It was mid-July, days after I’d moved to New York City. K and I lay side by side on her bed, placing ice cubes on each other and letting them melt into the hollows of our bodies. “Ice checkers,” she called it. They slid over the keyhole tattoo on her tanned breastbone and settled into the crook of her arm, where the archangel lived. It would have been erotic were it not for the week-old litter box and the delirium of the heat. Inexplicably, she had no air conditioner.
The shaved-ice man on the corner already knew to serve up two coco leches without us asking, the fragile paper cups of snow a mirage in our hands. It felt as if a wet, hot blanket had been pressed around my whole body—a waking suffocation. In California, we had air-conditioned cars, shade trees, and the swimming hole with its napping lifeguard. Prickly with sap, the air was at least dry, cooler in some places than others where it pocketed itself in the Sierra Nevadas. Here, it rained sweat and urine.
I now spent every waking moment looking for an apartment. This I did with a numb resignation. K was characteristically insouciant and acted as if this was only a snag in the plan, instead of a tear in the fabric of the universe. Because of her, I was homeless.
Orientation for grad school had already begun and I’d somehow landed a prestigious job as a preschool teacher at a progressive lab-based institution on campus. The training began weeks before the children arrived. We learned to sing in other languages, to make snacks so allergy-free they were practically air, to use hand signals like the ones orca trainers use in order to maintain class order. In an effort to indoctrinate us with their play-based, child-centered pedagogies we were instructed to raise monarch butterflies from the egg stage in our apartments. Silky lantern habitats were provided as well as a thick book on lifecycles. The eggs? We had to forage those ourselves along bike paths and in the wilds of Prospect Park. It would have been wonderful…if I’d had a place to live.
The place K and Sam had found was in a Tudor-style building in Hamilton Heights down the street from a fancy Italian grocery store and a single-origin coffee shop. In a kind of stupor, I helped her move. With each of her many Oliver Sacks books, I packed up my unrequited desires. I taped every opening shut. I sat in the U-Haul next to her, holding her Russian Blue cat on my lap. We were the punchline of a lesbian joke, except she was moving in with a man.
K found me two flatmates and pressured me into signing the lease on a three-bedroom apartment so far uptown, I was practically in the Bronx. The whole operation was the shadiest thing I’d ever done. I followed the broker into the basement of an unmarked building. With one roommate on vacation in Europe and the other still on the other side of the continent. I fronted the security deposit and signed each document in a detached stupor under a flickering fluorescent light. I had only the items I’d arrived with on the plane, and suddenly I was on my own in a bare sixth-floor walk-up. Sitting on my twin mattress, which occupied the entirety of the room, I exhaled for the first time in a month and listened to the reverberations of life around me. It smelled of burnt spam and cigarettes.
Home.
Things were looking up, even if at a canted angle. I found a Georgian-era chair with a busted caned seat by the dumpster and carried it home like a grand prize, placing a pillow over the gaping hole. The chair—lovely from a distance yet structurally unsound—became a symbol of my life in New York. My neighborhood was predominantly Dominican and each day certain streets felt like an open air market. I found what I thought were enormous avocados only to learn they were a different fruit entirely. The produce stands delighted me. The catcalls, did not. A cadre of men who camped out on the sidewalk in a barricade of bottles a few doors down would block my way, touch my hair, and even, on several occasions, followed me all the way to my door, aggressively clicking their tongues and leering.
I bought a small bed frame off Craigslist and put some carnations in a vase on a table beside it. My mother’s first letter had already arrived and with it, a bag of tea, the familiar bergamot scent scorching my raw senses. Sticking to the plan, no matter what happened to me, became the objective.
When E moved in, fresh from a summer in Europe, her mother came with her like a lady in waiting. She brushed her enviably lustrous brown hair each night as if she were a child while giving me financial advice. She told me we should divide rent into near thirds, even though her daughter’s room was 300 square feet and mine was a closet. I learned that when she was quite small, she’d had viral meningitis and suffered from mysterious chronic pain ever since.
The only thing that soothed her was smoking vast amounts of weed. A machine on the counter, larger than a stand mixer, pumped concentrated cannabis into a kind of enormous balloon that E would remove and sort of huff from while walking around the apartment, telling me how to decorate it. She had butterfly magnets that said “believe in your wings and you will fly.”
At IKEA, E disintegrated in the hand towel aisle. She insisted on a deep purple synthetic because the color soothed her. In light of the fact my cast iron pan was too complicated to use, she demanded I pay for a set of cheap KLIPPFISK nonstick alternatives. At home, plastic was her refuge. She unboxed entire sets of feather light dishes, cups, and utensils. Wood could trap bacteria and endanger her already fragile health. This she shouted while eating from a large bag emblazoned with “WEED-OHS,” a pot Cheetoh that left her hands covered in a sickly green dust. She became hysterical while trying to put plates in my bamboo fold-out dish rack. To demonstrate its ineffectiveness, she pushed my small antique tea saucers through the slats. “THIS DOESN’T WORK. SEE?! IT’S NOT WORKING.” The saucers were shattered. She threw all my sponges away, saying they harbored germs, but left festering wash cloths in the sink until roaches scuttled into their sour folds.
After a midnight escapade in which E left any perishables not belonging to her on the counter to spoil in the August heat, it was clear something had to be done. The other roommate and I attempted to confront her, as tactfully as one would attempt to clip the nails of a wild badger. We sat on the couch. I poured tea as a peace offering. We used the positive, constructive criticism, positive, approach. I’d already spent my day with preschoolers, what was one more, slightly taller one? When we asked her, gently, to consider using a laundry basket instead of leaving clothes in the communal space she clenched her fists and said we just didn’t understand how hard it was to live with her condition. We were about to move on to the next agenda item, when E noticed something crawling on her arm. It was the size of a sesame seed and burnt red.
There was no mistaking it.
When pest control came, a greasy man with a Jack Russell who nuzzled his way around our baseboards, he told us blankly that we’d have to get rid of all of our furniture and burn our clothes. E began wailing.
My other roommate invested in a large pop-up tent that purported to act as a kind of incinerator for bedbugs. She stuffed all of her items inside and cranked the knob. There was the smell of burnt rubber and then the breaker blew. We didn’t have electricity for a week.
Was god punishing me for leaving my mother? Perhaps chaotic, mercurial women were my lot in life. They were drawn to me, like the roaches to the dish rag.
In a stupor, I unceremoniously stuffed all my clothes and bedding into black trash bags and cinched the tops. Each day I wore one of two outfits which I washed in boiling water, but the bed bug bites swelled with Kusama-like boldness each day on my neck, wrists, and ankles. In answer to their stares of horror, I told the other teachers I had heat rash.
A week into the pestilence, the third roommate disappeared overnight. A check with the remaining rent for the month with the memo “I’m sorry” was taped to the door. I opened it. A half-burnt bouquet of sage and a used metrocard were the only evidence she’d ever been there.
In desperation, E told me I couldn’t abandon her. She said I’d agreed to this and I needed to uphold my end of the bargain. Her eyes were enormous and bloodshot. She said this between gulps of smoke from the bag which filled the air between us. In a way, she was right. My name was on the lease. But that also meant I had the power to break it. I called the shady agent and said I wanted out. He said this was impossible. It was too late. Three times a day, between reading Eric Carle books to thirty well-off children, zig-zagging to classes, and preparing presentations, I wore him down through persistence. Finally, he relented, but at a price. I’d have to forego the security deposit for the entire building and find someone else to take over my lease.
When I got home that day, there was a brand new deadbolt on the door.
My key didn’t work. After knocking and pleading for some time, I collapsed on the floor and wept. It was nearly 11 at night and I had no one else to turn to. I called K. She arrived with Sam who agreed to accompany me to the police station. Two officers followed me back begrudgingly, as if they were overqualified for these childish inconveniences, and broke through the door in a cloud of plaster dust.
E stood in the hall, wearing only her underwear, a joint in one hand and a liter of Diet Pepsi in the other. She turned white, then looked at me as if I were Judas. Before the police could say anything she screamed, “You fucking bitch!” at me and ran to her room, slamming the door. The police posted themselves in the kitchen while I prepared to vacate the premises. In my room, a woman I’d never met before sat on my bed, half-dressed. “Who are you?” she asked. “Who are YOU?!” I replied. “This is my room,” she said, confused. “I just moved in today.”
Wordlessly, I began picking up the black trash bags that held my world and walked out. I left the beautiful desk I’d recently bought, the dishes, and the books. Yet something in me couldn’t leave the chair. The police said it seemed things were under control and vanished. Shaking and dazed I began carrying my battered chair toward the stairs. E emerged from the queasy green fog in a bathrobe, her fingers pointed at me like a switchblade. “You…you owe me for that chair. We bought that together. YOU OWE ME. YOU. OWE. ME!!!”
But I was already back out on the street, alone in the city.
(To be continued next week)
i'll admit i thought this was fiction until seeing the comment section! your narrativization of these unfathomable situations is stunning!
I remember hearing snippets of these experiences and thinking it was unconscionable that one person should have to endure so much. I still hate it.