Rose and I moved to New York to be motherless. We moved to New York to want undisturbed and unchecked.
And what did we want? We wanted to be seen as an overpoweringly singular instance of late-twentieth-century womanhood. We wanted fan mail. We wanted to be worshipped. We wanted lives full of purpose and free of regret. True daughters of the second wave, we were counting on work to get us there. We thought that if we worked hard enough we would one day, and on time, stand exactly where we hoped.
But we were neither selfish enough nor selfless enough to become heroines. And even though she and I are no longer speaking, it makes me happy to think and write of that we.
Once, on my twenty-sixth birthday, we ran out on the bill at a very expensive restaurant. When I realized that our waiter’s shift had finished and our table in the corner had been forgotten in the Friday-night frenzy, I said Let’s make a run for it, and we stood up from our chairs and walked out. All the while looking at all the handsome, burnished people with money, looking at them as if they were rings in a jewelry case, as if they were lives or faces we might buy for ourselves one day, realizing that maturity, too, was its own kind of money, and yet still feeling reckless and regal, because we were free and no one could buy us.
Another time: the two of us, riding the Staten Island Ferry for no other reason than it was unseasonably warm in March, meeting two elderly women with winking eyes and fanny packs, one with a cane and one wearing a sun visor, who said, as we sped away from Manhattan, white waves pounding behind us, waves as white as their hair, You two must be sisters, the way you’re laughing.
One night, at a friend’s bewilderingly ostentatious wedding, we charmed the bartender into giving us each a bottle of Veuve Clicquot as revenge on such ostentation, and we ran out of there with coats flying behind us—coats we’d bought for fifteen dollars each on the street in the West Village, castoffs from the lives of long-dead old ladies—clutching those green bottles to our chests as we hopped into a cab. New York: getaway cars everywhere, whenever you needed one.
On yet another night, summer, at a birthday party, we danced ourselves into cramps so painful we walked barefoot out onto the sidewalk, shoes crammed into our handbags, and hobbled one block to a Duane Reade where we bought flip-flops and then hobbled another five blocks to the subway. Let’s get old in exactly this way, I said, as we clutched at each other’s arms and crept toward the entrance to the R train.
Rose and I, true daughters of Long Island and New Jersey, loved a diner: it was democracy in action. We were sitting in a booth at the Red Flame, a diner we loved on Forty-Fourth Street, a diner that’s still around, and a family of French tourists, who had been sitting a few tables away from us, wearing trim down jackets, eating what looked to be shrimp scampi, sent a bottle of white wine over because they’d heard us arguing over Godard. Rose was trying to tell me why I should hate him and I was trying to explain why his misogyny didn’t bother me. You could have those kinds of conversations back then. We drank the whole bottle with our grilled cheese-and-tomato sandwiches and fries and declared that we’d had way worse at book parties.
When the Red Flame goes out, Rose used to say, we’re leaving New York.
One night we left work too late to see a band in the East Village, and I remember Rose saying Well, we missed it. We missed U2 at Red Rocks, we missed Billie Holiday at the Blue Note. Napoleon, Sid Vicious, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Moses. May of ’68 and July of 1789. We missed it! All of it! I had to sit down on the sidewalk on Avenue B I was laughing so hard.
I think of that all the time: We missed it! All of it!