Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House (3 page)

As my mother frequently pointed out when I was growing up, she and my father had “come extraordinarily far.” By this she meant that they’d pulled themselves further up the social and cultural ladder than could fairly be expected of anyone from southern Illinois, much less two people who’d been dealt such a difficult set of childhood conditions. They might not have made it to New York, but within four years of getting married, they found themselves in Palo Alto, where my father had been given an opportunity to earn a Ph.D. in music in exchange for writing arrangements for the Stanford marching band. I was born during that time, after which we made the
aforementioned moves to the Chicago suburb and then to Austin, where, after nearly six years, we made that jolting move to New Jersey.

But let’s stay in Palo Alto for a moment. From the time they’d arrived there, my parents not only began subscribing to
The New Yorker
but also managed to take on several other qualities they associated with the kinds of people my mother often referred to as “classy” and “high-powered.” A few of these trappings had to do with things like speaking properly and driving European cars, even if that meant used, rusted Volkswagens. More of them, however, were expressed (with an enthusiasm that bordered on the obsessive) via houses and home decor. And since my own housing compulsions are a direct descendant of my mother’s efforts to cope with the identity confusion that plagued our immediate family like a skin rash, I simply can’t talk about where I’ve lived without explaining where my parents have lived. Literally and figuratively, their foundations were shakier than any seismic fault line.

But this instability was nothing that couldn’t be remedied—or at least covered up in high style—by those hardwood floors and Oriental rugs. Inspired by the musty gravitas of certain professors’ houses in Palo Alto, whose combination of old-money regality (tattered volumes of the
OED
on stands, yellowed maps of Nova Scotia) and flower power–inspired clutter (anything macramé) filled her with the promise of overcoming the yokelness of her upbringing, my mother modeled our houses on the image of her ideal self.

Moreover, she often did so on minuscule or even nonexistent budgets. In Austin, despite my father’s unremarkable assistant professor salary, she managed to turn that dilapidated bungalow (the previous owner had lived in a single chair for
something approaching fifteen years until he finally died, mountains of TV-dinner boxes and yellowed pages from the
Austin American-Statesman
blocking the light from the windows) into a veritable advertisement for the upper-middle-class, liberal elite. The white oak floors, delicately resanded and ritualistically doused with Pine-Sol, the intricately thought-out splashes of color (a sapphire blue wall in the archway between the living room and the dining room, an abstract mural in the kitchen), the built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the omnipresent jazz or classical music: to me, all of it meant home. But to my parents, especially my mother, who kept touching up that kitchen mural practically until the day we moved out (think swirls and circles in earth tones, Rothko meets lava lamp), all of it meant they’d escaped their old home.

Except something happened after we packed up and drove—my father in a rented Ryder truck, my mother in a Plymouth Horizon with me and my brother in the backseat and our cat in a wire mesh carrier—seventeen hundred miles to the place that would technically be our home for the duration of my childhood. As I’ve said, I wasn’t yet nine. I can’t reasonably suggest that the move bifurcated my childhood in any kind of measurable way. While I knew how to ride my bike to friends’ houses in the immediate neighborhood and was sufficiently enmeshed in the terrain that I rarely passed a honeysuckle bush without grabbing a blossom and siphoning out the sap right then and there, I was not old enough to know the streets, to have memorized the skyline, to have forged friendships that had any real hallmarks of inseparability. I would never, of course, be from Austin, since I would spend the subsequent ten years—the bulk of my childhood and all of my adolescence—in Ridgewood, New Jersey. Ridgewood would
be where I’d experience my first kiss, get my driver’s license, and graduate from high school. In 2008 I would attend my twentieth high-school reunion, and it would be the banquet room of a Wyndham Garden Hotel in New Jersey that, at no small expense, I’d take planes and trains and taxis to reach. Once there, I’d greet my former classmates in a genuine spirit of nostalgia and shared history.

That said, I have never been able to say I’m from New Jersey without feeling as if I were wearing someone else’s name tag at a party. For all the time I spent there, for all the ways in which my speech can tilt ever so subtly into the nasally timbre of a tristate mall queen (though, curiously and somewhat embarrassingly, those “y’all’s” creep back into place when I’m in Texas), the place still feels to me like the wrong exit off a highway my parents weren’t quite equipped to be driving on in the first place. This was due as much to the particular town as to the state. As out of place as we were in New Jersey as a whole (there’s practically nothing about the boisterousness and raggedy mirth of a typical Jerseyite that would appear to share any DNA with the members of my own gene pool), we managed to pick a town that reduced us to a late-1970s version of the Beverly hillbillies.

And that’s not just because we pulled in to town in that Ryder truck and, thanks to a minor accident, a freshly dented Plymouth Horizon. It’s because we essentially had no business being there. Whereas most of the dads were Wall Street brokers and corporate executives and doctors, my dad was an aspiring writer of commercial jingles (he was going to move on to bigger things, yes, but first he needed to feed his family). Whereas most of the moms, as I mentioned, played tennis, my mom played Brahms on the piano and continued to fume about the nonpassage of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Whereas most of the kids wore ski parkas proudly adorned with lift tickets, I had never really seen snow.

You would think that moving from Austin, Texas, to Ridgewood, New Jersey—locales that despite certain cultural differences shared a common language, maintained similar standards of health and hygiene, and both used the English system of measurement—wouldn’t exactly be tantamount to immigrating to a foreign land. But somehow for us it was. A markedly desirable town thanks to its proximity to New York City and to its good public schools, Ridgewood was also a markedly uptight town, at least compared to the languorous hippiedom of Austin. Not only could my parents not understand why my playmates’ mothers wanted to be called Mrs. —— rather than by their first names, but they literally could not understand what people were saying. En route to New Jersey during the move, after our Plymouth Horizon was sideswiped by an 18-wheel tractor trailer just after crossing the state line on I-95, my mother was reduced to near tears when a state trooper’s recommendations for taking surface streets the rest of the way involved “da toyd cycle.” It was only after drawing a map on the back of a Burger King bag (“sack” in our red state parlance) that it became clear he was talking about a series of traffic circles and some significance involving the third one: “toyd cycle” translated to “third circle.” By then, it hardly mattered anymore. We were less than a mile inside New Jersey borders, and we were already in the seventh cycle of hell.

Maybe that’s overstating things. We did, to my wide-eyed delight, receive a visit from a representative from the Ridgewood Welcome Wagon, a Florence Henderson look-alike who showered us with a fruit basket and coupons for discounted dry cleaning and free desserts at Friendly’s. But I think I
can also safely say that on just about every level, the social currency that circulated among upper-middle-class mid-Atlantic-state residents rendered the dollar value of my parents’ Midwestern-bred, academic-influenced lifestyle nearly worthless. Despite the townspeople’s fixations on being able to put elite college stickers on the backs of their station wagons, my parents had no real concept of the power of networks formed through these institutions. They had never traveled abroad. The term “summerhouse” was alien to them. Whereas other families vacationed on Sanibel Island or Cape Cod, our out-of-town getaways usually involved driving to southern Illinois. We did not, I now suspect, have quite enough money even for that. As it was, we didn’t have health insurance for the first few years.

The result of all this dissonance was a certain unacknowledged chaos, self-doubt disguised as superiority, joylessness masquerading as something my mother might have called “serious-mindedness.” And in an often frantic-seeming effort to cope, we made two-facedness our family crest. Out in the world, we pretended to be proud and happy citizens of northern New Jersey. I took jazz and tap-dancing lessons twice a week. My brother mounted lemonade stands in the front yard. My father took me to the bakery on Sunday mornings to buy donuts, and my mother shopped in the downtown dress shops and stood in line at Rite Aid like any other mother. But within the confines of the house, all niceties and efforts at respectable suburban conduct were checked at the door. Arriving home from school, I’d launch into a theatrical diatribe about how terrible my day had been (it rarely was truly terrible, but somehow the rants were cathartic), how intolerable my teacher and classmates were, how beneath my dignity it was that we’d had to play dodgeball/draw triangles/set
the Pledge of Allegiance to music. In response, my mother would often say something like “Well, if you think —— is a nitwit, you should meet her mother.” Later, at the dinner table, withering critiques of friends and neighbors—“he thinks Bach is pronounced ‘Batch’!”—were not only tolerated but encouraged.

As snobby as we were, we were hardly polymaths. My father’s opinions were almost exclusively confined to matters of music; my mother’s extended to music and home decor. Looking back, I wonder if some other family was sitting around their dinner table saying, “The Daums don’t even have passports, can you
imagine?”
But at the time, our shared disdain for our surroundings seemed as integral to those surroundings as the trees and sidewalks themselves. We complained, therefore we were. We excoriated the town, therefore it was home.

Did it have to be like this? Could we have taken another tack? Was it possible that with a different approach, we could have found an antidote for this particular form of overprivileged, underintellectual (not
anti
-intellectual; most Ridgewoodians weren’t so much opposed to the life of the mind as they were just generally more interested in the stock market), oxford-shirt-wearing, weekend-golfing, leaf-blowers-blaring-at-7:00-a.m. boorishness? Is there any way we could have taken all that fractiousness and converted it into something useful?

In theory, we could have moved to New York City. We could have skipped Ridgewood entirely and driven the Ryder truck out of Texas and up the eastern seaboard and straight over the George Washington Bridge. We also could have wised up after a year or so in the burbs and shifted the contents of our rented Tudor house to some railroad apartment on the Upper West Side, where my mother would be freed from starchy PTA
moms and presumably kids would know how to pronounce “Bach.” In theory we could have done this, but in theory we could also have become missionaries in Malawi. In practice it was never going to happen. For all the courage and energy my parents had mustered in forging a route from southern Illinois to their various destinations, New York City required a faster metabolism than either of them could have hoped to achieve. Plus, for all their disdain of suburban prissiness, they found themselves reluctantly in agreement with Ridgewoodians on at least one point: the city was no place to raise kids.

My parents were obsessed with New York—its mythologies, its towering density, its promise of high-powered talent pools and professional opportunities. But they were also cowed by it, and understandably so. In the late 1970s and early 1980s it was dangerous and dirty and, given the way the squalid, hooker-filled Port Authority Bus Terminal book-ended just about every one of our trips in from New Jersey, just ever so slightly third world in its ambience. My father was once mugged at knifepoint; another time a small girl romping down a Hell’s Kitchen street errantly threw a piece of metal shrapnel in his direction. It hit him in the face and caused profuse bleeding; the girl ran away, terrified. This was the era of the removable car radio, and whenever we drove into the city, my father would pop out the cassette deck and hand it to my mother to carry in her purse.

Still, my father often spoke of the perils of New York, particularly the West Side midtown neighborhoods where he was attempting to do business, with a certain relish, almost as though he were bragging.

“Well, New York is great, but it’s not quite civilized,” I’d hear him say on the phone to friends in faraway places who we all imagined were marveling at the scope of our ambition.
“There’s a sense of lawlessness. The city will eat you alive. I can see how a lot of people just wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

Both of my parents, my mother especially, were fond of suggesting to various Midwestern and Texan friends and relatives that we actually lived not in New Jersey but, rather, in some kind of staging area between the vacuous suburbs and the head rush of Gotham.

“Yes, the address says New Jersey,” my mother would say. “But we’re just right over the border from Manhattan. Just right there. Very close.”

This was not true. We were completely and utterly in New Jersey. We were twenty miles away, and it was a long twenty miles, psychologically if not geographically. Still, as though standing at the western mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel and trying to see a sliver of light from the other side, my parents peered at their dream lives from afar and did everything they could to convince themselves that they were wide awake and living them. This effort was aided somewhat by the fact that my father did much of his work out of Chicago, which had a thriving jingle-writing scene and where he had a number of professional connections dating back to his graduate school days. Why we hadn’t just moved to Chicago I wasn’t sure, but I remember my mother repeatedly saying that my father “had to be known as a New York guy in order to get hired by the Chicago guys.” For at least the first five years that we were in Ridgewood, my father was in Chicago more often than he was not. And though that put my mother in the somewhat awkward position of appearing to be a single parent even though she wasn’t, she would later tell me that his absences were among the few respites from what otherwise amounted to a life of relentless if weirdly indescribable stress.