Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House by Meghan Daum Read Free Book Online Page A

regular salary and, what’s more, that salary actually increased over time, it wasn’t long before her house was properly outfitted and her supposedly temporary experiment in independent living graduated into permanence. She moved from the cottage-style house to a slightly larger, slightly more modern ranch-style house (a strange if vastly updated reimagining of the rented ranch house in Austin). A few years later, she bought the left-hand unit of a Tudor-style duplex near the Ridgewood train station.
    The money for the duplex came from selling the Jones Lane house, an event that precipitated my father, partly at my urging, finally doing the thing he should have done in 1964: moving to New York City. There he lived—and continues to live—alone in a one-bedroom apartment near the Tudor Hotel whose living room was taken up almost entirely withmusic production equipment. There he was allowed to occupy all corners of his eccentricity. His inherent nocturnalism, which had always been cramped by family life and, even after my brother and I were gone, the noisy lawn mowers and early-closing restaurants of Ridgewood, was now tucked into the cradle of the never-sleeping city. As though the nonurban world had been a fifty-five-year nightmare from which he finally awoke, he seemed to forget about grassy terrain altogether, once complaining to me that he’d taken the bus all the way out to New Jersey to attend a Fourth of July barbecue only to find that it was, to his great distress, outdoors. Living in New York, he told me, made him “as content as I’ve ever been.” Since he’d never been a believer in happiness (when I was in the seventh grade, he’d explained happiness to me as “something that exists purely in the past tense”), I saw this as a major accomplishment.
    Years pass. Nearly ten. My mother lives happily in her Tudor-style duplex, a
House and Garden
–worthy abode exploding with color and art and flowers and light streaming through the sunroom windows and Sondheim music streaming through the Bose stereo. She has remade herself. She is a busy, animated, unattached woman with busy, animated friends and tickets to concerts and paintings made by artists she knows. She drives a pristine, preowned Alfa Romeo sedan that she bought from a gay male friend for what she claims was not an inordinate amount of money. When she orders a drink, she asks for an Absolut gimlet on the rocks. When she goes on vacation, it’s to Vermont and to “the Cape.” Her son has gone to college in California and never returned back east. Her daughter has moved more times than it seems possible to count. Her husband is still legally her husband, partly forhealth insurance reasons (thanks to self-employment and heart disease, he cannot get his own) and partly because their apparently mutual love of solitude has precluded the burgeoning of any new relationships that prove significant enough to necessitate a divorce. Ultimately, they will live apart—and alone—for longer than they ever lived together.
    When the time comes to retire, my mother finally makes an honest woman out of herself. She moves to New York for real.
    I am, by then, living in Los Angeles. Summoned back east for her retirement festivities as well as assistance moving her into her apartment, a junior one-bedroom in an Upper West Side brownstone more fit for a twenty-five-year-old junior marketing executive than a sixty-three-year-old with arthritic knees, I experience a moment that makes me catch my breath in wrenching self-recognition. On the corner of Columbus Avenue and Seventy-eighth Street, in the rank, piteous humidity of a June evening, stands my mother, father, and brother as well as my mother’s brother and his longtime girlfriend, who, fresh off recent travels to Bali or Singapore or God knows where, have come up from Miami. A moving van will come later, but we’ve spent the afternoon unloading a couple of car trips’ worth of items my mother for some reason