What is Left

I LOST some weight last month. I removed half of the keys I carried for all of my adult life from my key ring, and returned them to the real-estate company whose properties include the apartment that my family rented for seventy-six years. I used those keys constantly after I married, visiting my parents and younger siblings, then my widowed mother, then my brother, who lived there for the past eleven years and died two months ago. The apartment had to be vacated in a couple of weeks, its contents sorted, distributed, sold, donated, stored, or abandoned as junk. Seeing the cartons and large black trash bags pile up, it struck me that death might be the ultimate repo man. After the place was more or less empty, I gave the keys to the landlord.

When I unlock the door to the apartment I live in with my husband, my now-lighter key ring cues a sense of diminishment.

Growing up on the West Side of Manhattan, I rode the 86th Street crosstown bus, officially the M86, several times a week, if not every day. As a college graduate living with my parents, I took the M86 to and from work. When I married and moved to the East Side, I crossed town frequently, soon with young children in tow. In later years, visiting whoever was living, lonely, ailing, needy, dementing, or dying in the apartment on Central Park West, I backed and forthed so regularly I could have approximated a tide chart.

Walking west on 86th Street toward Madison Avenue last week, I saw the M86 at its usual stop on the corner. I began to run towards it when, abruptly, I remembered that I didn’t need to take it. I looked at the people getting on, and I ached, actually felt a cramp in my right hand, the hand that is habitually in my purse groping for my Metrocard just before I board a bus. I wondered: Can a missing bus ride feel like phantom limb pain? It wasn’t the ride I missed; it was the people and the home I routinely shuttled to see and to be in. Now I need errands, appointments, events, as reasons to take the M86.

Another habit rattles me at present. For more decades than I care to specify, I have taken an early morning walk partway or all around the reservoir in Central Park. The first thing I invariably notice when I step onto the cinder track is the apartment building where I used to live. Even without looking closely, I know its shape and position on the avenue’s lineup of architecturally distinct structures, the pale ocher of its bricks, the setbacks of its upper-floor terraces, the spacing of its casement windows facing the park. Now, when I see the windows of my old bedroom, I can’t help thinking that the girl I was is still there, in the dust motes on the furniture and fixtures in that room, inside the desk and dresser drawers, floating in the air throughout that apartment. That presence will be dispelled when the apartment is gut-renovated, as the landlord plans. She, I, we’re not ready to be torn apart or swept away; we are still useful, still visible in sunlight. Nor am I ready to forgo a walk or to change my route, despite what it prompts me to recall, fleetingly most days, occasionally at length, what happened to land us in that apartment: my family’s escape from Hitler’s Europe.

I would certainly prefer to look straight ahead, even with blinkers on like a skittish horse, but my genes and imprinting and temperament and residential location and various other recurring or random circumstances and relationships—life, in short—periodically gang up to turn my gaze backward. Besides, preference isn’t always a deciding vote I can cast or a plan I can make and stick to. My mind, like everybody’s, has some tenacious plans of its own.

Today, for instance, I started counting losses: keys to a home, its former and final occupants...