Free What Remains by Carole Radziwill

suggested a girl from Suffern had no business being there. I was embarrassed but I thought he was probably right. Who do you think you are?
    Suffern was a fenced-in, cheerful town, where not much happened, and a lot of people were happy with that. I never was. By the time I was in high school, I felt a sort of low-grade panic about my future and a gnawing embarrassment about my past. I was at an age at which I thought I should have a picture of an adult life in my mind. I longed to see the world on the other side of the fence, my nose pressed up against the town limits sign.
    The city held, I thought, every adventure I hadn’t imagined. I thought it might be a place to reincarnate, to pull a whole new existence from the chatter of crowded streets. I fell in love with it when I was small and my mother used to take us on weekends to Tante’s apartment. It captivated me—the noise, the grit, the busy, crazy flow of it all.
    I loved the same things then that I do now about the city—walking along Madison Avenue to Central Park, watching the lights in other buildings, soaking up energy from the people in Union Square. Listening to the buses out the front living room window of Tante’s apartment.
    She lived in the same fifth-floor railroad flat for fifty years. Her apartment had a smell of old things—piles of yellowed newspapers, pictures and letters wrapped with rubber bands. Layers of paint so thick none of the doors closed shut. The musty odor of a life lived and then boxed up. It was a safe smell, comforting. It said, I have managed it all this long.
    I could sit sometimes as a little girl on the stoop of her building and watch the people walk by with their stories. In bed at night, I listened to the steady, soothing sounds of the street. Everything was moving; something was going on behind all those doors stacked on top of one another.
    I loved the procedure of those weekends—watching the tall brick apartment buildings that lined the drive from the George Washington Bridge to the East Side along the FDR snapping by through the car window, pressing my face up against it, searching for the Seventy-First Street exit. My father let us out in front of the building and disappeared to find parking. The rest of us raced one another up the stairwell to the fifth floor, elbowing for the lead. Tante was always waiting for us in the hallway, peering over the rail as we ran up.
     
    When Anthony and I moved into an apartment on Park after we were married, we got into a fight the first night. A silly fight that was really about things that were bigger than we wanted to talk about—marriage, a new mortgage on Park Avenue, cancer. I left angry at midnight to walk around the city, and I ended up on Seventy-First Street. I walked out because I wanted to feel the city on my skin. I still do that, walk around aimlessly at odd times of the night. The feel of the city comforts me.
    You’re lucky if you have a place like Tante’s apartment, a place where you can remember the time when you were safe. I found myself in Tante’s foyer—the small room inside the front door before you get buzzed through the second—because I knew it would look the same as it did to me when I was five. Like two people watching the moon from opposite ends of the world. My five-year-old self and my thirty-one-year-old self staring at the same cracked pink-and-black tile, smelling the same mildew mixed with smells of old cooking.
    There had been times in the city at Tante’s, or dancing in Linda’s basement, or fishing off the dock in Kingston, that I was excited with what life had given me. Times I felt perfectly complete. Then I left all of that. I went too far to go back, but I didn’t know that until I was grasping for something familiar and safe and there wasn’t anything for me to hold on to.



Discoveries
    We used to drink it at the Radziwills’ when I stayed with them for the shooting. You should have seen those Polish princes putting it away….