AT THE AGE OF SIX, I struck a deal with the school bus driver: on the afternoon trip home, he would let me off at the stop where the mean kids got on. I wanted to avoid them, but that was only part of it: I wanted to be outside, in the world. I wanted to walk home.
I can’t imagine why he agreed. Maybe it was one less stop to make toward the end of his run, or maybe he really believed that I could navigate the city on my own and saw no reason to cage me up in the dark and rattling bus. At very least, he must have assumed that I knew my address.
I stepped off and walked to the corner. It had never occurred to me that not knowing where I lived might be a problem. My building had a green awning and a brass door and a red carpet leading to the elevator. The windows in our living room were covered by heavy green drapes that for some reason I associated with my mother. I would wrap myself up in them, or slip past them and stand in the narrow space between the fabric and the window, looking down at the cars and the pedestrians and feeling the intense mystery of her love for me.
This is a way of saying that I could feel my home’s presence among the thousands of other buildings that made up the city, could feel a path leading there as if through my own body. The light changed, and I began to walk.
Everything around me was in motion, too. People sped in all directions, plunging in and out of stores, leaping into phone booths, yelling into the black phone receivers with great passion. I couldn’t believe that all this happened, invisible, while I was in school. That the world went on when I wasn’t there to see.
That’s when I recognized the blue sign above Klein’s department store, where my mother had bought me a suit in the husky department, a tan three-piece number with a vest and bell-bottom pants. That suit was so elegant—I knew I was going right, that I would find my way home. I knew it, too, when I passed the Chock Full O’ Nuts, which had chromium stools lined up at the counter like giant silver mushrooms.
I passed Union Square and headed up Park Avenue, where the buildings were tall and the sidewalks always in shadow. I felt the temperature drop. I felt a lateness that had something to do with yearning. So much time had passed since the bus, since my parents in the morning. I stopped at an office building that had a small glass display case by the entrance containing maybe a dozen books with covers so ugly they were strangely beautiful. It had never occurred to me that books were made somewhere, but now I had stumbled on the place, and it felt momentous. I read the titles out loud, under my breath, as if they were the directions I’d been waiting for. Then I pressed my hand against the building’s dark granite façade and felt the cold stored up there, and I knew I had to hurry.
THREE YEARS LATER, WHEN I was nine, my parents decided to buy an apartment in a building a short walk away. The movers were coming to get the furniture and the boxes while I was at school; after school, I would walk to the new apartment instead of the old one; my parents would be there, waiting for me.
I kept putting that thought in my head and then instantly forgetting it. I had spent my entire life in the old apartment, and couldn’t quite imagine us as existing completely independent of its surroundings. My mother was, to me, the woman on the couch by the heavy green drapes; my father was the man standing in the entrance to the little kitchen, taking up the whole doorway. Those spaces gave them their shapes, their lights and shadows, mixed with the touch of their hands and the sound of their laughter to make them into the people I knew as my parents.
Walking home, I kept reminding myself that I was going to the new apartment, not the old, but the idea kept falling out of my head. There were all the familiar sights to make me forget: Fourteenth Street lined with bargain clothing stores, the racks spilling out the door and onto the sidewalk; Union Square, full of light; the shadows of Park Avenue South. I became completely absorbed in the flow of the city around me, propelled onward by the hidden current, and when I turned the last corner and came to my block what I saw in front of me was not the new building but the old, its green awning with white letters, its little flower beds with their tiny white flowers. I felt pleasure and relief, all the feelings of home, and yet I knew that I’d made a mistake: this wasn’t my home anymore.
It was then that I realized I had no idea how to get to the new apartment. I couldn’t quite visualize the route, and I didn’t know the address or the phone number or even what street it was on. It hadn’t occurred to me to learn those things.
I felt a surge of panic, but at the same time a wave of exhaustion so intense my eyes began closing. My love for my parents appeared as something infinitely sad and beautiful, a form of nostalgia. What I pictured were the granite ledges, the iron grates, and the empty dark basement entrances of the cityscape, all the lonely, useless places: those were me without them.
Not knowing what else to do, I opened the door to the lobby and walked to the elevator, keeping my head down so I wouldn’t be spotted. Up until that morning, the doormen had seemed like friendly extensions of the building itself, but I was a trespasser now, slipping like a ghost into the elevator, pressing the button marked 12, the number that to my mind had always stood for us.
When the elevator opened, everything in the hallway was exactly the same as it had always been: the same speckled wallpaper, the same little wooden table. I walked across the carpet, pressed my hands to our door, and felt my parents’ presence, vibrating on the other side. When I knocked, my mother would open up and I would be home: that was a wish so beautiful it was going to turn out true. All I had to do was make a fist and rap on the door with my knuckles, and my alternate, imaginary world would become real and let me in.
Instead, I turned around and took the elevator downstairs, stepped out into the street again, and began walking. The journey was haphazard, a question of feel, in part because it took me past the drugstore on Third Avenue, which marked the outer perimeter of where I was used to going by myself. And so, the relief when I saw that big brown building, a sort of terraced ziggurat. I had no key, didn’t know the apartment number, but when I entered the lobby, my father was standing there with some boxes, looking at me without surprise, as if he’d always expected me to show up.
THIRTY YEARS LATER, MY parents were still living there, in that building. My father was dying of Alzheimer’s, and I stopped by one afternoon to take him outside for some sunshine. He had been a trial lawyer, the old-fashioned kind that quoted Shakespeare to his juries, but language was leaving him behind now, like a fading memory. He’d forgotten how to read, and simple speech was difficult, so we just sat on a bench in silence.
“When I was a kid,” he said, finally, “the sky was blue and I would run. I would run very fast.”
I looked up. The sky was indeed very blue, luminous, endless. “I wish we could run away together,” I told him, thinking about his illness, the way it had walled us in on all four sides.
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “We would run home.”