Salon Wanderlust | Angela, the Upside-Down Girl

[Salon Wanderlust: Travel with a passion]

T A B L E_T A L K
How have you acquired new languages? Discuss travel and foreign speak in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y
My junior year abroad
By Edith Pearlman
A 60-year-old's adventures in a classroom called Jerusalem
(08/26/98)
My Hawaiian honeymoon
By Cintra Wilson
Of a 1,300-pound pop-ukulele star, teenage bikini queens and the best wave on earth
(08/25/98)
Sex, death and beauty in South America
By Melanie Goldman
Week Two of the Camel Trophy
(08/24/98)
Oh when the gays come dancing in
By Rebecca Bryant
The physical -- and emotional -- revelations of Amsterdam's Gay Games V
(08/21/98)
The view from Japan
By Dave McCombs
It's the economy, not the morality
(08/20/98)

Browse the
Wanderlust Passages archives

A N G E L A , T H E U P S I D E - D O W N G I R L

Book cover

[ E X C E R P T ]

ANGELA THE UPSIDE-DOWN GIRL
AND OTHER DOMESTIC TRAVELS
BY EMILY HIESTAND
BEACON
230 PAGES

BY EMILY HIESTAND | Like flotsam jostled together, we had been drifting into our futures since morning in a Chevrolet Bel-Air, turquoise with vestigial tail fins. Judy's mother had loaned us the Bel-Air; Beverly was beautiful; and the fourth girl -- we called ourselves girls -- was already homesick. What was her name? Her drawing style was a pen-and-ink pointillism, thousands of dots with which she coaxed the illusion of realism from an atomized abstraction. It was nearly midnight when we entered the ambit of America's city on a hill. The first door we opened, on the outskirts of Boston, was the door to the Glo-Min Motor Inn, whose name took the gloaming, the old time of waxing shade, through the turnstile of American pop. In our room and presumably in all the rooms at the inn, the lamps, chairs, and television set were tethered to the floor by thick black chains, a look that might in later years be passed off as punk chic. Down the street a few blocks from the well-secured motel there was a late-night diner. We parked the Chevy outside, sat at the counter in a row, and ordered a dish called clam rolls.
It was the year that, longing for the Moon, four astronauts settled for getting back to Earth alive, the year that Cambodia was invaded, the year of Kent State. Our final senior project had been to protest, again, the war -- draping the façade of our art school in sheets of black plastic which had billowed from the Doric columns like dark sails. In the diner now there was a local group, girls about our age whose territory was three booths along the windows -- an expanse of plate glass alive with greenish fluorescence, with glints of chrome and reflected licks of fire from the grill. The girls eyed us for a while, then sent over a welcoming party, whose greeting, summarized, was what the hell were we were doing in their diner, and were we some "rich chicks cruising"?
The counter waitress told the girls to knock it off, and they did, but when we left the diner they followed, moving down the sidewalk after us, walking then running, a blade flashing just as we got the windows rolled up and the car doors locked.

That night of our arrival, by chance in one of the city's most insular, and soon to be embattled neighborhoods, New England was impression only: Squanto and Thanksgiving, Puritans in somber jerkins, some tea floating in the harbor. We had read The Scarlet Letter in high school, and once my Girl Scout troop had been taken by Greyhound bus as far north as New York City, where we saw Camelot and a delicatessen, events of equal splendor -- the glistening white-gold stage and the glistening pickles and sodas of fabulous sorts (cream soda!), and metal trays hefting unknown salads, some of fishes and moist tentacles. From a harbor ferry, we saw the brawny goddess of Liberty wound in scarves of mist; we saw two tug boats bump into each other, heard the crews curse across the decks, and then the scout bus returned us to the east Tennessee hills.
Home was then Oak Ridge, and in that anomalous South of uranium and isotopes, with physicists and Danish Modern tapering about its living rooms, I felt none of the diffuse, bruised misgiving about the North that one could find, a century after Sherman, among many more Southern southerners. After high school I did not hesitate to migrate northward to a college of art in Philadelphia, the old city of the Atlantic Plain.
How lightly to me regional borders then signified: another new world could be chosen at a graduation party, with an offhand "Sure." Mark the logic that led four young artists to Boston: it was not New York, which Judy declared "too big," and it was not where any of us had come from. Ours was a tiny aperture of deliberation, and yet for me to aim at Boston was to travel farther north for a permanent dwelling than anyone in my family ever had -- save for my great-grandfather's brother, Sam Callahan, who had adventured from Alabama to Alaska and frozen to death one winter on the Lonesome River, a fact pointed out to me by my Aunt Marguerite. Some members of our family had removed themselves from the Deep South and survived -- some to Charleston, my parents as far north as Maryland -- but none to Massachusetts, core of the Yankee mind. My maternal grandmother, Frances Webb Callahan Watkins, took the news as though I were bound on the first Arctic expedition.

The Glo-Min Motel was home for a week as the four of us hunted for a cheap apartment, by which we meant something so rock-bottom cheap that one aging real estate agent guffawed when he heard what we planned to spend.
"You girls could not be looking in a worse place," he then said cheerfully. "This is Newton. This is the completely wrong town for you." He unfolded a map and used a magic marker to cross off Newton and all the other professionally dappled neighborhoods, and also the ones he deemed too raw, which left only a few scattered patches. The one he said we must try was a community northeast of Boston, on the bay. "Winthrop" it said on the map alongside his large finger.

Fast strong currents swirl around the peninsula of Winthrop, and colonial oarsmen named the area Pullen Poynt. The peninsula was also secluded, and for a century, until the railroad came, it was a retreat with summer hotels and sailboats, white dresses and parasols. Winthrop's social climate had changed by the time we drove the Bel-Air into town, but the sea air was still refreshing, ten degrees cooler than Boston proper. The roses of Winthrop relish the town's salt atmosphere, climb its walls blousily, lay themselves down on the town's fences in blankets as thick as those garlanding the Derby winner. From the steep glacial hill in the center of town, the prospect sweeps down to mouse-gray sand and cord-grass marsh. Beneath its soft apron of mud, the marsh holds hen and wedge clams, with their china-white, spoon-shaped cavities, and quahogs whose shells once made the good purple wampum. Immediately back of the shorefront drive, along streets named Mermaid and Neptune, are rows of tidy summer cottages. But Shore Drive itself was then the tatty, transient part of town, a strip of former hotels turned into rooming houses and apartments with aluminum siding, or fake rock siding, the kind that resembles giant mixed nuts inexplicably plastered onto a wall. The air smelled of mollusk, salt, and rotting wrack. In some synaesthesia of the shore, coolness too was in the smell, and if the day was gray the place could feel like wet laundry.
My first home in New England was the second floor of a house on this strip, separated from the Atlantic by a seawall and a beach of coarse sand. The house was as little like a house by the sea as a house by the sea can be: it was dim and sour, with fuel-oil fumes crawling up the stairwell from the basement, with sheets of buckling woodgrain paneling, an omnivorous shag carpet, and over wrought iron and orange glass lighting fixtures -- a knock-off travesty of Moorish lanterns -- looping down from the ceilings. Impressively cheap, this house was also close by a station of the subway that could shoot us into the city, where we imagined that we would find jobs -- jobs that for the moment were as invisible as the clams breathing under the glossy mudflats.
N E X T+P A G E | Lessons from a stripper's son


	T A B L E_T A L K How have you acquired new languages? Discuss travel and foreign speak in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y My junior year abroad By Edith Pearlman A 60-year-old's adventures in a classroom called Jerusalem (08/26/98) My Hawaiian honeymoon By Cintra Wilson Of a 1,300-pound pop-ukulele star, teenage bikini queens and the best wave on earth (08/25/98) Sex, death and beauty in South America By Melanie Goldman Week Two of the Camel Trophy (08/24/98) Oh when the gays come dancing in By Rebecca Bryant The physical -- and emotional -- revelations of Amsterdam's Gay Games V (08/21/98) The view from Japan By Dave McCombs It's the economy, not the morality (08/20/98) Browse the Wanderlust Passages archives		A N G E L A , T H E U P S I D E - D O W N G I R L [ E X C E R P T ] ANGELA THE UPSIDE-DOWN GIRL AND OTHER DOMESTIC TRAVELS BY EMILY HIESTAND BEACON 230 PAGES BY EMILY HIESTAND \| Like flotsam jostled together, we had been drifting into our futures since morning in a Chevrolet Bel-Air, turquoise with vestigial tail fins. Judy's mother had loaned us the Bel-Air; Beverly was beautiful; and the fourth girl -- we called ourselves girls -- was already homesick. What was her name? Her drawing style was a pen-and-ink pointillism, thousands of dots with which she coaxed the illusion of realism from an atomized abstraction. It was nearly midnight when we entered the ambit of America's city on a hill. The first door we opened, on the outskirts of Boston, was the door to the Glo-Min Motor Inn, whose name took the gloaming, the old time of waxing shade, through the turnstile of American pop. In our room and presumably in all the rooms at the inn, the lamps, chairs, and television set were tethered to the floor by thick black chains, a look that might in later years be passed off as punk chic. Down the street a few blocks from the well-secured motel there was a late-night diner. We parked the Chevy outside, sat at the counter in a row, and ordered a dish called clam rolls. It was the year that, longing for the Moon, four astronauts settled for getting back to Earth alive, the year that Cambodia was invaded, the year of Kent State. Our final senior project had been to protest, again, the war -- draping the façade of our art school in sheets of black plastic which had billowed from the Doric columns like dark sails. In the diner now there was a local group, girls about our age whose territory was three booths along the windows -- an expanse of plate glass alive with greenish fluorescence, with glints of chrome and reflected licks of fire from the grill. The girls eyed us for a while, then sent over a welcoming party, whose greeting, summarized, was what the hell were we were doing in their diner, and were we some "rich chicks cruising"? The counter waitress told the girls to knock it off, and they did, but when we left the diner they followed, moving down the sidewalk after us, walking then running, a blade flashing just as we got the windows rolled up and the car doors locked. That night of our arrival, by chance in one of the city's most insular, and soon to be embattled neighborhoods, New England was impression only: Squanto and Thanksgiving, Puritans in somber jerkins, some tea floating in the harbor. We had read The Scarlet Letter in high school, and once my Girl Scout troop had been taken by Greyhound bus as far north as New York City, where we saw Camelot and a delicatessen, events of equal splendor -- the glistening white-gold stage and the glistening pickles and sodas of fabulous sorts (cream soda!), and metal trays hefting unknown salads, some of fishes and moist tentacles. From a harbor ferry, we saw the brawny goddess of Liberty wound in scarves of mist; we saw two tug boats bump into each other, heard the crews curse across the decks, and then the scout bus returned us to the east Tennessee hills. Home was then Oak Ridge, and in that anomalous South of uranium and isotopes, with physicists and Danish Modern tapering about its living rooms, I felt none of the diffuse, bruised misgiving about the North that one could find, a century after Sherman, among many more Southern southerners. After high school I did not hesitate to migrate northward to a college of art in Philadelphia, the old city of the Atlantic Plain. How lightly to me regional borders then signified: another new world could be chosen at a graduation party, with an offhand "Sure." Mark the logic that led four young artists to Boston: it was not New York, which Judy declared "too big," and it was not where any of us had come from. Ours was a tiny aperture of deliberation, and yet for me to aim at Boston was to travel farther north for a permanent dwelling than anyone in my family ever had -- save for my great-grandfather's brother, Sam Callahan, who had adventured from Alabama to Alaska and frozen to death one winter on the Lonesome River, a fact pointed out to me by my Aunt Marguerite. Some members of our family had removed themselves from the Deep South and survived -- some to Charleston, my parents as far north as Maryland -- but none to Massachusetts, core of the Yankee mind. My maternal grandmother, Frances Webb Callahan Watkins, took the news as though I were bound on the first Arctic expedition. The Glo-Min Motel was home for a week as the four of us hunted for a cheap apartment, by which we meant something so rock-bottom cheap that one aging real estate agent guffawed when he heard what we planned to spend. "You girls could not be looking in a worse place," he then said cheerfully. "This is Newton. This is the completely wrong town for you." He unfolded a map and used a magic marker to cross off Newton and all the other professionally dappled neighborhoods, and also the ones he deemed too raw, which left only a few scattered patches. The one he said we must try was a community northeast of Boston, on the bay. "Winthrop" it said on the map alongside his large finger. Fast strong currents swirl around the peninsula of Winthrop, and colonial oarsmen named the area Pullen Poynt. The peninsula was also secluded, and for a century, until the railroad came, it was a retreat with summer hotels and sailboats, white dresses and parasols. Winthrop's social climate had changed by the time we drove the Bel-Air into town, but the sea air was still refreshing, ten degrees cooler than Boston proper. The roses of Winthrop relish the town's salt atmosphere, climb its walls blousily, lay themselves down on the town's fences in blankets as thick as those garlanding the Derby winner. From the steep glacial hill in the center of town, the prospect sweeps down to mouse-gray sand and cord-grass marsh. Beneath its soft apron of mud, the marsh holds hen and wedge clams, with their china-white, spoon-shaped cavities, and quahogs whose shells once made the good purple wampum. Immediately back of the shorefront drive, along streets named Mermaid and Neptune, are rows of tidy summer cottages. But Shore Drive itself was then the tatty, transient part of town, a strip of former hotels turned into rooming houses and apartments with aluminum siding, or fake rock siding, the kind that resembles giant mixed nuts inexplicably plastered onto a wall. The air smelled of mollusk, salt, and rotting wrack. In some synaesthesia of the shore, coolness too was in the smell, and if the day was gray the place could feel like wet laundry. My first home in New England was the second floor of a house on this strip, separated from the Atlantic by a seawall and a beach of coarse sand. The house was as little like a house by the sea as a house by the sea can be: it was dim and sour, with fuel-oil fumes crawling up the stairwell from the basement, with sheets of buckling woodgrain paneling, an omnivorous shag carpet, and over wrought iron and orange glass lighting fixtures -- a knock-off travesty of Moorish lanterns -- looping down from the ceilings. Impressively cheap, this house was also close by a station of the subway that could shoot us into the city, where we imagined that we would find jobs -- jobs that for the moment were as invisible as the clams breathing under the glossy mudflats. N E X T+P A G E \| Lessons from a stripper's son