So there I was, a child of the West, where history was marked in decades, where the history of a woman, her very name, could dissolve like heat off the freeway, an ugly shimmering, the inscrutable residue of what was already gone.

I moved to Manhattan when I was twenty-two years old. I’d had big plans for New York in the beginning. Everyone does, I guess. The first time I ever saw Manhattan, I was visiting Tom at Columbia. He’d left home an angry teenager with blue-streaked hair and a band called the Hangovers. But in his new life, in this new city, he had become very proper: an economics major with a girlfriend named Susannah Fern Howe. Her parents lived in Newton. “As in Fig?” I’d asked, but he didn’t seem amused. They had another house off the Cape. “Like where Mom went when she was little?”

“Off the Cape,” Tom corrected. “Martha’s Vineyard. An island. It’s different.”

He’d grown different, too. In high school he’d been hard as nails and full of mockery, teasing me about the ways I hardly knew the world, making vague reference to his friends and the confusion of their sex-having. Now he’d grown distant, polite in my company, as though both of us were already adults. I was ten, and he was already telling me New York was a “peerless city,” whatever that meant, the opposite of Los Angeles. All I knew was I wanted to go shopping in the Village.

“Shopping, yeah,” he said, winking. “We’ve got a little bit of that.”

Already: we. He and the city owned things, held them.

I’d been picturing vintage stores full of gauzy dresses and leather sandals. He took me to Fifth Avenue, where the money in my pink plastic purse wasn’t going to buy me anything. “What about the bohemian stuff?” I asked. “Bohemian” was a word I’d learned especially for my trip. We ended up on a street full of discount denim outlets, the kind with clattering metal shutters. Yellow jeans were going for ninety-nine cents a pop. “Here’s the Village,” he said. “Happy now?”

I moved there ten years later, to prove I could be. My mother had been asking me for years—What were my plans? My goals? —but I couldn’t think of any answer that was my own, that wouldn’t have been, beneath it all, a reply to her questions.

The problem wasn’t realizing that New York was different from the place I’d dreamed it would be, but rather, knowing that it was that place, somewhere I hadn’t yet discovered. I knew there were vintage stores like the ones I’d imagined, where elegant women ran their long fingers over lace skirts and tucked their feet into weathered ballet slippers to strut along hard sidewalks full of flakes that glittered in the sunlight. It was out there, that block. I kept trying to find it.