MotherSister Brooklyn

So I was reading this article about Martha Plimpton yesterday, and you know what stuck in my mind? Not her refreshingly old-school New York style, but the fact that she still lives in the rent-stabilized two-bedroom apartment she shared with her mom, who raised her on her own on the Upper West Side. “That’s what I gotta do!” I thought, my mind racing. “I’ve gotta secure a two-bedroom apartment now that The Scamp and I will never want to leave. Otherwise, our ship is sunk!”

Because I mean, really, tone-deaf articles like this one aside (married, high-earning white women buying real estate? oh, we’ve come a long way baby!), I don’t understand how any single woman with caregiving responsibilities — for a wee one, say, or an elderly parent — manages to find a decent place to live in this town anymore. (I’m emphasizing women here because it’s usually women who are paid lesser salaries, and it’s usually women who bear the caregiving load.) You usually legitimately need a 2-bedroom place, however small, but you don’t have another hard-chargin’, 60-hour-a-week warrior to split the rent with — so $2,000+ a month is astronomical, no matter how fancy the fixtures. Added to that are the time (spent not working) and expenses of child or elder care, and, well, you’re probably robbing Peter to pay Paul on a weekly basis. I also don’t understand volunteering (as people on the hunt essentially do when they advertise that they “can pay up to $2XXX…”) at least two large a month in rent, but I guess I’m showing my age on that point.

My cold sweat has been patted dry for the moment; I’m in the process of moving into a cozy 2-bedroom, by some miracle still here in Clinton Hill. But I doubt The Scamp will still have the keys to the place when he’s 37 years old like lucky Martha. Before my search was happily resolved, I was seriously considering Madame X’s tips to burst the NYC real estate bubble. Rather than waste time praying for a miracle, I’m just going to step up my hustle and scrimp and save every dime so I can seize the first good opportunity I find to join the owner class. Even if it doesn’t happen till I’m 62 and I only need a second bedroom for my walking stick collection.

I am way behind in my periodicals reading, which is why I only just discovered this 2006 Believer piece on writers’ houses. Anne Trubek questions the value of the tourist circuit of writers’ houses — a refreshing inquiry, as most articles about them tend to be thinly disguised interiors porn, highlighting literary abodes that may as well belong to Vanderbilts or Dukes. (I wonder if you ever see the writer’s bathroom in these places? Would probably tell you all you needed to know.) Besides, I’d rather see Zadie Smith’s house, Charles Bukowski’s house, Haruki Murakami’s house — but I guess it only works if the writer is dead and stinking rich.

More interesting to peruse has been Jill Krementz’s The Writer’s Desk, a collection of photographs of writers, well, writing and talking about how they enter the headspace to produce. There’s Toni Morrison on a couch writing longhand on a legal pad, Veronica Chambers perched on her kitchen counter with a laptop, Dorothy West in front of her unabashedly messy, paper-strewn desk. Process-wise, while I’d like to be like my hero Joan Didion — coolly collected, as always, in a 1972 portrait sitting in front of a table with only a massive typewriter, a ready book of matches, and an elegant wastebasket at her bare feet — I suspect I’m more like Susan Sontag, captured in 1974 sitting at a long table covered with stacks of books, papers, notebooks, pens, mail, reviews, and a telephone. She says: “Getting started is partly stalling.” Indeed.

On reflection, there are three things I usually need to really settle down and drum out some writing. If I have these things, it doesn’t really matter where I am. They are:

• Forethought. I do a lot of advance thinking and research, forming and reconsidering sentences and even paragraphs in my mind before setting them down. I wrote entire term papers this way in college and grad school; I rarely revised anything and almost never regretted that. Even my blog posts are at least half formed before I get near my laptop.
• Food and water…but not too much. I can’t start writing on an empty stomach, but I do need a little edge of hunger and thirst to stay in the groove. A parched palate and a growling stomach drive me to finish the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next page. This slightly insane delayed gratification is the reason that anyone who interrupts me while I’m writing will probably have his/her head taken off. The combination of low blood sugar and broken concentration leaves me as agitated as an alley cat in heat.
• A fight with The Hub. I find it harder to settle down to work if we’re too friendly. Picking a fight with The Hub ensures that he will temporarily avoid crossing my path, which in turn ensures that I’ll have the solitude I need. Plus, I need to be a little pissed off about something when I write; I’m pugilistic that way.

Sometime in 1983, I remember sitting at my orange-and-blue flowered kiddie table — which served as teacher’s desk, restaurant setting, doctor’s examination table, manicure station, and whatever else I used it for — and doodling idly on a piece of paper:

1984. 1985. 1986. 1987. 1988. 1989. 1990. 1991. 1995. 1999. 2000.

Whoa. 2000. “I’ll be 25,” I thought in amazement. “What will my life be like then?” I carefully traced and re-traced the numbers with my yellow no. 2 pencil, trying to picture the days when writing those years would be normal, of the moment.

Do you remember? Remember when we thought the future looked like this?

I’ve loved Aarnio ball chairs, but I didn’t know that one of his countrymen took the aesthetic all the way to an entire house!

Complete photo and more here.

So at last Saturday’s SalvageFest, a classy little piece of furniture caught my eye. Sort of a lingerie chest/cabinet thing topped by a mirror; sort of like this (in form, not detail)

but not quite. It was immediately familiar; I could almost smell my grandmother’s house again, with its green carpeting, 2-ton television set topped with framed family photographs, my grandfather’s big leather chair, and the ashtrays still full of his cigarette butts long after his sudden death when I was 3 years old. Perhaps because my brain was melting from the unexpected heat, I didn’t inquire about the piece (I wouldn’t have wanted that one specifically, but something just like it — at least I would’ve known the formal name for it) or snap a photo of it. Idiot.

I’ve been searching restlessly for something similar, and now I’m afraid I’ll never find it again. My fruitless hunt has also motivated me to try to acquire a gossip bench and at least one step table, furniture that also figured prominently in my grandmother’s house, which has been in freefall since her death half my lifetime ago. Midcentury furniture has been very trendy for the past decade, but for me, it’s very comforting and oddly old-fashioned, jogging memories of Star Trek, Gunsmoke, and Perry Mason reruns; flat Coca-Cola, boiled chicken, and pecan trees; Reader’s Digests and Ladies Home Journals piled up; ripe August peaches that seemed as big as the moon; and my Buddha-faced homemaker grandma, wearing my late grandfather’s old Army shirt and working on a quilt.

Chest in photo above available here.

When I was 10 years old, I had the third love fling of my brief life with Eddie Murphy (the first two lucky studs were Scott Baio and Michael Jackson — and then there was Prince, but that’s an ongoing thing so I won’t count it here). Whereas the first two love affairs involved watching “Joanie Loves Chachi” and Foxes, then staring at the video for “Can You Feel It?” and sighing at the cover of Thriller (especially the shot with the tiger cubs — ladies, you know what I’m talkin’ ’bout), my involvement with Edward Regan Murphy was far more adult: regular viewings of the R-rated Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop, and 48 Hrs.; an autographed photo as a thank-you for sincere birthday wishes; and keeping a folder of designs for his palatial mansion in Jersey.

That last bit, my friends, is how you know that Mr. Murphy had penetrated my id. You see, moving around incessantly as a child bred a little obsession with houses. I loved seeing house plans reviewed and chosen, foundations laid; walking through the shell and imagining the finished rooms, comparing flooring options and fixtures. I poured through my father’s plan books, critiquing this layout or that, settling on one and then carefully combing through furniture catalogs, clipping out what I liked and keeping everything in a folder I called home. One tidy, settled home, planned, constructed, and decorated by me and me alone. To be shared with Eddie or, y’know, whomever.

This little obsession resulted in a determination to build a house of my own someday. Today the Times has an article on architect-designed house plans gone digital, which is one more time suck I don’t need but will thoroughly enjoy. I’ve also wanted to learn more about vernacular architecture, especially as it relates to black American history; in this time of real-estate frenzy, it’s nice to focus on the humanity of the basic need for shelter.

[Image of shotgun shack from here.]