The apartment had a bay window that looked out on a very small backyard where two hummingbirds liked to spend time. A Meyer lemon tree stood in the corner, which I had real trouble comprehending. Even more incomprehensible: I’d find minuscule strawberries sprouting in the grass come summer.
There were so many things to be stunned by. Pleased by. Students who were less volatile, hostile, and sullen than the ones in New York. Foghorns at night instead of truck horns coming from the BQE; seagulls everywhere instead of pigeons. The smell of eucalyptus in Golden Gate Park, where I could bike without worrying about getting picked off by a truck or rage-fueled cyclists. I hadn’t been on a bike since college. The smell of jasmine coming through my windows. Avocados and figs at the farmer’s market, driven there not flown there, lying there in unassuming piles, as unremarkable in their number as apples in the fall back East. The red rocks of Corona Heights Park, so high above the city you might have been Jesus looking down on Rio, and the coyote I saw there early one morning, sitting on a patch of red dirt while the wind ruffled the hair on its very straight back, its ears at attention, gazing out at all the buildings.
The unmarked tech buses that floated down Divisadero in the morning, their cargo shrouded, offensively, behind black smoked glass, were a sinister reminder of the forces that ran the town. Had ruined the town? Pockets of it appeared to have resisted a certain amount of change. On weekend afternoons, on more than a few blocks, the sunlight slashing across the buildings seemed to be making the only sound, and neon signs that had been floating in the night for decades watched over more corners than they might have in New York. The money had not leveled the mountains in the middle of the city, or filled in the canyon, or dried up Ocean Beach. But it wasn’t my place to mourn what I’d never met, and I wanted to enjoy what the money had not yet erased. It felt good to move to a city that might have lost much of what people liked to call its character well before I arrived; felt good, almost blissful, to not have intimately known what had been replaced by a Starbucks or a T-Mobile or a quasi-luxury high-rise. To live in the middle of a convergence of several neighborhoods, which arranged it so that technically I belonged to none and could not be held responsible for ruining any of them. It had been weighing on me more than I thought I could acknowledge, having watched New York welcome more and more overt and closet suburbanites, more and more well-adjusted, cheerful young people moving there to drink and have sex and make money before they woke up and suddenly realized they needed a driveway and babies after all, in Montclair, or wherever else their money could take them, like Asheville, if they thought that taking photos with an expensive camera for their food blog meant they were creative. I knew it made you some kind of jerk to complain about watching the city betray you unless you were willing to sit in a community board meeting shouting at your neighbors, but I had never been able to show my love for New York that way. For better or for worse.
New York, where the rusted trails of water running down the subway tiles on the D platform of the Atlantic Avenue stop had become as familiar and as reassuring to me as the wrinkles on my mother’s hands had been in childhood.
New York? said the woman who’d sat down next to me on the first morning of faculty orientation, in the middle of the din caused by adults who were out-of-their-minds excited to see each other after months apart. The two of us, seated in folding chairs, introducing ourselves as we waited for the head of school to give her morning remarks.
Well, you definitely look it, she said.
Is it the black?
Yes, but also there’s something that says Outta my way, bitches.
I laughed. Should I throw a zip-up fleece over this? Would that help?
She laughed. Please don’t.
So what are these girls like? I said.
She shrugged. Their mothers are always looking at your ring finger.
I looked at hers. No rings. I held up my hand to show her—empty, too!—and she smiled. Lina. An upper-school Spanish teacher four years younger than me. Her parents had been born in the Philippines; she’d been born in Arizona. She, too, had fled New York—a divorce—and had lived in San Francisco for ten years. She used to be a copywriter who quit making money to make a difference teaching and then quit teaching public school so she could work in buildings that had heat. She loved her parents and her sisters, and I became her friend for the way she loved them: exuberant complaint and anecdote.
If I hadn’t met Lina, I would have never set foot in the bars, one in my neighborhood and one in hers, that looked like the ones we’d spent our twenties in—dark recesses, paneled in wood, booths upholstered in weathered red vinyl, Replacements on the jukebox, Red Stripe for six dollars a bottle. If someone showed you a photograph of the corners we drank on, you might say Was this taken twenty years ago? They tended to be occupied by men not too much older than we were, but grayer than we were, men still fixated on this band or that band, this director or that director. A cliché women could never inhabit, I sometimes imagined, because estrogen was protective against a certain amount of waxing pedantic and obsessive past everyone’s point of caring—the culture’s, your companion’s. A date that she and I both ended up on, however, more than a few times, courtesy of the algorithms being hammered out in a Mordor blocks away.
If I were still talking to Rose I might have sent her a postcard saying Greetings from 1994. I was still talking to Rose, though. In my head. I’m sorry, I said. And I’m sorry. Those two words a place to hide until I knew whether I really meant them. Birds in search of branches.
In one of those bars Lina told me about her habit of collecting what she called alternative narratives. Meaning: in her twenties, when she started working, she kept a mental scrapbook where she filed away all the real-life examples she came across of women who didn’t have children and took notes on the cast of their faces. The data resisted her attempts to glean a definitive conclusion—some faces looked brighter, she said, some looked bitter, but it was hard to say which side was winning. I think I drifted into my alternative narrative, to be honest, she said, but I’m totally happy to sit here drinking my shit white wine at the crossroads of defiance and ambivalence.
She invited me to join a book club—another thing I would never have done in New York—and I was welcomed into a group of women who, she said, had experienced a similar drift. I threw us dinner parties and they brought their husbands and girlfriends and often stayed until one in the morning talking.
And now I think having a best friend is something you only need when you’re a teenager, I heard one of the women say, as I made the rounds with a bottle of wine.
Most days I could agree with this statement. Most days I was glad to be free of all attachments. I wasn’t lonely, but I could grow a little bored. I didn’t care—that was the price I was willing to pay for not being responsible for anyone’s happiness but my own, and for not burdening another person with my own demands for the same. For living this near an ocean that shone bluer and brighter than the gray-green one I’d been raised in. For the city’s quiet, and a solitude that let my psyche grow so still I could look all the way down to the bottom of that dark well, further than I’d ever been able to in New York, and see, not with dread but with a clear, cold sadness, just how much fear had been the spring feeding all my mistakes. I might have needed to be this alone, I told myself, to decide who I wanted to be next.
On other days the quiet that descended so abruptly at dark was unsettling, and all that solitude left me feeling exposed and a little wild of mind. There was no one to tell the smallest, stupidest things to, or the biggest, most haunting things to, no husband, no Rose, no mirror, no amp, no way to tell what I looked like or sounded like or what shape I really took, and when I opened my mouth to talk to all the strangers I now had the pleasure of meeting, I sometimes spoke louder than usual in order to have the pleasure of feeling myself substantiated. The strangers didn’t notice, and if they did think something seemed off, and I sometimes thought they did, what could they say? We were strangers.
On those days I took the bus down to Ocean Beach to walk around the ruins of the Sutro Baths and stare out at the water, trying not to feel too bad about needing that much of the sublime that regularly, or too guilty for being able to access it that regularly. The second-guessing of my needs and desires had started to bore me, too.
At the baths one afternoon a woman and I struck up a conversation because I’d wanted to talk to her Siberian husky, and she told me that one of the sea walls at Ocean Beach consisted of headstones that had been swept out of a cemetery when the city decided to develop the land the bodies slept in. She said the cemetery had fallen into disrepair because San Francisco was made up of people who’d cut ties in order to come out West, and those bodies had no one to keep their graves presentable, or send up a hue and cry, her words, when the city scooped up all those bones and stones and dumped them by the water.
Although, said the woman, as her dog barked and seagulls circled, I’ve never thought it was such a bad idea, being that unsentimental about your dead.