I didn’t question my sister. I knew I needed to leave. If I hadn’t been sick all those years, then my mother had been doing something very wrong keeping me home, and if that was true, then I knew I didn’t want to be around her anymore.
I had one decision to make: Did I want to live with Robin or with Jill? That day on the beach, Robin and I talked over my options. I could either go to Philadelphia with her or live with Jill in Manhattan. Robin had a live-in boyfriend, Skip, and I felt I didn’t want to be in the way. Jill had graduated from college and could use the help with the rent. Manhattan also seemed like the easier transition; I was familiar with the city, and I would be close enough to still see my friends on Long Island. I decided to go with Jill. In the space of minutes, the decision had been made. I was going to leave home, and this would force our parents to finally separate, something they should have done years ago.
Together, my sisters and I took charge of our family’s future.
The next morning at school, in math class, I told Diana the news that I was leaving and moving to New York City. We made a pact that she would come to see me in the city, or I would come out to visit her on Long Island. Our friendship would continue, but with the whole of Manhattan at our disposal.
Although I remember my excitement at telling Diana my news, I don’t have any recollection of what I said to my parents. My father was so uninvolved in my life that my absence wasn’t going to affect him much; when my sisters presented the plan to him as a fait accompli, he had no objections. What about my mother? Did Robin explain that I was going to leave? I can’t be certain. And although I know I should be able to find a memory of my mother the day I left, it’s a blank. My mother was forty-six years old and watching her youngest child leave home. Her marriage was over; her nest was empty. But as hard as I try, I can’t picture her face as we said good-bye. Perhaps I was so focused on looking ahead of me that I forgot to turn and look back.
What I do know is that my mother didn’t at any point try to stand in my way. She let me go. I think she knew in her heart that she didn’t have the strength to take care of me anymore, and in her own way, she wanted to do what was right for me. If I went to live with my sister, it would be one less struggle for her to bear, and maybe I would have a chance at a better life.
* * *
THAT OCTOBER, I started my new life in New York. Jill was twenty-three years old and living in a small studio apartment at Thirty-third and Third Avenue. She’d begun working as a booking agent at the Wilhelmina modeling agency, crossing paths with famous models of the day such as Margaux Hemingway and Pam Dawber. I started at the Rhodes School, a small private school on West Fifty-fourth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Rhodes wasn’t at all elite or academic, and even with my less than perfect school records, I was able to pass the entrance exam. The fees must have been somewhat affordable as well, as my father paid for them using the money that Sherman had left in his will for my education.
Now that I’d left home, my parents rented out the house on Long Island and began divorce proceedings. My mother went to live with Robin in Philadelphia, while my father moved to Manhattan. He found a fourth-floor apartment in a brownstone on Fifty-third Street near Fifth Avenue, and, soon after, Jill and I moved into a fourth-floor walkup just across the street. The apartment didn’t have a kitchen and needed a lot of work, but we were eager to leave Jill’s tiny studio, and the rent was cheaper on Fifty-third. Our new apartment had long dark wooden beams crossing the ceiling and an old fireplace that no longer worked. Jill and I refinished the floors and painted the walls with a stucco effect. My father built a small bar to give us a kitchen area, and we bought a refrigerator, toaster oven, and hot plate. There was one bedroom, where Jill and I slept on mattresses on the floor. Malcolm paid my share of the rent and, in the beginning at least, gave me sixty dollars a month for food.
From the minute I arrived, I loved New York. For the first time in my life, I felt free to come and go as I pleased. Each day, I walked to school along Fifth Avenue, a distance of exactly one block. Right below the apartment, there was a little hamburger place where I’d stop for a burger whenever I had the money. On the weekends, Jill and I often went out together. She’d take me to the nearby Hilton Hotel for drinks with her friends; then we’d go to a disco where they didn’t check IDs, where we could order white wine spritzers and dance the Hustle. Everyone in Jill’s group was kind to me, the little sister. When we had money to spare, which wasn’t often, we’d go downtown to Orchard Street or the Village, where Jill’s model friends told us we could get great deals. I remember buying blue bell-bottom jeans at the new Fiorucci emporium after it opened, right around the corner from Bloomingdale’s.
I was learning on my feet, racing to educate myself, to grow up, all the time trying to leave my childhood behind me. Away from my mother, I never missed a day of school. I loved Rhodes
