The first New Yorker I ever knew was my mother, Chris Gerwig. I grew up in Sacramento, and that was the only place I’ve ever known her to call home. She had, in fact, lived in Brooklyn briefly as a child, but that was not what made her a New Yorker. She had and has the spirit of a quintessential New York City gal. She’s brash and smart and tough and funny, and was always the mother my school dreaded a call from because she would push and push and push until she got what she wanted. I was the only kid who was allowed to take both band and Spanish because of her insistence. She has more go-get-’em energy than almost anyone I’ve ever met.
I was too young to remember New York City the first time I visited from Sacramento. My dad was there on business, and there are pictures of me at 2 years old toddling around Central Park, sitting on the statue of Balto the Alaskan sled dog hero and having “tea” with the “Alice in Wonderland” characters. In the photographs, my mom is right there beside me, looking like I do now, with her big (slightly gummy) smile and lanky arms and a desire to walk until she can’t walk anymore.
At 5, I visited a second time. We were staying with family friends who taught at Columbia. It was summer but also somehow gray. As a Californian I had never known a gray summer. It was the late 1980s, so New York still had something seedy and dangerous about it. There was a story of the professor’s wife walking into a drug deal going down in the hallway of their apartment building and how she street-smarted her way out of getting hurt. I didn’t understand drugs or mugging, but I did remember an anxiety that was indistinguishable from excitement. It felt a universe away from the kids-on-bikes town that was Sacramento. It seemed impossible that it was the same country. And yet somehow, it also felt like home.
Sacramento is a place where you can always see the horizon. It is flat and beautiful and open. But I loved the crowdedness of New York City, how when it rained it seemed like the buildings were raining, not the sky. My mom held my hand tight as she walk-sprinted through the city. She was in her element here; everyone was moving as quickly as she was. She was joyfully sweaty. So was I. The Gerwig women belonged in New York.
The only thing standing out from the concrete and asphalt were the neon lights advertising kicks of different stripes. Musicals, alcohol, women. (I had just learned to read, and the concept of “Live Nude Girls” was extremely interesting.) When we waited for hours to get rush tickets for Broadway shows, Mom befriended people in line, just as she makes friends everywhere (the grocery store, the D.M.V., the library). They became very invested in the little blond girl getting in to see the show. And I did: “42nd Street” with Jerry Orbach. “Gypsy” with Tyne Daly. “Cats” with cats. At night, back at the apartment, everyone would play music — my dad on trumpet; his friend, the piano; his friend’s wife, the tuba. Someone taught me how to play spoons. My mom would clap along, saying, “Your dad is the one with the talent” although she had talents that were less performative but no less impressive.
There were children in New York, of course, but they seemed confined to the playgrounds. “It’s a great place to have a family” is a true thing that is often said about Sacramento. To be a kid in Sacramento then was to be in the right place at the right time. Nearly everyone had a backyard; some people had pools and even their own personal jungle gyms; you could choose which kids were invited to slide and swim and swing. My mom did not believe in having your own play set. She thought it defeated the point of a playground, which was to make new friends and get comfortable with people who weren’t your family. In Sacramento, she would walk me down to McKinley Park. It was a couple of miles away, but it had the best playground. I was walking that distance with her by the time I was 4.
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Later, when I told a boyfriend about the walk, he didn’t believe me: “That’s just a story your parents tell you.” He thought it was an exaggeration. But I am certain of its truth. My mother had raised me to be a walker, to be on the move. Two miles to the playground at 4 years old was real. My mom wasn’t my playmate, but she was the person who brought me out into the world and taught me that it was not scary. In New York, no one, not even the very wealthy, had their own private paradise; it had to be shared. City kids were good at playing, everyone was a stranger and everyone belonged. She had prepared me well.
But New York, ultimately, seemed to be a city of grown-ups. It was the adult world and I was a guest there. It was always past my bedtime, and all the normal rules were suspended. Once, my mom and I were in a cab (maybe we were late to something? My mom would never just “take a cab”) and I told her that the next day I wanted to wear my rock ’n’ roll outfit. It was a pink skirt and top with white guitars all over them. The cabby overheard and met my eye in the rearview mirror. He winked and said in a thick New York accent, “I’ll wait for you, doll.” Maybe now I’d think it was creepy; maybe my mom did think it was creepy; but at the time it was thrilling. New York was the place to be a grown-up, and I had to figure out how to get back.
At home in Sacramento, my mom took me to Tower Records to order the double cassette tapes of the original cast recordings of the musicals I had seen. She found me the best tap-dancing teachers in town to support my newfound love, and when I also expressed interest in hula dancing, she found the sole Polynesian dance group in Sacramento and signed me up. We had left New York, but she was still bringing as much of it as she could to me, with just as much bravado and hustle as the city itself.
When I finally made it back to New York to attend Barnard College, I was 19 and felt “Ah, yes, now life can really begin,” as if life hadn’t been going on before. Against explicit warnings not to, I climbed to the roof of my dorm to look down at the city below. It was my city, or I wanted it to be. But I had no idea which way was uptown and which was downtown. This place I had wanted so badly to be part of was still a mystery.
So I did the only thing that made sense to me. I got on the subway and rode it as far away as I could, deliberately getting lost to learn it. I spent the next several hours trying to find my way back without a map. Walking the streets and puzzling out how West Fourth Street could be right next to West 12th, I realized that I was doing alone what my mom had done with me years before. Walking, walking, walking, learning the city by foot, every inch. She was the reason I believed this was the proper way to introduce myself to the city. And the city felt like my mother. New York City felt like home because it felt like her.
