How to Be a Grown-up

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To Sophie, Theo, and Luke, the ones, the answer, and the reason

“I think if I make it to 40, I can be pretty amazing.”

—Wendy Wasserstein

Uncommon Women and Others

Part I

Chapter One

Although Labor Day was late that year, the heat still sat on the back of my neck like a wet towel. I stood on the porch with my three-year-old, Maya, and watched through the trees for a car kicking up dust on the road. After two weeks at my mother-in-law’s place outside Woodstock, NY, with no air-conditioning and no WiFi, we were both Ready To Go.

“Rory, honey!” she called from inside. I cringed. Terms of endearment were never a good omen.

“Yes, Val?”

“Did Maya touch my dream catcher?”

Maya shook her head, her ponytail, still wet from the swimming hole, swiping back and forth across my thigh. “I don’t think so, Val,” I replied. “You were really clear with her about what not to touch!”

“If you say so.”

I liked Val, more than most other women like their mother-in-laws, but one more hour of trying to be polite in that humidity and something Edward Albee was going to break out between us.

The original plan had been that my husband, Blake, would be with us for the whole trip. We’d hike the Catskill Mountains with our ten-year-old, Wynn, and take both kids to the man-made beaches along the Esopus Creek. But then Blake got yet another callback for this Netflix series he’d been auditioning for and had to jump on a plane to LA at the last minute. I was deeply rooting for him to get this part, rooting from the subatomic particles that flurried in my atoms. He needed it.
We
needed it.

Blake was that rare animal, a professional working actor, and he had been since he was a kid. But after Maya was born, the flow of residuals slowed to a trickle, revealing our income’s instability like a cracked riverbed. Our whole summer, our whole lives, were now coming down to his landing this role, which was as within his power as winning the lottery.

“Mommy, listen!” Maya started jumping and pointing. The screen door squeaked open, and Wynn ran out to join us on the porch just as we glimpsed the rental car coming up the drive.

“Yay!” I joined in their happy dance before bending to grab a duffel. The car cleared the maples and there he was. Blake Turner. Sitting at the wheel of a red convertible.

I looked down at our two weeks’ worth of clothes and toys and sports equipment. Even if Maya sat on my shoulders we wouldn’t fit.

I was about to open my mouth and ask some variation on,
What the what, Blake?!

But then I caught his face. Despite seeing his kids for the first time in weeks, something that would normally make him literally do cartwheels, he was struggling to smile.

“Well?” Val came out. “Did you get it?”

Marrying an actor was not something I’d set out to do.

It was, in fact, the embodiment of my parents’ worst fears—any parent’s, probably. Right up there with your child joining a cult—or having no sense of humor. Certainly for Sheryl and Randy McGovern of Oneonta, New York, this was nowhere in the plan. My parents had met at accounting school, and I’d like to be able to tell you they’re not exactly what you’re picturing—that they have a leather fetish or even high cholesterol. But they are exactly, endearingly, the people you would trust to keep you out of trouble with the IRS. So I lose a lot of time imagining what it was like for them the first day I came downstairs in the sparkly beret I salvaged from the YMCA lost-and-found and forced them to sit through my third-grade rendition of “Hey, Big Spender.”

Amazingly, they were supportive. Mystified. But supportive. Even when I decided I wanted to forgo a traditional college education to attend the performing arts conservatory at SUNY Purchase, where I discovered two unexpected things: first, set design. Second: Blake Turner.

The first time I saw him on campus, I thought I was hallucinating. I thought some potent combination of homesickness and paint thinner had conjured my teen crush, as if he were a genie sprung from the well-kissed pages of
Tiger Beat
magazine. I could not believe Blake Turner,
the
Blake Turner, was at my college.

As he slipped into his cafeteria chair in his ripped plaid shirt, dirty wool hat pulled low over his painfully beautiful features, only one sentence blared in my head:
I will die if I don’t touch him.
I immediately ran back to my room and called my seventh-grade best friend. Because it was 1992 and no one had e-mail yet.

We knew his story by heart. How he was nine when he was scouted to be in
Cooties
. Then, once that was a blockbuster, and he played Harrison Ford’s son in that drama about the horse farm, before you knew it he was a bona fide heartthrob. But then he just kind of . . . disappeared.

Campus rumor had it that, as he coasted into puberty, with his aquamarine eyes and floppy brown hair, he started losing every part to these real-life buddies his age named Leo and Toby. So his agent told him to bide his time, that once he reached his twenties, with his looks, the number of parts would blow wide open and he’d be steadily employed again.

So he walked among us at Purchase where I, and everyone else who liked boys, swooned for his Hamlet and his Ernest, his Jean Valjean and his Equus. Especially his Equus.

Toiling in the nerdy set design department, spattered in paint, dusted with plaster, hair knotted with a pencil, tool belt dragging down the waistband of my (what would now be considered mom) jeans, I didn’t stand a chance.

“Of course, you stand a chance!” my best friend, Jessica, would yell at me as I stared longingly at him across some God-awful house party. “Lots of famous people are married to normals.” Blake was famous-in-waiting—about that there was no question. The only silver lining in the looming black sky of graduation was Blake’s inevitable success and that we’d always be able to say we went to college with him.

“They like being the hot one,” Claire, our third roommate, agreed.

In hindsight, it’s hilarious that this was their argument: famous men marry average women. Not, “Hey, he’s a college guy with a penis who’s had a few drinks. I bet with very little prompting, he would agree to put it in you somewhere.” We were young, steeped in the romance of our undergraduate studies, and playing the long game.

Of course, after graduation, the further I got into my twenties, when marriageability
should
have been the criterion, the vaguer my objectives became. I got excited about a guy because he was excited about me. Dating in New York felt like I was constantly, breathlessly trying to capture vapor with a butterfly net. Whether the vapor was poisonous was a let’s-cross-that-bridge question.

Then, occasionally, on the nights Jessica and Claire were out of our tiny East Village apartment, and I’d catch Blake on TV, in an old movie or doing a guest spot on
ER
, I’d feel that heat pulse through my skin like I was thirteen again. Every time, I had the instinct to lift my hair from behind my ears, as if he could see me through the screen.

Then one autumn night, shortly after my thirtieth birthday, Jessica and I ducked into a bar on Avenue B we hadn’t planned to go to, but the temperature was doing one of those abrupt plummets and we were both underdressed. Jessica’s boyfriend, Miles, was in Chicago for his master’s in fine arts, and they were trying on a separation that never stuck. Most likely due to dispiriting nights like that one.

I was about to wriggle ahead to get us drinks when Jessica grabbed my arm, throwing me off balance in my Sexy Shoes—the ones I pointlessly wore to bars that were so crowded I could’ve been wearing bunny slippers and no one would’ve known. “It’s Blake!”

“Oh my God, where?” I ducked my head, untucking my blond hair and checking my teeth with my tongue at the same time as my feet started backing toward the exit.

“By the bar.
Say hi
,” she said forcefully in a way that would eventually serve her well with two sons.

“No!
He has no idea who I am
.”

“Then introduce yourself and say you went to a college the size of a public bus with him.”

“I
can’t
.” I dared to gopher my head over the crowd and she was right. Blake Turner. At the bar. Gone was the plaid shirt, the Dinosaur Junior tee, the hat that could have walked down the aisle at graduation by itself. He was wearing a tight-fitting dress shirt and good jeans. He had a Wall Street haircut. But the face was just the same. I was all hot static in an instant.

“What is wrong with you?” Jessica demanded. “You’re thirty! You just negotiated a raise from the biggest bitch in your department.”

“I don’t know,” I groaned. “When I look at him, I think I still have braces.”

“You are hot, Ror. Hot.” It was impossible for me to metabolize that. I think some part of our brains freeze in puberty, and where you were in the social hierarchy is the image you carry around for the rest of your life. This goes both ways. When I see class president Cindi Sherwood working at the gas station down the road from my parents’, she still smiles at all the male customers like they’d be lucky to get one minute of her broken-tooth time. In my mind’s eye, I was waiting for my growth spurt, for my boobs, for my Clearasil pads to finally
do
something. While I never crept past 5'3", the fact that when my boobs finally arrived, they left me with an admittedly enviable figure was something I just could not hold in my head.

“But what about my sloping eyebrow?”

“You crazy fucking nutcase. No one can see that but you.” She took my shoulders. “I will give you twenty dollars to go over there right now.”

“But I didn’t shave.” And that’s thirty. He won’t remember my name, but if he does, the only logical next step is sex.

“If you don’t do this and he marries Jennifer Garner, you will regret it for the rest of your life.”

“Okay.” I was about to nut up. In my version of the story, I was seconds away from breathtaking bravery. But . . .

“Rory McGovern!” It was like Bono knew my name. I spun slowly to face—

“Blake? Wow.”

He threw his arms out and hugged me. Really hugged me. “This is so awesome.” He turned to the guy he was with, a shorter blond with a weak chin. “I went to college with these guys!” he said, meaning us. “This is my friend, Chester. We’re doing
True West
at the Cherry Lane. Can I buy you a drink?”