Homecoming

The Connecticut college town where I grew up was a transient one. Graduate students and professors came and went; everyone was from somewhere else. Even so, my family was especially mobile. Every few years we left the country for a semester or two while my father was on sabbatical. I would be pulled out of school and removed to an exotic locale – Switzerland, Paris, assorted Caribbean islands – and then deposited back at my Connecticut school full of stories about French fashion and flying fish that interested no one.

The more that we left Connecticut, the less it seemed that we were from there. If being from somewhere means having shared experiences with your neighbors, speaking a common language, knowing that the Stop and Shop on Route 34 is better than the one on Whalley Avenue, my family increasingly had none of these things. Instead, we had in-jokes in different languages; we knew store names and bus routes from around the world. If I was from anywhere, it was my family. Eventually I went off to college and my parents and brother left Connecticut for good. Then my parents divorced and the four of us scattered across the country.

With home gone, I embarked on a nomadic existence, trying on different parts of the globe for size. I had a saying during this period of my life: home is where you put the cat. My cat traveled everywhere with me; when I walked into an apartment and heard his meow it was almost like being home. Eventually I found myself in Manhattan, where no one cares where you’re from – you’re a New Yorker now. I knew my next-door neighbor only by the way she used to decorate her door. She’d cut out little paper shapes to correspond with the seasons and tape them to her door in an elementary-school-bulletin-board sort of tableaux. One spring she died, and three days passed before anyone knew. Paper ducks and flowers stayed on her door for months, curling up at the edges, occasionally coming unstuck and floating down to the hall carpet.

Then I moved to Brooklyn, where I am expected to participate. In the five months I have lived here my block association has thrown one block party and two potluck dinners. My boyfriend and I went to the block party (as much as sitting on one’s own stoop and sipping wine constitutes going to a party), and our next door neighbor, Gloria, fed us stuffed eggplant and some sort of chicken and tomato dish that she had spent all day making. Children wheeled around the closed-off street on plastic cars and tricycles and scooters. It was a cool night in what had been a stifling hot summer, and it was lovely just to sit in the night air, to watch people buying t-shirts reading “Sackett Street! (between Smith and Hoyt),” to listen to the occasional Italian phrase come echoing off the brownstones, to hear the blues band tuning up at the other end of the block. Our landlord, John, parked his antique red hot rod in front of the building - for some reason block parties in this neighborhood always seem to involve vintage cars - and spent the party buffing it lovingly as neighbors came by to give him advice. Everyone on this block was now, it seemed, from this block. Whether they had been born and raised here or had moved only recently, this was their home.

Gloria was the first person I met on the block. She lives on the bottom floor of the brownstone next door to me. She’s lived there for sixty-four years, ever since she was a small child. At one point she owned the building, but now it has passed to her son, who lives on Long Island and rents out the top floor to a lesbian couple. When she first moved here the neighborhood was heavily Italian, but in the last ten years young Manhattan couples began to discover the area, and now the ex-Manhattanites threaten to outnumber the original Italian families. But still, Gloria is from this neighborhood. She spends the summer sitting in front of her stoop in a green and yellow floral housedress, her massive form blocking the way of anyone who might be coming up the street. The sidewalk is hers.

“Oh, so you’re the new neighbors,” she’d said when I first encountered her human roadblock. (In her thick Brooklyn accent it came out more like, yuh thuh new naybuhs.)

I stared at her, shocked that someone I didn’t know would approach me on the street.

“You just move in?” she asked.

“Um, yeah.”

“Yeah, you like the neighborhood?”

“Oh, it’s really nice,” I said. I had the sense that if I didn’t appease the locals they might run me out of town, and I wanted to make a good impression.

“So, where are you from?”

I stood in silence, mentally trying out and rejecting different answers. How could I not know where I was from? What kind of person doesn’t know something as simple as that?

“I grew up in Connecticut,” I finally said. “But my parents are from Bensonhurst.” Although a few miles away, Bensonhurst is a part of Brooklyn, and when Gloria smiled I knew that this had been the right answer.

“Bensonhurst is lovely,” she said.

Bensonhurst, with its long blocks of immense brick buildings and sparse trees, is anything but lovely. It was, however, home to three generations of my family at one time or another. Standing there on the sidewalk with Gloria I realized that if I am from anywhere, perhaps I am from Bensonhurst, where I have never lived.

All my life I heard my parents speak the secret language of Brooklyn. They talked about intersections like Avenue J and Ocean Parkway – names that, compared to our Connecticut neighborhoods, where every street was named after a tree or an Indian tribe, sounded as equally exotic as Rue du Docteur Blanche or Via Calloni. They reminisced about Coney Island, a place I imagined as an enormous waffle cone filled with soft-serve vanilla ice cream, standing upright in the sand. And when they met other people from Brooklyn there were casual asides about the Shore Dinner at Lundy’s or who sold the best egg creams – all code words from a foreign time and place.

Childhood visits to my grandparents’ apartment in Bensonhurst only served to increase the Brooklyn mystique. I would lie awake on the blue striped sofa, inhaling the accumulated smells of fifty years of briskets and stewed cabbages gently mingling with the musty scent of the sofa and my grandmother’s perfume. Pictures of long-dead relatives decorated the walls, and the wooden breakfront (a wondrous and exotic word) towered majestically over the small living room. Outside was the constant hum of the city – the sound of air rising around alleyways and building crevices, the sound of the city just being. An occasional ambulance would wail in the distance, and I would stay awake late into the night, listening to the sound of other people’s lives passing around me.

If anyone is from Brooklyn it is my parents, who were born and raised here. And yet, even they are not entirely sure. When I was in college my father organized a trip that I like to think of as the Eastern European Heritage Tour. My immediate family, accompanied by various distant Israeli and Austrian cousins, returned to the small town in Hungary that, prior to World War Two, our ancestors had called home since the fifteenth century. What had once been a bustling Jewish town was now a cluster of abandoned homes on a dirt road a day’s drive from Budapest. We walked up and down the road, all hoping for some sign of connectedness. I listened to my older relatives speaking Hungarian around me, wondering if perhaps some vestigial form of the language buried deep in my unconscious might awaken, allowing me to miraculously understand the rolling consonants and bouncing vowels. My family finally found itself at an old Jewish cemetery that had somehow lain undisturbed even while the town’s living residents had been shuttled to the far reaches of the Reich. It was raining lightly as we walked up the hill to the gravesites. The grass was overgrown; some of the gravestones had been smashed or overturned. And there, by slowly deciphering the Hebrew letters carved into a group of gravestones, we discovered the names of my great-great grandparents. We brushed dirt off stones, we pulled out long strands of grass, and we uncovered generations of our family.

“Take a picture of me with my grandmother,” my grandmother said, posing next to a towering headstone, her pink umbrella bobbing as she steadied herself. Dutifully we snapped pictures, we placed pebbles on headstones to mark our presence, and eventually we trundled down to the car and back to the hotel, relieved to leave the alien Hungarian countryside behind. At the time I thought that my father had organized the trip to assuage some kind of burgeoning midlife crisis – that it was his version of buying a racy sports car. But now I think it was something else. I think he was really searching for home.

Twenty-nine years after they met on a street corner in Bensonhurst my parents’ marriage ended. The family that I called home has disappeared. Pieces of my childhood have been strewn across the country: my birth certificate is in a soggy box in my father’s Florida garage; the painting that hung in our living room for most of my life now hangs in my brother’s cramped Washington DC apartment; a poem I wrote in fifth grade is buried in a filing cabinet in my mother’s den in Chicago. Although I moved to Brooklyn for the cheaper rent and the quieter streets, I think I was secretly hoping that I would find a place to be from. But the Brooklyn I’ve moved to is as foreign to me as the moon. I thought that, as with the Hungarian language, I might have an innate knowledge of Brooklyn geography. I don’t; I get lost whenever I venture outside of a ten-block radius of my house. The sounds of my Brooklyn are different from those I remember hearing in my grandparents’ apartment. An ice cream truck circles the neighborhood relentlessly; the tinkling sound of The Entertainer comes through my living room windows on an endless loop. Church bells ring out hourly, and on weekends children’s shrieks rise up from the street. Sometimes I lie awake late into the night, and very occasionally I hear that airless noise of the city just being, and for that moment I am, perhaps, as close to home as I can be. And then the silence breaks, torn apart by the revving of a motorcycle, by the clinking of bottles as someone goes through the garbage cans beneath my bedroom window.

When my boyfriend and I first moved here there was a lot of talk, primarily on his end, about buying curtains. Curtains, it seemed, made an apartment a home. We went off to Ikea, we picked out curtains, hemmed them, hung them up, and he was happy. Brooklyn is now his home. For me it’s not that easy. If this is my home then why is there never any food in the refrigerator, where is the sound of laughter when I open the door, where is my family? For most people there comes a time when your home stops being where your parents are and becomes where you are. For years now I have been in the in-between period. In Manhattan I hardly noticed it, but here, in Brooklyn, I do.

Brooklyn wants to be my home. My neighbors nod and say hello when I pass them on the street; some of them even know my name, although I don’t know theirs. On Sundays my boyfriend and I bring our New York Times to the local café, whose couches and coffee tables are already strewn with the crumpled Times’ of earlier visitors. The other coffee drinkers in the café are all couples who look like us in unwashed designer jeans and rumpled t-shirts, slumming it on a Sunday morning. We are on the younger end of the age spectrum in the café, and sometimes we are the only people not begging a small child to put that back, leave that lady alone, stop licking the floor. Couples wheel toddlers through the narrow doors in an endless stroller parade, smiling hello to each other. We don’t know anyone in the café, but I can see a day when we might. Slowly, my home is becoming where I live. These days I make an effort to remember to buy groceries, I turn on the radio to fill the apartment with people sounds, I subscribe to magazines, I buy kitchen appliances. Sometimes, when my boyfriend and I are sitting on the couch watching television, my head resting on his chest, listening to his breathing, we share a sarcastic comment aimed at the people on TV, and for a moment, I am home.