Agorafabulous! (22 page)

“Damn, miss,” a girl with tattooed eyebrows said with a whistle. “You look busted today.”

“Yes, Teresa,” I said faintly. “Yes, I suppose I do.”

“You out partying or what, miss?”

“No,” I said, struggling to sit upright. “I was applying to Columbia University. I spent six hours writing an essay. Just mailed the whole thing out this morning.”

“Miss, didn’t you already go to college?”

“Yeah, but that was undergraduate college. This is grad school.”

“Grad school?” Teresa looked horrified. “What the fuck is that?”

“It’s for an advanced degree, like a master’s degree,” I said, trying to remember if I’d put on deodorant. “It’s not required. It’s just . . . you can go if you want to.”

“I do not fucking want to,” Teresa said. “Like, for reals? No fucking way, miss. I’m doing an associate’s in fashion merchandising and that is fucking
it
.”

“That’s cool that you’re going to Colombia, though,” a boy said. “They make coffee down there, eh? They speak Spanish but I heard it’s like nothing you can understand. Plus there’s mad cocaine down there.”

“That is true, Manuel,” I said, thinking of the trust fund babies who regularly flood Ivy League universities with entitlement and nose candy each fall. “Now who actually did their homework?”

Months passed, and I got my acceptance letter from Western Carolina University. It came in a big, lovely envelope stuffed with various letters of congratulations, as well as a request that I phone the departmental office when I received the letter. I did, and was bowled over with excitement when a honey-voiced official offered me a full ride plus a paid teaching assistantship that would cover many of my outside expenses for the year.

“Can you believe it?” I squealed to Tom over the phone. “A full ride
plus
a teaching assistantship!”

“I knew it,” Tom said with what I told myself was pride. “I’m not surprised at all. Congratulations, baby. You deserve it.”

“Oh, Tom, you believed in me that much?”

“Well, it is
Western Carolina
University,” he said, laughing. “Did you really think there was a chance they wouldn’t take you?”

I was so excited by the good news that I didn’t feel bad about the inevitable rejection letter that I knew would arrive from Columbia any day. The point had been to say I’d applied. I could always be proud that I’d tried.

A week or two later, I opened my mailbox and saw something powder-blue poking out from beneath some bills and magazines. “About time,” I said to the rejection letter. I touched the blue corner, and realized to my surprise that it wasn’t the thin business-size envelope I’d expected. And then I pulled a big blue packet out of the mailbox.

I stared at it in shock. Were the admissions people particularly cruel? Didn’t they know that a short, polite rejection letter was kinder than some big envelope full of reasons why you didn’t get in? Unless . . .

I left the rest of the mail in the mailbox and rushed inside. I sat in the middle of my sunny kitchen floor and opened it.

“Dear Sara: We are pleased to inform you . . .” And that was all I needed to read.

“Oh my God!” I shrieked, as if I’d won a sweepstakes. I jumped up and down on the floor, on my couch, on my bed. I performed a series of awkward yet enthusiastic high kicks. I considered doing a back-flip but remembered I had never done one previously, and that didn’t seem like the sort of skill one spontaneously exhibited on command. And then I called Tom.

“Hey, what’s up?” he said in the way he always did, and I almost burst with happiness.

“I got into Columbia,” I said.

“What?” he said, his voice rising an octave and squeaking at the end.

“I did. I got in.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, because
I’m fucking smart
?” I was shocked at myself for actually saying the words that had leaped to mind.

He was quiet for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to jump on you like that.”
Oh, no. Now he’ll be angry. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. Please don’t leave me. Please don’t ever leave me.

“No,” he said. “You’re right. I deserved that.”

What?

“Congratulations,” he said. “That’s amazing.” He sounded wistful and sad and actually proud.

“I’m not going, or anything,” I assured him. “I just wanted to see if I could get in. And I did, so now I can always say I got into Columbia. We can frame the acceptance letter and put it up in our bedroom!”

“If I were you,” he said, “I’d really think about what the best choice is for you. Not for me or for us, but for you.”

Something was wrong. Everything was right, but somehow something was wrong. He never spoke to me like this. Like an equal.

“Oh, I want to come home,” I said, fighting the rising anxiety inside me. “Columbia would be too expensive, anyway. I mean, I can’t afford that.”

“Yes, you can,” he said in the same weird, quiet way. “You can take out loans.”

“Well, I’m not going,” I said resolutely. “I’m really not. Besides, I’ve already asked you to do a year with me living far away. I promise I’ll never move far away from you again.”

The next day, I e-mailed the department head at Teachers College at Columbia and offered my thanks, but explained that I wouldn’t be coming to school in the fall. The day after that, Tom broke up with me.

“Why are you doing this?” I sobbed, even though I knew there were a million reasons why.

“Because this isn’t working,” he said. “You and me. We’re not good for each other. It hasn’t been good for a long time. You know it, too. And now you’re going to give up your dream to come back here and live with me, even though we make each other unhappy? No way. You can’t.” He was crying, too.

Alongside the pain, I felt an enormous surge of relief. I ignored it.

“But we were going to get married,” I wailed. “And have a house, and a dog, and a kid. And now I don’t even know what I’m going to do.”

“You’re going to move to New York City,” he said. “And your dream is finally going to come true.”

The next day, puffy-eyed and weak, I called Columbia and asked if I could please come to their school anyway. They kindly said yes, and advised me that I’d better move quickly if I wanted to get those $60,000 in loans. I said I’d see them in a couple of months. Then I called Western Carolina University and politely un-accepted their offer of admission. As I spoke to the woman from WCU, my voice cracked a little.

“You okay, honey?” she asked.

“I’m just going to miss Asheville,” I said, sniffling. “I’ve missed it all year out here and I thought I was gonna be home in a couple months, but now it turns out I’m not.”

“Well, honey,” she said. “We’ll still be here. You can always come and visit, you know. But if I were your age and I got the chance, I’d give New York City a try. You only get one shot at this kinda thing.”

I thanked her and hung up.

The last couple of months in Texas were a whirlwind of preparations. I thoroughly enjoyed my drive back East, stopping in Asheville to stay with friends for a few days before I made it up to New York. I managed to avoid Tom, which wasn’t hard at all because he wasn’t exactly trying to hang out with me. I moved into an apartment with two women I met through Craigslist, and delighted in the two dogs and the cat with whom I also shared my new place. They didn’t belong to me, so I didn’t have to do anything other than cuddle them, which was ideal.

Then there was Teachers College, the most obviously-named graduate school in the world. It sat just north of Columbia’s main campus, a labyrinthine pile of bricks and stone. I busied myself with selecting courses, buying books, and learning the geography of the Upper West Side. Night classes began, as did my daily student-teaching assignment at a public middle school in Manhattan. And sometime in mid-September, I realized with a start that I hadn’t had a panic attack in . . . in . . . I couldn’t remember how long. Not when Tom had dumped me, not when I’d said good-bye to my colleagues, not when I’d driven alone through midnight summer storms in Texas, not when I’d sat in the front passenger seat of my mom’s car and barreled through the Lincoln Tunnel, not when I’d discovered my apartment of choice was a rather steep walk-up. I hadn’t even panicked on the day I met my perpetually disapproving cooperating teacher, the woman charged with mentoring me while educating thirty-five precocious New York City seventh-graders. She had the bitterness one only finds in certain older teachers, the ones who’ve been in the system far too long and who still nurture a wish that they’d done something else. She watched my lessons with a sour expression on her face, but somehow it didn’t throw me.

No matter how stressed or tired or uninspired I felt, I didn’t panic. I was too busy to panic. If I wasn’t downtown at middle school, I was uptown at grad school. If I wasn’t uptown at grad school, I was doing homework in my bedroom. And if I wasn’t actually at one of these three sites, I was on the subway en route from one to another. I had discovered that subway trains generally didn’t get stuck in one place for over four minutes, and that in New York City there was always a Starbucks with a bathroom when I needed it. I might have to wait in the store while a drunk woman took a shit on the floor beside the toilet, but I
would
eventually get access to that toilet.

To my enormous surprise, I found the strange manic pace of life in New York oddly soothing. Perhaps my anxiety was not only crowded out by my daily obligations but by the wild quirks of my fellow New Yorkers. On any given block in New York, I was bound to be, if not the sanest individual, at least not one of the craziest. And there were more of “the craziest” than any other type.

I did not, for example, shit on any floors in public or private spaces. I did not walk down the street screaming about the coming of the Messiah, the Devil, or the ice-cream truck. I did not engage in fisticuffs with an imaginary pugilist beside the strawberry stand at Union Square Farmers’ Market. For the first time in my life, I was too busy to worry about anything unrelated to lesson plans, adolescent social development, and the New York City Board of Education’s benchmarks and statistics for success in English, grades seven through twelve.

One night in September, I went out to a pub near Columbia with some new friends. During the dinner, Tom called me and promptly apologized for everything he’d ever done wrong in our relationship. He was almost certainly drunk, but I enjoyed the moment nevertheless—at first.

“Oh, we both made mistakes,” I said magnanimously, out on the street where I wouldn’t interrupt my friends’ heated debate about charter school funding. “And you really did me a lovely favor by breaking up with me. Now we’ve both moved on to better things. I’m living in the world’s greatest metropolis and making a difference each day in the lives of little children, and you—what exactly are
you
doing, Tom?”

“Just working, you know,” he said. “Seeing a nice girl. Playing touch football with my buddies. Man, I’m happy to hear you’re doing so well, Sara.”

“Good to hear,” I said faintly. “I have to go now, and do significant things. Good-bye, Tom.” I hung up the phone and leaned against the building.

SEEING A NICE GIRL?
Who the FUCK had given him permission to “see” a nice girl? It had only been four months since we’d broken up! Did he have no sense of propriety? Was he an emotionless death robot sent from another planet to destroy my entire existence with a single phone call? What kind of a cold, evil bastard moved on from the greatest love of all time within four fucking months? I wanted to throw up. I wanted to punch a fist through a storefront window. I wanted to find the girl he was fucking and kick her repeatedly in the teeth, and then push
him
into a bubbling vat of something terrible and oozey.

Aside from a brief rebound dalliance in Texas with a twenty-year-old hippie who believed he’d been abducted by aliens as a child, I hadn’t gotten back into the world of opposite-sex relations. I certainly hadn’t been on any dates or “seen” anyone “nice.” This meant that even though I was doing some interesting things in a cool city, Tom was winning. He was
winning.
And this was one thing I could not abide.

I needed to have sex with someone. Probably a series of someones. Or have a series of sexual encounters with a single someone who would then become a non-single someone because he would be my only someone and I would be his. The only problem was that I didn’t know any straight young men in New York.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There were two straight young guys in my program at Teachers College, but one of them only dated Jewish girls and the other one was caught up in a not-so-secret secret affair with a classmate, who reported to a friend of a friend that the gentleman in question had an enormous penis. I’ve never been a fan of big dicks, so this piece of information did not engender any lustful thoughts in my heart. I possess a vaginal model that takes a while to adapt to the shape and size of a particular phallus. It is made of a substance not unlike memory foam. When my equipment hasn’t been used in a while, it returns to its factory setting. The lack of flexibility may be pleasing to my partners, but I often find it uncomfortable. I am told that upon having children, it will become as accommodating as a wind tunnel, but I’m no closer to that event now than I was at twenty-four. I preferred that my reintroduction to the world of cocks come in the form of an interaction with a medium-to-small member of the species.

My savior came in the form of Andrew, a guy I’d briefly crushed on at my first college, Emerson. He was a senior when I was a freshman, and he’d been kind and quirky and smart and weird, and he was very good at writing. Back then, he’d had a long-term girlfriend, and I’d never entertained any serious thoughts of dating him. But when I ran into him at a pretty little bar in Brooklyn one night, I discovered that he was (A) newly single and (B) not opposed to talking to me at great length while I flirted shamelessly. I gave him my phone number, or maybe I asked for his, and somebody called somebody else, and eventually we set up a date.