The following is adapted from “Everything Is Going to Be Great: An Underfunded and Overexposed European Grand Tour,” Rachel Shukert’s just-published memoir of traveling and living in Europe in her very early 20s. This excerpt takes place in Vienna, in the summer of 2003.
Berthold was very short for an Austrian man. He was also quite a bit older than he had looked from across the room — the lines around his eyes deeper, his face more determinedly weathered, but artfully so, like one of those distressed handmade journals bought in overseas marketplaces by people who are very serious about properly poeticizing their self-absorption; for example, people like me. We stood beaming idiotically at one another like befuddled dignitaries determined not to cause offense, I wondered if Berthold might not serve the same purpose as such a journal — a sort of talismanic shortcut to authenticity, a leathery foreign object suitable for display in dimly lit cafés, telegraphing my literary ambitions, my credibility, my admirable commitment to tasteful pretension.
Berthold finally spoke. “So,” he said finally. His eyes, I noticed, were a beautiful, liquid golden brown, like a stream of perfectly brewed tea. “You are from New York City?”
“Yes,” I said. “I mean, no. I mean, yes, I live in New York City. But I grew up in Omaha. In Nebraska.”
“Nebraska?” He frowned. “What is it?”
Several bottles of wine later, Berthold had me pressed against an ancient wall in a cobblestone alley, crushing his mouth onto mine. His breath tasted sour, of cigarettes and liquor, and he forced my jaw open to accept his tongue, which wriggled thick and slightly cold in my mouth, like a slab of reanimated sashimi. I was forced to store my own tongue in his mouth, pressing it somewhere between his undulating dorsum and the wet inside of his cheek. Our incisors met with a crunch, faint but sickening all the same, like a greasy butter knife scraping against a china plate. I pulled away for a moment, pretending to catch my breath.
“Look at this wall,” I murmured. “It’s so old. Imagine. Mozart probably peed against this wall.”
Berthold kneaded my neck hard with his chin. “Please,” he whispered. “Come please with me now, to my home.” His arms snaked inside my jacket and wrapped warmly around my waist.
Horrible kissing aside, I was tempted. I liked being with him. I knew his last name; I knew his occupation. I was convinced that he was neither a thief nor a serial killer, nor was he planning to abduct me in order to conduct grisly acts of medical experimentation and/or cannibalism. I had gone home with many, many young men about whom I knew a lot less — and when what I did know was a lot less encouraging. But that night, something held me back. Somehow, I wasn’t yet prepared to go home with an Austrian stranger named Berthold who was old enough to be my father.
He seemed to understand, and after I agreed to have dinner with him the following night, he insisted on seeing me to my hotel.
“The Hotel Kummer,” he said softly, when we arrived. “Do you know what it means, Kummer?”
I shook my head.
“Sorrow,” he said. “The Hotel Sorrow.” He gazed past me into the lightless void of the welcome hall. “Maybe next time I see you, you have no more sorrow, Rachel.” It was the first time he had said my name.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. I was still jet-lagged, but the unease that kept me awake was something else — a vague, nagging feeling that I had lost something. Fully awake, I found some change and went outside to the all-night Käsekrainer stand across the street. The Käsekrainer is unique to Vienna; it is a special kind of sausage about a foot long, thicker than a broomstick, the crisped skin a mottled pinky brown and heavily beaded in hot fat. When you bite off the tip, a piping hot gusher of runny white cheese coats your tongue, singeing the roof of your mouth and any other parts of your body on which it may happen to land. At this very stand, on my first night in town, I had suffered a direct hit of cheese to the eye. My cries of pain were quickly drowned out by a chorus of cruel laughter from a pair of young neo-Nazi skinheads standing next to me, and I had fled from them in terror.
Now, as I stepped up to the counter and ordered a beer, I wondered if they had really been skinheads at all. I could have imagined the swastikas on their shirts. I wondered if this was my “sorrow,” as Berthold had said. To always see skinheads where there were none.
———
Berthold was already at the restaurant, drinking a gin and tonic at a table near the window. Over a dinner of Wiener Schnitzel with spaetzle and blackberry jam, he told me about himself. He had grown up in a small Alpine town near the Italian border, the youngest child of a policeman father.
“Your father was a policeman?” I said, frantically doing the math in my head. Berthold was in his late 40s, which would have made his father at least 80, which would have meant he was a “policeman” during the –
Berthold interrupted me before I could finish the horrible end of my thought. It didn’t matter, he said. He didn’t like to dwell on the past. He wanted to feel young. He stubbed out his cigarette against the word “Cinzano” printed in blue at the bottom of the ashtray, and reached across the table to touch my face. Softly, he murmured something in German.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I say: You are a beautiful child.”
When Berthold kissed me outside the restaurant, there was none of the unpleasant choking wetness of before, and when we broke apart and he asked me, again, to come home with him, this time I didn’t refuse.
In the weeks that followed, we saw each other regularly. I only had sex with him one more time, mostly out of politeness, but I still enjoyed his company. Berthold was solicitous and fatherly, making sure I ate and bringing me little gifts — old sepia-toned postcards, a toy elephant made from wooden beads and elastic string. When he wasn’t working, he took me to art museums or for walks in the Prater, the large park on the outskirts of the city. After an hour or so, we’d stop in a café. Berthold would reach across the table and pat my hand distractedly while he fussed with his lighter and his tobacco and his gin and tonic. I imagined that the people who smiled at us as they walked past took us for a father and daughter; an estranged pair, perhaps, our halting conversation not borne from a language divide but from the bittersweet effort of getting to know each other again.
I suspected Berthold knew I was, shall we say, not of the Master Race, but he never brought it up, just as I never brought up who his father might have been arresting when he began his career in Austrian law enforcement in the very early ’40s. It didn’t seem fair to force someone to confront his family’s Nazi past until you’d been dating for at least six weeks.
However, there was something that had been bothering me that I felt I had to bring up. The other night, I had struck up a late-night conversation with the monosyllabic, grease-spattered sausage man, and he had begun to ask me about my ethnic background. Cagily, I had replied that I actually had relatives who had lived in Vienna.
The sausage man had snorted. “In the Second District, maybe.”
“What’s the Second District?” I asked.
He gave me a look that chilled my blood. “The Jewish district.”
“This man,” Berthold shook his head angrily. “This man has no right to say this to you.”
“Whatever,” I said. “I mean, I know he didn’t mean it as a compliment, but really, all he said is that I look Jewish. Which, you know, I kind of already knew.”
“No,” Berthold placed his hand over mine, and gazed deeply into my eyes. “No. You are beautiful. You do not seem Jewish at all. Please not to worry. Some people in Vienna still are full of hate.”
———
On Sunday mornings there was a huge flea market in the empty field just past the Naschmarkt. It was known as the biggest and best in all of Central Europe. I had begged Berthold to go with me, and on my last day in Vienna and our last afternoon together, he finally agreed.
It was another beautiful day. Spread before me as far as the eye could see, the detritus of Europe glittered, a vast museum of the unexceptional. Faded biscuit tins and bits of old glass, picture frames and atomizers and eyeless dolls with matted hair and parted lips; the sun hid the chips and scratches with dancing spots of light, lending the stacks of painted china and the rows of dusty old clocks an eager new sheen, like bedraggled puppies putting on a valiant show for prospective parents at the pound.
Berthold was soon deep in negotiation at a table piled high with luridly colored barware, and it seemed most of the items for sale in the inner stalls were out of my price range anyway, so I made my way alone to the outermost edge of the market, lined with makeshift stands bearing merchandise of a decidedly less rarefied nature: broken toys, scraps of greasy clothing hanging haphazardly against a length of wire fence. A large man carrying a stack of cardboard boxes brushed roughly past me, nearly knocking me to the ground. I grabbed the edge of the nearest table for balance, and suddenly I saw it.
It was at the bottom of a half-empty carton, tucked carelessly inside a creased plastic sleeve like an old comic book. The cloth was badly discolored, and its frayed edges had started to fold up on themselves, but there was no mistaking it for what it was. A yellow Star of David bearing a single word in faded black: Jude.
When I was a very small child, long before I had heard the words “panic attack,” I used to tell my mother that my “tummy was beating.” I’m not sure she ever knew what I meant, but to me, it seemed the best way to describe the terrible feeling of descent, of dread, as though I had mistakenly swallowed my pulsating heart. Now, I actually thought my heart might force its way out of my body and land on the grass with a bloody squelch.
Taking my frozen panic for interest, the woman behind the card table pounced. Nattering aggressively in an unfamiliar language, she seized the star from the carton and pressed it hard into my palm. The plastic sleeve fell open, and I could feel the coarse cloth against my skin.
“No,” I cried, and yanked my hand away, knocking a small metal vase and a ceramic ashtray to the ground. The woman began to scream at me, waving the plastic-covered star in my face in an accusatory salute. Suddenly, I heard a man’s voice behind me, shouting angrily and harshly in German. Berthold had come to my rescue.
The woman changed her tone and held up the star cajolingly, gesturing toward me. Berthold grabbed my elbow and jerked me away, an act made somewhat less masculine by the fact that he was carrying a shopping bag full of table linens and an enormous lamp shaped like an elephant.
“That woman …” I stammered.
He sniffed. “That woman was a Gypsy. Who knows how she gets what she is selling.”
“But the star …”
“You don’t want that,” he said.
“But I do,” I said softly. “It was there for me to find.”
“Forget about it!” he shouted. “It’s not nice! It’s not something to buy!”
The harshness of his voice seemed to startle us both, because he immediately plastered his face with an artificial smile. “I have bought some wonderful books, books from when I was a child. Come! We’ll have lunch, and I’ll show you.”
I took a long look at his hopeful face. He had been kind to me. For a moment, I wanted to tell him that all was well, that of course I’d forget about this, that my memories of Vienna, and of him, would be nothing but drinks in cafes and the glittering foyers of grand museums.
“I’m not hungry,” I said instead.
We said our goodbyes later that afternoon. He dropped me off at the hotel, kissing me on the forehead like a child. We promised to keep in touch, but I knew we wouldn’t — we both knew. I was leaving to face the future. And Berthold would always be a part of the past.
“Are you going off to be a Mad Man?” I asked my husband as he downed the last of his coffee, slid his laptop into its case, and headed for the door.
“No,” he said, giving his shirttail a final tug. “But I’m about to be an Irritated Man.”
I can’t blame him. Since “Mad Men” entered the cultural consciousness, I have harassed my husband, an advertising creative director, with a multitude of questions, mostly of the facetious variety. “No,” he replies, with diminishing patience, “I don’t start drinking at 10 a.m., I’m not allowed to use my expense account for prostitutes, I don’t compulsively pat the bottoms of secretaries at work. We don’t even have secretaries anymore. That’s a profession whose time has passed, like silversmiths and fletchers and the people who make barrels.”
“Coopers,” I say. “A person who makes barrels is called a cooper. As in Sterling Cooper.”
“I have to go,” he says. “I’ll be home late. Don’t wait up.”
“Bye, Don,” I say as the door closes. I turn to my cat. “Sally,” I say sharply, “bring me my cigarettes from the bedroom. Then go watch TV.” The cat stares at me for a few moments before contorting her torso to delicately slurp at her own anus, an entirely appropriate response. I wonder how many hours it will be before I can reasonably head for the liquor cabinet.
I’m not actually crazy. (I may be a little OCD about pop culture.) Deep down, I know that the liquor-soaked miasma of Sterling Cooper has about as much in common with my husband’s office as “Dynasty’s” Denver-Carrington has with BP. My husband, despite an appreciation for a well-mixed martini and a mildly sadistic gruffness with underlings, is not Don Draper; Don Draper, for one thing, would never leave the house with toothpaste in his beard. The only thing that has really made him be like Don was that for so long, I felt like Betty.
Women of my generation weren’t raised to be Betty. Our mothers, the trailblazers, told us we could be anything we wanted to be — brain surgeon, judge, astronaut. The possibility of becoming a housewife seemed scarcely a step up from being a prostitute or a drug mule: a cautionary tale, something you could grow up to be, but only if you were too lazy or stupid or unlucky to become president of the United States. It was the option for people who didn’t have any options, and if you did have options — if, for instance, you had good parents and a good education and hadn’t been raised to be some kind of veiled brood mare on a fundamentalist religious compound in the desert — then you really had no excuse. Every other young woman I know seems to identify with Peggy Olson, pluckily battling her way up the corporate ladder, or perhaps more poignantly with Joan Holloway, a confident, organizational superhero destined never to get her full due. Everyone also seems to be of the opinion that Betty is a vain, spoiled brat that they want to smack in the face.
When I first started watching “Mad Men,” during the show’s second season, I wasn’t technically a housewife, but being a writer can feel eerily close sometimes — the endless stretch of days spent puttering half-dressed through the silent apartment, the ever-growing list of errands and things to pick up “as long as you’re home”; each quart of milk and bag of dry cleaning a tangible reminder that you don’t have anything better to do. My first book, for which I had such high hopes and such good reviews, was threatening to sink without a trace. Every day, while my husband was at work and the industrious, overachieving Peggys of my acquaintance were off conquering Manhattan one legal brief at a time, I sat at my sad little desk in the corner of the living room, working joylessly on underpaid freelance assignments and watching, with not-so-quiet desperation, my Amazon rating plummet (my people are not Nordic). A high-class problem, sure, but sometimes the worst heartbreak comes wrapped in the prettiest package, and if Betty Draper’s generation was indoctrinated never to admit to disappointment in marriage, mine was just as trained not to admit disappointment in a career. And above all, I had to hold on to my career, because without it, what was I? A housewife. A failure to feminism, to my mother, to myself.
So I felt that I understood Betty Draper, even in her less than flattering moments. I empathized when she snapped at her children, and I understood her preening, designed to elicit the admiration of men and the envy of her friends. I understood the icy rage when she coldly offered her cheek to Don to kiss in the mornings. It wasn’t because of the lipstick on his collar or the empty bottle of rye — or at least, not just because. It was because he got to go off to be busy and brilliant and essential, while she got to stay at home, lining the drawers with stupid contact paper. The Drapers’ spats reminded me of the fights I had with my husband when I asked why he was at work until 2 in the morning, why it seemed he had to leave the country three weeks out of the month. “You don’t understand,” he would answer angrily. “You don’t have to be financially responsible for another person.” And I would shout back, more furious with myself than him: “God! Don’t you think I wish I was?”
The climax of my Betty Draper overidentification came near the end of last season, in the episode called “Souvenir,” when Don goes to Rome on business and takes Betty, who, like me, lived in Europe in her very early 20s, a time she spoke of with obvious wistfulness. Removed from suburbia, she transforms into a knowing cosmopolitan sophisticate, revisiting not only the woman she once was but also the one that, under different circumstances, she could have become. In the episode’s last scene, the Drapers have returned to Ossining, N.Y. (is it really a coincidence that Matthew Weiner chose for their home a town most famous for its maximum-security prison?) and Don, his face full of hope, presents Betty with the titular souvenir, a gold bracelet charm shaped like the Colosseum.
Betty says: “Now I’ll have something to look at when I talk about that time we went to Rome.”
A bracelet charm. A trophy decorating a trophy; an adventure, an identity, reduced to something cute and useless, like a purse for a doll.
I cried for almost two hours after that episode. I felt that nothing I had ever seen on TV had captured my personal experience so profoundly. And then, all that crying must have dislodged some kind of obstruction in my brain, because I suddenly remembered something I hadn’t since the Season 3 premiere:
Betty Draper is a fictional character.
One day, Betty Draper will be a crossword puzzle clue, and I will still be (God willing) a living, breathing human. This was not 1963. I wasn’t trapped. I had options. I had a career (if not, exactly, a job), a husband with a verifiable birth certificate, and a fairly healthy grasp on my emotional life. There was no need to avenge myself on innocent birds or dining room furniture, or leave a man I hardly knew for another man I hardly knew expecting a different result — the very definition of insanity, and, as I mentioned earlier, I am not crazy.
Life is full of disappointment, but my disappointments were my own, not assigned to me by a team of Cheever-wielding scriptwriters. I found this idea oddly liberating. If I had put myself in this funk, I could get myself out of it. All I needed was to cut out the Richard Yates, quit drinking in the middle of the day, and for “Mad Men” to take a well-deserved hiatus.
Besides, I have a feeling Season 4 is going to be all about Trudy Campbell.
Some years ago, when I was young and stupid(er), I was at a launch party on the Lower East Side for some defunct magazine, the kind that served mostly as a repository for party pictures of the editor’s awesome and creatively dressed friends. These magazines don’t really exist anymore, investors and editors alike having realized that the same operating model can be achieved on Facebook with no overheard costs or pesky editorial content, but this was a different time, the nascent digital age, before “print media” had transformed into an archaic concept, like “happiness” or “money.”
I had never heard of this magazine, which seemed a compelling reason to go: If I hadn’t heard of it, it must be cool. My friend had left by the time I arrived, or had never shown at all, and I lingered on the sidelines of the party, not talking to anyone, sipping a free drink and hoping to pass off my crippling shyness for entitled reticence when a fairly well-known nightlife photographer approached me. He was one of these guys like Ryan McGinley or Terry Richardson, a specialist in the school of “Look at This Awesome Party You Didn’t Go to Full of Amazing People You Don’t Know.” (The fact that said party is a sort of Beckettian constructed wilderness, at once everywhere and nowhere, is something you don’t figure out until you’re closing in on 30.) He told me he thought I was pretty and looked cool and asked if I would pose for some pictures. The party was winding down, so he suggested we go to a place down the street — a very private, very under-the-radar, very hip club I had only read about — and take some pictures there.
OK, so let me back up. Nobody moves to New York because they think they’re just like everybody else. A young kid, fueled by a toxic blend of bravado and wicked insecurity, can expend a truly terrifying amount of energy trying to prove her exceptionalism, prove that she is different (read: better) than the dull hometown peers she left behind, who go to uncreative jobs in uncreative clothes, eat at Chili’s, practice monogamy. And now, at last, a full-fledged arbiter of the extraordinary (or so it seemed at the time) had given me his stamp of approval. As we breezed past the velvet rope and into the club, a place that only the night before would have seemed as impossible to infiltrate as the private quarters of Buckingham Palace, I was filled with joy and relief. Finally, I had made it! I had arrived! I was so excited that I didn’t think for a second to ask him, even as he led me down the stairs to a dark, secluded bar away from the main club area, what kind of pictures he had in mind.
Did I think he wanted me to pose in a sexually suggestive manner? Of course: I wasn’t expecting to sit for a Richard Avedon portrait. But I didn’t expect that he would yank up my skirt without asking, rip down my panties and start snapping away, all the while instructing me to “spread” and “look sexy.” And I certainly didn’t expect that I, a woman who has never been shy about voicing her displeasure, would go along with it despite the gnawing sense of violation and shame. I mean, it wasn’t quite the Coco-takes-her-bra-off-and-cries scene from “Fame,” but it was close. And that guy at least let Coco take her bra off herself.
Luckily, a club staffer saw what was going on and kicked me — and my nascent X-rated modeling career — to the curb, telling me that if he ever saw me around there again, he’d call the police. At the time, I was furious and humiliated to be mistaken for a prostitute, or an exhibitionistic pervert who was the sole person to blame, but in retrospect, I feel kind of grateful to the guy. (If only Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan had been so fortunate.)
The photographer accompanied me to the sidewalk, where he lamely apologized for the “misunderstanding” and said he’d send me the pictures if I wanted.
“Just erase them,” I said, and made him do it while I watched. Humiliation had restored my assertiveness.
On the long subway ride home, I tried to make sense of what had just happened. Why had I not resisted? Would I have spoken up for myself eventually? Where would it have ended? I didn’t have a job on the line, or a relationship — the only thing at stake here, I finally realized, was my own vanity. That was the real reason I hadn’t pulled up my sad little panties and run for the door. Because I didn’t want the photographer to stop thinking I was pretty. I didn’t want the photographer to think I wasn’t cool.
Not long before, a female friend and I had watched a “Girls Gone Wild” video with a mixture of righteous outrage and disgust. The filmmakers were clearly exploiting these girls, many of them decidedly not, shall we say, at the height of their decision-making powers. Still, it was hard not to feel disdain for the tan, tacky, scantily clad girls themselves, who clearly didn’t attend as selective a university as we did and probably had never even taken a women’s studies course. (Like a lot of twentysomethings, my friend and I were smug, pretentious assholes, an unfortunate condition I have spent the better part of my late 20s battling mightily to correct.)
But after my own episode, I began to wonder: What, really, was the difference between what I had just done and “Girls Gone Wild”? My photographer might be better known for snapping creatively tattooed Lower East Side girls than wasted coeds in Tampa, but the means were the same: the flattering coercion, the seduction of being found beautiful, of belonging. The only difference between the preening sexual exploitation of GGW’s Joe Francis and the preening sexual exploitation of, say, Terry Richardson (who has been accused of all kinds of nasty things of late) is that only one of those sets of pictures is going to wind up in some chic gallery on Rivington Street or in the pages of French Vogue. And the girls themselves were not so different either. Like me, they were probably just surprised and flattered by the attention, trying to navigate the dangerously permeable line between being admired and being objectified — a line it’s often hard to tell you’ve crossed until it’s too late.
These days, you don’t have to be an insecure kid with an unhealthy deference to club photographers to find yourself baffled and vulnerable at the end of a camera lens. We live in a tricky age of near-constant documentation, of Facebook pages and blogs and Flickr galleries full of pictures we have taken, much of it designed to convince others (and designed to convince ourselves) of the fabulousness of our own lives. But when I think about the incidents of my own past, even when I hear the sometimes ridiculously overwrought uproar about teenage girls “sexting” pictures of themselves to their boyfriends, or posting them online, it worries me. I’m not saying there aren’t plenty of women who feel genuinely empowered by taking their clothes off. In other circumstances, under other conditions, I’ve even been one of them. But the moment I put my very human craving for admiration in someone else’s hands is the moment I lost what was worth admiring.
I think we all know freedom’s not another word for doing whatever some guy with a camera and a compliment wants you to. Freedom — and power — is about being able to say no when it counts.
Rachel Shukert’s new book, “Everything Is Going to Be Great,” will be published in July by Harper Perennial. Follow her on Twitter at @RachelShukert.
It’s the last day of school, minutes before the bell rings. I’m excavating the year’s detritus from my slime-green locker — crumpled homework assignments stained with ink and ketchup; dark vials of hardened rubber cement. Around me, kids are chattering about the trips they will take and the amusement parks they will visit, tossing books and papers into trash bags and at each other’s heads. A small group silently marks the seconds under the large wall clock hanging above the double doors. When the reedy bell finally shrieks, cheers reverberate through the hallway. I heave my knapsack over my shoulder and trudge out into the sticky Nebraska heat, crestfallen.
It wasn’t that I liked school so much. It’s that I hated summer.
Summer meant sweaty thighs sticking to plastic chairs and getting diaper rash, long after you had stopped wearing diapers. It meant waiting around at barbecues to scarf down a still-cold hot dog that tasted of freezer burn and lighter fluid. Worst of all, summer meant camp, where I would be required to live, play and shower with other children. I would be forced to sit atop an elderly horse as it plodded down a well-worn trail, stopping whenever a horse ahead paused to release a cascade of feces that hit the hard-packed dirt with a warm plop. It meant bleach burns in the arts and crafts shed, and being made to sing Zionist folk songs at dinner.
“Look at Elliot,” a dreadlocked counselor reprimanded me, pointing to a pale boy who stood upon a table, wiggling his behind and bellowing the words of Theodore Herzl with a fervor sure to make a hardened Hezbollah fighter blanch. Elliot’s parents had recently divorced, his younger brother was autistic and his St. Louis Cardinals cap covered the fine hair that was just beginning to grow back after his battle with childhood leukemia. “With all of the challenges he has to face, he can still show some spirit. What’s the matter with you?”
I twisted my sunburned lips into a painful grimace. “My stomach hurts,” I told the counselor. “I think I have food poisoning.”
“Again?”
“Again.”
The infirmary was my one respite, a place where I could lie down, bathed in air conditioning, and avoid the tyranny of enforced merrymaking for at least a few hours. Through the open window, I would listen to the hum of my fellow campers shrieking and splashing with a mixture of superiority and envy. Why were they able to enjoy themselves, I wondered, as I lay on a lumpy cot, reading “Night” by Elie Wiesel.
The word on the street is that people like summer. They welcome the chance to relax, to consume alarming amounts of melon and engage in casual sex acts beneath a starry sky. I can appreciate this on an intellectual level, but the inability to enjoy these kinds of simple pleasures has persisted throughout my life, and something about the summer months throws my general malaise into painful relief. The constant burden of forced merriment — the sense that you should be out somewhere, anywhere, taking advantage of it all, like Gidget or the Kennedys, weighs heavily on me. Like New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day and Halloween, the pressure to do something significant, meaningful and — most of all — fun paralyzes me with anxiety. I obsess about all the places I could be and the people I might have been, with just a slightly better combination of genetics and fate. I could have been a bronzed surfer girl on the beaches of Malibu, someone tanned and toned and easygoing. I could be the owner of a seaside taverna on the Adriatic or Aegean coast, one of those rocky sun-kissed shores where nobody seems to work and joy is abundant.
Or I just could have been someone with smaller breasts.
Seriously. I know this is not the wisdom espoused by Maxim, but in the summer, my breasts are the Moriarty to my Sherlock Holmes, the Lex Luthor to my Superman. In the winter I can camouflage them under carefully chosen sweaters and coats, but in the summer — boom! There they are, out for all to see. Wearing a bra is unbearable, going without one unthinkable, and a bathing suit, well, I don’t want to talk about it. Other girls might prance about in floaty little rompers and strappy sundresses, but from the time I hit puberty, even a simple tank top made me look like a deranged prostitute from a Fellini movie, the kind who will willingly smother the faces of the local boys in her tremendous mammaries for a cigarette and a pound of grapes. Even before gravity took its terrible toll, any shopping expedition for summer apparel was certain to end in tears.
“Cheer up,” my mother used to say, while I struggled with a whispery little sundress in a cramped dressing room. The triangular flap of flimsy cotton meant to serve as the bust barely concealed my areolae. “Maybe one day you’ll have a mastectomy.”
I would have reprimanded her, if I didn’t sometimes think the same thing.
Once I was old enough to drive and could come and go as I pleased, I was able to temper the tedium and self-consciousness that summer brought with liberal amounts of mind-altering substances. But just when I might have conquered my summer phobia, I moved to New York City.
The summers in New York are appalling, hot and horrible, and the smells alone are enough to make you gag — an opaque, unholy stew of garbage, sweat and sewage, with a soupçon of spoiled milk and urine. I won’t even get started on the subway, except to say if you have ever waited on a New York City subway platform on a scorching August day for a train that refuses to come, sweat dripping down your belly as some busker pounds out a furious “tribal” rhythm on the “drums,” then you understand why there will never be peace in the Middle East. The heat brings a unique blend of fury and lethargy — I feel like I could murder someone, and be totally indifferent if they killed me back.
But more than anything, my real problem with summer is the way the world grinds to a halt. Friends and acquaintances flit in and out, and promises made in the spring are suddenly postponed to the fall.
And then there is all this time — silent, empty, dangerous time — to think about what the hell you are doing with your life.
During the rest of the year, we plug along, cocooned in our dark clothes and home offices, e-mailing and IM’ing, sure that the guy we met the other night, the one from the big agency or publishing house, is finally going to be the one to make all our dreams come true. There’s no time to wonder if there’s more to life until June rolls around. We may officially recognize the last day of the year as Dec. 31, but everyone knows it’s still when the school year ends. Summer represents a moment of departure from our mundane lives, both a respite and a new beginning. But like so much else in life, the reality inevitably disappoints. The days drag on. The phone stops ringing and the e-mails stop coming. We watch, helpless, as the more charmed among us disappear to vacation homes and parties, into the magical world of the “already made-its.” Those of us further down on the ladder are doomed to wander the silent city alone, brooding on what we haven’t done, and on how much farther there still is to go.
For me, there comes that day of reckoning at the end of August. When I was younger, all I could think about was getting back to school, back to normal life. Now that I am an adult and have realized there is no such thing as real life, all I can think about is getting out. I’m trapped in my dingy, poorly ventilated apartment, unable to move. For days I do nothing but sit on the couch and watch daytime television, nauseated by the scent of my own sweat. And at last I think, enough. I’ve had it. I will move to someplace nice, like San Francisco or Switzerland. I will go outside, have a yard and a dog and a group of friends who will be there for me and with whom I will not feel unhealthily competitive, as I was promised by the sitcoms of my childhood, and finally, I will be happy.
But then, suddenly, it’s September. The air is warm but carries a subtle breeze of relief and possibility. The phone starts ringing again, and giddily, I make plans and appointments, full of new purpose, running around greeting people I forgot I hated.
New York may be the worst possible place to spend the worst possible season, but I can’t just leave. That would be quitting. And nobody likes a quitter. Besides, maybe this is the year it will all work out. Maybe this is the year I’ll finally be popular.
I swing open my old locker to accumulate the refuse of another year. The summer is over. There’s three whole months to enjoy — before it’s time to start complaining about winter.
January Jones as Betty Draper in "Mad Men" 
