Eventually, Carrie and I run out of things to gossip about, and she still has to finish the workday, so my banker box and I make our way back home to Washington Square.
I live in a fourth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village with my roommate Sam, a situation that came to me courtesy of a message board, and to her courtesy of an uncle who bought this outrageously beautiful apartment sometime in the late ’60s and has held on to it ever since. Sam originally lived with her sister, but when she defected to D.C. for a job, Sam decided she needed a roommate. It was two years before I found out her uncle doesn’t charge her to live here at all. She uses the rent Ipay her to supplement her income, which supports her pursuit of life as an eccentric, working part-time at an experimental art gallery whose claim to fame is that once a month it doubles as a nightclub.
Having never lived in New York—or tried to find an apartment in it—it was a long time before I realized how ridiculously, unbelievably lucky I was to find this place. At the time, I was just happy to have a reference point to share with people back home. When you’re from small-town Ontario and people say to youso where do you liveand then you get to sayso have you seenFriends? Basically there…your street cred goes up by a factor of about five thousand.
I shut the door and drop my keys into a little ceramic bowl we keep by the entrance, the clinking sound disturbing the kraken currently occupying the living room.
She is—as always—dressed like a goth architect. Jet-black hair, jet-black eyeliner. Silver. Never gold.
“What’s up, loser?”
It speaks.
Sam is lying flat across the sofa, her arm draped artfully over her eyes.
I blink at her. “Are you…did you just wakeup?”
“I’ve told you before,” she says, not moving at all. “I’ve hacked my circadian rhythm. Your 4p.m.is my 4a.m.”
“So you did just wakeup.”
“I was out late last night.”
And every night,I think. “Have you eaten? I was going to make salmon.”
“Do NOT,” she says, sitting up quickly, her legs swinging out to the floor, “stink this place up with your weird salmon thing. Ari is coming over later.”
“Ooh, that’s—” I stop when I see the look on her face.Right. In Sam’s universe, relationships are strictly casual. “…not worth commenting on at all,” I finish smoothly. “Totally unrelated, I’ve decided to freeze the salmon and eat crackers.”
“Good,” she says, lying prone again.
This place is actually more of a one-bedroom. Sam lives in the room at the end of the hall, where the bathroom also is. Our kitchenette is divided from the living room by a small wall, making it mostly open-plan.Mybedroom is technically a closed-off dining room, but a very spacious one, and even when her uncle lived here, meals were rarely served in this space.
I don’t have a closet, but I do have a wardrobe, and a desk, and a queen-size bed,andonly two of those items of furniture are touching—palatial by Manhattan standards. When I first showed it to my mother she saidoh my god, how do you live in that cupboard.Go figure.
I love this apartment. I love the sloping wood floors, the uneven walls, the washer and dryer that’s not in our unit but mysteriously lives in a cupboard in the hallway directly outside our door.
My favorite thing about this place, though, is Sam. She’s like a goth version of my sister Shannon. Both of them are famously mean.
Sam, for example, savagely makes fun of me for being uncool every single day, but has a zero-tolerance policy for anyone else doing the same. Once at a party, one of her hipster artist friends called me basic—something she literally calls me all the time—and she stopped dead in the middle of her conversation, turned slowly and said, with eerie calmness,say that again and I’ll skin your cat,then carried the cat around under her arm for the rest of the night, just to really drive the point home.
Shannon, too, is occasionally known to go to extremes. In my first year of high school, I accidentally dropped a tampon inthe middle of history and this jock called Brett McMichaels tossed it across the room and told the whole class I had my period. I was extremely embarrassed, mostly because Ididhave my period, and had to walk over and retrieve the tampon, which I needed. When Shannon heard this story, she found him outside his locker, dragged him over to a nearby water fountain, and held him under it until he begged for mercy.
I twinge at the memory. I want so badly to text Shannon and remind her of this story, but since I know all I’ll get is a big fat nothing in response, I don’t bother. I miss my sister and her bad attitude and her brutal honesty, and have no idea if I’ll ever get any of that back, though now that she’s engaged again, maybe she’ll finally start acknowledging my existence. At least in the meantime I have Sam, who, like Shannon, will always bravely tell me when my outfit sucks, and will almost always be right about ittoo.
She eventually gets up to take a shower. She’s all the way down the hall before I remember to tell her that I’m going home for my sister’s engagement party and will be gone for a week.
“I literally don’t care at all,” she says, shutting the bathroom door in my face.
“Love you too, Sam!” I call out, then head toward my room.
Eight
Ah, LaGuardia. The cursed pit of nothingness. I had no idea when I first moved to New York that I’d spend so much of my time here—you never consider practicalities like that when you’re daydreaming.
The weirdest thing about flying back and forth between the same two places is that you accumulate all this specific knowledge that you never have occasion to share with anyone. Who is there to talk to about the ranking of best to worst wines at Bar 212? When I count up the number of hours I’ve spent milling around at Gate 51 I feel physically sick. That’s days of my life that will never be returned tome.
Today, I’d welcome a delayed flight—a canceled one would be even better—but lucky me, everything is right on time.
