At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays

by Anne Fadiman

  I’d lived in Manhattan for twenty-five years, George for twenty-one. We liked Mets games and New York accents. We liked Juilliard students who played Boccherini in subway stations and Sikh taxi drivers who wore turbans. We liked to walk from our loft in SoHo to Goody’s, our favorite restaurant in Chinatown, and slurp Shanghai soup dumplings from large porcelain spoons. We liked our building, a turn-of-the-century box factory whose upper floors, when I moved there in 1978, were still served by a freight elevator that bore a hand-lettered sign: WE KNOW YOU ARE OLD AND FORGETFUL, BUT PLEASE RETURN THIS ELEVATOR TO THE GLUING DEPARTMENT.

  In spite of all that, as we reached middle age we found ourselves inclining tropistically toward open spaces. It was impossible to describe our nature-cravings without sounding like Wordsworth, only more blubbery, so George and I avoided the subject around our friends, most of whom would have become seriously ill had they moved more than five blocks from the nearest bagel shop. We had both spent our early childhoods in New England, imprinted at tender ages by the smell of mown grass, the pea-green color of the air before a summer cloudburst, the taste of butter-and-sugar corn—the methods of whose eating my family had divided into two categories, Rotary (round and round) and Typewriter (left to right). (George and I added a third, Dot Matrix, for those who favor a back-and-forth approach.) We wanted those things again. Besides, our younger child was fond of projectiles—balls, slingshots, airplanes, rockets, arrows, torpedoes—and we were tired of shouting “Not at the wedding pictures!” Henry needed a yard.

  We couldn’t afford a weekend country house, and might not have wanted one anyway: too much like having a wife and a mistress. Serial monogamy seemed preferable. About ten years ago, we started talking about a second, rural phase. Since we were both writers, we could live anywhere we could plug in our modems. Cautiously, easing into the water by slow degrees, we visited college towns (bookstores, foreign films, possible teaching jobs) in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine. Some had houses priced beyond our means; some were too far from George’s parents, who live in Boston. We settled on the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, named for the Puritan frontiersmen of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, large numbers of whom, like my great-great-grandfather, were massacred by Indians who thought they should have stayed home.

  When Sir Walter Elliot, the self-absorbed baronet in Persuasion, becomes “distressed for money,” he decides to move out of his ancestral manor in Somersetshire. It is suggested that he might be able to stay put if he practiced certain economies, but he cannot imagine such a fall. “What! Every comfort of life knocked off! Journeys, London, servants, horses, table,—contractions and restrictions every where. To live no longer with the decencies of a private gentleman! No, he would sooner quit Kellynch-hall at once, than remain in it on such disgraceful terms.”

  Sir Walter is defined by his home. The Baronetage, the only book he ever reads, opens of its own accord to the page headed “ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH-HALL.” When he becomes ELLIOT OF A-RENTED-HOUSE-IN-BATH, will he still be himself? (Yes, says Jane Austen. He’s just as obnoxious as ever.) It makes Sir Walter uneasy to think of a tenant living in his bedchamber, taking walks through his grounds. “I am not fond,” he observes, “of the idea of my shrubberies being always approachable.”

  We felt that way, too. Afraid to burn our bridges, we decided to rent out our loft, furnished, so we could creep back if we started missing soup dumplings too severely. We owned no shrubberies, but I wasn’t sure that I wished strangers to approach the corner of the living room where we had exchanged our wedding vows, the bathtub that had soothed my first labor pains, the bed in which we had exchanged a thousand embraces and a thousand confidences. Would they appreciate “Nudes for Nudes,” a series of four pencil sketches by George’s mother that we had mounted on the shower wall? (I have always believed that it is unsporting for fully clothed people to look at pictures of naked ones. The placement of this work was designed to even things up.) Would they be properly impressed by the dining-room lamp, a large black contraption that had formerly graced the Erie Lackawanna railway station in Hoboken, New Jersey, and was still equipped with an anti-moth-immolation grille?

  Sir Walter forbids anyone to mention that he is letting his house: “It was only on the supposition of his being spontaneously solicited by some most unexceptionable applicant, on his own terms, and as a great favor, that he would let it at all.” We had no such qualms. We engaged a real estate agent who dressed in black and had an Italian first name and a last name that was half French and half Spanish. (It was hyphenated. Paolo was far too upscale to have only one name.) He walked around the loft. I’m not sure he appreciated “Nudes for Nudes.” I saw him eyeing the aquamarine felt-tip-pen stain on the chair near the front door, the grungy sofa, the ancient gas stove. “It will be just right,” he said in his expensive Italian-French-Spanish accent, “for a very special person.”

  Paolo wrote a display ad for the New York Times real estate section headlined “EXPRESS YOUR INTERIOR WORLD.” At first I wasn’t sure what this meant, but I hadn’t spent all those undergraduate hours on explication de texte for nothing. Eventually I deconstructed it. It meant: “You—the very special person whose next address will be 150 Thompson Street—may look like an investment banker, but inside your three-piece suit there lives a starving poet who is crying to get out.” The ad continued: “This bohemian loft [read: there are no Sub-Zero appliances] oozes charm & character [read: there are children’s fingerprints on the walls] only found in original old SoHo [read: there’s only one bathroom].” In its favor, the loft did have “wd flrs, orig beamed ceils, and grt clsts.”

  Although there are pages and pages in Persuasion about whether Sir Walter will find the right tenants, there is not a word about cleaning up Kellynch-hall before its prospective occupants come to inspect it. Nineteenth-century novels never mention such matters. The servants take care of them. Even if the tenants were to drop in unannounced, the silver would already be polished, the floors waxed, the carpets beaten, and the ancestral portraits straightened. Paolo did not find our loft in a similar state of readiness.

  “The animals will have to go,” he observed. The animals! How thrilling! He made it sound as if we kept a pack of ocelots. In fact, our menagerie consisted of Silkie, Susannah’s hamster, and Bunky, Henry’s frog, both of whom lived in plastic boxes on the dining-room table, underneath the lamp from the Erie Lackawanna railway station.

  “The kitchen is cluttered,” he added. Before Paolo’s arrival, I had spent three hours de-cluttering it. There wasn’t a single object on the counters. No one could toast, blend, or make coffee in this kitchen; it was apparently owned by people who had been born without digestive tracts. This met with Paolo’s approval. The problem was the family photographs posted with magnets on the refrigerator. “No personal effects,” he explained, using a phrase I had heard only on television detective shows, describing corpses that had been robbed before they were murdered.

  We banished the animals to Henry’s bedroom, expunged our personal effects, spread a patchwork quilt on the sofa, replaced the Revere Ware teakettle with an imported red enamel coffeepot you couldn’t pick up without a potholder, replaced the potholder, repainted the kitchen cabinets, scrubbed the windows, mopped the floors, rolled out a Persian rug the children weren’t allowed to walk on, moved nine bags of toys to our neighbor’s loft, and propped the pillows vertically on our bed, which meant that all the comfortable ones—the soft, saggy blobs you could bury your cheek in—were extradited to the closet. It could have been worse. If we’d been selling the loft instead of just renting it, we might have been tempted to hire a fluffer. (Fluffer is a term borrowed from pornographic filmmaking; he or she gets the male star ready for the camera.) In the housing market, the fluffer—also known as a stager—induces a temporary state of real-estate tumescence by removing much of what the client owns and replacing it, from a private warehouse of props, with new furniture, carpets, plants, paintings, tow
els, sheets, shower curtains, throw pillows, lamp shades, ice buckets (to hold champagne next to the Jacuzzi), breakfast trays (to hold tea and the Sunday Times), and Scrabble sets (to spell out BEAUTIFUL HOME). One fluffer ordered his client to remove a Georgia O’Keeffe painting from the wall and hide it under the bed. The colors were wrong.

  Even though our loft was prepared by amateurs— self-fluffed, as it were—it had never looked better. We rented it to a kindly macroeconomist. The Elliots rent Kellynch-hall to a kindly admiral who keeps the house shipshape, though he moves the umbrellas from the butler’s room to the hallway and strips Sir Walter’s dressing room of most of its looking glasses. “Oh Lord!” Admiral Croft explains, “there was no getting away from oneself.”

  “No getting away from oneself”: that is both the fear and the hope of people who move. If you’re pulling up stakes in order to remake your life and your character, what if you go to all that trouble and end up no more changed than Sir Walter? On the other hand, what if your identity is stuck with such firm adhesive to your old home that you leave little bits behind, and your new self is tattered and diminished?

  According to the sociologist James M. Jasper, it is no wonder that Americans name their cars Quests and Explorers and Ventures and Caravans. We move more than anyone else. In a typical year, one in five Americans relocates, whereas in Japan it’s one in ten, in Britain one in twelve, and in Germany one in twenty-five. Each of those one in five Americans flouts the law laid down by almost every book whose plot revolves around relocation: Stay where you are! Can you think of a happy book about moving? I can’t. It’s fine to hie yourself to Troy or Oz or Narnia or Wonderland, as long as you end up back where you started—and, indeed, a frequent theme in stories about travel, whether real or imaginary, is the central character’s strenuous efforts to get home. (Traveling is always thought to be more enjoyable than moving: we envy foreign correspondents but pity army brats.) A typical children’s-book move is the one made by the orphaned heroines of The Secret Garden and A Little Princess from warm, fecund India to cold, dreary England. Even the Little House series, in which the Ingalls family stays intact and reasonably content as it moves from woods to prairie to creek to lake, becomes incrementally less idyllic with each volume. Most discouraging of all is the sort of educational volume, illustrated with photographs of cheerful moving men, that extols the joys of leaving your friends and starting a new school. You can tell the author is lying because the next title in the series is usually something like Tonsillectomies Are Fun!

  And as we pass out of childhood, what do we read? Martin Chuzzlewit, in which young Martin moves to America, falls ill with fever, and loses all his money in a land swindle; Main Street, in which Carol Kennicott moves to Gopher Prairie and is suffocated by small-town provincialism; The Grapes of Wrath, in which the Joads move to California and—well, you know the rest. From birth to adulthood, our lives are a journey away from Eden. And that, because it matches our own trajectory, is the only direction the literary moving van can go.

  When I was eight, our family moved from Connecticut to California. The weather was balmy, the beaches broad, the incidence of runny noses low. But objective merit means little to a child. All I knew was that the light was too bright, the shadows too hard, the landscape too brown.

  I hoped that the move to Massachusetts would be not a deracination but a reracination. During our last three months in New York, I was encouraged in this view by the e-mails I received from the owner of the place we were going to rent, a foursquare yellow clapboard farmhouse built in 1804, on the east bank of the Connecticut River, by Elijah and Resign Graves. (Those Puritans! It was coercive enough to name your daughter Felicity or Chastity, but Resign!) Our landlord, whose family was planning to spend a sabbatical year in London, was a science writer who had just completed the labels for an insect exhibition that featured a rare birdwing butterfly collected by a man who was eaten by cannibals. As the spring and summer progressed she sent us frequent nature bulletins: The trillium was blooming. Two orioles had been spotted on the quince bushes. The red fox had trotted through the pasture. The hummingbirds had returned. The mother wrens were peering out of their nest box. Her boys had found two toads.

  How familiar it all sounded! Frances Hodgson Burnett would never have sent Sara Crewe back to India, but our lives were not a novel. Might it be possible to journey backward instead of forward?

  We’d find out soon enough. But first we had to deal with our To Do list: Fill out change-of-address forms. Reglue kitchen cabinet knobs. Fix toilet. Unclog bathtub drain. Get sofa and chairs cleaned. Go to dentist. Get renter’s insurance. Disconnect phone and utilities. Send transcripts to children’s new school. Switch bank accounts. Duplicate keys. Write farewell note to neighbors. Cancel New York Times. We had to compile a list of instructions for our tenants: Put out garbage on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, recycling on Wednesday only. Open hall closet by pushing, not pulling. Remember to replace water in plastic lint catcher. (Our future landlord wrote us a similar list: Don’t let children touch bat poop in attic. Protect potato chips from mice by suspending bags from ceiling. Feed suet to woodpeckers and thistle seed to finches.)

  Our grt clsts held layers we hadn’t seen for years. New Yorkers, lacking attics and basements and garages, treat their closets like trash compactors (or, to put it more charitably, like the squeezing machines that turn duck breasts into canard pressé). The by-products of our shared lives had been squished into a dense sediment that, when pried out and spread on the floor, expanded by a factor of ten. How could we have accumulated so many outgrown hiking boots, so many mateless mittens, so many letters from people who had once loomed large and now, like distant trees, had shrunk to near-invisibility?

  I had imagined that our final weeks would be sweet, a last hurrah of city-love, but we were too busy for sentiment. In our early days together, George and I had walked down Prince Street every night, holding hands. Now we walked the same route every afternoon, dragging our cast-off possessions to Goodwill.

  We packed 347 boxes. (I know the number because it is written on the moving company’s invoice. The total weight was six tons.) We vowed we would never buy another book. We broke our nails peeling packing tape from slippery brown rolls. We kept losing our scissors, our Magic Markers, our color-coded dots (green for the new house, red for storage). Later, we discovered that we had boxed them up.

  When we left for Massachusetts, I had been awake for three days and three nights. Our rented car was so full that the rearview mirror was useless. Susannah held Silkie’s terrarium between her knees. I held Bunky’s aquarium between my feet. As we drove north on Interstate 91, I thought: This is the worst mistake I have ever made in my life. George and I will never get another writing assignment. Susannah will hang out at the mall. Henry will chew gum. The sushi will be frozen.

  When I was younger, I spent several years studying the Hmong, a mountain people whose entire culture had evolved around their frequent migrations. Their wood and bamboo houses could be taken apart, portaged in modular chunks, and put back together. Their great arts were textiles, jewelry, music, and storytelling. Everything was physically and psychologically portable, so it was possible to move without cutting off one’s roots.

  In the car, I was certain we could never do that: our reassembled lives would look nothing like our old ones. But when we drove down our new driveway, my despair lifted with a whoosh that cannot be explained even by the lability of fatigue. The yellow house was beautiful. A few minutes later, the moving van pulled in, and I asked the driver to locate a box that I had labeled on all six sides: BALLS BALLS BALLS BALLS BALLS BALLS. At a school auction, we had been the high bidders on a set of balls of every conceivable genre—football, basketball, volleyball, softball, tennis, soccer, bocce. Henry spilled them out onto the back lawn and ran in circles, tossing and kicking and rolling.

  That night, as we lay in bed, I murmured, “George! We’re really in the country! Listen to the peepers on the rive
rbank!”

  “Those aren’t peepers on the riverbank,” George said gently. “That’s Bunky, on Henry’s bureau. We’re hearing him over the baby monitor.”

  As the weeks passed, we missed New York, sometimes acutely, but that did not make us love the Pioneer Valley any less. I reminded myself that the most happily remarried widows are the ones who had the best first marriages.

  George and Susannah swam every day in the Connecticut River and reported what they had seen on the bottom (a golf bag, a glove, a potato). Henry and I bicycled to the corner store, which, unlike its SoHo analogue, had signs in the window offering night crawlers and chewing tobacco—but it also had seven brands of ice cream and a luxuriant hawthorn tree out front. On our fourth visit, Henry settled himself under the hawthorn and said, with a five-year-old’s easily acquired sense of permanency, “This is where we always sit.”

  Last month, we signed the papers on an 1807 brick farmhouse in a neighboring town. When we learned that it needed a new roof, we refused to look at any materials that were not guaranteed to last at least twenty-five years.

  It is true that I had a great-great-grandfather who was killed by Indians, but these days I find myself thinking more often of another great-great-grandfather, also a Utah pioneer. John Sharp moved from Clackmannanshire, Scotland, where he had worked in a coal mine, to New Orleans, then to St. Louis, and finally, in 1850, to Salt Lake City. His journey to Utah was, I will grudgingly admit, even more arduous than our journey up Interstate 91. The first snows overtook his wagon train, and he and his party spent the winter in caves they dug in the side of Red Butte Canyon, roofing them with wagon boxes and walling them with stones.

  After Sharp arrived in Salt Lake City, the skills he had acquired in the mines of Clackmannanshire won him the contract for quarrying and hauling, by ox-drawn wagon, the huge blocks of granite that were to form the foundation of the Mormon Temple. He became superintendent of the quarry, then a Mormon bishop, and finally a director of the Union Pacific Railroad. In 1869, at Promontory Point, he helped drive the golden spike that completed the transcontinental railroad, enabling people to move across the country by train instead of covered wagon.