At the end of a rough day of work — although at that job, all days were rough — I decided to reward myself with a bag of sugar cookies. They’d come home with me, alongside an equally healthy dinner of macaroni and cheese, a pair of Grey’s Anatomy DVDs and the will to retreat into my bedroom with food and entertainment and no good reason to leave until the middle of the next day. My bedroom, at that point, was an island of relative cleanliness and sanity in an otherwise filthy and cluttered-beyond-allcomprehension rowhouse in South Philadelphia.
And the perpetually difficult job was one in which I worked as a “research assistant” for a college professor, a nice and entirely inappropriate title, as the job I was just a couple weeks into at that point was rapidly losing any common ground it had once shared with what I believed I had been hired to do, in all the least promising ways.
In an effort to jumpstart my career in a writing-related field, I’d sold everything that didn’t fit in my Subaru Impreza or the bag I strapped to the roof of it, and left my beloved Portland, Ore., for the East Coast. My precision job search consisted of blanketing that coast from Georgia to Maine with applications for every job I found posted online that looked remotely promising. From my mother’s backyard in western Colorado, I had a phone interview with a college professor looking for a research assistant — the first hit from my search. On the promise of 20-hours of work each week at $10 an hour, I turned my fully loaded car for a city I had never visited. He’d asked for me to start two weeks from when he offered me the position, and to my 23-year-old brain, that sounded like plenty of time to finish a cross-country move that was already half over. I’d sent a bevy of emails out inquiring about rooms for rent, because having a roommate would mean I knew at least one person in Philadelphia.
I was driving across Illinois when I finally received a call back from someone with a room opening up in his rowhouse. He’d sent me photos and said, “It’s a little messy while my roommate moves out,” so I didn’t look closely at the clutter. We talked about the things that are priorities for roommates in their early 20s — work hours, pet friendliness and music preferences — and agreed it would work out for me to move in. I told him I’d be there in two days, and he assured me his roommate would be out and the room would be waiting.
My last words, just as we were hanging up, were, “And you’re clean, right?”
He said yes.
Liar.
When I arrived on that September evening, I turned down an improbably narrow street squeezed with well-worn red brick rowhouses, found the door with 225 above it, and knocked. He was surprised to see me that day, having confused my 48-hour arrival notice for something more like 72, or never.
His “roommate” was actually his girlfriend and “moving out” meant moving her stuff into his room so they could rent out the extra bedroom. She was still very much there, as were the three guinea pigs she kept in the room that would be mine. It stank of their longunchanged bedding, and they had knocked sawdust shavings out of their cages and sawdust now drifted into corners and generous gaps between the wooden slats of the floorboards.
I’ll say the only nice thing I have to say about that roommate: he was kind. He and his girlfriend explained the phenomenon that is a Wawa convenience store complete with a near infinite variety of coffees and a food counter, delivered Tasty Cakes, helped me carry in boxes from my car and insisted I take the futon mattress since I had nothing else to sleep on, my mattress having not fit inside my car for the drive east.
I sat down on that futon mattress as dusk fell that first night and my room turned to toal darkness — there was no overhead light fixture, and I owned no lamp — and cried. I knew this was already a disaster.
My roommate cheered me on when I undertook cleaning and painting projects, and his girlfriend provided helpful advice. To parallel park your car on those impossibly narrow streets, she said, required jumping a tire up on the opposite sidewalk. And when I mentioned that I’d opened the doors to the cupboard under the bathroom sink and watched several mice scurry away — there was a serious infestation — she replied, “Oh, I just don’t open that cupboard.”
In the basement, the floor from the toe of the staircase to the washer and dryer on the far side was inches deep in clothing, towels and sheets. A neverplayed drum set hovered near the wall, only mostly immune to the spreading fabric chaos.
On the ground level, floors were never cleaned, windows had likely never been washed and walls were painted in off-shades that came from the “oops!” rack at the hardware store. The kitchen counters were always covered in dirty dishes. My roommate would cook dinner and leave the chunks of steak he’d grilled on the stovetop for days to follow. His only partially housetrained dog, a mastiff mix with a square head largely emptied of any computing power, would frequently defecate on the living room floor during his 10- or 12-hour shifts at work.
Our two bedrooms and the bathroom were on the third floor. I have nothing to report about his room. I’m not sure he ever left the door open.
In mine, I’d swept and swept again, trying to knock the guinea pigs’ shavings from the cracks in the hardwood floors, and used another “oops” color that looked creamy yellow at night and pale mint green in the day to paint the walls, rolling over the dirt smears and places where fly paper that had been hung against the wall left sticky orange traces of both paper and flies. I spent one afternoon conquering the bathroom — scrubbing the shower so I didn’t feel compelled to wear shoes in it and mopping the floor until the tile was once again white. By the end of the day, the dog had paced from the living room and hallway into that room often enough to lay down a new carpet of dirt.
I began desperately searching for somewhere else to live. The search took me to apartments in ever-shadier neighborhoods with only modest improvements on cleanliness to recommend them. I’d heard Fishtown was up-and-coming, but found myself in what looked like the murder-in-law apartment with only a microwave for a kitchen and inch-thick shag carpet, dark blue so you couldn’t see it had never been shampooed. I tried near one of the universities, and was told I’d better not plan to walk myself home alone at night, a key component in my daily commutes by train from downtown to the fringes of the western suburbs. I called about an apartment above a charming storefront in Manayunk, on the outskirts of Philly, that had a sign hung in the window. The landlord asked what I was looking to pay, and I told him what I’d budgeted (remember, $10 an hour for 20 hours a week guaranteed work, and though my hours had mushroomed, I wasn’t willing to count on that lasting). He laughed and said “Miss, we’ll never be doing business together.”
I carried on that search while working as many hours in two days as I’d been told I’d be putting in over a week — my first day was 12 hours long, my second 13. The professor was an exacting, German-born man who didn’t hesitate with a compliment or a criticism. I remember opening documents I’d never worked on before and being asked where a mistake had come from as if I were to blame for it.
As he doled out my paycheck in cash each Sunday, sometimes for as many as 60 hours that week, I learned to count upwards in German by 20s. German language inquiries about food, coffee, tea and water were also all drilled in daily. My coffee cup wasn’t refilled until I had asked for it in wellpronounced German. My accent became quite good. He also corrected my conservational English — “say ‘yes,’ don’t drawl ‘yeeeaaaah’” and it’s “there are two,” not “there’s two” — adding a disparaging, “It’s only your mother tongue” with every revision.
I’d been hired, I thought, to do primary source research to assist in the background for historical plays he was writing. We finished just one of those in my time there — a beautiful and compelling script for two readers, the text for which came entirely from letters the professor’s father, a war correspondent and propaganda officer for the Nazis, had written to his mother during World War II and a memoir written by a Jewish holocaust survivor and given to her son.
My first day on the job was spent helping the professor finish a 120-item checklist for his English 101 and 201 students to use with their essays and my visions of spending hours in archives at libraries and backrooms in museums vanished behind stacks of essays as grading quickly became the bulk of what I did with my time. His rubric was so demanding that many of his students received zeros on the first drafts of their essays, having lost points for mistakes including starting two sentences in a five-page essay with the same word, grammatical or style errors and use of passive verbs. Missing circling one of the passive verbs or marking another mistake used incurred a deep intake of breath followed by clucking and “Not very good…” as a review of my work.
Some students took the option to rewrite. Many dropped his class, and he finished the semester with five or seven of the nearly 30 students who had begun with him. I was disheartened to see students wanting to learn to write, needing skills for years of courses to follow and pouring tuition money that in many cases had been tough to come by getting shut down and giving up.
Like so many periods of growth, it was a difficult and often painful time. In addition to tremendous growth — learning to grade essays at a faster speed, read more closely and catch more mistakes; being diplomatic, calm under pressure and resilient to criticism — I saw myself in a light I never had before. In my nightly subway rides home, as I realized I was the only woman and only white person for as many train cars as I could see and a bubble of fear rose in my chest, I saw the face of the kind of racism that growing up white in towns full of white people can create. In my layered sweaters and boots or clogs, I was habitually seen as a lesbian — even my boss was sure I was gay, and that was an interesting side of the table to sit on. I reveled in and sometimes cringed from the freedom of being in a place where no one knows you, and so you are whoever you say you are.
So I came back to that rowhouse, closed my bedroom door and turned to small comforts. Which brings us back to the night of the sugar cookies.
In an effort to create a dog-proof but cat-passable barricade that would allow my two cats into my bedroom where they could eat and sleep in peace, I kept a stack of boxes of books near my door, which didn’t latch, and pulled that stack back behind me when I left the room, leaving a gap of a few inches.
The day I came home with a dish of macaroni and cheese and those sugar cookies meant to comfort me, I set them down in my bedroom, left for mere minutes, and returned to find my roommate’s dog had shoved his way into my bedroom and devoured the entire bag of cookies.
Meanwhile, my cats had undertaken another effort in their regular assistance with the mouse infestation problem — they were leaving two or three dead mouse presents daily. One of them was in the torture-play section of Project Mouse Eradication and the dog was attentively watching and waiting his turn to join in the game.
The mouse leaped into the air, the dog lunged, and the two collided. Impact must have occurred right around the trigger for the dog’s gag reflex. It immediately vomited, and a puddle of liquefied sugar cookie with a dead mouse in the center covered the hallway and began dripping down the stairs. The putrid reek of it filled the hallway. The cats fled, the dog fled, and I fetched paper towels and a trash bag.
When my roommate came home, hours later, ready to spring to action to remedy a long-gone mess, I told him the next thing leaving would be me.
I moved into a shoebox-sized studio apartment right downtown shortly after that, and spent another six months in that professor’s home office, hunched over a lap desk covered in essays that I flooded with red ink.
When I was corrected on my pronunciation of “the” (whether the vowel gets a long e sound or an a sound depends on if the following word begins with a vowel sound, I was told), and I laughed in response, I knew I had to be done.
I didn’t want to be a quitter, to give up on this bold, brave undertaking of having embarked out on my own, but this was an ambitious and problematic mission with more hope to back it than real possibility. It felt like failing, to give up and go home. The choice to leave felt like the weak one. I recognize now that it also required faith and strength to walk away from such a committing effort and trust that another opportunity will appear.
I’m so glad that I went, and I’m so glad that I left.
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