How To Time Travel in One Easy Step

Or, How I Ruined My Own Photoshoot by Crying in The House I Grew Up In

Funny story! This Monday morning, I had a photoshoot to accompany a (very big and fancy) profile, and I had the idea to meet the photographer on the stoop of the house I grew up in, a brownstone on the Upper West Side that my parents lived in from 1985-2015. The photographer and I had only been chatting on the stoop for a few minutes when an Escalade pulled up, and a dapper young man dressed all in white hopped out and asked if I was there to see the house.

“No,” I said. “Are you showing it?” He was.

This is the point when I should have paused and considered the fact that I was there to have my picture taken, and that I was wearing mascara for the first time in a year. Instead I stood up and asked if I could go in. I could.

I made it about three feet into the house before I burst into tears.

Photo by Cappy Hotchkiss. This mirror now lives in our bedroom. The head tutu lives in a box in my closet.

I only took terrible pictures, apologies in advance, but this (top photo) is the mantle in the dining room, and the site of all my parents’ wonderful dinner parties, and my birthday parties, and my wedding (bottom photo).

The house was empty, and had been staged with some unassuming, vaguely modern furnishings, which added to my feeling that we had only just left it. Six years doesn’t seem as long as it used to, but I think if there had been some other family’s photos and ephemera hanging about, it would have felt less out-of-body and more disconcerting. Did I mention that I cried every time I entered a new room? I did.

The view from the top.

The house has an excellent staircase. I had forgotten the curves of the newel posts and the smoothness of the wooden bannister. How many tender, sacred things do we forget in our lifetimes?

I almost took this sign from the garden. I bought it for my father as a present—Underhill is the last name of one of his beloved characters, and it seems that the people who bought the house from my parents found a NYC street sign charming enough to keep.

The heaviness of the lock to the garden door. The view from my childhood bedroom window, and the apartment building across the way, from which my neighbor used to throw me candy. The creak of the floor. The brown glass of the skylight. The little speaking holes that didn’t work, not for communicating and not for dropping secret treasures and having them come out the other side.

There had been some renovations—a few new sinks, some fresh paint—but nothing major. The house is perfect just as it is.

The broker’s client walked in when we were back on the stoop, the kind photographer pausing when I began to blubber. The client moved through the house fast, and on her way out, I said, “It’s a really good house.” “Oh,” she said, “It’s not for me, it’s an investment.” I didn’t poke a hole in her tires, but I considered it. In related news, if anyone has $8 million dollars for me to borrow, I’ll take it.

I hope the photos show everything—my heart, overflowing, all thirty years of life in that house spilling out. We’ll see. They say time travel isn’t real, but I don’t know. I think it’s all a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

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