by Meghan Daum
Why I thought that landing in a prewar Manhattan apartment was best accomplished by going to Vassar, a college seventy-five miles north of New York City in the Hudson riverbank city of Poughkeepsie, I don’t exactly know. In addition to being swayed by the fact that Meryl Streep had gone there, I recall that I did apply some perverse logic to the decision, most of it based on reading the wedding announcements in The New York Times and seeing where various people went to college and imagining, based on their jobs and even their photographs, what kinds of apartments they might live in. I also recall that the longing I felt for such an apartment seemed at the time a direct reaction to life in the suburbs, which I experienced as fundamentally counterfeit and misrepresentative of my true self. I remember feeling (albeit in a vague, unarticulated way) that if I could just have a phone number with a 212 area code—a number, unlike my parents’ business line, that connected to an actual phone—I would be able to slough off the residue of my family’s disappointments and disenchantments and be my own person in the world. Unlike them, I would be unencumbered and unembarrassed. I would know how to take the subway and, therefore, how to be human.
But these feelings, as turgid as they sound now (which belies how “real” they seemed at the time), weren’t the whole story. What I didn’t know back then—and, indeed, what I didn’t know until after I’d left New York many years later—was that it wasn’t the prewar apartment I craved but, rather, an ineffable state of being I can only describe as domestic integrity. This integrity has something to do with being able to not feel like an impostor in your home and, therefore, in your life. For a host of reasons I perceived this as something almost totally absent from our life in Ridgewood. That’s not to say (though it’s taken me a long time to get to this admission) that it’s not available in Ridgewood or any other suburban town, nor am I suggesting that it’s a built-in feature of Manhattan apartments. But whereas I long believed that the driving force of my early adulthood was my visceral, sometimes delirious desire to live in New York City, I now realize that my real needs were at once simpler and infinitely more complicated than that. I think I could have walked into any number of domiciles when I was seventeen—a clapboard house in Iowa, a Victorian apartment in Baltimore, a cabin in the woods somewhere—and been knocked over by the same fumes.
But, of course, I didn’t and I wasn’t. I was focused on New York. And while I was at Vassar preparing for my life in New York (like my parents before me, preparation was key, which is why I hadn’t cut to the chase and gone to New York University or, if I’d had the grades, Columbia), I managed not only to major in English but also to minor in moving.
After my freshman year, I switched residence halls every single semester. With each of these moves, I thought the “integrity” I’d discovered in the music copyist’s apartment could be found in the next dorm room, the next cluster of flannel-shirted students watching TV in the parlor, the next impromptu pizza party in the hallway. At the very least, I thought that moving was saving me from some kind of unidentifiable but palpable malaise. In every case, I turned out to be wrong; the next place was always as dissatisfying as the last.
At least I made it through the first year without moving. Occupying one of the smallest doubles in the dorm, a room whose tininess was supposedly mitigated by its having been—of all people—Meryl Streep’s (at least according to the residence advisors; I later suspected that this claim was made about any room that was otherwise undesirable), I managed to soldier on. I had a roommate, a genuine WASP with her own beat-up Subaru and a boarding school education who was extraordinarily bright and possessed of a personality that could be by turns captivating and totally maddening. We were fast friends in the beginning until, in a way that seemed both painfully gradual and breathtakingly abrupt, we weren’t. Though I’m pretty sure she was as much at sea with herself as I was with myself, our discontent manifested itself on opposite ends of the crazy-girl spectrum. While she was ranting to her dinner companions about gynecological injustices to third-world women, I was holding court with the blank wall over my desk, where I smoked cigarettes and listened to gloomy Suzanne Vega songs. Undeterred by the cliché of it all, I read poetry, scribbled anguished musings in my notebooks, and spent untold hours wondering if the people around me who appeared to be having so much fun were actually having fun or merely doing imitations of the kinds of people who have fun. When I wasn’t pondering such questions, I was occasionally sleeping with a boy who had no intention of being my boyfriend. It was a charmed existence.
Returning to Vassar for my sophomore year (the summer had been a haze of low-paying odd jobs in Ridgewood, including stage-managing one of my mother’s summer-stock productions at the high school), I was assigned a large garretlike single on the fifth floor—the top floor, the attic essentially—of the dormitory I’d occupied the previous year. Initially determined to make the best of the situation, I kept the windows permanently ajar to encourage a breeze and decorated the walls with black-and-white art-movie posters—notably an enormous banner for the 1984 cult-hipster film Stranger Than Paradise. I also had a luxurious new sleeping implement. Before returning to school, I’d decided that the iron-framed twin beds provided by the college “hurt my back” and thus convinced my parents to buy me a full-sized, canvas-covered futon mattress (all the cool Vassar students had these, though not due to back pain). Once deposited on the floor of my room, as if to signal some combination of earthiness and sexual readiness, I completed the boudoir tableau with a cheap Guatemalan blanket and a candle that had partially melted into an empty beer bottle.
Within days, I was miserable. Though friends initially came over to say hello and check out the room—oh, the grand start-of-semester college tradition of surveying friends’ rooms; it is here that the first seeds of house envy begin to sprout—it wasn’t a place anyone would simply swing by on his or her way to the bathroom or someone else’s room, so I had no spontaneous visitors. There were a smattering of other rooms on the floor, but other than a suite of freshman women, the residents of which were even more morose than I (they preferred the term “freshpeople”), there rarely appeared to be anyone home. Meanwhile, the boy with whom I’d occasionally been sleeping decided he preferred to more-than-occasionally sleep with someone who would also be known as his girlfriend. I attributed his interest in her to the fact that her dorm room could be accessed via just one flight of stairs.
Of course, I knew there were other factors at work. I knew that, for reasons seemingly beyond my control, I had slipped into a persona that was fundamentally lame. At least it felt that way. But this was par for the course. If a student learns nothing else at a liberal arts college, especially one as rife with gifted, glamorous students as Vassar, he is at least guaranteed a lesson in insecurity. At least a temporary form of it. At least until he turns himself upside down and shakes the pieces of his old self out of him like crumbs in a Pringles can. At least until he graduates and realizes no one else understands Derrida either, so who cares. No exception to this rule, I had by my second year at Vassar managed to assemble a list of grievances against myself that rivaled those of a major divorce. Items ranged from anxieties about holding my own alongside my more cultured, better-read classmates (haven’t read Thomas Mann, haven’t been to Europe, didn’t know there was a Francis Bacon the painter as well as Francis Bacon the English guy from a long time ago) to standard-issue self-loathing about my hair, body, and wardrobe (do not have luxurious Botticelli-like curls like every other girl here, do not have thighs the circumference of table legs, cannot figure out how to shop for and wear vintage clothes without looking like a member of the chorus of Oliver!). And while I knew on a logical level that none of these hardships were directly linked to my being housed on the fifth floor of a dormitory, I somehow remained convinced that the first step toward a cure involved not a library copy of Death in Venice or a junior-year-abroad application but several cardboard boxes and some large plastic bags.
In other words, returning from th
e holiday break that January, I dropped my bags in the garret, which was hot and airless and strangely muggy even in the dead of winter, and decided that the only way to not wish I could fall asleep and wake up three years later as a full-fledged adult—or at least a college graduate—lay in residing fewer than five flights away from terra firma. I requested a transfer with the housing office. A few days later, I was offered a tiny room on the second floor of a large dorm known for its enthusiastic watchers of the parlor television set. The following Saturday afternoon, I moved my clothes, books, desktop computer (unbearably heavy in those days), and other assorted items down the stairs, across the quad, and into my new quarters. I remember being so determined to do the job smoothly and efficiently that I didn’t even detach the stereo speakers from the very large tuner/amplifier (a 1960s relic given to me by my father) to which they were connected. This required putting the whole audio system in a giant box, wires tangling themselves around the various components and curling out the sides like vines, and half carrying/half dragging it to its destination. I’m pretty sure there was snow on the ground.
I remember that I had to move the futon mattress, so I must have enlisted other people to help (despite the glum existence I’ve described, I did have friends who would have done me such turns), but to this day I have no recollection of who else was involved in this move. Likely, I was already embarrassed by what I was doing. As deranged with unwarranted melancholy as I sometimes was, I wasn’t so far gone as not to realize that there were better ways to spend your weekend than hanging your clothes in a new closet and waiting for your new life to start. Deep down (or even not so deep down), I knew that switching dorms was a strenuous but ultimately lazy way of trying to unpeel myself from the morose and rather ridiculous person I’d become since arriving at Vassar the year before.
But like those dreams where you try to scream but can’t make a sound, I felt almost physically incapable in college of simply studying or reading or even looking at a piece of art or running around a track. Instead, I spent nearly every waking moment planning my next move: What would I do over the summer? What courses would I take next year? (Never mind that I hadn’t read the books for my classes this year.) Where would I live (and what would I wear and what kind of haircut would I have) when I was finally graduated from this place and feeling human again? And because each of those scenarios seemed dependent upon some kind of relocation (insanely, even the question of what courses I’d take was followed quickly by questions as to where would be the best place to live when completing the course work), I’d often find myself lying on my futon and surveying my possessions with an eye toward moving them. How heavy is that bookcase? I’d wonder while lying in bed at 4:00 p.m. How many drawers’ worth of clothes could I stuff into one garbage bag? Could I carry three bags at once? Four? Could I carry my printer in one arm and an entire stack of bedding in the other? Could I do this at night so no one would notice?
These weren’t just little mind games. Over my remaining two years at Vassar, I would move seven more times. Please know how much this admission makes me cringe. Counting the moves up just now, I died a little death, not only at the thought of how many books I could have read or chemistry labs I could have taken (though considering I barely got through high-school chemistry, who are we kidding?), but also at the sheer amount of money and time I wasted doing everything in my power to avoid being a regular college kid who did regular college things.
The summer after my sophomore year, instead of working as a camp counselor or getting a Eurorail pass, I insisted on living in Manhattan, where I’d been hired as an intern (at $200 a week, which thrilled me) at an office at Lincoln Center. Having finally acquiesced to my pleas to not spend another summer in Ridgewood, my parents allowed me to sublet the Upper West Side studio of a woman my father knew through work colleagues. The apartment had exposed brick walls and a sleeping loft and, as it happened, was a fifth-floor walk-up in a brownstone (curiously, this fifth-floor situation had none of the unpleasant side effects of the fifth-floor dorm room). The woman who occupied it most of the time was a former actress who was now pursuing a career writing children’s musicals about the rodeo circuit. She charged me $800 a month, and I worked out an arrangement with my parents wherein I paid half and they paid half. Astonishingly, I managed to be frugal enough to hold up my end on my $200-a-week income.
It was a hot, hungry, lonely, glorious summer. I was twenty years old, and my life felt like a vast ocean before me. I loved having a real job and living in the city. Though there was no air-conditioning and I had cheap, unflattering work clothes and was so strapped for cash that when I spilled my dinner on the floor one night, I went to bed famished because there was nothing else in the cupboards and I literally couldn’t afford to go out and buy a sandwich, I found myself in a state of unparalleled happiness. I loved the buzz of the office, loved the table and chairs on the tar rooftop of the brownstone, and loved the smell of ammonia on the sidewalks outside the Korean grocery markets in the morning.
I loved the people at work so much I wanted to round them up and yoke them to my shoulders as I plowed my way into adulthood. Though I would later realize that most of them were fairly ordinary New Yorkers trying to live decently on the middling salaries of the nonprofit world, I saw them at the time as wildly sophisticated. From my desk in the office, where I typed address labels and stuffed envelopes with a glee I’d never known before, I observed their behavior and listened to them talk on the phone. As far as I was concerned, I was researching the role of my future self. I had crushes on all of them: the men and the women, the old and the young, the glamorous, high-rolling executives and the Brylcreemed accountant. At night, as I drifted off in the airless berth of the sleeping loft, the echoes of their voices in my head were as soothing as the sirens outside.
When my sublet ended in mid-August, I moved back to Ridgewood for a few weeks and completed my internship by commuting to the Port Authority on the Short Line bus. When that was over, I packed up and returned to Vassar. The under-whelm was palpable. The school, which had long ago started to feel like some kind of amusement park for overgrown adolescents, now seemed to have shrunk into an architectural model of itself. It was hard to say what felt more oppressive, the self-congratulatory pride the place took in its ability to offer both limitless freedom and near-foolproof safety or the fact it attracted so much wealth that one student had an original Warhol on the wall of his dorm room.
Despite my new level of exasperation with Vassar, I had a good semester, the best of my whole college experience by far. I lived with three friends in a unit of modern-looking campus apartments designated for upperclassmen. Normally, this housing, which had an open, multilevel design I’ve always associated with late-1970s-era condos in which groovy singles with feather earrings would play Christopher Cross albums, was reserved for seniors. I, however, had been allowed to enter the housing lottery with three senior friends, and to our delight we’d been granted an apartment. In a statement of opposition against the cult of covering the walls with tapestries and/or huge posters depicting high-contrast black-and-white art photographs, we refused to decorate at all. We were righteous minimalists.
Soon, however, I found myself caught inside yet another escape fantasy.
I did not want to be a college student anymore; I wanted to be a working person living in New York. Now that I had tasted independence, now that I’d known the exultation of turning a key in the solid, wheezing front door of a brownstone, now that I’d known life under the vast canopy of the city, the smallness of the college bordered on the intolerable. In desperation (though perhaps in a stroke of genius?) I applied for and received a one-semester transfer to NYU. I called my beloved colleagues from the Lincoln Center office and talked them into hiring me as a part-time office assistant. I found a $700-a-month one-room apartment in a mildew-scented building in Greenwich Village (another fifth-floor walk-up, as it happened). I then—and this still astounds me—crunched the numbers in such a way tha
t I was able to convince my parents that this scenario wouldn’t cost them a dollar more than if I were to finish out the year at Vassar. As I had the previous summer, I’d be paying half my rent—this time $350 per month, which I would easily earn at the Lincoln Center job.
Too distracted by the coming storm of their marital dissolution to put up a fight, my parents granted me permission. And so at Christmas break my father drove the Plymouth Horizon up to Vassar and helped me take the futon mattress and the stereo components (still connected) as well as my computer and books and clothes and a high-contrast black-and-white art photo or two back to Jones Lane. A week later, I loaded it all back into the Horizon and enlisted my father to drive me into the city. I’m pretty sure he did so with reasonable graciousness, which in retrospect seems too kind given the manic, almost embattled attitude I’d developed about my need to get away from both my family and my college. Once installed in my new digs, I stocked the kitchen with ramen noodles and spread out the Guatemalan blanket. I put the Suzanne Vega CDs on the shelf and plugged in the computer. And although I felt like an impostor of staggering proportions, I also couldn’t help marveling at myself just a little bit. There I was: a twenty-year-old with her own job and Manhattan apartment. Smoking cigarettes and staring at the wall had taken on entirely new dimensions.