Washington Square

On a visit to Greenwich Village, Abigail Thomas reflects on a different time in a "different" city.

Acroterion/Wikimedia Commons

I’m sitting on a bench near the fountain. My daughter and I were in New York last night, going back home to Woodstock today. A short film had been made out of one of my stories, and we had been invited to the screening.

The sun is shining, the fountain is throwing water into the sky, my daughter is talking to a young woman walking somebody else’s dog. A few people in academic robes are having their pictures taken with the fountain as the backdrop. They are celebrating their college graduation. I lasted in college one semester and never went back. I was pregnant, and told to leave. It was 1959. I think if I’d finished college I’d never have become a writer. Too many critics looking over my shoulder. Anyway, I never regretted it.

I lasted in college one semester and never went back. I was pregnant, and told to leave. It was 1959. I think if I’d finished college I’d never have become a writer. Too many critics looking over my shoulder.

I haven’t been in this park since the sixties. New York was a different city back then, we all seemed to know each other, and you could live on next to nothing. My salary was $100 a week. My little apartment on West 12^th Street was $143 a month. Today you couldn’t rent an empty kitchen drawer for that. Everyone I knew was broke, but we didn’t know it yet, and together we felt like family.

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Different city, different times, it’s no surprise, I must have been a different person. I am 82 now, three marriages behind me, four kids, twelve grandchildren, two great grandchildren. But as I sit here, thinking about the young woman I was, I can almost see her, sitting barefoot on the rim of the fountain while her kids play in the water, a young woman who had fled a bad marriage, hungry for everything she didn’t yet know, willing to sleep with any man who could fog a mirror, a naive young woman who believed in a different future for this country. I know what her life was like, thrilling and dangerously out of control, but knowing and feeling are different.     

I want to be her again, just for a moment, just while I sit here, wild and foolish and full of hope. But at 82, I have become a sequence of nesting dolls, and she is now too small, buried too deep. And it’s time to head back to the hotel, check out, and drive home.

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Read the whole Goodbye to All That series.