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Part I
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
āJOSEPH CAMPBELL
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The tide always determined how difficult it would be for my dog, Bucket, to claw her way up the metal ramp at the base of the dock. At low tide, it was practically vertical and my boyfriend, Neil, and I would push her by her haunches while she awkwardly clambered at the rungs. At high tide, it was flat as dirt and sheād prance right over. No matter the tide, fishermen busied about, throwing us a wave as we made our way up toward the parking lot each morning. Neil and I would walk hand in hand, discussing our schedules for the day or what we might have for dinner that night. We were on our way to work like any other couple, but there was no rush. Time just never felt real until our bare feet left that dock. Piping plovers with their toothpick legs scurried through the mud alongside us, pecking at snails and cracked mussels, flapping their delicate wings territorially as we passed. Fiddler crabs side-scuttled in frantic herds beneath the wooden planks at the sound of our approach. Bucket would pause to watch them sometimes, tilting her velvet hound ears from side to side. For all its quirks and oddities, living on an old sailboat on this dock was the only home that dog had ever known.
There was nothing in my early years that might have suggested Iād end up living that way. I was born and raised in Fairfield County, Connecticut, just about an hour outside of New York City. Itās a place known for its over-the-top wealth and, subsequently, for its over-the-top wealth disparity. Within Fairfield County are the town of Fairfield and the city of Bridgeport. And despite their being geographically flush up against one another, the average household income in Fairfield was about triple the average in Bridgeport.
The little blue house I grew up in sat perfectlyāand precariouslyāon the line of those two places, in a small neighborhood called Black Rock. I could drive down my street, take a left, and run into a million-dollar waterfront home, or I could drive down my street, take a right, and run into government-subsidized housing projects, or the charred frame of a burnt-down home that nobody bothered to rebuild.
Black Rock was still technically Bridgeport, but for the most part, it was a pleasant little middle-class place with flower beds in front yards and families on bicycles and a paved pathway that wound around the water of Long Island Sound. Old folks played chess outside the neighborhood market, and kids carved their initials in the oak tree in front of the big house on top of the hill before someone came out and shooed them away.
Every bike Iād ever had as a kid was stolen. One day when I was twelve, I borrowed my brotherās without asking. I rode down to the corner store for candy, but when I came out not five minutes later, it was gone, and I was hysterical. A man I recognized from the neighborhood told me to jump in his truck. He had seen a kid taking off on a red bike.
Miraculously, we found him pedaling frantically down a side street. I watched nervously through the windshield as the man nearly ran him off the road before jumping out and throwing him to the ground. The boy on my brotherās bike couldnāt have been much older than me. A white kid with a dirty, oversized T-shirt and a wallet chained to his belt loop.
Break-ins and shattered car windows and pillaged center consoles were just as common. I have vivid memories of friends not wanting to ride the public bus with me because they were far too frightened of the kind of people who needed to. One year, a schoolmateās mother refused to let her come trick-or-treating with me. āAll the kids from Bridgeport come over there,ā she grimaced.
Hordes of teenagers would arrive on presumably stolen bicycles with pillowcases to fill with candy; not the freshly purchased plastic pumpkins the other kids carried around. Even on a day meant for dressing as something youāre not, some folks still couldnāt escape the identities they had been assigned.
My mother would wave to the neighbors and the kids on the stolen bikes from her eternal position amid the flowers in our front yard. No zip code could keep her from pruning the petunias to perfection, but even she carried a sense of shame that we couldnāt afford to make it over the geographical and metaphorical line. She was adamant about writing Fairfield on informal address forms. āClose enough,ā she would whisper to me under her breath.
My brother and I went to private schools in different towns, because the public schools in Bridgeport had metal detectors at each entrance and a noteworthy teen pregnancy rate. So, each morning, we would battle our way up into the front of my dadās work van. Whoever didnāt shout āShotgun!ā fast enough sat on the center console with their legs dangling. Weād stop by Dunkinā Donuts first and then tumble out the door in front of the redbrick school building behind the church with pink frosting smeared across our cheeks.
I knew we were different in some way, but I was too young to know exactly why. I had a few guesses. I could feel my cheeks flush when other parents would stare. Perhaps it was the lack of seat belts or the sawdust sprinkled across our uniforms or the faint smell of marijuana embedded in the fabric of Dadās seat cushions. He was a contractor and my mother was a school secretary. I canāt imagine they made a whole lot of money, but they worked tirelessly to give my brother and me the life they believed we needed. Money was the only thing I really remember them fighting about. Dad made too little of it and Mom spent too much of it, which was easy to do, I suppose, when trying so diligently to keep up with the neighbors. The waterfront-home neighbors, of course, not the subsidized-housing neighbors.
And so thatās how I grew upāright in the middle, more of a chameleon than a pack animal. Not quite rich, but not quite poor. Not from the right neighborhood, but not really from the wrong one either. Close enough to press my hands to the glass and peer inside, but far enough to know exactly which side of the glass I was on. Even as a child, I learned that it mattered. For some reason, it mattered deeply where and how you lived.
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My mom never viewed me so much as a child sheād given birth to, but as a friend sheād been waiting her whole life to meet. When I was growing up, she and I would dance barefoot on the hot pavement in rainstorms or hop the fence to someone elseās pool and jump naked off the diving board beneath a ghost-white moon. It was as though that cloak of silvery darkness provided enough safety for her to disregard where we were in the neighborhood pecking order, if only for a moment. When she and I were together, there was nothing else in the world.
One school night, she burst into my bedroom and threw open my dresser drawers looking for something for me to wear. Her friend was supposed to go with her to an Aerosmith concert but she was sick, so my mom slicked some lipstick across my twelve-year-old face instead.
She drove us over to the amphitheater, where we sat in the front row. So close, in fact, that I reached my tiny hand up onto the stage where Steven Tyler paused to let me touch his strange satin slipper. Iād never been to a concert before. My mom cheered and sang and danced in too-tight leather, grabbing my hands and swinging me from side to side beneath flashing lights.
When my mom was in high school, she would leave the house in the morning in the dresses her mother laid out for her, but as soon as she was safely on the bus, sheād unzip her backpack and pull out faded jeans and the white patent-leather go-go boots she kept hidden under her bed. She embodied the in-between. It seemed as though she wove effortlessly between two spaces at once. She was a complicated woman, as most of us are. In many of my childhood memories, I recall her caring deeply about what other people thought. In many others, she seemed to disregard it entirely.
One summer afternoon when I was in middle school, she and I rowed a small boat out into a creek surrounded by mansions with sprawling wraparound porches. Without warning, she stood from the bench seat, steadied herself, stripped off her clothes, and jumped stark naked into the water in broad daylight. āWho cares?!ā she shouted, floating on her back, laughing, motioning for me to join her.
I suppose I should have been embarrassed by a mother who jumped naked into neighborhood swimming holes, but I loved her most in those moments, when the Connecticut housewife costume slipped off and she just was who she was.
Sometimes I think I resented the world I was raised in so much because it was stealing a part of her from me. Iād search her face at church gatherings or Christmas cookie exchange parties or in the aisles of the supermarket where sheād stop to chat with Mrs. So-and-So. She looked so different to me there: stiff and rehearsed, as if playing a role. Beneath it all, I saw a woman free and naked, moving effortlessly through water pierced by midday sunlight.
The woman I truly looked up toāidolized evenāwas the one with the go-go boots hidden in her backpack.
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When I was ten, my family was approved to join a local yacht club that we most likely couldnāt afford. Kids took swimming and tennis lessons while stay-at-home moms and full-time nannies lounged by the pool, peering up occasionally from magazines to watch the lean, oiled bodies of lifeguards reprimanding their children for running on the deck.
It was there amid that positively clichĆ©d Connecticut world that I first saw Neil. He was twelve years old, hanging off the side of a little white sailboat. Painfully shy, he spent much of our adolescence avoiding eye contact beneath a bed of curls, tinted brassy blond from the salt of Long Island Sound. In our high school years, we sailed together on a team called āBig Boats.ā An old, white-haired member of the yacht club named Mr. Lander would arrive in his bright red Porsche and escort a group of sun-tanned, dull-eyed teenagers onto his multimillion-dollar sailboat to teach them how to race in regattas.
We were ordered to wear white polo shirts and khaki shorts, and if we were efficient and civilized, or better yet, if we placed in the regatta, we were rewarded by getting to watch Mr. Lander have a celebratory beer and shift his hips side to side to the crooning of Jimmy Buffetās āMargaritavilleā as we sailed back into the harbor.
I was fourteen and would have rather been just about anywhere else on earth. Mr. Lander complained often about the shortness of both my khakis and my attitude. My unwillingness to learn affirmed my position on the sailboat. I and a few other kids were assigned to sit on the deck with our legs hanging over the edge to balance out the weight of the boat when we were heeling to one side in strong wind. I was, in short, extra weight. About as important as a bag of sand.
Neil, however, was a sailing prodigy. At the age of fifteen, he was often at the helm of the ship, gazing upward at the telltales atop the towering white mast, shifting the smooth wooden wheel ever so slightly beneath his hands as the sails billowed with new pockets of wind.
He was known for taking a tiny one-man sailboat out in gale-force knots, steering the bow directly into oncoming storms, crashing through whitecaps, and heeling so far over the side that only his feet remained on the boat. One evening, with the wet white spinnaker sheet wrapped tightly around his fist and a hurricane on the horizon, he heeled so hard against the raging winds, he broke his own back.
A raised and jagged purplish scar from mid-spine to tailbone serves as a permanent reminder of a kid who lived like he had nothing to lose. But Iād have never guessed that the skin beneath his old Bob Dylan T-shirts bore markers of such ferocity.
He was soft-spoken with a honeyed voice. Filled with liquid courage on Friday nights, heād pluck expertly at his guitar onstage with his high school band, then disappear out a back door before anyone even knew he was gone. That was how I knew him. Calm, like the surface of the water weād shared out on bows of great white boats. Mysterious, like long scars hidden below cotton tie-dye.
One summer evening, I was home from my sophomore year of college when I stopped by a friendās house for a barbecue. Neil was seated across the table from me, fidgeting with the label of his beer bottle. I had always thought he was handsome.
āDo you ever see Mr. Lander?ā I asked.
He glanced up at me and smiled. Despite our shared childhood, we had hardly ever spoken more than a few words to each other. But there in the backyard that night, weighed down with summer heat, something had shifted. We talked for hours.
His parents had moved out of state, leaving him nothing but their old thirty-three-foot sailboat, Satisfaction, floating in the murky brown waters off Long Island Sound. And in the summer of his twenty-first year, thatās where he lived. It was fitting to know he still existed there in the only place Iād ever really known him; sun bouncing off mirrored waves, salted hair, terra-cotta skin. It was as though he had stayed there, frozen inside the memories of my childhood. The boy on the sailboat.
When the party was over, we stood beneath the humming of a streetlight. Timidly, he asked if Iād like to come down and see the boat. He seemed almost shocked that I agreed. We spent that first night together down there on the dock, hands awkwardly fumbling over one another as though we were still the wide-eyed kids weād known each other to be. The following day, mere hours after weād parted, a text message lit up the blue screen of my flip phone. It was Neil.
Want to go sailing tomorrow? For old timesā sake?
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Some beginnings happen so fast, they hardly feel like beginnings at all. One day Neil asked me to go sailing; five weeks later he told me he loved me as I stood barefoot in the street, tear-soaked and waving as his car disappeared out of sight. He was bound for Plattsburgh, New York, where he would spend the next three years getting a degree in expeditionary studies while I returned to the University of Rhode Island six hours away.
He would call me in between classes. Mine: technical writing, poetry, and English literature. His: emergency survival, white-water kayaking, and ice climbing. We were as different as weād always been, but weād slipped seamlessly into each otherās worlds as though we had lain dormant there all along.
We would drive hours through the night, seeing who could orchestrate the best surprise. Who could pop out from behind someoneās dorm room door or appear on the otherās quad after class on a Friday like in some cheesy eighties movie.
Despite the fact that we talked on the phone constantly, he would write me letters; long, handwritten letters on pages ripped from his notebooks. Heād draw pictures in the margins and list all the things he loved about me.
After I graduated two years later, I made my way up to Plattsburgh with a five-pound box of letters resting on the front seat beside me. The corners were dog-eared and worn from all the times Iād left a college party to lie in my bed and reread them.
We spent his final year of college in the upstairs apartment of a multifamily home that should have been condemned three families ago. Making eight bucks an hour at a bagel shop and living in a beer-encrusted, black-mold-infested ...
