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Love on a Shoestring

I
fell in love for the first time at Stonehenge. Bending down to lace up one of my new granny boots, I noticed him bending down to tie one of his rust suede shoes. In front of the world's most famous prehistoric monument, we forged a bond based on mutual attraction and loose laces. He gave me a soulful look and said, “Hi.” He may have also declared his undying love, but right then a swarm of Girl Scouts descended from a convoy of tour buses and drowned him out. I had a knot in one of my laces and he helped me undo it. His name was Scott, and with his wild mane of curly hair and large blue eyes, he reminded me of Roger Daltrey.

We were touring England as part of the Tufts-in-London program, but instead of taking in the sights, we'd been taking in each other. At Oxford's Bodleian Library, I looked up from the illuminated manuscripts to see him staring at me from across the display case. Walking down one of countless regal staterooms, past portraits of homely royals, I saw him looking past the duchess with the double chin and priceless pearls and directly at me. We didn't say a word. We just looked and then looked away. Finally, after our shoe-tying ceremony at Stonehenge, an ancient Druid rite that transformed us into a couple, we sat together on the bus. Cat Stevens's “Moon Shadow” was playing on the radio. “So, where are you from?” he asked.

In London we lived at a funky South Kensington hotel that served as the school's academic base. By chance, Scott had been assigned the room directly opposite mine. We took most of our classes in the hotel's Victorian parlor rooms, lounging on threadbare sofas and chairs. The hotel had only one tiny shower, and on Saturday nights—theater night—there'd be a line of students clad only in towels, snaking down several flights of stairs. There was so much to see: Laurence Olivier in
Long Day's Journey into Night;
Diana Rigg in Tom Stoppard's
Jumpers;
Peter Brook's
A Midsummer Night's Dream;
Vanessa Redgrave in
The
Threepenny Opera;
Alan Bates in
Butley;
Nureyev and Fonteyn in
Swan Lake.
Scott, who wanted to be a composer, introduced me to jazz, and we heard Ornette Coleman, Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, all the greats. The tickets were so inexpensive we had money left over to eat at cheap Italian restaurants with white tablecloths and candles in Chianti bottles. One night, over a plate of spaghetti carbonara, Scott called me radiant. I said, “It's just the candles and your second beer,” but he assured me, “No, it's definitely you.”

I wore my granny boots practically every day. They were my “first love” boots. All I had to do was look at them, and I'd feel a surge of happiness that practically made me dizzy. Letters to my parents overflowed with excitement and the occasional odd detail: “My kidneys are fine!” I exulted. “I think I must have gone to the bathroom so frequently at home out of sheer boredom because I haven't had any trouble here. That's what happens when you are HAPPY!”

One day, Nathan, my adolescent crush from the November Club, appeared in Scott's room. It turned out that he was a friend of Scott's roommate and had just returned from Africa. He didn't remember me at all.

“We went to the November Club,” I reminded him. “We danced together and then you called me Scarecrow.”

“Why would I call you a scarecrow?” he asked, puzzled.

“Especially since she's a cow,” added Scott's dreadful roommate, who hated that Scott and I were in love. In truth, I was more cow than scarecrow. I'd gained fifteen pounds devouring Marriott Hot Shoppe cheeseburgers at Catholic University and was no longer thin. But I preferred to think Nathan didn't recognize me, not because a decade had elapsed, or because I'd gained weight, but because love had transformed me beyond all recognition.

During our monthlong winter break, Scott and I made plans to travel together.

My roommate, Barbara, a sweet, easygoing girl from Rhode Island, reminded me how lucky I was to be seeing the world with someone I loved. I agreed. I was very, very lucky.

A few weeks before we were set to go, Scott announced that his father wanted him home for the holidays and had already sent him a plane ticket to New York. I was distraught in a way that's only acceptable when you're young and in love for the first time. A month seemed like a thirty-year jail sentence. I didn't know how I'd be able to handle it. I pictured myself collapsing on the floor, tugging at his corduroy pants, and screaming, “Please don't leave!” In acting class, when our teacher asked us to evoke a painful memory, I remembered the moment when Scott told me he'd be going to New York, and I actually made myself cry. “I didn't think you had it in you,” the teacher said. “Brava!”

With my plans canceled, I tagged along with Barbara, her best friend, Caroline, and Mary Sue, who was from Louisiana and wore false eyelashes and a fur stole. Unlike Barbara and Caroline, sensible English majors carrying backpacks, Mary Sue and I were aspiring actresses and traveled with a complete wardrobe. Among Mary Sue's many pieces of luggage was a professional makeup case that had multiple drawers for her lashes, tubes of glue, and dozens of shadows and lipsticks. I brought clothes for every occasion, including ones I was unlikely to attend, such as a papal audience or dinner at a palazzo. Naturally, I brought my granny boots, which I hoped would comfort me during the dark days ahead.

We traveled everywhere by train, standing nose to nose with other passengers for ten hours at a time. Our hotel in Rome had stained wallpaper and a broken toilet that coughed up murky brown water. It rained nearly every day. Italian men, none of whom appeared to own palazzi or even
appartamenti
, followed us everywhere, grabbing, pinching, and making lewd noises. I missed Scott. Nothing compared to the pleasure of his company, not the Sistine Chapel, not the Coliseum, not the “genuine Feragamo” ballet flats that subsequently fell apart because I didn't know how to spell
Ferragamo
.

After Rome, we went to Florence, arriving at the Santa Maria Novella train station, where a cute young policeman asked if we needed a hotel room. He told us that his cousin owned a cheap but charming place around the corner. Figuring he planned to rape us, I whispered my concerns to Barbara, who said, “For God's sake, he's a policeman!” So we went to the hotel, which was indeed clean and charming, and I felt slightly better, until he asked us to have dinner at another cousin's restaurant. He'd bring three other policemen. They were cousins too. None spoke English, so the conversation was limited, but the food was the best we'd had in Italy. Even better, it was on the house. The next night, we all went to a noisy club, where at some point the first policeman asked me if I wanted to rent a car and see Tuscany with him. After I declined, he turned to Mary Sue, who, batting her false eyelashes, drawled, “Why, sir, you insult me.” At the end of the evening, the policeman announced that someone had stolen his wallet and would we mind paying the cover charge and drinks?

The next morning, Barbara took off with him. When she returned several days later, she was flush with excitement. Though she didn't come out and say it, I suspected she'd slept with him. I hoped it wasn't her first time. The next day, we were heading to Venice, and he was supposed to meet us at the train station to return Barbara's rental deposit. He'd dropped off the car himself.

“You know she's never going to see that money,” Mary Sue whispered as we waited at the station.

I knew it. Barbara's best friend knew it. But Barbara, even after he'd missed the appointed rendezvous by an hour, even after we'd missed our train, still didn't know it.

“Maybe something's happened to him,” she said. “Maybe he got into an accident.”

An hour passed, then another. Watching the dawning realization on Barbara's face was excruciating. “He's not coming, is he?” she cried. We all shook our heads no. “He took my money. It's everything I have.”

We called the hotel, but the owner claimed he didn't know his cousin's name. Finally, we went to the police station. “One of your policemen stole money from me,” Barbara explained. She went through the whole story; by the time she was midway through, we'd attracted an audience of about a dozen policemen who couldn't contain their laughter. None of them spoke much English, but having heard similar stories before, they didn't need to. “Crook,” the police chief said. “Thief.
Capisci?
”

Barbara was devastated and hardly spoke for the rest of the trip. I couldn't imagine possibly losing your virginity to a crook. It was bad enough losing your boyfriend to his father. We visited more churches, with their flickering candles, dank musty smells, and dark paintings of skewered martyrs. We ate plates of mediocre spaghetti carbonara, and then, finally, we returned to London, where Scott was waiting for me.

In mid-January, the miners went on strike, and for seven weeks we had intermittent power and electricity. It was thrillingly romantic. We ate our meals and read D. H. Lawrence by candlelight. After one of my teachers read a paper I'd written on
Women in Love,
he suggested I switch from theater to English. And so I decided to become a writer. Mostly, though, I was a woman in love. I lost my appetite and with all the walking we did, I also shed the extra fifteen pounds, plus another five. By the spring, I'd covered so much ground that the local cobbler couldn't do any more repairs on my crumbling granny boots. “These old girls have had a good run,” he said, “but they're totally knackered.” Scott offered to buy me a new pair of shoes, so we went shopping together on Kensington High Street. He picked out a sensible pair of knockoff Hush Puppies.

“I really like these,” he said.

“You mean, for you?”

“No, for you. You need a comfortable pair of walking shoes. Besides, I was getting pretty sick of those granny boots.”

“I'd die before I'd wear these,” I said.

This escalated into a huge fight. I started to cry, and he walked out of the store, and the salesman, looking uncomfortable, said, “Do you want the shoes or not?” I told him to put them away and I waited for Scott to return. Twenty minutes went by, and no Scott. I couldn't believe he'd leave me in a discount shoe store. Finally, he came back and I was so nervous about losing him that I apologized and let him buy me the $12 knockoff Hush Puppies. They were rust suede—the same color as his shoes. We were a perfect match.

With the school year about to end, Scott hatched a plan to keep us together for the summer. His father was president of a publishing company, and I was offered a temporary job at one of his magazines. His parents agreed to let me stay with them in their New York apartment. What could be more perfect than that? According to my parents, lots of things, starting with a job in Andover. This precipitated a flurry of letters in which I pleaded my case as ardently as Portia in
The
Merchant of Venice.
In response to their concern that I was becoming too dependent on Scott, I wrote,
“I am not depending on him for my livelihood, only my happiness, and if wanting happiness counts as an offense, then I, along with the whole human race, plead ‘Guilty!'”
Letting me live in New York with my Jewish boyfriend was clearly preferable to reading any more of my letters, so they ultimately gave in.

When I arrived back home, however, my mother quickly made it clear she was not happy. “You should have never left Catholic University,” she said. “You've become unchaste and immoral.”

I pulled out my precious beat-up granny boots, intending to store them in a safe place. My mother told me to throw them out. “They're filthy and falling apart,” she said.

“I fell in love in these boots,” I said.

“Well, they look it,” she replied.

My mother hated clutter and was famous for tossing things away, even things she wanted to keep, like her diamond engagement ring. “I just want to pitch and chuck everything,” she'd say when she was in a spring-cleaning mode that encompassed all seasons. Bumpa cringed whenever she walked past his room and hid his valuables on the top shelf of his closet, above his wooden roller and magic liniment. I placed my granny boots in a plastic bag and asked him if I could store them in his closet.