a note when he could have just left the package, but as I found out that afternoon, he can’t bring you the package when your ex-boyfriend hasn’t actually paid what it costs to mail it to you.
I paid the remaining postage to bail my package out of post office jail, and went home to open it.
Graham had been texting furiously in anticipation of my reaction, so I knew the box contained a big, romantic gesture.
The contents were:
•1 heart-wrenching mix CD
•1 doughnut from my favorite doughnut shop (hello, Peter Pan Donuts on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. May you forever serve your community with delicious doughnuts and surly Polish teens behind the counter), a pulverized and dried-out symbol of our love.
•1 T-shirt, which, as his note explained, he was returning to me because it was my favorite shirt.
I had never seen that shirt before in my life.
I texted him to say thank you, but threw it all in the trash. Okay, I took two bites of the stale doughnut first. But I was done. With Graham and with New York, though I’ll always feel my stomach catch a little when I think of either of them. I still get nervous when my plane lands at LaGuardia, like I do when I think I see a boy I once loved at 10:00 A.M. on a Saturday at Target, when I haven’t had time to put on my eyebrows or wash my hair. I think you always get that way when you see an old love: like your old self, the one he adored, could be right around the corner, young and happy and wild. When I come back to New York and my cab drives down the BQE, it passes all the rooftops I drank on with Graham, and all I see are the ghosts of the good times. I don’t see myself overdrawing my checking account for the third time in a month, or getting caught in the rain and showing up to my first day of work so soaked that I had to wear a sweat suit from a stranger while my clothes dried on a heater. I just see us riding too-small vintage bikes through the cemetery, high and smiling, the best Easter I can remember. I see him pulling my shirt over my head and tumbling into bed beside me in his tiny bedroom, and the way he’d always whisper “beautiful” when he saw my bare skin. I see myself in silhouette, lying on the edge of Graham’s roof, my head turned to watch the traffic lurching down Manhattan Avenue while he packed a bowl. When I turn to him, he laughs with his big smile, and it is my turn to get high. New York and Graham were fun to love, until loving them wasn’t fun anymore, when I was tired of being broke and exhausted and having men jam their boners into me on crowded L trains. But I owe them both a big thank-you. For all the fun, for all the pot, for giving me the time and space to be who I was, even when I was kind of a shithead.
And then, for making it easy to leave. In Minnesota, I wasn’t running toward or away from anything. I was just another good Midwestern girl with a savings account and a full-size sedan, spending her Sundays running around lakes and doing my own laundry. I was finding my own way through my new life, in the city that raised me. And I was on my way to Aaron.
Chapter 11
How I Met Your Father
Hi, Ralphie.
Right now you are only two, and you are incredibly selfish. You are always asking me to hold you or give you some grapes, and when I ask if you would prefer to perhaps poop in a toilet instead of having your grape-filled feces mashed against your nuts, you just tell me “no thanks,” and hand me the butt wipes. You do show signs of promise, though. You have recently begun telling me that I am beautiful, most likely because I’ve started asking you to call me Beautiful Mother instead of mommymommymommymommy. You offer me your leftover milk after you’ve backwashed nearly half a peanut butter sandwich into it, and you let me know when you think I look tired (really appreciate that). In the mornings, you tell me you love me “SO MUCH!” and squeeze my face in your little palms.
While I’m not banking on your ever not pooping your pants, I’m assuming that someday, you will be interested in me as a person, and you will want to know how I met your father, the guy who is responsible for your oversize head, your sharp canine teeth, and your jolly disposition.
I’m hoping this is the case because I love “how we met” stories, and I want you to love all the things I love: R. Kelly, Real Housewives, and HGTV included. As a kid, I loved hearing how my own parents met: Grumpy was home from Vietnam, and Madame was invited by a mutual friend to his welcome home party at some ramshackle house near the University of Minnesota.
She’d heard of Steve McInerny before, but she’d never seen him, not until he came stumbling drunk down the stairs, six feet tall, 130 pounds, and deeply tanned from the Vietnam sun. That, she thought, is the man I’m going to marry. I made Madame tell me that story over and over, in great detail. Like all men who eventually become conservative old white guys, your grandfather was a dirty hippie when he was young. He had long hair, and reminded Madame of her favorite Beatle, George Harrison. When she first laid eyes on him, Grumpy was shirtless, wearing high-water bell bottoms because he’d gone shopping without trying on any of the clothes he bought.
I wanted a “how we met” story like Madame and Grumpy’s: one my kids would want to hear over and over again.
I remember meeting your father at the art gallery that used to be your great-uncle Mike’s photo studio. Uncle Mike’s space always doubled as a site for family gatherings, from sweet sixteen parties to funerals and Thanksgivings, but when he retired, he handed the keys to his studio to a new generation of young creatives, who transformed it into an art gallery and invited what seemed like the entire city of Minneapolis to the opening.
I was there for the first time since my own grandma’s funeral, standing in a space that used to belong to just our tribe, now swamped with hundreds of strangers. I’d thought your dad may be there, since we’d recently begun a Twitter flirtation, but I wasn’t really sure what he actually looked like aside from the tiny, low-res avatar that represented him in his profile photo. I wore my man-eater outfit: s
hiny American Apparel leggings, oversize white tank top, leather bomber, Frye boots, and red lipstick. And then, I waited. And when I saw him from across a crowded room . . . I wasn’t sure who exactly he was. Not until he burst into the circle I’d made with my cousins and held out his hand.
“You’re Nora McInerny.” He smiled.
I did what any girl would do in that situation: I reached into my bag and handed him the “Taylor Tells All” issue of People magazine. I knew from Twitter that he loved Taylor Swift, and he held the magazine close to his heart and thanked me.
“Oh,” he said, “you know I’m not gay, right?”
My son, please know that nothing makes a girl think you are probably gay than telling her that you aren’t when she hasn’t even brought it up. Still, I took this possibly gay man up on his offer when he asked if I’d like to go out to a bar with him and his friends.
If you’re a good dancer—which remains to be seen, because right now your go-to move is just to wiggle your legs like you’re doing a toddler version of the Charleston no matter what song is playing—it will be because of your dad. I stood awkwardly on the dance floor of a shitty club in northeast Minneapolis, trying to avoid dancing, while your dad grabbed drinks for me and your aunt Lillian, who had grudgingly agreed to accompany me on an outing with a guy I vaguely knew from the Internet who may have been gay. From his spot at the bar, your dad smiled at me, busted out a little jig, and did a power slide on his knees across a crowded dance floor to deliver two Coors Lights to me and Lillian.
I knew when I accepted that ice-cold Silver Bullet that I had met a man I would definitely make out with.
It’s a damn good story. Except it’s not really the first time I met him, apparently.
If your dad were here, he’d tell you that we met years before, when he was working at the same ad agency where Madame had worked since I was in middle school. While I was home for a long weekend, I stopped by your grandma’s office to say hello, and she walked me around to say hello to the colleagues of hers I’d known since I was a little girl. But she had an ulterior motive. As your father put it, she was “parading me around to any single guy she could find,” like some sort of tour of Eligible Minneapolis Advertising Bachelors.