A Thousand Misses

For the first time since I’d moved to West Virginia, two dramatically different things began to happen. My apprehension towards the intentions of strangers began to dissolve and I made eye contact at the grocery store. Although accidental, furtive glances made way for smiles and a little less of my East-coast indifference. I also started applying for jobs in Huntington, reaching out to every contact at the University that might produce some kind of employment. While these contacts proved fruitless, I caught myself wanting friends, wanting employment, resolving (if not quite wanting) to create a life for myself here.

Although accepting and supportive of my boyfriend's Catholic views, the strict stance on cohabitation before vows erected itself like a wall between us and any future plans we had dreamed of. I pleaded and asserted on the phone from my air mattress in the basement. He denied, steadfastly resolute.

Following my declarations that "this was the one" and that I wanted a life and a family, Dad offered to pack me up and ship me off to a flat in New York. The offer seemed less and less appealing as reality dawned. I would struggle to pay rent on an overpriced shithole in the city hours from a boyfriend that would make absurd excuses to visit but never stay--lest his parents disapprove. I would not have the family or life that I wanted in New York.

The Catholics I'd dated had a nasty habit of not wanting to admit to their parents just how close we were and where they lay their heads at night. After our first night together with one of the more memorable mistakes I made, I watched as the boy I cared for sat on the edge of my bed pulling on his socks. He dressed himself hastily as I drew the covers around myself. Not wanting to show my rising panic, I posed a simple and obvious question as calmly as I could.

"Where are you going?", I asked.
"Confession."

While among the more ridiculous and cliched, his was not the only lesson.

There was the "You're a great girl, but I feel nothing for you" guy, whose arms bore railroad track burn marks from desperate acts and his Teretts that I had tried to understand.

There was the off-off again first love who called every few months just to hear the sound of my voice--the only girl he ever felt about in that way you hope someone will one day feel about you. He endeavored to deserve me until I was twenty when he loved me and moved to Maine in the morning. Our relationship was punctuated by silence while others I went on to have were filler between their breakups, my breakups, and hiccups generally faced by youth with seemingly endless choices.

There was the one who said I gave too much--much more of myself than anyone ever should give another person; the one who chose an end over continuation just because he could, and another who would have loved me given the chance or not. He brought me snow from upstate in a coffee cup for Christmas and hardly slept beside me on the couch for our closeness.

It was one near-hit for a thousand misses. The Catholic had been the most memorable. So really it had been my fault that when the second rosary was hung with care around my bedpost on the silver chain I'd procured for it and his parents instructed that while we spent every waking moment together, the sanctity of marital acts was respected--I should have known. There was no future for Tommy with a girl marred by divorce, a borderline parent, and an intellect free from religion.

In the weeks following my father's return I accompanied him on regular trips to Lowe’s and Sam’s Club--covert missions for pink bundles of insulation and ten pound bags of mesquite chicken precooked for convenience. We settled into an easy routine of attic insulation work in the morning before temperatures rose to blistering and repainting doors to the house in the afternoon--scattered with intermittent trips to the office to submit job applications.

We stuffed the attic with insulation from second floor closets--rigging batt-sandwiches of wooden slats and clamps even MacGyver would envy--and satisfied our mutual thirst for company over dinner in the pink retro fabulous kitchen that had escaped recent renovation attempts.

Tacked to Dad’s refrigerator was a typed list of “Short-Term and Long-Term House Projects”, each with their own specific date range for completion. This list bore additional tick marks as the weeks passed and I added further tasks to their ranks, desperate for something to do.

Each day I unpacked an article from the heap of silk-screens, packages of prints, and inescapable remnants of life I’d amassed in the corner of the basement. I only unpacked impersonal things, the first a red mosaic mirror--purchased from several years ago from IKEA and rarely used in the dim pull-lights. I had never cared very much for it after our shopping trip to Elizabeth, but I had hung it on the wall in my childhood room as a testament to my developing taste in home-decorating trends.

This past January, I watched my boyfriend wrap the mirror in bubble wrap, on what would be my last trip to New Jersey. Sea foam green bubble wrap. I’d always been told it was ugly, but I had watched him carefully wrap, fold, and tape the bubble wrap around its edges with an intensity of care and concern for its protection that I’d wished he had shown me. Hired men entered the room bowing their heads apologetically, removing a single dresser on my mother’s command from the door way. I had confronted her on the landing, hands clasped to my tear-streaked face, and I asked to be allowed the courtesy of packaging and removing my own things from the house. It wasn’t as much asking as it was shamelessly begging through choked pathetic sobs to be acknowledged. Her eyes carefully lowered she stepped right, left, right again to move down the stairs, escaping our little dance and my plea for dignity.

It wasn’t the act of being forcibly removed from the house by a parental tour-de-force who avoided all eye contact I found merciless--but that it was in front of an audience and at the hands of strange men who patted me on the shoulder and told me that it “had to happen today”. She’d only paid them for a few hours that morning and though I’d also expressed an interest in keeping the white Ikea chair and burgundy foot stool that sat in the corner beneath the matching mirror; they extracted only the dresser from my Tetris floor of cardboard boxes and left the room. I hardly saw them.

Tommy, handed me the mirror, now coated in a solid shell of clear packing tape with a smile. “Here,” he said “this should be safe now, don’t you think?”

We’d intended to stay the night, pack in the morning and move everything into a storage facility a few towns away. It had been a simple plan. I swept the hardwood floor. I comforted myself with the sense of decency I showed in the manner in which my room was left. I may have been kicked out but the floors were swept and unwanted knickknacks dug from closet depths deposited in cardboard boxes in the center of the room--the weight and contents of each deemed easily disposable.

Everyone had left--my sister and her boyfriend Waldy escorted by the police my mother called citing domestic threats of violence, my Aunt Ginny desperate about the fragile nature of my mother’s health who had driven two hours to come to her rescue, and our family friend Chris who’d acted as a mediator of sorts and removed my mother from the house while I pulled myself together on the upstairs bathroom floor. My mother didn’t return to the house until we’d hit the Garden State Parkway on ramp heading north. The mirror survived the snowy drive back to campus in the trunk of Tommy’s ‘85 Oldsmobile though many more valuable things did not.


I extracted the mirror from the bubble wrap and placed it next to the pictures of graduation Tina had sent me on an antique sideboard I tentatively claimed as a dresser. I opened my suitcase at its foot and arranged a pair of black pumps on the single shelf. These small gestures of settling in were almost too much for my father, who deemed the archaic oak as being far too fragile and valuable to bear my jars of powder make up and contact lens case. “Please don’t let anything mar the surface”, he said. I stashed my eye drops back into my red suitcase and told him I’d keep that in mind.

We constructed a closet from a scrapped pipe and white closet organizers that hung from the rafters in the basement 8 inches higher than useful--Dad called it “Appalachian Ingenuity”. At night I compulsively checked the doors, mistaking the dangling forms for misshapen ghosts who’d taken their grave situation into their own hands. Post-mortem suicide didn’t seem like viable option for anything other than my interview suit and college party dresses that lacked company and occasion worth celebrating, but I began to hang my day dreams of home among them.