The Roommates

by Stephanie Wu

  The boat I worked on was owned by a wealthy man who worked in telecommunications, and it had thirteen crew members and could accommodate twelve guests. The cabins were all tiny double rooms with bunk beds. There was a cabin that fit three girls, but because the head stewardess hated me, she put me in a tiny room with a deckhand in his late thirties, instead of in the room with two other girls my age.

  I couldn’t tell my family about the situation until after I got off the boat—they would have been horrified that I was living with a guy in such close quarters when there was a spare bed elsewhere. The two of us had different shifts. I worked during the day and slept at night, and he was sometimes on watch at night and asleep during the day. There were a few times when I came into the room and his laptop was on, and it was obvious he was watching porn. Thankfully, he never masturbated while I was there, at least that I know of. It wasn’t that he was gross, but he did make me uncomfortable—you don’t get much privacy on a boat.

  I got along well with the rest of the crew, which included a couple from New Zealand. No one hooked up on our boat—the men were older and the girls weren’t interested. But on other boats, everyone has sex with everyone else. You earn so much money that you can afford to party and drink Moët. There’s lots of cocaine on the fun boats.

  My job was in the laundry room. In the five weeks I was on the boat, I only saw a guest once, and that was because he wandered into the kitchen by accident. Most of the time, I was below deck doing laundry, which included doing disgusting things like scrubbing the underwear of the Russian prostitute the owner had brought on board as his guest.

  When the guests weren’t on board and I was allowed above deck, we cleaned the entire boat. Everyone had a tricked-out cleaning kit, with toothbrushes for scrubbing hard-to-get places and Q-tips to clean light fixtures. I picked up a lot of good tricks—if you put vinegar and water in a spray bottle, it’s a great cleaning agent.

  The boat itself traveled from Cannes to St. Tropez, and then to Portofino. Three days before we got to Venice, the head stewardess told me that my trial period was coming to an end and they couldn’t hire me permanently. I was sick of it by then anyway, so I got off in Venice and happily moved to London. No matter how much money I make, I’ll never own a boat. It’s so expensive—even if you never take it anywhere, you still have to pay for the crew and maintenance. I haven’t lived on a boat again since then or even been on a cruise.

  —L, 28 (F)

  THE RUSSIAN MISSIONARY

  I GREW UP IN SALT LAKE CITY and was raised by a Catholic father and a nonpracticing Mormon mother. My parents have always been incredibly supportive of letting my brother and me decide what religion we wanted to follow on our own. After studying many different religions, I decided at sixteen that Mormonism is what I relate to the most. I became Mormon then, and it’s been a huge part of my life ever since. In college, it was interesting to go from a place where everybody knows and understands what Mormonism is to a place where people asked, “Are you in a cult?” or “How many wives does your dad have?” It was a fun opportunity to talk to people about what being Mormon is actually like, instead of what most people think it’s like.

  After I graduated, I realized that there are very few truly liberal Mormons in the world. I thought it was worthwhile for people to meet more Mormons like me, as opposed to ones who have never left Salt Lake City, so I signed up to serve a mission. Young Mormons serve missions all over the world—you don’t get to choose where you go, and it’s always a bit of a gamble. You could go to Mozambique or Tulsa, Oklahoma. The one place I did not want to go was Russia, because I learned Russian in college and had lived there before. I remember praying, “God, I’ll go wherever you want me to go, but if it’s got to be Russia, then please not Moscow.” It’s a huge city, and it’s dirty and loud, and people are mean—if you think New Yorkers are bad, Muscovites can be worse. And lo and behold, I was sent to Moscow.

  Because I spoke the language, I didn’t have to spend three months in the missionary training center learning how to teach in a new language. But in the eighteen months I served, each of my seven companions—the people with whom you live and work with for six weeks at a time—were native Russians, and only my last companion spoke English. I spent just under a year in Moscow, eight months in a city northeast of it called Yaroslavl, and a brief time in Kazakhstan. When you spend twenty-four hours a day seven days a week within sight and sound of a person you didn’t choose to live with, you get all kinds of great stories.

  Even before I met Sister Volkov, I had heard rumors about her. She had a reputation for being unmanageable and kind of bizarre. She was a stunning girl, but was very self-aware of her beauty. She had a pouch with twenty-seven different tubes of mascara in it, and she applied two coats of each every day. It took her three hours to get ready every morning, which meant she didn’t always follow the Mormon handbook. The handbook, or the white bible, essentially tells you how to live your life. There’s no argument as to what is right and what is wrong as a missionary, because part of the purpose is to learn obedience. According to the handbook, you have to be awake at six thirty, and pray and exercise for thirty minutes with your companion, and then come back, get dressed, have breakfast, and be ready to go for the day by eight. Sister Volkov took two or three hours every morning. She had really long hair, and in the twelve weeks we lived together, I only saw her wash her hair once. Every single morning was like prom—she went through tons of Aquanet a week creating these elaborate hairdos, and it was easier if her hair wasn’t slick from showering.

  Sister Volkov acted as if everyone loved her, which might have been delusional. We started working together, and what her previous companion and the mission president neglected to tell me was that she had a horrible seizure disorder, which didn’t manifest in a normal way. She didn’t have seizures where she fell over and shook. Instead, she froze up—you could see her joints stiffen up—and it was totally terrifying. The first time it happened, we were on the subway and she stood completely still, and I thought she was going to fall over. She also didn’t take her medication, because she didn’t like the way she felt on it, so she was having more seizures where she was essentially blacking out and wouldn’t remember what she was doing for the hour or so before her seizure.

  As a teacher, she was great—she was good at improvisation, and so was I, so the two of us could essentially plan entire lessons in our heads. We worked really well together when it came to teaching. She also had a lot of poise and composure and was an amazing storyteller—she could transfix you with any story, including Mormon urban legends. People either loved her or hated her. The good thing about having two missionaries is that even if you hate one of them, you can still connect with the other person teaching you. A lot of people loved Sister Volkov, because she was incredibly dynamic and they never saw her awful side. When we were on trains, she was a total gross-Russian-guy magnet—she was everything a Russian guy wanted—and invariably found a group of guys playing cards and asked to play with them. She always cheated, which was funny.

  In a good companionship, both people should always know what’s going on. But Sister Volkov hid our cell phone from me—we only had one per companionship. She often disappeared into the bathroom with it and called people, and I was pretty sure she was calling home, which you’re not supposed to do. One day, she told me she had a strong feeling she had to go to an area that wasn’t technically in our mission boundaries. One of the things we value as Mormons is guidance by the spirit, and she forced me to go along with her. When we arrived, we turned a corner, and her father was standing there with things for her—it was obviously preplanned, and they clearly wanted to go to lunch together but didn’t want me there. It was those types of things that bothered me—it wasn’t what being a missionary was about. I didn’t like her because she was so manipulative, which is the exact opposite of what you want when you’re trying to communicate the most important thing in your life to others.

  Thank
fully, I saw other missionaries enough that I could bitch about Sister Volkov when I wanted to, especially because she didn’t speak English. Many of the Russian missionaries did, so the Americans often got around that by speaking Pig Latin. I’ve learned that I can live through anything for six weeks, so the whole time, I kept thinking, If I can get through six weeks, I’ll be fine and will get transferred somewhere else. When our six weeks were over, I thought I’d never see her again.

  A few months later, I got a phone call from my mission president—this was incredibly rare, because usually we all had to go to a central building in Moscow where they announced transfers in a ceremonious way. I’d only spoken to my mission president a few times, and he called me and said he was going to tell me my next two transfers. “In February, you’re going to Kazakhstan,” he said. Kazakhstan is the holy grail for missionaries in my area. Everyone wanted to go because it is so nice there, and it’s much easier to be a missionary in a place where people invite you in for dinner and offer to feed you. “But before that,” the mission president said, “I’m sending you back to Yaroslavl to serve with Sister Volkov again.” This was the period during Thanksgiving and Christmas, and Russians don’t typically celebrate Christmas. It was freezing cold and as awful as I had envisioned. That winter was one of the coldest winters on record—it was negative three degrees Celsius almost every single day, and we were out on the streets walking around and talking to people the whole time. Meanwhile, I had decided that I wasn’t going to talk to Sister Volkov.

  The apartment we shared in Yaroslavl had two bedrooms. The handbook guidelines state that companions have to sleep in the same room, but not the same bed. All Russian furniture is convertible, so it looks like sitting room furniture during the day and someone can sleep on it at night. There was an Ikea bed in the room and a chair that folded up into a bed, and that’s what I slept on for several months. We had a tiny kitchen and a bathroom. One of the few exceptions to the rule of being within sight and sound of each other at all times is when you’re in the bathroom, which was often a refuge for missionaries. If you wanted to be alone, you locked yourself in the bathroom.

  On the night before Christmas Eve, we were rushing home because the next day we were getting on a train to meet all the missionaries in Moscow to celebrate together. We were already super late because Sister Volkov had been dillydallying. We passed by a grocery store, and she said she wanted to go in. I asked her if she was hungry, but she simply said, “No, there’s something I need to do.” Even though we were already late and had to be up at four thirty in the morning, she insisted on making a stop. I told her I’d stand in the front and wait for her for five minutes. Since you’re never supposed to leave your companion, this was something we often did as leverage—we forced the other to be disobedient if they wanted to do something that wasn’t allowed.

  Sister Volkov disappeared into the grocery store and came back with an armful of tacky Christmas tree ornaments and plastic snowflakes. I thought she had bought tacky gifts for the other sister missionaries, which was very Russian of her—Russians love tacky gifts. But we got back to our apartment, and she pulled out one of her four epic suitcases that weighed over a hundred pounds each, because Sister Volkov was a total shopaholic. She disappeared into another room and by then, it was getting late—we were supposed to be in bed by ten, but it was past midnight. And any time I couldn’t see Sister Volkov, I would get nervous that she was having a seizure or that she’d fallen and hurt herself. Forty-five minutes later, she busted through the door with all the poise and grace of a 1930s dramatic actress, did a little turn, and said, “How do you like my holiday look?” She had taken the tacky ornaments and sewn them in the shape of a sash onto a summery sundress. She was always obsessed with her looks and wore ostentatious clothing in general, like a giant fur hat, which wasn’t protocol for missionaries. We were there to be humble and work with people who are insanely poor, and we weren’t supposed to wear anything over-the-top. She liked to dress up because she wanted others to tell her how great she looked. With the Christmas-ornament sundress, all I could think to say was, “Don’t you think you’ll be cold in that?” If I had thought about it more, I would have told her she looked incredible, so she would have worn it and it would have been hilarious. But I was mortified, because she was someone I was responsible for.

  For some reason, my comment appealed to her—if I had told her she couldn’t wear it or that she looked great, she would have worn it. So she went through her suitcases to find other things she could wear to the Christmas Eve party, which was a bunch of missionaries in a room eating food that someone else had cooked for them with meat and vegetables in it. Those were two things we never bought in Russia—I lived almost entirely on buckwheat groat and crappy bread while I was there. I used to dream of salads, and whenever I left the country to renew my visa, I came back with cans of chickpeas. It was pretty pathetic.

  Sister Volkov was atrocious to me over the course of the holidays, and later that week, after we’d gone eight days without speaking to each other, we were coming back from a baptism—a rare occasion for us. Missionaries who live in Brazil will probably baptize somewhere from one hundred to two hundred people they teach over the course of their mission, but in Russia, you’re lucky if one person gets baptized. We were walking back very late, and it was dark outside—there are not a lot of lights on the street in Yaroslavl. All of a sudden, I could tell that she was going to have a seizure—she was walking more slowly for no reason, and Sister Volkov is a woman who walks with a lot of purpose. The only time she slowed down was if she was looking at a weird trinket that somebody was selling on the side of the road. I turned around and I could see she was about to fall over. I ran over, put my arms around her, and held onto her in the dark and freezing cold. The only thing I could think to do was to say her first name—which we never used—over and over. I don’t even think she knew what my first name was. I kept holding her and saying, “Antonia, it’s okay. It’s okay.” This was a person who I had so much hatred for, but standing there and knowing the only thing I could do for her was to hold on to her was so personal and intimate. It was such a revealing moment for me, and I was overcome with a strong feeling of love for a person who made my life hellish for twelve weeks. I could tell when the seizure was over because her joints softened and her muscles relaxed. She woke up, stood up on her own, and in a classic Sister Volkov way, looked at me and said, “Why are you stopping? We’re late.” It was a quick jolt back to reality.

  After my mission ended, I stayed in touch with all my companions except Sister Volkov. We talked almost every week, and most have come to visit me. Then in 2010, the Mormon church opened a temple in Kiev, Ukraine, which was a big deal because there are churches everywhere, but only 140 temples in the world, and before that, Mormons from Russia and Ukraine had to go to Korea or Finland to go to a temple. I traveled to Kiev for the dedication, and it was incredibly exciting. I saw all these people I had taught, and in the distance, I saw Sister Volkov. She’d gotten married, and I looked at her and smiled and said hello, although I didn’t stop and talk to her because she was distracted by someone else.

  Later, a friend who had served in my mission came up to me and said, “Did you see that Sister Volkov is here?” “Yes,” I said, “I waved and said hi.” He had been chatting with Sister Volkov, and when he asked if she’d seen me yet, she’d said, “Who is that? Is she American?” And my friend was flabbergasted—he didn’t want to say, “Yes, you served twelve weeks with her.” It was almost funny—she’s the one person from our mission who I can never forget, and I don’t even exist in her mind anymore.

  —E, 29 (F)

  RECENT GRADS

  THE FOUR-MONTH HANGOVER

  AFTER COLLEGE GRADUATION, my best friend from high school and I decided to move in together in New York. We knew it would be cheaper if we found a three-bedroom, so Dave suggested we bring along his college friend Jimmy. I’d met Jimmy at parties over the last few years, an
d I always thought he was a fun guy. Everything was fine for about six weeks, and then Jimmy started to become very withdrawn and paranoid and solemn.

  We had a great first-floor apartment with a backyard and a nice big living area. Jimmy’s bedroom was the one that faced the backyard. He would get upset if people were smoking out there or making noise after ten P.M. And he tied this all to his ongoing health problems. He’s a good-looking guy but very frail. Apparently, he was a football player in high school, but developed a muscular dystrophy disease, which left him weak. He claimed to have incredibly fragile health, and that any cigarette smoke coming in through the window would send him into a death spiral. He was very, very dramatic about it and spent most of his time in his bedroom. The only time I ever saw him was when he was on a cocaine binge—which probably contributed to his bad health.

  It was a hot summer, and his window had flat bars on it so he couldn’t put an air conditioner in the window. He bought a ridiculous stand-up air conditioner that didn’t work at all, was sweating all the time and miserable from the heat, and got sicker and angrier. It got to the point where he started to look like a vicious vampire or alien—whenever he emerged from the bedroom, he’d slink around the corner and hug the wall, trying not to make eye contact when he went to the bathroom and back. It became increasingly terrifying, and you could never tell if he was home or asleep, because the door was always shut. We never knew how to behave in our own space. Whether we could relax or not depended on if he was there.