A few years later, newly married to her high school sweetheart and with an infant in tow, Lyndie took off on her next great road trip. They were “escaping” from Stanford University, where her husband had learned that college was not for him, and from what she calls an “over-controlling family.”
Carroll (“Cal”) Duff was brilliant in physics and math, Lyndie told me, and had thought of becoming a nuclear physicist or astrophysicist. But coming from a working-class background, he was “miserable” at Stanford.
“We beach-bummed/camped out for a year, all the way to NY,” she wrote, “shooting jackrabbits, catching fish, and skinny-dipping in whatever creeks were available. What cash we had went for proper baby food and whatever else Mimi needed. She was happy and well cared-for all the way.
“We did rent a room in an unfashionable district of New Orleans for a month, reveling in the luxuries of running water & indoor plumbing.
“One night, [as we were] sleeping fully dressed on a beach in Florida, a policeman came by with an enormous torch, to ‘evict’ us. We hastily stood, holding the sleeping baby, and promised to comply. As soon as he left we lay back down, went peacefully back asleep.”
Eventually they arrived at her father Jack Wallace’s apartment in Manhattan — tired, dirty, and hungry. He feasted them to a bowl of yogurt topped with tomato aspic and black caviar. “Always attentive to colorful design!” Lyndie remarked. “We could have used some steak and potatoes.”
Meanwhile, someone was breaking into the Ford and stealing all their possessions, including the battery. They used Jack’s dishtowels for Mimi’s diapers until they could re-supply. Jack outfitted Lyndie with a few modest outfits from Macy’s and lent Cal a suit for job-hunting.
Her father’s apartment was far too small for all of them, so the couple and baby moved into a grimy sixth-floor walk-up apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It “boasted a memorable miasma of age, damp and decay, thriving families of roaches and bedbugs, and lacking ONLY a toilet, heat, hot water, A/C, closets — SUCH a bargain at only $27.00 per month,” Lyndie told me. “But it was home!”
She repainted painted the walls in bright colors. The always irascible landlord complained, saying that was not the fashion.
She easily made friends among the few English-speaking neighbors. One was a young Greek, an aspiring opera singer. Her boyfriend was a would-be novelist from Russia whose biggest challenge, Lyndie wrote, was “lack of linguistic competence.”
“Gloria sang like an angel and was also an accomplished petty thief. She would scramble nimbly up into the back of a Pepsi delivery truck and snatch an armful of 16 oz. soda bottles for all of us to share – a rare treat .”
“It felt like a big interesting family,” she said. They shopped at a Ukranian butcher shop and a Jewish grocery store. Puerto Rican teenagers would sometimes help her carry the stroller and groceries up the stairs. An elderly woman would sit on the steps outdoors on any fair day, muttering unintelligibly in a foreign language, perhaps Polish, and picking at Lyndie’s skirt as she walked by. If it began to rain, a family member would bring her inside.
It was a noisy, boisterous, messy family. “Race wars raged inside the buildings,” she recalls. “Beer bottles were flung wildly down the stairwell, and curses flung as well. Stair steps of ancient stone worn low in the middle by generations of weary immigrants. Walls stinking of piss. Endless noise: sirens, voices, music.”
Cal earned $50 per week measuring for carpet installations on the wealthy Upper East Side. A proud man in a cheap suit and badly worn shoes, he refused to enter by the servants’ entrance. His wages were barely enough to live on, so he hoarded the petty cash meant to pay for taxis, and lugged the carpet samples on the subway instead for 15 cents, enabling them to feast on knishes or giant, salty pretzels.
For amusement, they could sit in Washington Square and watch the chess players. On Sundays they would ride up north on the subway to visit the Bronx Zoo, for free.
“On steamy summer nights we would ride the Staten Island ferry back and forth,” Lyndie wrote, “lurking in the lavatory to get by on a single pair of fares. What a great way to cool off. And the city lights! Lady Liberty!”
The tenement adventure lasted only a year. Cal wanted to return to California and Lyndie chose not to resist.
Cal may have hated college, but for Lyndie it was to be a failed dream.
Before her marriage, she had attended community college. While Cal was becoming miserable at Stanford, she had been “a frustrated would-be student.” She hung around classrooms with open doors, eavesdropping. She typed papers for the real students in exchange for lessons.
The head of the music department gave her lessons at night on baroque music and played for her on a harpsichord dating back to Mozart’s time. (“I think he suspected I was nuts,” she said, “but felt sorry for me.”)
They had planned for Lyndie to continue college at the New School for Social Research in New York City, but that never happened. There was no way they could afford it.
Instead, in due course, whenever possible, she would travel.