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

hadn’t wanted to put on the moving truck—pieces of art, pieces of pottery, wicker baskets stuffed with blankets and dishes—into the second-floor walk-up apartment and are en route to dinner.
    “Is that the Museum of Natural History?” my uncle inquires. “Well, I’ll be.”
    To which my mother tosses her head to the side and says, well, yes, and there’s plenty more great stuff where that came from. Like “really good” restaurants and “a bar I love” and “excellent theater” and “really great stores.” She already knows it well, she explains to my uncle and his girlfriend, both ofwhom are wearing pastel shirts and white pants and neither of whom is sweating as much as my parents and my brother and me; we’re all dressed at least partly in black.
    She’d been coming into the city for years, my mother continues. This is “really a natural progression.” She is “really quite at home” on these streets. “That way is south,” she says, pointing to the traffic flow on Columbus Avenue. “Central Park West is the next one over, and it goes north and south.”
    She knows it. She knows it well. And, of course, not at all. But she knows that, too. As with my father’s long-ago cries of “I was just there!” when the Chrysler Building flashed across the television screen during an American Express commercial, her ambition is on a collision course with her innocence, and no one or nothing is to blame except the legacy of striving and all its ruthless discontents. I am by now thirty-five years old, and I know this routine. I am looking at my mother, but I might as well be flipping through snapshots of my own most vulnerable moments: there I am pretending to know my way around school, even though I’m the new kid and can barely find the door; there I am in high school pretending to be friends with people I barely know; there I am in college pretending not to be miserable; there I am as an adult pretending that I don’t feel like a child. And as we stand on that corner waiting for the crosswalk light to change, I can see my mother bending over so far backward in an effort to erase the vestiges of her past that I’m afraid her spine will crack right then and there. I want to hug her as much as I want to hit her. But the signal changes, and we proceed forward.

TWO
    I ’m not proud of this, but I’ll come out and say it now. I chose my college not because of its outstanding faculty or its resplendent campus, not because of its fancy-pants reputation or its arty sensibility or its distinguished alumni. I chose my college not so much for what it could offer me while I was there as for what I believed it could deliver me into when I was done: a shabby yet elegant prewar apartment in Manhattan. I wasn’t quite sure how I would pay for said apartment—indeed, I had no idea how much such a thing cost—but I was determined to spend the better part of my twenties (and possibly my thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies) surrounded by houseplants in a sun-drenched if slightly musty one- or two-bedroom overlooking Riverside Drive or West End Avenue. In this apartment, I would drink a lot of coffee while staring out the window. I would read great books and have great lovers, and eventually I’d win a Pulitzer Prize or maybe even a MacArthur “genius” grant for things I’d written while staring out that window. I’d have really great clothes and furniture—all vintage.
    For the first seventeen years of my life, thoughts like thisdidn’t cross my mind. As a child and a young teenager I was less concerned with geography than with architecture. Not that I was “concerned” with “architecture” in any significant way (save a passing enthusiasm for
The Fountainhead)
. But to the extent that I shared with my mother a fairly nonstop interest in moving to another house, I cared far more about the floor plan than the location. It’s true that I was consumed with
Little House on the Prairie
and,