After I check email and feel shitty for three minutes, I openmy social media apps and feel shitty for twelve minutes. Doomscroll, doomscroll, doomscroll until I hear the front door open and I feel guilty and ashamed because I’m in bed while my mom has already left the apartment, done cardio, and is now getting ready to show a house to someone with a 401k.
Ten years ago, Mom quit the corporate IT job she hated and decided to sell real estate. It’s good to know that, contrary to what society wants us to believe, you don’t peak in your twenties. Jennifer Schuster (formerly Jennifer Pulaski) is proof that sometimes you peak at fifty-two, which means I have twenty-six whole years to get my shit together.
But how can I pretend to accomplish things with hammering and drilling a foot away from my head? I protest with my own onomatopoeia.Thwack thwack thwack—my open palm pounding against drywall—before venturing out of my hovel in search of coffee.
Weird how I always believe a giant cup of coffee will imbue me with motivation and a sense of purpose.Once I drink this magical beverage, I will have energy. I will cross items off the to-do list.I will turn the page on a new, productive chapter of my life.
But over the last fiveish years, I’ve consumed more than sixteen hundred cups of coffee and I’m still in the prologue. I do not begin my life; I merely continue existing.
“Hi, honey.” My mom still greets me with a full hug and a smile every morning, exactly the way she did when I came home for winter break during college. It preserves the illusion that I’m just here for a visit. A very long visit. “Sounds like we have a new neighbor,” she says, speaking extra loudly over the noise.
I move my head in vague recognition. I need my magical coffee elixir before I can engage in small talk. Perry’s dog, a slow-moving beagle mix improbably named Houdini, follows me into the kitchen to sniff my socks. Perry adopted him afterwatching one of those distressing Sarah McLachlan animal commercials during lockdown.
Perry and Houdini moved in about a year ago, which made my mom’s perfect-for-one condo feel even smaller. Not that I’m complaining. I’m the one who shouldn’t be here.
“Say, I heard from my friend Barbara Silverton yesterday.” Anytime my mom begins a sentence withSay,I brace myself for unsolicited advice. “She’d be a good contact for you. Do you think you’d want to email her? She’s some sort of dean now. Dean of faculty? I bet she could put you in touch with someone in the art history department. It’s a great school—one of the SUNYs.”
There aren’t any State University of New York schools that I’ve identified as a great fit for my area of study, but I remind myself that my mother is trying to help.
“That doesn’t mean they have a graduate program in my field, Mom,” I reply. “There aren’t that many tenured professors who focus on outsider art. And I haven’t seen Barbara in ten years. I don’t know what she could do.”
“Well, it’snetworking,” Mom says, as if this clarifies it. “You used to call her ‘Auntie Barbara.’ She’ll be at the wedding.”
“She will?” The guest list must have ballooned again. “Perry is going to meet so many new people at their own wedding.”
“It was Perry’s idea not to limit the number of invites. This is their first wedding, remember,” she points out. “Anyway, I’m going to look up Barbara’s school again because I swear I did see a graduate program in the art department.”
Researching is one of my mother’s main coping mechanisms for my current situation. She sends me links, articles, podcasts, job listings—all well meaning, none particularly helpful.
“I’m about to run a load of laundry,” she says. “Unless you’re planning to shower in the next hour?”
When she actively wants me to do something, instead of just making a request or a suggestion, my mother will phrase it in the form of a question like aJeopardy!contestant. I used to chalk it up to midwestern politeness, but now I wonder if it’s the same technique she used to placate my dad, a man who has not once admitted fault for literally anything.
“Go ahead,” I mumble into the upper cabinet where she keeps the mugs. “I’m going down to the pool. Starting a new book.”
“Is Romily coming over?” My mom hands me a Nespresso pod even though I didn’t ask for one.
“Not today.”
Mom looks relieved. I think she’s worried about one of the nosy old sticklers on the condo board complaining about the way my cousin treats the “shared amenities” at The Bixby as a private health club with no membership fee.
Even though we went to the same high school just a couple of years apart (back when she was still “Emily”), Romily and I weren’t close until the pandemic put everyone’s social lives in a canister, shook them up, and spilled them out in completely different configurations.
Aside from the fact that my dad and her mom are siblings, we had exactly one thing in common: our respective rugs being yanked from beneath our feet just as our lives were supposed to get interesting. We both went away to college…and ended up back in Ohio, living with our parents. That was enough of an injustice to yoke us together in shared indignation. We achieved a comfort level of scrolling our own phones in silence, without one of us suggesting that we do something more productive. I believe this is the highest form of companionship: rotting, alone together.
Back in the relative privacy of the office, coffee in hand, Iopen my laptop to get some Nothing done. Pretending to be vaguely busy is a skill I’ve honed over the last few years.
More drilling, banging, and muffled male voices from the next apartment. Feet shuffling on carpeting, heavy objects getting dropped on the floor. The daybed shakes with eachthummp.
The tall metal shelving unit next to my bed rattles against the vibrations from the drill. I sit up, watching my precariously positioned storage boxes shift closer to falling. Every time there’s athummpfrom next door, I brace myself for my dad’s collectible comic books to crash down on the carpet in an explosion of faded newsprint.
Have I not yet mentioned that a full twenty-five cubic feet of this office consists of extralong storage boxes, each containing three hundred comic books? Or that those awkwardly long cardboard boxes are too deep for standard shelves and hang over the edge by roughly ten inches?
I watch the inevitable disaster play out in slow motion: after a few more seconds of drilling into the shared wall, the long boxes on the very top of the unit vibrate right off the shelf.
They land hard, tumbling end over end, smashing onto the floor. Hundreds of comics, encased in clear plastic bags, spill out.
I dive to the ground, sacrificing my knees to carpet burn, checking the issues for signs of damage. The tiniest crease can affect the value of these books, to the tune of hundreds of dollars. I care more about the condition of this stapled newsprint than my own body.
