I came to New York on a ship.
My parents boarded the Queen Mary in Southampton with their five-month-old daughter, two chows, a Norland nanny and a lot of antique furniture. It was 1966. We sailed to America. “You were on its very last crossing,” my mother always told me.
We lived in a town house with a red door on Sullivan Street. My father’s parents gave him money for the rent. My mother was nineteen and homesick. She cried and missed her mother, with whom she fought. Her in-laws on Gramercy Park adored her, but she didn’t know anyone else. Every morning her husband left for a rented office he wouldn’t permit her to visit. He was writing. Alone with me, she talked to people in the park. I was cheerful and would reach for strangers from my pram. “Everyone loved you,” she said.
My parents brought me into their bed when it was morning and warmed me between their chests. They sang. I was in the high chair for supper, my mother spooning some orange sweet from a bowl, and the noise at the front door made us look. My father opened the door and the spoon reached my lips.
The nanny went away, and I cried, but my mother said a big girl didn’t need a baby nurse. She got skinnier and drank Tab from pink cans. When I was two she went to New York Hospital to have a baby. “That’s where Daddy was born, too.” A different baby nurse came to live with us. She wore a uniform and a white cap. “Penelope was born starving,” my mother said. My little sister howled except when I carried her around. “Imagine a two-year-old carrying a baby!” my mother would say. “But you did it.” When Penelope could stay upright, I sat her in the dirt of our communal back garden and played with her. I gathered her up when our nurse called us in.
“Isn’t Susy good with her?” said my mother. “Susy’s so good.”
In summer we drove to Provincetown, a big, big house, a big, big lawn, sand in plastic pails and hot pavement underfoot as we crossed to the beach. The chows left paw prints in the sand. My mother had a bikini and brown skin and white lines when she took it off.
I was three. Bob Dylan lived next door. That meant something. I heard my mother tell people. “We live next door to Bob Dylan,” I told the children in my nursery class. Once he wiped my nose.
My father walked me the long way to my school. No, we must have taken the bus, but I remember a vast concrete plaza, his hand wrapped around my curled fingers, then walking up a busy avenue. At windy intersections I stood against his leg. “Here, cry here,” he would say if I fell. He knelt and pulled my head against the soft place beneath his shoulder. “You are the only one allowed to cry on my shirt.”
After school I ran up the stairs to Penelope’s room. I could hear the crib rails shaking with her fists. She saw me and crowed, “Suzzy! Suzzy!” It made me feel huge and happy.
One day when I was three and a half my parents called me to the living room. I climbed into the butterfly chair. I liked to scratch my fingernail over the rough red canvas. They spread out Polaroids on the table. “This is our new house,” my mother said. Her voice was sparkly. She was happy. “We’re moving to Millbrook,” my father said, also happy. White house, dark trees, gray stream. In black-and-white it looked like a page of a book, not a real place. We drove into the forested reaches beyond the city. The drive went on and on until we came to a stop by a bright green slope. Before Mummy was out of the car I ran up to the house, my shoes disappearing in the sloppy grass. The sun lit up the white house, hurting my eyes. I raced around and around the porch. Through the windows the rooms were magic. My parents stood arm in arm, smiling.
I said, “There aren’t any beds.”
“We’re going to buy some,” they said, and they told me they had started shopping for furniture. Antique shops in the city would deliver things here. They were excited, and I was too, and my mother hugged my father, setting her head against his chest.
Millbrook. Storage. Separation. These were the words. My parents weren’t happy anymore. The baby was always crying and crying. The boxes, the bookshelves that had been cleared and the rolled-up rugs went away, to storage. Storage. Separation. Our rooms emptied as men came and went. From upstairs I looked down on the roof of their truck. The walls bare, my mother’s voice called, my father’s voice called back from another room. They didn’t call to each other much. “Daddy and I are going to live in different houses now,” my mother said, kneeling in front of me. “I love you and your sister more than anything else in the world.” I wanted the house in Millbrook. I don’t remember what they said about the dogs, who went away. My mother took me, Penelope and our suitcases and left.
We moved to a residential hotel on East Eighty-sixth Street. She said, “We’re going to have an adventure.” She slept a lot, and we watched television. I turned four. My sister waited for me to climb into her crib and snap up the straps of her blue-and-white striped overalls. I worried: Where would we get groceries now that we had said good-bye to the Grand Union on LaGuardia Place? Would the hotel be mad about the lamp my sister pulled over by its cord? I unwrapped the paper packages from the Chinese laundry and put our clothes away in the dresser. Just like Mummy, I sniffed the milk in the fridge to see if it was bad.
The Croyden Hotel was like a dollhouse we could live in. The elevator and the doormen belonged to us. We stopped for mail at a wall of brass doors, surprises in the tiny windows. Cabs came to our curb when our mother put up her hand. We knew the name of the woman who stood behind the rows of Wrigley’s gum and Life Savers in the lobby coffee shop. I forgot about my father between his visits, but when he came we got delirious. Sometimes he took us on a long taxi ride to Gramercy Park, straight down Lexington Avenue until we saw the wrought-iron fence around the little park and, beyond that, the deep red hue of his parents’ grand house. Or he took me and Penelope to a luncheonette a block away from the Croyden, and we sat on orange vinyl seats.
“I don’t like being called Daddy anymore. It’s babyish,” he said. I had a cream cheese and jelly sandwich. Penelope just had jelly. Purple was smearing her plate. “Call me Nat.”
I told our mother there was no more daddy.
“How pretentious,” she said. “Typical.”
Eventually we settled on Papa, pronounced the English way.
My mother started to have fun. “I deserve it,” she said. “He wouldn’t allow me to be a teenager.” The phone rang, and she messed up her date book with scrawled numbers and doodles. She talked and laughed, and then she clicked at the phone button to get a dial tone and start another call. I listened to the up and down in her laugh as I turned the pages of her book, examining her mysterious, opulent scribbles. She hired a mother’s helper. We played with jewelry on her bed, watching her at the mirror. “How do you like this skirt?” The mother’s helper answered. Mummy gave her clothes. She tipped the open perfume bottle to her wrist. “You can get arrested if you wear patchouli,” she said. “Police think you’ve been smoking marijuana.” I didn’t want her to go out. I didn’t know how young she was, what twenty-three meant. The purple suede boots hurt her back, she said, but fuck it.
In the mornings she put Penelope in a stroller and walked me to my new school. We crossed to the sunny side of the avenue. She had to find a job, she said. “Your father doesn’t give us enough.” One day she came home really happy.
“I’m going to drive a taxi!”
She drove at night, so the baby-sitter slept over sometimes. Occasionally we went to our father’s on Mulberry Street or, after he moved, to the Chelsea Hotel. Sometimes my mother double-parked her yellow car in front of the Croyden and dashed upstairs to get us. We sat on the front seat and slid under the glove box (her British word) if she stopped for a fare. After the car was back in traffic we’d pop up to say hi. This earned us bigger tips, she said. She drove Penelope to Montessori, then we went to my school. “Tell them, what does Mummy do?” The kids didn’t care. At home she explained that they were confused because usually men drove taxis.
“But now you have a mummy who drives a taxi! I’m the only woman in New York. I know all the men at the garage, and I’ll take you there one night. They’re dying to meet you.” I imagined the avenues filled with taxis, all the men, all the men, and her.
I heard her on the phone or in her room with the babysitter, telling about creeps who got into the cab and wouldn’t get out when she asked them to, the fares she shouldn’t pick up but did. She was robbed. She could just see the gun out of the corner of her eye. How petrifying, she said, not meaning me to hear. But I heard. I heard the clatter of her hanger replaced in the coat closet, the pause of her finger between numbers on the phone dial. I could hear her turn over in her sleep. I didn’t understand every noise but heard enough to wonder when I woke if she had come home.
Every day our mother had something to tell. She’d made a new best friend. She’d found the best dry cleaner’s. She’d met very important writers from The New Yorker. She got a part in a movie and took us to the first shoot. In a cavernous freight elevator she whispered, “You’re my protection in case he’s weird.” My sister and I sat on the studio floor, which was painted black and scuffed with shoe prints, and I held on to the strand of our mother’s voice coming from over there.
“Come on, children, quickly!” she called, and we trotted over to the lights. “This scene needs two little girls in it, and guess who gets to be the two little girls?” On the way home she told the taxi driver we were actresses.
She took us to see the movie when it came out, but she wasn’t in it. “I ended up on the cutting room floor,” she said. “As it were.” We weren’t in it either.
She came through the front door one afternoon and said, “Children, I found us an apartment.” That was the end of our hotel. We moved to East Eighty-first Street. “Henry Fonda lives next door,” she told the baby-sitter. “Lillian Hellman is across the street.” Penelope and I galloped in the living room, hysterical with space. Our mother leaned in the doorway, laughing. “This will all end in tears.” She liked to say that. She made friends in the elevator with a divorced woman from upstairs. “Amanda’s super. She’s my best friend.” Our apartment had three bedrooms. “It’s expensive,” she said. “We’re poor now.” That’s why we were sleeping on mattresses on the floor. Her mother sent parcels from England, sheets she didn’t use anymore.
I turned five. We had a live-in babysitter. We had white ice skates. Our father’s parents paid for the pediatrician and private school. We went with our mother to the hairdresser, waiting for our turns after hers. The fridge held smoked salmon and Perrier bottles. At suppertime the buzzer rang, and our mother clutched the phone between ear and shoulder as she angled money from her bag. My sister and I paid the delivery boy and took the sandwiches to the kitchen. Our mother liked prosciutto, watercress and butter on black bread, and we arranged it on a plate. We carried the plates to her and ate on her bed.
The pink hat was in her closet. When she got it down for us she’d tell about her wedding. It wasn’t a wedding like everybody else had. She eloped. She was proud of her pink suit, how it made her look old when she was sixteen. She said, “I had to forge my parents’ signatures,” and explained what “forge” meant. She said she’d show me one day how easy it was. Her sister’s telegram had arrived too late: “Whatever you do, don’t marry this man, I beg you.” The warning note tolled early. Our aunt Irene was the authority because she’d had a love affair with Nat when our mother was still a little girl. “I thought he was just like Heathcliff,” my mother said, saying her sister’s affair lasted for five years, enough time for her to grow up. “Then,” she said, “he made me fall in love with him.” Nat, ten years older than my teenage mother, sent an enormous box of chocolates to her boarding school, where she’d lived since she was eight. “How big?” we asked. “Like this, like this,” and she widened her arms. She stayed up half the night, treating the other girls. “I wanted them to like me,” she said. For that night she was the star. The box came with its own map and a set of gold tongs, which I could feel between my fingers as she described using it to pick up each wonderful chocolate.
She was a bad girl at school, always trying to run away, dropping bedsheets out the dormitory window. One day Nat came, pretended to be family, and they left. They didn’t have a first date, she told me. He took her to his flat in London, where they necked on the couch. He put his hand under her skirt and pulled her underpants down and left them on the floor.
She wanted to go, but he said, “Don’t you know, Daphne?” She imitated his sternest voice. “You must never let a man remove your knickers unless you intend to sleep with him.”
“So I did,” she said. “You see how naive I was?”
“You see how naive she was?” I told my classmates. They didn’t tell the stories of how their mothers lost their virginities. I knew how to make them listen.
As Sullivan Street dropped away from our real life my mother told me my father had had affairs. “He left me alone with a brand-new baby, and I was terrified.” We looked in the first album, and she pointed to photos of her with a baby propped up in a wash-tub. She said, “I thought you would break.”