City | Thornfield Hall

“If I have my books and records, I’ll be all right.” I said with a lopsided smile. I was telling the optimistic side of the story. The pessimistic version was that I cried every night because I couldn’t sleep. In photos the right side of my mouth smiled higher than the left. I tried to look “perky,” because people like “perky.” For a long time I was known as a “bubbly blonde,“ but the bubble burst when I fell into genteel poverty.

Everything will be all right, I chanted as I prepared to leave the place that felt like home. I had no wish to leave. I loved our apartment above a bookstore, the breakfast place across the railroad tracks, and the farmer’s market where we found fresh rhubarb, blackberries, and kale. There was always much to do: we went to the film series at the coffeehouse, ate biscuits and gravy at Noel’s, rode our bikes and hiked in the beautiful state parks.

But would everything be all right when I moved to the city? I made $1,900 a year in the small town and throve. If I were frugal, the new better-paying job in the city might pay my expenses for 10 months of the year. The prospect of taking a second job to eke out a living filled me with gloom.

I’ll be all right, I told everybody.. Yet in a corner of my mind I wondered, Is a professional job so great?

“Couldn’t you go on for a Ph.D. so you can stay here?” one savvy friend asked. She was, I believe, in her tenth year of writing her dissertation.

“Oh, no. I’ve gone to school all my life. Time to get a real job,” I said, smiling.

Sometimes decisions don’t feel like decisions. They become your fate.

As Dylan says: “But don’t think twice, it’s all right.”

That summer my hair inexplicably turned from blond to brown. Is that the equivalent of your hair turning gray overnight?

I remember a time when it was not all right.

I was living with my dad, who, shortly before my 16th birthday, moved in with a woman he was dating. She lived in a very small run-down town, where most of the stores had closed (I’m not even sure there was a grocery store), and people commuted to nearby towns.

Long story short: I didn’t move in with them. They weren’t monsters, but my friends, my school, my whole life were in my hometown. And after a weekend visit to Dad’s new digs, I was horrified by the culture. A boy actually drove a tractor around and around the block because he had a crush on Dad’s girlfriend’s daughter. I was so embarrassed. Ye gods! I felt like Margaret Mead taking notes on a different culture.

And so we parted ways.

Do not imagine that I was homeless. I lived with some good, generous people for a while, then I moved into a bad situation, the less said, the better. One night, I went to the Women’s Center and asked if I could spend the night there. Sure, sure, said the kind young woman who, I think, was the director or the manager. But the narrow room upstairs was bare and uninviting, its furnishings consisting of a second-hand bed and a chest of drawers, nothing else. In the kitchen there was a toaster, a coffee pot, and a refrigerator. It was clearly not a permanent space for living; it was for people passing through. I had thought I might be able to stay there if I did menial work, cleaning, in return for room and board. But I didn’t ask once I saw what the situation was.

Later, I had a similar feeling about the discomfort of hostels. One night, when I was looking for housing in a faraway city, I stayed in a women’s hostel. The door was kept unlocked – and though the neighborhood looked all right, the open-door policy made me nervous. Around midnight, a group of women arrived and conversed till all hours. We all shared one room, and I couldn’t get back to sleep.

I’m a Room-of-One’s-Own sort. And I have always managed to have that room, with the exception of this night at the hostel.

During what I call “my year abroad,” i.e., my year in the big city, I read a lot of Jane Austen. What else does a single woman do? (Or a married one?)

And then, just as it happens in Jane Austen’s books, the man I loved proposed to me. Was he Darcy, or was he Captain Wentworth? I believe he is Captain Wentworth, but I’ll have to ask him…

And so everything was all right, as I had said it would be.

What do we mean by neighborhood?

I love dictionaries, not for definitions but for sample phrases and sentences: a fashionable neighborhood; to move to a nicer neighborhood; located in the neighborhood of Jackson and Vine Streets; the whole neighborhood was there.

We lived for several years in a “nice” but unfashionable neighborhood. It bordered on the edge of an obscenely wealthy neighborhood, dotted with mansions and big estates, and a crime-ridden neighborhood where shopkeepers paid for “protection.”

And, yes, I admit it, my happiest years were spent in that big, rambling, shabby apartment in an urban neighborhood. I worked at home, at a desk in the dining room. I typed fiendishly day and night, always just ahead of deadlines, and rushing into the living room to answer the phone. “Smith,” I would say briskly, as if I were in some horrible office. Well, my name isn’t Smith, but you get the gist. As if anybody thought I worked in an office! So funny, looking back. And I took my lunch break walking around a beautiful nearby park. It was heaven in the city!

Despite my indifference to home-making and decorating, I loved the apartment, especially the layout. You walked into a foyer, where we dropped the mail on my grandmother’s buffet. Our living room was under-furnished but cozy: two “reading” couches, one for Captain Nemo and one for me, where we spent whole weekends sprawling with our books and newspapers. There wasn’t a coffee table, but we had several tables, intended for the dining room, I suppose, but we used them to pile up our stuff: an enormous mahogany thing which would seat 12 people; a 1960s blond wood table with folding leaves; a carved oak table that had belonged to my husband’s great-uncle (which wouldn’t fit in his dining room, and took up half our living room); and a rickety formica kitchen table. A copy of Interview with the Vampire propped up the air conditioner in the window.

The neighborhood was convenient for transportation, with three different bus lines, and we took advantage of it. I will never forget the middle-aged Black gentleman who used to “escort” the “ladies” onto the bus. I always giggled when he took my arm and guided me up the steps. Nowadays, someone would slap a sexual harassment suit on him, but, heavens, he only took our elbows!

What happened to my favorite neighborhood was sudden. The landlord moved away, and the manager stopped doing repairs. Then the manager began renting apartments to people who, if not criminals, lived on the edge. Even the shops changed. At the cafe we saw a man pull a switchblade out of his sock. We did not wait to see what happened, but hustled out the back door. The manager rented the apartment across the hall to a prostitute, whose drunken customers banged on her door at all hours. Then our apartment was burgled. The burglar didn’t want our tables, or our books, or our typewriters. No, he she took the VCR and a pack of Royal Lunch Crackers.

In the next year, everybody moved out of the building. First, the old ladies. The most elegant, Gwendolyn Rose, had lived in the same apartment for 20 years, and had paid for the wallpaper and expensive tiled floors. “No, I can’t bear to see what they’re doing to the place,” she said sadly. Then the chatty old lady who had mysteries delivered to her from the library moved to a nursing home. She was very emotional about embarking on what she knew was the last move of her life.

And then my friends, “professionals” of roughly my age, began to leave. All of us were sad, because we loved our home. Most found condos or apartments in the neighborhood. We could have done that, too, but listened to our richer friends who thought it was absurd not to live in a house. “Everybody passes through that neighborhood, but then they move!” they told us.

Well, we have lived in some great neighborhoods and some terrible ones. The suburbs can be more crime-ridden than the cities, though people don’t admit this. A policeman told me it was dangerous to wait at the bus stop because there were suburban gangs and a LOT of drugs. (Yes, I was terrified by the people in the shelter, smoking what was definitely NOT marijuana. I waited pretty far from the shelter when I had to take the bus.) It’s best, if at all possible, to live in an urban neighborhood, where everything is within walking distance, and/or there is a choice of several buses,

Nothing can replace my charming old neighborhood, but it, alas, became a ghost town. All the shops have closed, and the apartment houses are empty or torn down.

Very sad, and I wish we had taken photos, but who had a camera? It was somewhere, but we never used it.