prelude part two
Click here to start at the beginning.
Part II
I graduated a year and a half later, in May of 1999. I’d spent the first half of my senior year in a study abroad program in Paris, and I’d used this as an excuse for not having made any plans for after graduation. I moved home to Nyack, and quickly opted for the path of least resistance, accepting a full-time position at the company where I’d worked the previous four summers. They were a not-for-profit Medicaid managed care organization. For the next three years I convinced myself I could find post-academic contentment if I was doing social worker-ly good in the world. I was the one who could pick up a phone and tell a pharmacist, “Yes, give her the antibiotics for the baby’s ear infection. Then call me at the office in the morning and I’ll make sure you get paid”. I was the one attending policy meetings in Albany and bringing back a presentation to executive staff. I was the one planning fund-raising events with the March of Dimes and the United Way. I was all those things and more, but I was also kidding myself. I got two promotions in three years, but happiness continued to elude me, and I got more and more bitter.
Because there was a whole in my heart that would only be filled by writing, and member newsletters did not count. I was young, and I was a spoiled brat, but I thought I knew what I wanted. Especially after 9/11, I was haunted by the certainty that I was wasting time. So I quit. They were sad to see me go, but not that sad, because I had become unpredictable. They gave me severance, so I was set for a while. (See? Spoiled.)
I blame my unpredictability on my sense of being un-tethered. In late 1999, I had moved out of my mother’s house and into my own apartment less than three blocks away, within easy walking distance. I was mostly glad to be on my own, but by 2001 I wished I’d stayed at home longer, because I was never ever going to be able to go back. Mom and John, her husband, were selling the house and nearly all of their possessions, retiring and moving onto a 45-foot wooden sailboat, a Herreschoff Mobjack named North Star. She was (and still is) a beautiful boat, with gleaming varnish and elegant lines. John had been in the Navy, and this was his life-long dream, to captain his own vessel, drifting in peace up and down the Atlantic seaboard, eventually coming to rest in the Caribbean. My mom was along for the ride, joining in his search for peace and quiet and the perfect island.
I was happy and excited for them, in spite of my own fears and losses. The loss of my childhood home was traumatic. My Grandpa José had built the house. The day I was born, my mother went into labor while laying tile in the kitchen. A section of the linoleum floor remained bumpy and uneven for more than two decades, until Mom and John renovated the kitchen themselves right before they put the house on the market.
By the time they’d been gone a year, many things had changed, both in my narrow life and in the greater world around me. 9/11 had passed, leaving me shaken and stirred and sobbing. I’d taken a leave of absence from work, and returned but eventually quit. I made a serious of disastrous decisions, mostly financial, which left me unable to rent my own apartment after I finally broke up with my fiancé of nearly five years. Through a friend of a friend, I managed to find a great place, one half of a two-family house. Miraculously, my new landlords skipped the credit check. They welcomed my cat, Rabbit, who I’d fed from a bottle since he was two weeks old. At that moment, he was the only normal thing left in my life.
I was happily unemployed and I planned to spend at least six months supporting myself with my severance and finally writing a novel. I got started. But disaster didn’t wait to strike.
On October 31, 2002, I left the house with George, the ex-fiance who I was, typically, still seeing. We went to see The Ring. It was the first horror movie I’d even seen in a theater. George is a film geek with a special place in his heart for Japanese horror, and he’d been working on me for years.
We drove home afterwards to a fire truck blocking my street. I imagined one of our neighbors and an upset jack-o-lantern. I remembered the cold air as we’d left earlier, air that smelled like snow and had caused me to close my bedroom window for the first time. I remembered pausing for a moment in the driveway, the night silent except for the theme from John Carpenter’s Halloween, which played from a neighbor’s dark porch. Later, much later, I would also remember the feeling that I’d forgotten something, something important but unreachable.
Because the fire was in my house, in my very bedroom, started by a cigarette left smoldering in a garbage can. I lost nearly everything that night, including my train of thought. I fell into a haze.
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Posted on September 11th, 2008 under Grenada • Tags: backstory, memoir. • 
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September 11th, 2008 at 7:23 am
Nice work, Maria, looking forward to more. Great read!