Notes from Astoria, New York, 1988
From my new bedroom window, the lights of the Empire State Building crown the city's skyline to my left. The Triboro Bridge, outlined in cornflower blue lights, sparkles with rivers of traffic to my right. The city exhales promise and possibility. If only I could work up the nerve to leave the apartment alone.
My sister Diana and I are sharing a room again after six years of living apart. Diana went away to college while I stayed local in Syracuse. I earned my associate's degree at a community college and worked for two years for a shopping mall developer. Also, I didn't know how to leave my childhood or my boyfriend. Carmen and I had been going out for four years when I declared I wanted to move to New York and finish my bachelor's degree. I didn't declare it as much as I whispered it, and the idea quickly grew into a rushing current I couldn't pull myself out of, and I didn't want to. I rode it all the way down Route 17.
Now, here I am with Diana, who moved to New York last year. She found us an apartment on 42nd Street, two blocks up from Steinway Street. It is a pre-war, one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a four-story walk-up. We put our grandmother's old table and chairs in our kitchen and her curved-back Art Deco chairs in the living room. We bought a refurbished hotel TV and share a double bed for now. We fashioned a freestanding clothes rail out of PVC pipe, thinking it practical and creative. However, we lack the engineering, physics mastery, and enough super glue to make it work. It almost immediately collapsed under the weight of our clothes.
Our shoes tap across the parquet floors, and I play U2 on our turntable to distraction. Well, I did until my sister told me the woman below us didn't want Bono on top of her all day. I dispute this idea. The bathroom is all tiles: bright white with a black stripe around the middle and small white hexagonal tiles on the floor. We share a laundry line strung from our small bathroom window to our neighbor's apartment across the way. I worry about faulty clothespins because, down below, stand the building's garbage cans in the superintendent's courtyard.
Diana works for a Japanese shipping firm just across the river, so she is home by 5:30. I know Diana by our secret buzz: "Shave and a haircut, two bits." I let her in and hear the slam of the building's front door echo up the same stairway that her steps skip up seconds later.
I did the laundry in our bathtub today. Diana was furious with me. She can't understand why I wouldn't go out and find a laundromat. However, she was pleased I put the Dukakis sign in the living room window. She says it makes us seem native to the neighborhood.
Carmen and I did not break up as I had expected, as I had hoped. Instead, we speak every night at 9 p.m. to check-in. He fears New York City and could hardly bear leaving me to its wilds. After he and my mom moved me in, I saw that he had left his Louisville Slugger in the corner of the bedroom, sitting as a silent sentry.
My semester starts next week; I'll be ready then.
Notes from Greenwich, England, 1999
I have the most marvelous secret, which is revealing itself in smug satisfaction all over my face. I'm not a tourist. I am a local. I fell in love with an Englishman, and now I'm here. While my suitcase is unpacked and stowed for an unknown, unworried amount of time, the bulk of my belongings are still on a cargo ship somewhere crossing the Atlantic Ocean from New York. Luckily, the ground-floor flat Chris found for us is already partially furnished.
The flat is in a Georgian townhouse on the Greenwich High Road. The main bedroom and kitchen are downstairs, the loo is halfway up on the landing, and a tiny second bedroom and large living room are upstairs at street level. We have sole access to a small, walled-in garden, and I like to leave the kitchen door open to let the air through.
It's full-blown spring here, and I walked to Greenwich Park the other day to stand on the Prime Meridian. There's power in believing in imaginary lines. They mark out countries' borders and the edges of property. They can be something to cross or make a stand on. I first stood on the Prime Meridian with my father two years earlier on a family trip. I remember that day so well. As we walked up the steep hill to the Royal Observatory, I saw little children on bikes, giggling, and thought, 'I could live here; I want to live here.' I never imagined that I would be fast-forwarded to this moment in time. Who gets to think of a desire and have it materialize? How many people don't recognize it when it does happen? Looking back, I wonder if the young children's laughter, like the work of fairies, gave me a moment of prescience. It was as if my wish foretold my future.
I crossed a country's border and must cross it again should this not work out. I don't know what imaginary lines I'll stand upon or cross in the future, but for now, I enjoy opening the door to our back garden to let a local cat walk into our house. I call her Lady Bramble, and she sees no imaginary lines. What's mine is hers, and she sits on an ottoman curled in a black ball of fluff, and allows me to pay homage to her.
I don't trust that any of this will last.
Notes from Newark, Delaware, 2003
Richard and I survey our new house. It is a tiny split-level in a little cul-de-sac neighborhood filled with ticky-tacky new builds in coordinating neutral shades. We've been married for a year, and his work has brought us back to the United States. I don't mind because it's now our adventure, though I would have lived in England forever. Our long backyard is bounded by a little strip of trees that is one of those invisible lines; just past it, we can see the parking lot lights of a business structure at night. The building is in Maryland.
On our first night, I declared that we must sleep on our new screen porch just because we could, but the night was sticky and wakeful. It was difficult for us to buy a house because I have an American credit rating and inherited a down payment, but Richard has a career and is still a subject of the Queen. I am wary of our neighbors. The people next door still live in the backlash of 9/11, with American flags enveloping every bit of their garden. Fair dues, I suppose, I'm still not settled with it yet either.
Richard and I attended a local town meeting to learn about the area. They began with the Pledge of Allegiance, just like we were in grade school. I am lost in the country I've returned to. I felt guilty not wanting to recite it along with them, and Richard couldn't possibly have joined in. I didn't appreciate the mandatory performance that it felt like, and realized I had a lot of difficult navigation ahead of me.
I feel more like a foreigner than Richard because I haven't lived in domesticated America since I was 22, and I moved to New York and then to London. He's new and expects new. I expect what I left. I'm a big-city girl in the suburbs. I should settle easily, but everything is strange and slightly different. It's like a dream where you know where you are, but it doesn't look the same. There is one big street in this town, and it is called Main Street; Main Street, USA, with a Five and Dime and everything. At least there's comfort in the small-town feel of my re-entry. Philadelphia is just up the road, and New York is just beyond that.
We can build a life here, or as Richard says, "Delaware is a great place to start a road trip."
Notes from Madison, Wisconsin, 2008
I fell badly for Colleen. A door that has been open to her for all 56 years of her life is now closed. One morning, she turned the key and locked the door for the last time. She signed some papers and had to knock on the door for admittance that evening. Her family's home is now ours. She had to return because they left an enormous safe in the basement. They were trying to make it our problem, and we insisted they take it with them. As agreed, they came and left with it, and Richard, Katie, and I are officially Wisconsinites.
We spent the summer living in an apartment in Fitchburg while we house-hunted. We sold our Delaware house just before the bubble burst and couldn't believe our luck. Our new home was built in the 1950s and reminds me of the house I grew up in, which was of a similar age in Syracuse. The day we toured it, we just knew. It wasn't a hard decision after seeing many strange options in new developments, like the one with the empty hot tub in a windowless basement room, which we dubbed the "bloodletting room," and the bizarre house where a female psychiatrist ran her office, carrying a palpable dark sadness. There are things a realtor can't hide or explain, but we all see, like the mold on the basement wall of a ranch house. Our realtor just rubbed it off with his hand and said, "Nah, that's not mold." It was.
As I settle in here, I feel Betty everywhere. She is Collen's late mother and the first and last person to live in this house before us. Her husband died in the 1980s, and Betty died in hospice about 6 months before we arrived. I refer to the kitchen window as Betty's window. I can feel her looking out over her yard as I wash the dishes. I found an entire bottle of her Coumadin spilled behind the old refrigerator and wondered why she had never asked anyone for help cleaning it up. Was she able to replace the prescription easily, or was it near the end of her life, and no one cared?
When I do my inaugural load of laundry in the machines we purchased with the house, I find a single pair of her underwear in the dryer and think about the humanity of it all. We are all fundamentally the same in our existence. What had I ever left behind? Diana and I found a silver dollar in the Astoria closet, which the Irish girl who lived there before us had left behind. In London, the owners left an ancient Chesterfield couch for our use, which triggered my asthma until Chris had them remove it. In Syracuse, I left behind my childhood possessions that my brother had stolen before I could sort or retrieve them.
There is no "Leave no trace" in a place where humans live for any period. Who knows what Richard and I left in London or Delaware or what we'll leave here someday?