How to Grow Up (14 page)

Breakups make me feel old and haggard, all used up. Getting a new hairdo or a shot of Botox lifts me out of dumps. Even a mani-pedi and an eyebrow wax remind me to take care of myself—an outward manifestation of all the inner self-care breakups require of you, and a continuation of the declaration of self-love that you made when you dumped that fool. Oh, wait—that fool dumped you? As we say in 12-step, rejection is God's protection! The Universe was looking out for you by taking away someone who was bringing you down. Give thanks by getting a facial. You are made in the Universe's image, and she likes to see
you looking your best! Plus, there is a real satisfaction in looking different the next time you run into your ex—
You think you know me? You don't know me. You never even got to see the best of me. Here's a glimpse; eat your heart out, loser.

Breakovers are good for your self-esteem, and they pay respect to how a breakup leaves you changed. You're never the same after a heartache. That doesn't mean you're degraded, or ruined—you're smarter, sharper. You're a little older. You're going to see the world differently now, and the world should see you differently, too. Get a haircut, or dye your hair some wild shade. Buy a new outfit; thrift it if you must. Pierce your tongue. No—don't do that. I did that after a breakup and it was a disaster. I bit it all the time by mistake, and it became infected. Get a tattoo (just don't hit on your artist). Go on a health kick and detox from the bad vibes. Have a friend teach you how to master cat-eye eyeliner once and for all, and make it your new thing for a while. There is no end to how you can change up your appearance, and it's always a great idea. It's better you're focused and obsessing on yourself than on whatever clueless bozo got the ax.

The second most amazing thing I did to help get over a painful breakup was to get contact lenses. After living my whole life with a strip of plastic cutting across my face—a.k.a. glasses—I could suddenly
see
myself! I became unrecognizable to people, even those who'd known me for ages but had gotten used to clocking my specs to identify me. It was so gratifying to have friends marvel, “You look
so different
!” because I
was
different. I wasn't going to put up with the mad bullshit my latest relationship had put me through ever again. I was a
new woman
! And I
was glad it showed. It was hard to learn how to yank apart my lids and poke myself in the eye like some
Clockwork Orange
torture scene, but I mastered it through practice. Plus, it really widened my eye shadow possibilities to no longer have a plastic contraption blocking the mirrors of my soul.

However life changing it was to shuck my glasses, the number one best most amazing thing I did to help get over a painful breakup was to go to Paris. I was lucky to have the spare dough for a plane ticket, but the experience was so thoroughly healing, I would encourage anyone to put it on a credit card or bum the funds off someone who loves you. Have a breakup party and ask everyone to make a contribution to your Paris Breakup Vacation Fund. Do whatever you need to do to get your ass out of whatever non-French country you happen to be in and into Paris. I suppose you could go somewhere else—to Mexico to snorkel with all the other fish in the sea; to Rome to lose yourself in history and catcalls; to Tibet to hunker down in a cave. But I really recommend Paris.

Why Paris? For starters, it's beautiful, and its beauty is of a melancholy variety that jibes quite nicely with post-breakup downer energy. When I brought my own broken heart to Paris, doing a house swap with a French friend (Don't have a French friend? Make one, quick! One should always have a French friend!), I spent my first non-jet-lagged day walking along the Seine in the rain. The weather sucked, which was great. It was overcast and pigeon-colored, like my heart. I took the elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower and saw exactly nothing through the thick cloud cover. It was a metaphor for my own sorry state—
unable to see the loveliness of the larger world, what with all this sadness fogging my vision.

Travel is perfect for a broken heart, liberating and addictive. The exotic new surroundings can augment your angst and make it seem pretty, somehow. You are the mopey heroine of your own French film. It transforms your days from a frantic scheme to avoid bumping into your ex to a luxuriously lonely experience of solitude. Everything you do, from feeding yourself breakfast to grabbing a coffee, feels like a wonderful treat, because of the novelty. You couldn't send a cutting text if you
wanted
to, because your cell phone is shut off. Yeah, do not get a travel plan—you are going off the grid. To truly immerse yourself in your heart and in the world, you can't be fielding endless cell phone distractions. The temptation to shoot a shitty text to your ex will vanish, as will that lingering psychic tension you get from wondering if
he's
ever going to text
you
. You can't post sexy selfies by the Seine in hopes that it will make him regret everything he's ever done. You can't pull up a map and find your way from point A to point B. Get lost. That is what you are in Paris to do—to lose yourself to something bigger and more beautiful than your petty romantic scuffle, to become one with the city until its elegant mystique becomes part of your own spirit. To excavate your dreamy id from beneath the superego of social media. You won't miss the piddly dopamine blips that a text message brings. Paris will take care of your dopamine.

Parisians are famous for their moodiness and their love affairs, and this is another reason why I believe it makes for an ideal breakation destination. No one will bat an eye if you walk
weeping though its ancient streets. Has this heartbreak prompted you to take up smoking? Guess what? Everyone in Paris smokes. Enjoy yourself. Buy a pack of Gauloises, lean under a bridge to escape the drizzle, and hasten your own demise while pondering existentially the temporary nature of it all. This is what Paris is for.

It is also for love. Or if not love, love affairs. People make out all over the place in Paris—in the grocery store before the refrigerated shelves of yogurt, on the street before a metro station, on the speeding underground trains, on one of the ubiquitous carousels, before a crepe stand, by the Seine, in bars, on the paths that encircle Notre-Dame. You would get the impression that Parisians, in spite of their scowling appearance, are DTF, and you would be correct. Take the experience of a friend who came to stay with me for a week during my Parisian retreat. We'd found an English-speaking 12-step meeting helmed by a heavily tattooed French punk who took us out for food after.

“Why don't you go to French meetings?” I asked our new friend.

“They are so annoying,” he said in his smoking-hot French accent. “It is all—but
why
am I an alcoholic?
Why? Why?
Who cares why you are alcoholic? Shut up!” The punk had no patience for his countrymen's existential angst, but I was charmed by it. Why had my relationship gone south? Why had I stayed in it so long when it had made me so unhappy? And if it had made me so unhappy, why was I so bummed out that it was over? Such questions were welcomed by Paris. Paris was wondering the same thing.

My friend left us to debate this as she went downstairs to use
the bathroom, and along the way crossed paths with a different smoking-hot young gentleman (there are many in Paris). They quickly cruised one another, and the Gallic gentleman swooped in for a kiss. My friend was shocked, and kissed him back. When he attempted to lead her into the bathroom to continue their amour, she said no, and he backed off. That was that. She returned to the table shaken, though not unpleasantly so. She then went on to have a torrid affair with the tattooed French punk, whose heart she broke by not allowing him to whisk her away to his beach home in Normandy.

France's relationship with feminists and feminism is strange and interesting. On the one hand, Simone de Beauvoir is a national treasure. On the other, a French friend routinely endures having her rump grabbed by her boss like some 1960s American nightmare. They have a different relationship with casual sex and love affairs, viewing situations that in America would be inappropriate as simply human. While I am far too American (and American feminist) to live with an acceptance of extramarital affairs and workplace groping, the ease with which sexual encounters can be fallen into in French culture is a bit of a fantasy. I had expected to spend my time in Paris alone and sulking, but when my French friend informed her countrywomen that a lonely American was staying at her apartment, invitations to parties began rolling in. Well, to me they were parties—to the Parisians they were just, you know, life. This is how you live, gathering at one another's homes each night with loaves of bread and hunks of cheese, with bottles of wine and packs of cigarettes. This group was younger than I was by at least a decade, but I
never felt like a grody old-lady interloper. In France, as in much of Europe, older women are still recognized as human, oftentimes sexy humans. I did not drink the wine but I smoked their cigarettes as if I had the lungs of an eighteen-year-old, with a “when in Rome” attitude. Indeed, the French seemed not even to recognize their vice as such. When, concerned about my smoking, I said, “I'm going to have to get a facial when I return to America!” I was met with a series of glares.

“Do you think we have ugly faces from smoking?” my new French friends demanded. No! Of course not! But they were French. Things were different for them.

I began a little affair with one boy, only to recognize him as perhaps the wrong boy and then switch my affair to another, who was the right boy. Of course, he was in a relationship already, but being French, his girlfriend gave us the green light to indulge in a petite tryst on my visit—she was conducting quite a few trysts of her own. This conjured in me such gratitude and admiration for the pretty French
fille
that I got somewhat of a crush on her as well. I imagined I was Anaïs Nin, in love with both Henry and June. Such things can only happen in Paris, of course, and there was a moment I thought about living there for a spell, being their
trois
. She was a young model and intellectual, going to the Sorbonne and taking sexy pictures on the side. She spoke perfect English and we engaged in all sorts of conversations. He was older, though still younger than I was, and worked some sort of bureaucratic job that gave him existential conflict. He spoke very poor English and I spoke no French at all, so our communications were blissfully physical.

On New Year's Eve I threw a party at the house I was staying at, and all my new French friends spent the night. The pretty French
fille
claimed her boyfriend for herself, which I thought fair, and I gave them my bed for the evening. I slept on a little mattress in a crawlspace above the kitchen. It was like a tree house inside the attic apartment, and through the window across the room I could spot the cold, pale dome of the Sacré Cœur cathedral against the dark sky, glowing like the moon. I fell asleep and had a terrible dream. In it I had something to say to my ex. He had treated me so badly, and I was going to tell him what I thought about it once and for all. The pain I felt was rushing and urgent; the need to deliver this message was agonizing. I rushed through the streets of San Francisco, looking everywhere. I burst into his house and found him in bed with his new girlfriend, cowering beneath the covers. In the dream I felt a leaden disappointment settle over me.
I was so carefree in Paris
, I thought.
But now I am home, and I have to feel
this
again.
And then I woke up.

When I did, I was so relieved to be not in San Francisco, but in a Parisian attic crawl space. I could hear one of my new friends puttering around the tiny galley kitchen, making espresso in the giant Italian espresso maker. I lay on the thin mattress and considered my dream. I acknowledged how obsessed with my ex I had been, a fact made starker by how little I'd thought of him since being swept away by Paris. Paris had made the world bigger for me, and my ex had become smaller. Even though I knew in San Francisco I would resume my routines—which would include running into my ex at events and recovery meetings—I felt that Paris had gotten under my skin, had perhaps caused me to
change, to shift into a new direction. What was my ex next to Paris? What was his girlfriend next to the Seine? No one was anything in the face of the dark river and the ancient bridges that spanned it. I took my New Year's dream as a gift, reminding me of how I didn't need to be anymore. And when I returned home I did run into my ex, and it annoyed me, but that annoyance didn't take up residence in my heart. There wasn't any room, with so much of Paris in there.

So, go to Paris. If you can't do that, go somewhere. Take a road trip, a train trip, a bus trip if you must. Find a place that reminds you that the world is so much bigger than your heart and whoever broke it this time around. Go hang out by the ocean and trip out on its mammoth ancientness. Offer it your heartache—it's big enough to hold it, to dilute it with all that salt and water, melt it away to nothing. Salt purifies. Take a dunk if you can stand it. You're alive. That relationship was but one chapter in your long, long story, one little scene in your epic.

Too Cool for School

C
an we go back to talking about money? I'm sort of obsessed with it. Money, and class—who has money, who doesn't, and what it means for all of us. On a recent road trip I was doing my regular road trip duties as the person who doesn't drive. In the past, such tasks once included paging through cumbersome road atlases, squinting at the skinny colored lines that crisscrossed the page, poking it with my finger and saying, “I think we're
here
.” Now that GPS exists, my job has become much more enjoyable—reading out loud to keep the driver entertained. On this road trip, I had the Sunday
New York Times
on my lap and was reading aloud a long piece that tracked three girls from working-poor families as they tried to go to college. It was a depressing article; they mostly failed. No one in their families had gone to college, so no one understood how to help them jump through the hoops and suss out the loopholes that could bring them financial aid and overall success. Their parents were bewildered and felt inept.
Their boyfriends, coming from the same backgrounds, just wanted them to stick around and get married. In spite of all this, the girls managed to go to college for a single year, something that looks like a failure but is its own triumph. At the end of that year the lack of support and the feeling of alienation at school, compounded by the unforgiving financial situation, were too much, and each one called it quits. These were Latino girls figuring this out in Texas, 2012. As a New England white girl who tried to figure it out back in 1989, I related to their story completely.

As I approached my would-be college years increasingly confused about how a person goes about continuing her education, a phrase my mother often sounded was “There's gotta be room in the world for the ditchdigger.” As a lifelong broke person—her father had dropped out of school to join the war and later worked as a machinist, while her mom had operated a cash register at a department store—my mother had cultivated a sort of defensive pride about her membership in what was once the working class and is now too often the working poor. Frequently this pride veered into bitterness—“Money goes to money,” she'd say, meaning that people who start out with money are generally pretty good at sucking up more of it. She was scornful of wealthy people, an attitude I eagerly adopted and then attributed to my punk rock ethos—
Eat the rich! Die Yuppie scum!
I, too, had decided that anyone with more money than we had (i.e. most people) was somehow immoral. And if you believe that people with money suck, it can put you off wanting to accumulate some, even if your lack of dollars is making your life hard.

In my downtrodden hometown, a VA hospital sat high on a hill, a warren of brick buildings beside a red-and-white-checkered water tower so tall it could be seen all over the city. My uncle Rocky, a ne'er-do-well, had drunkenly scaled the thing as a teenager, plummeted, and lived to brag about it. The VA hospital offered a free nursing school, largely attended by working-class mothers on the verge of divorce, women who had to come up with a career quick, to support their brood once their man split. That was how my mother got there—by the end of her schooling, she was both a licensed practical nurse and a divorcée. In exchange for the free education, you agreed to work at the VA after graduation, which propelled my mother into a specialty of taking care of the elderly, though she'd have much rather worked with children. Why didn't she switch her focus once she'd worked off her debt to the vets, then? Or continue her studies to get her RN? Registered nurses command way more bucks than LPNs, after all. “I don't want to be like them,” my mom said dismissively when I made the suggestion. “They think they're better than everyone.” RN wasn't a job to aspire to; it was a class of people better off than she was—the enemy. You can become obsessed with class, being from a lower one in a culture that insists such divides don't exist. You see shades of have and have-not everywhere you go.

In a way, my mother was right: There's gotta be room in the world for the ditchdigger, and the dishwasher, and the barista and the stripper and yes, the LPN. After all, the world the haves occupy runs on the efforts of the have-nots. Someone has to haul goods to the stores they shop in, provide T and A for courted clients to gaze upon, deliver their mail, care for their parents
when the elders start peeing themselves. These are my people. My truck driver uncle and his stripper wife. My postal worker father and LPN stepfather. My grandfather, whose hands were never not blackened from the machines he grappled with all day; not even those abrasive industrial soap granules could scrub it away. My grandmother at her cash register. The older I got, the harder it was for me to see where I would fit in this world, how I would make my own living. What ditch would I dig? I longed for something better, but I didn't know what better was.

When you grow up in a blue-collar world, you don't even know what other jobs are out there. An engineer? A sommelier? A film editor, art therapist,
financier
? Even if one knew these positions existed, one still might not understand what they were, let alone how to get in on it. Gazing out at this stunted landscape of occupations, I was haunted by the question
What do you want to be when you grow up?
I never wanted to be a nurse, or a truck driver. There was only one job in the whole world that I had ever heard of that sounded good to me: I wanted to be a librarian. Who became librarians? Old maids. It was something women
wound up as
, not aspired toward. My aunt Shirley would shush me when I shared my dream of being paid to hang out with books all day. “You don't want to do
that
,” she said with a sour face. “You want to be
Miss America
!” And then she'd start singing the theme song to
Miss America
at me.

I was always a rabidly bookish kid. My mother likes to tell the story of how as a toddler, I'd try to make friends with passersby by standing against the chain-link fence in our front yard and begging, “Play with me! I got toys! I got
books
!” (Probably I
am still doing this.) By grade school I was reading so far above my age group, the librarian made my mother write a note allowing me to take out big-kid books like
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
, reading it before I even understood what a period was. I founded a second-grade newspaper,
The Schoolyard Gazette
, and tried my hand at journalism, crafting hard-hitting articles about chicken pox and penning a comics and jokes page as well. I had enough material for my first chapbook of poetry by third grade. Had my family hailed from a different class, I would have been shoved into a prep school, tested for prodigy potential, encouraged to work my interests into an impressive extracurricular CV. Instead, my father complained to my mother that he thought I was reading too much and demanded she talk to me about it. My mom was a reader herself, and was proud of my reading, but she was also susceptible to her husband's suspicion that there might be something wrong with a girl so obsessed with books. She asked me hesitant questions about fantasy and reality—Did I understand the difference? Did I know that my books weren't real; they were made up? That life, the world around me, was real? I nodded.
Yeah, of course.
I'm not stupid!

But the questions made me a little nervous. I'd been secretly selecting a different fictional heroine each day and then walking through the world as if I
were
her!
What would Harriet the Spy do? Or Leslie, from
Bridge to Terabithia
? Or strange Meg Murry from
A Wrinkle in Time
? Girls in books were so passionate and deep, so smart. They navigated their own hard worlds with a grace I envied. What if these fictions
could
become my reality? Well, clearly that would mean I was a crazy person! I scrapped my
experiment and returned to the world as Michelle, lonely in my intelligence, a future social outcast.

The idea of becoming a librarian stuck around as a vague, lingering thing, like a song you heard a long time ago that occasionally gets stuck in your head. It felt further away each time it popped up. No one ever told me what a person has to do to become a librarian. Maybe everyone around me thought, as I did, that you just filled out an application at the library and got hired, the way I was hired at DeMoulas Market Basket when I was fifteen, my first cash register of many. Of course, one must go to college if one wants to become a librarian. One goes to library school. And if one is planning to advance one's education thusly, one should put a little thought into where one goes to high school. My dream school was Newman Prep, a pricey Boston institution where the artsy students dyed their hair the color of Coke cans and no one called them “faggot” or threw food at them. But such a school was out of the question. It was too expensive, and it was in
Boston
, where I would get raped and mugged! As if our downtrodden city wasn't teeming with rapists and muggers and everything else.

And so my first high school was St. Rose, a Catholic high school for girls. By the time I was fourteen my freak flag was waving high enough to catch the negative attention of my burly Italian classmates. New England is an interesting place. It's Pilgrim-y and puritanical. People still have an eye out for witches and they are ready to burn others for looking or acting different. I scooted out of class early each day, to avoid pummelings by the brawny girls who were driven to rage at the sight of my chemical-black hair, teased into a sprawling, inky tarantula upon my head.
“What, are you a satanist or somethin'?” they'd ask me regularly. Who could blame the dears—I penned upside-down crosses into the plaid of my uniform skirt and listened to a band called Lords of the New Church, whose lyrics had inspired in me an atheism that thrilled, after nine consecutive years of oppressive Catholic school. I felt like I was learning more about the world from the songs of the obscure bands I was discovering than from the nuns. I didn't believe in religion anymore, so the religion classes felt bizarre. In composition the teacher had us write essays for or against abortion; I wrote a pro-choice screed and was called before the class to explain how in the world I was okay with the murder of innocent babies. “Satan worshipper!”
a classmate hissed as I sulked back to my seat.

“If there's no God, there's no Satan, either,” I'd snap at my tormentors.
Duh!
Who were these idiots? Rather than argue with my classmates, I eventually began responding to the accusation with devil horns and a smile. By the end of ninth grade the head nun had had it with the community outrage my satanic appearance provoked, and told me I would not be able to return for my sophomore year unless I untangled my hair and returned it to its native mousy brown. It didn't matter. My family couldn't come up with the last installment of my tuition, so it was on to the city's public high school for me.

Throughout my whole life, my mom made sacrifices so that I would be kept out of public school, with its threat of ass kickings and teenage pregnancies. Sure enough, within a week of being there, gangs of cackling females were shoving me in the hallway, sneaking up behind me, and knocking me into walls. Or worse,
knocking me into other students, who would then spin around angrily and knock me again. Maybe I could have removed the black rubber bat that I had pinned to my shirt as jewelry, or wiped off the black lipstick I'd found at the drugstore the previous Halloween. I could have allowed myself to be bullied into a plainer outfit and less ghoulish makeup, but not without tremendous cost to myself, something I recognized early on, with wordless instinct. Plus, one thing a decade of Catholic schooling gave me was the understanding that good people are regularly martyred by jerks who don't get it. Eventually I decided to transfer to a third high school, Northeast Metropolitan Regional Vocational High School—the Voke. At least I had some metalhead friends to hang out with there. People thought they were satanists, too.

When I registered at the Voke I was asked if I planned to go to college. “No,” I replied. It was a quick answer, born of fear. What college would I even go to? How did you find out about them? How would I get there? Who would pay for it? Because of this shortsighted answer, the better English and literature classes became off-limits to me, and I was forced into strange, pulpy courses: Mysteries and Westerns; Sci-Fi and Fantasy. My piece for an assignment in which we were to continue writing
The Pit and the Pendulum
past Poe's ending so impressed the teacher that he hung it on the wall and made my classmates read it. “This,” he said, “is what I'm talking about.” Another English teacher commented admiringly on the way I became so engrossed in my reading, tuning the whole world out. It was a practice I'd developed at home, a small place often aurally cramped with a blaring television, chatty phone calls, and neighbors who dropped by to
smoke cigarettes and drink tea and gossip loudly. Snug in my book, I found that the whole world fell away; as I grew older and recognized my world to be often cruel and unfair, depressing and ugly, books became a preferable alternative to reality.

After graduation I did try, in my own clueless way, to go to college. After learning about the School of Visual Arts in New York City, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the desire to make movies. My weirdo Goth friends and I occasionally made horror movies with someone's parents' video camera, and I loved all of it—brainstorming the story, choosing which angle to shoot, casting my friends, becoming an evil clown or a spurned lover or a juvenile delinquent. Imagine if doing that could be my life. I sat down at the table with my typewriter and filled out my application, wrote my essay. Nobody helped. When I was done I asked my mother for fifty dollars, the application fee. She turned white as a ghost, but she gave it to me. Next I applied to Tulane. I had romantic feelings about New Orleans from reading
Interview with the Vampire.
Maybe I would live there and write my
own
vampire story among its voodoo priestesses and antebellum ghosts. I'd already written a screenplay about a bunch of teenage vampires living in mausoleums in an abandoned New England cemetery (soundtracked to Bauhaus, of course). I thought my script was pretty great, but I didn't know what to do with it. Maybe at college I'd find out. When I finished that application, I asked my mother for the fee.