The Stranger Within Sarah Stein

Chapter One

There are two kinds of strangers—the ones who are strange, like weird, and that’s why you’re not supposed to talk to them; and the other kind, the people who you just don’t know. The weird ones are different and sometimes a little creepy. But the strangers you don’t know might one day become a friend.

And there’s the other kind of stranger—the stranger in you. You become strange to yourself. And strange in both ways: weird, like you’re wearing your underwear as a hat; and unfamiliar, like you’re the new kid in town. Everyone else seems like they belong. You’re the only one who feels strange.

Sometimes where you’re standing doesn’t feel right even though you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. You’re not sinking, and you’re not stuck. You change positions. It doesn’t help. You keep moving and end up in the same place. You feel lost, like your feet are pointing the wrong way.

I live in New York City, which scares most people but always seems safe to me. I like the noises at night—all those loud footsteps that jam like jackhammers, the taxis buzzing like yellow fireflies, the Greek diners with those carousels of cake, all lit up like frosted castles. The city feels like someone’s butt won’t get off the remote control; it’s all fast forward and someone hid the pause button. I like how everyone is always trying to make themselves look tougher than they are—teenagers riding on the subways wearing nose rings, angry construction workers with tattoos, growling grandmothers.

Homeless people do sort of scare me. I don’t know why. They are strange, but what kind of strange is homeless strange? Are they weird, or is it that I don’t know anyone who is homeless? I feel homeless even though I have a home. There’s a roof over my head, but that’s not how it feels inside my head.

Lately I’ve really been scaring myself.

I’m Sarah Stein. I’m twelve. And my parents are divorcing. I hate the way that sounds, like an embarrassing middle name. Now everything feels confusing. It’s like being in a strange place and not speaking the language, or locking up your bicycle and not remembering where you left it. It feels all sideways and zigzag, out of order and in reverse.

I haven’t been able to figure it all out yet. I’m a New York City kid with a street strut that some people see as cocky but I think is really just a mask. Everyone has one, you know. Masks aren’t always for scaring people. Sometimes you just want to hide your face because your feelings are showing. It’s like makeup, except that it doesn’t wash off so easy. We’re all wearing masks, even when it’s not Halloween.

My mom doesn’t want me to see how angry she is; my dad is trying to hide his sadness. She wasn’t always this way, and neither was he. When you lose yourself, maybe you first have to become someone else before you can find your way back. But what if you don’t find your way back? What if you can’t?

It would help, I think, if I was older. When you’re older you’re taller and you can see more, and there’s less to be scared of. But at twelve you feel like you’re missing something. You’re a pre-teen and a postadolescent—a pigeonholed kid. Always in between, the zero zone where people don’t notice you as much. You don’t get carried around anymore. But that doesn’t mean you know where you’re going. You’re trapped in the middle—the middle of the middle—between hardcore rap and bubblegum pop, between Gap and Guess, Harry Potter and Push, between your mother and your father, and between the two Sarahs. Yes, the TWO Sarahs. There are two Sarahs, but the problem is: Neither of them is really me.

The divorce drew a line in black permanent magic marker. Our divided house now can’t be erased. And I know how things are on both sides of the line. There’s the before and the after. Before the divorce, bad was never really all that bad. Bad was the wrong word. It was more like annoying, like getting your feelings hurt, or not being allowed to use the computer, or realizing that your dress is so not cool. But now I know that bad feels like something else. Bad feels like this.

Sarah, dear, my mother said in her customer service voice. Your father and I have something we need to say to you.

I’m thinking a cancelled summer trip, or Lizzie McGuire was off the air.

I remembered the three of us rollerblading in Central Park, or watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, or the lighting of the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center. We had things to say to each other, ordinary things, like stay in line and stop swerving, or let’s get ice cream afterwards. This talk was going to be different. The words were the kind that hurt.

My dad didn’t say a thing. He didn’t even look at me. This meeting wasn’t his idea. I could tell. He’d rather be somewhere else. He’d rather talk about something else.

We were sitting in the living room of the loft apartment in TriBeCa where we all used to live, before everything got split up—the people in our family and the things in our home. I started to see the loft like a board game, with people and furniture taken away, one piece at a time. We were playing a family game with the whole family, except that when the game was over, the family was over, too.

You see, my mother began. She was wearing a business suit, a black jacket with winged lapels that were as shiny as baby seals. The skirt was pleated and striped, and there was a gangsta girl hat, like a Bonnie who was just about to dump her Clyde.

You probably noticed that Daddy and I aren’t getting along so well lately.

Yes, I noticed the unheld hands and the slight insults. There were silent dinners and cold shoulders. Their lips never touched anything but food.

My father looked embarrassed. His head dropped and his eyes glanced downward too, like a kid who forgot to do his homework. The assignment was to keep his family together, and he looked like someone who had just flunked. I think he just wanted to escape inside one of his paintings, which were leaning against easels and walls all over the loft as if they were windows to a secret, magic hideaway.

I think that’s why he paints. I think that’s what canvases mean to him. When he paints a world opens up, a world of colorful splotches and mix-matched paints, of colliding rainbows and dizzying pastels, the imaginary place where my father goes. He begins by slopping, brushing, and poking at the paint. Then he retreats, tilts his head, and looks at what he’s done before he leaps inside. He doesn’t need a running start; sometimes I think he’s already in there.

He was tired and thin, his shaggy blonde hair looking like a wig he had put on backwards. And he was sad, which I think was always true even though he tried to hide it. The problem is that even his masks were sad. Now it was only going to get worse. A daughter would want to fix it if she could, but I’m only twelve.

We thought it would be a good idea for us to separate for a while, she continued. We’ll see how we do living separate lives, but, of course, you’ll be part of those lives. We’re separating from each other; we’re not separating from you.

How is that possible, I thought? If they’re separating, how can I be standing still? What’s to stop me from separating from them, or worse, separating from myself? I might get lost in long division, and not know what to do with all those remainders.

You’re getting a divorce? I asked sobbing. My father reached out and grabbed my shoulders as if he knew I would either fall or fly away. He wiped away some of my tears. My body shook like a popcorn machine. But he didn’t look at me. If he lifted his face I might catch him crying. I saw swirls of paint all over his forearms, like a pinwheel tattoo.

Oh, dear, my mother said, starting to sound nervous herself, it’s going to be okay. All of our stomachs had hit bottom and made strange noises, like bellies tuning up for a concert. Nothing is definite. We’ll just try it out for a while. I’m going to get an apartment in Dumbo, right near the chocolate factory on Water Street.

I glanced at my dad, who was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt covered with paint. His blue eyes had turned bloodshot red, his tan cheeks were now vanilla, the very opposite color from what gets wrapped and packaged at my mother’s chocolate factory on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge. Vanilla and chocolate. Night and day. Water and fire. Brooklyn and Manhattan. Those kinds of differences usually don’t end up getting married.

It was then, for the first time, that I began to see my parents more clearly, like I was looking through a magnifying glass rather than through the opposite end of a telescope. They now looked like big children, fumbling with their words, staring at their feet, squirming like guilty kids caught in a lie. Their strength was gone, and so was my faith in them, which I never thought I would lose.

It’s okay, Sarah, we got you. You won’t fall. Just kick your legs through and slide down, I remember my parents telling me when I was little and afraid of coming down from the slide. They were waiting for me at the bottom, their arms outstretched. I was so small, standing at the top of that ladder, the shiny slide reflecting the sun’s rays with its aluminum tongue. There was nothing to be afraid of. And so I did what they told me.

Good girl, they said as I giggled down the slide and wound up bundled into their arms.

But everything changed. My parents no longer had soft hands. I didn’t think they could catch me anymore.

Carly Cocoa’s Chocolate Factory was in Brooklyn, and now so was my mom. She used to just work in Brooklyn; now she was going to live there. And I was going with her, at least for part of the time. I liked visiting Brooklyn and hanging out at the chocolate factory, with its humming mixers and clacking machines, and the shiny display counters, wood-paneled walls and giant glass jars stuffed with jellied candies. And there was the smell of roasted almonds and tart liquors. The chocolate was sweet and gooey. But as much as I loved spending time at Carly Cocoa’s Chocolate Factory, I never wanted to live in Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn Bridge has connected the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn for over a hundred years. But now those swooping cables, stone columns, and Gothic towers were separating my parents. A river was going to run between them. And their daughter, stretched and suspended like a bridge, was between them, too. And I was only twelve.

TriBeCa and Dumbo are actually only a few miles away. But when a family separates the distance doesn’t really matter. All that matters is the split itself. And the bridge between them is rickety and unsure.

My dad is an artist, with wealthy patrons and a Chelsea gallery that sells his work, and museum exhibitions and articles about him in Art News and Art in America. His paintings don’t look like anything real. There are no images you can see; you have to imagine them.

They call his paintings abstract and without form, but so is he. On his canvases there are lots of strange shapes and colors, and gobs of paint that curl like ocean waves. Some of the paintings have tar, and in other paintings there’s ash and hay. Jackson Pollack was famous for his drip paintings. With my dad’s pictures, the paint doesn’t drip, he does. He’s a droopy dad.

I didn’t think they were ever going to get back together. My mother’s white lie raced through our loft like a white rabbit. No one cared about the truth anymore. My parents always told me not to tell a lie. But now lies became the family tongue, starting with my parents’ marriage, which was no longer true.

So, I’m going to be taking an apartment on Water Street, my mother explained, and your dad will stay here in TriBeCa, and you can live in both places. You’ll still go to school in Manhattan, and Hebrew School uptown, but you can shuttle back and forth over the Brooklyn Bridge on your bicycle between your two homes. I think you’re old enough to do that now. What do you think, Noah?

What? . . . Oh, yes, sure, he agreed. I don’t think he heard her, but he was saying yes anyway.

The bicycle, my mother said. Her eyebrows rose on her forehead, playing a game of limbo with her eyes. Are you listening, Noah? I said I thought Sarah was old enough to travel back and forth between us on her bicycle. She does that now, anyway, at least sometimes, when she works at the chocolate shop.

Yes, the bicycle, he said. And then he paused. The bicycle and the Brooklyn Bridge will keep us connected as a family. Sounds great, a perfect and environmentally friendly arrangement.

Dad, I said, speaking and sobbing at the same time, is this . . . you know . . . the divorce . . . something you want?

He looked up and stared at my mother.

I don’t want this to happen, I said. This isn’t going to be good. I just know it. Don’t I have a say?

I looked around the room and remembered many other family meetings, but not any that ended like this. My brain was blinding me with flashbacks.

Until the court decides, my mother said, we’ll try it out this way, with your father and I sharing joint custody.

Joint custody? I repeated. What does that mean? Have I been in custody these past twelve years?

You have two parents, Sarah, my mother said, and we both love you and want to be with you. We just have to figure out how it’s all going to work while we’re living apart, that’s all.

I got up and ran into my room, which was at the other end of the loft. We lived in one giant space, with tall ceilings and wide windows but no inside walls, an obstacle course where all the rooms were laid out like lily pads. You can kick a soccer ball and it wouldn’t make it to the other side. It would streak through the loft like a moonbeam; my father’s paintings falling everywhere like dominos.

I suddenly felt like kicking the soccer ball and knocking everything down, including my parents.

I sat on my bed and cried. I could hear them whispering at the far end of the loft. Please don’t do this, my father said. This will destroy Sarah. It will destroy our family. There will be nothing left.

Not everything is about family, Noah, my mother said. I need this—for me. Besides, families can take many shapes, she said, to the abstract painter.

Leave me if you have to, my father pleaded, but leave Sarah here. Let’s not tear her in two.

Even through their whispers I heard everything they were saying. My radar was tuned to the family frequency.

I stood by my dresser and stared into the mirror. I kept staring like I needed one last and final