Free TREYF by Elissa Altman

for, but would never actually own. I lived in a state of constant want—so desirous of this stuff I was certain I’d die without it—but I was reading chapter books by the time I was six. It was
want
, my fatherbelieved, that would push me and motivate me, and drive me to success; chronic disappointment was something he didn’t count on, although he knew it like the color of his own eyes.
    Less than ten miles from the eraser-pink brick building we lived in in the shadow of the Queens Boulevard traffic snarl were the pristine country clubs, golf courses, and yacht clubs of my father’s dreams. There were closets bursting with St. John suits and headlight-sized diamonds worn beneath expertly lacquered fingernails; there were skiing vacations to Sun Valley and customized, boat-sized Mercedes sedans, the ultimate status symbol of the time, with their hood ornaments sliced off, like automotive circumcisions, to hide the vehicles’ German provenance a mere thirty years after the war.
    Every Sunday, after our dutiful, staccato visits to Coney Island to see my father’s parents, we pointed our massive Buick towards Kings Point—Jay Gatsby’s West Egg—where his advertising agency’s real estate clients had been dotting the area with hastily built contemporary split-levels and ranch houses since the end of the 1940s. We drove from model home to model home—ten of them in a day, ostensibly part of my father’s job, but not much different for him than my FAO Schwarz catalog—and for years, I believed that we were forever on the verge of moving. I envisioned a yard, a carport like the Bradys had, and a place to throw around a football with Gaga.
    â€œAre we buying
this
one?” I’d say, dropping my mother’s hand and racing through fake avocado green model kitchens filled with fake avocado green model appliances and basement dens carpetedwith fake avocado green broadloom, and bathrooms adorned with fake harvest gold toilets that I, more than once, peed in.
    â€œWe’ll see,” my father would answer, opening and closing closet doors like an inspector.
    â€œI’m
never
living on Long Island,” my mother insisted every time, her arms folded across her chest. “I’m a city girl.”
    â€œBut the schools are so good out here,” he’d say.
    â€œThey’re fine where we are, too—” she’d say.
    â€œWe could have a yard—”
    â€œYou’re gonna
mow
? We don’t
need
a yard.”
    â€œBut look at the kitchen—it’s enormous.”
    â€œI hate to cook.”
    â€œYou could have new neighbors—”
    â€œI like our old neighbors.”
    Weekend after weekend, year after year, we made the long drive out to Long Island to see the houses my father advertised, until they began to blur like smeared ink into one wood-paneled, game-roomed beacon of hope and promise of success that my father wanted so badly he could taste it.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    T here were few secrets in The Marseilles and The Brussels; the walls were too thin, the hundreds of apartments jammed together like sardines so that every fight, every cry of anger or ecstasy could be heard, every rasher of bacon smelled as though neighbors were all living under the same roof, which they were. There were the Pugaches—Burt and Linda—she of the darkenedglasses, famously blinded for life when the enraged Burt, who was having an affair with her that she ended, hired three men to throw lye in her face in a jealous fit. He went to jail for fourteen years before marrying her and settling down in The Brussels, just upstairs from my grandmother. There was gossiping Laura Steinman, who lacquered her skin to the color of a football with the sunless tanner QT and whose face, my father once remarked over dinner, resembled a rotting apple core; her husband, Richard, gave off great, billowing clouds of Jovan Musk and