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

  Obviously, my perceptions were monumentally, laughably off. Westport was and is one of the wealthiest towns in the United States: a cradle of privilege and preppiness, not to mention the setting of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. We would have been more out of place there than we were even in Ridgewood. We didn’t move. We couldn’t have even begun to afford it—I can’t imagine what made my mother think otherwise—and besides, they’d bought the house on Jones Lane less than a year earlier. It was also considerably farther away from New York City than Ridgewood—fifty miles rather than twenty—which would have made emergency trips to reset the business line even more tedious than they already were. I have a specific memory of standing in one house in Westport, a shabby split-level that my mother would never have even considered in Ridgewood, and hearing my father ask the Realtor if New York City radio stations, such as NPR’s Manhattan affiliate or the jazz station out of Columbia University, came in up there. The Realtor said she didn’t think so. Sometime not long after, the subject of Westport was dropped.

  Instead of moving, my mother put her domestic energies over the next six years into overseeing remodeling projects in the Jones Lane house. Though there were only four of us, we were a family that needed lots of rooms. We yelled a lot, talked on the phone at unnecessarily high volumes, and, for reasons ranging from the practical to the slightly pathetic (music practice in the living room was encouraged over after-school sports, weekend teenage socializing was frowned on if not officially forbidden), were simply home more often than we were out in the world. We needed doors that closed (and slammed) and hallways that drew clear lines between territories. Our houses over the years weren’t large—we never had more than one bathroom—but no one could have accused us of not using every inch of space. By the time I was a senior in high school, my mother had spearheaded remodels of both the attic and the basement, projects that effectively gave each family member his or her own floor.

  As it turned out, my mother needed much more than her own story. Having spent much of her time in Ridgewood trying unsuccessfully to find a professional niche for herself—she gave private piano lessons, wrote a libretto for a kids’ musical, and, possessed of a pleasant, accent-free voice, attempted to become a voice-over artist by making a demo tape wherein she read magazine ad copy—she finally began to find her way shortly after I entered high school. Unfortunately for me, this involved essentially following me to high school. Here, my mother managed to finally shirk her self-appointed responsibilities as my father’s de facto publicist/manager/personal assistant and transform herself into something she (and certainly we) never imagined she’d be: a theater person. Ridgewood had an established summer-stock program, in which I, having spent much of my childhood belting out tunes from the musical Annie in the hope of one day auditioning for the real show (I surpassed the height cutoff before this could happen), had enthusiastically enrolled. And what began as my mother volunteering her piano-playing services for productions of shows like Carousel and Pippin, where I ambled around in the chorus, grew into larger responsibilities: assistant music director, music director, producer, theater arts teacher.

  My mother was tenured and then promoted several times. By the time I was in college, she was on her way to becoming something of the grande dame of the school’s drama community (whereas she had once deplored the obstreperous carryings-on of teenagers, she was now the cool teacher who joined their fun). Needless to say, this journey was as positive and necessary and healthy for her as it was sometimes exasperating and cringe inducing for me. Equally needless to say (though I’ll say it anyway, maybe out of some need to repeat the obvious to myself) is that she meant no harm. But if my late adolescence and early twenties were marked by any single experience, it was the experience of watching my mother transform her personality—and with it her style of dress, her speech mannerisms, and her taste in friends—in what seemed like less time than it took to mount a student production of Godspell. Seemingly overnight, she had traded her tone of abiding anger for a tone of abiding drama, her peasant blouses for colorful scarves and modernist jewelry, and, most notably, her residency on Jones Lane for the thing she hadn’t realized she’d wanted all along: a house of her own.

  The summer between my junior and my senior years of college, my mother moved out of Jones Lane and rented a small, cottagelike house in an adjacent town. After nearly twenty-five years of living with my father’s moodiness and constant monologue of criticism, she had decided that the cure for her misery was not only a life in the student theater but also four walls whose color scheme required approval from no one. It wasn’t another man she wanted but another life, preferably one in which she could drink wine in her sun-drenched living room and listen to George Winston CDs with no one ranting about the music being jejune and look at the art on her walls without feeling guilty that the other occupants of the house hated it. So one July day, movers came and transferred certain carefully selected pieces of furniture from our house to my mother’s bachelorette pad less than ten miles away. The proceedings, I’m told, were not hostile but rather so infused with guilt and unaccepted apologies that my mother developed a rash on her neck from rubbing it in anxiety. From what I gathered, my father and brother simply sat there, swatting away mosquitoes in a nonplussed stupor.

  By the time I deigned to get on the bus and travel the twenty miles from Manhattan, where I was living in squalid postadolescent rebellion in Greenwich Village, my mother’s new house looked like a page from the (then quite au courant) Pottery Barn catalog. Sleek modernist pieces were flawlessly juxtaposed with antiques, cut flowers leaped from glazed ceramic vases, the framed art posters that had festooned the old house seemed now to have multiplied; between the placards for my mother’s theater productions and the original, mostly abstract art either sold by or created by her new friends, there was scarcely an inch of blank wall space. Too broke to buy significant pieces of new furniture and too charitable to abscond with any major stuff from the old house, my mother had a living room sofa and chairs made of wicker. Though I do not remember this incident well (I suspect—make that hope—my mother remembers it hardly at all), I know she led me through the five rooms of the house with enough trepidation to suggest the parent-child relationship had been abruptly reversed.

  “It’s cute,” I said.

  This was a terrible time in my life. I was unhappy at college, and the unhappiness was exacerbated by guilt about being unhappy; it just seemed utterly inappropriate to the occasion. Depending on whom I was with (my mother being one example), I could be a real drag and this day was a case in point. I remember skulking around the house and eye-rollingly pronouncing it “nice” and “fine.” I remember sitting outside on the patio and eating a meal of tomatoes, French bread, and polenta, a product my mother squeezed directly from its plastic, sausagelike packing onto an earthenware plate. I remember feeling that she wanted to have some kind of seminal mother-daughter conversation but was still too shell-shocked to dare to initiate one, a vulnerability I took full advantage of by retreating into near silence. I remember that I later realized that the wicker furniture in the living room was actually the porch furniture, recushioned, from the Jones Lane veranda.

  Speaking of which, the Jones Lane house had developed the half-ghoulish, half-comical appearance of a refrigerator that’s been raided by someone hoping to go unnoticed. Like tubs of ice cream furtively poked by stray fingers in the middle of the night, the rooms hadn’t been emptied as much as they’d been manhandled into a patchier version of themselves. The sofa and dining table and the better armchairs still in place, it was smaller items—desk lamps, cheap bookshelves, a butcher board chopping block—that would suddenly reveal themselves as not there. You’d try to set down a glass of water while watching TV and realize the end table was missing. Kitchen supplies would be thinned out in a way that, oddly, was both insignificant and highly irritating; the flour sifter would be gone from the cupboard, the preferred salad tongs absent, the “good napkins” no lon
ger folded in the drawer on top of the less good ones.

  My mother has said that the initial idea behind getting her own house was that it would be a temporary arrangement. She simply wanted to see what living alone was like, to know she could do it, to check it off the list of life experiences that—by virtue of her generation or her hometown or her own choices—had heretofore been denied her. Indeed, in the beginning her house seemed very much like a young person’s sublet. The small things that had been purloined from Jones Lane were my mother’s big things. A single desk lamp would light her entire bedroom; an end table functioned as her desk. But given that unlike my father she had a regular salary and, what’s more, that salary actually increased over time, it wasn’t long before her house was properly outfitted and her supposedly temporary experiment in independent living graduated into permanence. She moved from the cottage-style house to a slightly larger, slightly more modern ranch-style house (a strange if vastly updated reimagining of the rented ranch house in Austin). A few years later, she bought the left-hand unit of a Tudor-style duplex near the Ridgewood train station.

  The money for the duplex came from selling the Jones Lane house, an event that precipitated my father, partly at my urging, finally doing the thing he should have done in 1964: moving to New York City. There he lived—and continues to live—alone in a one-bedroom apartment near the Tudor Hotel whose living room was taken up almost entirely with music production equipment. There he was allowed to occupy all corners of his eccentricity. His inherent nocturnalism, which had always been cramped by family life and, even after my brother and I were gone, the noisy lawn mowers and early-closing restaurants of Ridgewood, was now tucked into the cradle of the never-sleeping city. As though the nonurban world had been a fifty-five-year nightmare from which he finally awoke, he seemed to forget about grassy terrain altogether, once complaining to me that he’d taken the bus all the way out to New Jersey to attend a Fourth of July barbecue only to find that it was, to his great distress, outdoors. Living in New York, he told me, made him “as content as I’ve ever been.” Since he’d never been a believer in happiness (when I was in the seventh grade, he’d explained happiness to me as “something that exists purely in the past tense”), I saw this as a major accomplishment.

  Years pass. Nearly ten. My mother lives happily in her Tudor-style duplex, a House and Garden–worthy abode exploding with color and art and flowers and light streaming through the sunroom windows and Sondheim music streaming through the Bose stereo. She has remade herself. She is a busy, animated, unattached woman with busy, animated friends and tickets to concerts and paintings made by artists she knows. She drives a pristine, preowned Alfa Romeo sedan that she bought from a gay male friend for what she claims was not an inordinate amount of money. When she orders a drink, she asks for an Absolut gimlet on the rocks. When she goes on vacation, it’s to Vermont and to “the Cape.” Her son has gone to college in California and never returned back east. Her daughter has moved more times than it seems possible to count. Her husband is still legally her husband, partly for health insurance reasons (thanks to self-employment and heart disease, he cannot get his own) and partly because their apparently mutual love of solitude has precluded the burgeoning of any new relationships that prove significant enough to necessitate a divorce. Ultimately, they will live apart—and alone—for longer than they ever lived together.

  When the time comes to retire, my mother finally makes an honest woman out of herself. She moves to New York for real.

  I am, by then, living in Los Angeles. Summoned back east for her retirement festivities as well as assistance moving her into her apartment, a junior one-bedroom in an Upper West Side brownstone more fit for a twenty-five-year-old junior marketing executive than a sixty-three-year-old with arthritic knees, I experience a moment that makes me catch my breath in wrenching self-recognition. On the corner of Columbus Avenue and Seventy-eighth Street, in the rank, piteous humidity of a June evening, stands my mother, father, and brother as well as my mother’s brother and his longtime girlfriend, who, fresh off recent travels to Bali or Singapore or God knows where, have come up from Miami. A moving van will come later, but we’ve spent the afternoon unloading a couple of car trips’ worth of items my mother for some reason hadn’t wanted to put on the moving truck—pieces of art, pieces of pottery, wicker baskets stuffed with blankets and dishes—into the second-floor walk-up apartment and are en route to dinner.

  “Is that the Museum of Natural History?” my uncle inquires. “Well, I’ll be.”

  To which my mother tosses her head to the side and says, well, yes, and there’s plenty more great stuff where that came from. Like “really good” restaurants and “a bar I love” and “excellent theater” and “really great stores.” She already knows it well, she explains to my uncle and his girlfriend, both of whom are wearing pastel shirts and white pants and neither of whom is sweating as much as my parents and my brother and me; we’re all dressed at least partly in black.

  She’d been coming into the city for years, my mother continues. This is “really a natural progression.” She is “really quite at home” on these streets. “That way is south,” she says, pointing to the traffic flow on Columbus Avenue. “Central Park West is the next one over, and it goes north and south.”

  She knows it. She knows it well. And, of course, not at all. But she knows that, too. As with my father’s long-ago cries of “I was just there!” when the Chrysler Building flashed across the television screen during an American Express commercial, her ambition is on a collision course with her innocence, and no one or nothing is to blame except the legacy of striving and all its ruthless discontents. I am by now thirty-five years old, and I know this routine. I am looking at my mother, but I might as well be flipping through snapshots of my own most vulnerable moments: there I am pretending to know my way around school, even though I’m the new kid and can barely find the door; there I am in high school pretending to be friends with people I barely know; there I am in college pretending not to be miserable; there I am as an adult pretending that I don’t feel like a child. And as we stand on that corner waiting for the crosswalk light to change, I can see my mother bending over so far backward in an effort to erase the vestiges of her past that I’m afraid her spine will crack right then and there. I want to hug her as much as I want to hit her. But the signal changes, and we proceed forward.

  TWO

  I’m not proud of this, but I’ll come out and say it now. I chose my college not because of its outstanding faculty or its resplendent campus, not because of its fancy-pants reputation or its arty sensibility or its distinguished alumni. I chose my college not so much for what it could offer me while I was there as for what I believed it could deliver me into when I was done: a shabby yet elegant prewar apartment in Manhattan. I wasn’t quite sure how I would pay for said apartment—indeed, I had no idea how much such a thing cost—but I was determined to spend the better part of my twenties (and possibly my thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies) surrounded by houseplants in a sun-drenched if slightly musty one- or two-bedroom overlooking Riverside Drive or West End Avenue. In this apartment, I would drink a lot of coffee while staring out the window. I would read great books and have great lovers, and eventually I’d win a Pulitzer Prize or maybe even a MacArthur “genius” grant for things I’d written while staring out that window. I’d have really great clothes and furniture—all vintage.

  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.