How to Get Lost

One morning I felt terrible and counted out three dozen. The phone rang. It was Buck asking me to go fishing at the Jersey Shore.

“Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.” – Rebecca Solnit

Meanwhile, there were shrinks. I visited several psychiatrists who listened while I described the previous months and then recommended several treatments. Three wanted me to voluntarily commit myself to a locked ward, while two gave me generous Valium prescriptions and said I had the saddest story they had ever heard. One doctor actually cried. I didn't return to see any of them. I decided to wrap myself in cotton wool woven by the linen man’s workers, drivers, restaurant meals, the Hamptons, my birthday with a tumble of expensive gifts, chocolates from the most expensive store in New York City, a new pair of running shoes and a state-of-the-art electric typewriter. ”So you can write when you’re ready.” He wanted to take care of me, to see me protected from the world's cruelty. I won't ever be ready. I hoarded more pills. I had hundreds now, which I still kept in the freezer. 

photo by Hal Gatewood

One morning I felt terrible and counted out three dozen. The phone rang. It was Buck asking me to go fishing at the Jersey Shore.
”What about your fiancée?” 
”She's crazy.”
”I'm crazy.”
I’d never been fishing. My father never fished. He was a swimmer, but I’d never seen him with a fishing rod.
”C’mon, Molly. I miss you. I’ll pick you up.”
He picked me up in the plumbing truck. We listened to Springsteen driving down to the Jersey Shore.
”How’s your mom?”
”Good. The chemo’s all finished.”
”I liked your mom.”
He was staring at me. “You sure are pretty, Molly.”
”Thanks.”
”You still dating that old rich guy?”
”Sort of. I think he’s married.”
 “That's wrong.”
”I'm wrong.”

We were driving down to the New Jersey Shore, where my dad used to bring us sometimes, without my mom. Maybe he was in trouble. I can’t remember. Once, he rode a wave into shore and landed hard. Brigid, barely a teenager, had to help him drive home. He had injured his shoulder and couldn’t turn the wheel.

Buck patted the seat next to him, so I scooted over. He put his arm around me, and I smelled his shirt. He smelled like smoke and soap. His arm was hard yet soft. When I was in grade school, we had nuclear attack drills. Radiation couldn’t reach you if you crawled under your desk and crossed your arms over your head. When I heard glass breaking late at night and my mother screaming, I was afraid. But now I was scared all the time. Catherine’s accident seemed like the start of a pattern. I believed life was too dangerous, and the courage that had taken me to Ireland by myself across Europe, which made it possible to climb telephone poles and drive cross-country alone to California was gone. I feared everything: the street outside my house, driving, bank tellers, lines.

We reached Point Pleasant, and the skipper handed me a fishing rod. We went onto the ocean, and I threw my line into the water. I was sitting with my back against the boat, the sun warm on my face; the line still, and I closed my eyes. I tried to remember how I’d once hoped to live, before the rape, before the drinking, before the fear. I wrote inside all my books: “Molly Mary Ellen Moynahan” as if that name was magic and someday would be important. Before I discovered how dangerous the world was, I believed in happiness.

Later, I learned that everything costs. Love guaranteed loss. Buck sat down next to me and offered a sandwich. Nothing tasted good anymore, but the ocean air was cold and sharp, and suddenly, I felt hungry. I bit into the crusty white bread, fresh mozzarella, and pesto. He remembered what I liked. Maybe fishing was the answer. Staring at the water, I felt calm. The line went taut, and there was a pull and a weight on the end of my line. I didn't know how to fish beyond holding the rod, so I looked around, and a guy wearing a Grateful Dead t-shirt handed his rod to a friend and came to help me. Soon, a crowd gathered. I caught the big fish, an eighteen pound bass. I won the pot for the biggest fish, and Buck was happy.

”This girl hasn’t smiled in a month,” he told the other people on the boat. “I can take you fishing all the time. My uncle has a boat.”
I shook my head.
'“Why not?”
”I can’t spend my life staring at a fishing pole. Anyway, what about your fiancée?”
”I don’t care what she thinks.” He looked down at me. “I thought I’d never see you smile again.”

The big fish pot was three hundred dollars. I made Buck take half.

The following week, I called my theatrical answering service to cancel and was told I’d have to do it in person. The office was in Manhattan, near Port Authority, an old building that also housed several ticket lawyers, a pawnbroker, and a massage parlor. On the ground floor was the answering service. I opened the door to the business and inside was a window and a chair, but there was no other furniture.

”Hello?” I called out through the window. I saw an office with a chair, a bunch of phones, and some binders.
”Yes?” The voice came from the back. It had a Brooklyn accent and was hoarse.
”I need to cancel my service.”
”Why?”
”I’m not acting anymore.”
”Giving up? Too tough?”
”I'm not giving up.” He was still invisible. “My sister was killed. I can't do it anymore.”

There was silence. I sat down in the chair, and this man came through the door. He looked like a cartoon character drawn by R. Crumb, with baggy pants, big old shoes, and a bad haircut. He stared at me.

”Listen,” he said. “Are you mad at her?”
I nodded. How did he know? “She left me. I need her.”
”My older brother stepped on a land mine in Vietnam,” he said. “Blew him to bits. I wanted to hurt that son of a bitch for being so stupid. You gotta forgive her, honey. Forgive her for dying.”
”I can't.”
”Try. She didn't want to go.”
”Her son is only three years old.”
”See? She was a mommy. She didn't want to go. You gotta forgive her. Otherwise, your life will be hell. What's your name? I’ll take care of the paperwork.”
I had hung my head between my knees, and a pool of tears was forming on the tile beneath my feet. He briefly touched my shoulder. I stood up, and we hugged. He smelled like old paper.
”Forgive her, honey.”

I walked from Port Authority to the PATH Station on Fourteenth Street. Maybe angels all had broken hearts, I thought. The streets were crowded with people walking fast: women in power suits and sneakers, men with briefcases, homeless people, and men unloading trucks. I felt the fear emerge, a sense that danger was everywhere: cars, people, and buildings. My breath shortened; the screen started to turn gray like a film burning. Finally, it was possible to descend into the PATH Station and go home.

I needed a job. My background wasn't conducive to my finding an appropriate position. Minding the children of battered women, telephone foreman, cocktail waitress, security guard, and receptionist, there was incoherency in my career choices, which reflected my confusion. I looked in the newspaper and noticed many ads for department store buyers. While I hated shopping and mostly hated stores except ones that sold books and stationery, it made sense to me to apply to the Macy’s training program. “Why not,” I thought. How much intelligence can it take to buy a bunch of stuff?

Trend was a word they used repeatedly in the tryouts for the Macy’s assistant buyer program. You could be on trend (good) or off trend (bad). I was definitely born off-trend, which was probably the reason I wasn’t selected to become part of the Macy’s assistant buyers Program. That and the fact everything I selected as “hot,” as in selling well, was an abject failure, and everything I labeled a “bomb” sold through the roof. Also, because I was clinically depressed, I couldn’t invent a convincing reason for wanting to become a professional merchandiser. I just needed a job. In fact, I confided to one of the other would-be buyers that I found department stores awful.

The mid-eighties was the heyday of people spraying you with cologne, GWP, which stood for Gift With Purchase; all the commercials were touting how department stores were like the best places in the world, while several movies had plots that revolved around a store like Saks Fifth Avenue, Barneys, or Lord & Taylor. My family rarely shopped. Once a year, my mother took us to Korvette’s for new school clothes, and when we were older, we were taken to Loehmann’s one at a time, where you stripped in a communal dressing room and tried on piles of clothes handed to you by your antsy mother. There was no privacy, and every type of body you could imagine, old, young, fat, skinny, handicapped, in every kind of underwear, trying on clothes together. My mother had recently taken me shopping there and kept bringing me sizes that were far too large. 

Finally, a nosy woman leaned over and said, “Honey, that’s not your daughter’s size. Look how skinny she is.”
I was standing in my bra and underpants in front of a full-length mirror. Bones jutted from my hips; ribs were visible. My mother wilted, her arms filled with clothes for another body.
”Mom, don’t. I’m fine.”
”You’re not fine. Look at you!”
She stared hard at my reflection. Usually, I was sucking something in, holding my breath, but now there was nothing and nowhere to hide.
”I promise I’m eating. I’m fine.”
”You're not fine!”
I saw her fear and managed to belt a too big dress around my waist, so I looked almost normal again.

I was born in 1957 and missed the Summer of Love and Woodstock, sort of missed punk, totally missed disco by choice, grunge, and anything resembling rap. I dressed like a hippie in the late seventies when it was time to buy those power suits with shoulder pads. I wore white Olaf Daughter clogs in seventh grade and was so ahead of the curve that my classmates thought they were orthopedic. I got a perm when perms were passé, and I never, ever wore makeup unless it was for a party, and then I put it on so I looked like a slut, which was the only way I perceived makeup as fun. My hair was too thick to blow dry and I had never understood hot curlers or styling products. Despite our years spent living abroad, I may as well have grown up in Appalachia. Shopping seemed like punishment.

Despite my complete lack of fashion, I was addicted to women's magazines and had been sending away for free samples for a long time. The earliest manifestation of this habit almost sent me to jail when I subscribed to a monthly supply of dinosaur bones at the Smithsonian. I put the fossils and samples under my bed next to the greeting cards and forgot about them until a man called my mother and said I owed thousands of dollars. “She’s ten years old," my mother told this Smithsonian rep. “You shouldn’t have sent her anything.”

I loved getting stuff by mail. I had a catalog that listed free things, shampoo samples, writing utensils, greeting cards, and recipes so you could serve your friends high tea. Meanwhile, I had a mother who washed her hair by sticking her head under the faucet and using dishwashing detergent. I read Vogue, Mademoiselle, Glamour and Cosmopolitan, fascinated by anything feminine. I sent away for free false eyelashes and henna and tanner, but when I got my period, I was sure I was dying, and no one warned me that when a man told you you were beautiful, there might be a price to pay. Receiving mail told me I mattered, which wasn’t very clear. My existence was sometimes hard to ascertain; we lived in an isolated area, my parents were absorbed in their lives, and my sisters ignored me. When I received mail with my name and address written on the envelope, it confirmed I was alive.

After I chose all the non-starters at Macy’s (peace beads, angora dresses, cat pins) and rejected everything that had sold well, we were told they would let us know whether we had jobs. The linen man invited himself as my plus-one to the wedding of a classmate from Princeton Day School. Her mom was Man Ray’s niece, and while we had been semifriends in high school, we hadn’t spoken since graduation. He was obsessed with the idea of Princeton, the cachet, which I found weird. For one thing, I hadn’t grown up in Princeton but across the town line in Lawrence. For another, well, the whole Princeton mystique was disparaged in my family.

My father started as an English professor at Amherst, then Princeton, and then we lived in London for a year. My parents partied with Kingsley Amis and other famous writers. Then something academic and evil had occurred. When we returned to the States, my father moved to teach at Rutgers, where he had colleagues like Richard Poirier and the respect of an excellent university that constantly had to assert its excellence in the shadow of an Ivy League. My mother made faces at the mention of Princeton University, and I found the town where I was born and grew up to be a microcosm of the snarky adult world. We were cynical and privileged and sad and drank too much and smoked too much pot. Our teachers at Princeton Day School were a mix of wonderful and terrible, with several of them guilty of sleeping with my classmates.

The linen man reserved a room at the Nassau Inn and then announced he would take me to a Grand Tortola resort the following week. I went to a bookstore and looked up the resort in Fodor’s, only to discover that the cost of our suite was more than that of my first car. While there, I looked at the Physicians’ Desk Reference to check the latest medications prescribed to me by my shrink. The shrink had been alarmed by how little I was sleeping and had given me two pills to take on Friday nights. The result was a deep, dark, dreamless sleep that lasted until Sunday morning. Then I would go to the laundromat, frequently falling back asleep and waking up to the soft hands of someone’s child, checking to see if the lady was real. The Physicians’ Desk Reference told me a possible side effect of the drugs I was consuming, Nardil and Elavil, was death. I found the idea that I could inadvertently kill myself with prescribed drugs strangely comforting. This was probably a sign the depression had deepened, if not spread.

When I told my mom we were going to the wedding, she insisted we come to the house for tea, which I found odd. The therapy I’d received so far told me I was suffering from PTSD resulting from my terrible childhood. While I knew my childhood had been far from perfect, I believed there was a lack of understanding of the brilliance of my parents that made negligence necessary. A child could not compete with James Joyce, Frank Lloyd Wright, and wine, especially the youngest child, the last of three. Strangely enough, these doctors didn’t seem all that impressed with the Harvard degrees, the years we’d spent traveling and living abroad, my father’s novels and criticism, and my mother’s architecture. When I described how much I drank since age fifteen, they asked me why my parents didn’t get me help or whether they ever wondered why I was so unhappy.

”They were too busy. I wasn’t very impressive.”
I assumed we would explore the tragedy of Catherine’s death, but instead, they focused on the family dynamics and used words like “abandonment” and “narcissism.” My interpretation of how often I’d been injured and then frequently yelled at for hurting myself was that I was a wild child who didn’t wear shoes and was always wandering away.
”You were age three,” one doctor said, consulting his notes. “Did you lose yourself?”
This was too painful to fully accept. My sister was dead, my parents were heartless, and I was doomed to drinking and running away from intimacy. No wonder I was depressed.

We drove down to Princeton in the linen man’s fancy car on a beautiful July day and pulled into my parent’s driveway. I walked into the house feeling strange about everything. Sometimes, I wasn’t sure I even liked the linen man. He was mean to fat people, said terrible things about the Chinese he had to do business with, and a bully to any waiter who failed to please. His insistence on attending this wedding struck me as odd, but I assumed he had a fascination with Princeton, a common trait in people who grew up in places with fewer rich people and less history. I wasn’t sure where the linen man had attended college but it wasn’t an Ivy League.

”Welcome, welcome!” My mother was wearing a shirtwaist dress in the middle of a weekend afternoon. This was not normal as she usually fixed stuff or gardened in jeans and an old shirt. The living room table was set with China I had never seen and the good silver we only used on holidays.
”We can’t stay long.” I looked around for my father.
”Hello, Molser.” My father gave the linen man a long look. “How’s it going?” He looked at me.
”I didn’t get that Macy’s job.” I waited for his reaction.
”Of course not. You hate to shop and you don’t like stores.” He kissed my mother on the cheek. “Nice to meet another one of Molly’s boyfriends. I'm off. I have to do research at Firestone.”

We sat down in the Herman Miller chairs, and my mother poured the tea. The linen man asked about her renovations to the house, and she offered to show him around. As they went into the kitchen, my anger nearly choked me. Why didn’t they notice how thin, miserable, and lost I was? I walked over to look at the family pictures on the sideboard. These family photographs made us resemble unhappy Eastern Europeans. Taken by an assistant to the director Ingmar Bergman, she had us stand against stark backdrops, white walls, grainy wooden doors, a jagged stone wall, forbidding us to smile. In the family picture I am so small, a perfectly white, oval face with crooked bangs. Brigid’s a half-wit beauty, my parents look like murderous Sicilians and Catherine stands in the back, taller than my father because of her scoliosis, her half-smile implying knowledge I was desperate to understand. My mother returned with the linen man, both of them smiling while I felt like throwing a chair through the window. It felt like I was being auctioned off; she was selling me to this rich, controlling older man for the promise of my silence.

”We'll be late for this stupid wedding,” I said, slamming my cup in its saucer.
In the car, the linen man glanced at me. “Your parents are nice.”
”My father didn’t like you.”
The linen man put his hand on my knee. “You should be cherished.”

I felt like slapping him. The wedding was outside. The guests scattered around her father’s huge steel sculptures that my mother always dismissed as “amateur.” I saw classmates I hadn’t seen since we graduated from high school. Some of them knew about Catherine, some didn’t. The ones who didn’t complimented me on how thin I was. As the ceremony started, the linen man began to talk smack about marriage.
”This is a terrible idea,” he said, too loudly. “Why don’t they go straight to divorce?”

We left early and headed towards the Nassau Inn. The only time I’d ever been there, I was so drunk I passed out in the lobby. The room was smaller than I would have expected, but the linen man liked it.
”Feels authentically Princetonian,” he said.
We did a few lines and then started fighting. It began with my asking him why he was so cynical about marriage.
”Just wait.”
”Are you still married?”
”Of course not.”

I longed to be back in my own place. Watching my mother flirt with the linen man had been unnerving. Seeing so many people from high school reminded me of how little progress I’d made in my life since college. Some of them were getting PhDs, had children already, and seemed aware of the future. When I thought about the future, there was nothing – darkness.
”I don’t have a future,” I told the linen man.
”We're going to Tortola. I rented a villa.”
”Seriously? Why would you pay that much money for a hotel room? It's sickening! People are starving on the streets of New York.”
”I never hear you complain when I pick up the check.”

He had a point, yet I reached down, pulled off my clog, and flung it at him. It hit him on the shoulder. We stared at one another. I shocked myself.
”That hurt,” he said.
”I'm not going away with you. Take my mother. I’m sure she’d appreciate the trip.”

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach