When I was twelve, a drunk, older guy at a Jewel concert bumped into me and loudly exclaimed that I looked like Elizabeth Shue. I turned bright red and tried as hard as I could not to smile wide enough to reveal a mouth full of braces—I knew they’d undermine the intellectual, physical, and emotional maturity that he MUST have identified in me. (’Cuz nothing says maturity like scrawling “Eat Shit & Die” on your converse, stuffing your bra, and forcing your mother to sit ten rows behind you at The Wiltern and act like she doesn’t know you…but I digress.)
This man’s attention lit me up like a goddamn FEMA switchboard in a natural disaster, but he also made me feel so uncomfortable and so unsafe. This man didn’t see me. He couldn’t see me. And I knew it.
What I didn’t know and couldn’t have known at twelve was that this brand of cognitive dissonance—a paralyzing, simultaneous ignition of worthiness and worthlessness—would eventually become my emotional calling card. Welcome to womanhood, baby girl. Good luck making sense of anything that’s happening to you.
He asked for my [parents’ home] phone number; I gave it to him.
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Today, as I pumped gas at the Monrovia Shell station, an embarrassingly bad, up-tempo Jewel tune of modest, early-2000s fame—God bless that woman’s second act—blared out of the speakers. And if Big Oil doesn’t believe we should occupy public spaces in silence, then neither do I, so I started singing along at full volume. Just as we hit the bridge (“…sell your sinnn; just cash innnn…”), I looked over my shoulder and caught the gaze of an older, mentally-disheveled lookin’ dude filling up his Mini Cooper.
He looked me up and down, hungrily licked his bottom lip, smiled approvingly, and said, “You remind me of Elizabeth Shue.” I immediately remembered that night in ’96 at the concert. Jewel! Elizabeth Shue! Creepy man! Same shit—how about that? I must have looked confused rather than surprised, because Mini Cooper man cackled—loudly enough to move him from the “mentally disheveled” to “mentally unhinged” category—and added, “Elizabeth Shue is from the 90s. Who knows what you were doing in the 90s.”
“This,” I said. “I was doing exactly this.”
Welcome to womanhood, baby girl. It only took twenty years to make sense of anything that’s happening to you.
He, too, asked for my phone number; I didn’t give it to him.
Yesterday, I spent the afternoon alone at a nude beach, and I may never be the same. I’ve gotten pretty damn free in the last couple of years, but this was next-level. I’ll can get naked in front of most women fairly easily (thanks, Westridge School for Girls?), but this little bit of beach was populated almost entirely by men, which is a whole different psychological ballgame for me—pun semi-intended.
Anyone who has ever loved me knows that I adore sea-swimming. There are few activities that offer me the kind of simultaneous freedom and connection that being a tiny, splashing speck in ocean does. It’s the best. Just the best. And I almost didn’t swim today. Because…naked. Because…trotting to the shoreline naked!
Then, as barftastically cheesy it sounds, I remembered the woman who I want to be. I want to be a woman whose life reminds other women of their worth. I want to be a woman who doesn’t script vicious monologues about her own body in her head when she catches a stranger looking at her. I want to be a woman who knows that any man who gets this house of cellulite and stretch marks and softness (um, hi, you don’t lose 100 lbs. in a year and come out of it firm or perky…like, in any way whatsoever) is really lucky.
Not lucky because I have a “great personality” in spite of my body. And also not lucky because I think I’m better than any of my potential partners or better than any of the women whom they could have chosen to love instead. Just lucky because life is fragile, and connecting is beautiful. It’s everything.
Hate is obviously alive + breeding in our world (see: Orlando Nightclub Massacre, Donald Trump, the Stanford rape case, the countless police killings of unarmed black men nationwide, et al), so you might as well join me in throwing some love out into the universe.
This weekend marked the first time I have ever been to Boston and not seen him. The entire city feels amiss. Everything is gray, and all the buttons are in the wrong buttonholes. And since thirty-two years of being greeted on trips back east with a signature Jim Broderick “Ho-ho!” don’t come to a close without some kind of emotional undoing, I’m all choked up and writing this on an airplane.
I’m a crier by nature, but these tears are the kind that I’m not comfortable letting go of. Letting go of these tears just facilitates letting go of my grandfather, and at this point, I’d rather make a burning nest of them in the back of my throat than let them fall.
Dramatic, perhaps, but I can be a dramatic person. I think he enjoyed that about me.
People have been asking me since his passing last month, “Were you close?” It’s a well-meaning question, but it’s also unanswerable. Far is not the opposite of close, I realize, but all I can think to say is, “We were close and we were far.”
My younger brother, Sam, and I grew up in California. My parents are both Bostonians and the oldest of five, and our nuclear family is the only contingent on either side to have made a home outside of New England. Consequently, my grandfather was not a part of my day-to-day existence; he wasn’t someone I ever expected to be at my recitals or school plays (although he and my grandmother did fly out to watch me ham it up as Mame in Auntie Mame when I was in 10th grade), and I never spent a Christmas with him.
But Sam and I did spend every June counting down the days until we would fly to Boston for the summer’s end. We could never sleep the night before a flight to back east, and we would squeal with excitement when the Super Shuttle pulled up to our house in the darkness of 5 a.m. to ferry us to the airport.
My friends would brag about their upcoming family vacations to places like Disneyworld and the San Diego Wild Animal Park, and I just remember smiling and feeling sorry for them. This was partly because my mother was (and remains) exceptionally vocal about the repulsiveness of popular, commercial vacation destinations, but mostly because I knew that Disneyworld couldn’t possibly hold a candle to what we had in New England. And so much of what we had was about Grandpa and his brilliant, hilarious clan of Brodericks.
I loved going back east because I felt special there. Special, wanted, and important. As far back as I can remember, my grandfather—a genius by virtue of his Harvard graduate degree alone in my eyes—seemed genuinely interested what I had to say. He loved dissecting people’s motivations and internal processes. Even as a child, I knew that Grandpa was interested in my experience of the world and that he took me seriously. And I was definitely a little girl who wanted to be taken seriously.
I never had to hustle for my worth with him or prove that my opinions and experiences were worthy of serious consideration; this was a given. As an adult, I’m still trying to figure out what real intimacy actually means, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with being seen—really and truly seen. Being seen by others is fundamentally all we want as human beings, and Grandpa always made me feel seen. If the speeches at his memorial this weekend were any indication, he made everyone feel this way.
So where do we go from here? What does my grandmother do when she wakes up each morning to an empty space in the bed next to her? How do I accept that the absence I feel isn’t just the result of allowing too much time to lapse between visits, but rather the result of a final, permanent shift?
I have no answers. This is all new to me. Death in the family is, for the most part, new to me—I’m lucky this way. I suppose I should spend some time being grateful that I still have three more grandparents who are alive and kicking…or at least pantomiming some version of kicking. I am grateful for this. I really am. But still, nothing about this feels okay. We are now in after. It’s uncomfortable. Unacceptable.
I’m terrible with endings, conclusions, goodbyes, partings, closing arguments, and letting go as a general practice (ask anyone), so I think I’ll end by saying thank you.
Thank you for making me feel like the most interesting person in the entire world every single time we spoke. Thank you for teaching me to appreciate a well thought-out garden and Eames chairs. Thank you for the childhood games of Keep Away and the force-feedings of classical music. Thank you for telling Grandma that you were struck by how beautiful I grew up to be after our visit last spring. She told me. I cried. Thank you for all of it. To borrow from your own words to my father just before you left us, I’ve enjoyed it all.
#TBT to 2/2/97, a.k.a. my 13th birthday, a.k.a. the time in my life when I wore oxblood Doc Martins every day and posted open letters to Courtney Love on my Geocities (or was it Angelfire?) site, which was coyly called “Pigtails for Rachel.” I can remember feeling pretty damn on top of my game that night. We had just returned to my parents’ house from the “dinner party” I threw myself at Il Fornaio (because what 13-year-old desperately trying to be a 30-year-old wouldn’t want to ring in her teen years with eight of her closest girlfriends and a classy-ass plate of capellini al pomodoro?), and I had on the best outfit I had ever assembled. Or close to it. Micro-mini vintage polyester slip. Docs with special-occasion silver shoelaces. Slightly padded bra that I begged my mother to buy me for an hour straight at Macy’s on Lake. Urban Decay lipstick & nail polish in “Gash.” Gwen Stefani wore Gash—she said so in Seventeen Magazine.
* * * * *
Make a wish, they said. I mean, because that’s what they say on your birthday. I’ve always been someone who believes in the power of wishes and candles and concentration and moments of silence (light a candle—any candle— in my face, and I’ll get Fiona-Apple-on-a-rainy-day reflective on you faster than you can say “Shadowboxer”), and I remember running through the feels so hard when this picture was taken. I had been drinking for one year, bleeding for two, and hating myself for at least ten—all things that I was pretty sure made me a Very Modern Woman in the eyes of the world. Because women drink and bleed and hate their bodies. Obviously. So they told me to make a wish, and I wished for a different body and for a boy to fall in love with me. And in this moment, the moment captured in this photo, the moment before I blew out my candles, I knew that I was wishing for all the wrong shit. I have always had enough education and enough self-awareness to know that I am wishing for all. the wrong. shit. And yet I have held my breath and wished for it all anyway, year after year. I’ll be 32 in February. We’ll see. #throwbackthursday
I Still Read Your Horoscope 