There's No Place Like Home

I ran into my neighbor this morning.  She lives on the first floor of the little walkup building in Yorkville and I live on the top – which is not called the penthouse in a walkup.  We aren’t friends.  We don’t make plans to see each other, we don’t talk on the phone, we don’t have meals together: we’re neighbors.  We stop and visit when we see each other on our way in or out.  I held the door for her and her dogs.  She remembers when my daughter was born.

There were movers on the stoop when I came home this morning, which happens a lot in this building.  It’s a transient place, people move in and out of here all the time thought they might be for the couple on the third floor who cook delicious smelling food most nights.  Or the couple on the ground floor who’d been living in a studio about the size of a college dorm room. 

But my first floor neighbor’s door was open and she told me it was she who was going.  To Florida.  She lost her job, and couldn’t find another one, and New York is just too expensive.  She cried when she hugged me goodbye.  She has lived here for 35 years.

Do people expect to spend their whole adult lives in one place?  Do they want to?  According to data from the most recent Census released at the beginning of April,  Americans are less likely to move, and more likely to go shorter distances when they do, than at any other time since the Depression.  And a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found 56% of U.S. born adults have not lived outside their birth state. 

My neighbor never expected to leave this building.

I never expected to stay.

The apartment came to me through New York serendipity – the kind of thing that hadn’t ever happened to me before, and hasn’t happened since.  One morning a man stopped me on my block.  He was small, rabbity, he wore a filmy short sleeved buttondown shirt and a short sleeved T shirt underneath that, and he made me nervous.

“I’m the super of that building. Know anyone who needs an apartment?”  He stood too close, and didn’t sound entirely on the up-and-up.  He sounded like he was offering to sell me hot goods.

But I said, “Me.  Maybe.”   I’d been thinking vaguely of moving.  The apartment where I lived then, in the building next door to the one the super had pointed out, faced a brick wall.  Not a lot of light came in, and what little there was, my roommate, who slept a lot – a lot – did her best to obliterate.  I told the super – Eddie – I’d take a look.

The building made me nervous too, at first: a walkup tenement made of red brick that was old and smoked-looking, as if it had lived its life near a factory.  But inside, the hallways were clean, and the apartment was filled with sunlight. It overlooked gardens. 

I took it.  I wasn’t even old enough to legally sign a lease, but the landlord didn’t ask for i.d.  He gave me a month’s rent free, to celebrate.

That’s where I was living when I turned 21.  My parents wanted to give me a piano for my birthday.  They didn’t just give me one, pianos are personal things, I was supposed to come and test one their piano tuner was re-building, to see if it suited me.  I’d played for years, but not much since I’d left home, when I was 16. 

My mother and I went to the piano tuner’s place way out in Brooklyn.  He was working on a professional upright he wanted to sell.

Have you ever seen an upright?  Not a spinet, spinets are small, an upright has a case almost the size of a baby grand, though it’s oblong and, well, upright.  Vertical, rather than lying belly down, baby grand-wise.

“You know what?” I told my mother on the drive back to her house, also way out in Brooklyn, though not end-of-the-continent far, like where the piano turner lived.  “I think we should wait.  My apartment’s temporary.  It’s a walk up.  The delivery charge will be really high to move a piano up 4 flights, and where would I put it?  Let’s wait till I move into someplace permanent.”

That was years and years ago.  Decades.  And, like my first floor neighbor, I’m still here.

When I told my mother where I lived was only temporary, I thought that was true.  I didn’t plan to spend so long living in one place. 

I’d looked at apartments in Washington Heights and Inwood with a boyfriend.  But I had a feeling that move would have been a mistake, as the boyfriend turned out to be, so I stayed put.

I bought a house in the country with a previous husband.  The walkup apartment was cheap, we couldn’t afford the house and a “better” apartment, so we went on living here.  The house in the country disappeared.  And the husband.  I stayed.

Some years ago I moved in with a man who lived in a co-op in Chelsea.  His apartment was small, but there was another for sale in the building; we hoped to buy it and combine the two.  I’d kept my apartment, though, then, I was only working in it, going back and forth every day.  I wrote there, and ran writing workshops, but that was it.  We decided to sublet the co-op and move back up to Yorkville, to save money for the down payment.  Much of my life has been lived in this place.  My daughter was born and raised and fledged here.  When she comes home from college, I wonder if she looks around the apartment and thinks, “Was it always so small?”

           No, not when I first moved in.  Then it seemed huge, double the size of the gloomy, lightless two room place next door.  But places fill up: with things, with people.  I’ve fallen asleep many nights counting ways to make the apartment bigger.  

        By the time my daughter was ready for school, we could’ve used more space.  We looked at an apartment on the Lower East Side, in a building friends hoped we’d also move into.  But there were no parks nearby, and the neighborhood schools weren’t as good as the ones uptown.  When you don’t have much money, these things make a difference. 

One of the nice things about living in a place for a long time is that you get to know the other people who’ve been there for years and years.  The seamstress around the corner made dollhouse furniture with my daughter.  The men in the butcher shop give me chocolates on Valentine’s Day and when I order something over the phone, it comes with a sticker that says VIP Ziesk.

So, have I stayed because I live someplace where people know me?  Because this apartment costs less than another one would?  Because I haven’t been brave enough to move out and on, as my first floor neighbor was forced to do?

The building’s not as well kept as it used to be.  Eddie died years ago and the succession of supers who’ve come after him have treated the building with increasing neglect.  I haven’t played the piano in years.