Alexandra Styron

Word Count 1142

In 1983, I was sixteen years old and beginning my freshman year at Barnard College. Foolishly, I had skipped orientation, wanting to squeeze out the last few days of summer at the beach and thinking myself too cool for pep rallies and awkward get-to-know-you games. My brother, Tommy, already a few years out of Columbia, had assured me it would be fine. But as I dragged my milk crates into the elevator dorm and watched knots of kids heading out onto Broadway together, I got a sensation both queasy and familiar: the party had started without me.

If there is an organizing principle of my life, I suppose this is it. The youngest of four by a wide margin, I always felt like I arrived in my family about a decade too late. My siblings were close in age. By the time I was in fourth grade, they were grown and gone. My parents were, metaphorically and often literally, gone as well. We lived in northwestern Connecticut in a tiny rural town where my father found the quiet he needed to write. But in the late 70s, they took a studio apartment on the Upper East Side. Together, my mother and father went to the city often, for parties and dinners and important engagements. They went alone as well, conducting - as I’d learn much later - private lives separate from one another. Sometimes my mother would take me with her, to shop, or see a play, or visit my siblings who had themselves fanned out across Manhattan and were making art, doing good works, having fun. As soon as I was old enough to think about college, I set my sights on Barnard.

I had some catching up to do. And I got right to it, my quest to be on the Innest of the Inside taking a path that made only a glancing tour of academia. At Saint Anthony’s, the haute monde fraternity on Riverside Drive that maintained a velvet rope admission policy, I appeared in Madonna-inspired get-ups, clocking which boys were the kind of Eurotrash that could improve my social capital and which were just posing and insecure like me. I danced at Heartbreak, on Varick street, and The Peppermint Lounge on West 45th street till my mascara was a mess, then retired to The College Inn on upper Broadway for egg sandwiches and well done french fries. In a Soho loft, I ditched my virginity, followed by a short, grim relationship with a grad student that ended, without fanfare, on my way to an abortion clinic. I turned seventeen. At Astor Place, I had my long sun-bleached hair cut into a lopsided wedge. With a rat tail.

Sometime in the late winter, a bald headed character I knew from summers on Martha’s Vineyard looked me up. On the island, he owned a vintage clothing store full of motorcycle jackets and Army surplus shorts and hung out with some of the movie stars who had houses back then overlooking the beach. He was, he told me, kicking around the city for a while. His friends were opening a Hard Rock Café on 57th street. He was helping to curate some of the memorabilia. (Hard to imagine now, but the Hard Rock of the early 80s was still a mecca of coolness and exclusivity). On and off for several weeks, my friend picked me up in a limousine at the Barnard gates. We’d tool around to the Odeon, the Saturday Night Live green room, meet up with folks at the unfinished restaurant site or at some grand crash pad overlooking Central Park. I flirted with everyone, and was flirted with, asked myself more than once “am I doing this?” or “what exactly is happening here?” Whatever it was, I somehow emerged unscathed, and was returned after every adventure by sunrise or when the cocaine ran out. Whichever came first.

Eventually, that girl would grow up. It took another decade or so of wasted time, squandered opportunities, chasing the wrong career, the wrong men, the wrong train to self worth. But ultimately I forged a life with satisfactions that no secret password or last call for alcohol could confer. As I did so, I began to miss the countryside. It was a physical thing, a need to run my thoughts, and my dog, in the woods. But it was psychic too. At twenty-nine, New York had taken the stuffing out of me. I bought a little house on The Vineyard and thought I could make it there alone. But that old taste for action drew me back to town. And then love came along, and kept me here.

When my children were born, I was sure that New York and I were truly done. I dragged my husband to Connecticut to look at real estate near my parents. I called the pre-school I’d attended and asked them to hold a place for my son. But after months of unsuccessful house hunting, the bright idea began to go sideways. Is this what I really want? I wondered as we drove the snowy hills, car seats in the back. Maybe I’m just too tired for big decisions. We settled instead in Park Slope, where I took solace in the knowledge that, if I ever got enough sleep again, the party was still outside my door.

These days, it’s hard to be romantic about New York . After almost two years stealing about a city of nearly nine million people, trying not to get too close to most of them lest they kill you with a sigh, we could all be forgiven for wanting to break up with the place. Who amongst us hasn’t wanted to pack up her shit like so many people already have and move to Austin or Whitefish or Brooklin with an “i”? For thirty-nine years I’ve loved this city and hated it, left and returned, taken advantage of all the spectacular benefits of being a New Yorker while continuing to maintain a strange interior fiction that I don’t truly live here. In my wallet you’ll find - along with my Empire Blue Cross ID, my Brooklyn Museum membership and my Slope Cellars Wine club card – a Massachusetts driver’s license. For almost four decades I’ve held the line at this most basic marker of citizenship.

My daughter is the same age today as I was when pulled up to Morningside Heights. Wiser, thank God, and appreciably more gimlet-eyed, she says she'd like to go somewhere else for college. I’ve told my husband that when she does, I have a hankering to leave, too. But don’t lose my number, New York. I just renewed my driver’s license. And I have a feeling that, wherever I am, I’ll probably leave my dancing shoes by the door.

Alexandra is the author of a novel and two non-fiction books, including the bestselling memoir Reading My Father. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair among other publications.