Very important people, p.1
Very Important People, page 1
For my mom, who always taught me
I could become anything I wanted in life…
except a good singer.
Your Standard Clichéd Fantasy
Things weren’t going well. And on this day, it felt like they would never be better. The letter I held in front of me with both hands had arrived in the usual bank envelope, but I knew before I opened it that it was a bounced check notice. It wasn’t unexpected. The only question had been which check would win the honor of crossing me over the threshold into officially broke. Negative forty-three dollars was what I was worth now, and I was riddled with so much anxiety and regret that it physically hurt.
It’s not that I’d been under the delusion that life was fair. I had seen too many good people go through terrible hardship to believe something that foolish. But I had bought into that whole “great risk, great reward” nonsense. I honestly believed that taking big chances – courageously hoisting yourself out of your comfort zone – led to amazing, life-changing opportunities. That notion now seemed incredibly naïve. Inane, even. It was dawning on me that great risk actually just meant that there was great risk for failure.
I tossed the paper onto the couch, hoping it would slip into one of the growing holes in the cushion and be somehow erased from reality.
“Everything okay?” My new roommate asked as she emerged from the kitchen in her baby blue terracotta robe, her hair wrapped in a giant towel. Her question sounded more out of curiosity than concern.
I speechlessly watched her for a moment with my mouth hung open, struck by the oddness of a complete stranger walking through my living room in her bathrobe. It was so fluffy, and her mouse-like face so dwarfed by the towel, that she looked like a cloud drifting by.
“Yes, Corinne, everything is fine,” I replied, feigning serenity.
Corinne offered a dubious nod. She shuffled along the faded carpet toward her bedroom, taking little baby steps to avoid spilling her tea. Her thin lips were pursed as she eyed the liquid swaying inside the cup. I fought the urge to push her along. She reached her bedroom and softly closed the door behind her.
Alone again, I bit down hard on my bottom lip, determined to prevent the tears welling up behind my eyes from spilling onto my cheeks. Were the tears more from angst about my poverty status, or the anger I felt toward the bank for charging me a twenty-five-dollar penalty fee I obviously didn’t have to give them? I couldn’t distinguish.
I was sure of one thing, though: I, Nicole Sharp, was failing – quite spectacularly – at being on my own. I was jobless, friendless, and as of this day, totally hopeless.
Of course I knew, in theory, that moving to a new city, hundreds of miles from any living soul who cared about me, without any job or solid game plan, during an economic recession, could go badly. I mean, duh, right? That is a recipe for disaster. But if I was being honest with myself – a practice I’d not yet quite mastered – I never believed that it would. I was so sure, deep down, it would be a much needed fresh start. That I’d build something from nothing and find my place in the world – this mythical place where I felt content and fulfilled and…present in the moment. Somewhere I could feel like I was really there. Your standard clichéd fantasy, I now recognized.
In every daydream I indulged while procrastinating my final papers before college graduation – what now felt like a lifetime ago – I would find a best friend in my new roommate. We’d sip wine and share our opinions on politics, men, and philosophy. She would be a kindred spirit, to whom I would rush home to announce I’d landed some fantastic job. We would go out to celebrate, on me of course.
And in my illogical imagination, I would flirt with the sexy upstairs neighbor, usually a Harvard student or a young doctor beginning his residency. He would nervously invite me to dinner and the theater as we retrieved our mail in the hallway. We would hold hands over a candle-lit table in a tucked-away Italian bistro. And at the show, I would get misty-eyed over the powerful performances, and he’d try to hide the smile on his lips because he found my sensitivity so endearing. Indeed, perhaps I watched my VHS of Pretty Woman a few too many times as a kid.
I mean, seriously? I actually believed that men invited women on first dates to the theater? And, do adults ever talk about philosophy? Of course they don’t. This was Boston in 2002, not 16th century Paris. I was an idiot.
In reality, there was no man to wipe my tears, and no friend whose shoulder I could cry on. In reality, I was lonely and scared.
My new roommate and I had absolutely nothing in common. Corinne was only a few years older than I, but at the age of twenty-five, she carried herself like a legitimate grownup. A pre-school teacher who was up by six and in bed by ten, she made me feel as if I was still a teenager.
She didn’t gossip about guys. She had a long-distance boyfriend working on his PhD at a school I’d never heard of in the Midwest. She listened to classical music, something I’d been exposed to only in high-school music class, when I was too busy doodling in my notebook to pay attention.
She even ironed her t-shirts. Her t-shirts. I’d involuntarily chuckled when she suggested designating times in the morning to use the iron, so as not to disrupt each other’s routines. I responded to her quizzical expression by explaining that I iron only when absolutely necessary, like when the steam from a hot shower failed to de-wrinkle my clothes. I then responded to her look of dismay by nervously smoothing my hands over the wrinkled t-shirt I was wearing at the time.
She, who paid her bills before the due date and balanced her checkbook, could not sympathize with someone who knowingly rolled the dice with every check she signed.
That hot summer day when she added me to her lease, Corinne told me that she could never pick up and move to a new city without already having a job lined up because she wasn’t the kind to do things without having every detail planned out. Although she disguised this jab as a compliment to my adventurousness, I knew it was her way of expressing, “you’d better be able to pay your half of the rent, lady.” I supposed I didn’t blame her. Looking back, I realized she must have been desperate for a roommate to be willing to sign a lease with me. She didn’t have any friends here either.
The hesitance to establish a binding living arrangement was mutual. I didn’t want to move in with someone as blatantly uptight and dull as Corrine, but my options were limited, and the last thing I needed was my dad accusing me of risking homelessness on top of everything else. The internet was a terrifying place to find a roommate, and at the very least, Corrine wasn’t a psycho or criminal. And perhaps just as important, she already owned furniture and dishes. The little money I’d saved would not afford me such luxuries.
All I could contribute to our humble abode was the worn-out old couch that adorned my family’s semi-finished basement for the past decade.
“Maybe we could buy a slipcover that matches the rug,” Corinne suggested on the day I moved in, as my dad pulled the couch to the dark corner she’d chosen “so we could sit without the sun in our eyes.”
Dad straightened up and let out a grunt, which I knew was his way of expressing his insult that the couch on which he watched countless sports games with his buddies wasn’t good enough for this nose-in-the-air city girl. I’d hoped Corrine mistook his gesture as fatigue from the long move.
I couldn’t ask my dad to curb his attitude, though. Every interaction between us at that point had the potential to escalate into an epic shouting match. He didn’t want me in Boston, and he most certainly didn’t want to come to Boston himself. He initially refused to join my mom, brother, and me when we packed up the U-Haul to drive the long trek from our home in rural Pennsylvania. Many times in the months leading up to my big move, I’d walked into a room and felt the thick weight of tension hanging in the air because I’d interrupted an argument about it between my mom and him. My mother finally convinced him that sending me off was part of his fatherly duty, and if he failed to live up to it, she would view him differently as a parent. Only then did he reluctantly agree.
Front-Yard Garage Sales
and Back-Yard Barbeques
Few people from my hometown of Stone Cove, PA, ever gave the world beyond our tiny dot on the map a second thought, much less ventured into it. On occasion, Stone Cove residents might travel a lengthy twenty-eight miles do some shopping in Marshport, a suburban city that served as the cultural hub for the surrounding rural towns.
In Marshport, there was a mall, a movie theater, and a variety of mid-priced chain restaurants in which to dine. In junior high, it was an important milestone for a boy to take you to Marshport for a date – an opportunity to be relished, to go somewhere other than the Stone Cove Diner or Putter’s, our ramshackle mini-golf course, on the weekend.
Those were the main attractions for teenagers in Stone Cove, and like many of the businesses in town, they existed for more than half a century. While the rest of the world evolved to Starbucks on every corner, Stone Cove’s family-owned operations clung on for dear life. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not that I equated big-business with culture. I was a country girl raised to be suspicious of corporate America like any other. But I always craved more than I could experience in Stone Cove. There just wasn’t anything to do there. Every day was the same, and it felt like time just floated away.
By my senior year of high school, I’d attended as many front-yard garage sales and back-yard barbeques as I could handle. I was certain there were more g
I’d never argued much with my dad before then. He rarely even raised his voice. Hell, the guy barely ever spoke to me at all. He left for work before dawn most days. When he came home – covered in a layer of dirt and smelling like the inside of the trackloader he’d operated all day – he’d give me a grunt and a nod, and then head for the shower. Our relationship never entailed much more than that. Taking care of us kids was my mom’s domain, and that included discipline. Until the day I told him I wanted to go away to college as my next step after high school, he had never shown much interest at all in my life.
But that day was different. That day, he took hold of the hopeful future I’d quietly mapped out and shattered it. His eyes grew wide and dark, and the wrinkles in his face appeared to deepen. I remember thinking that he looked like a Disney villain, and I was stunned frozen like a child.
“Are you saying to me that our home isn’t good enough for you?” He asked in an ominous whisper, as if collecting himself from a sucker punch in the gut. He and my mom were sitting across from me at the kitchen table, and he was gripping my college acceptance letter in one hand – thrusting it toward me as he spoke and crinkling the paper with his fingers.
“I’m not saying that, no. I just want to try something different.” I swallowed back a lump in my throat. It was not how I’d expected the conversation to go. I imagined it would be brief, and something to the effect of “are you paying for it yourself? Yes? Okay then, see you in four years.” His real-life reaction was…intense.
“Different?” His shoulder stiffened. “Has being near your family become boring to you? Have we gone out of style? You’ve had enough of us, so you’re just going to pick up and leave?” His voice grew louder with each question, and my mother began to quietly cry. She pressed her fingers under her nose to stifle it and stood up. Turning her back to us, she began shifting canisters on the counter, as if it was suddenly urgent they be lined up in order of height.
He glanced at her and then turned his angry eyes back to me. His voice became slow and deep. “Your mother and I have worked very hard to take care of this family. But family doesn’t seem to matter to you. Do you realize how ingracious you’re being?”
The question sounded more like a declaration, and I dared not inform him that “ingracious” wasn’t a word. I simply snatched my college acceptance letter out of his hand, a gesture marking the most contentious interaction we’d ever had. The piece of the letter between his fingers didn’t budge, and the paper ripped apart. Then, in a dramatic show of defiant submission, I ripped the piece I’d grabbed into a bunch more pieces and threw it in the air like confetti, before storming into my room to cry alone.
Although my dad got what he wanted – me, home for four more years – he never actually started to act like he was happy to have me there. He continued to ignore me, and I him. The only difference was, I had begun silently resenting him.
Under the Lid of His Baseball Cap
I never told my hometown boyfriend, Jimmy, of my crushed dream of going away to college. I saw no reason to hurt him, since as it turned out, I would attend the local community college in Marshport and commute from home.
The truth was, though - even back then – I had a nagging feeling that I wasn’t meant to end up with my hometown boyfriend.
Jimmy was a genuinely good guy, and we had the kind of relationship others envied. We’d known each other since grammar school, where he would nudge my arm while I was writing in class, forcing my pencil to veer off the page. It made him laugh, every single time. We went trick-or-treating in the same group of friends and played manhunt through the same backyards. We were pals until the summer after our freshmen year of high school, when it changed.
That summer, we snuck a bottle of Jack Daniels into his sister’s Fourth of July party. By the end of the night, we were giggling and stumbling so much that we knew we’d be wise to stay out of sight. We made our way to The Squirrel’s field at the end of the block.
A giant brick barbeque not far from its border had been defunct for years and was a familiar hangout. The structure had three distinct sections – a middle that was as tall as I was, with two stacks that reached up to my waist on either side. Each had its own pit and grate. Surrounded by uncut grass and dandelions, it looked like a monument. In a way, it was one.
When we were kids, we used to climb on it and use it as home base for our games. The local teenagers would gather around it to drink beers and talk about nothing. It felt strange to be there that night. The days of hide and seek were over, and we were fast becoming the older kids in town.
We sat atop the highest grill, our legs dangling off the side, and talked about his older sister more candidly than usual. Morgan was pregnant. She’d been married four months earlier and there was some suspicion that his future nephew attended the wedding. The fact that the event took only two months of preparation was curious, to say the least. Her husband was in her high school class, but he hadn’t stayed in school long enough to graduate with her. They had an on-again-off-again relationship for quite a while.
“Everything’s changing too fast. My sister’s gonna be a mom. My parents are gonna be grandparents. I don’t know if we’re ready for this,” Jimmy confided.
Perhaps it was the hint of fear and confusion in his voice, or the fact that he was sharing something I knew he hadn’t told anyone else, but at that moment, he was the sweetest thing I’d ever seen. With an alcohol-induced boldness, I took his hand. He looked at my hand and squeezed it. Then he lifted his eyes to meet mine, his chin pointing upward so his big brown eyes could see under the lid of his baseball cap, and kissed me. It was a first kiss for both of us.
We didn’t go back to his sister’s party that night. Instead, we stayed in the field talking, kissing, chasing each other around the barbeque, and, finally, falling asleep. It was probably the last time I felt like a care-free kid playing in that field. After that night, Jimmy and I were a real couple, and with that came real – and complicated – feelings.
~ ~ ~
I did love Jimmy, very much. He was my closest friend. But as the months melted into years, it started to feel…stagnant. Not just our relationship, but life in general. We were like a pond in the hot sun, without any hint of a breeze. It was stifling. At least, by the time we’d been together for seven years, that’s how it felt to me.
I’m Not Something
Jimmy’s family never expected much from him, and through the years, I came to learn he never expected much from himself, either. After high school, he worked full-time at the hardware store his father owned. As much as I nagged him to sign up for at least a few college courses, he never showed any interest in more school. His future was set, like concrete that’d already begun to harden.
In the years that I went to college and he didn’t, I’d chat with him about professors I liked, toss around ideas on topics for term papers, and share interesting tidbits I learned in class. He’d listen. He was a great listener. But he didn’t relate, and I suspect he didn’t much care, beyond the fact that he was a kind boyfriend who enjoyed knowing what I was thinking and feeling.
Eventually, there grew a sense of loneliness inside of me. It started to get so big, that I’d sometimes wake up crying. And I was restless. I wanted something different from the life Jimmy and I had, and I wanted him to want it, too.
~ ~ ~
“So, you’re fine with living here for the rest of your life, working in your dad’s hardware store? You’ve never thought about starting a new life, somewhere else?” I asked.
It was a few months before my college graduation, and I was trying to coax a conversation about my plans for after. I had made the decision to leave. I wasn’t sure yet to where, but I wasn’t going to let anyone guilt me or scare me into staying in Stone Cove this time. I was 21 years old, I had money saved, and it was my decision alone.
