Wherever You Go, There They Are by Annabelle Gurwitch

Author:Annabelle Gurwitch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-03-31T11:23:58+00:00

My mother is making the great leap backward.

going tribal

Why didn’t I see it coming? I’m someone who views the future with a modicum of sobriety. When I saw a photo of Johnny Depp’s Winona Forever tattoo, I knew it should’ve read Winona for the amount of time actors typically spend together, which ranges between two and a half hours and the last day of shooting on the film we fell in love working on.* I’m always thinking ahead! That’s why I don’t have tattoos!

For some, the parental role reversal is heralded with the first changing of the adult diapers; for me, it was a phone call announcing, “We’re broke.” When you grow up helping your parents avoid phone calls from the IRS, a call like this isn’t totally unexpected. Despite a deficit of income and a lot of creative bookkeeping, they had managed to get by, often with considerable panache. How they afforded this panache was something of a mystery. The sale of their remaining asset, my childhood home, revealed that much of their lifestyle was underwritten by multiple mortgages. Now that they’ve paid off the three remaining loans on the property and chipped away at the mountain of credit card debt, lines of credit, and outstanding taxes, there’s not much money left over and decisions must be made.

My sister, Lisa, and I have been called in to mediate the stalemate over where they’ll live next, a decision that has reduced my parents to squabbling children. The choice has been narrowed down to two residences that are within their budget.

When push comes to shove, people go tribal. Some ancient longing to go home stirs inside us; maybe it’s coded in our DNA, though in earlier centuries, when life spans were much shorter, you might have been thirty-three and toothless when you felt the call to return to your place of origin and be surrounded by your people. For most, that place would have been a few minutes or a few steps away, if not in the same house/teepee/hutch/lean-to/and before that, cave.

But where is home? The intoxicating concept of manifest destiny, uprooting for jobs, relocating as a sign of economic mobility—it all adds up to America’s singular identity as a modern society on the move. When Bruce told Wendy, “We gotta get out while we’re young, ’cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run,” you knew Springsteen was urging her to flee from Asbury Park with an urgency that no one has ever used to suggest hightailing it out of the Fifth Arrondissement in Paris.*

The year I left home to become a New Yorker and find my theater tribe, 1980, was the apex of internal migration in American history. Over the next years, both my sister and I moved further from our family. Our grandmother Rebecca lamented this uprooting, characterizing our “traipsing” from city to city in the most disparaging way she could think of: “Y’all are like two Gypsies!” Which just goes to show that members of one marginalized group can always find another, more marginalized group to feel superior toward.

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