On Sunday at dinner time, the evening before All Hallows Eve, my son, who just turned 13, decided he wanted to wear a costume for the first time since he was small. This is why I had to go into the storeroom off the long upstairs hall, a room I only enter once or twice a year, reluctantly, because it is a daunting mess and a Pandora’s box of memories that I’d rather not open. It is a small room, painted white, with nifty built-in shelving and drawers installed in the 1930s. Some of the items in the storeroom are exactly where my grandmother left them when she died in 1974. It smells like mothballs and armpits in there.
In the corner of the storeroom, by the window, is the costume trunk. Deep inside the costume trunk are matted, 1980s wigs from class plays, the yellowing wool beard and fading red-to-pink flannel trousers from a 1930s Santa costume, several floral muumuus from the 1960s, piano scarves, a white helmet from the Second World War, and plenty of crushed hats of various styles: a crushed straw pork pie, a crushed tangerine-colored pillbox, the crushed light-blue beanie I was expected to wear, for humiliation’s sake, as a freshman at Columbia College in 1985. . . .
To my surprise on Sunday, I also fished out of the costume trunk a vintage satin sewing bag containing all my correspondence from the year 1981.
I was 14 in 1981, and I wrote a lot of letters. That much I can remember. I remember having close-cropped, punk hair and sitting in front of a blue electric typewriter that hummed under my hands and jumped in response when I tapped the keys.
But I had forgotten just how many letters we all sent back and forth by the U.S. Post when I was young, and I can only vaguely remember — through a veil, a gauzy, nylon 1950s-neckerchief-scarf veil — some of the friends who sent me long, excited, lovelorn missives from faraway New Jersey and Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut on cool stationery that coordinated with their personality. Do you remember Paper Place on Main Street and the delights of envelopes, stickers, and note cards that expressed your personal style?
The word “entropy” has been on my mind this autumn. Things fall apart. The house I live in will never be spiffier than it was in my youth; the floorboards are worn and the toilet in my bathroom has begun to whistle when pressure builds up in the pipes, a penny-whistle piping, and I need to get a plumber to look at that. I will never be more youthful than I am today. I am not youthful. I wish my hair were thicker.
My most frequent correspondent in 1981 was a high school girl named Andrea K. who was three years older and lived in Leonia, N.J., near the Palisades. Her parents had known my mom forever, and we had struck up a friendship at some forgotten family function because we both were into underground rock and roll and subculture fashions. Andrea was an Anglophile who sprinkled her letters with self-conscious Britishisms (“bird” for “girl”) and wore vintage Beatle boots, a severe Mod bob with straight bangs, and a miniskirt cut out of the Union Jack.
I can remember Andrea standing in her kitchen in Leonia and telling me she allowed herself one tablespoonful of peanut butter as a special treat because she needed to maintain a gap of air between her thighs. I was wide-eyed at that revelation. I was a tomboy raised with the wholesome, whole-foods, hippy values of the Hampton Day School, what we’d call “crunchy” today, and I was very naive in my way, even though I was already reading Allen Ginsberg and “Dr. Sax” at 14. (There was an overdue-book notice, too, in the sewing bag in the costume trunk in the storeroom off the upstairs hall: $2.75 billed for Kerouac’s “Dr. Sax,” which I had not returned by Aug. 9, 1981, and which is still wedged on a bookshelf in my childhood bedroom between Jean Rhys’s “Voyage in the Dark” and Willa Cather’s “O, Pioneers!”)
The friends of our childhood dissipate, disappear into disorder. Entropy.
One memorable night in the summer of 1981, Andrea K. and a New Wave New Jersey boy who kept talking confusedly about Ayn Rand took me with them from Leonia to Newark, where we caught the PATH train to Manhattan and ran straight to the Peppermint Lounge on West 45th Street, my first dance club. (In June, I had seen the Clash at Bonds International Casino in Times Square, my first concert, and I am sure I wrote to her about that hugely momentous occasion, although none of my letters survive in the sewing basket, of course.) Andrea called me “Bopper.”
Oct. 21, 1981, on tiger-striped punk stationery in red and black:
“Dear Bopper, What are you doing on Halloween? I hear the Ritz is having a good show, the Misfits and Siouxie and the Banshees. . . . Want to hear something humorous? I got ‘Class Individualist’ in my school’s senior polls. I guess it shows more personality than ‘Best Smile’ or ‘Best Eyes.’ “
Andrea’s letters were littered with boys, boys, boys — so many that I had trouble keeping them sorted at long distance. There was a Mod named Matt; an aristocratic biochemist at Cambridge University named Julian; a bass player with dyed blond hair and a black Fiat who, when they went out, turned out to be 26, stupid, and divorced, and a “living dream Ken doll” actor named Chris, who she met in the phone booth at the Broadway Joe Steakhouse on West 46th and who gave her the phone numbers of both his apartment and of his message service.
Thanksgiving Day 1981: “Dear Bopper, I went to visit the Rhode Island School of Design. I really disliked it. All the present students look like Air Supply fans.”
My daughter, who is 15, will, when pressed or feeling guilty, send short emails, but even emails seem a burden to today’s teenager. Written correspondence has shrunk down; it’s smaller now than even single words, it’s just abbreviations: “lmk” (“let me know”), “idk” (“I don’t know”), “ik” (I know), “ily” (“I love you”).
Teddy left the house on Halloween wearing his normal street clothes, with an inflatable Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles backpack on his back. He returned not long after 8 without the backpack, which had been dropped somewhere along the way, but with shaving cream in his hair and on his jogger pants. He smelled strongly of Gillette. He and the boys had mainly sat at the picnic tables on the sidewalk by Hampton Chutney, talking, and then run around Herrick Park a bit. Halloween doesn’t seem nearly as thrilling these days as it should be. Halloween is not Hallows-Eve-y enough for my taste. I want, at minimum, a bonfire and a few wild addresses to the Moon.