That's A Girl's Car

I wasn’t in Boston when the bombings happened. My friend — a doctor at one of the city’s biggest hospitals — was at home with her family. My friends who work downtown were fine. My friend running the marathon checked in later; he wasn’t near the blast.

I have no connection to this event, other than the fact that I spent two years of my life working blocks from the marathon finish line. That I walked those streets every Monday through Friday. And that the hospital where I worked was in the news, photographed with armed guard in front of it.

But this isn’t an “I was there” missive. It’s just a series of memories from someone who grew up very, very far away from Boston, spent a portion of her life in it, and came home permanently changed. Broken, even.

But not because of the city.

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I often refer to 1999-2001 — my first two years after college — as “the spin-off sitcom years.” I lived in Cambridge, but almost everyone I knew and loved from college had moved elsewhere. I scraped by on $24,000 a year, then $27,000. This was at the height of the dot-com boom. I lived on $0.89 turkey pot pies, Easy Mac, and Pop Tarts. I’m surprised I didn’t develop scurvy.

When I graduated, I wanted to be a writer. If that didn’t work, I wanted to be an editor. I didn’t want to go through recruiting, like most of my classmates. I wanted to find a job that wasn’t i-banking or consulting. I thought it was strange that so many kids straight out of college were somehow qualified to be consultants. But they ended up making twice what I did out of college, so that shows how much I knew.

Shortly before graduation, I interviewed to work at the Boston Phoenix. I loved that paper. It was a receptionist position, but they assured me that I could write for the paper, too. It was a great in, they told me.

I got the job. It paid $6 an hour.

I declined the job.

They came back and made me another offer. “We don’t usually do this,” they told me, “but we really want you to work for us. We can offer you $6.50 an hour.”

It broke my heart to turn that down. But accepting it meant I’d have to work two jobs, and I didn’t want to do that unless I had to. So I decided that I’d just write in my spare time, and would try to freelance after I had a stable day job. And surely I could find a stable day job in publishing.

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Everyone told me that, if I really wanted to make it in publishing, I’d have to move to New York. But I didn’t want to move to New York. I liked Boston. It was pretty and familiar. I wanted to see if it could become my home. So I stayed.

I did not make it in publishing.

I tried, though. My first job out of college was at Houghton Mifflin. I’m pretty sure I got the job because, during a summer internship, I’d befriended an employee over our mutual love of Rent. She was very quiet, but very nice. Her boss, however, was prone to yelling. I am prone to crying when yelled at.

I worked in a quad of cubicles, surrounded by other editorial assistants. They were so smart. They were so nice to me. They were all probably grossly underpaid.

Around the corner from our cubes was a giant window. I loved that window, even though Boston would get dark at 3 p.m. in the winters. I loved that, when it snowed, I could look out the window and imagine I was in a giant snow globe, where everything was cozy and lovely.

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I was terrified of my boss and bored by my job, but I loved every other part of working at HMCo. I loved the grand building with a brass dolphin embedded in the entrance floor. (Is it still there? I doubt it.) I loved the massive sunlit atrium that looked like something out of a palace. And I especially loved working in downtown Boston. I loved walking past F.A.O. Schwarz, even though I couldn’t afford any of the toys. I loved gazing in the window of Shreve, Crump and Low, which I remembered from the book Anastasia At Your Service. I loved that, if I was really stressed out, I could walk through Boston Common over lunch or after work and look at the swans and flowers, trying to assuage my fears about money and my future. (Though I didn’t love the day I walked through Boston Common wearing a leather messenger bag, thrilled that every handsome man I passed smiled at me, and finally realized at the Park Street T-stop that the bag strap had undone two of my shirt buttons.)

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I tried to freelance. I had a connection at the Boston Globe: a prominent writer whose fame I wasn’t aware of when I met and absolutely charmed her. (Once I realized how important she was, I flubbed every meeting and conversation.) She connected me to someone who let me write a neat article about a BU painting class and the elderly Boston residents serving as its models. It had a neat hook: artsy kids with turquoise hair were talking and connecting with 80-year-olds, who were having their stories heard and their faces gracing striking pieces of art. It got published in the Sunday Globe. But after that, nothing. I inquired a couple of times about more work, but ultimately, I am shy and submissive: not journalism material.

Everyone told me that it would tarnish my resume forever if I left my job in less than a year. But my boss’ yelling fits were getting louder and more common — especially since, in my panic, I would occasionally misplace things. I told myself that getting fired would be worse than leaving the job early. I posted my resume on a job-finding website, and — in a move that probably hasn’t happened since 2000 — it got an interview offer. A woman from the Brigham and Women’s Public Affairs office e-mailed, “I’m looking to fill a job and HR isn’t moving fast enough. You seem like a good, smart writer. Come in for an interview?”

I couldn’t believe she hired me. I couldn’t believe I got a $3,000 salary raise. Today, I can’t believe I didn’t ask for more money.

My daily commute shifted away from the brass dolphin and F.A.O. Schwarz and Shreve, and to a less impressive but still perfectly nice building across from the Prudential Mall. (The actual hospital was several T-stops away; we were off-campus due to space limitations.) I’d pass the Boston Public Library almost every day; and while I rarely went inside (which I still regret), I always gave a dollar or some change to the long-haired, wizard-like man playing the recorder beautifully outside the building.

My food habits changed at BWH, too. There was free coffee in the office — as much as you wanted — but the only creamers were Mini-Moos. I drank so many that, to this day, even the sight of those little containers makes me dry heave. There was a cafeteria on the top floor, where the charming cafeteria workers always joked with customers as they cooked burgers. And I could occasionally afford a burger. Or a Finagle A Bagel chocolate chip bagel, only $0.89 with butter (you let the butter soak in for a few minutes and OMG HEAVEN) or $1.24 with cream cheese (but that’s expensive, so you only get them on special occasions). Or the unbelievably cheap sushi restaurant I found on posh Newbury Street, of all places; you could get 6 pieces of a tuna or salmon roll for only $2.99.

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I loved my boss. I loved my job. And I loved working for Brigham and Women’s Hospital — knowing that, in some small way, I was Helping People. I wasn’t going to be a world-class writer or editor, but my little articles about employee recognition awards and hospital teams training for the Boston Marathon were brightening someone’s day (though the time I misspelled “Marathon” in a headline brought more calls to the office than anything else I wrote).

Then my boss left. Then I noticed how clique-y the office was. I remember buying a sweater on sale from the Ann Taylor at the Prudential Mall (it was the only thing there I could afford), only to have a woman in the office snidely tell me, “Oh, I saw that sweater on sale, too.” I started drinking after work — more than usual.

I didn’t know I had an anxiety disorder. All I knew is how lonely and lost I felt. Walking — constant walking — was the only thing that even started to quell my fears. Every day over lunch, I would walk around the reflecting pool by the First Church of Christ Scientist. Sometimes, I would walk past the Copley T-top (Prudential was closer, but only the E trains went through it), going on to Boylston or even Park Street. One day, in the spring before I left, I walked all the way back to my Cambridge apartment. I’m still amazed that I did that.

“Come back to Texas,” my family prodded me. “Think about your future. You need to go to grad school.”

“For what?”

“Anything. But it needs to be at UT. It’s nice that you went to Harvard, but your grandfather was on the Board of Regents at UT, and it’s very important to the family that you to go UT for your graduate degree.”

My mother had gotten remarried two weeks after I graduated from college. I had a bevy of stepsiblings I didn’t even know. But I wanted to get to know them. I wanted to be part of a family again. And I knew what I didn’t want: to continue scraping by in Boston, finding new roommates well into my 30s and 40s because I couldn’t afford to live by myself, struggling through the dark winters and the increasingly brutal summers.

Boston slipped out of my grasp, even as I walked its streets every day. I told myself the beautiful buildings on Berkeley and Boylston Street belonged to other people, not me. They were for people with confidence, with career paths, with money (or the promise of money in the future). My roommates — strangers when they moved in — had turned out to be delightful, and my college friends were all making plans to return to Boston; but still, the city stopped being my future. It turned into a temporary locale, a place I was circling until I could land in Texas.

I applied to the then-School of Library and Information Science at UT-Austin. My boyfriend at the time wanted to go into academia; I told myself I’d become an academic librarian and would follow him wherever he went.

Spring came to Boston. I plotted my escape. I’d walk to my apartment from the T stop, looking at the buildings boxing in my view of the sky and telling myself that I’d be able to see the whole sky in Texas. I’d go to the Crane store in the Pru, looking at the stationary and saving up for the boxed sets on sale so I could keep in touch with my friends and then-boyfriend after I left. (He was going to England for grad school and unsure when he was returning.) I bought a famed gurgling cod pitcher for my mom and another for my boyfriend’s family, both in white, and treated myself to a cobalt blue one.

One day, after a sharp disagreement with a co-worker, I stormed out and kept going until I reached the South End. The trees bloomed lushly over the cobblestone sidewalks. I stopped at a fruit vendor’s stand and bought oranges for one of the few co-workers who seemed to like me. I rarely ate oranges before working with him, but he’d always peel one and give me a few slices. Throwing that orange to him when I returned to the office, refreshed from the spring air, brought me more joy than I’d had in months.

The weeks before I moved home that June were exciting times for the office. One of my assignments was covering a unique Boston Marathon runner: Danalyn Adams Scharf, the first female heart transplant recipient to complete a marathon. I also interviewed a number of runners affiliated with the hospital and its charitable causes. I remember the joyful chaos of the marathon: all the cheering, the people milling about, a wonderful undercurrent of excitement in the air.

Then, Governor Jane Swift — the first governor to give birth while in office — had her twins at my hospital. A TV reporter held up a copy of “BWH Bulletin,” one of my newsletters, on-air. When I saw that on one of the media room TVs, I cheered so loud that co-workers ran over to see what was going on.

The office had a farewell lunch for me at a fancy restaurant. (An empty chair stood at our table. They’d invited my then-boyfriend, but he’d stood them up.) We walked to and from lunch under those beautiful blooming trees, the sky a perfect cerulean blue, laughing and joking about everything that had happened lately. And for just a little while, everything stopped being stressful, and was just as perfect and gorgeous as that sky and those trees and flowers. For just a little while, it felt like God himself tore through all the bullshit, pointed at me, and said, “For the next few weeks, everything is going to be okay, because the most important thing you’ll take away from all this is that You Helped People.”

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I moved back to Texas, taking with me — among the rest of my things — a printed photo of the hospital flocked by news vans, their live feed poles towering high, all there because of Governor Swift’s babies. The media spotlight turned toward my hospital, but for a lovely reason.

I left Boston with P.J. Harvey’s Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea in my head. Even now, when I hear “You Said Something,” I am still walking on St. Botolph Street, into the South End, trees and flowers and red brick buildings around me, welcoming me, becoming — for at least a moment — my home.

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Everything I’ve written above is not the story I usually tell people. I’m quick to point out, with a big smile, that I’m a Texan at heart and I couldn’t wait to come back to my home state. I tell people I never really felt at home in Boston. That I’d always planned to settle in Austin.

I think I say that because, in my heart, I know Boston didn’t chase me out. I know I ran away. I probably never would’ve risen to the top at HMCo, or worked at the BWH Public Affairs office forever. But neither would my nightmare of the desperate 40-year-old begging people to live in her crappy apartment have come true. (Probably.)

I’ll always regret that I left Boston feeling like a failure. Like just another kid from a small town who couldn’t cut it in the big city. I don’t think I’ll ever get closure on that. But it helps to think back and remember that there were good parts as well as bad parts. That, in a small way, I Helped People. And that nothing’s stopping me from continuing to Help People, even if I don’t work at a hospital anymore.

So I remember. And I tell myself I’m going to move forward, despite my regret. And maybe that’s all the closure I need.

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(If you want to contribute financially to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, I encourage you to visit The One Fund. If you want to donate blood, contact your local American Red Cross or blood donation center. And bless you for being, as Mr. Rogers’ mom said, one of the helpers.)

Copyright 2013, Sarah Rodriguez Pratt. All rights reserved.