Lost in New York: Two Stories

1.

It was in the summer of 1952 that I found myself sitting in the police station of the 13th Precinct in Manhattan. My family lived in an area of the city that was close to Greenwich Village, not far from Bellevue Hospital where my father worked as a physician. At the time I was with the police, I was going on four and a half and my sister was five months old. She was born in March of that year on the day after St. Patrick’s Day. The story has it that my mother’s water broke while we were at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Fifth Avenue. My grandmother was with us, and I am told that my mother took a cab to Lenox Hill Hospital about a half a mile away while my grandmother and I stayed to watch all the people dressed in green.

After my sister was born, our mother took some time off from her work as an editor to be home with us. Truthfully, I feel sure she was doing some freelancing, but I have no real evidence. She loved her work and I imagine that having two small children all day was not nearly as interesting as her job working with writers at a publishing company. One summer day, she put my sister in a stroller and took us out to do errands. She needed to go to the drugstore, which was on Third Avenue, about six blocks from our apartment. At the age of four, this was a long distance. My mind, no doubt, was lost in all the sounds, smells and sights coming from every direction: street vendors selling hot dogs and huge pretzels, women screaming from open windows to their kids on the street. The smell of hot engine exhaust was everywhere as city buses took off from their stops like lumbering behemoths. Big sweaty men were pouring tar into holes in the street and thick steamy air billowed out of sidewalk vents. I think I must have started hating New York on that day. When we got to Third Avenue where the subway was elevated above the ground, the roar of the train above frightened me.

Somewhere on Third Avenue my mother and sister entered the drug store. I kept walking, oblivious to their departure. At some point I became aware that my mother and sister had disappeared. I must have been scared, though I have no recollection of this. I remember thinking that the street went on forever and that I would see them up ahead. I suppose an adult on the street, seeing a small child walking alone under the elevated subway tracks, flagged down a policeman. A tall man with shiny metal buttons on his shirt bent down and asked where my mother was. He said that he was a policeman and that he was going to take me to find her — and that we would get an ice cream cone on the way. So before I knew it, I had a big chocolate ice cream cone and was sitting on a desk in a large room with people around me asking questions. Where do you live? What does your mother look like? Was there anyone with her?

I didn’t know my address. And I imagine I had few adjectives then that would make my mother sound distinguishable from any other woman. While this was happening at the Police Precinct, my mother was in the drugstore stricken with fear as she realized I was missing. She screamed my name over and over inside the store; she went outside and scoured the sidewalk in both directions and screamed again. The pharmacist sprang into action and said that he would call the police station. My mother was frantic.

The next thing I remember is sitting on the lap of a policeman in a big car with lots of buttons and dials in front of me. He told me that we were driving to where my mother was waiting for me. I had finished my ice cream cone with half of it on my face. The car pulled up to the sidewalk in front of the pharmacy and I could see my mother, my sister in the stroller, and many other grown-ups all waving their hands wildly. The policeman helped me out of the car and lifted me onto the sidewalk. My mother put her arms around me and the other people clapped. She then took me by the hand into the drugstore and got angry with me for upsetting so many people and for not paying attention. She took a tissue out of her pocketbook, wet it with some of her saliva and started wiping the dried-up chocolate ice cream off my face. She said I had my head in the clouds. I knew that was not true — I was not even looking at the clouds.

This might have been my first experience feeling ashamed. As we walked back home, I remember looking down rather than up. I held onto the handle of my sister’s stroller as we made our way back to the apartment. I had become a problem for my mother, and then later that night my father weighed in. He called me a scatterbrain. I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew it wasn't good. My parents began to see me as a kid lost in her own world. I knew even then, at the age of four, that it was not my own world I was lost in, but rather in theirs.

2.

By the time I was a teenager, we lived uptown in a polished neighborhood of shiny shops, museums and doormen. It was a mild winter night when I decided I had to run away from home. We lived in a five-story brownstone that had a tiny elevator. The woman who owned the building lived on the first two floors and we lived on the top three. She hated children, so we rarely saw her and if we did, she didn’t acknowledge our presence. My mother was working full-time as an editor at a publishing company and my father was a successful cardiologist, making rounds at the hospital before his office hours and then house calls on his way home. They both finished work late and my sister and I rarely had dinner with them. We had a housekeeper living with us and she cooked meals and generally kept the place going.

When my parents were home, they were exhausted and had short fuses, easily irritated by our needs. I was clearly an annoyance to them, so I retreated into my room and my imagination to find relief and peace. I went to a small all-girls school with fewer than twenty girls in each grade level. I didn’t have many friends, but I was not unpopular at school. I was funny — the funny kid — and so my presence seemed to be appreciated by my classmates. I loved many of my classes: English, Science, French and Latin were my favorites. I started writing when I was about 14 and, in large part, it was writing that got me through adolescence in one piece.

I was a curious child, I am told, asking questions incessantly. When my mother got tired of answering all my “why” questions (Why is the ocean so big? Why don’t the clouds fall down on us? Why is my big toe bigger than the others? Why does the cheese stand alone?etc.), she would look at me and say, Because that’s the situation that prevails. When I could no longer get the answers to my questions, I became a quiet observer. At some point as I approached my teen years (a time of tumult in the best of circumstances), I realized that the more successful my parents became, the more distressed the household was. It was like an algebraic equation. As the years went on, I felt captive in a city I did not like and in a family that did not see me.

This is when I started planning my escape. I saved my allowance and any money I received for birthdays. I figured I could go to Pennsylvania where my summer camp was. I loved it there — and most of the girls who attended lived near Wilkes Barre or Philadelphia. At 13, I did not know how to get to Pennsylvania, but I knew Grand Central Station was involved. I planned to sneak out of the house after my parents had dinner. I would get on the elevator from the floor where the kitchen was, assuming they would be downstairs in their bedroom for the remainder of the evening.

My father spent each evening lying in bed reading the business section of the New York Times, multiplying numbers with a ballpoint pen in the margins of the stock market listings. (I assumed he was counting his money.) At the same time, he ate four or five oranges or tangerines. Sometimes a giant bunch of grapes. He consumed enormous quantities of fruit after dinner every night. In the morning, there were peels, pits and stems in my mother’s large cigarette butt-filled ashtray. She was on her side of the bed, lying propped up on pillows, reading the galley of some book, all the while chain-smoking Chesterfields. Books came to her in ream boxes from aspiring authors, pages and pages typed on onionskin or bond paper. Her concentration was like that of a brain surgeon or an Olympic athlete. It was nearly impossible to get her attention if she was reading.

In the month of my planned defection, John F. Kennedy was president. My parents loved him, but were upset that he was making a big mistake about something they called the Bay of Pigs. I had no idea what this was, but it sounded like a crisis. I imagined a body of water full of drowning pigs. Between the stock market listings in the New York Times, the Bay of Pigs and the manuscripts my mother was engrossed in, I figured I could get out of the house unnoticed. I did not know then how correct my assumption was.

I packed a small bag with some clothes, the money I had saved, and a couple of bananas I took from the kitchen. I entered the small elevator, pressed L for Street Level and left the little building that was my home. I knew that I could get to Grand Central Station by taking either the Lexington Avenue bus or the one on Fifth Avenue. I decided on the Fifth Avenue one so that I could look at Central Park out the window on the way to 42nd Street. I would get off at the same stop as the one I used when I went to my mother’s office across from the Algonquin Hotel. My plan was to buy a ticket for the train to Wilkes Barre and then call my friend who lived there.

After I left my house, I walked to the corner, waited for the light to turn green and crossed Madison Avenue toward Fifth. I felt simultaneously fearful and free. I wondered how long it would take for my parents to realize I was gone, hoping they would feel panicky, regret all the mean things they had ever said, and promise to themselves to pay more attention to me and my sister.

Directly in front of me, one block away, was the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I loved this museum and was sorry it was not open. I often went there after school, spending time in their Children’s Museum on the lower level. The inside of the museum was dark, since  it had closed several hours earlier. The only lights were the ones spotlighting the massive arches of the entrance. There was not a bus in sight, so I climbed the many steps outside the museum’s entrance to get a better view of oncoming traffic. When I got to the top, I put my bag down and sat on it, taking the bananas out first. I was only two blocks from our apartment, but I felt like Columbus discovering the New World. I had run away from my home, en route to Pennsylvania and I celebrated by eating a banana.

I saw a bus go by, but did not feel like running to catch it. I was happy sitting in the dark high above the street watching the world in front of me. There were people walking along Fifth, some with dogs in tow, others carrying shopping bags and briefcases. There would be other buses. It was dark and for some reason, I was not afraid. I figured no one could see me sitting in the recesses of the dark staircase, but after a while, a policeman spotted me:

“Hi there, Miss. Whaddya doin’ up here?” he shouted as he climbed the stairs

“Just waiting for the bus,” I replied.

“Do your parents know you’re here?” He asked a logical question seeing that I was a child.

“No.” I paused, “I’m running away from home.”

He sat down next to me. “And where are ya goin’?”

“To Pennsylvania,” I said.

“Hmmm. How will ya be gettin’ to Pennsylvania?” He asked in the way adults sound when they don’t believe children.

“I’m taking the bus to Grand Central Station. I’ll get a train to Wilkes Barre.”

“How far away do ya live?”

“A couple of blocks that way,” I replied pointing toward 82nd Street.

“Well, ya know, it’s 9:30. I bet your parents are worried sick.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I replied hoping he was right.

“Why’d ya want to run away?” He was trying hard to sound friendly, while at the same time needing to get to the bottom of the situation.

“I want to live someplace else. I want to live in Pennsylvania.”

His voice raised an octave or so. “Whaddya mean? You don’t like New York?” He sounded like he could not believe this was possible.

“Not much.”

“What’s goin’ on at home?”

“Not much.”

“Well, I want ya to listen to me.” His voice deepened. I could tell he was going trick me with a fake choice: two options, neither of which would be acceptable to me. This is another thing adults do to kids — give them the illusion of agency.

“I think ya need to go home right now and talk to your parents. Work things out. Running away’s not gonna do ya any good. They’ll go crazy trying to find ya and you’ll end up back home anyway. C’mon. Either I’ll walk ya back there or watch you walk there by yourself.”

“I’m going to Pennsylvania,” I reiterated, fearing this grand plan of mine was coming to an end.

He persisted. “It’s too late at night to go to Pennsylvania.” We were back to the fake choice. I could either go home by myself or with the policeman. Either way, I would not end up in Pennsylvania.

He stood up. The way his body moved indicated that I was to stand up too. I put the uneaten banana back in my bag. He offered to get rid of the floppy banana peel of the one I had eaten.

“So which is it gonna be? You want me to walk with you or watch you walk home?”

I told him I would go home by myself. I started down the steps; he was close behind. When we got to the sidewalk, he watched me cross to 82nd Street. I slowed my pace. Every so often, I looked over my shoulder to find the policeman not far behind me. I was hoping he would lose interest when I got to Madison Avenue. As I made my way, I was plotting to hop on a Madison Avenue bus and lose him. But as I got to the corner of Madison and 82nd Street, he was still on my tail. My house was a half block away. I had run out of escape options.

When I got to the doorway of the building, I looked behind me and he waved. I did not wave back. I opened the heavy metal door to the lobby and sat down on the blue velvet bench in the corner. I figured once I pressed the button for the elevator my parents would hear it move. I imagined they would be angry — no, furious — that I had had the nerve to leave the house without telling them. My plan was to rush past them and into my room, closing my door firmly behind me.

I pressed the number 4 on the brass button panel inside the elevator and closed the safety gate. When the tiny lift reached the fourth floor, I opened the gate and pushed open the door onto the hallway leading to my bedroom. I expected my parents to be standing there, livid, fit to be tied (an expression they often used). I could almost predict what they would say:

Where the hell have you been? What were you trying to do? Give us heart attacks? When are you going to get on the ball? How could you be so inconsiderate — to leave the house without telling us? Who do you think you are?

Theoretically, all of those accusations-in-the-form-of-questions had some good answers:

Where the hell have you been? I was on my way to
Pennsylvania, but only got to the steps of the
Metropolitan Museum.

What were you trying to do? Run away from here.
Give us heart attacks? No, this never crossed my mind.

When are you going to get on the ball? I have no idea.
I’m not even sure I want to be on the ball you’d like
to see me on.

How could you be so inconsiderate — to leave the
house without telling us? If I had told you I was going
to Pennsylvania, you would have laughed at me and
not allowed me to go.

Who do you think you are? I don’t know who I am,
but I can’t find out living here.

But of course this was not going to be a conversation. They would be angry because I messed up the evening. Because I was not fitting in. Because I was not who they wanted me to be. I took a deep breath and opened the door slowly. I heard only the sound of the television coming from their bedroom down the hall. I was careful to hold the door long enough to allow it to close slowly and quietly. I was incredulous. No one was in the hallway. I realized suddenly: they were unaware I had left home.

My sister was asleep in her room. My mother was chain-smoking while reading a manuscript on her bed with the television blaring. The Bay of Pigs was being discussed on some news show they were watching and I could hear my father’s voice, raised and strident. He was going on about Castro and Khrushchev, people I figured had drowned the pigs. My father was lying on the bed with the New York Times and all his fruit. The smell of oranges mixed with cigarette smoke was as familiar as any odor in my young life.

I walked into my bedroom and shut the door carefully. I sat on the side of my bed allowing myself to feel the heaviness of this disappointment. I had failed to run away from home. I began to unpack my bag, placing the uneaten banana on the top of my dresser. I would eat it in the morning even though I knew my mother would smell it and then complain about my eating food in the bedroom. Later in the evening, my father got called out for a cardiac emergency. He raised his voice as he was getting dressed because he was tired and all worked up about the Bay of Pigs. Before he got on the elevator to leave the house, he opened my bedroom door. I was sitting on the floor of my room petting our cat.

“Why aren’t you in bed, for God’s sake? It’s almost 11:00.”

And then he was gone.

I returned to the same life from which I failed to escape and graduated from the tiny girls' school right after I turned 18. I never tried to run away again, though I lived for summers at camp in Pennsylvania. My mother and father kept working ever harder and I continued to give them a run for their money. I did eventually escape 82nd Street and New York altogether when I left for college in 1966. I never returned to the city other than to see them from time to time as they grew older.

Each time I went to visit, I flew into LaGuardia Airport. Often the approach to the airport included flying over Manhattan. I would look out the window and see the big, dark green rectangle that was Central Park; then I could pinpoint the Metropolitan Museum and even 82nd Street. I dreaded the pilot’s announcement: Ladies and Gentlemen, we are approaching our descent into New York’s LaGuardia Airport because I could instantly feel myself regress to the age of about 16 with all the accompanying states of awkwardness and misery; I would suddenly feel unstable, lonely, and more than anything, lost. It would take a full two weeks after I returned to wherever I was living (Ohio, Washington, D.C., North Dakota or Minnesota) for me to reestablish my bearings and pop back into my real age.

Lost is a state of mind, perhaps. Or maybe nothing more than feeling unseen. I was lost in my family much of the time, but really it was always up to me to pay attention to who I was becoming, even if it caused a ruckus. Once I knew who I was, once I put down roots in a place that felt like home, I could visit New York to see my parents with few ill effects. I could fly over Central Park and think about sitting on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum when I was 13, knowing that what I wanted more than going to Pennsylvania was for my parents to find me. But in the end, I suppose, no one can rescue anyone else from feeling lost. We are like walking Lost and Founds, careening through whatever time we are given, losing ourselves in one distraction after another, and then, with good luck and enough energy, finding ourselves over and over again.