Since my children were babies, I’ve likened them to exchange student roommates. At first, you are so happy to meet them but the language barrier is high. You make exaggerated movements, speak loudly, and use simple words. Slowly, you come to understand each other a little better, and you take them to all the best museums and restaurants, trying to impress them with your knowledge of all the things peculiar to where you live. But then you notice that they eat everything in the fridge without asking or replacing the food, and their customs become obviously different from yours. They sleep at different hours, and have a different comfort level with poor hygiene. They come and go at odd hours with other people from their native country, with whom you also have a language barrier. Finally, you begin to resent them, and try to collect the rent, and they threaten to move out, and you are secretly glad when they do.
My husband Brook is my OG roommate. We lived in the same dorm for two years, traveling by bus to Burton-Judson (our cafeteria) for breakfast every morning and evening. Then we were roommates for two years, apart for one, but living just blocks from each other, and then roommates again. After some this-ing and that-ing, we decided to make it permanent. We’ve had a lot of other roommates in the meantime; most recently, it’s been our two sons, or as I like to think of them, “the two German exchange students we’ve been hosting for two decades.” One has moved out and the other is starting to maybe consider moving on, so I thought I’d reflect on some of my other roommates. To protect the innocent and guilty alike, I won’t be using names. I’ll just use letters that don’t reflect their initials.
My first roommate A sang ALL songs in an opera voice, including Respect, by Aretha Franklin. She moved in with exactly ONE compact disc: the soundtrack to the musical CHESS. You know “One Night In Bangkok”? It’s from that musical. Now imagine it sung like an Italian aria. I used to dream that she stole my underwear and used my toothbrush. Her father thought we had Black men visiting the room because I made our outgoing answering machine message this clip from De La Soul.
My next three roommates were pretty innocuous so I’ll skip to the summer of 1994, when I lived with two sublettors while my “real” roommates were back home in Somerville and Lincoln, MA. Roommate B was from Colombia, South America, in Chicago to take classes in a business school program. One problem is that our apartment was not near the B school and so she complained constantly about taking public transit and usually just took cabs to school. She also switched our phone plan to an international calling plan, which was $400 a month, but I had to pay an elevated rate to called within the US. She then moved out without paying her last month or any of the phone bills. The other was C, who was cool enough but her boyfriend was a lounge lizard on our couch. Here’s an actual conversation:
(He is lying on the couch, “reading” The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” which I assume is for a summer course at the University of Chicago, where we are both students)
Me (flopping down in arm chair): Hey, what are you taking this summer?
Him (not lowering book): Drugs
Me: I mean, what class?
Him: nothing. I was supposed to read this last quarter but didn’t. Thought I’d give it a try.
That was the full extent of our interaction the whole summer, although he was there most of the time.
The Massachusetts contingent (which included Brook and roommate D) arrived and things were normal for awhile. In summer 1995, we had dozens of roommates, including roommate E, in town for internship from RISD, and F, a friend of mine from high school who went to Notre Dame. We also had the members of every band from Providence or South Bend who had gigs in Chicago, too numerous to give each a letter. One guy was called Bagel Miser. I think he must have eaten all our bagels. Roommate D put a dead squirrel in the fridge. There was an unprecedented-at-the-time heat wave, and one night, sitting in the hot still dark, our neighbor told us that he was going to get a tattoo of Malcolm X and Martin Luther. Funniest thing I’d ever heard at the moment because I was so hungry and sleep-deprived.
That summer, Brook was on the jury for Congressman Mel Reynolds. We weren’t allowed to discuss the case with Brook, so we’d give him the Sports section of the paper and gossip about the insanity of the case when he left for court. Reynolds was accused of, and later convicted of, sex with an underaged campaign worker. There were a lot of recorded phone sex calls in evidence. Very exciting times, let me tell you.
At the end of that summer, D moved out, and G moved in. G was an acquaintance who was in the class behind us. His weekly ritual was to put on scrubs and a stethoscope to watch the TV show ER. Otherwise, he mostly kept to himself. Until one Saturday morning, he and Brook and I were sitting at the dining room table, having Marlboro Reds and coffee for breakfast, listening to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me on a little radio that set on a table where the telephone was also kept. Peter Sagal invited callers to answer this question: “What animal is the mascot for the University of Wisconsin?”
Slowly, G rose from his seat and left the room. From the radio, we heard, “We have G from Chicago on the line. G, what animal is the mascot for the University of Wisconsin?”
Male voice answers, confidently: Wolverine.
Brook and I make eye contact. “It’s a badger,” Brook said. “That’s G,” I said.
G comes back into the room and sits down, picking up the newspaper.
“We know that was you. And it’s a badger,” Brook says.
“What are you talking about?” G says.
“Are you fucking kidding me?! That was you!” I say.
“No it wasn’t.”
And that was it. Things never were the same after that. If lines hadn’t been drawn before, they were that day.
We did have a few more roommates in that era. One day my boyfriend showed up with two kittens that had been left outside his office. We named them Scobie and Clea, after characters from The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. I took them to the vet to be neutered. When I returned to pick them up, the vet asked me why I had thought Clea was female.
“She had nipples,” I answered.
The vet put one finger of each hand on his chest, and said, “I’ve got nipples! Clea’s a boy!”
In fairness to me, Clea also had undescended testicles so I don’t really feel like he was being that cool.
Our final roommate in that apartment was a dog name Flynn, who Brook hated, but since we were moving to separate apartments just a few weeks later, he agreed I could adopt. His logic, flawless as always, was that we’d never live together again.
I’m going to stop here, even though I had at least nine other roommates over the following four years, not counting Flynn, Scobie, or Clea. I’ll save those stories for another day.
The fun never ends…
I was hoping for the tomato in the microwave...