Memoir

Angela Tanzer                                                                                                         

11/13/13

                       The rooms were considerably small. Kitchen-living room. A room for my sister and me was down the hall. My parents had to sleep in the living room. Despite it sometimes feeling cramped or quaint, the house we lived in until I was four had an aura of comfort to it. In retrospect, though my memories are scraps of something like a black and white movie: silent, short movements and unfamiliar people--the orange boots one of our baby-sitters wore, but not her face, tiny, insignificant things, like what a blanket of snow flakes enveloping Manhattan looked like through my four year old eyes one morning-- I know I loved my old life.  Everything from crawling around the kitchen with my little sister, or being propped up in my high chair eating tons of bananas, to my slightly rude best friend and family members gathered in the living room wearing party hats on a birthday celebration, standing or sitting laughing. Even moments like locking myself in the bathroom when I was four grew on me, like a vine that I couldn’t cut down, even on the day we arrived at the front steps to the red door of the brownstone, 589 10^th street in Park Slope.

            Frustration always grips me hard and gives me unbearable, stupid impulses. Rip up this stupid thing. You don’t know what’s happening, so why not just—Angela stop! You’ll figure out what’s going on… I was four years old when we moved out of the Upper East Side to Brooklyn. The day was so disorienting it was all I could manage to look around at the empty, wood-floored rooms, sit down on a tiny chair and scribble away in a Hello Kitty diary and not tear it up. We had to start looking into new places when construction had to be done in our old apartment. Initially the construction only took us out of the house and into a tiny room at a nearby hotel, a room I remember nearly nothing of. This doesn’t surprise me, as year by year, the times I spent in Manhattan seem to recede slowly from my mind, floating further and further away into the dark and unseen face of the past. Nothing seems real about it anymore.

            Though I may not have first recognized it trapped so deep inside my old life, attached to an existence, to routine I not only knew so well but also cherished so much, the change was for the better. Though early childhood memories sometimes slip the mind swiftly and frequently, I somehow recall myself sitting on the floor, flipping sadly through a book of pictures and last words that my old classmates had sent. My new school was a typical talked-about Park Slope mom’s school. I loved my kindergarten teacher, a tall, caring women, a mess of reddish curls atop her head like the frosting on a cupcake. Our new apartment was still small, often giving off that push-your-chair-in-all-the-way-or-else-no one-can-walk feeling. My sister and I shared a tiny room with a window that had been painted completely white. Park Slope was and still is less like the busy, house-under construction Upper East Side and a more refined, expensive neighborhood.

            Now I sometimes wonder where I would be if we hadn’t moved into Park Slope. I know I wouldn’t be at this school and surely not as nice a neighborhood. To think that if the construction hadn’t been done at that time or my parents hadn’t considered looking into apartments THAT year, I would be in a different place with different friends and know different teachers is crazy. All we have is all we can imagine life as and unless we are the ones who wanted change in the first place, we are utterly baffled by our ability to step right into a new stream of life. Just like that.