Shoes

So, I woke up today for my first “real” day in Maine. My plan was to update this blog, do my taxes online, catch up on emails, and look for work. But then my brother Jay called, wondering if I could pick up my niece Eliza early from daycare. Happy to have an excuse not to look for a job and to watch the Little Mermaid again, I agreed to pick her up and take her to their house in Brunswick.

So that’s where I am now, sans Internet connection, writing this in a Word document for later posting. I’m still grappling with my total lifestyle overhaul. One day, I’m riding the 6 train uptown, eating lunch on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, meeting friends for drinks downtown on the Lower East Side, walking home to my apartment decorated with mid-century modern furniture and hooked up with 500 cable channels and wireless Internet. The next I’m putting my garbage out on the curb and driving a Volvo station wagon with a 3-yr old (albeit a beloved one) strapped into her car seat in the back. These are not minor changes! It’s as if I moved out of the city and took on family life—only I don’t have a family. No husband, no kids—I feel like I’m living some phantom life, driven to it by the inexorable ticking of my biological clock. No kids—no problem! I’ll still get the station wagon and live in the suburbs! If I build it, they will come!

It’s confusing, because plenty of my friends have had babies while living in the city and maintaining an urban life. Certainly I could have, also, but maybe I compartmentalize things too much: city living is for being young, single, footloose and fancy-free. Maybe deep in the recesses of my mind I believe that city life is incompatible with child-rearing, given that I was raised in a pretty rural environment, with a big yard, unrestricted access to the beach, trees to climb, hills to sled down, an ocean to swim in, woods to explore—all of this with no limits. Our cat didn’t even have a litter box because he just went outside when he wanted to, and on occasion even brought us home a mouse or baby rabbit from the field in front of our house. Our dog never had to be walked; she, too, just pawed at the screen door when she wanted out. Our mailbox was far enough away that sometimes we drove to the top of the driveway to pick up mail; otherwise, you could walk there and make an afternoon of it, stopping at the willow tree, examining the goldfish pond at Mr. Abiri’s (he bought the house my dad was raised in), sneaking onto someone else’s property to check out the fort the Sylvester boys had built in the woods.

I always felt like a bit of an imposter in the city. It seemed that other people had more of a right to be there—people who had grown up in Westchester, or New Jersey, people whose parents held jobs in the city, or used to. For me New York wasn’t a natural progression, from suburb to city; it was a fantasy city, a place where a bigger, glittering life—the life I saw on TV and read about in magazines—was happening. I imagined myself like one of those girls in the Mademoiselle fashion spreads, wearing “career” clothes and working in a shiny office, high above the city streets. I don’t know what I thought I’d be doing, but it would be something important, and glamorous, and I’d always wear great skirts and tops and high heels that didn’t hurt my feet. (I didn’t even know heels could hurt your feet so much until I actually moved to New York and tried to wear them while walking across town to work then after work to meet friends for drinks. There were days I would barely be able to stand up in the subway, my feet hurt so badly. Of course, that could have also been because I bought such cheap shoes when I first moved to the city. There was a time when spending more than $50 on a pair of shoes seemed like an extravagance only other people would be self-indulgent enough to grant themselves—it certainly wasn’t for me. My, how things have changed!)

In my first few months in New York, I actually wore these hideous black platform shoes with two rubberish straps across the top that cost about $10 from Payless, I think. I wore them to work at Viking Books every day, because I didn’t have anything else. From my apartment on Mulberry Street, I’d walk across Soho to Penguin on Hudson Street, not having any idea how fortunate I was to live and work downtown and not have to commute on the dreaded subway. As the years went on, the distance between my place of work and residence slowly expanded: from E. 14 to Hudson St.; from 28th St. to Park Slope; from 19th St. to Williamsburg (this was actually an easy commute); and then, the commute that pushed me over the edge and prompted my thinking of moving out of the city, from Brooklyn Heights to East Harlem. Not nearly as much fun as walking from Mulberry to the lower West Village, and seeing movie stars and models on my walk to and from work!