Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2002-08-19- 1:48 a.m.

Two Characters In Search Of A Country Song

8.15.02 – 7:45 p.m.
I consider Thanksgiving to be my favorite holiday. For all the reasons mentioned in that entry, and one more of special significance: on Thanksgiving, all of my family, despite whatever their differences are, tries their best to be on their best behavior. It is a chance for me to enjoy all the best qualities of the people I’m related to, and to avoid most of the inevitable baggage that comes from being related to one another. Rachel, on the other hand, hates Thanksgiving.
We’re on the road home now; in fact, we’re more than halfway there. The vacation is now for all intents and purposes over, and our minds have moved on to what we’ll have to take care of when we get home. I’m reminded about when I was in high school, and my friends and I would go to the Adirondacks in the summer and climb mountains. Not the sort of mountains you need oxygen and sherpas to climb, of course, just the sort of mountains that you walk a path up and then back down again. The climb up was of course the more physically tasking, but it always seemed easier. As you went up, you could measure your distance to the summit, look at how much you had achieved and anticipate the victory of making it to the top. Getting to the top of the mountain, that was your goal. The climb down, well, it may not have been as hard physically, but the promise of making it back to the car, well, it just doesn’t have the same allure.
That’s how it is with the two of us now. We’re just doing the part we have to do, the trip home. All the magic of the ride up is gone; she’s withdrawn into herself, and I’m driving along feeling hurt and unable to quite fathom why. Not only can’t I figure out what she’s done to hurt my feelings, I’m pissed at myself as I drive that I’ve allowed her far enough in that I can get hurt. It’s been a month and a half – I should be able to shrug off mass infidelity at this stage.
But with Rachel and I right now, there is this presumption going on among all our friends that this is essentially the relationship that will solve the two of us. There is something vaguely disconcerting about this; the way her friends will be so excited to welcome me into their lives, or the way they will tell me about how things will be with Rachel and I after six months. And my friends aren’t much better. I’m finding it a little hard to fight against all this presumption; it seems like it is just easier to go along with everyone for right now. I’m looking at it from the standpoint of economy of debate; if I decide just to change my own mind, I only need to have one debate, but if I want to change all of them, I’ve got to have the same conversation two or three dozen times. Sometimes it is just easier to go with the flow. Sometimes it’s easier just to believe, even in the face of the evidence.
We’re sitting in a roadside Friendly’s, off of I-95 in Connecticut, and we’re getting lousy service. It’s been fifteen minutes since I ordered my burger and fries and Rachel asked for her chicken fingers and house salad and we have yet to receive our drinks, much less rolls or anything. We’re well past the point of chit-chat; we’ve been on vacation away from newspapers or outside events for six days and trapped in a car together for six hours. But the silence is growing oppressive. If the sign of a healthy relationship is the ability to sit comfortably in silence, then we are ailing, if not code blue just yet. So I ask her why it is she hates Thanksgiving.
She tells me a story. Her mom left her father when she was in college. Her mother had wanted to leave sooner, but stayed in order to get a better idea of what their family finances were, to insure her father couldn’t cut off Rachel’s college tuition. Her father didn’t take it well, to put it mildly. That year, Rachel decided to spend Thanksgiving with her dad. She isn’t sure exactly why, perhaps it was because she felt badly for him, or maybe she just wanted to try and preserve a relationship with him. In the car, on the way to Thanksgiving dinner at the home of family friends, her dad tears into her. He blames her for the divorce. And as they are pulling onto the street where they are supposed to have Thanksgiving, he calls her a “fucking bitch”.
Rachel refuses to join her father for dinner. She asks him to take her home. He refuses. She proceeds to call herself a cab from her cell phone. She takes the cab back to her father’s house, gets in her car, stops to pick up a frozen pizza, and eats it alone in her mother’s apartment for Thanksgiving dinner. It took her father over two years to apologize for that. In the meantime, he remarried and didn’t even invite Rachel.
She looks up from her plate (in the time it has taken to tell this story, our food has come – all at once, and kind of cold, despite the forty minute wait…. Friendly’s sucks), and says to me, “I tell you sometimes that I’m sorry I don’t make it clear how I feel, how I intellectualize my emotions. The thing is, I’d love to have a dad I could count on, a dad I could support and who would support me. But I don’t, and no matter what I want, that just ends up with me being hurt. And that’s how I learned, and that’s just how it is.”
And I nod sympathetically, and I try to find the right thing to say, and not to be too sorry that I asked. So I offer her the option of coming to spend Thanksgiving with my family, and I say to her that I can’t promise much, but that I’d try my best to make sure she doesn’t have to worry about having a terrible Thanksgiving this year. And she says to me, with real venom, that she doesn’t need me to make sure she doesn’t have a terrible Thanksgiving this year, and that she can take care of herself. So I apologize, and tell her I certainly didn’t mean to suggest she couldn’t take care of herself.
But even as I start to understand better, I wonder if understanding makes any of this more appealing. I understand her reserve, her intellectualization of emotion, but none of that is really heartening if I’m going to be trying to make some sort of romance with this girl. It isn’t that I don’t believe I might be able to thaw her heart, or that I don’t feel I haven’t done a little already. But my heart is beaten and bruised as it is; I’m not sure I’m up for the heavy lifting of trying to salvage someone else’s too. Maybe she doesn’t need me to do that for her either, and in this too, she can take care of herself. There’s some stupid beer commercial where a guy says he doesn’t want a girl who needs him, but someone who just really wants him. I don’t know if that is what I’m up for. I think, for better or worse, that I’d like to be needed.
11:24 p.m.
I drop Rachel off at her building. I double park outside, and help her carry her bags from the car to her elevator. She asks me what I’m doing that weekend, and I tell her I’m not sure. She says she’ll call me tomorrow, and she kisses me once on the lips and says goodnight. As I head out to the car, I’m a little bit amazed: it seems I can take my first vacation in three years, and come home, and find out that nothing much has changed at all.

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Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
Don't Worry, It's Coming - 2003-08-02

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