Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) by Sarah Tomlinson

That was exactly what it had felt like to go to Orgonon with my dad, and to love him from a distance. But no matter how close the song made me feel to him and our time together, during the months I listened to it, he was gone away from me. And I had no idea when I would see him again.
    When my father did materialize, just after Christmas of my sixth-grade year, he had a new woman with him. Her name was Eva, she was German, and she had short, dark hair. Having come to America to improve her English, she worked as an au pair in the Boston suburb of Weston, so she was much better with kids. I liked her much more than I did Phyllis.
    At nearly eleven, I wasn’t the emotionally feral young girl I’d been during Phyllis’s reign, which helped me to accept Eva’s presence during this rare visit with my dad. I was also just so glad to see him after several years apart, especially during a time I’d felt estranged from Mom and her new family. My dad understood me in a way no one else did—he lived the existence I craved, full of ideas and experiences—and I felt that even one day with him gave me sustenance for my regular life.
    I had recently become interested in any clues I could find as to the ways of the grown-up world. The movie that best expressed how I felt, Pretty in Pink, reached the theater in our nearby town during the spring of my sixth-grade year. I hated my freckles, and I knew Mom’s freckles had also persisted until she was a teenager, so I made a daily vigil to the mirror to see whether mine were lightening. They were not. And then I was gifted with this movie where the opening credits played over close-up shots of Molly Ringwald putting in earrings and applying lipstick, her freckles quite clearly visible, as she’s revealed in all of her redheaded glory to be the kind of beautiful, cool girl whowas desired by her male classmates. Maybe my freckles weren’t so bad after all.
    The movie was a revelation. Molly’s character had a complex relationship with her father. She was a nerd—she studied diligently, aspired to go to college as a way out of a life she felt stunted by—and yet she knew about fashion and music and culture. She was my hero. I not only saw the movie at the theater on Friday night, dressed in my pink mock-letterman sweatshirt and fake pink pearls, I also went back to see it on Saturday night. I bought the soundtrack, which was my first exposure to so many amazing alternative bands—Echo & the Bunnymen, the Psychedelic Furs, the Smiths—and the whole new world of the urban underground.
    If Pretty in Pink was how I envisioned my life—even though the characters were a good seven years older than me, drove cars, drank booze, and had sex off camera, the film depicting my aspirations, About Last Night, had come out the summer before. When Betty had suggested we go see a movie during her visit, I didn’t mention its R rating.
    Even Betty realized at some point that perhaps this movie was not intended for a ten-year-old, maybe during the hot sex scenes between Rob Lowe and Demi Moore, or the charged postcoital banter about whether or not an “I love you” spoken at climax counted as the real thing. She leaned over to me in the darkened theater.
    â€œDid you know this movie was going to be like this?” she asked.
    â€œNo,” I said, not shifting my eyes for fear of missing a single nuance.
    I was still too young for the sex, really. I was there for everything else. I wanted to live in a big city where I did interesting work and had cool friends and lovers, and every day shone with the heightened sense of importance that life in small-town Maine lacked.
    W hen Betty visited the summer I was eleven, she decided I was ready for my first manicure, at the beauty school where she went to get her hair and nails done because of their discounted prices. Craig had alwayscut my hair at home. This was a new and glamorous experience,