College. Junior year:

An entry from my 8th-grade English class journal. I was clearly a suck-up.

Tuesday, September 6, 1994

[Age 13]

This year I will work more on my book, try to be on the high honor roll all year, and have fun in school. I am looking forward to Washington and will have a good time with my friends, teachers, and in the holocaust museum along with the other places we will go.

I think this will be a good year for me because French and Science are more enjoyable, I have many field trips, good teachers, more friends, and neater penmanship!

Though I have many hopes for this year, I never have high hopes for gym. I believe it is sexist because girls and boys are separated because boys are “stronger and could hurt the girls.” I don’t think that is fully true and have a hard time enjoying gym.

I also hope we can write a lot more than we did last year in English and do nouns and verbs less. I hope French will be better than last year and we won’t have as much homework, but anyway, I think this will be a good year.

Yesterday, I received this wonderful gift in the mail from my bosom friend Oline’s father:

With this note:

And here’s why:

Had Oline and I known each other as young girls, we would have been inseparable, primarily because of this, and this, and this. And this, and this, and this.

And this:

April 12, 1997 Saturday 8:31 pm

[Age 15]

Last night we watched Romeo and Juliet, as it came out of video Tuesday. I cried in all the same places. I felt the quickening of my heart as Leonardo DiCaprio filled the screen. He looked at Juliet the same way I remembered—I still want him to look at me that way.

It’s the idea of Romeo and Leonardo DiCaprio that saddens me the most. I know that Leonardo is only acting. That he really goes to the bathroom like everyone else, buys groceries, went to school…the Romeo in the movie was so intense and focused his entire life on Juliet, as she did Romeo. That is what tears me apart. In real life, love is divided. One person does not make another the sole purpose of living. They have jobs, families, chores, school, hobbies…but in this movie, Romeo and Juliet have nothing but each other, which makes it entirely believable and understandable that they would kill themselves when they lost one another. That is what I want.

I want a movie Romeo who has no other obsession but me. I want to be free of all other ropes but him. I want to meet him in the courtyard and kiss him until midnight without worrying about getting up early for school the next day. I want intense romance! Or any romance!

I would take Romeo as a schoolboy who cooks dinner every night for his mother and walks the dog after doing his homework. What I do not want—what makes me terribly unhappy to think that this is the only love left in the world—is to be caught up in a meaningless relationship with a boy who is placid and unpassionate. Who leads me around school on an iron arm like many couples I see. Those people have boyfriends (and the other way around). There is no need behind it as there was in Romeo and Juliet.

They needed one another to escape the violence and hatred between their houses. There is no desperate love behind the relationships I see in school. The two people do not love one another to the point where they are consumed by the mere glance of their lovers. They do not speak of each other as being “the sun” or “a rose.” They speak of grades and friends and sports—which would seem vile on the tongues of Romeo and Juliet while proclaiming their love on the balcony:

“Romeo, o’ Romeo, where for art thou, Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name, and if thou wilt not be but sworn my love, then I shall no longer be a Capulet.”

“Shall I speak now, or hear more?”

“Oh Romeo. What is in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet as would Romeo remain.”

“I am here! What did you get on your math test?”

Awful! Anyway, I have not had a boyfriend so why even ponder what I would do with one. I just love the idea of being in love. I mean really BEING IN LOVE and not just using that person as an extra friend (whatever that meant). One thing I noticed in Romeo and Juliet is that when they are together, they don’t speak of their families or friends. They look only at one another. That is the look Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) gives Juliet that makes me cry. He is filling his eyes with HER and sharing himself with HER at the same time SHE is filling her eyes and mind and heart with HIM. That look of utter love and tenderness is what makes ME love Romeo and Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo. It is the look I am waiting for.

Translation:

HERE I TAKE A BREAK BECAUSE THAT SOUNDED LIKE A GOOD PLACE FOR A NEW SECTION. SO—A NEW AND MORE AWOKEN SECTION BEGINS HERE WHERE THE FOG OF CHILDHOOD HAS BEEN BLOWN AWAY BY THE WIND OF CHANGE. Lara

October 7, 1995 Friday 5:39 P.M.

Oh, I have to wake up now after that burst of poetic capital letterism. No, this is not the end. In fact—I am only 14 you know. I still have an entire life ahead of me and so now I will put down my pen—look out the window of the car going up to VT and enjoy my surroundings of the rolling fields, familiar barns and the dew of dusk settling on the mountains ahead.

Lara Age 14 only once.

April 17, 1997 Thursday 11:28 pm

[Age 14]

Last night I drempt of Leonardo DiCrapio (as Dad so crudely calls my love).

I drempt that I had to fill a math requirement in high school (right now) and to do so, I was put in Brenna’s 6th-grade math class (though she wasn’t there).

To make this more interesting in my dream, I placed Leonardo DiCaprio in this math class as well. He was 16 and sort of time-reversed. I was my own age, but he was back seven years in time. So far, he’d only done a few episodes of “Growing Pains.”

Anyway, he sat all the way on the other side of the classroom—me seated on the far right. My teacher was a carbon copy if Mrs. B (who is my geometry teacher right now) except 100 times more dull.

So I amused myself by remembering that Leonardo was in my class. Somehow, I managed to get my seat changed to directly behind him and I stared at  the back of his head during class.

Then, the dream took an odd, fantastic turn. My mother (I think it was her) was driving Leonardo and me to a nonexistent beach behind the high school. I suppose that in my dream, I was still partially enrolled in the school, but Leo had been kicked out.

Therefore, when he suggested taking a walk along the beach, I got nervous and asked if we should. Mom encouraged us and drove away.

There was a stone wall enclosing the ocean. The beach was an extremely narrow strip of sand because it was high tide.

The rest is rather complicated, but I had on a new bathing suit and suddenly the ocean was a large pool, but still an ocean. Leo kept throwing in beach balls and inner tubes that were on racks somewhere, and I would take them back out. As he added more toys to the pool, more people seemed to fill the water.

Now we were all standing around the rim of the pool (it was a real pool now) and Leo stood behind me. All the other boys were wet from the water and miserable.

That was it.

A family trip to a Wyoming horse ranch, during which I succumb to cliché and fall for a young cowboy:

August 9, 1995 Wednesday
11:00 pm Wyoming time
1:00 am Connecticut time
[Age 14]

After dinner Jess and I went off to find HIM to say hi. We saw him by the pond and discussed methods of approaching our victim, who was fishing in high socks.

We walked in circles around the lake, then came up behind him and chickened out. We passed him and continued around the lake, jumping over streams and dark holes in the ground where water flowed.

Then we sat on a small wooden dock that lifted when you sat down, and discussed ways of winning his heart.

I could fall in the lake and he would save me, but I would pretend I wasn’t breathing so he would perform CPR!

We could lasso him over to us.

We could attach ourselves to the end of his fishing line.

Or we could do nothing, which is what we did.

We ran away when Maria and Stephanie started toward us. I thought we must have looked pretty cool. Especially if we ran really well. I’m glad I didn’t trip and fall on my face.

I have to go to bed now. It’s 11:30 and I’ll write the rest tomorrow. I’m not saying I have a crush on HIM. But he does have a great mouth!

I didn’t remember much about the night before. There had been dancing, champagne, a white dress with a grass-stained hem, 32 bobby pins in a row on the bedspread, and a mosquito.

“Do you remember the mosquito?” I turned to my new husband in the driver’s seat. His eyes—like mine—were bleary and red, and happy.

“What mosquito?”

“It landed on your forehead during the vows.”

On the three-hour drive from Connecticut to Vermont, we were comparing notes on our wedding day, which neither of us remembered in its entirety.

“I don’t think anyone else noticed. But when you said ‘I do,’ the mosquito was drinking out of your forehead.” I laughed and, once laughing, couldn’t stop. My eyes filled with tears again and I blotted them away. My eyelids were raw and gritty. Everything we said made us cry.

“I don’t remember that part.” Doug smiled, dangerously close to the brink himself. “All I really remember was putting the ring on your finger.” He choked on the words and I handed him a tissue from the box wedged between us.

The casual observer might think us pathetic. But we were exhausted and we already missed the family and friends who had gathered together for one too-brief evening before waving us down my parents’ driveway in my little sister’s yellow Jeep Wrangler.

The drive we were making now was one my family had made every winter weekend for twelve years. On Fridays my parents would pick Brenna and me up from school and we would head to Mount Snow where we had a little condo and took ski lessons. Sunday night after ski class, we drove three hours home again. If you add up twelve years of three-hour drives, we spent 1,512 hours on the road. That’s 63 whole days, or nine weeks of straight driving. No matter how you measure it, that’s one damn long car ride.

I grew up on Interstate 91. We drove from Mystic through Hartford, up through Massachusetts to the base of the Green Mountains, where we left the highway for the rural Route 9. At the Dutton Orchard, we met a stream that ran beside the car like a puppy all the way to the Adams’ Farm. We would pause at Candlelight Video (now gone) to rent the weekend’s movies, then stop at Grampy’s (later Christy’s, now 7-Eleven) where Dad would get gas while Mom bought cheese and crackers and toilet paper.

Ten minutes from our weekend home, we drove straight up the hill beside the ski mountain, turned right through the gate to Greenspring Developments, and wound through a labyrinth of little streets to our driveway, where our condo was illuminated by a streetlight that rose out of a giant heap of snow.

As we turned the corner, Brenna and I would take bets on the height of the snow heap, which we would later riddle with a network of tunnels using wooden kitchen spoons.

Vermont was my other home and I spent half of my childhood growing up in that house. I couldn’t wait to introduce Doug to my childhood. I would show him the pictures of Brenna and me skiing at ages six, seven, eight, eighteen; the grandfather clock that Dad wound up every Friday night; the back porch that was always hidden under six feet of snow.

I would take Doug to the Silo restaurant, where we ate dinner on Saturdays. I would take him up the ski lift and then we’d walk all the way down the leaf-covered ski trails, looking for bears, as my family had done every October since I could remember.

When Doug and I hit Hartford, I began to point out the familiar sights from the car window.

“There’s the bridge with the red balloons.”

“I think those are suspension weights,” said my husband, the architect.

“Whatever. I always thought they looked like balloons.”

“OK.” He took my hand. “Then they’re balloons.”

“And there’s the Basketball Hall of Fame,” I pointed out the long, concrete stadium adorned with basketball players in bas relief.

“Did you ever go there?” he asked.

“No. We never stopped in Hartford.”

We never stopped, period. My father drove as if there was a finish line. We tail-gated and dodged in and out of traffic, but Brenna and I always felt safe in nests of blankets and pillows in the back seat.

We were pulled over only once—ironically on one of the rare occasions when Dad wasn’t driving all that fast. On a deserted country road, fifteen minutes from the condo, the inside of the car was suddenly flooded with arcs of red and blue light. Mom put down her knitting needles and Dad pulled over.

“Is there a problem, officer?” he asked, in his dangerously calm voice. The vein in his temple bulged in the red light from the police car.

“Do you know how fast you were going?”

“Yes,” he rumbled. “Exactly 42 miles-per-hour.”

“That’s right,” the officer said, “and the speed limit is 35.” He handed Dad a ticket.

Our pace did not allow for sight-seeing or sit-down dinners. We only ate at restaurants we could drive through, never coming to a full stop as Dad exchanged dollar bills for Happy Meals and kept right on rolling past the window.

And God help us if we had to pee. There were no bathroom breaks.

It got to be a phobia. Mom and I, alike in our OCD tendencies, would visit the bathroom three times each before climbing into the car. My sister never learned.

“Here’s a coke can.” Dad would say, and without taking his eyes from the road, he would wrap his arm behind the seat and hand her the can. She would throw a tantrum—and because she and Dad were so much alike—Dad would yell back.

Brenna never actually used the can. But she did have to trudge up to the tree line and squat in the bushes off the highway. And once, in the middle of Hartford where the road has no shoulder, or trees, or bushes, Dad pulled onto the highway median and Brenna peed while cars zipped past on either side. She never got over that.

“I guess we did stop in Hartford once, then.” I told Doug.

There was one gas station where we were allowed to stop. It was in a cul-de-sac right on the line between Massachusetts and Vermont. As we approached the station, Brenna and I knew to put our shoes back on and shrug into our coats so we would be ready to jump from the car before the engine died. We’d be back just as Dad finished pumping the gas, and then we’d be off again, on our way up into the mountains, where Dad assured us there were no more bathrooms.

Besides being the last rest stop in Vermont, the gas station marked our ascent up the mountain. One more hour and we were home. This was my favorite part of the drive because the highway gave way to country roads. It was Brenna’s favorite part of the drive because of Dusty.

Brenna had always wanted a horse. When she was six, she was convinced Santa Claus would leave her a pony under the Christmas tree. I tried to prepare her for disappointment, but she had faith in Santa. Christmas morning, when she burst into the living room to find merely a stuffed pony under the branches, she threw a tantrum.

Then she adopted Dusty, a gray horse who lived on a farm just inside the Vermont border. Of course, we never stopped to meet him. But as we drove past, Dad would compromise by slowing down just a little so Brenna could wave. When she was six, he was a pony. He was young and glossy—and shy, even then. He grazed in the shadows under the eaves of the barn.

The barn was our signal to change the music. We had two tapes: The Clancy Brothers live in Concert with Tommy Makem and The Christmas Revels. We listened to The Clancy Brothers during the first part of the drive, and The Christmas Revels during the second.

We had other tapes at home, but the soundtrack to this drive was composed solely of Irish Folk and Christmas carols. Variation ended in disaster. In 1997 Brenna implored us to listen to Hanson’s debut album Middle of Nowhere, featuring the hit song “MMMBop.” In a badly miscalculated attempt at humor, I noted that all of the songs sounded the same. Brenna was sensitive about her music—and her adoration of the youngest Hanson brother. She screamed at me. Dad screamed at Brenna. Mom screamed at Dad. And we never strayed from our tapes again. We knew every word of every song on both albums, and the four of us sang along, like the Partridge Family, only off-key.

I stopped singing along when I was a teenager. Instead, I sat in the far back seat and wrote in my journal, frustrated and restless to be riding in the car with my parents and little sister when I’d rather stay home for the school dance.

I labored over increasingly difficult homework assignments in the dim passenger light that aimed a filtered halo onto my US History book. Sighing in misery, I stared out the window with my Physics book spread across my lap, open to an impenetrable chapter on torque. Later still, I plodded through SAT practice tests and drafted countless college application essays.

And every winter, Dusty’s head dipped a little closer to the ground, his legs curved into a curtsy, his fine, straight back bowed, his coat dulled. We started holding our breath as we approached the barn, afraid to find the farmyard empty.

We’d crane our necks, catch sight of the vacant plot of grass behind the fence, and begin to cry out—only to spot him finally in his old place near the wall, his coat now as weathered as the wood, as though he had become part of the barn.

The trips to Vermont ended when I went to college. My sister decided she wanted to be an actress, so weekends began to fill with auditions and plays. When Brenna went away to college, my parents put the house up for sale.

A couple put in a bid a week before the wedding. Dad agreed to sell, on the condition that Doug and I could spend our honeymoon in the house before the new owners moved in. As we packed the yellow Jeep, my parents told me to take a look around and take anything I might want, before the house—and everything in it—belonged to someone else. I knew this was my last drive.

“Slow down,” I implored as we approached the barn on the side of the empty road.

“What is it?” Doug gave me a puzzled look, but eased off the gas. As we rolled very quietly, very slowly past the barn, I looked for Dusty.

“There he is!” I shouted, startling Doug, who followed my finger to the dark corner of the farmyard where the old gray horse leaned against the gray wood.

“Want to pull over and go meet him?” Doug asked, edging toward the side of the road.

“No! Oh no, we can’t stop,” I said, almost panicked at the thought. “We never stop.”

“Just this once,” he said, and put the car in park.

Compared to 1,512 hours or 63 days or nine weeks on the road, this final car trip passed very quickly. Just three hours—a fraction of a lifetime spent en route.

As we crossed the road, I thought about all the times my family had driven past this barn. The last ten years, like the stripes on the highway, like my wedding day, went by in a blur. It’s funny what stands out.

An old gray horse next to an old shed. The Gypsy Rover. A flash of police car lights behind us on a dark country road. The ache of a full bladder. The click of knitting needles from the front seat. A mosquito on the forehead of the man who was about to become my husband.

Doug and I leaned together on the rickety fence and Dusty swished the flies away from his gray rump with his gray tail.

“Hi Dusty.” I held out my hand, palm up. He sighed a great gust that quivered his nostrils and raised his big, liquid eyes. He didn’t come over, but Doug and I stood at the fence for a few more minutes, keeping him company. Then we climbed into the car and headed back out on the road.

September 13, 1994 (Age 13)

For many years I have been teased, torn, and filled with anger about something I have tried to change. It exists everywhere, no one’s anger alone can quench it. Sexism.

One of the most unfair problems in our world. I have felt it many times, in skiing, school, karate, and in most of the world’s minds.

When I try to talk to my classmates about gym, they roll their eyes and tell me how stupid I am. But there is a problem, and there always will be a problem unless something is done about it.

Everything about gym is unfair. Girls are required to do 1 pull-up and boys are to do 2.

Girls have to run the mile in 20 minutes, boys run it in 15.

When it comes to sports such as soccer, basketball, and field hockey, girls play inside, boys outside.

More than once after class I asked the reason for this. The ingenious reply was: “If a boy kicked a soccer ball at you, you would be knocked over.”

I’m not knocked over so easily.

I have tried talking to people, but it seems that no one but my parents believes that there is a problem, and will talk about it. I will not give up trying to change the way it is.

A special Friday Angst just for my little sister.

Summer 1995 during a family trip to Wyoming (Age 14):

Today we had a picnic. We were walking to our table with our hamburgers when it suddenly started hailing! The wind was so strong that Brenna’s lettuce flew away and hail got in my hamburger. As soon as we got back inside, the hail stopped.

Over lunch, we had a conversation about the village Brenna is building in the woods for the Little People. She has built a teepee, house, fire pit and spit, table, bed, dock, boat, bow and arrow, drum, and outhouse out of twigs and the natural stream running through the woods.

She leaves pieces of her breakfast, lunch, and dinner out there for the Little People and says that the food is gone when she returns. Yesterday, she stole the wine left in Dad’s glass and put it in a tic-tac case, along with jam from this morning and a piece of meat from last night.

Every time a door opens she cries, “THE LITTLE PEOPLE!”

I think she’s getting a little carried away.

Sunday, December 10, 1995 6:30 am (Age 14)

I can’t sleep for worry and pain. Today I have decided to talk to Melissa about Kevin. She always says that she hates him, which makes me angry and jealous. Kevin likes the girl who is mean and doesn’t like him, while I really like him and would never throw ice at his face.

Yesterday at lunch, Kevin kept looking at me and screaming that I was scaring him. I replied that I would throw my hot chocolate at him if he continued to be so rude, but he answered that his cup was fuller. Later, Melissa told me that she would have thrown it at him.

Kevin’s teasing isn’t violent, but throwing hot liquid at him to ruin his clothes and make him walk around wet and cold all day is violent.

Anyway, I’m going to talk to Melissa next time she brings up how cruel Kevin is, and I will tell her that Kevin wonders why she hates him enough to throw ice at his head. I’ll tell her that Kevin is a good person and all good people deserve to be treated with kindness, even if they tease you a lot. Kevin’s personality is Kevin’s personality, and there’s nothing wrong with it unless he hurts you in some way.

Kevin will probably never learn how I am going to stand up for him. Maybe Melissa will realize what I am trying to tell her and be kinder to Kevin. Maybe they will find that they really like each other and start going out. That would hurt so much.

Because I like him so much that I’m willing to stand up for him, he may go out with Melissa, who hates him. I feel like the Little Mermaid who loved a man so much that she gave up her life to try to gain his love. She walked in pain each and every day, her tongue tied. Then, even though she went through so much for the prince, he fell in love with another woman who had never done anything for him. And to save him, the mermaid plunged a knife deep into her own heart and was only rewarded for her pain and love by becoming sea foam that kids pee in.

That’s what I have to look forward to.