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Authors: Meghan Daum
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Center office and talked them into hiring me as a part-time office assistant. I found a $700-a-month one-room apartment in a mildew-scented building in Greenwich Village (another fifth-floor walk-up, as it happened). I then—and this still astounds me—crunched thenumbers in such a way that I was able to convince my parents that this scenario wouldn’t cost them a dollar more than if I were to finish out the year at Vassar. As I had the previous summer, I’d be paying half my rent—this time $350 per month, which I would easily earn at the Lincoln Center job.
Too distracted by the coming storm of their marital dissolution to put up a fight, my parents granted me permission. And so at Christmas break my father drove the Plymouth Horizon up to Vassar and helped me take the futon mattress and the stereo components (still connected) as well as my computer and books and clothes and a high-contrast black-and-white art photo or two back to Jones Lane. A week later, I loaded it all back into the Horizon and enlisted my father to drive me into the city. I’m pretty sure he did so with reasonable graciousness, which in retrospect seems too kind given the manic, almost embattled attitude I’d developed about my need to get away from both my family and my college. Once installed in my new digs, I stocked the kitchen with ramen noodles and spread out the Guatemalan blanket. I put the Suzanne Vega CDs on the shelf and plugged in the computer. And although I felt like an impostor of staggering proportions, I also couldn’t help marveling at myself just a little bit. There I was: a twenty-year-old with her own job and Manhattan apartment. Smoking cigarettes and staring at the wall had taken on entirely new dimensions.
The sped-up version of the subsequent year and a half goes something like this: I lived in the one-room apartment, worked at the nonprofit arts organization, and took NYU classes in dramatic writing (apparently, I was now a playwright). The following summer was the summer that my mother moved out of the house on Jones Lane, and as my parents were no longer able to supply me with $350 in monthly rent money, I wasforced to return to Ridgewood and, yet again, commute to Lincoln Center on the bus (it was around this time that I visited my mother’s new house and ate polenta with her). In the fall, I returned to Vassar, where I lived in a spacious senior dorm room until I decided I could no longer tolerate eating in the dining hall. At the end of the first semester I rented an off-campus apartment—the second floor of a shabby row house several blocks from campus—with my friend Claire, a premed student whose reasons for living off campus I can no longer remember.
Not that I was planning to live there full-time. By that point, I had amassed almost enough credits to graduate; all I needed to do was write my thesis and attend its accompanying weekly seminar. I no longer wanted to be a playwright, but, rather, a journalist, so I applied for and was granted a three-day-a-week internship at an art magazine in Manhattan. The idea was that I would crash in the apartments of various friends who had already graduated from Vassar or (in a pinch) stay in Ridgewood for the part of the week in which I was doing the internship. I would then return to Vassar once a week for my thesis seminar. Since the campus was only a two-hour train ride from Grand Central Station, this scenario was not implausible, though not exactly advisable either.
I implemented this plan for four days until, on the fifth day, the art magazine went out of business and the entire staff was laid off. Having cleared my calendar of nearly all campus-related activities, I finished out my college career sprawled in front of the television in the row house apartment watching
Little House on the Prairie
reruns and, eventually, news coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots. By graduation day, I had ten addresses under my belt and had moved the futon mattress up and down a total
Too distracted by the coming storm of their marital dissolution to put up a fight, my parents granted me permission. And so at Christmas break my father drove the Plymouth Horizon up to Vassar and helped me take the futon mattress and the stereo components (still connected) as well as my computer and books and clothes and a high-contrast black-and-white art photo or two back to Jones Lane. A week later, I loaded it all back into the Horizon and enlisted my father to drive me into the city. I’m pretty sure he did so with reasonable graciousness, which in retrospect seems too kind given the manic, almost embattled attitude I’d developed about my need to get away from both my family and my college. Once installed in my new digs, I stocked the kitchen with ramen noodles and spread out the Guatemalan blanket. I put the Suzanne Vega CDs on the shelf and plugged in the computer. And although I felt like an impostor of staggering proportions, I also couldn’t help marveling at myself just a little bit. There I was: a twenty-year-old with her own job and Manhattan apartment. Smoking cigarettes and staring at the wall had taken on entirely new dimensions.
The sped-up version of the subsequent year and a half goes something like this: I lived in the one-room apartment, worked at the nonprofit arts organization, and took NYU classes in dramatic writing (apparently, I was now a playwright). The following summer was the summer that my mother moved out of the house on Jones Lane, and as my parents were no longer able to supply me with $350 in monthly rent money, I wasforced to return to Ridgewood and, yet again, commute to Lincoln Center on the bus (it was around this time that I visited my mother’s new house and ate polenta with her). In the fall, I returned to Vassar, where I lived in a spacious senior dorm room until I decided I could no longer tolerate eating in the dining hall. At the end of the first semester I rented an off-campus apartment—the second floor of a shabby row house several blocks from campus—with my friend Claire, a premed student whose reasons for living off campus I can no longer remember.
Not that I was planning to live there full-time. By that point, I had amassed almost enough credits to graduate; all I needed to do was write my thesis and attend its accompanying weekly seminar. I no longer wanted to be a playwright, but, rather, a journalist, so I applied for and was granted a three-day-a-week internship at an art magazine in Manhattan. The idea was that I would crash in the apartments of various friends who had already graduated from Vassar or (in a pinch) stay in Ridgewood for the part of the week in which I was doing the internship. I would then return to Vassar once a week for my thesis seminar. Since the campus was only a two-hour train ride from Grand Central Station, this scenario was not implausible, though not exactly advisable either.
I implemented this plan for four days until, on the fifth day, the art magazine went out of business and the entire staff was laid off. Having cleared my calendar of nearly all campus-related activities, I finished out my college career sprawled in front of the television in the row house apartment watching
Little House on the Prairie
reruns and, eventually, news coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots. By graduation day, I had ten addresses under my belt and had moved the futon mattress up and down a total
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