Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House Read online

  As a result, her life became devoted almost exclusively to the cause of being the opposite of these things, to being educated, well-spoken, with-it, and, above all, sophisticated—or at least the version of sophistication she imagined when she surveyed her home life and conjured a view 180 degrees in the other direction. Lacking the financial or familial support to leave town, my mother enrolled in the local university and began assembling the tools necessary for her eventual escape. She became an accomplished pianist. She learned how to speak with clarity and confidence. Perhaps most important (she’s explained this herself; it’s not just my conjecture), she dated a guy whose parents seemingly knew a thing or two about the world. Sure, they were from Carbondale, but their house had books and records. It also had The New Yorker magazine. On visits to their place, my mother would flip through the mysterious pages as though she were glimpsing a distant, dazzling land. And even though she turned down her suitor’s marriage proposal because he was “ultimately dull,” she never forgot the portal those magazine pages provided into a befuddling but obviously superior world. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to live in New York—that would come later and with a vengeance—as that she wanted to live in a place that resembled the kind of place that a person who read The New Yorker would live.

  Her primary means of expression for this ambition: houses. She wasn’t blessed with a willowy body type that might otherwise have made fashion her canvas, nor did she have an aptitude for foreign languages or interest in travel that could have made her genuinely cosmopolitan (her younger brother, for his part, escaped the muck of their household by growing up to be an inveterate globetrotter). But she did know what to do with paint colors, with curtains, with furniture. In fact, she had more than a few shades of brilliance on that front. Despite having grown up in a nondescript one-story brick house with no art on the walls and no books on the shelves, she had her share of opinions, however vague, about the kind of art (not from Sears) and books (not dime-store paperbacks) that would line the perimeters of the homes of her future. And, like a musician who could play by ear, she had the ability to conjure a room in her head and re-create it in three dimensions.

  Given her generation and resources and station in life, my mother believed the best context for such a lifestyle was affiliation with a university. Not that she wanted to be an academic herself; she wanted to be an academic wife. Though she’s never really explained to me how this aim came into being, I can only presume she’d run into a few of these types while growing up and they’d made a positive impression on her. After all, Carbondale, though it wasn’t Cambridge or even Lincoln, Nebraska (where, decades later, I would eventually flee when the ripple effect of my mother’s dreams began to feel like a choke hold), was a university town. Despite the not insignificant poverty rate, it was also a place where, every night, someone in some house (maybe even a few people in a few houses) sat down to dinner with a glass of red wine and a Mozart sonata. And having glimpsed some version of this scene on one or two occasions (perhaps as a babysitter, perhaps for ten seconds while dropping off a paper at a professor’s house), my mother decided she wanted nothing more but would settle for nothing less. Thus she kept her eyes peeled for someone whose cautious, noncommittal bohemianism would mesh with her own and, with any luck, help supply her with the ultimate proof that she had transcended her origins: an elegant yet understated house with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the perfunctory hardwood-floor/Oriental-rug combo, and a kitchen stocked with hanging copper pots and a copy of The Moosewood Cookbook.

  This was my mother’s vision in the mid-1960s (minus the Moosewood, which didn’t pub until 1977 but, even in the days before Woodstock, surely was a twinkle in the eyes of an entire generation of women). This was what she believed she wanted: not a career, not even the life of a genuine intellectual, but the trappings of that kind of life. She wanted the house, the rugs, the shelves. So was it blind faith my mother brought to the table the day she decided—and I have no doubt she was decisive in the matter; it’s a skill I’ve always admired in her but didn’t fully inherit—that my father was the train to which she was hitching her almost violent need to transform herself? Did she simply love him for the sake of loving him? Or did she look at him and catch some vision of an educated, well-spoken, and sophisticated life? Did she see in him some iteration of a New Yorker cartoon character (not beyond the realm of possibility, given his prominent nose and the mad-professor-style tufts of hair that flanked his already bald pate) and conclude via a series of unconscious calculations that of all the grad students in the music department of Southern Illinois University, he was the one most likely to help her succeed?

  Two years her senior, my father was well-known to be a virtuosic composer and musical arranger and destined for a life of some variety of creative greatness. Still, if ever there was a case of raw, uncultivated, and by-all-appearances limitless musical gifts unsullied (that is, unassisted) by careerism of any kind, it was the case of my father, a man who would eventually leave academia to pursue a freelance career that was sometimes so fraught with paranoia and resentment that his own children would be forbidden to watch certain television programs because he’d been considered but not ultimately hired for the job of composing music for them. (Hint: I had not seen a complete episode of The Simpsons until my junior year of college.)

  But in 1965 in Carbondale, concerns of this caliber were unimaginable. This was a world in which St. Louis was considered a glittering, faraway metropolis and wedding receptions took place in church basements over Hawaiian Punch. My mother says her wedding cost $200, and she likes to emphasize that at twenty-three, she was considered an old bride. She also tells me this: upon their engagement, my father’s mother came to my mother and warned her against marrying her indolent, no-account son. Whereas my father’s mother could see that her future daughter-in-law was ambitious and possessed (thanks undoubtedly to her efforts to define herself in opposition to her mother) of a keen sense of social protocol, she saw her son as aimless and uncensored, a beatnik who shot his mouth off without apology, a musical savant whose anachronistic tastes (Glenn Miller, Sarah Vaughan, no interest in Elvis Presley whatsoever) threatened to lend a freakish taint to what otherwise might have been an aura of cool. Whereas my mother was organized and a self-starter, my father was a weird dreamer. Whereas my mother was from a respectable family (her parents might have been lackluster, but her uncle was an ophthalmologist who lived in a two-story redbrick Colonial straight out of a Currier and Ives painting), my father’s background, at least as far as I understood it, was a slightly milder version of Faulkner.

  Not that my paternal grandmother, by then a holy-rolling evangelical who eschewed rock and roll and wouldn’t have approved of Elvis anyway, put her son’s deficits in quite these terms. But for all her whacked-out self-loathing, you can see where she was coming from. The poverty surrounding my father’s upbringing has, at least to my coddled, suburban sensibilities, always stunned me to the point of nearly voyeuristic fascination. When I was a child, the salient detail of my father’s upbringing, to me, involved the absence of indoor plumbing. His family had had an outhouse until he was twelve. Most mind-blowing of all, this wasn’t a country outhouse in the nineteenth century like on Little House on the Prairie but an outhouse for a house in town. In the 1950s.

  But wouldn’t you know it: my father was also seduced by The New Yorker. As a high-school student, he would visit the library of his hometown of Centralia, Illinois, and read the jazz reviews of Whitney Balliett. He would learn about who was playing at the Village Vanguard. He would read descriptions of musicians, such as Bill Evans, he’d never heard but would later come to revere, and try to imagine what New York would be like in real life. Shortly after my parents married, my father did a brief stint as a fellow at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, after which he and my mother drove down to New York City. They stayed in the Tudor Hotel on Forty-second Street and Second Avenue and went one night to the Village Vanguard. A friend
of a friend from Eastman met them and then took my father to a bar where jazz musicians were known to hang out. There, my father saw many famous players, including some he’d read about in The New Yorker. Until then, he hadn’t ever entirely comprehended the idea that people actually lived in New York. As spellbound as he was, he didn’t consider staying. He was married, after all, and he and my mother both had teaching jobs waiting in Indiana.

  As my mother frequently pointed out when I was growing up, she and my father had “come extraordinarily far.” By this she meant that they’d pulled themselves further up the social and cultural ladder than could fairly be expected of anyone from southern Illinois, much less two people who’d been dealt such a difficult set of childhood conditions. They might not have made it to New York, but within four years of getting married, they found themselves in Palo Alto, where my father had been given an opportunity to earn a Ph.D. in music in exchange for writing arrangements for the Stanford marching band. I was born during that time, after which we made the aforementioned moves to the Chicago suburb and then to Austin, where, after nearly six years, we made that jolting move to New Jersey.

  But let’s stay in Palo Alto for a moment. From the time they’d arrived there, my parents not only began subscribing to The New Yorker but also managed to take on several other qualities they associated with the kinds of people my mother often referred to as “classy” and “high-powered.” A few of these trappings had to do with things like speaking properly and driving European cars, even if that meant used, rusted Volkswagens. More of them, however, were expressed (with an enthusiasm that bordered on the obsessive) via houses and home decor. And since my own housing compulsions are a direct descendant of my mother’s efforts to cope with the identity confusion that plagued our immediate family like a skin rash, I simply can’t talk about where I’ve lived without explaining where my parents have lived. Literally and figuratively, their foundations were shakier than any seismic fault line.

  But this instability was nothing that couldn’t be remedied—or at least covered up in high style—by those hardwood floors and Oriental rugs. Inspired by the musty gravitas of certain professors’ houses in Palo Alto, whose combination of old-money regality (tattered volumes of the OED on stands, yellowed maps of Nova Scotia) and flower power–inspired clutter (anything macramé) filled her with the promise of overcoming the yokelness of her upbringing, my mother modeled our houses on the image of her ideal self.

  Moreover, she often did so on minuscule or even nonexistent budgets. In Austin, despite my father’s unremarkable assistant professor salary, she managed to turn that dilapidated bungalow (the previous owner had lived in a single chair for something approaching fifteen years until he finally died, mountains of TV-dinner boxes and yellowed pages from the Austin American-Statesman blocking the light from the windows) into a veritable advertisement for the upper-middle-class, liberal elite. The white oak floors, delicately resanded and ritualistically doused with Pine-Sol, the intricately thought-out splashes of color (a sapphire blue wall in the archway between the living room and the dining room, an abstract mural in the kitchen), the built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the omnipresent jazz or classical music: to me, all of it meant home. But to my parents, especially my mother, who kept touching up that kitchen mural practically until the day we moved out (think swirls and circles in earth tones, Rothko meets lava lamp), all of it meant they’d escaped their old home.

  Except something happened after we packed up and drove—my father in a rented Ryder truck, my mother in a Plymouth Horizon with me and my brother in the backseat and our cat in a wire mesh carrier—seventeen hundred miles to the place that would technically be our home for the duration of my childhood. As I’ve said, I wasn’t yet nine. I can’t reasonably suggest that the move bifurcated my childhood in any kind of measurable way. While I knew how to ride my bike to friends’ houses in the immediate neighborhood and was sufficiently enmeshed in the terrain that I rarely passed a honeysuckle bush without grabbing a blossom and siphoning out the sap right then and there, I was not old enough to know the streets, to have memorized the skyline, to have forged friendships that had any real hallmarks of inseparability. I would never, of course, be from Austin, since I would spend the subsequent ten years—the bulk of my childhood and all of my adolescence—in Ridgewood, New Jersey. Ridgewood would be where I’d experience my first kiss, get my driver’s license, and graduate from high school. In 2008 I would attend my twentieth high-school reunion, and it would be the banquet room of a Wyndham Garden Hotel in New Jersey that, at no small expense, I’d take planes and trains and taxis to reach. Once there, I’d greet my former classmates in a genuine spirit of nostalgia and shared history.

  That said, I have never been able to say I’m from New Jersey without feeling as if I were wearing someone else’s name tag at a party. For all the time I spent there, for all the ways in which my speech can tilt ever so subtly into the nasally timbre of a tristate mall queen (though, curiously and somewhat embarrassingly, those “y’all’s” creep back into place when I’m in Texas), the place still feels to me like the wrong exit off a highway my parents weren’t quite equipped to be driving on in the first place. This was due as much to the particular town as to the state. As out of place as we were in New Jersey as a whole (there’s practically nothing about the boisterousness and raggedy mirth of a typical Jerseyite that would appear to share any DNA with the members of my own gene pool), we managed to pick a town that reduced us to a late-1970s version of the Beverly hillbillies.

  And that’s not just because we pulled in to town in that Ryder truck and, thanks to a minor accident, a freshly dented Plymouth Horizon. It’s because we essentially had no business being there. Whereas most of the dads were Wall Street brokers and corporate executives and doctors, my dad was an aspiring writer of commercial jingles (he was going to move on to bigger things, yes, but first he needed to feed his family). Whereas most of the moms, as I mentioned, played tennis, my mom played Brahms on the piano and continued to fume about the nonpassage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Whereas most of the kids wore ski parkas proudly adorned with lift tickets, I had never really seen snow.

  You would think that moving from Austin, Texas, to Ridgewood, New Jersey—locales that despite certain cultural differences shared a common language, maintained similar standards of health and hygiene, and both used the English system of measurement—wouldn’t exactly be tantamount to immigrating to a foreign land. But somehow for us it was. A markedly desirable town thanks to its proximity to New York City and to its good public schools, Ridgewood was also a markedly uptight town, at least compared to the languorous hippiedom of Austin. Not only could my parents not understand why my playmates’ mothers wanted to be called Mrs. —— rather than by their first names, but they literally could not understand what people were saying. En route to New Jersey during the move, after our Plymouth Horizon was sideswiped by an 18-wheel tractor trailer just after crossing the state line on I-95, my mother was reduced to near tears when a state trooper’s recommendations for taking surface streets the rest of the way involved “da toyd cycle.” It was only after drawing a map on the back of a Burger King bag (“sack” in our red state parlance) that it became clear he was talking about a series of traffic circles and some significance involving the third one: “toyd cycle” translated to “third circle.” By then, it hardly mattered anymore. We were less than a mile inside New Jersey borders, and we were already in the seventh cycle of hell.

  Maybe that’s overstating things. We did, to my wide-eyed delight, receive a visit from a representative from the Ridgewood Welcome Wagon, a Florence Henderson look-alike who showered us with a fruit basket and coupons for discounted dry cleaning and free desserts at Friendly’s. But I think I can also safely say that on just about every level, the social currency that circulated among upper-middle-class mid-Atlantic-state residents rendered the dollar value of my parents’ Midwestern-bred, academic-influenced lifestyle nearly worthless. Des
pite the townspeople’s fixations on being able to put elite college stickers on the backs of their station wagons, my parents had no real concept of the power of networks formed through these institutions. They had never traveled abroad. The term “summerhouse” was alien to them. Whereas other families vacationed on Sanibel Island or Cape Cod, our out-of-town getaways usually involved driving to southern Illinois. We did not, I now suspect, have quite enough money even for that. As it was, we didn’t have health insurance for the first few years.

  The result of all this dissonance was a certain unacknowledged chaos, self-doubt disguised as superiority, joylessness masquerading as something my mother might have called “serious-mindedness.” And in an often frantic-seeming effort to cope, we made two-facedness our family crest. Out in the world, we pretended to be proud and happy citizens of northern New Jersey. I took jazz and tap-dancing lessons twice a week. My brother mounted lemonade stands in the front yard. My father took me to the bakery on Sunday mornings to buy donuts, and my mother shopped in the downtown dress shops and stood in line at Rite Aid like any other mother. But within the confines of the house, all niceties and efforts at respectable suburban conduct were checked at the door. Arriving home from school, I’d launch into a theatrical diatribe about how terrible my day had been (it rarely was truly terrible, but somehow the rants were cathartic), how intolerable my teacher and classmates were, how beneath my dignity it was that we’d had to play dodgeball/draw triangles/set the Pledge of Allegiance to music. In response, my mother would often say something like “Well, if you think —— is a nitwit, you should meet her mother.” Later, at the dinner table, withering critiques of friends and neighbors—“he thinks Bach is pronounced ‘Batch’!”—were not only tolerated but encouraged.