The Chris Sartinsky Memoirs: Chapter Twenty-Six: Emptying The House

Karen sort of stabilized after the auditorium episode. She had enough to worry about—the preparation for her final exams, final papers, and graduation itself kind of swallowed her, or at least it was enough to take her mind off her breakdown for a little while. She didn’t have the time for a complete mental collapse.

In April or so, she got her post-graduation plans all set, and that was a load off. She’d gotten either an unpaid or a poorly-paid internship at the Boston PBS station, I don’t remember the specifics, and she was going to supplement it working at a bookstore. She’d nailed down the two jobs within days of each other. The plan was to spend a year or so doing that while she got her grad school plans and resume together. She was starting work in June. “So I have two weeks after graduation with nothing to do.”

“That’s good?”

“I can do anything. I can see the world.”

“In two weeks?”

“Sure I can.”

“You can’t see half of Massachusetts in two weeks.”

“I can see half of Europe in two weeks. You know how easy those trains are?”

“No.”

“They’re easy.”

“You wouldn’t see any of it though. You’d only be zooming through it.”

“With my eyes closed? I’d see plenty.”

She kept bothering me about going to Europe with her. I finally agreed so she would stop asking--since I knew she had no intention of actually going. It worked—I told her I was excited about going and she called me “insufficiently sincere” and never brought it up again.

She thought I was going to stay in Boston with her that summer, but what I was really doing was going back to Connecticut. This is what I’d been planning all along--I just didn’t know how to break it to her exactly. I even had a job of my own lined up. I mean, it’s not like it was a great job, or a job I couldn’t have weaseled out of, or even a very good job. A friend had helped me land a spot as a ride operator at Lake Compounce Amusement Park in Bristol. So obviously I could have stayed in Boston if I’d really wanted to. But I didn’t. This, I knew, would be hard to explain.

The natural question would be, why was I so set on going back to Connecticut for the summer? It was nothing Boston had done wrong—I loved the city. Did I want to get away from Karen? Maybe, a little. She was exhausting, certainly, if only in the way I find relations with anyone exhausting. I still enjoyed being with her, though, it wasn’t that. If anything, I felt like she was probably getting pretty sick of me, so I ought to give her a break, but that was probably just a way for me to pass the blame to her. So in the final analysis, I’m not sure why I chose Connecticut over Boston that summer. It was probably for the same reason I’ve made so many other decisions in my life—if it wasn’t the best thing, then it was at least the easiest, and I thought dominoes would fall and the decisions would be made for me, even if not necessarily in my favor.

If you put a gun to my head and I had to guess, though, I’d say this: I wanted a few months as a nonperson. That’s what I liked about the summers and the winter breaks and all. I went home for weeks or months and I did nothing—I’d see friends and family once in a while, sure, but most days I’d be at home all day, parents at work, twins out doing things, and on the best days I got to feeling like even I wasn’t there. I’d get to feeling like the empty house. I mean, I had the job, but I would work hard, I told myself, to not make any friends there, to punch in and punch out, get right home and enjoy every second as a nonperson I could. Karen reminded me of my basic humanity. It was a drag.

Karen warned me that I’d have to meet her parents on graduation weekend. “I’d just as soon you not come in contact with them,” she said, “but with all the celebrating it’s probably unavoidable.”

“Why don’t you want me to meet them?”

“I didn’t say that. And anyway, what do you care? It’s not like you want to meet them.”

It was pretty much true, so I changed the subject and asked her if there was anything I should know beforehand. “They’ve adored every boyfriend I’ve ever had,” she said. “But all of them were capable of making eye contact with strangers, so I don’t know where that leaves you.”

Yeah, she knew me pretty well by this point.

A week or two before graduation, she bought her cap and gown from the campus bookstore. The Karen of two months earlier would have stuffed it into the bottom of the closet so she wouldn’t have had to think about it until she had to, and then would have enjoyed the panic of not being able to find it twenty minutes before she had to go. But the new Karen wouldn’t take it off for the first 48 hours. She went everywhere with it—to the laundromat, to restaurants, to bars. Everyone kept congratulating her. It was annoying. I told her they’d throw her in an institution.

“Let them try,” she said. “There’s nothing insane about wanting to celebrate the single tangible achievement of my life.”

“Three weeks ago you were so terrified you wouldn’t leave the room.” It was true; she’d been having all kinds of episodes. In April, she was putting off a paper and I told her to get to it because she needed the class to graduate. Before the word had left my mouth she’d grabbed me by the shirt and thrown me against the wall. My elbow punched a hole right through it; I had to cover the spot with a Dianetics flyer I’d been handed at the Boston Marathon. The hole was almost all the way down the wall, though, and I had to hang the flyer diagonally to cover the whole thing, so it didn’t look very convincing. My R.A. asked about it once so I asked him if he wanted to take a stress test and he never brought it up again.

Anyway, “I’ve come to terms with it,” she said. “It’s time to step forward and be an adult.”

“Remember how you said you were afraid because you were going to fail and all that?”

She dismissed me with a wave of her hand. “Success and failure aren’t binaries,” she said. “They come in degrees, and I’ll succeed enough. I’m educated and smart. I’m already 2/3 of the way there.”

“What’s the other third?”

“They’re not literally thirds,” suddenly annoyed. “You can be obtuse as a rock sometimes.”

“You mean dumb as a rock?”

“I meant obtuse or I wouldn’t have said it.”

The night before graduation, I had the big dinner with her parents. Karen tried to play it cool, but I could tell she was actually pretty excited to have me meet them. Which surprised and unsettled me. Being incapable of sentiment, I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

We went to Legal Seafood. I didn’t object, even though I don’t like any seafood, because getting walked over without objecting was the only way I knew to make anyone like me back then. They had some non-seafood things, but I didn’t want any of them. I asked if they could make me pancakes, and the waiter said he’d check. He served me a plate of cod and told me there’d been a “mix-up.” I ate some fries (which tasted fishy) and the garnish (which wasn’t bad, for garnish).

Karen’s parents were both unbelievably happy people. Everything seemed to tickle them—me, Karen, the food, the silverware—very heavy, they couldn’t believe how heavy it was! I’m making fun, but I actually quite liked them, sort of. And it rubbed off on Karen—she smiled at everything right along with her mom and dad. She was like I’d never seen her before. She was giggling. I’d never heard her giggle before. What she really looked like was like she’d been set free from something—like she was shedding four years of fear and pretense and just overwhelming nausea. She kept looking at me—she wanted me to see all this. She wanted me to see what she could really be like, if society and I would only let her. And maybe she wanted to see if I could do the same thing, too, but it wasn’t in me.

“It’s so nice to finally meet you,” Karen’s mother said a little after we sat down. “We’ve heard so much about you.” My parents had barely heard word one about Karen—she was “some girl I’m seeing.” I’m not even sure they realized “some girl I’m seeing” had been the same girl this whole time. Karen smiled at me. I think she was glad I was figuring out that I was legitimately important to her, and that she hadn’t had to tell me straight out.

“I’ve heard a lot about you two too,” I struggled. “You’re her mother and father.”

“I understand you’re thinking of getting into television?” Karen’s dad asked me.

“What?” I asked, half-panicked, like I’d been accused of something I’d done that I’d thought I was getting away with. “No. No!”

“Yes,” Karen reminded me. And I remembered that it is kind of what I told her—I had told her that maybe I would get a job at a station in Boston, or go back to Connecticut and work at ESPN after graduation. But I hadn’t really meant it. It was just the kind of thing I said to keep people off my back—truthfully, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, although I certainly knew I didn’t want to work in TV. I thought she’d known that, but apparently she’d taken me at my word—and really, I had no reason to believe she wouldn’t. I felt like a fraud and a scumbag just then, and I thought the only way to feel better about myself was to lie bigger and better than I ever had before.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, “TV. I thought you said ‘skiing.’” They all laughed at that. It’s amazing what people will laugh at when they’re trying to like you.

“So what do you want to do in TV?” Karen’s mother asked.

“Excuse me,” I said. I set my straw to the side and downed about half my cup of soda to buy some time while I thought of a convincing story. “Well,” I finally started, and then something went down the wrong pipe and I started coughing horribly for real. “Well,” once everything was cleaned out, “I was thinking maybe about editing. I just think it’s, you know, really gratifying to have all this raw footage and piece it together into a coherent whole. Yeah?” They nodded. “But I figure I’ll just start as a P.A., and learn a trade or two on set, and see what I like doing and what I’m good at.” I couldn’t tell if I was talking really fast or not. “Who knows, though. I may even wind up wanting to produce.” Then I laughed really loudly for some reason. Again, I can’t stress enough how much bullshit this was. But everyone was quite impressed with me.

No matter how much I tried to turn the subject to other things, we kept coming back to me. And as the night wore on, my fake ambitions kept getting grander and grander, and I kept feeling worse and worse. They, on the other hand, were positively glowing. I could have told them I was a Kennedy at this point and they wouldn’t have blinked. I could have told them I had to be at Cape Canaveral in the morning because I was flying on the space shuttle and they would have offered to drive me.

After dinner and an ice cream somewhere and a stroll around Newbury Street (it was a long night and it was like 80 degrees out and muggy as fuck; I was literally panting), Karen’s parents dropped us off at Bay State before heading back to their hotel. The two of us stood on the steps, arm-in-arm, and waved to them as they drove off. It was so hokey I could barely stand it. “They love you,” Karen said, right into my ear. “Mmm hmm,” I said, and I walked inside.

Karen wanted to talk all about it, what I thought of her parents, and what they thought about me, and if I’d had a good time, and all of that. It was weirdly normal, for her. This sounds like a backhanded compliment, but it is not. It was suddenly and unexpectedly wonderful to see her like this, even if that was the opposite reason I’d been going around with her in the first place. To see her unguarded, to see she wasn’t always bracing to be hit or readying herself to hit you all the time was new. It did remind me of home. But I guess I wasn’t ready to face that. I told her I felt sick and pretended to sleep for a good three hours before I finally did drop off. It was the night before her college graduation—she was awake the whole time.

The next morning she literally pushed me out of bed. First thing I felt that morning was my head landing on the hardwood floor. She got all dolled up in this fancy white dress and did her hair and makeup and put on shoes she could barely walk in, then put on her cap and gown over all of it. She was ready to go about two hours before she had to leave—she hadn’t been able to sleep the night before and had driven herself crazy waiting until she couldn’t wait anymore. I threw on some jeans and the same shirt I’d worn two days ago (if I’d worn the same one her parents had seen me in at dinner the night before, you see, they might have caught on). She kept hugging me—I told her it was sweet but she was making it very hard to get ready.

Her parents had been joined by a couple grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. I told them I wouldn’t crowd them and that I’d sit somewhere else—they put up a fight, but ultimately let me go. That whole party headed off for Nickerson Field. I stayed back for a little bit. I just sat at the end of my bed for a while. I still had another year in college, but it didn’t feel that way. I felt like I was running out of everything. I knew Karen wasn’t going to be thrilled when I told her I wasn’t going to be in Boston for the summer. I knew a year is nothing when your plans don’t go any further. I knew three months with a crappy job and no girlfriend around was a step backwards in every way. I knew if I kept sitting there much longer, I was going to be late.

Of course I wanted to be late, and I timed everything so I would be, just a little late, but I walk too fast. I do walk really fast, this is something that’s caused me problems more than once. I noticed that I was going to make it on time after all once I got to the BU Bridge and I tried to slow down, but even then I couldn’t do it.

The big ceremony was at Nickerson Field. It was a beautiful day, bright and sunny and not too hot. In typical BU fashion, the whole thing was a clusterfuck. Signs ostensibly pointing graduating students to the field and families to their bleachers were sending people on nightmarish, circular treks around the school’s West Campus. I saw parents covered in sweat like they’d been wandering around the Gobi Desert with no canteen, little brothers and sisters who could barely stand for hunger and exhaustion, at least one grandmother sobbing like she’d just been widowed. I knew the area (I’d spent a week as a photographer for BU’s student newspaper, during which time I took a couple photos of the men’s soccer team at Nickerson, lost the film, lost the paper’s camera, got fired, changed my phone number so they would stop calling and demanding money and wrote and delivered several threatening pseudonymous letters to various editors and columnists just for the hell of it) so I found a spot on the bleachers quickly. I saw Karen’s family close by and they saw me, so I buried my face in a program and waited for the thing to start.

There was really no reason for me to be there. There were thousands and thousands of people down on the grass—no way in hell I was going to pick Karen out of that crowd. If I’d skipped it she never would have known. There were some honorary degrees and some speeches—I couldn’t remember a word of them as soon as the ceremony ended. I couldn’t tell you who gave the commencement, or if it was any good.

There was a big stage and a couple cameras on cranes, and some huge screens showing videos of all the speakers and kids in the crowd and whatnot. At one point the school’s legitimately evil President Emeritus was droning on—I was drawing a big octopus on an old newspaper—I looked up and saw Karen’s face blown up on the screen. She was sitting there looking up at the podium like this speech was the most interesting thing she’d heard in her life. She was holding hands with some girl I’d never seen before—she didn’t seem to know who Karen was, but she also didn’t seem to mind. And then just like that they cut away to someone else.

I avoided Karen and her family after Nickerson, opting to wait to give my congratulations until after her smaller psych department ceremony, where she’d actually be getting her diploma. I headed right to Morse Auditorium, where they were holding it. Everyone else was still at the field and I was the first one there. I took a nap in one of the seats right up against the wall on the right side, towards the back.

Karen shook me awake. At first I thought I’d missed the whole thing, but I could see people were just filtering in.

“Isn’t it bad luck to see me before you get your diploma?” I asked, still shaking out the cobwebs.

“That’s only if we’re getting married,” she said. “We’re not getting married, are we?”

I thought, oh holy Jesus.

Her family walked in and she waved them over. “Wasn’t it a nice speech?” one of them asked. It could have been a Klan rally for all the attention I’d been paying, but I said, sure was. They all took seats in my section.

It wasn’t long before Karen had to head backstage, and the rest of her family was too excited to pay any attention to me. Good, I thought, I’ll be left alone. But that’s not really how I felt, if I was being honest. I wished I could do whatever Karen was doing, whatever made her so comfortable and happy around these people. I pretended I was another cousin or something and laughed at their dopey inside jokes I didn’t even understand. But then I thought maybe I didn’t want to be like Karen—because what was she the rest of the time? Unhappy or locked up or repressed or whatever—who wanted to be like that? Or, if you were going to be like that, who would want to be like that only some of the time? At least be consistent, so you know what you’re dealing with, so you know what it’s going to be like when you wake up the next morning.

We were treated to a second commencement address by someone in the psych department. I remember one little piece of that—the speaker was some old lady. She started winding down, and she said something like, “It’s the obligation of everyone here to help those who need us,” or something like that, and it annoyed me, because I felt like she was taking a shot at me.

Karen just about leapt out of her seat when they called her name. I missed the rest because I had a (real) sneezing fit just as she was striding up to the head of her department who was waiting with her diploma. I got sshed by someone—no one in Karen’s family. I said, “asshole,” right as Karen was sitting down again, loud enough for people to hear it. I mean, that was the point.

After the ceremony, I was standing around with Karen’s family in the lobby. Karen was still backstage or talking to friends somewhere and for whatever reason I got the awful feeling that I had to go. I told them I was going to get a cup of coffee and I dipped out a side door and I just never went back. I snuck all the way back to my room and started furiously packing. My parents were supposed to drive all my stuff back the next day, but I figured I’d stuff as much of it as I could in a suitcase or two and take a bus back that night and leave the rest of it and hope it would still be there when I got back in September.

I did get a couple suitcases packed, and I could have left. That was the plan, I would have been free. But instead I sat on the bed and decided to wait. I wouldn’t call it a pang of conscience. More of a thirst for confrontation. Maybe Karen would tell me what was wrong with me one last time before I left, that might be of some help.

It was maybe an hour I was sitting there. I heard a car pull up to the brownstone and heard Karen bounding up the steps and down the hall up to my door, where she knocked, even though she had a key (maybe not on her). I opened it, then sat back down on my suitcase real quick.

“Where’d you go?” she asked. She was still happy with me, even though I’d ditched her and her family. She was giving me every break she could. I just told her I’d had to go.

She took off her gown and started collecting stuff around the room, I don’t know, whatever she needed. “We’re going out to dinner, you’re welcome to come,” she told me, “or I can come up with an excuse for you if you don’t want to.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“OK,” she said, totally fine with it (amused, if anything). “It’s just, you know,” she said, tearing around the room half in a frenzy, “I sort of didn’t think of it before. But I’m done.” She pulled a sweatshirt off a shelf and a load of books nearly fell on her, but she somewhat miraculously caught them. “Seventeen fucking years, you know?” She saw the suitcase and stopped. “What’s this?” she said.

“I have to pack,” I said. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

She looked at me like bloody murder. Boy was I uncomfortable. “Leaving where.”

“Back to Connecticut for the summer.” Six or seven solid seconds. “I told you about this, right?”

“Nope.” She was holding keys in her hand; she let them drop. She stared a fucking hole in me.

“Remember when we were talking about it the other day?” I ventured. She didn’t move a muscle. “I said, ‘I’m spending the summer in Connecticut this summer.’ You said, ‘I know.’” Nothing. “I remember it was raining at the time.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“This is going even worse than I thought it would,” I said out loud.

“Is there a reason you decided to wait until the day of my college graduation to tell me this?”

“No.” I was starting to feel really bad. So after a pause, I said, “you can come to Connecticut with me.”

“I can come to Connecticut with you, that’s what you’re telling me?”

“Sure.”

“I can leave behind my job here in Boston and live at your house for the summer? Is that your plan?”

Hmm, I thought. This feels like it might be a trap. But I said, “yup.”

“You can go kill yourself.” This was neither the first nor the last time someone told me to kill myself, but out of all of them, it’s probably the time that made me feel the queasiest.

She just left then. Bolted out of the room, down the hall, down the stairs, to her car where her parents were waiting. I followed her out, a few yards behind, for my own safety.

She turned around when she got to her car. “You shouldn’t really kill yourself,” she said. “I know you’re stupid enough to take that seriously, even if you aren’t stupid enough to really kill yourself.” She opened the door, then closed it again. Her parents couldn’t hear us (they were blasting some James Taylor song). “But I kind of hope your car flips over and you burn to death or something.” Then she got in the back seat and they drove off.

She gave her parents some excuse for me, which was nice of her. They never had a clue.

After she was gone I sat on the steps for a while. Bay State was pretty quiet, like it always was. Every once in a while you’d see a graduate walk by with their parents, or a jogger with headphones or something. It was like 6 or something like that, really nice night. Boston’s the nicest place in the world in May and when it snows in December; there’s no beating it. A BU grounds guy dropped a big sack of mulch on the sidewalk across the street and it split and spilled everywhere and the guy just walked away. I sat there for a little while longer before I got up and went back inside, but then decided I’d take a walk around the city because I didn’t have anything else to do, it was all packed away.