surprise me. From the outside, their shared theme might appear to be self-destruction, but from where I’ve stood, what they have in common is something altogether different. I subdued hunger, overcame the animal self’s blind instinct for self-preservation, in search of a perfect silence.
18
Our apartment in Charlottesville took up half of a nondescript, ranch-style brick duplex in a small, characterless neighborhood hemmed in by commercial strips, professional offices, and an apartment complex. The kind of neighborhood occupied by recently divorced single mothers, and struggling young couples, and low-level-management bachelors edging into their forties and eating half-frozen TV dinners over the sink. And us, of course.
Our apartment had two dark bedrooms, a cramped bathroom, and a living-dining room opening into a kitchen. Electric-blue industrial-grade carpeting glued to the living room floor suggested the transience of so many tenant feet coming and going, short-timers too briefly in residence to care for comfort. The walls were covered in a paint textured with vicious little nubbins.
The worst thing about our apartment, however, was the suffocating feeling of confinement, of being reduced to a cramped space and a scrubby backyard imprisoned by chain-link fencing. It made me restless and claustrophobic. It was depressing. It wasn’t home.
It was, on the other hand, an adventure. I lived in an apartment —so sophisticatedly urban. I didn’t know anyone who lived in an apartment. I imagined we might have wacky neighbors and comic sitcom adventures in the manner of Mary Tyler Moore and her spun-off former neighbor, Rhoda. I could ride a bus to school, a proposition so Middle American that it sounded positively exotic. My sister and I could walk—walk!—to the Safeway just up the road. In the midst of my self-imposed starvation a grocery store was like pornography: so desirable, so forbidden.
We left virtually all our furniture out at our other house, which we continued to think of for a while yet as our real house, and my parents hammered together the trappings of domesticity in square-edged lumber: a sofa, and platform beds of particleboard resting on square two-by-four frames, topped with foam pads. I liked the novelty of sleeping only inches off the floor. I thought it was hip and chic and unconventional, very hippie vans and Haight-Ashbury. We even slept under sleeping bags.
That our parents had moved us to Charlottesville with the primary intention of wresting my sister and me from the oppressive attention of too many bored teenage boys was never discussed. That was the subject that dared not breathe its uncomfortable name—a La Brea Tar Pit of awkwardness all of us preferred not to blunder into.
“But why are we moving to Charlottesville?” I’d demanded, attempting to exploit this avoidance of the obvious answer to my advantage. As though if my parents couldn’t come up with a good enough explanation, the whole plan might be scrapped. Why do children ever bother to mount such negotiations?
“You’ll be close to school,” said my mother. “You can be in plays, and your sister can play on the soccer team.”
It was irritatingly difficult to argue against that logic. The long drive to Charlottesville had always been the bane of our extracurricular lives, the reason why we couldn’t join Brownie troops or even attend birthday parties without planning as if for a military campaign.
Nevertheless, I burned with ill-concealed resentment at this move, which I considered to have been dreamed up if not quite for the sole purpose of making me unhappy, then at least in complete disregard of my feelings. I’d waited the whole summer in maddened impatience to get back to Virginia—back, plain and simple, to the boys. Life had gotten stupefyingly boring the minute they left school in the spring. I wrote some of them ten- and fifteen-page letters, the romantic inaccuracies of my memory of them growing
18
Our apartment in Charlottesville took up half of a nondescript, ranch-style brick duplex in a small, characterless neighborhood hemmed in by commercial strips, professional offices, and an apartment complex. The kind of neighborhood occupied by recently divorced single mothers, and struggling young couples, and low-level-management bachelors edging into their forties and eating half-frozen TV dinners over the sink. And us, of course.
Our apartment had two dark bedrooms, a cramped bathroom, and a living-dining room opening into a kitchen. Electric-blue industrial-grade carpeting glued to the living room floor suggested the transience of so many tenant feet coming and going, short-timers too briefly in residence to care for comfort. The walls were covered in a paint textured with vicious little nubbins.
The worst thing about our apartment, however, was the suffocating feeling of confinement, of being reduced to a cramped space and a scrubby backyard imprisoned by chain-link fencing. It made me restless and claustrophobic. It was depressing. It wasn’t home.
It was, on the other hand, an adventure. I lived in an apartment —so sophisticatedly urban. I didn’t know anyone who lived in an apartment. I imagined we might have wacky neighbors and comic sitcom adventures in the manner of Mary Tyler Moore and her spun-off former neighbor, Rhoda. I could ride a bus to school, a proposition so Middle American that it sounded positively exotic. My sister and I could walk—walk!—to the Safeway just up the road. In the midst of my self-imposed starvation a grocery store was like pornography: so desirable, so forbidden.
We left virtually all our furniture out at our other house, which we continued to think of for a while yet as our real house, and my parents hammered together the trappings of domesticity in square-edged lumber: a sofa, and platform beds of particleboard resting on square two-by-four frames, topped with foam pads. I liked the novelty of sleeping only inches off the floor. I thought it was hip and chic and unconventional, very hippie vans and Haight-Ashbury. We even slept under sleeping bags.
That our parents had moved us to Charlottesville with the primary intention of wresting my sister and me from the oppressive attention of too many bored teenage boys was never discussed. That was the subject that dared not breathe its uncomfortable name—a La Brea Tar Pit of awkwardness all of us preferred not to blunder into.
“But why are we moving to Charlottesville?” I’d demanded, attempting to exploit this avoidance of the obvious answer to my advantage. As though if my parents couldn’t come up with a good enough explanation, the whole plan might be scrapped. Why do children ever bother to mount such negotiations?
“You’ll be close to school,” said my mother. “You can be in plays, and your sister can play on the soccer team.”
It was irritatingly difficult to argue against that logic. The long drive to Charlottesville had always been the bane of our extracurricular lives, the reason why we couldn’t join Brownie troops or even attend birthday parties without planning as if for a military campaign.
Nevertheless, I burned with ill-concealed resentment at this move, which I considered to have been dreamed up if not quite for the sole purpose of making me unhappy, then at least in complete disregard of my feelings. I’d waited the whole summer in maddened impatience to get back to Virginia—back, plain and simple, to the boys. Life had gotten stupefyingly boring the minute they left school in the spring. I wrote some of them ten- and fifteen-page letters, the romantic inaccuracies of my memory of them growing
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