Return to a city
She is a disaster I will walk into the center of and then run away from for years to come, and this is the first leap.
“Meet me in the middle,” she says.
I’m teetering along the edge of a curb outside my friend’s townhouse in D.C., taking one slow step at a time like I’m Mary Lou Retton on a balance beam. Emily is in LA, but she leaves in a few weeks to move back to New York, and she’s decided I should help make at least half the drive.
“Just tell me which airport, and I’ll be there to pick you up,” she says.
It’s May 2001, and my hand sweats around the bulky plastic of my new flip phone held close to my cheek. Emily’s voice is creaky and out of tune, still a jarring difference in quality from the landline connection we’ve mostly been talking on, but I have unlimited weekend minutes and can’t think of a better use than trying to sustain this tiny precious bubble between the two of us.
“I have a job,” I point out, though we both know I’ve already agreed.
“You hate your job.”
I don’t exactly — it’s my dream job, or was supposed to be. But this is yet another weekend I’ve found a reason to escape my life in New York and everything that’s not quite working. I don’t want to work or live somewhere I’m mostly trying to figure out how to get away from. I don’t know what to do instead.
“It’s just a few days,” she tries. “Come on. They’re not going to fire you.”
I almost wish it were that simple, that the good-hearted and overworked activist-journalists I work with would realize the mistake they’d made in laying off the more expensive and experienced senior editors in lieu of my cheaper, younger, still idealistic efforts.
The part that feels simple is that Emily wants me, wants me to do something, and so I will. Emily is a disaster I will walk into the center of and then run away from for years to come, and this is the first leap.
-
The cheapest one-way ticket I can find to somewhere in middle America arrives in Kansas City, Missouri, two weeks later. Emily plans her route east accordingly.
This part only sounds weird when I say it out loud to people who don’t understand that the internet’s most addictive lure, especially at the turn of the millennium, is not just for stockpiling obscure facts but for meeting near-strangers who love the same things you do.
The only time we’ve spent in person was in April, when Emily came to New York to visit her family, who live just north of the city. She shows up at my Brooklyn apartment and sleeps on my extra futon for a night. We go out drinking with some old friends of hers, none of whom believe that we met online. After the third or fourth dubious response, we give up and invent our own origin story: we met in Baja at my brother’s surf competition. Neither of us have ever been to Mexico. My brother can barely stand up on a surfboard. But her friends buy it, believing our bullshit instead of the truth.
The truth is our story starts with The West Wing, during its second full-hearted, wide-eyed season. We exchange comments on blogs and message boards, then emails, then instant messages, and then start talking on the phone. Emily is far from the only friend I’ve met in a similar manner, and by the time we connect, she’s been collecting and creating dozens of little sub-cultures and communities of fangirls for years.
I’ve had internet friends before, but somehow, being near the center of Emily’s orbit feels like I’ve been inducted into a high realm of the most generous and excitable cult. Already we are co-conspirators, our version of the truth besting the real world’s boring reality, and I am drunk on the epic story we are writing together.
-
Emily’s made steady progress from LA to the midwest all week, her cat Hawkeye smuggled into motels in her giant messenger bag each night. I pack light and catch the A train to JFK.
She’s waiting at the curb with her windows rolled down when I come out of the Kansas City airport, smoking and singing along to Patty Griffin. Pretty much everything she owns is crammed into her black Jetta.
“Welcome to KCMO,” she says, as I shove my bag down into the passenger seat footwell. “Where should we go now?”
This isn’t, I realize immediately, so much of a long-distance move as a road trip. I am exceptionally familiar with the former — my family picked up and moved every time things weren’t going right, and I attended no fewer than five kindergartens and lived in nearly 40 houses or apartments by the time I left for college in Chicago.
We have five days, almost six, before I have to be back at work, and only about 1,200 miles to cover. “Well, I’ve never been here,” I say.
Emily sucks in a deep drag on her Parliament Light, cheekbones sharp in relief. She has a long nose, a thick shock of black hair that is always falling in her eyes, and a mouth that curves up one side in a permanent smirk, the result of a childhood dog bite and subsequent plastic surgery. We have spent so few of our many hours together actually in person that her face, and her jittery jangly energy, feel newly fascinating.
“I’m making good time,” she says. “Let’s just stay here tonight.”
And so off we head in search of famous barbecue. We may have met on the internet, but the internet is, in mid-2001, not quite yet at our fingertips. We can text on our phones, but there’s no Twitter, no data plan, no Yelp to consult about lunch, or Google Maps to navigate. We have a stack of paper maps to lead us across the country and an old-fashioned ability to believe strangers we ask for help might have our best interests in mind.
And we have my favorite resource, as a still-idealistic young journalist: the local paper. We slot two quarters into a metal box on the sidewalk, lifting out a copy of the Kansas City Star, and get caught up on city politics over ribs. The sports page yields a stroke of what feels like destiny. The Royals are in town and have a night game. We drop Hawkeye and our bags at a cheap motel and drive out through the corn fields to find the ballpark.
They’re playing the Arizona Diamondbacks, but still Emily digs a blue-and-orange Mets t-shirt out from one of the dozen bags stuffed with clothes in the backseat and changes in the parking lot. She tells me, not for the first or last time, about going to see the 1986 World Series with her dad. Like me, Emily loves the idea of sports, and especially the stories behind them, almost more than the actual athletics themselves, and like me, it’s inexorably, obviously tied up in our dysfunctional relationships with our fathers. She doesn’t have a lot of stories where her dad comes off sounding great, but that World Series game, when she was 10 years old, still has a magical halo for reasons beyond the Mets’ unlikely championship win.
My dad taught me to love baseball, too, reciting stats about his favorite teams and players and, in lieu of reading me bedtime stories, calling the play-by-play for famous games from his childhood like a sportscaster. I was naturally inclined toward ambidexterity — or perhaps just a lefty whose orientation was not so binary to demand resistance from the norm in a world built for right-handers — so I always caught with my traditionally dominant hand. He taught me to hit switch-handed, because it was confusing to the opposing team, and because when you hit left you had a few steps’ lead to first base. I learned how to field a hard ball to the body by shielding the glove in the curve of my shoulder, and above all else, how to avoid throwing “like a girl”. (He also prized learning to shake hands decisively and not throwing a punch with your thumb tucked inside.)
Though a few Little League teams in the ’80s had been forced to take girls, and I might have made a similar case for myself, we settled on girls’ softball when I was 9 or 10, local teams that he coached as I played 2nd base or shortstop (his former positions) reasonably well, for a girl, until the girls throwing fast pitch got so good I was scared at every at-bat that I might actually die and lost my nerve. But still my father had instilled in me the long, slow zen of watching a baseball game unfold, how to keep score with a pencil in the program while waiting for that breathless moment when the steady rhythm of strikes and balls explodes into the perfect ballet of a double-play.
Kauffman Stadium, the Royals’ home turf, feels like a Field of Dreams mirage, rising above the corn fields outside the exurbs. We drink cold beers on a warm summer night and let the strangers sitting around us tell us everything that’s wrong with the home team that year: no depth in the bullpen, too many trades without enough return, rock-bottom payroll, that guy at first who thinks he’s a star but is past his prime.
I buy a Royals hat in bright blue and another ice-cold watery beer for each of us. The home team wins 3-2 that night, a rarity in a season that ends up tying a franchise-worst record with 97 losses. The vibe is good. We tuck our shoulders in together, whispering sentence fragments into each other’s ears like we have this great secret no one else can possibly understand. We are alien visitors to their planet, two girls soaking in every detail of their culture and filing it away for future use. We’re building something together as magical as a baseball diamond manned by long-dead legends.
The motel room is small but the air conditioning works, a relief given that the hot, humid midwest evening hasn’t settled much even close to midnight. Hawkeye sulks in his messenger bag and barely acknowledges we’ve returned.
There is one double bed covered in a scratchy brown coverlet, so I assume we are sleeping in it together. I don’t know what that means. In the handful of months we’ve been chatting late into the night, long, circuitous and confessional phone calls, we’ve never precisely addressed what exactly it was we are becoming to each other.
We’ve both had boyfriends and girlfriends, but that’s hardly made it less confusing what might happen now. Emily seems to me, especially at this time, to be a person who is always surrounded by beautiful friends jockeying for her brilliant attention. But I greedily hold close the fact that she asked me — demanded, lobbied, and guilted me, and only me! — to make this journey with her. That means something more, right?
I know how I feel around her, how reluctant I am to close out the AIM chat window no matter how late it’s gotten on my east coast, or how happy I am when I log back in the next morning to find that Emily, a chronic insomniac, is in fact still there on the other end, ready to pick up wherever we left off. Those soft secret whispered life histories spun out on the phone. The way we swallow our smiles while her friends all but ask, and then simply assume, that we are dating. That means she wants to. I think. I hope.
At this point, 24 years old, I’ve been in love only once, a long entanglement in college that was more of a deep romantic friendship. Life as a young queer campus activist in the late ‘90s made it easy to act sexually confident, especially with friends I loved but never felt could be serious relationship potential. New York, the last two years, has largely been a solo adventure, punctuated by some fairly terrible one-night-stands and a few ongoing friends-with-benefits arrangements that are fun but somehow never compel either party to seek something more permanent.
Whatever this is with Emily already feels bigger and potentially more important than everything and everyone that’s come before. It’s reassuring: I can fall in love again. I have a life of wild adventure ahead of me.
But I also can’t quite figure her out. She carries herself like a broken bird, skinny and scraped up, her long neck held proud and eyes darting around, missing nothing. I can’t shake the feeling that while she is still excruciatingly elusive to me in so many ways, to her I am an open book.
We both strip down to our underwear and t-shirts and crawl into the bed as if we’ve been sharing one for months.
“Good night,” she says, and turns off the light, turning away in her Mets shirt, onto her side. I do the same.
-
On our way back to the interstate the next day, we pass a small park where kids are playing in a Little League game, and decide to pull over and watch and write a little.
Though we met because of The West Wing, at Emily’s suggestion I watched all of Aaron Sorkin’s previous show, Sports Night. Pre-Netflix, before “binge-watching” even existed as a concept, I plowed through both seasons of the critically acclaimed but short-lived series via VHS tapes onto which Emily had dubbed all the episodes, then mailed to me in New York. (The expectation was that I’d return them to her or pass along to another nascent fan.)
One of the first times we ever talked online, she immediately insisted that I had to read her “magnum opus,” a long piece of fan fiction she’d written about Sports Night’s two lead anchors. I’d written fanfic myself, even a few pieces I felt reasonably proud of and that, amazingly, Emily had wildly praised. But I’d never met someone so confident about it. “When I get famous,” she said, “I’m going to tell everyone this is how I learned to write.”
Somewhere in the last couple weeks of planning, we decided this trip was the perfect chance to collaborate, to write a story together. Emily’s writing is crisp, smart and better than anything I’ve accomplished to that point, though I’d considered myself a writer since I could hold a pencil well enough to scribble out stories as a kid. We have my first-generation Apple iBook, the clamshell-shaped white-and-teal plastic case with a handle that folds out so you can carry it like a small briefcase, and a spiral-bound notebook we use when the battery has died. We pass one or both back and forth throughout the trip, scribbling down ideas in the car or when we stop at greasy spoons for dinner.
Creating a story out of thin air with a co-conspirator is, at its best, a dizzying and seductive adventure. I’d never done it before and have only rarely since. I had other friends who were writers but none who would admit as readily that it made us, among other unflattering qualities, excellent liars. At that I had a head start — my father was both a chauvinist softball coach and a second-rate con man — and for years felt I’d upgraded the family business by refusing to lie for personal gain, limiting my elaborate falsehoods to fictional characters.
I underestimated how well I’d learn to lie to myself, and how falling in love with a writer who wasn’t even particularly trying not to lie or be loved was maybe not going to lead me toward happiness. Instead, I steered into a series of dramatic choices that would themselves make for excellent stories, if only years after their sting faded.
-
We drive to St. Louis, then dip down onto I-64 through Kentucky. The Jetta’s air conditioning is broken, but the stereo is loud enough to hear even with the windows rolled down and the hot freeway breeze blowing in our faces. We listen to a lot of Bruce Springsteen (my collection) and Tom Waits (hers).
In Louisville, we eat a late dinner at a shitty bar, where the bartender absolutely cannot grasp how to make Emily a black-and-tan, her drink du jour, even though they have both Guinness and Bass on tap and Emily tries to talk her through the simple combination. We pull out the notebook and retire to a back table to write longhand, passing the pages back and forth and taking turns making changes and then adding new scenes to our story. The bartender who can’t make a black-and-tan goes in there verbatim. It’s a story about a road trip, except really it’s about sports, except really it’s about two men who’d rather talk about sports than their feelings for each other.
We watch the Sixers play in the NBA Finals on a tiny TV mounted in the corner, above the bar. Allen Iverson is on a hot streak, finally playing like his hype had promised all along. He’d been on the cover of Sports Illustrated in April, pouring out his tattooed heart, the classic story of a young man struggling to live up to his father-figure coach’s deep-seated faith that under all the misbehavior is a talented and worthy young man. The article ends with a plaintive plea from Iverson’s mom: Larry Brown, please don't leave my son. It becomes a kind of shorthand for me and Emily after that as we write together — how to nail the landing, leave it all on the court, break the readers’ hearts.
Maybe we can get to Philadelphia in time for a game. The broadcasters tell us they have two more in a row at home. It’s as good a plan as any of the rest of this.
The next day, somewhere in eastern Kentucky or maybe western West Virginia, we pass signs for a lake not far off the freeway and take the exit like we’re in a car chase, too fast, half-lost. It’s nothing fancy, and we don’t have swimsuits, but we strip down to jean shorts and bras and splash in, delighted to wash off the road grit and stomp around in squishy mud. Emily unearths two bandanas from the back of the Jetta and we soak them in clean water from the park bathroom and get back in the car, refreshed, handkerchiefs tied around our necks like Thelma & Louise.
We stop that night in Charleston, West Virginia, which is comparatively cosmopolitan or maybe just cheap enough that we can afford a nice hotel and a real sit-down dinner at a place right on the river downtown. I’m a recovering picky eater and Emily is only recently delivered from a childhood allergy to most seafood, which it turns out you can grow out of, and that night we begin a tradition of interrogating our waiters about fish, and in particular about oysters, as we make a pact to cautiously expand our palate.
There’s a movie theater nearby playing Moulin Rouge, which has been out for a month but neither of us has seen, despite our abiding love for all things Baz Luhrmann. We are awestruck by its hyperbolic, magical vision of love and death through the lens of reimagined and remixed pop hits. It’s seductive, romantic and tragic — and though I’ve spent the last few long days in the car trying to reconfigure my expectations of whatever this relationship is with Emily, tonight undeniably feels like a date. Dinner and a movie, a walk along the river as we belt out our favorite snippets of songs, twirling and dancing in the streets like the theater kids we never really grew out of being.
And yet, back at the hotel, it simmers back down into a sleepy asexuality. This room, by far our fanciest yet, has two queen-sized beds. The road is catching up to us both. I can feel the possibility that this will be its own epic romance slipping away, shivering under the too-strong air conditioning and cocooned in nearly all the clothes I brought with me under my own bed’s comforter.
-
Hour after hour in the car and we have yet to run out of things to talk about.
We challenge each other to create epic lists, both ranked and simply encyclopedic: best books we’ve ever read, episode titles from The X-Files for each letter of the alphabet, our favorite constitutional amendments from most loved to least necessary. We are two bookish girls who invented our own fun and games for most of our internal childhoods, and the chance to delve into such unbridled imagination with a partner in crime is still a novel experience for me, an intoxicating one.
Many of our lists are little more than an expanded game of “I Spy”: most hopeless-sounding town to grow up in, best/worst desert island food if the selection was limited only to the last gas station where we stopped, worst tractor-trailers to drive behind in fear they might spill their oversized cargo. The most dangerous to be behind, we’d figured, was large mechanical equipment — massive drills, steel I-beams destined for some skyscraper, oversized trucks or cars themselves.
We don’t spend much time in silence, comfortable or otherwise. Instead, it’s like a sprint to the finish line, over and over, to spin another tall tale or excavate a childhood story. It’s a crash course in each other’s creation myths, like a summer school class that crams a year’s worth of learning into a short week or two.
After cutting up through West Virginia and skirting along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, we turn north again on I-81, headed toward Harrisburg. We’ll have to make our way off the major interstates, through Amish country, in order to hit Philadelphia without a massive backtrack. We’re amped up from diner coffee and push through well after dark, but greatly overestimate the roadside offerings available in rural Pennsylvania, driving first eight miles in one direction off the freeway and then back and another nine in the opposite direction in hopes of finding a motel that both has vacancy and an office still open to take our money.
Outside Lancaster, just before midnight, there’s suddenly a massive traffic jam. We idle for a few minutes, then turn the car off and get out to see what’s caused such an unlikely backup. Walking down the middle of darkened country road — there are no cars coming towards us — with only the other stalled cars’ headlights to make our way, we begin to notice something that looks like snow. It’s obviously not — the summer night temperature is still well into the 80s — but whatever white substance is floating through the air has that broad, flat, almost leafy weight to it, like how potato flakes look on film when they’re standing in for snow. It collects in fluffy piles on the asphalt, swirling in the light summer breeze.
Emily darts and dodges around until she catches one in her hand, pinching a thin spine between her fingers. It’s a feather.
We keep walking, now even more confused, feathers swirling around our legs like we’re stumbling through a pillow fight. A few hundred yards up, a small flock of chickens runs across the street in a squawking fury. Just ahead is a jack-knifed truck, the cab still on all four wheels but its trailer twisted, overturned, crates spilling out. There’s a sheriff’s deputy, and the truck driver is bleeding a little from the forehead but otherwise seems fine, his radio crackling with voices up above us in the front seat.
“Chicken truck wasn’t even on our list,” Emily says as we walk back to her car. We’d conceded that an entire trailer packed with full-grown livestock, such as cows, could do lethal damage to the tiny Jetta, but we hadn’t come close to accounting for smaller game.
The cop tells us our best bet to find a place to sleep is to turn around and drive back past the freeway the other way, again, and close to one in the morning, we find a motel where at least the office light is still on, even if we have to ring the bell twice before someone shuffles out to check us in.
A sweet Amish girl, maybe still a teenager, asks us how many beds we need and we both shrug. She gives us a room with one. I dream of chickens crossing the road, back and forth in various formations, and a line of cars nudging their way through the crowd.
-
We make it to Philly in time for the Sixers’ Finals homestand, but of course it’s sold out as the city celebrates their team’s winningest run in almost 20 years. We watch instead in a neighborhood bar packed full of fans, hollering and cheering as if we stumbled in from down the street and not midway through a weeklong trip. This bartender makes Emily a black-and-tan with a casual, bored flick of the wrist under each tap.
The game doesn’t go well. It’s not quite over for the Sixers, but it’s close. After a hot hot hot streak, the Sixers are at the end of what will turn out to be Iverson’s best season of his career, with Brown named NBA coach of the year. But after beating the Lakers in the first game of the Finals, they’ll struggle to come back, dropping four in a row, including this one.
Especially because it’s the playoffs, hotels in the city are absurdly expensive, and because Emily went to Bryn Mawr nearby for a few years, she’s already calculating how much easier the familiar drive up to Brooklyn will be if we leave now instead of the next day. We get back in the Jetta, each passing mile marker now a countdown to the end of the trip, the possibility of simply not stopping, of driving over that cliff. The Verrazano Narrows Bridge is practically empty, and we’re back in front of my studio apartment by two or three a.m.
Five days away should be a brief blip, but walking back in the door with Emily the tiny apartment feels both insignificant — we are but weary travelers returned after a great adventure — and monumental: is there a whole second act to my time in New York that has maybe just begun? I’ve been so sure I am almost ready to leave the east coast for good. Home again after an almost inexplicable, impulsive interlude, I’m rethinking everything.
It’s stuffy and stale though I’ve been gone less than a week. I turn on the air conditioning unit my stepdad carried down the block from the discount electronics store and helped install, another reason the prospect of summer in New York seems full of potential and not just humid misery. I can’t leave now that I have an air conditioner.
Hawkeye won’t come out of his bag. Emily unfolds my couch futon so it lays flat, curling into a compact ball on her side, and I crawl into my own bed a dozen feet away. We sleep.
Next week, because the calendar can be a cruel reminder of the worst times as well as the best, is — impossibly — the tenth anniversary of Emily’s death in 2013.
I can count on one hand the people who most made me who I am today, and Emily will always be among them. For the better part of a decade, all those anxious growing into a real grown-up years of my twenties — even when we were determinedly not speaking to each other, before we would find our way back again, after we drove each other to the brink — she pushed and shoved and demanded I become a truer, better version of myself.
I met Emily at precisely the moment when my post-college momentum and sense of self had stalled out, when the giant, Sorkinesque question of “What’s Next?” loomed so large and seemingly unanswerable. And then — there was Emily, who had a million ideas about what we could do with ourselves for the next minute or hour or year or decade. Most of them were terrible, awful, often illegal ideas. All of them were crackling and vibrant and seemed so necessary in the moment that everything else faded away.
She made me feel crazy and brilliant and impossibly clever. Three months after this road trip, we survived 9/11 together, kind of (“the worst thing to happen to New York since the Dodgers left,” her grandfather famously said), then each moved back and forth across the country a few more times. Our self-fulfilling spin cycle of codependency infuriated my friends. We broke each other’s hearts, I know, over and over.
And even when we were joking about it — when we decided to be roommates in 2005, we cavalierly said, “What could we do to each other that’s any worse than we’ve already survived?” — it felt like a dramatic interlude we acted out for each other, a story we were still writing. I ran away from her and back to her until I couldn’t take it any more and instead told her to leave.
I still can’t look back and imagine a different way it could have gone between us, when it went so wrong, but among my few life regrets is not having found some way to reach out to her again with love and friendship and kindness. I wish we’d made more lists together. I hate that she never got to see David Tennant in Jessica Jones, or Gillian Anderson in Sex Education, or Michelle Yeoh in Everything, Everywhere, or me finally falling for Will Riker.
I hope there’s some peace now in her troubled bones. She should have had a longer story.
I come back not to return;
no more do I wish to mislead myself.
It is dangerous to wander
backward, for all of a sudden
the past turns into a prison.—Pablo Neruda, “Return To A City,” Extravagaria
I wrote most of the above after reading Rachael Herron’s excellent Fast-Draft Your Memoir in 2018, before I decided I wasn’t sure I wanted to give more time and mental real estate over to the hard times of my early twenties. But I was inspired by recent work-related memoirs of both secret teen dreams and epic road trip disasters to revisit this part and at least move it along a bit. Let it have a little sunshine. Remember the dizzying heights.
Thanks to Jess Driscoll, Sara Sarasohn, and to Alexander Chee, who taught us to use our own artifacts to reconstruct the past. I’ve done everything I can think of to fact-check the details here against cached internet archives and my scraps of writing and photos from that trip, but the only parts I’m 100 percent sure are objectively true are the final scores of the games.
Absolutely beautiful Shana. Thank you so much for sharing. ❤️
Love this, Shana.