My husband and I went to Boston for the weekend for a friend’s surprise birthday party. I used to go to Boston for the weekend all the time when I was in my teens and 20s. What a strong pull it exerted then: all those smart students swarming the umpteen colleges, including my sister at Brandeis and my best friend at Tufts. All that colonial history before we turned our attention to its often-ugly underbelly.
The shabby-chic allure of Cambridge with its bookstores – and the restaurant named after the monster in Beowulf. And Steve’s, the mecca of Somerville, where they plopped a soft mound of vanilla ice cream on a marble slab and mixed in gobs of whatever candy your heart desired.
I remember struggling in the 70s to find an adjective to describe it all and finally landing on a new one that didn’t yet carry a negative connotation: trendy.
But many things changed since then. My two close high school friends settled in neighboring Boston suburbs. I moved to Manhattan for grad school, sold my car, and started a rich new life that I wouldn’t trade for anything.
You can get to Boston by bus or Amtrak, but last time I rode the bus it took almost seven hours. Amtrak costs a fortune unless you book way in advance. So, a rental car it would have to be. The tiny Dollar office in the West Village—where I always reserved a compact but they never had one when I arrived—closed last fall, so now I walk across town to the Avis.
Luckily, a small sedan was ready for me, shiny black and just-washed.
I’m the designated highway driver in the household. I look forward to driving the old familiar route, letting my mind wander among questions big and small, as I tend to do when I leave my life and routines in the rearview.
Landmarks
I’m still disoriented by the new, mileage-based exit numbers on the highways, but all the landmarks are still there: “my” old exit off the Merritt, the gigantic red neon sign of the Hotel Hi-Ho in Fairfield that will probably outlive us all, the long tunnel through New Haven’s small mountain.
On the Wilbur Cross I consider, as always, the exit for Yalesville, a place I’ve never seen or heard mentioned anywhere else. I get my usual lexical thrill at the sign on 84 for Rentschler Field: six consonants in a row!
At the Silver Lane exit, I mourn another of my closest high school friends, one who died of cancer; after graduating from UConn, like so many of my friends, she lived in an apartment complex there. It was where she perfected her chocolate-mousse cake-in-a-bowl.
We drive deeper into winter. The light is wan and my sneakers chalky with salt from our brief pit stop. The shiny car is quickly covered in snowy grit. The heater, as a friend once said, has two settings: hot and too hot. I keep turning it down because I can’t maneuver out of my jacket while strapped in and driving. My husband, who has shed his coat and relaxed into the passenger seat like a living room, keeps turning it up.
An old melancholy unexpectedly washes over me.
The farther I get from the city the more I feel myself slip into the skin of my younger, more introverted self and her thin resume, not yet at all certain she’ll succeed in life.
As the miles accrue I feel I’m driving even deeper into the past, to my upstate New York college self (though that involved a different leg of 84, the vistas of the Taconic yielding to the grim conveyor belt of the Northway).
Winter, always winter—getting my jeans zipped over my long johns always a worry. Always snow on the ground and more on the way; always long-distance-boyfriend machinations; always papers to write that felt as hard as tunneling through that rock on the Wilbur Cross.
Nice interlude
So as not to spoil the birthday surprise in one friend’s household, we’re staying with the other friend and his wife. We have a platonic “Same Time Next Year” friendship with this couple: on the second Friday of August, when it’s always hot and muggy, we stay overnight on our way to Cape Cod. It’s weird to see each other all covered up in winter clothes. The husband, a self-professed curmudgeon, cooks us a fancy dinner as he always does, and we talk and laugh for hours.
Navigating the curmudgeon
I love these friends and their wives so. I love spending the weekend immersed in their worlds, parallel to ours, since we all have two kids around the same ages and we’re in tune politically and culturally. We also have so very much shared history, with new memories accruing each year. But one divide between us keeps rearing its head.
On Saturday the curmudgeon (who is also kind, thoughtful, and funny), drives us into Boston and parks in the garage near Emerson College, where he teaches a class. He’s annoyed because the scanner to pay for parking is broken and he’ll have to find a dreaded human to pay later. We take the hairpin turns of the low-ceilinged, low-lit space, park, navigate stairwells and elevators and eventually are spat onto the sidewalk by the Common. Ugh, I say. Parking garages are so awful.
This seems like a pretty uncontroversial statement, so I’m surprised when it hits a nerve. My friend scoffs at my naivete about the way things work, and he defends parking garages as a fact of life. I defend my entitlement to my opinion: hey, I used to have a car, I say; I did my time in this world. Too late, I realize I’m likening suburban life to jail. Only much later do I come up with a perfect counter-example:
I’ve heard him express revulsion at the dog-pee smell of Manhattan in the summer. To me, it’s just the way things work—a fact of life.
The moment passes. We take a nice brisk stroll through the Commons, where we circle the gigantic new Martin Luther King monument, agreeing that it’s simultaneously too realistic and too abstract. In the Public Garden we visit the bronze McCloskey ducklings in their winter finery. We agree that “Ouack” is a silly name for a duck.
We walk up Beacon Hill. As a West Villager, I feel right at home on the cobblestones. But the tall 19th-century row houses with their pediments and protrusions strike me as weirdly ersatz; my eyes are used to the smaller scale and austerity of Village houses, which weren’t built for the wealthy. I mention this and I feel it again: I’m measuring the world against New York City and the world is not coming out ahead.
Back in the garage, we find a human to pay and drive to the Gardner Museum, but it’s sold out, so we drive to the Museum of Fine Arts and park in another garage. My friend notices the small knapsack on my back and says, I keep thinking you’re carrying a parachute. I suddenly feel self-conscious about something no one in the city even notices. Then we companionably take in a Copley portrait show and an exhibit of contemporary Chinese quilts.
Saturday evening we go to the party at the other couple’s home. It’s fun to watch recognition slowly fill the face of the birthday girl as she realizes we’ve traveled all this way for her. There’s an additional surprise: her husband has arranged a house concert featuring the charming local singer-songwriter Vance Gilbert.
I instantly fall in love with him and his songs. I feel brief suburban-square-footage envy as I try to picture squeezing a mini house concert into our apartment.
When other guests ask me where I live, as people do at parties, I say without a thought: the city. After all, that’s what we all called New York in Connecticut, and Connecticut is in New England. Of course Boston is much deeper into New England, and might be considered its unofficial capital. My friend, the gracious party host, swoops in. “No one knows what city you’re talking about,” he gently informs me. I feel like a New York-centric snob and a rube rolled into one: a snube.
Never have looked back
In Norwalk, no one pegged me as the person most likely to become a New Yorker, least of all me. But I fell hard as a grad student at Columbia and I never looked back up the Eastern Seaboard. Here I am all these decades later with a knapsack on my back, looking down my nose on strange things like townhouse ornamentation and parking garages, a person who’d rather get around on her own power or take the T than be part of car culture. Funny—I could be describing a Boston college student.
We get on the road early Sunday, knowing that Avis may charge us for an extra day if we return the car an hour late. We stop at Dunkin’ Donuts for breakfast, eat on the road, and get crumbs in our laps. Now that we’re leaving, we’re getting the hang of the suburbs.
It snows lightly for the first couple of hours and I can’t keep the windshield clear. Something deep inside me takes comfort when the signs start pointing toward New York City. 90 becomes 84 becomes 91 becomes the Wilbur Cross becomes the Merritt becomes the Hutch becomes the Cross County becomes the Saw Mill becomes the Henry Hudson becomes West Street becomes home.
Somewhere along the way the sun comes out and melts the snow. I drop off my husband and our stuff, drive across town, bid good riddance to the car, and resume my beloved walking, biking, opinionated, fast-talking, running-into-friends-on-the-sidewalk, apartment-dwelling life.
It was good to go to Boston for the weekend.
