Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House (6 page)

For the first seventeen years of my life, thoughts like this
didn’t cross my mind. As a child and a young teenager I was less concerned with geography than with architecture. Not that I was “concerned” with “architecture” in any significant way (save a passing enthusiasm for
The Fountainhead)
. But to the extent that I shared with my mother a fairly nonstop interest in moving to another house, I cared far more about the floor plan than the location. It’s true that I was consumed with
Little House on the Prairie
and, by extension, the idea of living “in the country.” But I was more interested in the scene inside the house and barn (hence my affection for patchwork quilts and milking stools) than in what surrounded it. When my mother brought me along to open houses, I cared more about what my room would be like than what town or state this house happened to be in.

But when I was seventeen, all that changed in a nanosecond. One evening during the summer before my senior year of high school, my father allowed me to practice my stick-shift skills by driving the Plymouth Horizon into the city. He needed to drop off a score at the apartment of a music copyist who lived on West End Avenue on the Upper West Side. Within moments of my walking into this apartment, a hundred goals and priorities I’d never known I had sprung to life inside me. By the time I’d stepped all the way into the living room, I’d decided that I would simply die if I could not, immediately upon graduating from college, live in such a place.

It was a classic of its genre—a prewar apartment with high ceilings and chipping paint on the window sashes and worn hardwood floors covered by a worn Persian rug. I wasn’t privy to the bathroom, but I have no doubt it was a solid, epochal affair with a pedestal sink and original porcelain hexagonal tiles, a few of which were probably cracked around the perimeter. It was modest, far smaller than our house on Jones
Lane, and not the kind of place you’d think would necessarily rock the world of a seventeen-year-old girl. But my world was rocked. Just as my parents, decades earlier, had glimpsed their existential salvation in the pages of
The New Yorker
, I’d seen my future, and it was on West End Avenue. After five minutes in the apartment, I drove home with my father and mounted a strenuous, long-term initiative to point my compass in the direction of that future. I used the preferred method of Ridgewood teenagers: college applications. Due to my abysmal math grades (I’d spent two summers taking remedial algebra), I focused on schools for which I didn’t technically have the grades but that might take me because I seemed interesting and creative. In other words, I wasn’t going to Yale or Princeton. Though I now suspect I might have had a chance at getting in as some kind of eccentric case—as an “interesting, unconventional candidate”—I wasn’t going to Brown either. My high-school guidance counselor, for reasons that mystified me and rankled my mother, wanted me to go to a huge university I’d never heard of in Ohio. Clearly he knew nothing of my real estate plans.

Why I thought that landing in a prewar Manhattan apartment was best accomplished by going to Vassar, a college seventy-five miles north of New York City in the Hudson riverbank city of Poughkeepsie, I don’t exactly know. In addition to being swayed by the fact that Meryl Streep had gone there, I recall that I did apply some perverse logic to the decision, most of it based on reading the wedding announcements in
The New York Times
and seeing where various people went to college and imagining, based on their jobs and even their photographs, what kinds of apartments they might live in. I also recall that the longing I felt for such an apartment seemed at the time a direct reaction to life in the suburbs, which I
experienced as fundamentally counterfeit and misrepresentative of my true self. I remember feeling (albeit in a vague, unarticulated way) that if I could just have a phone number with a 212 area code—a number, unlike my parents’ business line, that connected to an actual phone—I would be able to slough off the residue of my family’s disappointments and disenchantments and be my own person in the world. Unlike them, I would be unencumbered and unembarrassed. I would know how to take the subway and, therefore, how to be human.

But these feelings, as turgid as they sound now (which belies how “real” they seemed at the time), weren’t the whole story. What I didn’t know back then—and, indeed, what I didn’t know until after I’d left New York many years later—was that it wasn’t the prewar apartment I craved but, rather, an ineffable state of being I can only describe as domestic integrity. This integrity has something to do with being able to not feel like an impostor in your home and, therefore, in your life. For a host of reasons I perceived this as something almost totally absent from our life in Ridgewood. That’s not to say (though it’s taken me a long time to get to this admission) that it’s not available in Ridgewood or any other suburban town, nor am I suggesting that it’s a built-in feature of Manhattan apartments. But whereas I long believed that the driving force of my early adulthood was my visceral, sometimes delirious desire to live in New York City, I now realize that my real needs were at once simpler and infinitely more complicated than that. I think I could have walked into any number of domiciles when I was seventeen—a clapboard house in Iowa, a Victorian apartment in Baltimore, a cabin in the woods somewhere—and been knocked over by the same fumes.

But, of course, I didn’t and I wasn’t. I was focused on New
York. And while I was at Vassar preparing for my life in New York (like my parents before me, preparation was key, which is why I hadn’t cut to the chase and gone to New York University or, if I’d had the grades, Columbia), I managed not only to major in English but also to minor in moving.

After my freshman year, I switched residence halls every single semester. With each of these moves, I thought the “integrity” I’d discovered in the music copyist’s apartment could be found in the next dorm room, the next cluster of flannel-shirted students watching TV in the parlor, the next impromptu pizza party in the hallway. At the very least, I thought that moving was saving me from some kind of unidentifiable but palpable malaise. In every case, I turned out to be wrong; the next place was always as dissatisfying as the last.

At least I made it through the first year without moving. Occupying one of the smallest doubles in the dorm, a room whose tininess was supposedly mitigated by its having been—of all people—Meryl Streep’s (at least according to the residence advisors; I later suspected that this claim was made about any room that was otherwise undesirable), I managed to soldier on. I had a roommate, a genuine WASP with her own beat-up Subaru and a boarding school education who was extraordinarily bright and possessed of a personality that could be by turns captivating and totally maddening. We were fast friends in the beginning until, in a way that seemed both painfully gradual and breathtakingly abrupt, we weren’t. Though I’m pretty sure she was as much at sea with herself as I was with myself, our discontent manifested itself on opposite ends of the crazy-girl spectrum. While she was ranting to her dinner companions about gynecological injustices to third-world women, I was holding court with the blank wall over my desk, where I smoked cigarettes and listened to gloomy
Suzanne Vega songs. Undeterred by the cliché of it all, I read poetry, scribbled anguished musings in my notebooks, and spent untold hours wondering if the people around me who appeared to be having so much fun were actually having fun or merely doing imitations of the kinds of people who have fun. When I wasn’t pondering such questions, I was occasionally sleeping with a boy who had no intention of being my boyfriend. It was a charmed existence.

Returning to Vassar for my sophomore year (the summer had been a haze of low-paying odd jobs in Ridgewood, including stage-managing one of my mother’s summer-stock productions at the high school), I was assigned a large garretlike single on the fifth floor—the top floor, the attic essentially—of the dormitory I’d occupied the previous year. Initially determined to make the best of the situation, I kept the windows permanently ajar to encourage a breeze and decorated the walls with black-and-white art-movie posters—notably an enormous banner for the 1984 cult-hipster film
Stranger Than Paradise
. I also had a luxurious new sleeping implement. Before returning to school, I’d decided that the iron-framed twin beds provided by the college “hurt my back” and thus convinced my parents to buy me a full-sized, canvas-covered futon mattress (all the cool Vassar students had these, though not due to back pain). Once deposited on the floor of my room, as if to signal some combination of earthiness and sexual readiness, I completed the boudoir tableau with a cheap Guatemalan blanket and a candle that had partially melted into an empty beer bottle.

Within days, I was miserable. Though friends initially came over to say hello and check out the room—oh, the grand start-of-semester college tradition of surveying friends’ rooms; it is here that the first seeds of house envy begin to sprout—it
wasn’t a place anyone would simply swing by on his or her way to the bathroom or someone else’s room, so I had no spontaneous visitors. There were a smattering of other rooms on the floor, but other than a suite of freshman women, the residents of which were even more morose than I (they preferred the term “freshpeople”), there rarely appeared to be anyone home. Meanwhile, the boy with whom I’d occasionally been sleeping decided he preferred to more-than-occasionally sleep with someone who would also be known as his girlfriend. I attributed his interest in her to the fact that her dorm room could be accessed via just one flight of stairs.

Of course, I knew there were other factors at work. I knew that, for reasons seemingly beyond my control, I had slipped into a persona that was fundamentally lame. At least it felt that way. But this was par for the course. If a student learns nothing else at a liberal arts college, especially one as rife with gifted, glamorous students as Vassar, he is at least guaranteed a lesson in insecurity. At least a temporary form of it. At least until he turns himself upside down and shakes the pieces of his old self out of him like crumbs in a Pringles can. At least until he graduates and realizes no one else understands Derrida either, so who cares. No exception to this rule, I had by my second year at Vassar managed to assemble a list of grievances against myself that rivaled those of a major divorce. Items ranged from anxieties about holding my own alongside my more cultured, better-read classmates (haven’t read Thomas Mann, haven’t been to Europe, didn’t know there was a Francis Bacon the painter as well as Francis Bacon the English guy from a long time ago) to standard-issue self-loathing about my hair, body, and wardrobe (do not have luxurious Botticelli-like curls like every other girl here, do not have thighs the circumference of table legs, cannot figure out how
to shop for and wear vintage clothes without looking like a member of the chorus of
Oliver!)
. And while I knew on a logical level that none of these hardships were directly linked to my being housed on the fifth floor of a dormitory, I somehow remained convinced that the first step toward a cure involved not a library copy of
Death in Venice
or a junior-year-abroad application but several cardboard boxes and some large plastic bags.

In other words, returning from the holiday break that January, I dropped my bags in the garret, which was hot and airless and strangely muggy even in the dead of winter, and decided that the only way to not wish I could fall asleep and wake up three years later as a full-fledged adult—or at least a college graduate—lay in residing fewer than five flights away from terra firma. I requested a transfer with the housing office. A few days later, I was offered a tiny room on the second floor of a large dorm known for its enthusiastic watchers of the parlor television set. The following Saturday afternoon, I moved my clothes, books, desktop computer (unbearably heavy in those days), and other assorted items down the stairs, across the quad, and into my new quarters. I remember being so determined to do the job smoothly and efficiently that I didn’t even detach the stereo speakers from the very large tuner/amplifier (a 1960s relic given to me by my father) to which they were connected. This required putting the whole audio system in a giant box, wires tangling themselves around the various components and curling out the sides like vines, and half carrying/half dragging it to its destination. I’m pretty sure there was snow on the ground.

I remember that I had to move the futon mattress, so I must have enlisted other people to help (despite the glum existence I’ve described, I did have friends who would have done me
such turns), but to this day I have no recollection of who else was involved in this move. Likely, I was already embarrassed by what I was doing. As deranged with unwarranted melancholy as I sometimes was, I wasn’t so far gone as not to realize that there were better ways to spend your weekend than hanging your clothes in a new closet and waiting for your new life to start. Deep down (or even not so deep down), I knew that switching dorms was a strenuous but ultimately lazy way of trying to unpeel myself from the morose and rather ridiculous person I’d become since arriving at Vassar the year before.

But like those dreams where you try to scream but can’t make a sound, I felt almost physically incapable in college of simply studying or reading or even looking at a piece of art or running around a track. Instead, I spent nearly every waking moment planning my next move: What would I do over the summer? What courses would I take next year? (Never mind that I hadn’t read the books for my classes this year.) Where would I live (and what would I wear and what kind of haircut would I have) when I was finally graduated from this place and feeling human again? And because each of those scenarios seemed dependent upon some kind of relocation (insanely, even the question of what courses I’d take was followed quickly by questions as to where would be the best place to live when completing the course work), I’d often find myself lying on my futon and surveying my possessions with an eye toward moving them. How heavy is that bookcase? I’d wonder while lying in bed at 4:00 p.m. How many drawers’ worth of clothes could I stuff into one garbage bag? Could I carry three bags at once? Four? Could I carry my printer in one arm and an entire stack of bedding in the other? Could I do this at night so no one would notice?