Going Home

They say you can never go home again. As with most overused aphorisms, there’s a certain truth to it. Marry a boy from high school, and going home, both literally and figuratively, is just part of the landscape of life.

When we were expecting our first child, our friends with babies advised us that living around the corner from the grandparents benefits everyone. My instinct was that a little distance would be better for me and our fledgling family, a necessary step in our independence. We began to explore a move from our Manhattan one-bedroom rental, and I was determined to put a bridge—Throgs Neck or Whitestone, take your pick—between us and both sets of parents. It’s close enough, only a thirty minute drive from our home in Westchester back to Long Island where my husband and I grew up. Over the two plus decades since we moved slightly north, we’ve made the trek hundreds of times. The journey is more than physical, and sometimes the emotional toll surpasses the ever-rising monetary toll as we cross the East River. At least that’s how it is for me, now.

When you come off the bridge, there’s a stretch of Northern Boulevard that connects Queens to the area of Nassau County where we grew up, our parents’ homes about half a mile down the road from each other. As a commercial strip, it’s nothing special—the usual assortment of car dealerships, grocery stores, bottle shops. Some of the businesses that line both sides of the busy avenue have been there, in some incarnation or another, since I was a kid. An afordable bridal gown store, the bicycle place where my parents bought me the ten-speed that I rode all over the neighborhood until I learned to drive, the French restaurant that my family never tried even though it was owned by the parents of a girl in my grade and I thought that was cool. Other things are markedly different. Many new establishments have opened catering to an influx of Asian immigrants, and the majority of the signs and billboards are now in Chinese and Korean. The strip is simultaneously early 1980s and 2019, real estate both frozen in time and catapulting into the future.

There’s one spot on the way to the residential area where, if we hit the red light, the ghosts of two of the key stomping grounds of my youth reach out to me, pulling me into a vortex of memories that’s hard to resist. On the left is what used to be Scobee’s Diner, on the right, was once Patrick’s Pub. I somehow assumed that both would be there forever, visible testaments to my younger self. Yet both are gone.

The diner, nicknamed by my high school friends “La Scobee” in an attempt to lift it out of its pedestrian reality, was as plain vanilla suburban as they come. Ostensibly Greek, it offered food of every ethnicity at every level of refinement, from hot dogs to ribeye steak, spaghetti to veal milanese. But we stuck to the basics. Our preferred order was french fries with gravy. Every time we sat down in our usual booth, someone would order the brownie, just to hear the overworked waitress say, “I’m sorry, honey, we don’t have the brownie today.” They never had the brownie.

In my nostalgic mind’s eye, we practically lived at Scobee’s, “open 24 hours a day.” We went to the diner after theater productions, orchestra concerts, and on random Saturday nights when there was nothing else to do, which was a lot of the time. One of my favorite memories is of having breakfast at Scobee’s the morning after senior prom, my best friend Dee and I and our dates coming straight from watching the sunrise at Jones Beach. We arrived just as the daytime staff replaced the overnight crew, ready for a stack of pancakes and too young to have acquired a taste for coffee. Years later, in our mid-twenties, my husband and I were amused but not surprised to see photos of a half dozen of our high school friends gathered at Scobee’s at three a.m, dressed to the nines after closing down the dance floor at our wedding reception, gorging themselves on burgers and yes, french fries with gravy, hold the brownie.

When we weren’t at Scobee’s, we were at Patrick’s across the street, which had the added allure of serving alcohol to minors in the days when the legal age was eighteen and a sixteen year-old with a winning smile and a fake college I.D. could still score a drink. It was at Patrick’s that I learned that tequila did not have a flavor of its own and therefore blended nicely into a tequila sunrise, a drink I don’t think any self-respecting adult has ever ordered at a bar. And, although it claimed to be an Irish pub, for some reason the speciality on the menu was always turkey tetrazzini. Just writing that makes my stomach do a little flip. I had my first legal drink at Patrick’s, too, but by then the thrill was gone. Still, when the building was knocked down and replaced with a SAT test prep facility, I felt a lump in my throat.

But the road home doesn’t end with the old haunts of my teenage years. Northern Boulevard turns into Bayview Avenue, the storefronts of Little Neck giving way to the homes of Great Neck. My parents’ house stands at the top of a big hill—I can feel the pull in my childhood legs as I climbed, walking home from Hebrew school. And although still physically there, unlike Scobee’s and Patrick’s, my parents’ house is the most absent of all. It looks mostly the same as when my sisters and I sold it it nearly a decade ago to a young Chinese couple who assured us at the closing that the house had good feng shui. When we drive by, I can see that they’ve added a nice deck in back, and cut down the majestic weeping beech in the front. I hope it was diseased but fear it was just blocking the sunlight. 

My father passed away in December, 1999, just a few weeks away from Y2K, wondering, along with the rest of the world, what the future would hold. My mother lived alone in the house for another eleven years, as it and her health slowly but ultimately deteriorated. I suppose on some level I also expected, as children do, that my parents, the two beacons of my youth, would also go on for forever.

But here I am, still making the trip out to Long Island with my husband to visit his parents in their house that, after all these years together, holds almost as many memories for me as the one I grew up in. A going home of sorts as well, but with a persistent ache. What started as a “little distance” for me is now so infinite and so permanent, a separation that only the bridge of love can reach across.

-Reyna Marder

Reyna Marder Gentin attended Yale College and Yale Law School. Her fiction and personal essays have been published widely, and her debut novel, Unreasonable Doubts came out in November, 2018.