Help Me (I Think I’m Falling)

Aug 05 | Written By American Baroness

Sherry Merry is mad at me.

It’s the summer of 1983.

I’ve been distracted lately and, on top of the store theft last week, which happened on my watch, yesterday I forgot to write in the purchase amount on a customer’s credit card form, making the transaction invalid. It’s strange because I got through the unpleasant part: looking through the little book of teeny-tiny bad credit card numbers, a near-blinding experience every time; the receipt is signed, but the total box is empty.

I work for the Merrys, Sherry and her husband, Arthur. Sherry is a miniature woman with a massive personality. Her perma-grin opens onto a gravelly voice, and on top, she has a messy mop of thick, feathered, dirty blond hair.

Sherry Merry looks like a Lilliputian Stevie Nicks.

And she’s so mad at me.

Sherry and Arthur ask if I would speak with them privately, outside. We walk in silence, down and around, and then down and around the wooden staircase in the North building of Faneuil Hall, where I am an employee in their store, Sea Boston, that’s S-E-A Boston, nautical apparel, and out the back entrance onto Chatham Row. I remember thinking, this must be important because at 10 am on a Friday in July, the store should be open, and we’re out here in the stifling heat, potentially missing a sale.

Sherry does not like to miss a sale.

I’m hungry and overheated, desperate for the breakfast I’d picked up at the muffin place in the main building. My usual: vanilla yogurt, banana, and a large iced coffee with half-and-half. This particular morning, Sherry intercepted me as I walked into the store; and though I am five foot ten inches tall, a giantess compared to my Sea Boston boss, she scares me.

Outside, on Chatham Row, we stand in harsh morning sunlight. My Ray-Bans are upstairs in the store, where I’d distractedly chucked them, next to my iced coffee. By now, I think, the ice cubes are melting, and the large plastic cup is covered in condensation.

Out on Chatham Row, the atmosphere reeks of stale beer from last night’s misdeeds in this touristed part of town. So far this summer, the heat has been record-breaking, muggy we say in Massachusetts, but really, it’s sickeningly sticky.

Sherry Merry looks up at me.

She is so mad.

I’ve been working at Sea Boston for two years, summers and school holidays and, until now, I’ve never made a mistake. I arrive to work early. I always say yes, to inventory, to extra shifts, to staying late even when it means walking alone through deserted pitch dark Haymarket to North Station, to take the last train to the suburbs, back to my hometown where I am now, once again, living for the summer. In less than two months, I’m starting my junior year abroad, in Grenoble, where the 1968 Olympics were held. I only know this nugget of Olympic trivia because my junior high school phys ed teacher, Ms. Forbush, competed as a speed skater for the US team that year. She, too, was tiny and tough, like Sherry Merry, but thicker, you might even say “built.” I was a naïve kid, so it wasn’t until years later that I understood why her last name was supposed to be so funny.

She sure is for bush!, the 8th graders would giggle. I just didn’t get it.

This particular summer, 1983, I am busy preparing for France. Already, I’m a Francophile, having spent some time in my early teens with relatives in Montreal as well as an entire week in Paris with my high school French Club—unsurprisingly, I was president of that club and planner of the trip—during which we stayed in a two-star hotel in the Latin Quarter. Soon, I’ll be in Grenoble, an industrial city sunk in the midst of some Alps, southeast of Lyon, as part of an exchange program between Boston University and the Université de Grenoble, otherwise known as “the Harvard of France”, or so our parents were assured.

I’m working more than ever this summer.

College is expensive. By now, I’m accustomed to subsidizing myself with student loans. Last year, sophomore year, my first at Boston University, I’d figured out a way to get free room and board: as an au pair to a sophisticated Jewish family, the Kleins, living in Brookline Village. For the first time ever, I had my own bedroom and bathroom. The Kleins, Joan and Rob, drink coffee out of a cafetière and wine out of heavy goblets. I learn many vital life lessons that year, not least of all that straight men, too, can worship Bette Midler. Rob is a fan and by the end of my first month in their home I know every song on “The Divine Miss M” by heart. Joan, a psychologist, reminds me occasionally that I should have a plan, a map of what I want in life and how to achieve it. Unable to take in her advice, I disregard it. Later, I understand that she must have observed my vulnerabilities, and had wanted to shield me from remorse and regret.

This summer, in 1983, I’m working all these hours at Sea Boston to save money for the weekend trips I fantasize about taking during the upcoming school year—to Paris, certainly, but also to Florence and Rome, Amsterdam and, for some reason, Geneva. I make the daily trek to Faneuil Hall. Sea Boston is open 7 days. I’m on the schedule for all of them. I’m 19, and I’m tired.

Sherry’s husband, Arthur, works hard. He, like Rob Klein, is one of the first men in my life who I could, in the present, recognize as gentlemanly—paternal, patient, and always polite. Arthur is tall and ropey, a runner, with coarse salt and pepper hair and a razor thin moustache. A Thin Man. A Nick, without his Nora. Because, from the back especially, he and Sherry are an odd couple; they look more like a Diane Arbus father-daughter portrait than your everyday, ordinary husband and wife.

Out on Chatham Row, we stand there, the three of us, in the steaming hot morning sun—towering Arthur, tall me, and teeny-tiny Sherry.

What’s this?, she growls, producing the proof of my failure. On the triplicate credit card receipt, I’d filled in the descriptions:

2 striped sailor shirts, 1 small and 1medium
1 navy blue cotton crewneck regatta sweater, large

I’d also filled in the prices, neatly, to the right. But no subtotal, no tax, and no balance due. It’s barren. I’ve blown it.

You let a hundred and eighty seven dollars walk right out the door!, Sherry growls, staring up at me.

Sherry Merry is livid. She questions not only my focus, but my work ethic and, in what I now understand to be gaslighting, my sanity. She wants to know, what, exactly, is wrong with me.

She demands to know, where is your head these days?

My head, so to speak, is primarily on my soon-to-be French life. Exhausted, I daydream about Grenoble, about traveling on trains, overnight in a sleeper maybe, and my romantic rendezvous in cafés all over Europe. On the commuter rail from the suburbs into North Station, every morning and evening, I fantasize that I’m in première classe en route to some glamorous destination or other, dressed like Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour, a famous French film from the 60s I’d recently seen in an arthouse cinema in Harvard Square.

Deneuve’s character in the film is a reluctant young housewife who becomes a lady of the night, though she only works during the day when her husband is at his office. (Belle de nuit is French for “lady of the night”, a prostitute; so, the film’s title is a play on words: belle de jour is a lady of the night during the jour/day.) Deneuve is stunning and the film is sexy. At 19, I have yet to be in a romantic relationship. Actually, I’ve barely dated. Though I have no aspirations of becoming a prostitute, and no fantasies about sex with strangers, even French ones, Belle de Jour arouses my latent sensibilities, some untouched desire for seduction.

Accordingly, this particular summer, I have invited an exhilarating, ongoing, frivolous flirtation with a good-looking security guard—a college student, home between semesters, making some cash strolling around the North Building in a uniform, looking out for potential thieves. The shops here in Faneuil Hall are classy and the merchandise is pricey. On weekends, we stay open late. This is Boston in the early 1980s, so overt racism is systemic, and it is acceptable. Black and brown male shoppers are assumed to be trouble. We are told, if you see them, let security know. Every shop owner or shop keeper is white, and most are also young and female. It is assumed that we need protection.  

My security guard is a blue-eyed blond, the sporty type, and, surprisingly, we share a taste for new wave music and 70s folk rock. One evening, as he stops by on his last round before closing time—he always lingers here longer than he ever would in the rubber stamp shop across the hall—he professes to loving Joni Mitchell’s “best record”, Blue. This is also my favorite album—of all time!, I tell him—and with that connection made, the rhythm of our conversation shifts, slows, and I sense a softening. What was a crush feels now more like affection, the beginning of something warmer. I notice that his eyes are more green than blue. And how adorable it is that he missed a spot shaving. Looking at his hands, I wonder if this beefy guy might have been a chubby kid. Like me.

He never, ever, says, simply, good night, and this evening is no different. He has a schtick: because he’s a security guard, he refers to himself as “The Police,” like the band we both love; and whenever he leaves the shop after checking on me, he semi-sings, I’ll be watchin’ you, the refrain from their popular summer song, “Every Breath You Take”. After all, his job is to watch me. To watch all of us shop girls in the North Building. Even the skank across the hall, selling those stupid rubber stamps sets.

If I know he’s working the morning shift, I buy two iced coffees and bring him one, also with half-and-half. I tell myself,  I’m getting one anyway, I might as well buy two. It’s not a big deal. How hard is it, really, to carry two iced coffees with the yogurt and the banana. Stop complaining. Nobody is forcing you! And you know he appreciates it.

I find out, from posters around the city and ads on the radio, that the Lady of the Canyon herself is playing a concert on Boston Common in a few weeks. I am young, but I’ve been a Joni Mitchell fan forever. Tickets are 10 bucks. I figure it’ll be worth every penny. So, I buy two tickets, one for me and —in an escalation of my iced coffee offerings—one for him. I spend most of the day rehearsing a casual invitation. The next time I see him, I present the tickets—ta-da!— and he gasps in excitement. We have a date. July 20, 1983. General seating. I recommend, we should get there early.

The last time I’d been to a concert, with a boy, had been a few years back, during my freshman year at the catholic college my father made me attend. Somehow, I caught the eye of a handsome trust funder from Pittsburgh, named Paul, whose father was an industrialist. Paul was the black sheep of his family—the unremarkable youngest in a family of overachievers—which is how he’d landed where I’d landed, rather than in the Ivy League, like his siblings. After hanging out a few times, he invited me to a classical music concert at a nearby philharmonic. Luckily, I had one nice dress, a black tuxedo wrap style given to me by my Italian grandmother, my Nana, who had died a few weeks earlier. She’d been petite but full-figured, so somehow, magically, in that dress, we were the same size—Nana wore it primly, past the knee, and I wore it short. It was my first experience of feeling chic.

At the philharmonic, I sat stone-still for two hours, hands in my lap, playing at being lady-like, staring straight ahead, hoping Paul would turn to look at me and be struck by the majesty of my profile which, my Nana had always assured me in her thick Sicilian accent, was…

a-beautiful, like a-Miss America…

Paul did not turn to look at me that night, and in fact, he ditched me a few days later. In writing. He sent me an actual letter, by campus inter-mail—the old school equivalent of breaking up by text. I remember the return address: he wrote, Public Enemy #1. I’m not sure why. He really was weird.

For solace, I turned to my chum, Vinnie—Vincent Daly—a good Catholic boy who went to mass every Sunday and sometimes during the week. When he and I first met, I noticed how he resembled the best-looking Benedictine brothers on campus. Some of those monks were movie-star handsome. At 5 o’clock every weekday, they would descend en masse from the monastery on the hill for their pilgrimage to the campus pub. A cluster of robed and belted men, adrift. The Black Cloud, we called them. It was common knowledge that certain students—boys and girls—cozied up to the clergy over a cocktail or two.

My heart was always with the sisters, silent and nameless nuns who remained almost exclusively behind closed doors, only emerging to mother the monks, and to provide the student cafeteria with sugary desserts, confections they baked in top-secret kitchens, hidden somewhere in the bowels of the main building.

Vinnie was a great listener. He let me go on and on…and on…about Paul and how he’d written me this creepy letter explaining why he couldn’t be what I wanted him to be. What is he talking about?, I’d asked, incredulous. I don’t want him to be anything.

I saw Vinnie again, in the early 90s. He was ahead of me in line at a Boston music venue, waiting to see The Roches in concert. I knew it was Vinnie, even from a distance. I knew his profile. Vinnie! I called out, and when he turned around I saw that he was wearing a priest’s collar. Father Daly. Of course.

For now, though, it’s that day, that evening, July 20, 1983. And I have an actual date. Decades later, I learn that we were at the infamous “aborted” Joni Mitchell concert on Boston Common: She opens with “Coyote” and then walks off stage three songs later, in the middle of “Song for Sharon”. Rumor has it she hung out in her limo and smoked pot while the audience settled down. (More likely she snorted coke.) She didn’t like that we, the audience, were, and I quote, “milling about, not paying any fucking attention, man.” I was paying fucking attention. She came back, begrudgingly, and silenced us with her extraordinary sound, her colossal talent, her near-mystical presence.

We were having fun, the two of us, sitting on a blanket, singing along and swaying to the music. And it was one of those evenings—lit like day-for-night, hot but not sticky, the city mostly empty. By the time Joni finished her last song, “Help Me (I Think I’m Falling)”, I was completely at ease, confident enough to venture, should we go to the North End for cannolis and coffee?

He looked away, almost imperceptibly, across the common in the direction of Beacon Hill. Then, he laughed, just a little. Not at me, of course. But also, not exactly with me. Smiling, he said, sorry, I can’t. My girlfriend’s waiting for me. She hates it when I’m late.

We set off in our separate directions—me back to North Station through dark and deserted Haymarket, he toward tawny Beacon Hill and its quaint cobblestone streets lined with vintage lampposts.

Maybe I should’ve felt hurt. Or embarrassed. Or jealous, even, of the other young woman. Then again, what was there to envy? I’d spent the evening at a Joni Mitchell concert with her boyfriend, while she sat around, seething, waiting for him to come home.

And anyway, I tell myself, I’ll be in France soon. What I really want is to finally feel free.