by Alida Nugent
In movies, there are always obstacles. There are always bad boys before the storm, some terrible schmuck who ruins the main character and makes her tired but ever closer to finding that somebody who will wake her up. There is plenty of suffering before the good happens. This is something that I have taken stock in, because I’ve dealt with plenty of bullshit for somebody so fresh out of the womb. I deal with the difficult because I expect, in return, a reward down the line. I believe in the eventual payoff, and I also believe in paying your dues. That payoff, I reason, will be so huge. You deal with the worst, you get the best. I want big emotions and orchestral music and a very real commitment in the two of us. That takes some trial and error. That takes some patience. That takes things I was not ready to give yet—my all.
It’ll never happen with any of my bad boys. Bad boys will never want to loaf on a couch with me without the promise of robbing a bank later. They have never understood me, even though it seemed like they could, on account of all my tough-looking jackets. We were always two cool ships passing in the night, because I called my mother and thought that being considerate to people was important. They didn’t.
There would be somebody else, when I was open enough for the situation to mosey its way on over to me. This guy wouldn’t be nice. He would be cool AND kind, and nobody would ever call him nice because they were too busy calling him funny. I would meet him after a long string of rude people, and he would be fresh air after a whole lot of smoke. I would be so grateful for him to be there. I would tell him, “Nobody’s been so good to me,” and I would really, really mean it. However, like the movie heroine who doesn’t know she’s going to end up with the guy right in front of her, you have to do the audience a favor and open up your fucking eyes to what was around you.
Life is not a movie. No happy ending is guaranteed. No wound is closed by magic. There had been lessons I had been refusing to learn. How if you aren’t letting somebody know they’re hurting you, they’ll keep doing it. How if you aren’t letting yourself know you’re hurting yourself, you’ll keep dating assholes. How, honey, you really need to stop dating assholes. That shit is not cute. Acknowledging them is half the battle.
* * *
My brother and I went out for beers a few weeks after our initial conversation. I wanted to let him know that I had taken his advice seriously and I wanted to try something with him.
“You know, I cry sometimes.” I begin with a strong, embarrassing point and keep on going with the revelations. “I help old ladies cross the street. I get emotionally invested in animals. I smile and give hugs to my friends, and I don’t like making people feel bad. I am a nice girl, and no matter how tough I think I am, I hate getting hurt. I am Alida,” I say, “and I deserve to meet somebody who I can trust. Somebody who sees me like my brother sees me: a great girl. Worthy of a return phone call.”
My brother nods slowly.
“Well,” I continue, “he has to be, like, not a wimp or anything. And he has to be able to at least watch horror movies with me. I’m not going to date somebody who has the personality of a shoehorn because they’ll buy me dinner. I’m not saying you’re right and I’m going to forever date nice boring suit types. I need some substance. You know, maybe not a challenge, but somebody who keeps me guessing. With their jokes! Who, okay, probably didn’t take revenge for his father’s death….”
“Uh, Alida. Why don’t we see?”
My brother smiles, stretches, relishing in a point he’d been trying to make since I had braces. We go back to drinking and I call him an asshole sixteen times, a term of endearment I had given to the brother who would always protect me, who always thinks that I should get the best of everything. He couldn’t always be there to give that to me, though. Even the toughest of brothers can’t make their sister change the things they think they are entitled to. They can’t move you away from the jerks. They can simply hold their breath and their baseball bat.
“You don’t need a nice guy, Alida. You need a fuckin’ good guy. Hell, you need a wiseass. Lots of girls need those, especially you.”
He’s ragging on me, so I do it right back to him. I tell him one day, he’ll meet somebody who makes him constantly check his phone, makes him feel nervous when it doesn’t vibrate, and makes him stick around. He tells me he won’t. He and I might fall in different ways, but the idea of something real and huge—one that could potentially hurt us—was something we both were a bit scared of.
He and I will get better at this, I think. One day, we’ll get beers with two more people at the table, two more people who proved us both wrong.
Drop My Keys in a Place I Call My Own
When you live in a walk-up apartment, you learn a couple of things about yourself, and most of those things have to do with how out of shape you are. It takes me approximately fifty-two steps to get to the door of my apartment, and by the time I get up there, I’m panting. I do not want my roommates to know that I get out of breath from walking up stairs because I have been talking about “going running” forever, while completely avoiding the actual act of “starting to go running, ever.” On this particular day in June, I linger outside the door, trying to control my breath. I turn off my music because you can hear that I’m listening to pop music and not something punky and cool, and then proceed to wipe my feet on my neighbor’s doormat. My roommates and I have the best of intentions, but after a year of living in our apartment, nobody has remembered to pick up a welcome mat. We’re always quickly and quietly shuffling our feet at the door of apartment 4E, hoping our neighbors never catch us.
I push the door open, throw my keys down, and walk across the gritty kitchen floor. “Yikes,” I think, as I do a mental calculation of how long it’s been since the floor was last Swiffered. My guess is at least a month. I tell myself I’ll do it, but later, and kick off my shoes, punting them across the room because nobody is looking. Like most “first” apartments in the city, mine is dingy but comforting. There are no windows in the living room. The couch pillows smell like somebody who might have slept on them for three days, months ago. There is no “aesthetic” to my home. There are no lively vases or decorative key-lime candles. We have one picture frame: a plastic one with a picture of Fabolous in it that my friend stole at a party. We have a single wall decoration, a lizard sculpture. We constantly talk about going to IKEA without ever taking the initiative to look up how to get there.
I flop down on the couch, sip some Sprite that I had left out from the night before, and turn on the television to watch something I’ve probably already seen a million times. My forehead is dripping sweat and I freak out for a second when I think I see a bug out of the corner of my eye. Just my tweezers, though. I had dropped them there days ago, and don’t judge the laziness implied by the second half of this sentence, but I do not pick them up because I can never find them when I put them away. The apartment smells like dumplings (Trader Joe’s, $3.99), and it makes me hungry. I wonder if it’s worth the effort to boil water to make pasta.
My roommate Adam enters the apartment, all plaid-shirted and red-cheeked and enthusiastic. Adam is enthusiastic and fun even when he is not being enthusiastic, like when he is unloading the dishwasher. His boyfriend is walking behind him; he’s here almost constantly these days, and nobody minds because he always encourages popcorn making, and plus, we are adults, and adults have their boyfriends over all the time. This is just what we do now.
Adam plops his keys into the octopus candleholder (which obviously has never once held a candle) and pulls an envelope from his back pocket.
“We got our lease renewal. We need to decide ASAP if we want to live here next year.”
How was your day? Hello, what do you want for dinner?
I answer those questions in my head and then I decide to address the only thing he actually asked.
“We should talk about it together,” I say.
Together being Amanda, the third roommate, the other college compadre, the other piece to the puzzle of “Shoul
d we start buying toilet paper in bulk?” Amanda is in her room, her legs strewn across her bed, shorts on, scrolling down a Web site on her Mac keypad with one finger. She has moisturized, I imagine, the only one of us who can do that consistently. We tell her the news; she agrees we need to sit down and discuss soon.
I go back to the couch and sink into its mustiness. I close my eyes and think of nothing, like how much money I have or how to move a bed down fifty-two steps.
* * *
One year and four months prior to that day, I was green and naïve and liked to do plenty of things I don’t like to do now—eat sushi, buy posters to hang up, look for apartments. I had money in my bank account and was ready to move out of my childhood home into my “own pad,” which would eventually lead to a “bigger place,” and then “a place with the [not yet real] boyfriend” and eventually a 401(k) and a future where I was nostalgic for my twenties. A springboard into real life!
I took the steps needed—I told my parents I would be leaving, and then begged for them to help me move. I looked for friends who would also be willing to move with me, preferably ones who didn’t use check-cashing stores. Through casual and distracted Internet chatting and overly enthusiastic drunk texts, two former roommates and I decided to take the plunge together.
This was good, I reasoned. Living with people you had already lived with before means you never really have to improve yourself as a roommate. Nobody would ever expect me to open the mailbox ever or remember to turn off the light when I went to bed. In turn, I didn’t expect them to do something insane and obnoxious like date a standup comic, and I wouldn’t complain if they never cleaned the bathtub. It was a sweet deal, a much-needed reprieve from trying to find Craigslist roommates who didn’t sound like they followed people in parking lots or, even worse, were in a band that would practice in the apartment.
The three of us began to chatter about “THE MOVE” before we even started to look for apartments. We thought of THE MOVE in terms of getting boyfriends at the exact same time, or eventually commuting to work in nice outfits we didn’t have, or getting home after a long night of listening to the bumping music that I’d probably consider grating a year later. Like I said, naïve.
The first time we looked for apartments, we met up beforehand and laid down our guidelines, the same way children ramble on and on about game rules they make up on the spot: Subway proximity. Closets. No muggings. Privacy. A balcony, maybe. Wood floors. Cute neighbors. A good bar nearby. Affordable. Working toilet. Laundry in the basement. Personally, I cared only about the not-getting-mugged part. I imagined that criminals would sense that I had my own place and immediately jump out of bushes and take my tiny Target purse, laughing as I yelled “Stop that man!” to no avail.
We settled on a reasonable rent range, based on no knowledge of how much it costs to do anything. We thought our electric bill would be something in the vicinity of “You know, it’s not like we keep our lights on that often. Just at like, you know. Night.” We were excited to spend money. We were excited about “up-and-coming” neighborhoods where we stuck out like sore thumbs on hands that could not defend from a potential attacker. We pretended not to care that up-and-coming meant look at this one hipster coffee shop to satisfy you, you spoiled pig brat. We were excited about the potential of any neighborhood—of finding brunch places and bartenders who would say, “Hey, how is that [insert personal thing he knows about you here],” and good bodegas.
Green. Green. Green.
We had lists of Craigslist Realtors printed out, numbers that we would call, and a Juán or Joe or Jack would put us on hold and ask us if we would consider paying just a little more than our agreed maximum. A little would be more like a thousand. All the Realtors looked like they were the kinds of guys who hit on women at bars by peacocking, like they read The Game. They would leer at us with eyes full of dollar signs and shinier ties than I would have ever trusted otherwise. Most were around our age, or wanted to be. It goes without saying that people our age don’t know shit.
We found ourselves unsuccessful on more than one million occasions. Two weeks stretched into months and season changes and apartments that didn’t “really have walls.” (Yes, that’s right. An apartment with no bedroom walls.) Once, we waited for close to an hour outside a head shop for a landlord to let us up the stairs, until we noticed the fire marshall had actually shut the building down. We would sit in pizza places and glare at each other, three friends who disagreed on Realtor fees and how annoying it would be to live under a subway. I put Parmesan on my slices, they put red pepper. Would it ever work?
“I need to get out immediately, you guys. My parents are becoming interested in finding the URL to my personal blog,” I would whine.
“Are you kidding me? It takes me over an hour to get into Manhattan. How can I ever have fun when I constantly have to commute a billion hours a day?” Adam lived in Brooklyn, but not in the part of Brooklyn that was filled with young folks and not extremely old and Orthodox Jewish people.
“Guys, come on. We’ll settle for the first decent apartment we see.”
So we lowered the bar. Shadier neighborhoods. Less amenities. Places with visible mice.
“Maybe this is what hell is,” I said on more than one occasion, knowing I was being too dramatic. This was a privilege, a luxury to be able to look for apartments in one of the best cities in the world. Going through all of this bullshit was annoying but necessary, like waiting in doctors’ offices or filling out forms or cleaning our closets. But knowing that certainly didn’t make it easy. It was a constant roller coaster of hope and disappointment, leading me to become more emotional than I ever thought I could be over a living space. I cried over my bank account and Realtor fees twice. I cried over Park Slope and small bedrooms and the Q train. I cried, and I cried, and then, the heavens opened up, after six apartments on a Sunday afternoon and iced coffee and burned bagels. Heaven in the form of a walk-up in a neighborhood I had looked at on a whim, near a church with graffiti of fruit.
When you find an apartment you are meant to be living in, the heart knows. I wanted to kiss the exposed brick, the high ceilings, or the Realtor who brought his pug and looked to be about twenty-six years old. I wanted to kiss the paper that made me hand over twenty-four hundred dollars I barely had, to live in a room that had a closet on the outside and could barely fit my twin bed. Floors that were water damaged. A new dishwasher, still in it’s wrapping. It somehow arrived broken, and my dad had to fix it.
After signing the seventeen-month lease and forking over the eighty million dollars necessary to move into this place, the three of us went to a Thai restaurant, feeling celebratory and tired, like we had crossed the finish line, even though we had just begun.
“Here’s to our new apartment! Here’s to squalor!” We ate our pad thai, and I noticed how, when you’re in the middle of them, even the biggest moments don’t feel like that much at all.
* * *
The day we moved I wore a sweatshirt I used to wear a lot in high school. My parents surveyed the neighborhood and one coffee shop, two friendly elderly Hispanic men, and a Pomeranian later, they decided they would lose only a minimum amount of sleep because their daughter was moving to a mildly safe neighborhood. Then we spent three hours trying to fight the unfortunate curve in the staircase—the great mattress fight became the big dresser-drawer fight, which turned into the bed-frame fight, which turned into a white T-shirt flag of concession and back pain and armpit stains. I wiped my brow and put my hands on my hips to assess the progress every ten minutes, and it made absolutely no difference at all. I had forgotten to bring important things like my DVD collection, an extensive collection that had at least three Topher Grace films. Even without the weight of In Good Company, my limbs hurt for three days afterward. My dad hurt his back something fierce. I am too old for my dad to be helping me move, but I was too young to admit this out loud.
That night, my roommates and I drank SoCo out of our mismatching glasses and
cheered to absolutely nothing. To sleep. To unpacking. We stared at the boxes and unpacked and half unpacked things and said to ourselves, This is the beginning of something!
Something, of course, that would eventually turn into the everydayness, the usual, the routine of life that we wait for blips of excitement in.
* * *
By the time the second summer in our apartment rolled around, we weren’t so enamored with our living conditions. The bathroom wouldn’t stop smelling like mold, but by cracking the tiny window, our neighbors could see us showering, so we kept it closed and held our breath when it got too rancid. One day, the tub filled up quickly and the water wouldn’t go down. I peered into the murky, foggy water and looked for any sign of the swirl and drain. Nothing. I came back twenty minutes later. There was my hair, Amanda’s hair, all kinds of hair floating in the tub. I texted our super, Angel, or Super Angel, as we call him, and he told me he would come fix it. He did not, so I showered in hair and skin and volumizing shampoo. The second day, I decided to take matters into my own hands and poured a whole bottle of Drano down the drain until it went down halfway. I felt triumphant, capable, until I saw a water bug and stood on the sides of the tub, like the ground was splitting beneath me, to wash my hair.
I counted six cockroaches that summer. The first time, it climbed into my shoe and I screamed until Adam killed it. The next time, I hit it with a wine bottle until it split in half, the disembodied creature moving its legs until I covered it with a tissue.
The freezer stopped working and my Fudgsicles became liquid, so I had to pour it into a cup and drink it. It doesn’t even fill the glass up a quarter of the way, and it’s not refreshing, and it is so hot in our apartment that my boyfriend, my very first city boyfriend, tells me to come to his house on weeknights. He comes on weekends, and I have to give him glasses of wine and then he falls asleep.