Coming Clean: A Memoir (13 page)

“I hate that word,
fine
,” my mom said. “Whenever you say you’re fine I know you’re anything but.”

My parents sold their house to a friend whose husband did contract work. They sold it for a third of its value under the stipulation that it was “as is” and the new owner’s responsibility to clean it out and rip it apart. The couple that bought the house stopped speaking to my parents shortly after realizing what they had taken on, but not before mentioning that when they had gotten to the attic, they found hundreds, maybe thousands of beer cans, a man’s clothing, and an old cot.

Someone had been living in our attic.

I’d had a feeling. There was a door that led to the attic right across from my bedroom, and I had heard a voice coming through the cracks in the door once. There was so much stuff—old furniture, boxes of papers, and bags upon bags of god knows what—in the space between the attic and my room that I knew it would take herculean strength to get out of the attic through that door. But our garage didn’t lock, and there were stairs straight to the attic from there. I told my mom about the voice, and she said I was probably just hearing the rats.

“You were right. Someone was living in the attic,” my mom told me when she heard the news. We were in the middle of moving into their new apartment and the cleanness of it all had washed away much of my recent hatred.

I didn’t feel justified. I felt violated. Everything about us was wrong. I could go back to Boston and be the perky girl I had perfected, I could board a plane to the Netherlands and be just another American looking for adventure, and when I graduated I could be any number of people, but it didn’t matter where I was, or who I pretended to be. I would always be the girl who grew up in garbage.

J
UST LIKE AFTER THE FIRE
,
my family started over completely after my suicide attempt. New clothes, new furniture, new appliances, new life. Just like after the fire, clean carpets and new stuff were enough to make me believe that we wouldn’t waste this second second chance.

The apartment still smelled like fresh paint when I left for the airport less than a week after we moved in. My parents drove me up to Boston and waited with me in the airport for my flight to Amsterdam to board.

At the airport, while my father seemed contentedly distracted by his simultaneous reading of the newspaper and listening to the news on his pocket radio, my mother took me aside.

“Promise me that you’ll never settle. I’ve settled for so much in my life because I didn’t think I was worth anything,” she told me. “I want you to enjoy this trip, and when you get back, we’ll take out loans for school. We’ll make it work.”

“I won’t let you take out loans for school,” I said. “But we’ll make it work.”

Over the course of a month I had gone from living with fleas, rats, and a squatter to living in a castle. Emerson owned a fourteenth-century medieval castle in the southeast of the Netherlands, complete with two moats and a tower where the village used to slaughter virgins to ward off dragons.

The program director, an Indonesian woman who had lived in the Netherlands long enough to pull off a guttural Dutch accent like a native, plied us with coffee to help keep us awake during our postflight tour. She showed us around the outer castle—where we would have our classes, where meals would be served, and which housed the ever-important vending machines—as well as the inner castle, where the library and community rooms were located. The town consisted of a bar, the Vink; a post office that was also the convenience store, where we could buy bus tickets called
strippenkart
to take us to the neighboring villages; a bank; a grocery store; and a bakery. The whole town was no more than a mile around.

While many of my fellow students were housed in makeshift dorm rooms, my two roommates and I found ourselves in what once must have been a master bedroom. Untouched by collegiate renovations, our room was huge, with ornate wallpaper, high ceilings, giant windows overlooking the inner moat, and an inactive fireplace. I had certainly moved up in the housing department.

I changed my class schedule before I left New York, deciding to focus on more academic courses while studying abroad than I did in Boston. I took the one mandatory acting class needed for my major, taught by an eccentric French woman named Sophie who commuted to the Netherlands once a week to direct
the class to roll around on the floor and channel our inner animals. The rest of my schedule was filled with history courses. I was in my first class of the semester, the World Since 1914, when the program director knocked on the door and had a word with our teacher. Class ended abruptly and we were ushered to the community room. CNN was on, and we all gathered around it instinctually. There was a fire in the World Trade Center, or at least that’s what I thought, until a moment later when I saw a plane hit one of the Twin Towers.

We spent two days crowding around the two telephones in the castle, taking turns calling home and trying to get through the busy lines. I knew my parents were okay where they were—they weren’t anywhere near the city—but I was desperate to hear their voices. I had been so angry at my parents before I left, for Gretchen, for the guy in the attic, for the years of living with rats and sludge and fleas, for freezing-cold winter nights, for the years of being left to fend for myself during their alternating depressions, and the years of lying. But in that moment, I only wanted to be home with them. I wanted to tell them how sorry I was that I had hurt them, but how glad I was that they were out of our house—that I would have swallowed a million pills if it meant keeping them from ever living that way again.

“We’re okay, honey,” my mom said when I finally got through. “I want you to stay in Europe. Apply to a school somewhere in England or Ireland; I don’t want you coming back here.”

My dad picked up the phone. “Hey, kiddo, you doin’ okay over there?”

I didn’t say all those things I had wanted to say. I said “I’m fine,” told them that I loved them, and went back to my room.

The rest of the semester went along as planned, sort of. Our advisors told us to avoid telling anyone we were American, to claim we were Canadians whenever possible, since no one hates Canadians. American flags were removed from the front of our dorms, and organized trips were cancelled so that we could travel innocuously. My friends and I still spent our weekends sleeping on trains and travelling from one country to the next, but we were all homesick. Many of my classmates flew home for Thanksgiving, but my two roommates and I went to Rome instead.

There was champagne and chocolates waiting for us in our hotel room. Normally we considered sleeping in a hostel a splurge, but a friend of ours from Emerson worked his way through college as a concierge and arranged for us to stay at the InterContinental for the holiday. We had just spent three days on the island of Ischia and had challenged ourselves to eat nothing but the fruit that grew there—the champagne went straight to our heads.

Our first stop was a Gustav Klimt exhibit at Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, then a stroll through the cat-filled streets of Rome, until we stumbled into a little trattoria on a cobblestone street. Our waiter loved Americans and plied us with wine and shots of lemon-flavored liquor, all while serenading us with what we assumed was opera but could just as well have been the Italian equivalent of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

We stumbled to the subway and climbed the Spanish Steps to our hotel, where I tried to sober up enough to call my family. My efforts were futile—my parents promptly put me on speakerphone and let the whole family listen in on my drunken Thanksgiving salutations. The whole world seemed to be in mourning, but I was more thankful than I had ever been. My family had survived itself, and I was full of limoncello.

A
FTER RETURNING TO BOSTON
from the Netherlands, I cashed in my trust at a steep penalty and took on another job, balancing waitressing, babysitting, and secretarial work before, between, and after classes. I added a minor in marketing communications, realizing that I would possibly need a backup plan one day, and an acting degree wasn’t going to do me any favors when it came to the hefty student loans I was taking on.

I spent my summers in Boston, too, working and taking as many summer classes as I could because they were cheaper in the long run. By the time my twentieth birthday rolled around, I had stockpiled enough credits to graduate. I didn’t need a senior year, and so I didn’t have one.

The only collegiate requirement I had left was an internship of my choosing. I chose to work for a talent agency in Los Angeles. In late August, I packed up what few belongings I had in Boston and boarded a plane to LAX. The school had arranged for me to live in a two-bedroom apartment in North Hollywood with two other Emersonians and a student from Boston University. We got along well but didn’t spend all that much time
together, each of us testing the waters of LA in our own way—one was an actress, another an amateur skydiver considering a career as a stunt double, and the girl from BU was looking to work her way into the business side of the music industry. Our pleasantly sterile apartment wasn’t far from the Hollywood sign, and was directly across the street from the Universal lot.

My mother had been, for the first time in my life, completely unsupportive of my decision to move to Los Angeles. She was afraid that I would fall in love with the West Coast and never come home again. It was a valid fear, because for the first time in my life, everything that could go right for me did.

I had taken the promise I made my mother seriously, making a mantra out of
never settle
, repeating the two words in my head over and over again when I wasn’t sure whether to do the smart thing or the scary thing.
Never settle
echoed on and on in my head during the days I was locked in a closet sorting headshots, a requirement of my internship at the agency. I questioned other interns about possible upgrades in responsibilities, and after realizing there weren’t any, I didn’t settle: I quit my internship after one week and went back to submitting my résumé to casting directors. The production team for a show being filmed on the Universal lot right across the street from my apartment needed an intern to help schedule appointments and run auditions. I wouldn’t be taking the entertainment industry by storm, but the women in the casting office were nice, and nice was better than being locked in a closet.

When I told my aunt Lee about my internship, she put me in touch with the wife of her former personal trainer. He had stopped training Lee a few years earlier after his wife took a VP job in Universal’s marketing department and the family moved
to LA. I called her office and was welcomed over for a talk and a tour.

If she weren’t a public relations guru, this film studio executive could have been a movie star; she looked like a younger, blonder Annette Bening. I did my best to impress her, sharing practiced speeches about my minor and being an active member of the Public Relations Student Society of America. I told her I was considering a career in PR after my internship was over. I wasn’t sure if that was the truth, but it wasn’t necessarily a lie either. College had been my ultimate goal for the majority of my life, and now that it was coming to an end, I had no idea what was next for me. I did know that I wanted to be polished, poised, and respected like this amazing woman who had allowed me to steal a moment of her very important life.

She took me out to lunch the following week, introduced me to people I should have known but didn’t, and told me to call her when my internship was over to see about a job.

My internship was going equally well—the casting director let me read with auditioning actors, introduced me to the show’s main cast, and even cast me in an episode to help me get my SAG card. I’d lucked into a few days of bit-part work on TV shows my parents dutifully taped back in New York. Since I wasn’t auditioning, I suspected my boss had pulled a few strings to help me, but she never brought it up, and so neither did I.

Beautiful people everywhere seemed to be welcoming me into their fold, offering me sunshine and jobs, farmers’ markets and craft services—it was all so easy, and easy was never the life I expected. I didn’t know what to do with easy except to poke and prod at it, looking for disappointment.

I found a comfortable discomfort in loneliness. My supervisors
were kind to me, but they didn’t exactly want to hang out with me on the weekends, and I found the endless conversations about the entertainment industry among my peer group to be utterly mind-numbing. The people I loved, the people I trusted to simply be myself around, were all on the East Coast.

I hadn’t made any friends outside of my roommate social circle, and we were acquaintances at best. Every couple of weeks we would venture out to a bar to scope out the scene. I was still underage, but within days of my arrival, Rachel had sent a care package with a driver’s license and two credit cards she didn’t use in case I was asked for backup ID. Armed as “Rachel,” I stood awkwardly around Burbank bars, wondering if all of the people inside would end up driving home drunk, ordering Midori sours because they looked pretty, and excusing myself to the bathroom any time a guy approached me.

Romance seemed to me like foolishness, reserved for people with nothing better to do; I had gone through the entirety of college without a single date and I didn’t plan on starting here, especially since I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in LA.

Moving back to New York after college meant moving back in with my parents for the first time since we had left the house behind. I loved them, their visits to Boston, and even the brief visits home I made for the holidays, but I wasn’t sure if I could go back to living their way of life. When they picked me up from the airport after my semester in the Netherlands, their new apartment was spotless. It had been less than six months since I had tried to kill myself, and my mother diligently picked up every stray paper, portable radio, or dish that was put down for more than a few minutes at a time, afraid of my reaction. But in the two years since, the trauma behind their move faded, and
so did their diligence. My mother started paying me a warning call before I came home. “Don’t expect too much,” she liked to say before launching into a long tirade about how hard it was to live with my father, as if living with him was something I knew nothing about. She would tell me she had been cleaning for days but making little impact on his ever-growing collection. It was the same speech before every visit, and I knew it wasn’t just him at fault. She was still quite the shopper. Instead of TV shopping shows, she could now ward off boredom by shopping online. The combination of the two of them was too much for the small apartment to handle.