by Meghan Daum
Out on the street, he’d ordered the movers not to take anything else off the truck. When I explained that I had a longstanding agreement to sublet the apartment, he said he didn’t know about it and that therefore it wasn’t true. When I offered to call the woman from whom I was subletting and let him talk to her, he said this would accomplish nothing. He said I needed something called “proof of residency.” He said he needed to be involved in this transaction, though he wouldn’t specify in what way. And after twenty minutes of screaming and crying and hysterical calls to various people who couldn’t do anything (Alison, Stephanie, the guy I was dating, the guy I’d dated before this new guy), I started to understand what “proof of residency” meant. It meant baksheesh. It meant cash. Of course. So I went down the street to the ATM and took $100 out of my already overdrawn bank account and returned to the building with my “proof.” He accepted it as though it were a complete surprise and then let the movers resume. It would be the first of many fistfuls of proof I would hand over to this man. In fact, in the ensuing two years, the cost of simply staying afloat in the city and having a modicum of fun would break me. And sooner rather than later, I would grow so tired of feeding the city’s various angry beasts that I would leave it for good. But that night, I had won. I was twenty-seven, the age my mother had been when I was born. And as I lay on my futon, counting the notches in the ceiling molding, I felt as if I were finally peeking out from underneath the covers of my youth. I was home. At least for a time. And even if I wound up being a failure in a thousand other ways, no one would ever be able to say I hadn’t done so on my own.
THREE
For a long time, I believed I was enthralled by the Little House on the Prairie idea because it was just that: an idea. It was a narrative, not a viable lifestyle option. I believed the reason I gasped in delight whenever I happened upon an episode on TV was that it transported me to a rural idyll that was intriguing in theory but that I would surely hate in real life. In other words, I was never going there. I was just going to watch. It’s odd, then, that in my twenties, despite my devotion to urbanity, I often found myself wrestling with a curiosity about country living that seemed strangely akin to a homophobic person “struggling with same-sex attraction.” As much as I wanted to be a creature of the city, as much as I’d organized my entire life around the overpriced, undersized vagaries of Manhattan living, I sometimes found myself wanting desperately to live on a farm, or at least near one. I can’t explain this by way of any rational desire; indeed, it was almost purely visceral. I wanted to smell the countryside, to hear it. I wanted to live someplace where the evenings were punctuated by the sound of a wooden screen door slamming shut. And though this longing could be temporarily extinguished by dull weekend in upstate New York among oppressive mosquitoes and anxious friends (with their inevitable freak-outs over how to properly caramelize onions and who’s on cleanup duty), the thought of leaving the city and plopping myself down in Laura Ingalls country only got more beguiling as I got older.
The other thing happening as I got older was that my life in the city was beginning to take on the qualities of a pair of shoes you’ve been wearing forever and now have holes and smell slightly of Camembert but somehow can’t bring yourself to throw away. Though I loved my friends, I was tired of the cantankerous, money-extorting building super, tired of hot, airless subway platforms, tired of knowing that no matter how much I earned or how “deserving” I was, I’d probably still never live in the kind of apartment I really wanted. And so, when I was twenty-nine, I tossed out my old shoes. I gave up my sublet, put my few pieces of furniture on a long-distance moving truck, and got on a plane for Lincoln, Nebraska.
I realize that it can be difficult to make sense of this move. Even ten years out—and I am writing this book almost exactly a decade after I boarded that TWA jet and flew from LaGuardia to St. Louis to Lincoln—the whole experience remains something of a delicious enigma. For all its fine qualities, Lincoln is not exactly one of the nation’s premier destinations. It has no seaport or famous cuisine. It’s unlikely to be written up in an in-flight magazine as “one of the heartland’s hidden gems.” From certain angles, it can almost look like a caricature of Midwestern banality. There’s the requisite “rich” side of town, where the country-club district gives way to swirling cul-de-sacs of McMansions and jumbo-sized Macaroni Grill and Outback Steakhouse restaurants outside of which cherubic families clutch beepers that will vibrate when their tables are ready. There’s the “poor” side, where weathered Victorian houses have been converted into low-rent apartment buildings, where coffee canisters filled with cigarette butts sit on porches like statuary, where immigrants from Mexico and Vietnam and Iraq work multiple minimum-wage jobs and commingle—somewhat uneasily—with white folks who’ve been laid off from factories or are living on disability. In between these areas there’s the main campus of the University of Nebraska and the capitol building and the Haymarket district with loftlike antiques stores and a vegan sandwich shop and some elegant old neighborhoods with copper pots hanging from racks.
To say that I wasn’t swayed by the succor of those latter neighborhoods, to insist I wasn’t unconsciously channeling my mother’s never fully realized desire to cloak herself in the cozy snobberies—so “classy” yet so affordable—of college town life, would not be entirely honest. Indeed, I remember being shocked that some version of “the life of the mind” and all its attendant Persian rugs and Bach festival posters was apparently available—and for far, far less money—in venues other than Central Park West. But my fascination with Lincoln went beyond its favorable exchange rate with Manhattan. At the risk of sounding mystical or callow or, worse, unaccountable for my choices, I have to say that my decision to move there felt less like a decision than a decree from some otherworldly authority. I didn’t just want to do it; I had to do it.
I had to do it because I had somehow managed to live almost three decades without feeling as if I could perform basic adult tasks. Thanks to the infantilizing embrace of Manhattan, I had never owned a car, never (at least as an adult) raked the leaves or shoveled the snow of my own yard, never had the experience of going to a supermarket, buying a large amount of groceries, and, rather than carrying them several blocks home like a bedraggled mule and then shoving them into shallow cupboards, simply loading them into the car and then unloading them into the proper storage space in a proper kitchen. I realize these examples sound quotidian and therefore kind of adolescent—the hallmarks of adulthood as seen by a young girl tugging at her mother’s skirt. But I cannot overemphasize the degree to which I felt that certain fundamental life experiences had eluded me in a way that rendered me practically paralyzed. True, by the standards of the city I could get along well enough. I could find my way to temp jobs and to TriBeCa restaurants, and no siren or car alarm or street hollering was too loud to keep me awake at night. But in the outside world, in places (on the rare occasions I visited them) where the vast blankness of the land and sky made even the enormous supermarkets seem tiny, where, to many, words like “Vassar” were just a random sequence of letters, where weather mattered more than most anything else, I often felt lost, irrelevant, fatuous.
I moved to Lincoln because I did not want to continue in this vein. On a more practical level, I also moved there because it was incredibly cheap. Because this reason was—and is—simpler to explain to others, it’s the one I still tend to trot out when fielding questions about the whole episode. Courtesy mainly of student loans but also of rent that was “almost manageable” rather than actually manageable, I was now approximately $80,000 in debt. Because of this debt, I told myself—and a lot of other people—that the abrupt turn in my life trajectory had come out of desperation. I told myself that I had “no choice” but to move to Nebraska (as if it were a modern-day debtors’ prison) and begin the process of getting unbroke. But this was a lie; even at the time I knew it was a lie. If cleaning up my finances had been my only goal, I could have just found a full-time,
high-paying (or at least better-paying) job with benefits and stayed in New York. If my rent was truly my biggest problem, I could have moved to Queens or Hoboken and commuted to this job like a normal, hardworking person. But the truth was that the move wasn’t really motivated by money. It was motivated by a fierce and frightening desire. This desire was two-tiered. The first tier was that as much as I sometimes yearned for a full-time, high-paying job with benefits, I wanted more to remain what I already was: a writer who was paid (though often not well) for her work. The second tier was the unassailable fact that I was drawn to the big sky and austere, angular landscape of Nebraska in an almost chemical way.
The way I discovered that sky and landscape was that I went to Lincoln to research a magazine article about female methamphetamine addicts. During the week I was there, I met some impossibly nice people and, moreover, noticed that the cost of living was impossibly low. The way I actually ended up moving there was that I went home to New York, spent more than a year thinking fondly about Nebraska, and eventually woke up one morning realizing I’d rather be waking up on the prairie for $500 a month rent than paying twice as much to face an air shaft. So I called the impossibly nice people and told them I was immigrating to their exotic land. They were delighted, if utterly bewildered. They told me to stay with them—they had a farm, no less—as long as necessary while I found my own place. So a few months later I gave notice on my apartment, packed up my stuff, threw myself a going-away party, and left town. And from the moment the plane touched down on the tarmac—a vast Great Plains tarmac that seemed to spread out for miles in all directions—I knew I’d done, if not necessarily the smart thing, an unequivocally right thing. I’d wriggled my way out of the city’s imperious grip. To my greater elation, though, I was in house heaven.
From my New York perspective, the real estate in Lincoln was so affordable it almost seemed free. Grand Arts and Crafts houses of the “prairie school” sold for as little as $150,000, three-bedroom clapboard bungalows for $75,000. I wasn’t looking to buy, of course, but just knowing the housing stock was not only appealing and plentiful but also accessible to an ordinary, middle-class person made the world feel suddenly manageable, humane even. I rented the ground floor of a charmingly shabby 1920s-era house for $525 a month. The place had five whole rooms. These rooms included a dining room with gleaming, intricate woodwork and built-in glass cabinetry. French doors divided the living room from my office, and the bathroom had a cast-iron claw-foot tub. Even though the neighborhood, a collection of bungalows and apartment houses adjacent to the aforementioned professorial region, was not exactly Lincoln’s most affluent—many a sofa could be spotted on a front porch—I found myself giddy. For the first time in years, paying the rent and the electric bill did not invite a panic attack. For the first time ever, people around me were simply living their lives rather than pulling themselves up. And although I was still too much my parents’ child to completely abandon my lifelong class ascendancy mission (I still called editors in New York and chased writing assignments; in my Cynthia Rowley heels I was still a pretentious twit some of the time), I found myself reclining into some version of serenity. I drank beer on the porch. The sound of train whistles made my cheeks flush.
Naturally, I met a guy. An artist/landscaper/aging slacker. I moved with him to the countryside, where we rented a house whose porch was sagging to one side like some sad drawing in a children’s book. The house sat on ten acres of pasture surrounded by hundreds of acres of corn and soybean fields: an actual little house on the actual prairie. This thrilled me beyond comprehension. I began and eventually finished a novel about a girl who moves to a fictional Midwestern town. The girl in the book would also move to a farmhouse, but she would move into a large farmhouse with multiple bedrooms and a mudroom with wainscoting, wide-planked floors, and weather-beaten windows on three sides. The real-life version was a four-room saltbox with bedrooms scarcely big enough for beds. We painted the walls in aquamarines and periwinkle blues and filled the place with antiques and pieces of stained glass. We got rocking chairs for the porch and a floppy-eared puppy we named Rex. We drank together too much and spoke to each other too little. The rent was $700.
Though I harbored an often irrational fondness for this guy—despite having no discernible income or employment, he was handsome and hilarious and a good cook—I didn’t move in with him because I thought we’d be together forever. I moved in with him because I knew there was practically no way we’d be together forever. I realize that’s just the kind of mind-set that’s contributing to the moral decay of America; I know that’s why the terrorists hate us. But there you go. I moved in with him because at that point in my life the thing I wanted more than anything else was to live in a farmhouse on ten acres and, like it or not, such endeavors are best taken on with a partner. Plus, I loved the guy; that much was true. But we both knew we were never going to last more than a few years on that place. You can only sit on your lopsided porch drinking mediocre wine and eating mediocre Brie from the Hy-Vee supermarket and staring at the cows across the road for so long. As it was, I did this for nearly three years.
I’m pretty sure I mean that literally. The way I recall it, one day I was moving into that house and discovering the pleasures of semi-intoxication on that lopsided porch, and the next thing I knew it was more than two and a half years later and I was still sitting there. This is not uncommon in Nebraska.
Not that a part of me wouldn’t have loved to stay on that farm—or, better yet, some other farm—forever. In braver moments, I could see myself staking my own claim on the land, wandering alone and wraithlike through some rambling, inexpensive manse. But no matter how vivid these scenarios, I eventually couldn’t shake the feeling that it was time to leave the countryside. Although I’d stuck around far longer than I’d ever imagined I would, my final verdict was that remaining on that porch, eating that cheese, would turn the best decision I’d ever made—leaving New York—into the worst one. I may have been rather glamorously tanned and windblown on that gusty, treeless terrain, but I was also always a little hungover.
But where to go? Making a life for myself inside Lincoln city limits was an option, of course. I could have found a sweet house for an even sweeter price. And by now, in addition to the impossibly nice friends with the farmhouse, I had plenty of people to pal around with in town. I went out regularly for lunch and dinner. I ran into acquaintances at the farmers’ market. I was even in a book club. But when I closed my eyes and imagined a snapshot of my future self, I just didn’t picture the state capitol building or Buzzard Billy’s Armadillo Bar and Grillo (of which I was a regular) in the background. This was sad, though sadder yet was that I had no interest in returning to New York either. Even though I half believed that my old friends were still right where I left them, huddled in bars arguing about the state of contemporary fiction and so sure I was coming back that there was actually a drink waiting for me on the table, I couldn’t go back. I’d gone soft. I’d become too attached to the acoustics of life in an honest-to-goodness house—especially that piquant, summery sound of a wooden screen door slamming—to go back to clanking elevators and hollering building supers. Besides, the puppy had grown into an eighty-five-pound sheepdog. He couldn’t live in New York, at least not comfortably, and by then I’d realized that I couldn’t either.
My solution was Los Angeles. I know what you’re thinking. A sellout maneuver, an obvious choice, a step backward. But bear with me while I say a thing or two about the place. When you’re as predisposed as I am to wanderlust, any activity that occurs outside your own home (walking to the corner store, for instance) is an exercise in looking around and determining whether you’d rather live there than where you’re currently living. All foreign and domestic travel, all excursions around the city, all books, movies, and television shows depicting particular locations become fodder for relocation fantasies. It goes without saying that the real estate section of the newspaper is a form of pornography. So, with a f
ew exceptions (Carbondale, Illinois; San Francisco), I think it’s fair to say that I’ve never visited a place without imagining myself permanently or at least semipermanently installed there.
That is to say, I remember at age twenty-six sitting in the unforgiving sun at my brother’s graduation from USC and thinking that with a proper hat and sunglass collection, a person could do worse than to live there. I remember being sent to Hollywood a few months later to write a magazine profile of a young woman who competed in mountain bike races with a dead piranha around her neck (why this interview was in Hollywood I can no longer remember; the biker lived in another state) and thinking how nice it was to be able to drive around in an air-conditioned car rather than ride the stinky subway. Of course, I didn’t admit much of this at the time. Back then, I was still nursing my adolescent crush on New York, and I often made fun of L.A., decrying it as a cultural wasteland that couldn’t hold a match to the gritty wonders of, say, a certain “amazing” borscht restaurant in the East Village. I said those things because I believed that saying those things made you a real New Yorker. And like most people who protest too hard, I ended up going back on everything I’d said and embracing all that I’d disparaged.
It helped, too, that I had friends in L.A., most of whom seemed to be doing remarkably well. Lots of people from Vassar had headed west after graduation and parlayed their black-and-white, 16-millimeter student films into jobs producing reality shows. Additionally, Stephanie, my 100th Street roommate, had moved there a few years after leaving our apartment and immediately began getting noticed as a stand-up comedienne (sometimes telling jokes she’d tossed off while we were conspiring about what to do with Brad). Moreover and most shocking of all, my best friend, Alison, as unwavering a Manhattanite as I’d thought there ever was (like my father, she disliked barbecues on account of the outdoors factor), had ditched New York shortly before my departure for Nebraska to follow a boyfriend to L.A. She even finally learned to drive, though it took her nearly three years and two failed tests and she remained partial to the Santa Monica Big Blue Bus. Still, she adored L.A. She loved it, actually. Although she’d parted ways with the boyfriend a year after the move, she’d always been grateful to him for showing her, as she put it, that “it’s possible to go entire weeks without ever being either chilly or too warm.”
