my virginity, I came close.
A year after college graduation, there was Dave, six foot and athletic with a slight overbite that made him good-looking in a sweet way. He drove a hundred ten miles round trip every weekend to see me. I finally had a lover, someone who made me feel beautiful, who made me an even number. I knew he wasn’t the one, but I was enjoying myself. As time went on, I was afraid that if I broke up with him, God would finally get me for Himself. There were also the voices of my southern Italian ancestors in my head: All your cousins your age are married or engaged. What about you? Cos’e` questo soulmate? You’re next in line on both sides of the family. And my own voice. What about me? Why can’t I just want this? Why can’t Dave be enough? I held on for two and a half years. Five months before we broke up, when my mother found out that we’d been sleeping together, she was livid. “What you’ve pulled is absolutely unacceptable under my roof,” her light blue eyes piercing mine as I faced her, my bed in between us, my heart pounding. I was sorry but only because she had found out. Now that I knew how good sex could be, I didn’t want to give it up. If I didn’t get married, the only life my mother and the Church would deem worthy was a nun’s. Three months later I moved into the apartment in Julie and her husband Nick’s house. I wanted to have something to show for myself in place of marriage, so I wouldn’t feel like a failure. I had to get away from my mother’s and Nellie’s fighting, which had become impossible since my mother and Tom married.
On the night I left, she and I were standing at the top of the landing while Tom brought the last of my things to the car. Her anger had cooled months earlier. Now I was the hurt, angry one. I didn’t want to move out knowing that I’d be breaking up with Dave soon, that I’d be alone. I wanted her to march to the front door, spread her arms across it, and tell me not to go—that she and Nellie would go for therapy, I should wait another year or two when I wasn’t so afraid to move out, it was okay if I never got married, she loved me no matter what. All I’d told her was that I didn’t want to marry Dave, which she sensed I blamed her for and I denied, but it was true. I subconsciously blamed her for my calling: maybe if she hadn’t named me after the Blessed Mother or nicknamed me Baby Jesus when I was small…I was jealous that all she’d ever wanted was to marry and have a family. It didn’t matter that I saw how dearly she was paying for it again. I was certain I’d do better. I had no idea I was wounded. Except for Dave, I attracted emotionally unavailable men like my father who never said, “I love you,” or “I’m proud of you” or “Tell me about your day.” I told myself that Papa hadn’t known any better, that he loved us, which was true but not enough. All I’d ever had were some fleeting moments when I’d feel a rush of his attention and affection. It was my mother’s love that always carried me, but it was Papa I was excusing and protecting. I romanticized marriage, making it an eternal honeymoon, but deep down I distrusted men and commitment. I wanted a prince to find and save me, to fill the deepest desires of my heart. What I needed was a Savior.
Four months later when I got home from a New Year’s cruise that I took with my family, I collapsed from the grief. I knew that moving out and breaking up with Dave was going to be hard, but I didn’t know it would feel like someone had died. The singles scene on the cruise was awful. I felt like God had abandoned me. I was terrified He was going to use the silence of my apartment to trap me into the calling I didn’t want. I felt a dark voice close in on me: It would be so much easier if I weren’t here tomorrow. I cried out, “Jesus, please take me.” I didn’t want to die; I wanted to be delivered, but I didn’t want to give up my will, find out for sure what God’s was. If He allowed His own glorious Son to be crucified, why would He ever love or take care of a nobody like me? I still went to Mass but I left as soon as it was over, afraid I’d hear God whisper, Come Follow Me. I told myself that just because I felt called to be a nun when I was a child didn’t mean it was real; how did I know there wasn’t someone else out there for me? If God wasn’t going to give me a husband, I was going to find one myself.
I dated as often as possible. There was Mark, the blue-eyed paramedic my cousin Gino introduced me to (I don’t remember why it didn’t lead anywhere); Vincent, the strawberry-blonde architect who started cancelling our dates because his ex was back in the picture; and Tim, the thirty-year-old lawyer I went out with for three months who wanted to quit his job and move to the south of France to paint. After a few dates, he started shutting down, showing up late, stopping at his mother’s for something to eat even when he and I were going to dinner. Maybe he smelled the Bride magazine I’d bought after three dates. He even asked me to drive. When he didn’t read the anger in my pause, I gave in, because I didn’t want him to break up with me. Sleeping with him only made me angrier, kept me from Holy Communion. When he got up at five to put on sneakers, I couldn’t believe it. “You’re leaving me to go running?” I asked, humiliated.
There were stretches when I enjoyed being single, like when my coworker Henry and I rented a house on the Jersey Shore, and he invited his friends, and I invited mine or when I threw parties, and my apartment was brimming. I was happy bringing people together, but when they left, or I had too much time on my hands, I felt helpless and panicked. Except for the gym and my job as an admissions counselor, I didn’t have a lot going on. My close friends were either married or unavailable, like Silvia who was in med school or Kara who lived seventy miles away. I wasn’t involved in anything—a charity, a team, not even a hobby—to pull me out of myself. I joined a couple of young adult groups, one for Catholics in Manhattan, but if I didn’t see anyone in the audience who looked attractive and well-adjusted, I walked out when the guest speakers were on their last syllable. Three day weekends with no plans were the worst. I’d start out hopeful on Saturday mornings, do three miles on the treadmill with the stereo blasting and the blinds thrown open to let the sun pour in. Then I’d make a pot of cinnamon decaf and a batch of corn muffins and give myself some kind of project like cleaning out my drawers, but when I was done and had forty-eight hours to go, all the nothing made me feel so miserable that I curled up on my couch sobbing, convinced God had forgotten me, but also, in the back of my mind, terrified that He hadn’t.
Things got especially bad the second winter in my apartment, one of the stormiest in history. Just as we dug out from one blizzard, another hit. Nick helped me with all the shoveling, but all I thought was, I’m alone. The one date I almost had with an investment banker from Julie’s firm on Valentine’s weekend got cancelled because of another storm and never got rescheduled, because Julie hadn’t thought we were a good match to begin with. I should have trusted her, but I didn’t. When I broke up with Dave, she was loving and sympathetic, but since then I felt she was avoiding me. In retrospect, I couldn’t blame her. I was needy and holding a grudge from childhood that I wasn’t fully aware of. While I was always trying to close the six year gap between us, she was usually looking for me to run her errands. When I started going out with Dave, my insecurities disappeared, but now that I was alone, I felt twelve again. One day when she calmly corrected me for not bringing the garbage out in time, I snapped, “Sorry, I’m not obsessed with garbage removal like you,” taking a shot at her domestic life, which I secretly envied. I wouldn’t even call her until one night when my fear and dread were so bad I didn’t know what else to do.
It was the end of the first day back to work after another blizzard, and everyone was gone, even my intensely dedicated boss Doris. The office was silent except for the wind against the thin paned windows. I had finished calling a few student applicants and had settled in to write a couple of cover letters. Even though working in Admissions was a good fit, I fantasized about a job in publishing, certain it would be easier and more glamorous than schlepping to high schools two hours away where students walked passed my Westerly College table toward the far more popular Villanova. My first two sentences came quickly, but then I couldn’t think of anything else, and the more I tried the more defeated I felt. I was resentful that instead of working on Madison Avenue, I was in a hundred-year-old house where I couldn’t keep the space heater on without blowing a fuse. I started telling off one person after another in my head: Janine and Julie for double dating and not including me; Doris for getting upset with me for not inviting her to a counselor’s birthday that someone else had planned; my mother for not intuiting how unhappy I was. I shook my head, saved the
