Getting Over Jack Wagner (29 page)

I didn't speak. I barely breathed, afraid if I made any sudden moves she would snap out of it and start spewing tips for broiling chicken or keeping lipstick from bleeding out of the lines. Even though, somehow, right now, I knew she wouldn't.

“Lola thinks it's part of the reason I was always harder on her,” Mom went on, looking at a spot somewhere over my shoulder, as I floated in the third person. “I never had what she did, that ability to think for myself. And I think being around it made me insecure.”

She looked at me. “You're different from me, Eliza,” she said. “You're strong.”

I'm not strong,
I felt like crying.
I'm nervous. I'm critical. I kill relationships before they begin. I'm picky and unrealistic and frightened of feeling pain, of feeling love, of feeling anything.
“I'm not,” I whispered, but I'm not sure she heard.

Mom sniffled, pressed a corner of her napkin to each eye, and blinked rapidly, as if to realign her face. When she stopped, her expression was soft and vaguely amused. “Remember the mothers on the TV shows we used to watch, Eliza? The ones who always had the perfect advice to give their kids in the last five minutes?”

I nodded. I remembered.

“I guess all I can tell you is what I wish I'd done different.” She smiled a faint, apologetic smile. “Don't be like I was. Don't spend your life afraid of living it.”

 

After dinner, while Mom scrubbed down the kitchen (because some things will never change) I went upstairs to my old room. I hadn't been in my room—much less called it “my room”—for nearly three years, ever since Mom had decided to use it to store Harv's exercise equipment. At the time, I was convinced the room would become immediately and irrevocably Harved: brown, warm, smelling of sweat and beef. As it turned out, except for the Lifecycle tucked almost endearingly in the far corner, my room looked unchanged.

My old dresser was still there, my old bed. The ceiling remained the angst-ridden gray-black color I'd insisted on painting it during my Morrissey period. I spotted a few torn poster corners and yellowed bits of Scotch tape still clinging to the walls, from the long-ago night I'd purged my life of Jack Wagner. When I opened the closet, I found a stack of cardboard boxes. Luckily, my mother can't throw anything away, either.

I dug into the first dust-filmed box and pawed through a legacy of humiliation. Old diaries.
Teen Beats.
Yearbooks.
Transformations
magazines. My sticker book. A mix tape I'd regrettably labeled “Red Hot High School Hits!” Unfinished letters that began “Dear Z…” I made a mental note to label that box “Do Not Open Even After I'm Dead” and tore into the next one, a musty clump of jeans in various shades of black, with strategic patches and rips and fades.

It was in the third box that I found what I was hunting for: the T-shirts. Most were either black or tie-dyed. I spotted one Coca-Cola rugby and one “Junior Science Champs 1988” courtesy of Eric Sommes (and that is absolutely his final mention). Crumpled at the bottom of the box, probably tossed there in the heat of heartbreak, I spotted him: Jack Wagner.

It was hard to believe, but the T-shirt was even more absurd than I remembered. After more than a decade apart, I could see it for what it really was: an acrylic blond man with a bare triangle of chest, a sultry smile, and a name in glitter. The fact that I was once a person who could have a) looked this cheesy, b) left the house looking this cheesy, and c) still thought I was the coolest person alive made me feel simultaneously appalled, fascinated, and a little wistful.

I dug down to the bottom of the box, pulled the T-shirt out, and tossed my tank top on the bed. I squeezed Jack over my head, forcing my arms into the tight armholes, and confronted the mirror on the back of my closet door. The shirt was much too small. The decal was flaking off. The haircut on it was hilariously outdated. No part of the ensemble had seen a washing machine since 1984.

And yet, seeing my reflection, I found something I'd lost. Not the shirt itself, or the rock star on it, or any of the musicians I'd dumped for their haircuts or cummerbunds or childhoods. It wasn't the men I could have been dating instead. It wasn't my father. I had lost the kind of love that once let me wear a T-shirt this absurd in the first place. The kind of love that was unashamed, honest. The kind that knew no fear. The kind of love that would kiss a mother, thank her, and wear this glittery rockin' cotton blend all the way back home.

I was always inexplicably drawn to musicians, ever since an early infatuation with REO Speedwagon's “Can't Fight this Feeling.” (My cousin was the serious Jack Wagner fan; she has his autograph in a frame.) I wasn't as committed or as exclusive as Eliza, but I have to admit—and I have no excuse for this—I was a sucker for earrings, stubble, black T-shirts. After college, I had a mild run of the prerequisite, early-twentysomething rock-star boyfriends: a drummer, a guitarist, a “townie” in a band, a guy with a brow ring who blasted a lot of Fugees. Lately, though, there's been no common thread among the people I've dated, unless you count a vague concern about ending up in the next book.

 

Despite our names being only two letters different (which, oddly, I only noticed after the book was finished) I see us as similar but not the same. Various details of my life show up, reshaped, in hers: my stint in the high school band (concert, not marching), a job ghost-writing exotic travel articles, my cat Leroy. We possess some of the same personal qualities, but—like many things in fiction, including the rock stars—they have their roots in real life and are then exaggerated, intensified, taken to the extreme.

 

In graduate school I wrote a story called “Deep” about a young woman who flip-flopped between dating “bankers” (i.e., safe and boring) and “rock stars” (i.e., passionate and deep). I was twenty-three, and pretty sure that all “legitimate” fiction should be heavy and serious and full of angst. Having fun with the story felt a little bit like cheating; I was worried about how my class would react. The response to the story was heated, hilarious, and surprising. Women identified with it; some men were offended. It became a small-scale gender war—a line about a “banker” who “cut bagels before he freezes them” had people literally yelling.

 

Some people reacted to the stereotypes, which didn't surprise me much. The characters
were
stereotypes. They were supposed to be stereotypes. Eliza lives in a world of TV characters and song lyrics. What surprised me more was how many women identified personally with the angst-filled, brooding musician thing. Now, though, I've come to expect it. It's amazing how many women—women with husbands and mortgages and four kids—have a “rock star” kicking around in their past. At first, when they hear “rock star,” they don't relate. But when they hear the amended definition—“By ‘rock star,' I mean a guy in a local band who practices drums in his mother's basement”?—they say, “Oh, I have one of those.”

 

More than two years after I wrote the story, it was still lingering. I found myself jotting down notes like: “Rocker v. musician” and “Milli Vanilli?” and “Older rock stars—facial hair.” Meanwhile, certain ideas and characters kept surfacing in other writings: women with short-lived relationships, commitment issues, perfection issues, reality/fantasy issues, herbal best friends, weaknesses for men with guitars. I felt like I needed to give these issues more room or they might stalk my fiction forever. Around that same time, the original story was published in
Salmagundi
magazine, and revisiting it reminded me how much fun it was to write. Most of my writing, then and now, is more “serious” fiction, but I realized I was wrong in thinking fiction is less legitimate if it makes you laugh.

 

Not easier. Along the way, there were moments of amusement and fun nostalgia—recalling obscure Wham! songs or grilling friends about the fluorescent shorts they wore in junior high—that aren't usually a part of the writing process. They felt like unexpected job perks. On the other hand, I think what's hard about funny is that you don't want the story to be just funny. You want there to be substance to it, a layer of seriousness underneath, and it was hard to find and maintain that seriousness without losing the humor.

 

Obviously, there are lots of books out there about funny, twentysomething women dealing with funny, twentysomething issues. I've read and liked a lot of them, but I've also felt a little gypped. Sometimes, after spending 200 pages really identifying with the main character, the perfect guy comes strolling into the picture and the ending feels unrealistic. At first, I tried various takes on the perfect-guy-strolling-into-the-picture ending too. But they were feeling forced, and I was getting increasingly angry. I didn't want to see Eliza compromised in the end, or requiring a boyfriend to be happy. Though
she
might have thought her book was about finding a rock star, ultimately it was never really about that. I wanted her to be a character whose sense of self-worth wasn't defined by dates or boyfriends or low-carb diets, whose story doesn't end with the perfect boyfriend but leaves the reader feeling hopeful anyway.