The neighborhood was everything. I could go to the dry cleaner and the liquor store on the same walk. Sushi, falafel, and pizza were just a short drive up Detroit. And if funds were low, so were prices at Marc’s, that T.J. Maxx of food, with its dented tuna cans and inexplicably large selection of peanut butter. Stores and restaurants flew rainbow flags year-round, and the one business I knew of that was openly homophobic—a taxidermy shop that appeared closed even when it was open and had a bumper sticker reading GOD MADE ADAM AND EVE, NOT ADAM AND STEVE in the window—was also openly mocked. I could go for a morning run in the Metropark, and in the evening, have a glass of wine at Three Birds. By comparison, my hometown near Cedar Point had not one single store at which to buy a CD, and there was opposition to plans for a Taco Bell because the locals believed it would attract gangs. Lakewood was a Shangri-La.
And just off of Detroit: Adam’s apartment, the seat of both my joy and misery. He hadn’t broken up with his girlfriend yet, but soon, I just knew, it would happen. They’d never have the chance to move in together. In the meantime, my plan was simple: continue sleeping with him and wait for him to give in to our obvious chemistry. But I’d forget this on the days I’d drive past his street on my way home from work and see his girlfriend’s car parked in front of his building. Her carrrrrrrr! I would be in agony as I pulled into my parking lot, imagining them in a Kama Sutra’s worth of positions—or worse, doing something like making dinner, throwing little puffs of flour at each other and laughing, a scene straight out of some stupid romantic comedy. I’d drag myself up the stairs of my building, collapsing in tears on the slipcovered couch that had been a hand-me-down from my grandparents.
This, as it turns out, is not a way to build self-esteem. I recognized that I’d become the kind of woman I’d always pitied, the “crazy” one waiting for a kind word or sign of affection from an emotionally (and otherwise) unavailable man. But I didn’t know how to break out. I’d decide that I was done, that I was too disgusted with myself to continue, and I’d go on dates with other guys. But then Adam would call, and the adrenaline would flood me.
Complete escape seemed the only option. For years, I’d entertained the fantasy of moving to New York City—a giant Lakewood!—and I began to plan in earnest. But really, it was both a distraction and a bluff: I was sure Adam would stop me. Our relationship wasn’t just sex, after all. We’d been friends before we’d been anything, and we’d spent nights talking about our lives, our ambitions, our secrets. That had to count for something.
I packed my apartment slowly, waiting. He never came. I got in the van and left Lakewood, this time by taking Detroit across the bridge and into Rocky River. I didn’t want to drive down the streets we’d walked, or pass the diner where we’d sat across from each other in squeaky vinyl booths, talking over coffee until 4:00 A.M. More than anything, I didn’t want to see his building. I felt at the time that he had taken Lakewood from me, but now, of course, I understand that I was the thief, and a cowardly one at that. I was leaving the only apartment I’d ever have that would be just mine: no roommates, no boyfriends. I’d been too obsessed with my heartbreak to allow myself the pleasure of being a single twenty-four-year-old woman in a city that I loved.
I later learned that Adam’s girlfriend had been cheating on him all along. They had broken up right around the time I’d settled in New York, where every street had been full of things I wanted to tell him about and every face was that of a stranger.
MARGARET SULLIVAN
Notes from the Expatriate Underground
WE WERE SO TIRED OF those people—the ones who had moved away from Buffalo, but still wanted to lay claim to it. The ones who gathered at Buffalo taverns in various cities to cheer (or grieve) the Bills, but didn’t have to think about the rusting steel mills along Route 5, or the problems of the second poorest city in the United States, or the constant infighting on the school board.
Although we true Buffalo people—the ones who actually lived in the Queen City—welcomed them back, with wan smiles, on the Wednesday nights before Thanksgiving, on Elmwood or Chippewa, we didn’t think for a minute that they were really Buffalo People.
No, they were poseurs, in their “City of No Illusions” T-shirts, swigging Genny Cream Ale and debating the virtues of wings at Duff’s versus Anchor Bar. Because after the holiday, or the wedding, or whatever had brought them back for a few days, they were gone, and we were here.
Still here.
I tolerated them for years, for decades. Now, I’m one of them: a Buffalo expatriate. And now, finally, I get it: the constant craving for the hometown, the need to talk about it all the time, the nostalgia for what was left behind.
I left for New York City in 2012, after most of a lifetime in Buffalo, including thirteen years as chief editor of the Buffalo News, where I had come as a summer intern after college in Washington and graduate school in Chicago. Three decades, somehow, went by. Parents died, children were born and raised. Then a job at The New York Times beckoned.
Now, after
