A Year Straight (15 page)

Age thirteen: Nonna Dina died.

Age sixteen: I drove four grueling hours to see a boy. Upon arrival, he kissed me and said, “Hey, I'm going to the skate park with my friends. Do you want to come and hang out, maybe read a book? There are some really nice benches there.”

Age nineteen: The girl I didn't realize I was in love with moved across the country. I was devastated, but I didn't know why.

Age twenty-one: When I returned home from a trip out of town, I found out the girl I'd been dating had started seeing someone else. They came in together to visit me at the
coffee shop where I worked. The new girl was supercool, an art school student. I served them lattes in my required uniform: a denim button-down shirt with the company logo over my heart.

Age twenty-four: The badass biker girl I'd been dating rejected me gently in her early morning whisper, “You're the perfect girl for me. I'm not ready for you.”

Age twenty-nine: Amy and I broke up.

Age thirty-two: “I went on a date with someone else, and I didn't miss you.”

And that was the short list. I'd been through stuff, bigger stuff. I'd been to the dark parts of myself. I'd worked my ass off to love me, and my dating frenzy was proving counterproductive.

To stop the inner dialogue, I decided to focus on my surroundings. This is one way of meditating, I'd been told, and the only kind I am capable of. I have no patience for sitting in a chair. I began walking again, noticing the crackle of wood chips beneath my feet, the scent of sagebrush in the breeze. The sun shone on the rocks, illuminating the various shades of brown, gray, and gold. The West Coast light is different, flatter. The trees cast sharp shadows on the cliffs—bigger, taller versions of themselves. It was a wonder how they persisted, their roots erupting from the parched ground. I looked down. The cracks in the dehydrated dirt formed tiny landscapes at my feet. Millions of minuscule canyons. A
hawk hovered over a field. Joggers trotted past me. Life was happening. Walking was the only thing to do, and so I did. I walked and walked until I rounded a corner to a vast view of the city and the Pacific Ocean in the distance. My heart swelled in my chest.

I found a bench away from the bustle and sat down. I closed my eyes. The sun's warmth felt like love filling me up from the inside. I soaked it in for several minutes. When I opened my eyes, peeking out of the dirt in front of me was the hint of something shiny. I dug it out. It was an old key that had clearly been there for quite some time. There was no chain attached to it, no name. I sat holding it, amused and a little perplexed. It was warm in my hand. It felt like the key was there for me. And then, out of nowhere, I began to laugh. The laughter was hearty, emanating from a deep place. Joy had snuck up on me. I'd sat in that same place many times before, brokenhearted, disbelieving, mad at myself and the world. And no matter how shattered I'd ever felt, love always found a way of finding me. I laughed and laughed.
Look at me! I can open my heart, be vulnerable, act like a lunatic, and have my heart broken!
Isn't that what living is for?

It was suddenly clear that what I'd become attached to was not so much the waiter himself, but the idea of love. Sure, I'd fallen hard for him and the future I'd prematurely fantasized for us. But sobbing for days over someone I'd known for a mere week was an overreaction, even for me. I was in
love with love. I always had been. I was never cut out for one-night stands, and though my enthusiasm might have scared the waiter away, I was not about to let that stop me. I would hold out for someone as eager as I was.

I scaled the steep steps back up to the parking lot, smiling and thinking,
Wow, these stairs really suck, but I'd do it all over again, gladly.

 

 

A FEW DAYS later, I received a phone call from my mom.

“Hello?” I reached for my headset to safely talk while driving.

“Hi honey. Listen, your brother is fine, but—”. I pulled over to the side of the road. My heart simultaneously leaped out of my chest and caved in on me. I burst into tears before she could even get a word in. “Elena, he's okay. But he's in the hospital.”

My brother had nearly been hit by a car on his bicycle (my biggest fear nearly realized), and in the process of swerving out of the way, he had taken a fall so hard that he broke his hip. They were still conducting tests, but all looked okay otherwise. I sobbed by the side of the road. My little brother had the wind knocked out of him, too. And for real. It was time to go home.

F
resh off a red-eye, I headed first to the grocery store and then to my brother's apartment. I perched on a stool in his kitchen while he relayed the details of the accident and his surgery. I whipped up oversized servings of our Sibling Special: cheddar, tomato, and avocado omelets. My brother's bum leg took up the entire couch, so I plopped myself down on the floor below him and balanced my plate on my knees. We ate in front of reruns of
The Office
and laughed at all our favorite parts.
Phew
. He was okay. I was okay. We were going to be okay.

 

 

I'D BEEN HOPING to touch base with Megan so I could invite myself over to her clean house to hang out. But she wasn't returning my calls, so I made my way to TJ's instead. It was always safer to keep my shoes on while navigating the maze
of dirty socks and stray bits of cat poop at TJ's house. Her overweight cat, “Shrimp,” didn't always have the best aim when using the litter box.

“Are these clean ?” I examined a pair of sweatpants I found slung over a chair in her room.

“I have no idea what you're referring to,” TJ shouted from the living room, “but the answer is no.”

I slipped into the sweatpants, stole a bag of popcorn from the endless supply in her kitchen, and collapsed onto her couch. She grabbed a handful of popcorn from the bag on my lap, spilling half of it all over the place.

“Really?” I asked, already knowing the answer. “You can't just take one small handful at a time like a normal human being?”

TJ chomped away with a smirk on her face.

“I like to make sure there's enough in the cracks of the couch in case I get hungry later.”

It was
Shark Week.
We watched episode after episode until sundown, at which point I dragged myself to the subway and made my way back to my brother's house.

The odds of being attacked by a shark are one in eight million. What are the odds of meeting that special single someone in a city of eight million?

 

 

I WORKED FROM my brother's apartment for a couple of weeks, until he was on his foot again (he had to keep pressure
off the broken side for another month). Once he was able to hop around his apartment and complete such tasks as cooking, cleaning, and picking on me, it was time for me to go.

Between Megan seemingly avoiding me and my fear of facing Noah, I couldn't bear returning to the office. So I fled to the closest remote place I could think of: Martha's Vineyard. My college friend Alexis had grown up there, and I'd exhausted every excuse not to go. I'd always pictured Martha's Vineyard as an island of narrow streets overcrowded with Croc-clad yuppies from Connecticut, where I grew up. The bars would surely be packed with guys wearing Black Dog T-shirts and shorts with whales on them. Martha's Vineyard was so not me. It was the perfect place to hide.

When you live in New York City, your perspective is a little skewed. I know that “the Vineyard,” as the regulars call it, is not nearly as remote as the middle of Maine, but for true New Yorkers, anything north of Massachusetts might as well be Canada. The Vineyard felt far from civilization because it proved impossible to get to. It takes six hours no matter which way you slice it, and forget about trying to book a weekend ferry during the peak summer season. Luckily, with my boss's recent move to California, I was still able to work “from home.” I booked a Wednesday afternoon boat.

As I stuffed my bathing suit and flip-flops into my bag, I caught my reflection in the mirror above my dresser. I looked lost, and not like on the TV show of the same name, on which
they are all tan and toned. I was pale. And tired. Below the mirror was a photo of my grandmother, which I took into my hands. In the picture, she is in her fifties. She's already had her kids and her divorce, and she emanates a feminine authority that I've always aimed to possess. The face in the mirror across from me displayed hints of her essence—some of the strength I'd inherited; some attained on my own. The rest I had yet to earn. I placed the picture down and picked up a deck of cards I kept next to two of her thimbles: gifts to me upon her death. The cards were hers, too, and when I was young we'd play our favorite Italian game together. Though it was a game of chance, I still attempted to cheat once, organizing the cards so that all the high cards were lined up for my picks. She smacked my hand and said, “Cheating takes the fun out of it.” Then, in the same stern tone that made me feel safe in the world, “You'll never know what fate had in store for you.”

“It's in your hands now, Nonna,” I whispered, blindly choosing two cards from the deck. “You pick for me.” A five and nine of diamonds.

“I have no idea what that means,” I said. I finished packing and left the two cards faceup on my dresser.

It was midweek, so I got a much coveted table all to myself on the ferry. An episode of
Top Chef
was playing on the TV above the snack stand. As fate would have it, the very first woman I'd ever dated was a contestant. She lashed out at
her teammates with the same venomous Scorpio wit that had won me over at nineteen, when she had betrayed her brash exterior and held the door for me. I took the sight of her as a sign that life is a series of cycles, more of a circle than a straight line.

When the ferry pulled into Vineyard Haven, I jumped out of my seat and ran to the edge of the deck. All the buildings in the storybook town were of the same country style, with the same cedar siding that over time fades to dolphin gray. Upon disembarking, I drove by a sign for the Black Dog Café and decided to stop in for a glimpse. I'm not going to lie. The place is cute. I passed the day working there and then made my way up-island to meet Alexis, who was tending bar at her parents' inn. The drive itself was rejuvenating. The trees, so lush and green, created a canopy over the road, opening up now and then to offer a picturesque view. The Vineyard actually did look like the oil paintings I'd seen in town earlier that day: white sailboats sprinkled across a shimmering turquoise bay; a field of deer, heads down, fluffy white tails at full mast; a hillside farm, its red barn blazing in the setting sun.

Alexis's parents greeted me with hearty handshakes and showed me to my room. I instantly felt like family. The year-rounders differ greatly from the summer weekend onslaught. They are openhearted, hardworking, sunburned people of the earth. They cook and clean and dig in the dirt. I overheard talk of bonfires and skunk taming, whatever that was. I traded my
boots for flip-flops and hung up all the dresses I would clearly not be wearing. I was ready to move in.

As she served up oysters and glasses of sauvignon blanc, I brought Alexis up to speed on my most recent antics.

“No way! Superscandalous!” she said, shining a glass and hooking it onto the beam above the bar.

“I know, I know.”

“But totally fun, too. Oh, and I know the perfect guy for you. My cousin Banyan.”

“Banyan? As in Banyan Banyan?”

“Yes, you are totally his type. Hippie girl with long brown hair.”

“But I'm trying to take a break here. That's the whole point.”

“He's playing a show on Saturday. We'll go and I'll introduce you.”

Banyan, the son of famous musicians, was hot and had a Vineyard house all to himself. It had been only half a day, but I was already dreading the boat ride back home. There's something especially calming about islands, knowing there is a moat separating us from all the things we need to do. The overflowing laundry pile back home would just have to wait, as would the countless phone calls yet to return. I never thought I'd be grateful for shoddy cell phone service. There was a sea in between my concerns and me, and Banyan was my ticket to paradise.

That night I fell asleep to the image of my life as a year-rounder. I couldn't wait to spend the rest of my days riding horses and sipping herbal iced tea by the pool.

The following day, my mom came to join me for some mother-daughter quality time—meaning by day we'd hang out at the beach and at night I'd ditch her to go out with Alexis and her friends. I picked her up at the ferry dock in my new Crocs. They're so comfortable! On the way back up-island, we stopped for ice cream at the famed Mad Martha's. As we strolled along Main Street, racing to catch the runaway drips of mint chip in the sweltering sun, we perused the window displays of framed cliff-side sunsets, straw hats, and pastel linen dresses. And there, crossing the street, was Banyan.

“Oh my God, Mom, don't look! That's Alexis's cousin, the one she wants to set me up with.”

“Where?”

“Don't look!”

I turned the corner and pulled my mom with me. My heart was pounding.

“Did you see him?” I asked, panting.

“You told me not to look!”

I turned to find myself face to face with a life-size poster of him, advertising his upcoming concert.

“That's him!” I said, pointing at the poster. His dreamy smile sent me adrift.
I could work at his mom's chic clothing store in town and get a family discount!

“Hmm,” my mom said, crunching on her cone, “I don't see it.” My mom often had psychic moments. That was not the moment for one of them.