Living Out Loud (34 page)

Sometimes the baby slips out with the bath water. I wanted to throw confetti the day that a family of rough types who propped their speakers on their station wagon and played heavy metal music at 3:00
A
.
M
. moved out. I stood and smiled as the seedy bar at the corner was transformed into a slick Mexican restaurant. But I liked some of the people who moved out at the same time the rough types did. And I’m not sure I have that much in common with the singles who have made the restaurant their second home.

Yet somehow now we seem to have reached a nice mix. About a third of the people in the neighborhood think of squid as calamari, about a third think of it as sushi, and about a third think of it as bait. Lots of the single people who have moved in during the last year or two are easygoing and good-tempered about all the kids. The old Italians have become philosophical about the new Hispanics, although they still think more of them should know English. The firebrand community organizer with the storefront on the block, the one who is always talking about people like us as though we stole our houses out of the open purse of a ninety-year-old blind widow, is pleasant to my boys.

Drawn in broad strokes, we live in a pressure cooker: oil and water, us and them. But if you come around at exactly the right time, you’ll find members of all these groups gathered around complaining about the condition of the streets, on which everyone can agree. We melt together, then draw apart. I am the granddaughter of immigrants, a young professional—either an interloper or a longtime resident, depending on your concept of time. I am one of them, and one of us.

D
uring our college years, I asked the man who is now my husband for the same gift for Valentine’s Day, my birthday, and Christmas. He would say, “What do you want?” And I would reply, “An engagement ring.” And he would laugh. In no time at all this became a standing joke, which is why, on my twenty-fifth birthday, I opened the latest in a succession of tiny boxes that had previously contained earrings, lockets, and the like with an air that was just a little bit lackadaisical. Inside the box was an engagement ring. Life had sneaked up behind me and planted a kiss on my cheek just as I had finally stopped straining to hear its footfalls. I wasn’t looking for it, and so it came.

I know there are people who never strain, who go to look at houses they want to buy armed with a notebook, a list of practical questions, and a dignified, slightly critical manner. I know there are people who can argue about salary at job
interviews and those who can greet a blind date—even one described by friends as a tall neurosurgeon with a great sense of humor—with a firm handshake and a level look.

And then there are people like me. I like to think of us as the tuning forks. When we are in the market for anything of substance—an apartment, a job, a relationship, a dress to wear on New Year’s Eve—we give off a high-pitched tone akin to that emitted by dog whistles. This tone sends one of two messages to people: stay away, or take us for all we are worth. Most women have known a fair number of allegedly eligible men in each category (and some who started out in the second and then moved rapidly to the first). But of the rental agents and personnel managers I’ve known, most were the take-’em type. The only exception was the wonderful, cynical man who once interviewed me for a reporter’s job and who, when I said I would work for free, answered coldly, “Don’t be dramatic.”

The tuning-fork phenomenon gives life an interesting quality, which, according to some friends, was introduced early in their own lives by their mothers. If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail. I have become such a firm believer in this that now that I have a place to live I half expect doormen all over New York City to dart forward as I pass by, grab my arm and say, “The penthouse just opened up—it has four bedrooms and a terrace, and the fireplace works.”

This is in sharp contrast to the search for my first apartment, which took place with my pupils permanently dilated with desperation and desire, one of the telltale signs of tuning forks everywhere. I told agents that I didn’t care if the bathtub was in the kitchen, didn’t mind if there wasn’t a kitchen at all, and thought the walk-in closet would indeed, with a little work, make a lovely bedroom. When I finally found a human habitation for rent, nothing could dissuade me. The delay on delivery of the refrigerator? (I’m getting a refrigerator? God! How
great!) The hole in the bedroom ceiling? (I’ll only see it when I’m lying down.) The rent? (It’s reasonable. Or it would be if I had it. But I’ll get it.)

Of course I adored that apartment because I had wanted it so badly, wanted it for no reason except that I was looking and it was there, which as many women can tell you is a key to some inexplicable and horrible relationships. During a time when I was in flux on just about every level, that apartment was my safe haven. I remember how, starting off from that apartment, I would take long walks around the city streets, in jeans and sneakers, buying flowers and food, window shopping, watching the pickup basketball games and the kids in the park. I thought this was all quite casual and continental, and that if I did it long enough I would meet some people. One morning a coworker said he had seen me walking the evening before and that he almost hadn’t recognized me. “You looked so intense,” he said. “You sort of looked like a cross between one of those kids with the big eyes in Keane paintings, and a serial murderer.” No wonder I wasn’t meeting anyone.

I was thinking about this the other night because of what happened on the bus. A man sat down next to me. I was reading my newspaper and he was reading his, and after a few minutes he started an idle conversation about some news event. That’s when I noticed how handsome he was. In the course of the conversation, it also occurred to me that he was quite smart. When he asked if I had had dinner, I realized he was trying to pick me up.

Under other circumstances—say, if I had not had a husband and two small children at home waiting for me—this would have been marvelous, but under other circumstances this would not have happened. It crossed my mind that it was a function of age, that I was only so crazed when I was younger because I was younger, but I don’t believe it’s so. If I were still looking, that man would have changed seats or feigned sleep
or keeled over in a fake faint rather than talk to me. He would have heard the hum. He would have known that he could tell me he’d like to have dinner, but wanted to warn me that he was leaving the next day to join the Green Berets for a secret training mission in Lebanon, and that in response I would have said only two words: “Which restaurant?”

I
got in a lot of trouble when I was a kid for not getting enough fresh air. There was a big chair in our living room, overstuffed and worn, and even on the nicest day of the year I could be found there, my legs draped over one arm of the chair, reading. I read a great deal, with no particular sense of originality or discernment. I read the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, C. S. Lewis and Robert Louis Stevenson,
A Little Princess
and
A Wrinkle in Time
. I read pretty awful stuff, like teen magazines, and I read pretty adult stuff, like
Wuthering Heights
. I still remember reading
Ulysses
when I was thirteen and thinking “What a weird book.”

My mother was thinking “What a weird child.” When the sun was shining and the neighborhood kids were playing Monkey in the Middle, my mother was always yelling at me to go outside and get some fresh air. She did not think
it was healthy to stay inside and read so much. One summer, to force me into the great outdoors, I was sent to camp in the mountains. Thinking of it even today is, as Evelyn Waugh’s Bright Young Things say, “too, too sick-making.” All those people and all that activity all the time: my God, I’ll never forget it.

I still read constantly: if my kids ever go into analysis, I’m sure they will say they don’t really remember my face because it was always hidden by a book. Obviously this is in part because I like books. But another reason is that I like to be alone. I like to go deep inside myself and not be accompanied there by anyone else. But I am the oldest of five children, and when I was young I had about as much chance of being alone as I did of being a lion tamer. Reading was for me then a way of lifting myself out of a crowded environment into a place where I could be by myself. No wonder my mother was concerned. Being by yourself was considered, at my age and in my family, an aberrant behavior. Camp was normal. Camp was fun. Camp was crowded. Camp was horrible.

We pay lip service to a notion that privacy is important, but I don’t really think we believe it much. When anyone lives alone we have a tendency to think they are just waiting to meet the right roommate; we have an impulse to pair our friends off or introduce them to others. Single people eating in restaurants are assumed to be there for lack of a companion, not because they like their own company. It is difficult for us to accept that a great many gregarious people are often, also, quite private inside, that they have a chocolate-covered almond kind of character. This happens to be the case with me, although societal conditioning has made me think about these two parts of myself as a little like the geography of the state of Michigan. I am so gregarious that I once went to an Irish wake and was the perfect mourner, even though I realized when I approached
the casket that I was in the wrong viewing room. And I love solitude so much that easily one of my favorite parts of the week is when I have somehow finished my work before the sitter is due to leave and I can hide out in my room for half an hour and read a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery.

Actually when I lived alone I was lonely a fair amount of the time, but it felt somehow restorative. Perhaps I was making up for all those years of living in a crowded house, and all the years to come when, I suspected, I would live in one again. Because of youth or duty or love I have most often lived in crowded houses, in which a book was partly an excuse for staring into the middle distance, zoning out, being inside your own skin. I have cultivated pastimes that make this kind of behavior socially acceptable. I do needlework, watch television, and, yes, read—all excuses for chewing the cud, ruminating over whatever crosses my mental screen. Or, like a narcoleptic, I can simply lapse into my middle distance attitude. My eyes unfocus and my mouth drops open just a bit. I look like a fish who has just been sideswiped by the
QE II
and never knew what hit it. My family calls this my “zone look.” It means
do not disturb
.