I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag Page 9

  It was Ann who helped me realize that it was useless to ask, “Why me?”; no answer would ever be good enough to justify what I went through. I spent hours in her office in tears, on some level hoping that she’d just tell me what to do, and then I’d be healed. But there was no magic set of instructions, and the first step was the hardest. Part of my new pattern was acknowledging that my survival mechanisms of the past weren’t working anymore. Putting that box far inside me back in Boston had served me for a time, but that time was over.

  Facing my darkest fears—not just about the attack itself, but about my very existence—enabled me to distance myself from the attacker once and for all. During the lineup and the trial I had been terrified of his physical presence, but now that he was behind bars for a good long time, I made a conscious decision to separate his actions from me and to take back the power he’d had over me. It’s not as if I was suddenly healed, but increasingly I felt that there was a barrier between my present life and the past.

  I was beginning to believe that I wasn’t at fault for what had happened to me. For so long I had thought that I had been chosen because I deserved it in some way. I still had so far to go in overcoming my deep shame, and doubts about my worthiness. But I hoped that someday I might be like that woman in the article, eventually able to memorialize the pain on just one day, then put it behind me until the next anniversary.

  Back in college, when Nicolette, Andrea, and I were living together, our apartment was broken into. Andrea had bragged afterward that if she’d been there when we were robbed, she would have physically attacked the thief. One night when a drunken woman came barreling past us, Andrea started screaming after her, and insisted that no one could push us around. Of course I knew that those were just fantasies, and I meant what I’d told her—that none of us can know what we’d do in a situation like the one I’d endured.

  Andrea and I stayed friends through the years, even after the trial, but it would never be the same. One day I was with Andrea and her family, and her mother said something to me like, “Thank God Andrea was there, she saved your life by opening up that door.” I felt so devastated in that moment. Andrea hadn’t saved my life—I had saved my life. My eyes stung with the effort it took to hold back my tears and clamp shut my mouth.

  Our relationship waxed and waned. I had continued to defend Andrea’s actions over the years, and it never seemed to me that she ever appreciated it, or valued my loyalty; in fact I often felt she resented me. Often, we’d make plans, and she simply wouldn’t show up. I’d go to her neighborhood to make it easier for her, and she’d leave me sitting in a restaurant or standing outside a movie theater waiting . . . and waiting. I felt like a blown-off blind date. When I’d call her to find out what was keeping her, she’d say, “Oh, Gilbs, I’m sorry. I spaced.” Each time she stood me up, I would get upset all over again. Eventually I had to confront her, to give her the chance to explain. I thought, This is my close friend—she would never hurt me on purpose. Maybe I’d done something to offend her, I reasoned. And of course she couldn’t read my mind, so if I didn’t say anything to her directly, then I’d just be holding a grudge.

  I’m all about the conflict resolution, not the conflict. So the next time I saw Andrea, I said, “I don’t know why you keep doing this to me. It really hurts my feelings.” I’ll never forget how she looked at me and said in reply, “You know what, Jen? I think you expect too much from people. It’s too hard to live up to it.” And that’s when it finally hit me. I’d never expected anything from her, not even to try and save me. But it was her guilt and frustration at who she really was on that May day that was coming between us, and I think it was too much for her to be around me.

  Andrea and I had been as close as sisters before the attack. She’d been my roommate for three years in college, and she was the one person who knew firsthand what I’d experienced. There were moments when my memories of the attack were so alien and horrifying to me that it was a comfort simply to have a witness who could attest that what had happened to me was real, and not a bad dream. It anchored me to know that she was there, and I fought hard to continue our connection. But our relationship was pulling her down to a place she didn’t want to go.

  All the emotional work that I did after the trial was exhausting, but once I got past the very worst of it, something unexpected began to happen to me. Without being fully aware of it, I started loosening the tight grip I’d been keeping on my emotions. Slowly but surely, I felt the feeling flow back into my numb heart.

  I truly had no idea how tightly wound I was—and to what degree I’d made myself impermeable—until I started to release my hold. Ironically, at a time when I most needed to feel joy, I’d actually cut myself off from one of my simplest pleasures in life, and without even realizing it.

  My mother raised us all to appreciate flowers. She was a master gardener and a docent for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and she wrote a gardening column for the local paper. She so loved her garden that she hated the very idea of edible flowers—she said it was like cannibalism. When I was little, she’d take each of us girls on tours of her garden, and by the age of five I could name every single flower. Even more so than the color of all those flowers, it was the scent that I loved. I remember being enveloped by their fragrance, just completely drunk with it, even as a child. To this day, flowers and their aromas bring me home to my mother’s garden.

  As an event planner, I could never bear to see how many gorgeous flowers would be dumped in the trash at the end of the night. Catering staff will often take home the food that’s worth saving, but the flowers were just tossed away. I generally passed on taking home the sweets, but I could never bear to see all the gorgeous floral arrangements treated as garbage. So while the waitstaff was packing up boxes of cookies, I was stuffing big plastic bags with flowers—enough to fill a taxi. At home that night I’d stick them in every vase and bowl we owned. When Rachel woke up to the floral explosion in our apartment the next morning, she’d look around and say, “Oh my God, who threw up roses in here?”

  I loved going through the flower district with clients. I soaked up all the colors, and I could still identify all the flowers. In the first few years after the attack, though, one key aspect of the experience was missing for me, and I wasn’t even aware of it until I made a discovery one spring day.

  I was walking to my office on Fifty-eighth Street between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues. It was a warm day in May, exactly one year after the trial, and four years after the attack. May had been a dark month for me in the last four years, but this year was different in a way that I don’t think I registered consciously. I recall a sense of lightness in my heart. I remember enjoying the sensation of the warm sun on my skin, and feeling my old excitement that the days were getting longer and summer was coming.

  Now that whole block is condominiums, but back then it was abandoned buildings and empty lots covered in broken glass and enclosed by wire fences. There was nothing alive in that mass of concrete for blocks. I was walking along, noticing how the bright sun made the shards of glass glitter, and suddenly I smelled something—a waft of sweetness. I stopped dead in my tracks and inhaled the scent deeply into my lungs. It was honeysuckle. It reminded me of my childhood—of my mother’s garden and summers at camp. Then I saw a honeysuckle bush peeking out between two ruined brick walls. It brought tears to my eyes, the smell was so sweet. Then I cried real tears. Oh my God, I realized in that instant, I had lost my sense of smell, and it was back for the first time in four years. I stood on that street and wept. The things I had denied myself without even knowing it. My sight and hearing had betrayed me on the day I was followed—I’d never seen or heard the attacker behind me, all that way from the subway. Ever since, I had become acutely attuned to visual and auditory signals. I always knew exactly who was on the street behind me, or near me on the subway platform, or running behind me in the park. In the process, my senses had become so tightly co
ntrolled that somehow my ability to smell had atrophied—neglected and unused, it just withered. But now it was coming back to life.

  Smelling that honeysuckle was a moment of innocent joy. It was reassurance that there was something pure inside me that couldn’t be forced, or restrained, or manipulated. It was spontaneous, uncontrollable, and completely genuine. It gave me hope. There would always be a before and after in my life, but on that day I began to believe that in the “after” I would be okay.

  Not long after that day, I was hanging out with Laura, and she said something that was really funny to me, who knows why. Pretty soon I was just rolling with laughter—the kind where you laugh so hard it makes you laugh even more, until you forget what you were laughing about in the first place. I laughed so hard that I snorted—and there it was, my all-out, totally unladylike guffaw that I’d also left far behind. I laughed until I cried, and then I cried for real because I realized that I hadn’t laughed with that kind of reckless abandon in years. Until that moment I had always held back just a little bit—I kind of stood to the side and observed other people’s mirth from a safe distance. Maybe I’d laugh to acknowledge that something was funny, but it wasn’t my laugh.

  After the attack, parts of me had fallen into a sleep state, while other parts of me took over the operations. My giddiness and vulnerability had been sacrificed for the sake of staying on guard and protecting myself. After the trial, though, and thanks to my work with Ann, I started to feel a little shift. First my laugh came back, and then there was a palpable little tingle in some of those other sleeping parts of me. I wanted to regain that sense of adventure that had been such a strong part of who I was before.

  Jimmy had formed a protective cocoon around me for more than two years. I’d been as happy as I could be during that time, and I’d stretched my battered little wings within the boundaries of our safe life in New York. During the trial Jimmy was truly my rock, and I had held on tight. He was safe, warm, and wonderful. But through no fault of Jimmy’s, that safeness started to feel constricting to me.

  Just prior to the attack, I had moved home after traveling around the world on a boat, living in Europe, hitchhiking all over Sicily, navigating through Russia and Turkey. After the attack, the farthest I’d traveled was the Florida Keys. Jimmy felt like my family, but I was antsy and impatient, and the girl I’d been for the last few years no longer felt like the real me. I didn’t know exactly who the real me was anymore, but I wanted to find out. And until I did, I couldn’t really give myself to anyone. Timing was just not on our side.

  When I broke up with Jimmy for good, he cut off all contact with me. I was devastated, deeply conflicted, and genuinely fearful to lose him so completely. But at the same time I felt a deep desire to be on my own, and to see what the rest of my life might hold for me.

  Over the next few years, pieces of me that I had carefully compartmentalized began to flow back together. I began to feel less splintered, less broken—and less afraid. This made me more confident in my work, too. When every event stopped feeling like my own personal Waterloo, I realized that solving problems wasn’t a live-or-die necessity or an adrenaline-pumping thrill, it could actually be a genuine joy.

  For a full year I had been planning a massive alumni event for a graduate school in Manhattan. Fifteen hundred people were expected for a seated dinner dance that we’d hold on Piers 60 and 61 on the Hudson. It was really like planning three separate events, because each class celebrating its five-, ten-, or fifteen-year anniversary was given its own dedicated space. At 4:30 p.m. the day before the event, I received a hysterical phone call from the alumni director. She was at the opening-night cocktail party, and she was being screamed at by alumni who’d been told there was no room for them at the dinner dance. It turned out there were 350 extra alumni who’d flown in from all over the world, just assuming they could buy their tickets for the dinner upon arrival. So now it was no longer a seated dinner for 1,500 people—it needed to be a seated dinner for 1,850 people. But the dinner was on the pier, and the space was filled to capacity. The alumni director was hyperventilating, completely unable to imagine a scenario that didn’t involve losing her job. I said, “Okay, give me twenty minutes.”

  I hung up the phone, and I didn’t have the foggiest idea how we were going to swing this. Could we tent the parking lot? Was I really going to put a formal dinner on uneven asphalt? Then it hit me. It was such a perfect solution that I actually burst out laughing. I couldn’t build another pier, but I had a better idea. I called the owner of a party boat that I often booked and asked him (a) if he was free the following night, and (b) if he could get a permit to dock at Pier 60 in the next twenty-four hours. The answer to both questions was yes, and I was able to call my client back and save her weekend and possibly her job as well.

  I had proven myself worthy again, but this time I’d done it minus the fear. It wasn’t my fault that 350 more people had shown up, and I didn’t believe I’d never work in this town again if I didn’t solve the problem. But I’d solved it anyway—and I’d done it with ingenuity, and creativity, and yes—joy.

  I began to think about taking a vacation, something I hadn’t done in years. In the past, I’d been too afraid that my business would self-destruct in my absence. I had always felt that I had to do everything and be everywhere at once. I’d be out at a club until 4:30 in the morning, and then be back at my desk at 7:30 that morning. All that effort to be fabulous and perfect was exhausting, and once a year or so I needed to step off the merry-go-round and be quiet and still and (for the most part) by myself.

  Even though I hadn’t been anyplace exotic since before the attack, I kept folders in my desk of everywhere I longed to see one day. I ripped up my Travel and Leisure and Departures magazines, collecting names of restaurants and hotels the way cooks collect recipes. I had been to Israel on a summer program in high school, and had wonderful memories of it, always wanting to return. My other obsession was Italy—I had been there during my stay in London, but had never been to the Amalfi Coast. So when I did start to travel again, it was only natural that I returned to Israel and Capri.

  When I landed in Israel, usually at two or three in the morning, I’d scope out someone young and single in baggage claim who looked like a local. Then I’d walk right up to him and ask for help getting my bags to a taxi and negotiating the price—since I knew I’d end up paying less if the person doing the talking was male and spoke Hebrew. On one particularly great trip to Israel, I met my perfect tour guide on the layover in London. I’d traded in my miles for a first-class seat, and the whole way to Tel Aviv, Inon came up from coach to chat with me. He was a banker living in Brussels, but formerly he’d been an expert in martial arts for the Israeli army. He was at least six-three and good-looking, and how could I refuse when he asked for the number where I’d be staying? A handsome Jewish banker who knew how to fight wanted my phone number—I could barely suppress a schoolgirl giggle.

  Inon put me in a taxi when we got to Tel Aviv, and by the time I got to my friend’s sister’s house, it was 4:30 a.m. At 8:30 that morning I was drinking coffee in the kitchen with Aya when the phone rang. She spoke Hebrew into the phone and then smiled and handed me the receiver. “It’s for you,” she said. It was Inon. He told me that he was coming to Jerusalem, and that he wanted to take me around Israel. I didn’t know him at all, but I didn’t even hesitate.

  I knew what it was like to be in a genuinely life-threatening situation, and maybe that gave me a special kind of radar. But I never once felt unsafe or alone when I was traveling by myself. Especially in Israel and Italy, I felt at home, among kindred spirits. The Israelis seemed to know what it was like to live precariously and just enjoy the moment because there might not be a tomorrow. They didn’t waste time; they never procrastinated when it came to fun or a new experience. There was no game playing. If you met someone and he liked you, he told you so. If he wanted to see you, he didn’t make a date for n
ext week. He said, “Let’s go—now.” Their answer to any new experience wasn’t Why, it was Why not? You have one life. So make it count. Yes felt like the right response to me.

  The Italians also seemed instinctively to know how to enjoy the moment, and I loved how completely anonymous I felt when I was there. They appreciated beauty and food, and could revel in a simple sunset in a way that I’d never experienced in the States. It was just the dose of freedom and immediacy that I needed. Back home, I was always trying so hard to be the person that I thought I should be. There was something about removing myself from home and being completely unknown in a new place that made me feel whole again. I could be quiet and alone when I wanted, or I could go to a restaurant and strike up a conversation with some locals. No one judged me, and there were no explanations needed.

  I think that one of the reasons I loved traveling alone is that it gave me an opportunity to celebrate the self-reliance that I’d embraced (for better and worse) after the attack. I had learned that no one else could magically make me all better or make the bad thoughts go away. I needed to redefine what it meant to be alone and make that concept feel strong, powerful, and satisfying. It was very important to me to know that I had the resources to fend for myself.

  As risk-taking as I could be, I wasn’t crazy. I definitely had rules. I didn’t travel to little towns by myself, and I never got in a car with a stranger. One of the reasons I loved Capri is that once I was there, I could reach everything on foot. I’d stay up late and sleep late, and I’d spend the day alone on the beach reading and taking long walks, enjoying the peace. If I felt like company, I’d have a drink at a bar. Once I was befriended by the son of the owner of the modest little pensione where I was staying, and he and his friends invited me to dinner and dancing. On nights when I started eating dinner by myself, just me and my book alone in a restaurant, it rarely lasted long. Inevitably I’d be invited to join someone else’s table, and then asked to a party on someone’s boat.