From Somewhere

Tova Mirvis

 

THIS CITY WASN’T supposed to be mine. As a child, faced with the prospect of my family moving from Memphis to Boston, I tore up my Red Sox baseball cards in protest. Is Carl Yastrzemski a good player? I asked my brother, and upon discovering who he was, took extra pleasure in ripping that card in half. At a restaurant, I ordered the Boston cream pie—“hold the Boston.” “I AM NOT MOVING TO BOSTON,” I wrote on page after page in my diary.

Boston was a world away from the city where I was deeply rooted, where my family had lived for five generations, in a thicket of more relatives than I could identify and a close (sometimes overly close) community where I was identifiable not just by my name but by who my grandparents or great-grandparents were. “I can’t imagine living anywhere else,” my grandmother once said to me in her Southern drawl, as she sat in the living room of the house she had lived in for more than forty years—for her Memphis wasn’t a place she happened to live, but something visceral, entrenched, necessary to who she was.

To be from a place: for a Southerner, this was the crucial thing. Not where your house was, not where you happened to live, but some core element of who you were. To be from a place: this implied an almost metaphysical connection to this one spot of earth, which was indelible, regardless of where you lived the longest. To be from Memphis—this didn’t mean to have lived there for years but to have had a parent or a grandparent who was born there. My father, it has long been said in my family, is not from Memphis, even though he has lived there for forty years. Ultimately he turned down the job offer in Boston, and others, too, which would have taken us to Chicago or Indianapolis, electing to stay in a city where this appellation—not from here—is correct. Despite the number of years my father has lived there, he feels not part of this place, not at home in a city that feels like a town, that feels small and closed, and decidedly not his own.

Once I got over that early horror at the prospect of moving away from Memphis, I too longed for cosmopolitan, intellectual, arty urban spaces. “There’s nothing to do here,” my friends and I complained, imagining that other cities offered endless options for bored, restless teenagers. I left to go to college in New York City and knew that I probably wouldn’t live in Memphis again. But unlike my father, I still believed that nowhere else would define who I was in the world. To be from somewhere—it didn’t mean that you loved the place, or even liked it; to be from somewhere meant that the city was entrenched in your identity—like family we are born into, not friends we choose on our own.

I was right that I wouldn’t again live there, and right, too, that Memphis—even just the word—would always evoke what it means to be rooted, to feel connected and necessary and whole. “How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home,” said William Faulkner, who captured more than anyone the Southern sense of place. More than twenty years since I have lived in Memphis, and the hottest, stickiest of days, in any city, when the air feels thick enough to swim through, makes me feel as if I am there. Any mention of the Mississippi and my mind turns to that muddy river with its sense of both history and myth that wends its way past the small, almost miniature downtown skyline. The sound of a Southern accent instantly carries me home: “Where are you from?” I feel compelled to ask strangers when I hear that slow lilt, wanting to tell them that even though they hear no trace of it in my voice, I too am from somewhere nearby.

But New York—the Upper West Side of Manhattan more specifically—this was the city of my choosing. I went to college there, then graduate school, but was certainly not from here, never rooted, always transient. I finished school and stayed, still feeling as though I were on some kind of long-term student schedule, on an emotional visa that let me stay as long as I liked without ever becoming a resident. I carried a Tennessee driver’s license for ten years after I stopped living there and only gave it up when it was pickpocketed from my bag on the streets of the city. In Manhattan, it didn’t matter. I didn’t need a license. I had no need for a car; you needed to rent a car only when you intended to leave the city, which I could go months without doing. On this island of strangers, I was happy to be stranded. The tight-knit community in which I grew up was nowhere around me; I loved living among the fellow-unrooted, where to buy curtains was too big a commitment because we didn’t know for how long we would be living in that apartment. And there was no need anyway for curtains; we saw our neighbors, they saw us, all of us participating in a shared intimate anonymity that only urban living can create.

I was newly married, then a young mother with a baby I walked to sleep on the streets of the city. That baby became a little boy who studied bus maps at the age of four. For entertainment, I took him on the crosstown bus where he happily told strangers how to get from any one location to another. He played T-ball in the living room of our apartment; a home run was hitting the wood of the china cabinet. Once, when visiting my parents in Memphis, he looked at the grass and asked if he was allowed to walk on it. We had another child, whom I strapped to myself as I pushed his brother in the stroller to school through rain, through snow. I was not going to move; not ever. One by one our friends with kids peeled away to the suburbs. I was still not going to move. Our apartment grew smaller. The city was too expensive. And there were other problems: a husband’s job that required him to be in his office at all hours, a growing feeling of something not right and the strain of trying not to know that. We had to move, but where? We ruled out large swaths of the New York area. Any place felt random: a town in New Jersey—why there?

Boston started to creep into the conversation. This was the city my husband was from, the city he loved, the city where his family lived. He was tired of being a Red Sox lover among Yankees fans, tired of feeling emotionally oriented a four-hour drive to the north. He loved the Boston architecture, loved the intangible qualities that make a city itself. More than anything, he wanted to feel at home. After thirteen years in New York City, I too was ready to again feel a sense of permanence. I agreed. If not Manhattan, I thought, then anywhere else.

We strapped the kids into the back of a Volvo station wagon, our first car, and drove to the blue-shuttered, white Cape we’d bought in Newton. We would have a yard. Our sons would play in Little League, and not in the living room. Most of all, we would create the sense that we, together, were from somewhere. I watched how at home my husband felt here, and I hoped for vicarious belonging, a Bostonian by marriage. “What brought you to Boston?” people asked, and I would say we moved because my husband is from here, because he loves Boston, and I, a writer with a transportable career and no other place I wanted to live, could go anywhere.

All these good intentions, yet it caught me off-guard how foreign Boston was, how decidedly not-from-here I felt. I spent my first few months going back and forth to New York. “How often do you go into the city?” someone here asked me, and I said about once a month—until I realized she meant Boston, not New York, which for me was still and always the city. Still feeling like that kid who’d asked the waitress to hold the Boston, I secretly rooted for New York sports teams, purposefully read the Times, not the Globe. Having grown up in a city where a few flurries was enough to shut down the place, I chafed at the endless snow, marveled that you were expected to drive in all that. I took little advantage of Boston the city, spending my days sealed inside my car on suburban streets, shuttling kids to schools, missing the way that in the city I had walked everywhere, meeting friends and neighbors along the way. Now if I passed anyone I knew, it was at forty miles an hour, with little hope of recognition, let alone connection.

More than anything, driving was how I knew I was not from here. Bostonians were a different breed of driver than the deferent Memphians I knew, where the only time you honked was when you were passing a friend and wanted to say hello. Here, there is no mercy for the tentative driver. What am I doing here, I asked myself again and again. I had foolishly decided not to buy a GPS, so I studied the maps, trying to take hold of the city in my mind, to grasp its turns before I set out in the car.

Months passed, and years. I made some friends, found things to like about living here. But still, I knew that this would never be where I was from. One day, I thought, we would move, not back to Manhattan or Memphis but to some other place where I would feel less of this sense of dislocation. Before we moved here, we had agreed that if I didn’t like it after three years or four, we would leave, though that promise was quickly lost amid the realities of jobs and mortgages and children. I begrudgingly learned to shovel snow and drive over snowbanks at the foot of the driveway. I feigned good feelings toward the sports teams, though I quietly hoped for playoff losses so the kids would go to bed on time. The highways were still the stuff of my nightmares—I was terrified of making a wrong turn and somehow ending up on some bridge that would take me to some unknown highway, with no exits and no way back.

After almost nine years of living here, we got divorced—this in its own way is to be from nowhere, cut off from your own past, every day unrecognizable, as you search out the most basic of landmarks. Gone is the idea that you know where you are going, that you know who your friends are, that you know who you are. To get divorced is to feel entirely lost on streets that you could once navigate with your eyes closed. The past feels cut off, across a divide, barely visible behind you.

“Why did you move here?” I am asked now from time to time, and I stumble over the answer. Why exactly did I, I ask myself. What if we hadn’t moved here, I sometimes wonder; how would this, all of this, be different? “Because my ex-husband is from here” makes for a drawn-out story, and a less than compelling reason, as though I’m some kind of stranded shipwreckee. In this city of history, my own personal history feels fractured. “Are you going to stay in Boston?” a few people asked soon after the divorce—people who clearly know little about custody law. Now there is no choice about Boston; like it or not, this is where I will be living for many years to come.

But even if I could realistically entertain the idea of moving away from Boston, I’ve found, to my surprise, that I no longer want to leave. Absent any other connection, absent the feeling that the city belongs to someone else, not me, I’ve come to see Boston in a new way. I have, however ironically and belatedly, started to feel at home. It’s not the at-home kind of feeling that my children have here, they who are emblazoned with Boston logos, who root for Bruins, Sox, and Celtics with the undivided passion of fans who know from where they come. (My children, it occurs to me sometimes, will never be Memphians—their connection to that city is only as a vacation venue where they visit their grandparents.) Nor is my belated notion of home anything like that deep-seated sense that my grandmother expressed, that where you live is where you must live.

Instead, it’s the happenstance at-home feeling of a transplant—which is perhaps the most fitting way to feel in this college town and immigrant hub, a city of people who are from elsewhere, who live with a backward glance toward other homes where they no longer live. How many of these people came for one reason—for school, a job, a fellowship—and have stayed long after that reason has disappeared? How many of these people here have found that Boston is a city in which you can always find another reason to be here, in which you can always start again?

To be from somewhere else is to know that things change, that connections are broken, that people move on and away. It is to shed the idea that what is now will always be so, that life can only be lived one way in one place. We all leave home sooner or later, all leave the idea of home as well. Living here still has an accidental feel, yet life itself has an accidental feel. It feels less important to be from somewhere; more important just to be somewhere.

In the past year or two, I’ve lost my fear of Boston driving, finally quieted that voice in my head that seeks an easier, alternate route, that whispers I can’t go there. The city and its surroundings have opened up. There are endless places to go and I feel newly determined to explore them, as though I were arriving wide-eyed in the city for the first time. I came to accept the inevitability of getting lost (which I am able to do even with my phone offering its sage advice). There is an odd pleasure in not knowing exactly where I am. Even after living here for ten years, few places feel cast with immense familiarity. It is easy to continually see this city anew.

A wrong turn, trying to get to the Boston Common to take my daughter on the swan boats, and somehow we are across the Charles from where we intended to be, and yet the consolation prize is to pass the domes of MIT and gaze at the white sails of boats against a bright blue sky, shimmering silver buildings in the distance. Keep driving, in varied direction, through the streets of downtown where history beats so loudly, past the Boston Public Library, in this city of writers and artists, past Trinity Church, which looks like it belongs more in some fabled fairy tale of castles and witch houses than in the middle of a modern busy city. On an early-summer day, drive past the Esplanade, where it seems the entire city is walking, because why would you be anywhere else—anywhere except for one of the kayaks or sailboats passing by, which remind you that you, too, could be spending your day doing this. Keep driving, and everywhere there is an abundance of students and colleges, fooling you into thinking that you are still this young, unencumbered age. Drive farther out until you reach Walden Pond; walking around it, you discover a small swimming spot where you can slip into the water and it seems you are the only one there. Drive south on I-95 and the sand-duned beaches of the Cape await. Behind a small gallery off 6A, take a mazelike walk through a salt marsh, across a shaky wooden bridge and amid stalks of grass taller than I am, over ground dotted with colored glass stones and metal sculptures that hang from trees as though, in this magical space, it’s entirely possible they grew there naturally. Drive west on the Pike and the city skyline gives way to the rise of mountains, a reminder that the abundance of tall buildings and the crowds of people are only one part of this larger place in which we live. Closer to home, Crystal Lake, where swimmers reportedly cross in the dark of night even though it’s prohibited, and the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, around 6 p.m. on a summer evening, where everyone, it seems, is fleet-footed and you believe momentarily that you too can run swiftly, endlessly.

For me, Boston is a city in which there is no grid, in which there is no clear pathway but an abundance of windy streets that change names and become one way, and lanes disappear as you drive down them. It is a city that reminds me we don’t end up where we thought we would; we don’t live only where we belong. We don’t always follow the paths that are laid out for us; we don’t arrive where we once were intended to go.