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

  As snobby as we were, we were hardly polymaths. My father’s opinions were almost exclusively confined to matters of music; my mother’s extended to music and home decor. Looking back, I wonder if some other family was sitting around their dinner table saying, “The Daums don’t even have passports, can you imagine?” But at the time, our shared disdain for our surroundings seemed as integral to those surroundings as the trees and sidewalks themselves. We complained, therefore we were. We excoriated the town, therefore it was home.

  Did it have to be like this? Could we have taken another tack? Was it possible that with a different approach, we could have found an antidote for this particular form of overprivileged, underintellectual (not anti-intellectual; most Ridgewoodians weren’t so much opposed to the life of the mind as they were just generally more interested in the stock market), oxford-shirt-wearing, weekend-golfing, leaf-blowers-blaring-at-7:00-a.m. boorishness? Is there any way we could have taken all that fractiousness and converted it into something useful?

  In theory, we could have moved to New York City. We could have skipped Ridgewood entirely and driven the Ryder truck out of Texas and up the eastern seaboard and straight over the George Washington Bridge. We also could have wised up after a year or so in the burbs and shifted the contents of our rented Tudor house to some railroad apartment on the Upper West Side, where my mother would be freed from starchy PTA moms and presumably kids would know how to pronounce “Bach.” In theory we could have done this, but in theory we could also have become missionaries in Malawi. In practice it was never going to happen. For all the courage and energy my parents had mustered in forging a route from southern Illinois to their various destinations, New York City required a faster metabolism than either of them could have hoped to achieve. Plus, for all their disdain of suburban prissiness, they found themselves reluctantly in agreement with Ridgewoodians on at least one point: the city was no place to raise kids.

  My parents were obsessed with New York—its mythologies, its towering density, its promise of high-powered talent pools and professional opportunities. But they were also cowed by it, and understandably so. In the late 1970s and early 1980s it was dangerous and dirty and, given the way the squalid, hooker-filled Port Authority Bus Terminal book-ended just about every one of our trips in from New Jersey, just ever so slightly third world in its ambience. My father was once mugged at knifepoint; another time a small girl romping down a Hell’s Kitchen street errantly threw a piece of metal shrapnel in his direction. It hit him in the face and caused profuse bleeding; the girl ran away, terrified. This was the era of the removable car radio, and whenever we drove into the city, my father would pop out the cassette deck and hand it to my mother to carry in her purse.

  Still, my father often spoke of the perils of New York, particularly the West Side midtown neighborhoods where he was attempting to do business, with a certain relish, almost as though he were bragging.

  “Well, New York is great, but it’s not quite civilized,” I’d hear him say on the phone to friends in faraway places who we all imagined were marveling at the scope of our ambition. “There’s a sense of lawlessness. The city will eat you alive. I can see how a lot of people just wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

  Both of my parents, my mother especially, were fond of suggesting to various Midwestern and Texan friends and relatives that we actually lived not in New Jersey but, rather, in some kind of staging area between the vacuous suburbs and the head rush of Gotham.

  “Yes, the address says New Jersey,” my mother would say. “But we’re just right over the border from Manhattan. Just right there. Very close.”

  This was not true. We were completely and utterly in New Jersey. We were twenty miles away, and it was a long twenty miles, psychologically if not geographically. Still, as though standing at the western mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel and trying to see a sliver of light from the other side, my parents peered at their dream lives from afar and did everything they could to convince themselves that they were wide awake and living them. This effort was aided somewhat by the fact that my father did much of his work out of Chicago, which had a thriving jingle-writing scene and where he had a number of professional connections dating back to his graduate school days. Why we hadn’t just moved to Chicago I wasn’t sure, but I remember my mother repeatedly saying that my father “had to be known as a New York guy in order to get hired by the Chicago guys.” For at least the first five years that we were in Ridgewood, my father was in Chicago more often than he was not. And though that put my mother in the somewhat awkward position of appearing to be a single parent even though she wasn’t, she would later tell me that his absences were among the few respites from what otherwise amounted to a life of relentless if weirdly indescribable stress.

  On weeks when my father was home, he’d go into New York and, as he put it, “hustle for work.” I’m pretty sure that no one, let alone him, entirely understood what this needed to entail (he didn’t have an agent or a rep and to this day has never felt he needed one), but my perception was that he functioned as something like a traveling salesman for himself. He dropped off his demo tape to music production companies and ad agencies. He had lunch with people who, presumably, were in a position to hire him. He was assaulted by little girls and mugged. Mostly it seemed, however, that he walked around the city, particularly the seedy midtown neighborhoods on the West Side that housed various recording studios and the musicians’ union and restaurants frequented by players in pit orchestras of Broadway shows. And amid all this pavement pounding, his unconscious disbelief that he’d actually made it that far out of Centralia, Illinois, became the collective unconscious of the family.

  “I was just there!” my father would exclaim whenever a Manhattan landmark appeared on television. “Walked down that street just today. That’s Broadway and, looks like, Fifty-fourth Street. No, Fifty-fifth. I was just there. Had my meeting on Fifty-seventh Street and walked south to the Port Authority. Yes, I know exactly where that is. Know it well.”

  We went through two houses in Ridgewood, the small rented Tudor and, later, a slightly larger house built in 1931 in the American Foursquare style on a street I’ll call Jones Lane. In each of these houses my parents maintained two telephone lines: one for normal, family-related matters and one called “the business line,” which was designated for my father’s work and was never to be picked up by children. (Once or twice my mother answered and impersonated a professional receptionist.) An answering machine (a technological marvel) hooked up to the business line delivered an authoritative message designed to give the caller the impression that this was no house in suburbia but, rather, a bona fide professional operation.

  Two separate phone lines was an exotic household feature in 1979. More exotic still was the ability to retrieve messages from remote locations using a small beeper that emitted a tone that would rewind and play the tape. I don’t know if this feature preceded the technology wherein you checked messages by simply pressing a phone-pad key or if my parents—likely my father—had chosen this particular model out of some belief that it was superior to the more conventional system (we were a Betamax family, so that should tell you something). But I remember clearly that the beeper, which was activated by a push button that had no lock, would sputter out electronic hisses as it got tossed around in my mother’s oversized purse. As a result, when she walked around, she often gave the impression of being attached to some kind of homing device. Once she sat her purse down on a supermarket checkout counter only to have the beeper emit a solid, unrelenting tone that, in her efforts to dig it out of her bag, caused her to spill the entire contents onto the conveyor belt and the floor. I remember being terrified that she was going to explode into a rage. I remember that I was sheepishly holding a candy bar that I was about to implore her to buy and that the clerk, a high-school student with fashionably feathered-back hair and a gold cross around her neck, looked at us as though we’d accidentally wandered into the store from some faraway land of d
isheveled women carrying strange technological gadgets. That is to say, she looked at us in confusion and, as far as I was concerned, disdain.

  Justifiably or not (probably not, but what does it matter?), this was how I experienced just about everything about life in Ridgewood, New Jersey, particularly in the first few years after our arrival. Even when I was as young as nine, I had the sense that everyone there already knew each other, that every clique was already formed, that everyone’s mom knew all the other moms, that maybe there were even secret underground tunnels connecting the houses so that entire social networks could thrive without my even knowing they existed. And watching the checkout girl watching my mother pick the contents of her purse off the floor, I remember feeling so diminished by what I perceived to be her total, inviolable sense of belonging and our total, inviolable sense of otherness that I wanted to disappear, beeper in hand, into the far reaches of the frozen food cases and cryogenically preserve myself until I was older and could flee the town forever.

  But the beeper was hardy the final frontier in our telecommunication adventures. More astonishing was that the business line had two numbers associated with it: a New Jersey number and a Manhattan number with a 212 area code. The line operated on a call-forwarding system, which meant that once you programmed it by dialing in a set of codes, calls to the Manhattan number would ring through automatically to the New Jersey number. Each line had its own similar but distinct version of the old-fashioned Ma Bell ring tone, and in the early Ridgewood years the jangle of the business line sent an almost bone-cracking jolt of nervous energy through the house.

  “It’s the business line! Dad, the business line is ringing!” my brother and I would yell, terrified that one of us would pick up the phone by accident and also terrified that one of our parents wouldn’t get to it in time. “Dad, get it! Dad, it’s business!”

  Somehow my parents had cobbled together the money to rent a musty one-room office in a shabby building on Fortieth Street and Ninth Avenue. This was not only home to a desk and filing cabinets and an Oriental rug my mother had placed strategically over the industrial carpet but also the official headquarters of the business line. Though it was generally unclear what actually took place in this office (my father’s keyboards and reel-to-reel tape recorders, which were crucial to his creative process, were permanently installed at home), the intended effect was to cover up—or at least distract from—the fact that we lived in New Jersey. Business cards and stationery bearing the Manhattan address were printed. A small sofa and a ficus plant were installed in the corner so that my father could take meetings with clients.

  Though I’m sure a few meetings did occur, what I remember most about the office in Manhattan is how little time my father actually spent there. As for the business line, not only did it not ring with the frequency my parents had hoped, but it had the unfortunate glitch of being forwardable only if you happened to be physically using the phone from which you wished to forward calls. That detail sticks in my mind thanks to the memory of one occasion wherein my father returned home from a day of “hustling” and making and taking a few calls in the office only to realize that he’d forgotten to reset the business line so that it would ring through to the house in New Jersey.

  “Oh, hell,” my mother said. She had already started dinner.

  “Well, is anyone really going to call?” my father asked.

  “Possibly,” my mother said, alluding to this music supervisor or that Broadway show producer (my mother really wanted my father to write music for Broadway shows).

  “You’re saying I should go back?” he said. It was rush hour. It was a Friday. Thanks to heavy traffic, my father’s journey on the Short Line bus from the Port Authority to the drop-off location at the Kmart on Route 17 had taken nearly an hour.

  “Don’t you think you should?” my mother said with exasperation if not unkindness. “Otherwise we’re talking about a whole weekend of calls not able to come through.”

  So my father got in the Plymouth Horizon and drove back into the city, found a parking spot several blocks from his destination, walked to the office, reprogrammed the phone, and drove back to Ridgewood. Meanwhile, we ate dinner without him. The business line didn’t ring that weekend.

  And so went life in New Jersey, a place that was at once too rich for our blood and too uncool to ever truly own up to. When we traveled to Chicago to join my father, I’d once again watch in befuddled silence as my mother told his colleagues we were from New York. When my father’s mother and then my mother’s father died the two consecutive years following our arrival in Ridgewood and we had to make trips to southern Illinois, I more than once overheard my mother implying to various relatives—the kind unlikely to pull out a map and figure out anything to the contrary—that we lived “in the city.”

  Should my parents have abandoned their caution and moved to Manhattan anyway, tucking themselves into the bristly folds of urban bohemia until they either made it or could return home with the satisfaction of having tried? Should my brother and I have been made to brave the menaces of the New York City schools? Would my mother, so angry for so many years in Ridgewood, have been better off being angry at muggers and car radio thieves than at suburban tennis ladies? Would she have been angry at all? Could my parents have cured their obsession with New York by simply giving in to it? Could they have sidestepped the insecurity that begat the phoniness that begat the chronic sense of estrangement and made themselves into genuine New Yorkers the old-fashioned way by faking it for as long as it took to start truly making it?

  Of course they should have. It’s just that they should have done it all twenty years earlier, minus the kids and probably minus each other. My father, bless his uncensored and cranky soul, has in moments admitted as much. Now that his children are grown, he’s glad he had them, he’s told me, but it probably wasn’t the ideal trajectory for his life. My mother, because she is a mother, would never say such a thing, not least of all because she’d never think it. As much as she wanted a ticket out of her hometown and state, I’m pretty sure she wanted a family even more, and as much as it breaks my heart to contemplate it, the idea that you could flee to the big city to pursue a career and then have a family was probably beyond the imaginative powers of most twenty-three-year-old southern Illinois women in 1965. Besides, for all their bold life maneuvers, neither she nor my father—individually or together—would have been brazen enough to catch the Greyhound bus out of town back when they probably should have. True to Midwestern form, they believed in being prepared, in waiting their turn, in not going off half-cocked. And so their time in Ridgewood went from two years to four years to fifteen years. My father finally found some success and started making some money (twice, he won Emmy Awards for music he’d written for a cartoon program; this one we were allowed to watch). My mother finally found a career and, thus, a little happiness. We didn’t move to New York City, nor did we move to Connecticut, Westchester County, or another part of New Jersey. This was surprising only insofar as, until I was in junior high school, we spent most weekends in these places looking at houses.

  We were a family without hobbies. We did not ski, hike, or participate in team sports. We did not play board games or cards. There was music, of course, but it was a despotic passion that doubled as a vocation and therefore did not count as a recreational activity. Instead, if there was anything that came close to a regular weekend activity, it was attending open houses. My mother, who was devouring shelter magazines before they became the wallpaper of the nation itself, often seemed physically unable to restrain herself from looking at an interesting house she’d seen listed in the newspaper. Sometimes these houses were down the block; sometimes they were in other states—and when she brought me along, it was as if she were dangling a new life in front of me. In the sixth grade, a year in which I was particularly miserable thanks to yet another school change when we moved across town to Jones Lane, I remember my mother becoming fascinated by the town of Westport, Connecticu
t, a high-WASP hamlet on the shores of Long Island Sound. We went there three or four weekends in a row, enlisting the help of a Realtor who showed us a handful of vaguely run-down properties surrounded by marshy grasses and ferns. And although my father, when he went at all, was solely along for the ride and appeared to have no interest in moving, it didn’t take long for me to decide I desperately wanted to move there. With the recent school transfer, I’d made some minor efforts to remake myself, mainly by announcing that I wanted to be known not as Meghan but as Meg. And with that choice no longer sitting well, not to mention my discovery that you were nothing in this school if you weren’t a cheerleader for Ridgewood’s version of the Pop Warner football team (an enterprise denigrated by my parents, who forbade me to try out for cheerleading), the prospect of a do-over was appealing. My mother had somehow developed the idea that Westport, whose fusty, old-money New England–ness contrasted with Ridgewood’s slightly nouveau-riche glitz, was an “intellectual” place. There was an appealing bookstore, a regional theater, and concerts in the park. In turn, I figured that maybe the cheerleaders were a bit brainier and might therefore be acceptable to my parents. I wondered if it would be like my first (seemingly more academically minded) school in Ridgewood or, better yet, like Austin, where my babysitters had not been surly teenagers but grad students who wore dashikis and the world had not seemed like a place you had to wipe your feet before walking around in.