The Walkers: Grace Paley, Broad City, My Mother, and Me

“For happiness she required women to walk with. To walk in the city arm in arm with a woman friend (as her mother had with aunts and cousins so many years ago) was just plain essential. Oh! those long walks and intimate talks, better than standing alone on the most admirable mountain or in the handsomest forest or hay-blown field (all of which were certainly splendid occupations for the wind-starved soul).”

These sentences hang on the wall in my living room, among the rest of the magical phrases that make up Grace Paley’s “Midrash on Happiness.” Before I had ever heard of rabbinical writing, before I learned to read Torah or wrote papers on Rachel and Leah, the word “midrash” summoned up the image of my living room’s wall, and a collage featuring Paley’s 1990 short story. The wall hanging was given to my mother by her best friend in honor of their friendship and their shared love/secular worship of Paley, acclaimed short story writer and Jewish activist.

I spent a lot of time as a kid sitting in front of “Midrash on Happiness” and trying to understand it. Whatever level of precocious elementary-school reading skills I possessed, they weren’t enough to let me parse Paley’s sharp, dense style. When I reached the moment of adolescent realization that the way your family does things is not the universal way of doing things, Paley’s words started to take on more meaning. I saw how my mother’s particularities were echoed in the story’s women. I finally found the connection between Paley’s narrator Faith’s adoration of long walks with female friends and my mother’s daily long walks on the phone with her friend. 

My mother’s walking ritual, necessary for her personal life and her life as a writer to thrive, has a place in a larger legacy of women walking, talking, and writing. Throughout her life, she’s been joined on her journey by religious walkers of all types–so many of them Jewish, so many of them New Yorkers. Perhaps those associations are random, or a product of my family’s social sphere. But over and over again, these women come into my life– traversing cities and riverside paths with routine and rigor, unraveling their lives and minds as they go. A friend circles her college campus to stay sane. A teacher walks from Harlem to the Lower East Side at dawn every morning to care for her ailing mother. A great-grandmother was remembered by all who knew her for her love of walking the Upper West Side.

As I grew up and started dreaming of New York, my mother introduced me to another depiction of women walking. Broad City, a TV show rife with dirty jokes and 2010s pop culture, plays quite a different role in the cultural landscape than Grace Paley’s stories, but I’ve always seen a common thread between the two. Abbi and Ilana, the best friends around whom the show tightly orbits, spend much of the show’s five seasons walking around New York City. Other things happen, yes—they go to work, they get fired, they date and go through breakups—but walking is the meat of the show, the backbone and connective tissue of every storyline. The show is about, above anything else, these two women and the things they see, do, and talk about as they walk. 

That’s never clearer than in the show’s final scene, after Abbi moves to Colorado, leaving Ilana alone in the city. The show concludes with the two of them chatting on the phone as Abbi walks through a mountainous, spacious park, and Ilana walks around a bustling public space in the city. When they say goodbye, Ilana walks down the stairs to the subway, but the camera doesn’t follow her. Instead, the focus moves to two other, slightly younger women coming up the stairs at the same time as her. Walking out of the subway, they discuss their plans to DJ a bar mitzvah. Then we see two more women walking together, rehashing their chaotic evening. Two older women chat in Spanish. Two more laugh together. Slowly, the conversations overlap and unite, forming one giant tapestry of walking and talking.

I love that finale so much. I love the way it acknowledges the vast world of walkers—women, Jews, New Yorkers, those who may be all or none. My mother. My great-grandmother. Grace Paley. And the walkers I’ll never know or talk to, but who walk beside me every single day, unraveling and creating art and life and the world as they go.

As I prepare to move to New York City for college this fall, I’m looking forward to all the delights and spectacles the city has to offer. But more than the galleries or performances, I’m anxious to permanently kiss my Subaru Impreza goodbye and join the walkers. Whether I’m strolling a few blocks for breakfast with a friend or marching down the length of Manhattan, I’ll know I’m a part of something bigger than myself.