Nothing Stays the Same

I’m sitting in my childhood bedroom where there are still horses painted on the bottom of the door that leads to the bathroom. The one with the full-length mirror I stood in front of when I was nine, and had a case of chicken pox so bad I ended up with pneumonia, high fevers for a week, and hallucinatory dreams where I thought I had died and was walking around Heaven looking for my grandma. I called her Nanny. In the dreams I couldn’t find her and I’d wake up crying.

I gave this room to my brother a few months after he was born, and took the smaller room at the front of the house - the one by the kitchen, with the guest bathroom outside. I was twelve then, and I did it generously. The smaller room was meant to be his - my mom had set it up as a nursery when she was pregnant - but the downstairs buzzer would ring outside his door and wake him up, and so would guests when they came to the house.

Everyone entered through the back door, into our kitchen, unless they were fancy guests who took the elevator. Even guests entering through the front door would make noise outside his room, as they went down the hallway that opens to the dining room. I spent half the week at my dad’s, so my big room was empty half the time - though that changed pretty quickly after my brother was born. I wanted to be with him, this tiny baby - I wanted to take care of him and keep him safe. I think that’s when it began to occur to me that taking care of a baby made sense, but taking care of my dad, a grown man, did not.

I don’t remember whether I offered to give up my room - easily twice as big - or if my mother asked, I just recall that I did it without hesitation. As it turned out, it was a fortuitous move for my teenage years - just around the corner - because I began to sneak out of the house after everyone was asleep. Not every night, just weekend nights, and often after my parents had already been out themselves - well past midnight. There’s no way I could have done that if I’d been in my original room. That would have meant creeping past my mother’s room, and only someone ready to face their own mortality would have done that.

There’s a glass door between the kitchen, guest bathroom, and smaller bedroom I took over, and the rest of the apartment. It’s a pre-war building, so when I say “glass door” what I mean is a door like a window pane, with a wooden frame and eight panes of glass. This door stayed open during the day as we’d be going back and forth to the kitchen, but my mom would close it at night.

The first time I snuck out of the house I was fourteen and enraged. I’d had it with everything and everyone. I had nowhere to put all my feelings. I was going to school and getting those A’s, I was dancing en pointe till my toes bled, I was barely eating, I was taking care of my brother, I was being a good girl, but I was furious. I wouldn’t have been able to say that out loud - instead I was grinding my teeth while I slept, getting migraines, and feeling anxious all the time. There wasn’t much credit given for the things I was doing right, but my god did I hear about it if I stepped a single toe out of line.

My mother would rage at me for nothing and everything, my dad would guilt me for not wanting to listen to his endless conversation about why he needed to bang every woman in his periphery, and why he was the victim of his own assholery. I’d had enough, but there was no space for rebellion in my mother’s house, or honest conversation at my dad’s. My mom was happy to support my newfound frustration with my father, because that meant more in-house babysitting, but I was not allowed to have any anger about her drinking or the way she would treat me after a bottle of chardonnay. Let alone two.

I wish I had footage of one of the nights I snuck out, because there was a whole process, and I think it was pretty hardcore for a kid. The first time I did it, I realized when the back door opened, a whoosh of air from the vestibule would rush into the apartment and rattle the glass door in its frame. I wasn’t sure if the rattling or my pounding heart was going to wake my mother, but I closed the door quickly, folded up a paper towel, and crammed it in the space between the glass door and the frame. Then I waited ten minutes to see if she was going to come out.

Next issue was closing and locking the backdoor without making noise. There’s a metal bar you can push inside the lock so you can close a big prewar apartment door soundlessly, but it’s very hard to lock a city door without making any noise at all. It can be done, but it isn’t easy. It takes some skill. You have to pull the door toward you, and twist the key slowly. You also have to hold your breath. I don’t know why it matters, but it does.

I’d wait ten minutes there, too, sitting on the steps outside the door, then I’d go. This was before cell phones, so I’d leave a note on my pillow telling my mother I was out with B, I knew my life was over, and I’d be home by 5 so she could kill me. Even in my rebellion, I was considerate.

B heard about this club downtown, Nell’s, where they didn’t seem to care how old you were. She knew a guy who made fake IDs, everyone had them, so we got ours, too. I had braces, there’s no way I looked like the Columbia University student I pretended to be and eventually was, but they didn’t care. They’d open that velvet rope and let us through. We never waited on line. It might have helped that B was 6’3”, but she had a baby face, too, she definitely did not look twenty-one. Gen X has a rep for a reason.

We’d go in and get gin-and-tonics. The smell of gin turns my stomach to this day. I didn’t like to let anyone buy them for us because then they’d expect to dance with us, and I didn’t want anyone to expect anything from me - I had plenty of that all day. I had no tolerance to alcohol, I still have no tolerance, so I’d take three sips and be pretty buzzed, and we’d hit that dance floor and dance our asses off. That’s really all I wanted to do. I had nothing to say to the grown men who tried to talk to me. I was fourteen. I just needed somewhere to do something I wasn’t supposed to do, and somewhere to sweat out the rage.

When I come back to visit New York City these days, I stay in my original room. When I go out, I don’t have to sneak. I miss my mother so much I can’t write the sentence without a vise grip around my heart, and pressure in my head. The pressure has been there off and on all week, partly from the rain, but partly from sadness and longing and some heartache. It’s been a week full of ups and downs. It’s been like this since my mother died, I guess it’s to be expected. This is my mom’s house. It will always be my mom’s house, but it hurts to be here without her, and it isn’t the same.

My mother ran the show, wherever she was. Now there is no show, there’s just an apartment where she used to be. I love being back in the city, it’s like putting on my favorite comfortable sweater. I don’t need any time to reacclimate, to readjust, to reorient. The rhythm of this city must be in my blood or something.

I went to see my friend Dani Wednesday* which was the highlight of my week. She’s one of my best friends, and when you live far away from someone you love, the time you do have is always special, so I knew Wednesday would be like it always is with her. There are a handful of people in my life I know I’m safe with, and she is one of them. It’s such a good feeling to be understood and known.

I went to see my Aunt Louise yesterday. If you’ve been here for a minute, you know my Aunt Louise. She was like a surrogate mom to me, I spent so much time with her when I was little. I wouldn’t be the person I am without her, and it’s hard to live so far away. If I lived closer, I’d see her every week. It was emotional, not in the way I’d expected. She’s sad about something, something I can’t fix, and it tore my heart apart.

There are some things that are screwed up beyond repair, and some that could be fixed so easily with a conversation, but there’s nothing you can do if someone decides they won’t talk to you. There are so many painful, terrible things happening in the world right now, I guess I am just that little bit extra devastated at the things that don’t have to be fucked, but are. Those nasty thorns that dig into us when we’re alone, those places where we could use some grace, but struggle to give it to ourselves, and are certainly not going to get it from the only people who could grant it. The thought of my aunt in pain is so horrible to me. She’s such a good person.

Most of us carry that kind of anguish, those grievances or unresolved situations, those moments where we weren’t given closure or communication. They hurt a little bit more when things are hard. I don’t know why we go searching for them when we’re in a dark place - picking up those old jagged rocks and reminding ourselves of how we fucked up, or what we shouldn’t have said - it’s like we’re hunting for confirmation that we deserve to suffer, that we deserve this banishment. My aunt does not deserve it, though.

Last night I went to the closing party of my elementary school. It’s been open 236 years, and if you don’t feel like doing the math, that means it’s been in business since 1789. I went there from 1st through 6th grades, there were about twenty of us in class - a few people left and a few came, but it was pretty much the twenty of us growing up together. I’d stayed in touch with a few of my friends, and then a bunch of us found each other on Facebook during the pandemic and started zooming every so often. We met at our elementary school for a reunion of our own making a couple of years ago, and I’m glad we did, because last night’s event was odd and unstructured.

The place looked small like everything always does when you go back as an adult. Our assembly hall which always felt cavernous and formal is just a room, and it was full of people who’d been rained on, a table full of sandwiches and plates of cheese, another with wine and water. There were t-shirts and sweatshirts, pens, clocks, colored pencils, and kaftans with the school emblem for the taking. There was a slideshow of old class pictures, and some of Christmas pageants from decades ago. I stood with three of my friends who will always look six years old to me, and we watched the slideshow until we saw our class photo. You would have thought we saw The Beatles come on screen. The woman running the slideshow stopped it for us so we could take a picture pointing to ourselves.

Jessie, Alex, me, Christian

We went out for Mexican food after, because that’s what you do. I walked down Broadway with my friend Jessie after. Our boys are the same age. We laughed about hot flashes because what the fuck. I don’t sweat with mine, I thought that’s what a hot flash was, but it isn’t, not for me, anyway. It’s like your engine overheats suddenly. I told her it helps me to say “I’m hot!” really loudly as I whip my clothes off. I think she’s going to try it. We hugged hard when we got to the subway station. I watched her go down the steps. The whole world feels fragile these days and I don’t take anything for granted.

I walked back to my mom’s house, haunted by the image of my aunt crying like a little kid. I can’t shake it, don’t think I will anytime soon. There’s no fairness in life, if there were, she would not be suffering. There’s no quid pro quo. I have to hope the love I feel for her got through, and the reassurance I tried to give her was enough. It doesn’t feel like enough.

I walked up the block I used to run down on those nights I’d sneak out of the house. I had nowhere to put my rage those days, no way to process any of my feelings. It’s not like that now. I’ve lost so many people the last few years, and my dog, too. I’m going to lose more people and the thought of that tears my heart out. I’d at least like to feel that the people I love can be at peace in the last years of their life, but I guess we don’t even get to control that. I have no armor anymore, I don’t know if it got dissolved in all the grief, or if it’s part of getting older, but I feel everything so deeply now.

I never did get caught sneaking out, by the way. You probably figured that out since I’m here, alive and writing. I told my mom about it when I was in my thirties. She was very impressed. Hug everyone you love a little longer and harder. Call someone you keep meaning to call. Don’t wait to do the things that feel important. Especially now, when the world is aching for some tenderness, be tender.

Nothing stays the same. Except for the horses on the bottom of the bathroom door I guess.

---

*While I was with Dani, we filmed a talk about writing, life, friendship, following your instincts, and so much more. You can watch and listen here. We’re only sideways and upside down for the first 10 minutes.