All the way to the floor

I watched my mother stroll down 6th Avenue in a Spring dress on her way to the Conan O'Brien show. We had just finished lunch and that morning she had helped me seal the deal on a new apartment, my first in Manhattan. She had been riding the subway, exploring the city, talking to realtors, meeting my coworkers and just generally living it up and getting things done in NYC for a couple of days by then. She looked younger, lighter and happier than I had seen her in years.

This was her second trip to New York. Her first had been about two weeks before with my sister. I was living in Brooklyn with my boyfriend of five years, a guy my entire family barely tolerated but nevertheless supported when necessary. He was one of those people who gets away with terrorizing everyone around him by maintaining an air of victimhood. My mother had had countless arguments with him yet she and the rest of my family still helped us move to New York together.

But that's the way Hartsells are. Once when I was around 10-years-old I was hanging out with a group of my brothers' friends when I happened to say something fairly sarcastic, a skill we all developed at an early age. Someone responded matter-of-factly, "Yep...she's a Hartsell." I didn't know if that was complimentary or critical, but I liked it just the same. Hartsells, as it turns out, tend to be unflappable. This can be both a positive and negative. Sarcasm is our natural response to both attacks and pretension; our smarmy little way of communicating, "Oh, whatever you just said doesn't really matter to me." In moments of great stress or angst, we tend to compartmentalize and focus on whatever it is that has to be done. This can occasionally makes us seem cold and aloof.

However, the good side of this is that in a crisis, Hartsells have incredible focus and flexibility. My sister's friends call my dad "The Wolf" a la Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction. He gets things done, solves problems and otherwise ensures domestic tranquility with an almost imperceptible ease. He can also be a stone cold asshole when confronted with irrational behavior; a trait I inherited from him. But that grace under pressure, that ability to look at a problem and see the solution in all of its simplicity is something I have tried to emulate to varying degrees of success.

Sometimes the solution sucks.

Sometimes it means upsetting your entire life and the life of people you care about in order to edge yourself closer, painfully to a better place. When I left my boyfriend and our apartment in Brooklyn I went to my office in Manhattan and slept on the floor. I had been in New York about 5 months, never lived there alone, and the only people I knew were my coworkers. That night I got a decrepit room in an awful hotel and vowed to be The Wolf in the morning and sort my life out on my own. By 11am the next day I was in tears on a payphone asking my mother to fly to New York and help me. She arrived at 9pm that night.

My mother got us into a better hotel, picked up all of my clothes from my old apartment, talked to my ex, found a few realtors and looked at apartments all while I worked from 9-5. Then when I got off she took me to see the places she thought were nice and after a few days everything was settled. She made friends with everyone in my office, took us to lunch and bought me a second beer at dinner one night. For the first time in years, I remembered that my mom was The Wolf in her own way. She wasn't a Hartsell by birth and while she and my dad are incredibly different people, I began to understand their bond for the first time. Very few people are equally good at putting all emotion on hold and taking care of business. My mother and father both have that ability to see a problem first and how it affects them last. It's an effortless selflessness in the face of adversity, and I will live the rest of my life trying to match it. Where my mother differs is on the sarcasm and intolerance. She's endlessly accommodating, something that is both admired and taken advantage of.

But I digress. My mother was off to see Conan. It was 4:30 and the light was beautiful and she strolled away on her own: no one to take care of, no one to wait for, no one to make comfortable at her expense. She navigated the Times Square crowd like a local and disappeared into the din. That night when she returned to the hotel she was beaming. "I danced with Conan!" Apparently, Conan warms the crowd up by trying to get them on their feet to dance. My mom, alone and unashamed, jumped to her feet and started dancing. Conan ran up the aisle and singled her out, "Hold on, I want everyone to see what you can do!" And they danced.

My mom used to tell me about going to clubs with her cousins when she was younger; how she used to be able to do The Twist all the way to the floor. As she walked away from me that day I saw her briefly as the woman she always wanted to be. You could see in her stride a confident grace, a levity with the tumult.

There's a fine line between responsibility and duty, and in matters of love and family one often isn't sure whether they have a made practical choice or a selfish one. All of the difficult choices I've made in my life were in an effort to be bold, to be nothing but what I'm supposed to be as clearly as I can define it. My solutions aren't always correct, or at least, they aren't always permanent. And my ability to accept heartache as a necessary product of never closing the book on self-discovery has a tendency to leave me shaken and those around me cold. Fear, doubt and recrimination are the bedfellows of longing.

To move forward, one must either be truly confident or dupe themselves with the illusion of confidence. And in that, we Hartsells are the masters. When our bravery fails us, our hubris takes over. A little arrogance goes along way and, eventually, the spirit catches up.

My mother was so self-possessed that day because it didn't matter who was looking at her. She was blithely, bewitchingly alone in a room full of people and cameras. And she danced away my worries, even though I never saw her.

Best Friends and Unrequited Love

Michael threw a love note across the room during pre-algebra class and it landed on my notebook. It was folded down tight and on the front the word, "HI" had been drawn in outline, with the background shaded. I turned the note over; he had shaded the back as well. I slowly opened it:

"Carol, I'm sorry if I'm bothering you, but I love you. You are more precious to me now than ever. The only thing that surpasses your beauty is your mind.
Love, Michael"

This was seventh grade. I was wearing a back brace and had yet to get contact lenses. Nevertheless, I wasn't interested in Michael. Not that way. Not then. He was my best friend and I wanted nothing more. He had black hair that grew straight and fell in his eyes sometimes, dark blue eyes, a smattering of light freckles, his front two teeth angled slightly and his lips made a perfect smirk that he used often, especially whenever I said anything I thought was deep. While he adored me, he also refused to let me get away with being pretentious or flighty and taunted me mercilessly when I was at my worst.

Michael loved me from seventh grade through tenth. All the while we were best friends. We went to movies, passed notes in class, talked for hours at night on the phone, and when we found ourselves hanging out with nothing else to do, he would rub my shoulders and neck, alternating between using his considerable strength and lightly rubbing his fingertips over my bones. I always had a boyfriend at another school so Michael and I never dated. But we wound each other up horribly.

One day between classes we were sitting in the AV booth of our high school auditorium. The lights were off and I was sitting with my back to him, my eyes closed while he ran his hands over my back. I realized that while he was doing this he was moving closer to me and I froze. I couldn't see him but I could feel his black t-shirt touch my button down and I imagined that he also had his eyes closed, hoping that the spinning axis of the earth would accidentally move us together. I heard his breath first, then felt it on the side of my neck just under my ear. A moment later I could feel the warmth of his lips, millimeters from my skin.

And then the fourth period bell rang. We both had Coach Oldham's history class next and he loved to torment students who showed up late. Michael collapsed with his forehead on my shoulder upon hearing the bell and sighed deeply. Years later I pondered over how many blowjobs must have taken place in that booth, how many teen pregnancies began over the sound board, and I lamented that Michael and I were so incapable of enjoying our first kiss. I think it must have meant too much to us. We were romantics: he in love with me for years, me falling for him glacially, bit by bit every day. We couldn't just fool around like everyone else. We had to make each other feel something specific, something we could only feel for each other.

Sometime after that, Michael got over me. He was becoming a man and tired of pining for someone who never seemed to be able to make up her mind about how she felt. He didn't know that my love for him had grown so deep it terrified me. I wanted everything from him. Love, friendship, sex. I still didn't believe in pre-marital sex, but I wanted it from him. I had kept him at arm's length for years because to me, he was an eternity of tenderness and affection and I was as afraid of eternity as I was of death. In seventh grade I imagined having Michael as my boyfriend and I knew I would never have another in school. I didn't want that.

By eleventh grade, I was ready to handle what I felt for him and what I imagined it would be like to be with him physically. I wanted him back in my car driving to the movies, listening to the radio, rolling his eyes at me as I spoke rapturously about R.E.M. and graphic novels. I wanted him to take me home -- his mom was never there -- and undress me on the floor of his room. I wanted to fall asleep in his arms and wake up and rush home frantically, then call him to say goodnight and fall asleep again listening to each other breath. I wanted him to pick me up and swing me around, because he could. I wanted to lie on top of him and run my fingers through his black hair and close his blue eyes with my lips.

None of that ever happened. I found the nerve to tell him how I felt one day and he said, without any maliciousness whatsoever, that he didn't care. He had moved on. My boyfriend Jeff and I had just broken up and I was on the verge of dating Kirk. We were about to graduate high school and I knew this was pretty much the last chance we had. I tried everything. Flirting relentlessly, pouring my heart out, acting like I was cool and didn't care. He didn't fall for any of it.

A few weeks later we were at rehearsal for the Spring play and I had to leave early. Our drama teacher asked Michael to walk me to my car since it was late. Michael and I had both independently taken up smoking, so we decided to share a cigarette since it was a side of each other we'd never seen. We stood by the car and laughed at who we had become. He looked more beautiful than I had ever seen him. He was tall, confident and had lost all of the baby fat that had once made him look less dashing. And for a moment, I saw the glint of giddy nervousness in his eye, something I used to see all the time when we talked. We finished our cigarettes and stood there in silence next to my car. It was cool out but not cold. I hugged him goodbye and he held me for another few minutes. I felt his hands move up to my shoulders as he pushed me back slightly and said, "Ok. I'm going to kiss you like a friend now."

There are people who take part of you with them when they disappear from your life. There are others who leave things behind that you can't shake. I'm not sure what I lost or gained in that kiss, but I know that the boundaries of it stretch for miles. Even now, at 32, after all of the other lips that have touched mine, I can still feel his clearly. I remember how I held back, terrified of what I felt and knowing full well that he didn't want anymore than that one moment. He was conquering what was left of the monkey on his back, and in the process he hollowed out a part of me that now lets in as much bad as good. All love from that moment on could only be bittersweet because it's future no longer seemed uncertain. The beginnings of things betray the endings, and I had to relearn how to enjoy everything in between.

That kiss, though...that stayed with me.