by Vikki Warner
I had several appointments with a new primary care doc, who sent me to a gynecologist and a gastroenterologist. I was thankful for my job, which didn’t pay much but came with very good health insurance. Now that the medical establishment had convinced me I really was sick, rather than just run down or getting old, I applied my usual level of doggedness to discovering the real source of my illness rather than denying its existence.
Burn Plan
During the winter at PennHenge, there is a slowdown, a time of solitude, extra sleep, and deliberate investiture in soups. The yard and the driveway fill with snow, which is then compacted into dirty ice. Leaving the house means succumbing to a list of cruel realities. While the snow falls and the wind blows, I watch, steeling myself for the inevitable shoveling escapade. After arranging my layers—socks, two pairs; giant moon boots; long underwear; jeans; sweater; scarf; ski hat; parka; down mittens—I go out to face the drifty bluster. I’m both lonely and exhilarated. Penn Street is quiet, barren, softened; there is a pleasure to the rhythm of the task at hand, and a problem-solving element to this clearing of snow from one place and piling it in another. As it goes on, though, a sharp irritation begins to slice through my meditative spell. Through the wall of the house I can hear the sounds of a first-floor tenant’s video game—repetitive booms like cannon blasts. My thoughts make a hairpin turn: suddenly I’m wound up and wondering why not a single one of these dudes has even asked if I need some help. The thought of them, cozy, playing pointless video games with no concern for the world outside—a world that includes their landlady shoveling snow for an hour straight—produces enough ire to fuel me through the end of the job. Shoveling faster, I begin to mutter to myself, while now passive-aggressively heaving chunks of snow at the house, on the other side of the wall from where these guys are relaxing.
Once I’m back in soft pants and kicking it with a hot chocolate, such rage seems silly. They’re renters. Snow shoveling is part of what they pay me for. It’s not their problem that instead of buying a snow-blower or paying the neighborhood kids to do the job, I choose to go out there and strain my own back. But there’s some little bit of me that insists it would be the nice thing to do for my tenants—all men—to offer to help with this manual labor. A few minutes of their time could save an hour of mine—not because I’m a woman, but because it takes one person a lot longer to do a job than, say, three people.
But how will they know I want help if I refuse to ask for it?
They won’t. And I can’t.
This is one of the many subtle discomforts that arise between me and my tenants—gray areas that are complicated by the fact that I am a woman.
As a landlady, I aim to present myself as gender-neutral as possible. I’m not talking specifically about my appearance, although I only wear makeup to weddings and I’m most comfortable in hole-ridden clothes that many women would throw in the trash. I’m referring to my style of managing the house and the people within it. It seems crucial to be straightforward, to tamp down any drama; perhaps that runs counter to perceptions of how my gender handles interpersonal tasks in general. I focus on simplicity, speed, and sociability. Simplicity: I get shit done in as few steps as possible, resisting the temptation to cheap out or hold out. Speed: If the toilet breaks today, my tenants know damn well that the toilet will be fixed today. Sociability: I want to be a friend to my tenants, responsive to their concerns, not just the name on the rent check.
The place where I’ve failed to maintain this plan is easily identified: knee-jerk tolerance. I wanted so badly to be known as the chill landlady that I made her a close relative of the long-suffering girlfriend, readily accepting a variety of slights. Extremly late rent—as in, into-next-month late? Broken glass, messes large and small, new roommates brought in with no heads-up? “That’s fine, yeah, okay,” I hear myself say.
Being a woman and a feminist, and inhabiting the somewhat unusual role of landlady, I imagine that I always need to be capable and get things done without anyone’s assistance. I haven’t quite conceded that it’s possible to take responsibility for something—even a big thing like a house—without also agreeing to do every task involved.
I also tone down the lady vibe out of self-preservation: Despite my no-nonsense way of shutting down unwanted sexual advances, I’ve experienced a few of them from past male tenants. They came in the form of the seemingly innocent comment (“Is it weird to tell your landlady she’s pretty?”); the skeevy observation (“That is definitely a porn plot, the landlady and tenant thing?”); and the less blatant but still belittling use of terms of endearment (tenants calling me “honey” and “babe”). These quips were mostly opportunistic, casually relayed. In fact, I felt like an onlooker to these comments; they were lobbed in my general direction rather than coming confrontationally, head-on. Even if it was a novelty floating in these guys’ minds, an idle sexual whim, directionless and fleeting, their voicing of it put me on alert. I have laughed at a tenant’s flirtations once or twice, waving them away because doing so seemed like the fastest way to remove my body from the scene and deadbolt it in my apartment. What a luxury it must be to vocalize whatever floats along.
After several years of feeling ignored and steam-rolled, though, the chill landlady had to cede control in order to preserve my mental state. Where once I would have texted, When you have a minute, I’d really appreciate it if you’d move some of the stuff outside your apartment, I started to say, Front hallway is not a good storage location, please find another place for your stuff. Thanks. That’s still a few shades politer than what I want to say, which is something like, Hey bonehead! Your bundles of cables and old canvases and random pieces of wood constitute a fire hazard and I’m sure as hell not going to let you be the reason why I can’t get out of the house in a fire. REMOVE IT IMMEDIATELY. I know how to be nice; I am learning also how to be firm and direct. I used to be so nice, and so afraid to be seen as anything but, as to squelch all meaning from my words; so many disclaimers make for an easily-ignored request. When I speak from a place of power, things get done, and PennHenge becomes better, safer, more peaceful. Land-ladyhood is a great training ground for doing that same thing out in the world, where it’s riskier and susceptible to an endless list of veiled challenges.
That fire hazard business, by the way, is not a hypothetical; it’s not something I say to my tenants just to get them to cooperate. By my count, I’ve witnessed six house fires on the blocks directly adjacent to mine. Usually they erupt in the very early morning; usually they are detected by my subconscious in deep sleep—silent, shocking. Some of the houses were empty; some were filled with sleeping people. No one was badly injured in any of these fires, but the experience of having just escaped your burning home must flip an internal switch that can’t be deactivated. One fire happened on a top-three coldest night of the year; Seth and I quickly layered up and went outside to offer clothing to the stunned tenants in their sweatpants and T-shirts, their bodies still warm from bed and adrenaline as they expelled vaporous, swirling breath clouds. The flames shot through the roof, stretching into the sky, as we stood with them, watching the firefighters’ counterattack. There wasn’t much to say.
It seemed the neighborhood had surreptitiously signed up on an installment plan to burn itself down, and my mind was infected by it. The fires were drawing closer, circling around PennHenge. In daylight hours, I knew it was silly to assume the flames were coming for us, but in sleep, my brainwaves uncontrolled, I was haunted. I frequently woke up smelling phantom smoke, my teeth ground together, my tongue lumpy and numb from being bitten. To soothe myself, I checked the smoke alarms; I installed more. I begged my tenants not to smoke in the house. I ran to the window to scan the block at any unexplained sound or siren.
A friend who is a heavy dabbler in real estate once said to me, “Landlords burn down these dime-a-dozen triple deckers all the time.” I was so insulted by his intimation that my house—the site of so much of my time and money—was one of many, a fac
eless blob not worth his notice, that I didn’t parse the rest of the thought. Landlords burn these buildings down. It’s a well-known tactic for collecting insurance money and displacing tenants from rent-subsidized apartments. (Rhode Island doesn’t have a rent control program—though it should—but the state’s Section 8 program offers housing vouchers and subsidies to landlords in order to create pseudo-affordable housing for low-income families.) This is literally eviction by fire. I’ve heard about it, I know it happens. It’s still shocking to live in the center of a scorching epidemic of it.
The probability of an accidental fire is not all that much greater in the Hill than out in the suburbs—otherwise average suburbanites are often on the news here in Rhode Island for using a grill in the house or a blowtorch to melt ice off the gutters. Many miles of outdated wiring are to be found in the area’s aging houses. There are risks, but not to the tune of six houses on three blocks. That’d be some serious bad luck. I have little choice but to believe that some of these fires are intentionally set, whether by someone with a beef against a resident or landlord, by the landlord himself, or by someone paid by the landlord. For those of us living nearby—whose homes are safe for the moment—that is both horrifying and comforting. Horrifying because it is unthinkable that any building owner would commit the disastrous act of burning down his own perfectly fine house, installing a threat to his tenants’ and neighbors’ safety where there would otherwise be none. Comforting because this is an intentional effort and not a fluke of wayward electricity or carelessness, and therefore, by some logic it’s less likely to visit my own home. Maybe I’m a big softy, with my silly liking and appreciating of old houses, but arson just rankles me. The arsonist landlord can go back to his respectable neighborhood, his burned-out building firmly out of sight across town or across the state. He doesn’t have to look at its blackened shell, but my neighbors and I do. There’s the obvious possibility of hurting or killing people, endangering first responders, burning down adjacent buildings, legal consequences—starting something that can’t be taken back. The idea that the law and the police and the insurance companies collectively look the other way while this goes on is just impossible for me to fathom.
There is another deduction to be made from this: that the neighborhood could be seen as beaten down to the point that no one would raise an eyebrow at this cyclical reign of destruction, where it wouldn’t be a foregone conclusion that we, the people who live here, deserve better than to watch our surroundings be ravaged on the regular. As if the neighborhood is not worthy of basic subsistence, its people not worth a modicum of safety or tranquility.
Greed is a horror. Success cannot be gotten through devastation.
Whomever or whatever is responsible for these fires, the boarded-up carnage sits, and sags, and sits, often for years, as insurance checks are cashed and plans for repairs are made, or not. Some houses are eventually torn down and the wreckage carted away. Others decay in the rain and humidity until their owners get it together and fix them. The houses that are repaired are not usually restored to their pre-torched state, but fortified to a semi-acceptable level with lesser materials. (After fire damaged his large apartment building, one landlord put smaller windows well inside of the old, larger frames, literally closing in his tenants’ view. It became a tidy parable for me, an image that represented the exact opposite of how I wanted to treat my tenants.)
The owner of the house right behind mine—a featureless brown three-family that Seth and I watched burn in the early hours of a spring morning—got his insurance dough and began to repair the place completely by himself, “trying to save money,” he shouted down from atop his belching cherry-picker; after putting in some new windows and beginning to work on the roof and siding, he stopped appearing. The tarps on the roof became ripped and frayed, slapping in on themselves as years of harsh weather slowly destroyed them. Wind and rain permeated the walls, where I’d bet a large pile of insurance money that ponderous amounts of mold formed. A family of birds took up messy residence in the open roof; industrious mice shimmied through holes at ground level. The yard filled with weeds and out-of-control vegetable plants. Eventually, someone came around and clear-cut it all, but they didn’t even bother to go inside the house.
Because I may never get my first choice—to see this house restored to some kind of working order—I take my consolation prize: I watch it try to return to the earth. It’s a fun study to undertake, as long as I stuff down my human need to see things used in accordance with their potential and purpose.
It doesn’t take long before you stop seeing the damage and the modern ruins and board-ups become a rote part of the neighborhood. Old ruins are sexy, prized, visited, appreciated. New ruins? They only symbolize failure. If you live amid new ruins, you have to constantly remember not to take them as an indicator of your own worth in the world.
My guts were still feeling like the flesh-and-blood equivalent of that damaged house, but my new primary care doc was hopeful. She was all business, brisk but friendly, and she was dead serious about cracking my case. After my summertime hospital stay, I spent the fall shuttling to specialist after specialist, relaying the latest developments and getting accustomed to watching doctors’ eyes widen when they saw the results of my hospital bloodwork.
Then I saw a gastroenterologist. She was young; she was driven; she was upbeat. I had a feeling I was nearing the end of this crisis of not knowing. I visualized taking a normal poop, and it seemed like a beautiful, otherworldly dream.
She scheduled me for a colonoscopy, an endoscopy, and a variety of blood tests.
I prepped for the colonoscopy with dire faith, drinking the criminally disgusting colon bleach provided until I barfed it back out.
Seth brought me in, waited during the procedure, and kindly listened to my daffy anesthesia-induced digressions afterward.
The next day, my gastroenterologist called.
“Okay, so I have some news. You have celiac disease. The blood test detected the antibodies, and we confirmed the diagnosis with the endoscopy. It’s severe in that you have a lot of internal damage to your small intestine. It’s kind of an off-the-charts case.”
“Uhhh, okay!” I said excitedly. I didn’t yet want to think about what this meant, but I had a feeling this was the diagnosis I should have gotten years ago, and I didn’t want her to think I couldn’t handle it.
“So, this means you are going to have to cut out gluten from your diet. Wheat, barley, and rye are making you very sick. You have to get down to a molecular level, like, check your toothpaste, things like that.”
“Umm . . .”
“But that’s the best part—the treatment isn’t a drug, it’s just a dietary change!” she went on.
“Mmhmm.”
“You can do it! It’s going to be hard for a little while, but I bet you’ll feel a lot better the next time you see me.”
“Okay. Thank you. Yeah, I can do it, I’ll figure it out,” I said.
“You’re welcome! Good luck! Let us know how you’re doing!”
I staggered around my kitchen in a daze, trashing anything and everything that had gluten in it, googling anything with vague labeling. I held a canister of flour, turned it in my hands, and watched the grains slide against each other, before dumping it.
I was too tired to give much thought to what I could eat, so for a week I consumed mostly corn tortilla chips and salsa.
Crunching, I thought bitterly of all the things I would NEVER EAT AGAIN—EVER: burritos, pizza, beer, pasta, donuts, bagels, pie. A simple freaking roll or a fresh, chewy slice of bread. A damn brioche! I would never get to try a single croque monsieur, whether I wanted to or not. A friend of mine with a severe gluten allergy relayed that for a while after she went gluten-free, she desired to punch any person she saw eating a tasty-looking piece of bread. Emotionally, I went the other way: I cried and had to leave the room when I found myself the only gluten abstainer in a group of friends luxuriating in really good pizza.<
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The strangest part was that I’d never again be able to pick something up and eat it without considering its every ingredient.
Before I could dissolve into self-pity, though, Seth started cooking for me. He took no shortcuts. He did not fall for inadequate wheat analogs like gluten-free bread or fake pasta. Instead he bought the best, simplest ingredients he could find, and took a lot of care to prepare them in healing ways. He was never annoyed with my new restriction; he took it as a chance to learn. The damage to my body couldn’t be undone in a week, a month, or even a year, but his understated care bolstered me, helped me start to mend.
I occasionally saw Neil around town for six months or so after his disgraced flight from PennHenge. I fumed at him from across several rooms. He worked as a bartender at one of my standard spots for a while, and wordlessly pushed free drinks at me. Then he quickly vanished from town, seemingly no more than a damaging apparition.
The second-floor apartment again went empty for a few months while I cleaned it, mellowed the residue of rage, and hired a “friend price” contractor acquaintance to make it suitable for mentally stable people to live in: new refrigerator, new stove, antique tub installed, new toilet, new drywall in the bathroom, antique light fixtures, and farmhouse sink in the kitchen. Even as I shifted my paltry money around and leaned heavily on my credit cards, I scraped the bottom of my checking account every other week to pay him. The apartment was still spare and bare, but I was proud to have improved it to the point at which nothing was broken or close to it. Now it was only in desperate need of humans who cared, even a little.
I had to make sure the apartment didn’t fall into the wrong hands yet again. I was reluctant—almost afraid—to count on myself to accomplish this task. I had again and again gladly palmed the keys over to people who immediately began to take extreme liberties. I used to be a strong judge of character, but I could no longer claim that knack. Best to rely on a known quantity; best to rely on someone I had found trustworthy before my powers of discernment had left me. I really needed a friend, a good friend, to move in.