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Thirty years ago, I stepped off an Amtrak train into the heat and stench of New York's Penn Station clutching an oversize trash bag full of my clothes. I had $1, 000─my life savings─tucked into the front pocket of my bluejeans, and a piece of paper with an address scrawled on it in my back pocket: 228 Sullivan St. I had never laid eyes on the apartment in an improbably pink building that I was about to call home for the next three months. My impulsive decision to leave Boston and move to Manhattan came for complicated reasons: a new love affair, the hope of learning how to become a writer and some romantic vision shaped by the Saturday-matinee Doris Day movies of my childhood. Also, like many people who move away from home, I was escaping. A few months earlier, my only sibling, Skip, had died in a household accident and I had spent all the time since futilely trying to comfort my parents. I was 25 years old, and the thought of living in that grief even one minute more was too much for me to imagine. Here, among the piles of trash that lined the street and the smell of falafels and exhaust, I thought I might take refuge. Heather, the woman subletting the apartment to me, was a dancer, blonde and lithe with Betty Boop eyes. She was moving across town to live with her on-again, off-again boyfriend. Eager to start her own new life, she showed me the dishes and cups─there were two of each─her coffeepot, which involved boiling water and pouring it through what appeared to be a sock, and all of the other things that made this Heather's home. I thought longingly of my Mr. Coffee tucked away in storage, my Farberware pans and Marimekko comforter. Heather gave me a quick tour of the neighborhood─where to buy coffee and a newspaper, where to go for a drink. Then she was gone. | 
