Elsewhere: A Memoir Part 5

"Those can be broken."

"You've hired movers. We've canceled the cable, the phone ... everything."

"Yes, but we can undo all that."

She rubbed her temples. "Can we please, please, just not talk about this?"

The apartment in Farmingdale had lasted only a year. It was too far from Waterville, as I'd known it would be, even before I saw it. We'd tried to mitigate the distance by inviting her to dinner every week or so and including her in school plays and other activities involving her granddaughters, as well as college events like the annual Carols and Lights holiday festival. Most important, we strove for continuity by reestablis.h.i.+ng our usual routines. Sat.u.r.day was for grocery shopping, just as it had been in southern Illinois, after which she and I went out to lunch, something she always looked forward to. And of course we talked on the phone during the week. Still, she made no secret of how isolated she felt in Farmingdale, mostly from me but also from Emily and Kate, who were growing up fast. Though there were a lot of women her age in the Farmingdale complex, she'd made no friends there, claiming women from Maine were provincial and clannish and dull. They cared little for politics, less for sports, nothing at all for fas.h.i.+on. They liked their seafood fried and their pastries dense. They were sluggish and self-satisfied. They gossiped incessantly about people my mother didn't know, and they weren't interested in her opinions.

So when an apartment not far from our house in Waterville came on the market, Barbara and I immediately checked it out on our own. That way, if it was a sty, there was no reason to get her hopes up. But it was lovely, half of the downstairs of a large, rambling old house, and the landlord and his wife lived just up the street. About twice the size of the cramped Farmingdale place, it had high ceilings and tall windows, a fireplace, and a nice front porch for summer sitting. Naturally it was more expensive, but we were happy to make up the difference-or would have been if we thought she'd be happy there. Lovely, you see, is in the eye of the beholder, and Barbara was shaking her head in dismay. Over the years she'd grown almost as adept as I was at seeing things through my mother's eyes, and that's what she was doing now. The fixtures in the kitchen and bath were of the same vintage as those on Helwig Street in Gloversville, and the fridge wasn't frost-free. There were outlets in the unheated utility room for a washer and dryer, which my mother, a confirmed apartment dweller, didn't own. The beautiful oak built-ins would have to be dusted. Ditto the hardwood floors. My mother much preferred wall-to-wall carpeting, since you could run a vacuum over it.

"You think she'll hate it?" I asked.

"Not immediately. Not until after we sign the lease."

Which is pretty much how it had happened. A few days later, standing in the kitchen, the landlord and his wife awaiting our decision in the living room, she'd raised all the pertinent, predictable objections. Her back wouldn't allow her to defrost a refrigerator. (That was fine, we'd get her a new one.) And she had no way to get to a laundromat. (No problem, we'd scout out a nice used washer/dryer unit.) And she hated wood floors. (A few area rugs would do the trick.) Knowing what would come next, Barbara left the room. "And of course the whole place will need a professional cleaning," she said, sotto voce, drawing her index finger across the surface of the stove. "There's a layer of grease over everything." (From the next room came the voice of the landlord's wife, "What did she say?")

So we signed a lease and later, back at our house, my mother called Gloversville to tell my aunt about her lovely new place, how much it reminded her of the Helwig Street house, and how close she'd be to us. To hear her tell it, this move was really for me. I'd grown weary of the half-hour drive to Farmingdale to take her grocery shopping. Now we could shop together in Waterville, and she'd really be part of Emily's and Kate's lives again. Her enthusiasm, I knew, was more for herself than her sister. She was giving herself one of her talkings-to, convincing herself that she was doing the right thing, that all would at last be well.

For a while things were better, but then ultimately worse. It was an old house, so the tall windows, while elegant, didn't glide up and down smoothly on their fraying ropes, and the gla.s.s panes rattled when the wind blew or a big truck rumbled by. Summers, the street was too hot and noisy to sit out on the porch, or so she claimed. Her neighbors weren't elderly, which meant they made noise. The woman in the upstairs apartment was heavy-footed and played music, and on the other side of her bedroom wall my mother could hear the tenant in the adjacent apartment-a sad young woman-weeping inconsolably over a long-lost boyfriend. I visited regularly and never heard any of this, but the house was old and full of sounds.

There were other disappointments, too, unavoidable but real. Though she was closer to us now and saw her granddaughters more regularly, they were in middle and high school and had full lives with their friends. Barbara was by then working full-time at Colby College, and I was both writing and teaching, so even though she was now three minutes away instead of thirty, she didn't see ten times as much of us; the imagined arithmetic was false, as it always seemed to be where she was concerned. And now that she wasn't in a seniors' complex anymore, when she went to the mailbox there were no other women her age to talk to, even in pa.s.sing, about the weather and who'd come down with a cold or had visitors over the weekend. When I called to check on her at the end of the day, she'd say, before h.e.l.lo, "Do you realize that yours is the first voice I've heard today that didn't come from the television?"

Then one day a bat came down the chimney, and that was that; we were off to Winslow, ten minutes away, on the other side of the Kennebec River, where I'd been tracking a small elderly housing complex, and finally our timing was right. Truthfully, we hadn't expected this apartment to work out either, but it did, largely because my mother, against all odds, had made a friend there, a woman her age, also "from away" and therefore unattached. Dot was kind and had a terrific sense of humor and also seemed to have the great reserves of patience this friends.h.i.+p would require. She had family downstate, though, and sometimes spoke about moving to be closer to them, talk that always sent my mother into a tizzy.

Dot was one of my many reasons for feeling particularly dubious about this upcoming move. I was more than willing to make the weekly drive from the coast to take my mother grocery shopping and out to lunch and wherever else she needed to go. Some weeks, if she had a doctor's appointment, I might have to make the trip twice, a strain, sure, but doable. And of course we could talk on the phone as needed. There was no guarantee she would find somebody she liked as well as Dot in her new place. But my mother believed she could read the future. If she remained in Winslow, Dot would leave, and then she'd be alone. Okay, I said, but wouldn't that be the time to move? Why not enjoy her friend for as long as she could? Because, I was given to understand, if there was the possibility of moving in the future, that would mean she was unsettled in the present. No, she'd just go. If she didn't find another friend, well, she'd do without.

"There," I said, taping the last of the boxes shut. "Done."

"You should go home," she said, offering up one of her despondent smiles. "You have responsibilities there."

"Mom. We're going to walk away from this," I reminded her. "I'll be here an hour before the movers. We let them in, and then we drive away. They're going to pack everything here and unpack it at the other end."

This new moving strategy was one I'd expected her to challenge me on. In the past she'd insisted on being present for both the loading and unloading, as if her physical presence and attention to the smallest details would prevent damage to objects that, once put in their proper and accustomed place, would reconst.i.tute her small interior world. The resulting spike in her anxiety levels in the weeks prior to a move made her impossible to live with, and naturally she'd be wiped out for weeks afterward, too tired and worn out even to eat. Over the last few years she'd become wobbly, unsteady on her feet (in need, actually, of the wall railings her new place boasted). Always managing to position herself in doorways when the movers, carrying something heavy or fragile, were trying to get through, she was a danger to both herself and them. And if anything got dirty or scuffed on the truck, she'd squeal in horror at the smudge and demand that it be cleaned then and there, before it entered the apartment, so everything came to a screeching halt. The placement of every stick of furniture was a battle in itself, and common sense was not allowed onto the battlefield. If the cable plug was on one wall, she'd invariably want her television by the opposite one, requiring the cable company to send out a technician to provide a second outlet. No feng shui enthusiast could take more seriously the arrangement of a bedroom, which had to "feel" right to her, irrespective of function. If there were only two electrical outlets in the room, you could rest a.s.sured of my mother's intention to cover them, after which another electrician would have to be hired.

I was determined to avoid all of this unnecessary angst by getting her out of the Winslow apartment the moment the movers arrived, establis.h.i.+ng her at our Camden house for the day until her things were off-loaded at the new apartment. Toward that end I'd drawn a schematic of her new place and asked her to decide where the major pieces of furniture should go, promising she wouldn't be held to any decisions and that anything could be repositioned later if need be.

"Really," I rea.s.sured her. "There's nothing for you to do. Nothing for you to worry about. Call me if anything comes up."

But I only had to look at her to know that her imagination was already running wild. What if they cut off her utilities too early? What if she couldn't reach me? What if, what if, what if?

"Would you rather come to Camden with me now?"

"Dot and I are going to the Lobster Trap. Did you forget?"

"No, I didn't forget," I a.s.sured her. "I know you've been looking forward to it. I was just offering. I'll call you tomorrow. We can talk everything through again if you'd like to. Absolutely nothing's going to go wrong."

I was halfway to the car when her door opened behind me, and I heard her calling out. "What?" I said, turning back. She was holding up the Anita Brookner. See? I forgot things. I'd forgotten that, at least. Things could go wrong.

In fact, though she didn't say so, everything was going wrong.

HER MOST RECENT MELTDOWN had been occasioned by a number of related factors that could be reduced to this: our lives were changing. Buoyed by the success of the movie Robert Benton made of my novel n.o.body's Fool and some screenplay opportunities, I'd resigned my position at Colby College to write full-time, a decision that struck my mother as both rash and dangerous. Two decades earlier she'd felt much the same way about my out-of-the-blue determination to become a novelist, an act of hubris, she thought, that threatened my stable career as an English professor. My recent successes as a writer were tangible, but to her they remained utterly baffling. She read each glowing review with genuine pride, often tearing up, and reveled in the modest regional prizes my books garnered. If she'd had the money, she no doubt would've hired contract killers to settle the score with critics who had the temerity to doubt my brilliance. After the n.o.body's Fool movie, the novel itself made a cameo appearance on the New York Times best-seller list, which threw her for a loop. "It's like it's all happening to someone else" was how she put it, and I sympathized because it mostly felt that way to me, too.

From various comments she let drop, I knew she was deeply mystified by how many people apparently wanted to read stories set in the kind of industrial backwaters from which she'd worked so hard to escape. Even more perplexing was the fact that I not only wrote about such places but returned to them again and again. After all, I had a Ph.D. and a valid pa.s.sport and made a good living among distinguished colleagues. Why was I slumming (imaginatively) back in Gloversville? She probably felt quite certain that in short order people would decide they'd had enough of stories set in dirty mill towns, and if I quit my job, where would I be?

The success of my fiction gravely conflicted with her own experience of life, as well as her profound sense of how the world went round. After all, she'd grown up during the Depression. My teaching position to her felt every bit as solid as the college that employed me. If Colby wasn't going anywhere and my tenure couldn't be revoked, then I was set for life or, to use her word, settled. Why court disaster by exposing myself to unnecessary risk? Why choose to be unsettled? As things stood I got a good paycheck every two weeks, whereas an author's life would be one of feast or famine. Its feasts not only were unpredictable but came intertwined with all kinds of whens and ifs-like, if you can finish the book you're working on, when you can deliver it-and such uncertainties were dry tinder, lacking only a spark to ignite a conflagration. We already had one daughter in college, and the other would soon follow. Could we cover those heart-stopping expenses by means of my writing alone? I a.s.sured her that we could and tried to explain that at least for the moment my being a teacher was actually counterproductive, that the time I spent in the cla.s.sroom diminished rather than increased my earning power, but that didn't register. To her, resigning my teaching position wasn't just folly but a particular kind of folly of which she had personal knowledge. Forty years before, on a whim, she'd quit a good job, and look what that had gotten her.

And it went even deeper than this. One of my mother's most cherished convictions was that back on Helwig Street she and I had pledged an oath, each to the other. She and I would stand together against whatever configuration the world's opposition took-her parents, my father, Gloversville, monetary setbacks. Now, forty-some years later, I was a grown man with a wife and kids, but this original bond, she believed, was still in force. However fond she was of Barbara, however much she loved her granddaughters, none of that altered our original contract, which to her way of thinking made us indivisible. She'd never really considered us two separate people but rather one ent.i.ty, oddly cleaved by time and gender, like fraternal twins somehow born twenty-five years apart, destined in some strange way to share a common destiny. If I was about to make a colossal blunder, then it was her duty, her moral obligation, to prevent it. Having been prideful herself, she knew what pride goeth before. What's more, my pride was risking not just my own future but my family's, putting them and, yes, herself in unnecessary danger. Because when things came unraveled, a son who at times failed to acknowledge the primacy of the Helwig Street contract might, if there weren't enough resources to go around, put his wife and children before her. I don't think these were conclusions my mother arrived at in the front of her brain; instead they were constant, ambient whisperings that originated in the shadowy recesses, as undeniably real as anything in the world for the simple reason that they never, even in jaw-clenched sleep, went away.

STILL, MY MOTHER MIGHT have been able to give herself a good talking-to and keep the worst of these anxieties at bay had I not compounded matters by announcing, not long after quitting my teaching job, our plan to move to the coast. Not that she didn't understand the logic. Now that I was untethered to the college, there was nothing holding us in Waterville. A few years earlier, we'd purchased a condo in Camden that we used as a weekend and summer retreat. It was three stories tall, one full quarter of a former Methodist church. Our unit was beneath the smaller of the two steeples, a place full of light and air, especially the master bedroom on the top floor, from which we had a view of the harbor. Barbara and I both loved it there but finally had to admit that it just wasn't working out. For one thing, our girls were then in high school and hated being yanked away from their Waterville friends and activities. For another, though she never said so in so many words, our having the place in Camden put my mother out of sorts. If we spent the weekend there, I'd have to take her grocery shopping on Friday instead of Sat.u.r.day, our long-established grocery day. And in the summer, though we frequently invited her to come along, she felt abandoned. She liked Camden itself, its shops and restaurants a vivid contrast to dark, moribund Waterville, but the hills, so beautiful to look at, frustrated and defeated her. All the places she wanted to go were within a hundred yards of our front door, but at the bottom of the slope. She had no trouble going down it, but once there she couldn't make her legs carry her back up again, which meant that whoever she was with would have to return home for the car. With the part of her brain that was rational and reasonable, she understood our preference for bright, vibrant Camden; the irrational, fearful part, however, harbored a suspicion that we'd purposely selected a place where she couldn't follow or, if she did, couldn't function. This was precisely the sort of paradox she was forever trying and failing to reconcile. On the one hand, we'd never once in thirty-five years abandoned her. On the other, we always appeared to be on the verge of doing so.

Moreover, the worst of her personal demons was the one who dwelt in the details, and this was especially true of our plan to move to the coast. Had we been able to give her a series of dates etched in stone-for selling the Waterville house, finding a new house in Camden, locating her new apartment, and the actual physical moves themselves-she could have written them on her calendar and checked them off, one by one, the way her mother had always done with Holy Days on the liturgical calendar. But we could offer nothing that was "for sure." Because property was more expensive on the coast, there was a real possibility we wouldn't be able to find or afford what we were looking for-but then again maybe we'd get lucky! To further complicate matters, after a couple of mills around Waterville closed, half the town was for sale, which guaranteed that unloading our house-something we needed to do in order to buy in Camden-was going to be tricky.

And these were just the surface complexities. Supposing we found a new place and managed to sell the old one, what would happen next? We couldn't say with any certainty. Normally her need to be settled, to reestablish her old routines in a fresh environment, would have been trump, but there were simply too many moving parts to accurately predict how things would go. If we rented an apartment on the coast and moved her in, it might be six months or a year before we could follow, and there was no chance she'd make it that long in a strange place, with us a good hour away. If we went first, there was the possibility of a similar gap before she could follow, because senior housing here was as problematic as it had been in Waterville. And while there were more options, they were all more expensive, so she'd be more financially dependent on us. And every place we looked into had a waiting list. How long would you have to wait for an apartment in a complex of twelve units if there were three people ahead of you? Or eight people in one of twenty-five? The answer to both questions was the same: as long as it took. If she put her name on the list too soon and an apartment came available before she was ready, what then? We'd presented her with a Rubik's Cube of possibility, the very thing we should have known she couldn't handle. The best we could do was to a.s.sure her that we'd take care of everything when the time came. Meanwhile she only needed to be patient. It was a doomed strategy, but it was the only one we had. It was either that or ...

Over the last thirty-five years, my wife and I had taken turns bringing up the inevitable or. This time it was Barbara's. We did have a choice, she reminded me. Either we asked my mother to live with things being unsettled until we could settle them, or we could just put our own lives on hold. We didn't have to move to the coast to be happy. I'd quit my job at Colby, but Barbara was still employed there and liked her job. We didn't need to move; we just wanted to. The question we had to articulate correctly and then answer carefully was the same one we'd confronted so often before. In the end, was doing what we wanted to do-what other people like us seemed to do without having to think about it-really worth it? Was the reward equal to the risk? My mother was no longer a young woman, and her health was clearly in decline. Even though we'd managed her last two moves-both of which she'd instigated-as much as she'd allowed us, it had taken her long months to recover from them. Another move-this one played under protest-might just do her in. Why not put everything on hold?

To this persuasive argument I had a one-word answer: genetics. Yes, my mother's health was in decline, but my grandmother had also suffered from high blood pressure, a thyroid condition, crippling arthritis, and ministrokes, and she lived into her nineties, as had her sisters. By contrast, my father hadn't made it to his sixty-fifth birthday, and neither had a couple of his brothers, nor had Barbara's parents. If my mother lived to be ninety, we'd be in our early sixties before we were allowed to make unenc.u.mbered decisions about our own lives. I was a Russo male, a bloodline ripe with its own genetic challenges, cancer primary among them. Add to this the environmental issue: I'd grown up in Gloversville, where cancer statistics soared off the actuarial charts. If my mother lived to be ninety, odds were good she'd outlive me. When I spoke with my cousin Greg on the phone and inquired after my aunt's health, he always joked that these old women-his mother and mine-were going to bury us both. Except it wasn't a joke. When in the last thirty-five years, I asked my wife, had we ever had the luxury of making a major decision purely on its merits? Of necessity we'd always had to consider my mother's needs before our own. Surely by now we'd earned a reprieve. Didn't we deserve the right to think about ourselves first for once? It wasn't as if we were planning to abandon her. We would find her a nice place to live, just as we'd always done. We'd pay for what she couldn't afford and make the move as stress-free as possible.

I was right, of course, and Barbara admitted as much. After all, she'd been throwing the same argument at me for more than thirty years, every time it was my turn to raise the dreaded or. The problem was that I was also wrong, and we both knew that, too. Nor was I surprised when she remembered my grandfather. "What was that saying of his?" she asked. He'd always been full of aphorisms, but I knew all too well the one she was referring to. "With your grandmother, you always have a choice," he was fond of remarking when I was a boy. "You can do things her way or you can wish you had." He was speaking about his wife, of course, but he might have been talking about his strong-willed daughter. By the end, he was.

THE HOUSE WE ENDED UP buying in Camden was old and elegant. Also, a potential money pit. In its most recent incarnation it had devolved into a three-family dwelling. The princ.i.p.al renters had lived on the ground floor in the main house, where there was a master suite with a lovely bathroom. On the second floor were two more small bedrooms, as well as a tiny apartment with its own entrance. At some point a large garage had been added at the back of the house and, above it, a second, larger apartment with a third-story loft. It wasn't a house we were originally interested in, but Chris, our realtor, knew I was a writer and thought the loft apartment over the garage would be a perfect works.p.a.ce for me. "And if you fix up the little apartment," he added, "it might work for your mom." Early on we'd told him what we were up against, that in addition to selling our Waterville house and finding something we could afford in Camden, we'd also need to find a place for my mother, and he'd promised to keep an eye out for a one-bedroom apartment.

"Or not," he said with a smile, seeing that his helpful suggestion had caused all the blood to drain from Barbara's face. An observant breed, realtors. My wife would later become one.

Chris was right about the loft works.p.a.ce, though, and while the main house needed a lot of work, it was pretty much what we were looking for. The wiring wasn't up to code, a costly fix, and the kitchen was mired in the Sixties. Many of the windows needed to be replaced. The real problem, however, was the tiny run-down apartment. We had no interest in renting it, so what on earth would we do, pretend it didn't exist? On the other hand, it was one of the reasons the house was in our price range. The property had been on the market for years and, according to the seller's agent, most prospective buyers were put off by the three-family arrangement. Eventually, he thought, it would sell to an investor who'd fix up and rent all three s.p.a.ces. Because of the apartment the house was definitely wrong for us, but there was something right about it, too, something that made me not want to dismiss it out of hand. Maybe it was just that we'd been looking for months and coming up empty. At any rate, I suggested we go up and look at that apartment one more time on the theory that if we considered the house at its worst, we'd feel better about turning our backs on what we liked.

You entered the apartment through the kitchen, and right away you thought, No, no, and again, no. The appliances were old and so grungy I immediately imagined my mother running her index finger along the surface of the stove. The stained, cracking linoleum was coming up from the floor. The living room was low ceilinged and so small it would hold little more than a sofa and coffee table, maybe a small TV in the corner. The bedroom was the size of a walk-in closet, with room for a single bed with one bedside table or a double bed without. In the bathroom, when you sat on the toilet your knees would touch the shower on one side, the wall on the other. The only good feature was the large and lovely screened-in porch that overlooked the back patio. I went out and just stood there. In winter, you'd glimpse the ocean through the bare trees. In summers I could imagine us sitting out there reading, cooled by breezes off the water. Sweet.

Barbara and Chris were in the hot little apartment waiting for me to come to my senses so we could leave. When I stepped inside, I got a flash. "What you're standing in," I said to Barbara, "is our master bedroom."

Chris blinked. My wife frowned. Whose master bedroom? Not hers. Not by a long shot.

But in a heartbeat I saw she was with me, seeing in her mind's eye what I was seeing in mine, and before I was half finished explaining, she was already ahead of me. You'd tear out the kitchen, knock down the wall that separated it from the living room, as well as the one between the bedroom and the bath. With its four tiny rooms reduced to two, the apartment could become a reasonably luxurious suite with its own private porch. Chris was grinning at us. "Moments like this," he said, "are why I'm a realtor."

Instead of returning to Waterville as planned, we booked a room at a B&B, and over dinner and a bottle of wine at the local chowder house we ran the numbers, trying to contain our mounting, irrational excitement, then ran them again. It was impossible. We could afford either the property or the work needed to transform it, but not both. Not unless we did all these things over a period of years. Not unless we moved into the loft apartment over the garage while the work was being done on the main house. Not unless I sold another screenplay. Not unless we sold the Waterville house, which after a month on the market still hadn't generated a single showing. Not unless we could find an apartment nearby for my mother. We'd have to hire a structural engineer to make sure the walls we meant to tear down weren't load bearing, and we'd have to bring the girls to see if this was a house they could see themselves returning to in the future with children of their own. Yet somehow, in the moment when we'd seen how it might be done, how the house's many drawbacks could be transformed into a real a.s.set, we'd already bought it in our imaginations. Impossible had become something we'd just have to deal with.

And my mother? Well, she hadn't come into our thinking at all, not until we came home late one evening not long afterward to find a message from her on the answering machine, telling me to call the minute I got back, no matter what time. Okay, I thought, this is it. Now we pay. I dialed her number.

She answered on the first ring. She'd been thinking about it for a long time, she told me, her voice rich with both challenge and mania, and had come to an important decision. She was going home.

RETURNING TO GLOVERSVILLE yet again might have been a lunatic notion, but it was hardly a new one. The idea began to take form, as near as I could tell, in the camp we rented when we first came to Maine, after which it advanced and receded according to the cycles of her mind. The problem (and I'd been aware of this since she and I made that first journey to Arizona) was that to my mother there were two Gloversvilles-the one she was always trying to escape from when she lived there, and the other she nostalgically considered, every time she fled, as home. When she was actually in residence, it was a small, insular, uncouth, narrow-minded place that prevented her from being her truest self-free spirited, unconventional, and unfettered. Once she'd flown the coop, though, the very qualities she detested became more attractive. The smallness she so despised became cozy; it meant you didn't need a car to live there. Your loved ones, the very people who intruded upon your privacy and always spouted unwanted advice, were a convenient block away. Seen from a distance, they weren't so much nosy as thoughtful and caring, their concern now a safety net.

What took me longer to understand was that just as there were two Gloversvilles, my mother also had two sisters. In reality, she and Phyllis couldn't have been more temperamentally different, and when my mother was living there it was always their differences that defined their relations.h.i.+p. She saw my aunt as conventional and interfering and judgmental, qualities Phyllis inherited, she thought, from their mother. There were many bones of contention, but it particularly infuriated my mother that neither her sister nor the local man she married, my uncle Mick, seemed to have any aspirations beyond the town line. To my uncle, who'd grown up on a farm and been too young to serve in World War II, Gloversville was the big city, and he made no secret of his affection for it. Their oldest son, Greg, my cousin and boyhood friend, had gone away to college but returned to marry a local girl and settled down to a life of deflated Fulton county wages. He and his wife lived next door to my aunt and uncle, and next door to them lived Mick's mother, Beatrice, for whom my mother had even less use than her son. That three generations were all living in the same block struck my mother, back when she'd returned to live on Helwig Street with my grandmother, as beyond perverse. They all walked into one another's homes without knocking, freely investigating the contents of the refrigerators and helping themselves without permission. Lacking even the most rudimentary notion of privacy, they saw no reason not to comment on everyone else's lives and day-to-day decisions. Who could bear to live like this?

Once away from Gloversville, however, my mother immediately saw things differently, and as she grew older, her nostalgia for the very proximity that had always stifled her so became more p.r.o.nounced. "How happy we were on Helwig Street," she'd recall, her eyes misty with memory, as if we'd been cruelly banished from this Eden. "We didn't have much money," she'd concede, somehow imagining this had been the only impediment to our contentment, "but everything seemed so safe. Remember how we used to rap on the floor?" I did indeed. When we wanted to parlay with my grandparents or they with us, we would rap on the kitchen floor (they on the ceiling) with a broom handle, and we'd convene invisibly, but close enough to whisper-in the back hallway. At the time I regarded the broom handle as one of the many advantages to our upstairs/downstairs circ.u.mstances and a.s.sumed everyone would be envious to know how easily and efficiently we communicated, with no need even to pick up a phone. Whereas my mother always cited this broom knocking as an example of how much better our lives would be when we finally escaped Helwig Street. We'd be independent, she explained, without people beneath us who at their every whim felt ent.i.tled to so rudely summon us.