Wipe Your Feet

When I was looking at colleges, my mother and I flew from Los Angeles, where we’d spent the previous three years, back to the east coast, where we’d spent all the years before. I was, at the time, dating a person who was in his first year at Wesleyan, and whose opinions on college were, so far, fairly low; at the time, naive to the fact that my parents would be moving back to the east coast after I graduated high school the following year, I opted to enjoy the trip as some sort of college taste-test vacation. I didn’t want to think about going to any of the fine universities on my list (I was one of those strange teenagers who actually didn’t want to go to college — I was close with my parents, didn’t even like sleepovers because I would worry after my folks or get lonesome for my routine; I missed my books, who were my friends — and enjoyed high school much more than I, probably, should have), so I saw that trip as my chance to “experience Pittsburgh” or “see how I feel about Philadelphia.” It staved off a lot of my anxiety, which made me feel inappropriately young, or small.

I was reading Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh because, after all, I would be in Pittsburgh for the first time. Something about that book worked away at me during the course of the trip — maybe it was the first time I was old enough to feel nostalgia for the present, to realize what it would mean to miss these moments later. And I would. I remember — or I’m conflating these two experiences, which is fine with me — that my cousin’s wedding in New York coincided with our trip. It came at the end of the two-week stretch, and my mom and I met up with my dad, my grandmother and my aunt. It was one of the last times I would see my aunt, Ginny, and in the photographs taken at our assigned dinner table she looks lit up. I’m sure this heightened the sum of Chabon + college + fall foliage — after all, seeing a beautiful lit-up redheaded woman whose eye makeup, when she laughed, immediately relieved itself of its position on her eyelashes can make anyone feel the best parts, all at once, of being young and alive.

Later that night, which I’m sure was the night before we were to return home (what would be home for another year and a half), I snuck my then-boyfriend into my hotel room. I met him in the lobby, where, and I promise that I’m not making this up, there was a cage with a huge white tiger in it. I asked the woman at the front desk what the deal was, probably just looking at her with an eyebrow cocked. “Tiger?”

She motioned to a blond man heading over to the elevators. “Siegfried,” she said. I filled in the Roy for myself. The tiger yawned and panted under a crystal chandelier.

Later, in my room, self-conscious about being looked at (oh, seventeen!), I lit candles everywhere. My aunt and grandmother were in rooms down the hall to the right, my parents and assorted cousins to the left. I fluffed the pillows and hopped into bed, forgetting the votive candle that flickered on the nightstand. Within an hour, there was a small but lively flame licking the lampshade, and the fire alarms were going off in the entire hall. My boyfriend, who wasn’t supposed to be in my room in the first place, gathered his belongings and raced down the hall, his bunched-up cashmere coat grazing my 88-year-old grandmother, his face obscured by his lightning-speed.

Later, to calm myself into an hour or two of sleep before packing and heading to JFK, I re-read a passage from M.O.P.:

I felt happy — or some weak, pretty feeling centered in my stomach, brought on by beer — at the sight of the fading blue sky tormented at its edges with heat lightning, and at the crickets and the shouting over the water, and by Jackie Wilson on the radio, but it was a happiness so like sadness that the next moment I hung my head.