Walk Away, a memoir

The past lives in our skins, our synapses, our laughter, our scars. It lives in places where our best and worst memories happened: warm meadows where we nested in long grasses, rooms with blood-stained plaster walls, empty beaches where we walked away.

I’d walked away from a violent love affair, and then from a series of less toxic relationships with men who left me feeling diminished. Each time, I promised myself, was the last time.

Then I met another man, who was tall and questioning and brilliant, who had his own dark places. I was fifty years old by then…

Walk Away, a memoir

In my second year of law school, after a brief stay in a rental house in another town, Mink and I moved back to our urban slum neighborhood in Lynn, renting a two-room apartment on the third floor of a tenement complex called Kingsley Terrace.

The building was below code in many ways; there was no security system, the windows rattled in their frames and leaked rain and snow and cold air, the plumbing was unpredictable, the electricity shorted out. Cockroaches, of course, infested the cracks between the walls, floors, and ceilings. People complained to the landlord, Mr. Backman, but…

Walk Away, a memoir

Nightmares & Dreams

Quick movements near my head still made me jump. Recurring dreams of Jimmy woke me on nights when I was not passed out drunk, and although I drank hard and often, that hair-of-the-dog cure never worked for me, and so I didn’t drink every day. At first, I jerked awake from the dreams when reaching out to touch him. Later, I woke with my heart pounding, gasping for breath from trying to run on feet that stuck to the ground like magnets.

During college, I was a good worker at the factory and waitressing jobs I…

Lived Through This

A rocky trail through forests and fields winds around the back of Quaker Hill in rural Maine. Before traveling to the summit, I pack a bottle of water and some grapes and my notebook. This time I also pack my nephew’s letter.

The tradition of letter-writing survives in families like mine whose loved ones are spread out over the country in county jails, state prisons, and federal penitentiaries. In prisons, smartphones are contraband, so stamps are still currency. My nephew, Alan Michael, is in a county jail awaiting trial. He can be held indefinitely without bail because he was on…

Walk Away, a memoir

Amulet

When I returned to high school, my intentions about fitting in were good. I carted all my favorite novels home from the library to sharpen my wits, but the time spent as a teenage runaway had both civilized and uncivilized me. I reread Austen’s Emma and realized why it disappointed me just a few years before. Emma was bossy, arrogant, and unlikable. She thought she knew what she was doing. I finally understood what irony was. Before my fucked-up love affair, I was just like Emma.

After it, I had trouble modulating my speech and behavior…

Walk Away, a memoir

When I re-enrolled at Swampscott High, the vice principal went over my record with me and told me that although I’d missed almost a year, enough credits accumulated in my freshman year and in the first half of my sophomore year so that if I took a full load with an extra class or two, graduating with my class was still possible. She encouraged me to sign me up for the last round of the SAT that year. …

Walk Away, a memoir

Cross Country

After six months in San Diego, Jimmy and I started hitchhiking back to Boston in the late summer of 1974, catching short rides that took us out of San Diego, heading north to the San Bernardino Valley. We stayed in a motel the first night, and the next day we got as far as the beginning of Route 66, on the western edge of the Mojave Desert. The town was Barstow, California, a small settlement under a bone-dry sky, and we were both covered in dust and old sweat by time we arrived. Near a bridge…