WHERE I USED TO LIVE

A love story of a love that ended

                      

[I have been told that the readers of Substack don’t mind longer posts, and, in fact, relish them. I hope that’s so. This is such a post. I hope you enjoy it.]

In the summer of 1974, I was a newly married, newly graduated nurse living in  Minneapolis, and I was going to move to San Francisco, where my husband would be going to law school. When I told people where I was going, they would invariably say, “Ohhhhh, you’re so lucky!” and it drove me crazy. I didn’t want to go to San Francisco. I wanted to stay in Minneapolis where my friends were, where I knew how to get around, and where the Gem Café on Hennepin Avenue put blueberries in their pancakes by hand, one by one.

But we drove out to San Francisco, my husband and I, and it was I who found the apartment where we ended up living. I liked it because it had bay windows, and was really clean, and across the street from Golden Gate Park, and not too far from the ocean.

I didn’t know how foggy it would be in the Richmond district; we rented on a sunny day. I didn’t know that we would be there for less than a year because I would end up hating not only the apartment but the entire state. By the time we left, I couldn’t say “California” without sounding like I was spitting.

But that was later. At first, we moved in, full of a kind of shy hope. We bought furniture we could afford, my husband put shelves on the wall and positioned the television so we could watch Mash and The Mary Tyler Moore show and Rhoda in comfort, and we began our new life. He went to law school, I went to work at Mt Zion Hospital, on a medical surgical unit, where you had to work all three shifts. I remember looking at the clock on the wall near the elevators there, and thinking, I have been here working at every hour on that clock, at every second.

Now, standing out in front of that apartment building, I spontaneously call my ex, to whom I rarely speak. We are not unfriendly, but he doesn’t want to be too friendly –as he told me, he wants to keep it “cordial.” And so we are cordial. And so I am a little afraid to call him, but I do anyway.

When he answers, I say, “Guess where I am?”

 “Ummmm….” he says, and we both laugh.

“20^th and Fulton!”

There is a pause, and then he says, “Oh! Our old apartment!”

“Yes!” I say. “Remember how strict Mrs. Assolino was about the window shades, how you had to keep them all at the same level? [I like it to look nice from the outside, see?] Remember how mad she got when we got a dog?” My ex laughs, remembering as I am, I’m sure, her saying, You people don’t know what you signed! about the contract she had presented us with that clearly forbade animals.

“What’s it look like now?” he asks, and I tell him it has fallen from its old high standards; it needs paint; the screens are ripped, the shades in the apartments are anything but even.

“You know,” he says, “I’ve been going to Minneapolis a lot on business, and the other day I was trying to find the house we used to live in. I couldn’t find it. Maybe it’s not there any more. But the neighborhood has gotten really nice. Uptown, it’s called.”

I stand very still, listening. I remember that house, the big drafty kitchen where I learned to make bread, the sunny yellow color I chose to paint my daughter’s room, the screened-in porch we had off an upstairs bedroom, the little back yard with the falling-down fence.

I find it so poignant that each of us has recently sought out places where we used to live together. But what to do with that information?  Our lives are so separate now. He is happily remarried. I am single. We live in different parts of the world and of the psyche.  And yet. Hearing his voice, my eyes fill with tears for the memory of how I used to feel …well, I guess the word is safe. I felt safe with him. There was a place for me to land. There was a place for me in the nest. It was two against the world, not just one, and one more makes all the difference; the winds don’t howl in the same way. There was another vote, another point of view, a 24-hour reality check; there was someone to talk to, even in the middle of the night, if you had to.  Recalling that sense of safety, I remember how often I felt sad or scared or full of regret after I began living alone, how I felt I was walking a tightrope with no balance beam. But I’ve been alone for a long time now, and I’ve grown used to it. I prefer it, and I know I won’t be with someone again, not in that way. I’ve made my bed and I am at last comfortable in it.

“Well, I’ve gotta go,” my husband says, and I say, “Yeah, me, too,” and I disconnect with great care and start walking toward Geary, down the same sidewalk I used to walk down when I was 25 years old. But before I turn away from the building where we used to live, I look at the outside stoop where I sat waiting for the mailman to bring me my board scores so I could get my license. I look through the glass of the front door at the vestibule, and have a body-wide rush of recognition: yes! The burgundy colored carpet, still there, the carved white wooden balustrade. I step back and look up at the bedroom window, where I used to lie on my side in a wide swath of sunlight, trying to sleep after having worked nights. It was so hard to sleep when the sun was out.

 I remember sitting at the desk in the bedroom typing letters to my best friend, begging her to leave Minneapolis and come to San Francisco. (She did come and then I begged her to return to Minneapolis with me when I went back. She said Uh, yeah, sure, maybe later; but she never did come. She stayed in California.)

            I look at the living room window and remember friends being crowded in there, how easy it was to laugh and to believe, as the old cliché says, that we would be young forever. There was an old studio piano up against one wall, a purchase I made because I’d always wanted to learn to play piano, though I never got much beyond “Off I Go to Musicland.” One of our friends was a good pianist, though, and one day I asked him to play a Laura Nyro song I loved, and I sang along: Upstairs by a Chinese lamp, it was called. It was a beautiful song, but as I recall it now, I think it was sung in a minor key: Spring whispered in her ear/Like soft Mediterranean wails.

I look at the bathroom window, where, early in the morning before the sun came up, I used to dress so as not to awaken my husband by turning on lights; and then I look at the kitchen window and think of how I made my first “married lady” dinners, I remember making ham with some sort of cherry sauce which now sounds appalling but then I thought was pretty darn sophisticated. I remember too the view from the kitchen window, which is what made me really want to rent that apartment. If you stepped to one side and craned your neck, you could see the Golden Gate bridge where, often times, it seemed to float in fog while, overhead, the sun shone bright.  I remember thinking, Well, this is good. This is good enough. You can see part of it.  But then it wasn’t good enough anymore. Nothing was, and I moved out of that apartment; then, years later, out of my marriage. 

Life is funny. I see now that the unhappiness I felt when I was here before had nothing to do with where I lived. Or the person I lived with. What I wanted to say to my ex-husband before I hung up was, “For so long, I blamed everything around me for problems that were in me. I hope you forgive me.” But I think he has. And I’ve almost forgiven myself. 

I take one last look at the apartment building and see a ghost of me in a nurse’s uniform, coming out the door to go to work. That girl’s face is full of sorrow; she is turned resolutely inward, and therefore cannot see all that is around her. “Look up!” I want to tell her. But what good is talking to a ghost girl from 1974 when nothing you say will help her? She will have to learn that love takes many forms, but that it must always start with oneself. She will learn that hope sustains us. It will take many years, but she will.

P.S. I am no longer alone. I am exploring a new relationship. It is good. Also, I now LOVE California.

Photo by Anders Jildén on Unsplash