They were waving cars forward and circling their arms with tremendous aplomb, like they were part of a Broadway musical. By the time I got to Midtown, I noticed that civilians had stepped into intersections to direct traffic, in the absence of traffic lights. Storekeepers were handing out ice cream to passersby-it was going to melt anyway, we might as well enjoy it. It was a warm summer afternoon and the mood quickly became joyful, buoyed by a sense of benign abandon. But there didn’t seem to be any disruption, aside from the power, so eventually we all left the office and began walking home. The shock of 9/11 was still palpable, and it wasn’t long before we heard military jets overhead. I was on the phone with an agent talking about a story, and the phone went dead. I was working at a literary magazine on Sullivan Street. And I keep thinking back to a day that was, if anything could be, the polar opposite: the blackout of August 14, 2003. We will file these scenes in our memory banks, this new city we are coming to know-where the balconies have sprung to life while the sidewalks sleep, where our apartment walls define our waking hours as well as our hours of rest. We walked home through Prospect Park and have not left since. I got back on the Q and met Max for dinner, because at that point it seemed like restaurants were still okay, as long as you were careful. I walked out into the gray twilight, on a block I don’t think I had ever walked on before, and marveled-in the way you still can in New York after more than 20 years, if you remember to look up-that the buildings were so tall and full of people, everybody navigating the in-between time of early evening. The subway was not crowded, and it was still cold enough to wear gloves, which I kept on to press the elevator button and to fill out the medical forms. I thought about canceling the appointment-that same day we had begun working from home-but I hadn’t had one in more than five years, and it occurred to me that, in the midst of a global pandemic, if something extra bad happened because I had skipped my routine mammogram I would feel like a world-class idiot. On my last day out this March, before my family retreated indoors and before the city itself began to lower its gates, I got on the Q train in Brooklyn, rode to the East Side, and walked to a doctor’s office on East 61st Street to have a routine mammogram. The memories were unavoidable, baked block by block into the pavement. At what point did it become too much? I kept catching movie-montage glimpses of my younger self, hailing cabs late at night or getting caught in a thunderstorm or treating myself to stockings at Barneys. We met in the city, dated in the city, got engaged in the city, got married in the city, had a child in the city. Max and I had lived on the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side, in Greenwich Village and the East Village, and in two neighborhoods in Brooklyn we had seen our local restaurant in the first of those Brooklyn neighborhoods become a favorite of Beyoncé and Jay-Z. I hypothesized that I had walked on every block south of Midtown. I missed Savoy, on the corner of Prince and Crosby. I still missed Grange Hall, which closed in 2004. When you have spent two decades in the city, you remember not only the restaurant that used to be in the spot where a new restaurant just opened, but the one that was there two restaurants ago the nostalgia can pull you under. I sometimes felt, I confessed to him, as if I was living in an archaeological dig of my own past. It was that we had lived here as adults for 20 years, and the sedimentary buildup of experience had begun to weigh on us. It wasn’t that we wanted to go somewhere else. A few years ago, on the way home from summer vacation in Rhode Island, my husband and I began discussing the possibility of leaving New York.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |