Ah, yes, is what I think soon as I step from my plane into LaGuardia to catch the announcement, "Would passenger Tony Massiotti please report to baggage claim."
I hear the name the way others might revisit a birdsong. It puts me right back. I imagine Tony's slick black hair and a gold cross 'round his neck, his manner wrapped in a pelt of machismo, his mother living in the row house next door.
Then there's the Third World-ish feel to the airport: smaller, dingier, with stairs (stairs!) to reach baggage claim, no escalator. For a moment, I'm startled. Seconds later, recognition arrives: this is America's Old Country. How much newness, con-venience and space we grow used to on the West Coast living between minute-and-a-half-old walls.
This dissimilarity between New York and Seattle, the city I now call home, prompts me to call my husband to laugh about the man next to me who is not "fighting" with his wife and she is not "fighting" with him as they yell at each other contentiously. But any number of my Seattle friends would think they were about to commit a double homicide as they lapse into a loudness that intensifies under the slightest bit of stress. I call my husband because we've had to work on this, he and I, he from the laid-back-I-never-show-emotion Scotch-Irish tradition, raised in San Francisco and, years later, finding himself married to an East Coast Italian girl impassioned easily about any old thing.
Besides, my people aren't from midtown or uptown where the fashionable go-getters try to make it in a city that means they could make it anywhere. Italian immigrants settled downtown. And I don't mean The Village, as in East or West, but below Houston Street. Which any New Yorker will tell you "is a whole nudder thing." Even more so 40 years ago. The first time I visited the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street I thought, hey, what's so bad about this apartment?
Here's the good news: I've been lent the keys to my publisher's pad on the Upper West Side, just a few blocks from Central Park. Which means to my family that "I've come up in the world." And I suppose it means the same to me, though only in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way.
On the sidewalk it's the working class, the Ecuadoran maids and nannies I identify with on an inner level, rather than the chiseled, blond "aristocrats" (my cabbie still calls them this, so I shouldn't? -these words should only be said with a Yiddish accent) who seem so fearless and entitled. I look at them and know I will never be able to be so blasé about privilege. It doesn't matter how many years have passed, how much wealth I've attained or success I've met; in this city I feel my proletarian roots resist, my past and present playing tug-of-war.
Among this jumble of emotions washing through me, is the feeling that I may have a big ol' dose of homesickness. Not only for a city that lets me wear pointy heels without staring down as if I've just dropped my drawers, or for the buzz of it, which I actually prefer to, say, a walk in a national park, but for how people don't seem to want to keep the mess of the world at bay by moving to the suburbs and mowing compulsively. Instead they seem to embrace the street, accepting that it's impossible to hide from it. It will eventually take the elevator up to find you.
And the doorman at my building on West 89th? He could be my cousin. He walks this block with such verve, such pride, such possession. God, I adore him. And when he hails me a cab by stepping right into the flow of oncoming traffic like a modern urban warrior, I think I'm in love. And because his mood is so down-to-earth and accepting of the caste system that plays itself out each day in the building he guards, as well as on this entire island metropolis, so, by association becomes mine.
As a young person straight out a girl's college (which my father believed would keep me unsullied - yeah, OK), I was too intimidated by the "roar of the greasepaint, smell of the crowd" to compete here. Maybe if my parents had been educated and not of immigrant status, I would have had a jump-start into a life that education and status combined is the very ticket one needs. That is, of course, if I didn't want to end up north of 120th Street or south of Canal living with eight roommates in a stifling concrete box on top of an eight-floor walk-up. Which isn't fun at any age and why so many young hopefuls end up in Queens.
And if I had been born to a different set of circumstances, would I have made it in this city? Why, yes. No. Possibly. I don't know. Most likely. Who knows?
All I know for sure is that right now I'm swinging a bag of ridiculously expensive, exquisite groceries from Dean & Deluca's. And I can appreciate the blissfulness of doing so in a way I might not if this city had forced me to admit that my competitive edge is on a par with an eraser's.
At this moment the simplicity of a life free from such vigorous drive is mine, and before I return to Seattle, I'm pretty certain I will remember anew that some people are better off living in The Apple. But I'm not one of them.
I have no doubt that's the thought that will become clear-cut in this out-of-reach city as I feel the relief of being here in an undemanding way. But on this particular sunny day, Manhattan is mine:
From the food to the theaters to the fashion to the neighborhoods as distinctly different as men are from women. From the man on 96th Street whose yarmulke blows off in the wind, to the Jamaican nanny who runs after it. From the dog in Bryant Park who makes a living for his owner by balancing two smaller dogs, pyramid-style, on his back. To the nail salon on Columbus, where my feet are blissfully massaged even as two cops ask questions of all the women working because, as it turns out, only yesterday a wife was shot dead by her estranged husband right here (sure enough, when I look down there is an ultra-scrubbed-clean carpet by the door!! I swear to you I'm not making this up!) and yet, I'm ashamed to admit, I still enjoy my pedicure.
And from Little Italy, down around Elizabeth Street, now so hip-it-hurts that I fear my ancestors are revolving in their graves much like the rotisserie chicken they once sold here.
For me, this is as good as good gets in Manhattan. And there is no way I will spend another minute measuring my life against the choices I might have made. It will only rob me of the very thing I once thought an "uptown" life would bring.
Because, finally, here I am.
Sanelli's two-women show "The Immigrant's Table" runs at Seattle's Historic Market Theater First three Friday nights in August, the 4th, 11th and 18th, 8 p.m., "under the Market Clock" at 1328 Post Alley. Tickets: 587-2414, www.unexpectedproductions.org
[[In-content Ad]]
