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 Beginning

I would like to say I spent the first few days proactively researching job opportunities, networking with local arts organizations, and perusing the aisles at the neighborhood Kroeger for new friends with whom I could discuss politics, religion, and art over plates of homemade linguini. I wish I could say I spent those first two weeks in any manner befitting someone who had not just graduated from college and moved to an alien state with a parent recently bumped up from acquaintance status.

Instead, I did the only things I could think to do when cast neck deep into the bible belt backwoods of America. I wandered the house in my pajamas—my intermittent episodes of hysteria mixed with self-assuring monologues rife with determination. I spilled my guts over dishes in the kitchen sink to any man (my father) or animal (our dog) unfortunate enough to have gained unlimited access to this daytime drama.
I was going to return to New York.

It was really a matter of making the future I vividly imagined come to fruition—full time employment, rent, room mates, and a now strained long-distance relationship—were merely factors that, should I complete the necessary legwork, would work out on their own. I was fully prepared to amble the streets of New York—prostituting myself and my hard-won college education to Starbucks, Borders Books, and McDonalds—in search of some shit job that would enable me to earn enough to cover rent on a mattress on the floor east of Manhattan.

The recession and my recent exile due to the failure of what my colleagues, professors, and mentors had all predicted would be the start of a successful career in higher education were no match for my sheer willpower. My job hunts were eight-hour marathons spent huddled in the graduate assistant computer lab at my dad’s office counting the job opportunities I had neither the education nor the training for.

Each application made its way into the mailbox sandwiched between long-winded letters to loved ones in New York that I’d taken to writing in the early morning hours in the basement. I wrote daily and with conviction—peppering the letters with promises of “I’ll see you soon” or “It won’t be long until…”, cartoon caricatures of young couples in love, and railroad maps that stretched across the envelopes in vivid bleeding red.

The mailman became an unwary target of interest whose afternoon deliveries took on the unprecedented ability to trigger waves of manic highs and lows. No matter how he tried to time his route down our street, I was there to meet him at the end of the driveway like a lost dog waiting to be let into the house after a row—waiting for that pat on the head that signals it’s ok girl…it’ll be alright.

In every effort to launch me into society—Dad introduced me to everyone in his department during our afternoon trips to the office with the hope that, should I make a friend or two, I might return to equilibrium.

The professors greeted me warmly, extending hands and pleasantries, but regarding me with an air and hushed tones one would use to greet the terminally ill. One in particular took to popping her head into my Dad’s office across the hall from where I sat to provide a play-by-play commentary of the economic downturn at a record volume. “I just heard something you shouldn’t tell your daughter”, she said. I stopped typing abruptly and leaned back in the overstuffed computer chair to better eavesdrop on what I was already certain would only continue to shred the fragments of my endless-potential-to-be-hired-self-confidence that had recently stuck at 10%. Her pink and white button down visible through the door frame, she continued without concern, “This is sure to send her off the edge. Did you know that some companies are refusing to even consider hiring those who are not currently employed?”

Most of the professors only tilted their heads in sympathy and said things like “Oh it’s very nice to meet you. Your father told me about your position and I pray something works out soon.”

For the first time in my life, my skepticism about the presence of a higher power—the glorious man in the sky who condemns as frequently as he forgives or loves—marked me as an alien to the South more so than my Yankee accent or my aversion to fast food. The last thing on earth I wanted was someone else’s prayers for my salvation—spiritual, emotional, economical, or otherwise. For a city where storefront churches dotted the commercial districts as frequently as rehab clinics, bordered up windows, and derelict industrial sites; there was hardly a shortage of Christian goodwill, for all the concern God had shown their city.

“Never tell them you don’t go to church,” my best friend Mimi told me before I left New York, “If you can’t think of the name of one in the area, just tell them you go to the one around the corner. Churches are everywhere there.”

Although her initial prophecy had proved false—that frequent trips to Walmart would cause me to lose my immortal soul—this prediction regarding churches turned out to be fairly accurate. I pressed my nose against the glass and switched from counting fast-food chains to houses of God on our way to the office, many of which had creative titles designed to entice those seeking salvation. Of them, “The Lighthouse New Baptist Church” of Chesapeake, OH, with its bubblegum pink and elegantly painted lighthouse sign, was my favorite. Its parlor sized sanctuary evoked images of neighbors hugging and kissing each other hello under candle-filled chandeliers at Christmas, snow falling into little drifts along the windowpanes. The church sat a few feet from the country road just across the river from Huntington, which bore no such Normal Rockwell retreats.

In the past few years, since the utter collapse of the automotive industry in Detroit, pill pushers had flooded the Huntington and Charleston tarmacs in droves. With them, they brought a new level of low-life, poverty, and addiction to the struggling middle class of West Virginia, who’s only foreseeable out seemed chemically intertwined with Oxycontin prescription pain pills. The obsession with escapism sat in the cushioned seats of multiplexes, beneath the dingy stained glass, next to the man who would procure the next hurried exchange of cash for flesh in 4 ½ alley. Whether the legions of the strung-out ever convened with the ranks of the self-righteous in the pews of roadside churches come Sunday—I could not tell. I merely counted them as we drove past on our way to my father’s house on the hill where I had an appointment with the mailman who would surely reward my devotion with an overdue love letter postmarked New York…one Blessed Virgin…one Lighthouse...one New Life…