Escape from the Topaz House

It’s funny how a song can evoke the feeling of a time in such startling detail. A smell can do that too, but today it was a song that toppled me abruptly into 1976, like Alice falling into the rabbit hole. The song was The Broadway Hotel, by Al Stewart, and there’s nothing significant to me about this song at all except the fact that it must have been playing on the radio when I briefly lived in Washington, D.C. during the seventies, if you want to apply any form of the verb live to my time there. I haven’t written much about this period of my life, probably because it was beyond miserable, so miserable that it still feels painful, and I haven’t found much humor in it yet.

So when Al Stewart was singing about the Broadway Hotel and the Year of the Cat, I was working at one of those temporary office jobs where you show up to type or file or complete some task so numbingly boring and mindless you want to scream but you keep your reality to yourself, do the job, and move on. This particular business was somewhere off the Beltway, technically in Maryland, and consisted of two men who told me they were food brokers. I wasn’t terribly curious as to what exactly this meant, but there were indeed food products in the office, mostly packaged ham.

I often paired a skirt with a black Danskin leotard for work in those days, just because that’s how I used to dress, at least when I wasn't hiding under a big khaki green parka. “We were wondering,” said one of the men one day, approaching me with trepidation. “We were wondering if you were a dancer. Or something. Well, when you’re not doing this.”  

No, I said, but volunteered nothing more, since I wasn’t really sure what I was, whether I was doing this or not. He must have liked me, though. He gave me a canned ham to take home.

Home at the time, if you want to call it home, was an apartment in Bethesda, rented by my then-husband who was really already sort of my ex-husband, but we hadn’t yet legalized the divorce and I had returned for temporary shelter, and it felt a little like suicide to me, but he saw it as being back together.  Anyway, the building was called Topaz House, one of those late 1960s structures with a plain beige hotel-like exterior, balconies and elevators, a bank of postal boxes and a directory of names, all very clinical and impersonal. I recall that if you took the elevator to the top there was a pool on the roof, and sun chairs, a chlorine smell and a chlorine feeling.  I cannot recall which floor we were on, but my not-quite-ex had gone across the street to “Cort Furniture, Quick Delivery, Easy Rental for Home or Office” and efficiently filled the place with brown and black things, some of them plaid.  Did I mention that I was depressed?

I’m not blaming anybody, either. I just didn’t know what I was doing with my life. I started a program at American University. Journalism. Would have been perfect for me, had I not been mentally ill. I dropped it the next day. I took a job as a hostess…not even a waitress…at a place in Georgetown called Déjà vu. That was fun. I stood around in a black dress and seated people and listened to various lines from men who wondered what I was doing when I wasn’t doing this, and just before closing I sometimes drank vodka with the wait staff who were fond of ice cold shots of Stolichnaya but I had no friends and I walked across the lonely parking lot at 4 a.m. and found my way back to the Topaz House.

One bitter cold winter day I left and drove back to my family’s house on Long Island, where I went upstairs and slept for 48 hours. Yes, there was a family house then, which means my father was still alive, and some siblings still lived there, and it was a place to go if you didn’t mind being a painful disappointment to everyone who mattered.  I minded. I left again, this time back to upstate New York. Great choice for a depressed person – upstate New York in winter. 

And I’ve written about those Syracuse years. Things got worse before they got better.

The important thing is that they did get better, eventually.  The other day I went for a walk with a young woman who was one of my students years ago and is now 25. She is remarkably talented and has accomplished many impressive things, but she's going through a rough time right now. "What was it like for you in your twenties?" she asked.  "Did you ever get this bogged down?"

Oh, I could tell you stories...But let’s go back and then fast forward, because here is where I want you to see me next. I am in another office, another city, but I am beginning to understand that my life belongs to me. I have managed to turn 30, and I am on the actual staff at this office, doing something professional and serious having to do with buses and social service agencies, something about committees and briefings and big boring documents, but I know this is not my true calling and I have decided to leave and go West.

There happens to be a young woman in the office with me at this time. She does clerical work. She’s a temp. And I can’t remember her name, but she comes from Canada, and she wears quirky clothes, and I like her. She is the one I confide in first, about my leaving, the leaving that is definitely on the calendar now and happening sooner than anyone else knows.I tell her that I will first go to Phoenix, to stay with a friend there, and then who knows? But I’m leaving and I won’t be back; that much is certain. We have exited the 1970s, but maybe that insipid song is still playing on the radio, the one about the Broadway Hotel; more likely it's Blondie singing Call Me, or Tom Petty doing Refugee. In any case, there’s nothing melancholy in the soundtrack now.

“Phoenix.” she says, looking up from the papers and files that mean nothing to either of us. “Will you rise from the ashes?”

Then she reaches around to the back of her neck and unclasps a necklace I have admired. It’s yellow, like sunshine and saffron, and belonged to her grandmother. It’s so yellow.

“Take it,” she says.

Sometimes it is the stranger who sees who you really are.  Oh, I know I would have gotten through without it, but I felt fortified, somehow, and understood.  And I wore the yellow necklace across the continent, and I wore it across decades, and I have risen from ashes more than once.