Homesick (10 page)

One day the general manager—a cocky young Yankee from Chicago—summoned me into his office. He looked grim.

“You know,” he said, “I couldn’t help noticing that you have Coca-Cola bottles all over the floor of your car.”

Well, yeah. Good Southerners drink Coke. Everybody knows that. But here I was, about to lose my job over it.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, then whispered, “I just hate the taste of Pepsi.”

“Well, you’ve probably never drunk it on ice,” he said. He filled a glass with ice cubes, opened a bottle of Pepsi, emptied it into the glass, and had me taste it.

“You know, that is a lot better,” I lied. I knew I was sunk. And there was really nothing more for me to do there. I stayed for a month longer, then slunk away. I never did make it to a single golf tournament.

By now, I was out of patience waiting for my New York break. I applied to be a flight attendant, and Delta flew me to Atlanta for an interview. On the flight home I met a man who was with Jack Morton Productions, a Manhattan company that did synchronized slide presentations for corporate clients. When I mentioned I had a degree in fine arts, he started talking to me about a possible job drawing storyboards and producing audiovisual presentations as a freelancer. “If you ever move to New York, look us up, we’ll give you a shot,” he said.

At that point, this was all the encouragement I needed. With only the promise of a nice man I met on a plane, I became a New Yorker.

The man was as good as his word, and my arts degree earned me my first job in the city, making $6.50 an hour, illustrating concepts in pen and ink before they were put on film. As I quickly discovered, my salary would reduce me to near-poverty levels in Manhattan, the only place in the city where I could possibly consider living. I found a roommate and took a tiny apartment in the Andover, a building at Eighty-eighth Street and York Avenue on the Upper East Side. Nestled among the old working-class German and Hungarian parts of town, the Andover seemed worlds, not blocks, away from tony Park Avenue. But I didn’t care. After all, I was still writing home to Mama for help paying the bills; I knew I ought to make some kind of sacrifice—particularly since she wasn’t exactly comfortable with my move in the first place.

“Why, Sela,
why?
” Mama protested when I told her I was moving to the city. “Why, of all the places in the United States, would anybody choose to live and work in New York City?” To many Southerners, especially of my mother’s generation, Manhattan is Babylon on the Hudson, the kind of place where a young lady might fall victim to all manner of danger and ruin. My thinking was: Mama, if you have to ask, you’ll never understand. New York has always been a magnet for misfit young Americans from small towns, who migrate there to find themselves, to test themselves, to be the selves they couldn’t be back home.

My Birmingham girlfriend Becky understands. She’d come to know New York as a child herself, having traveled there several times with her musician mother. Still, Becky knows the mental blocks that separate Southerners of our generation from the idea of New York. “Sela, girl, I don’t know how you found it within yourself to move up there,” Becky told me the other day. “When we were growing up, so many people had the idea that going to New York was only slightly less scary than going to Russia.”

I had to laugh, because she was right.

“Don’t you remember? Our mother’s friends thought it was the kind of place where you could fall down dead of a heart attack smack in the middle of Saks, and no one would do anything for you,” she said. “That there were so many people there, and nobody was going to look out for you like they would back home, and how you weren’t going to make any friends?”

That’s true, I told Becky, but I don’t understand why our mothers—our whole culture, really—raised us with such a distorted idea.

“You have to remember, honey, our side lost the Civil War. And the South had a big ol’ inferiority complex about the North that took more than a hundred years to get over,” Becky said. “But I think it might be something deeper, too. You know how we are down here. If I announced to all my friends that I was moving with my family from Birmingham to Memphis, or Atlanta, or somewhere else down South, by the end of the day I’d have a hundred names and phone numbers of relatives, sorority sisters, and friends of my friends who live in the new city. My Birmingham friends would call them up before we got there, and they’d take us in like long-lost cousins, because that would be the right thing to do. You and I know New York isn’t as bad as most older Southern folks think, but you have to admit you sure didn’t find anything like that when you went up there.”

She’s right, of course. When I left the South for Manhattan, it was like going off the grid—that regional network of family and friends that might have served me well as a safety net. But somehow, at that moment in my life, I guess I’d had enough safety. The prospect of New York was intimidating, of course. But I don’t remember ever doubting that I could make it there. I never stopped to think about how far I’d come. Where once I’d been too shy to confide in anyone but a mimosa tree, I was starting to become more surefooted, even outgoing; I suppose I was becoming a woman. Mama had no idea what to make of me, but just recently Daddy told me he saw a change that she might have missed. “Were you worried about me when I went off to New York?” I asked him.

“No,” he said in his matter-of-fact way. “I worried when you went to Memphis, though.”

So what was it that changed between Memphis and New York?

“Well, you’d been away from home some time. And I could see the difference. It just seemed like you knew how to meet people, get along on your own.”

Did I have an easy time of it in New York? Did everything fall right into place? I don’t think so—not at all. Nobody has an easy time of it when they first get to the big city. New York only seems easy to the young, whose idealism and lust for life cushions the heavy blows, and to the old and wealthy, whose money insulates them from the city’s daily grind. But I was so in love with the city that the struggles I had there seem today only to have intensified what was for me an exhilarating experience. As Woody Allen once said, “It’s not peaceful or easy, and because of it you feel more alive.” Yes, absolutely, and if my memory has softened the hard edges of my New York years, it’s because New York gave far more than it ever asked of me. It was the place where phantom dreams I only faintly knew I had began to come to life.

Of course, the friendships I’d made along the way also helped. Jim Lampley of ABC Sports and his girlfriend, Joanne, were so kind, taking me by the hand and weaving me into his network circles. Suddenly I found myself sitting at tables with Ivy League types, some of them reporters and producers from ABC News in Washington, up for the weekend. One of the men was dating a woman from the Kennedy clan. I didn’t dare open my mouth for fear I’d say the wrong thing, or have nothing to say at all. Instead, I decided to keep my mouth shut and hoped I’d seem mysterious. I still remember the night I went over to Jim’s apartment and heard John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk for the first time; I felt as if I’d entered some exotic new land, full of exciting sounds and challenges.

With all these new stimuli roiling around me, I have to admit I didn’t spend a lot of time missing Meridian. I still called home every day, as always. But Mama was so protective of us kids, so desperate to make sure our lives turned out well, that she couldn’t restrain herself from beckoning us home anytime she heard the slightest note of concern in my voice. Of course, it was wonderful to have that sense of security. But my mother could make the temptation seem overwhelming, and there were times when I just needed to resist the impulse to retreat into the womb of childhood. In those moments, it was my headstrong and fearless father’s example I could always count on to guide me.

It wasn’t homesickness that touched me in those days—it was a kind of wanderlust, a thirst for adventure. It was a feeling I’d first had on a trip to visit my cousins Judy and Tom Ward in Washington, D.C., after high school, years before. Judy took me to a bar in Georgetown, an old pub with lots of dark wood and brass fixtures: with its Old World clubby atmosphere, it reminded me of something out of
Brideshead Revisited.
It was there that I tasted a Bellini for the first time. Then I had dinner at Tom’s apartment, and his girlfriend, Peggy, (now his wife) prepared fondue for dinner. Fondue! It seemed so
Continental
. As we sat around dipping our sirloin in the hot oil and our bread in the melted cheese, I remember just beaming like a little girl, inwardly at least. If a plain old pot of melted cheese (and, at long last, not of the Velveeta persuasion!) could turn me into a wide-eyed innocent abroad, a Henry James heroine swooning over the sensual richness of life in among the European swells, you can imagine how far I’d come.

And New York was the answer. For me it was like being a child getting to taste a new delicacy for the first time, every single day. One day I’d be having lunch at Café des Artistes, with an artist who lived in the same building; afterward I was invited up with friends to see his book-lined, painting-filled apartment—an outlander’s perfect fantasy of a Manhattan aesthete’s flat. The next day I’d find myself with other friends in the Upper East Side living room of the Halabys, the family of Jordan’s Queen Noor, sneaking peeks at Her Majesty’s family photographs. And here is the strangest thing: The feeling that draped over me in those early days in New York reminded me of nothing more than the joy I took from my childhood Christmases at Uncle Thomas’s place, in that beautiful house, surrounded by the people I loved most. What could that possibly have to do with being all alone in a little apartment in a big Northern city? This: In both cases, I knew in my heart of hearts that I was standing exactly where I was supposed to be.

Which was enough to keep me happy—that is, until the rent came due. Remember, I was making only $6.50 an hour as a storyboard artist, and that wasn’t enough to live on in the city, not even in the late seventies. Delta had rejected my flight-attendant application, saying they were afraid I couldn’t be forceful enough for the job. (Back then, at least, they were probably right.) Eastern Airlines offered me a job, though, and I was planning to take it. I loved the idea of seeing the world, while always having a base in New York to come home to.

But then something else happened. A friend suggested that I try modeling, which certainly paid better than storyboarding—that is, if you got lucky and got hired. (After all, I wanted to eat at Le Cirque—at least once a year.) I’d tried it before: At the age of fifteen, following a young dream of mine, I’d gone to a local department store and entered a modeling contest held by a girls’ clothing line. The winners would be flown to St. Louis and photographed for an ad in
Seventeen
magazine. I was one of the four winners from around the country, and off I went to Missouri, but that was as far as it went. Only when I got there did I discover that the ad was for bathing suits. Lord, I was so thin, and still had a boyish adolescent figure—the last thing they were looking for in a bathing-suit model. The creative director let all four of us know, in no uncertain terms, that not one of us had what it took to become a professional model. What a disaster.