by Stephanie Wu
I left my things out in the living room and went into my room, which had one lofted bed and a normal bed below it. They looked like bunk beds, but they were full-size. It was late and I was exhausted, so I went to bed, even though there were tons of things going through my head—what had I gotten myself into? I had seen photos of the place, but I didn’t know the size of the room. The beds essentially took up the entire room and there wasn’t much space to walk around. I had come from a two-story house in Texas where I had the entire upper floor to myself, because my brother was away at college, with an office, a bedroom, a media room, my own bathroom, and a walk-in closet.
My new roommate, Carrie, was a beautician ten years my junior—she’s become a little sister to me. She had moved into the apartment a few weeks earlier. There are six of us total living in a four-bedroom apartment with three bathrooms, and I’m the only non-Mormon. The oldest roommate is forty-two and divorced—she had four children by the time she was twenty-four, because Mormons marry young and she had her kids back-to-back. There’s also a thirty-three-year-old yoga teacher and a girl from Wisconsin who is an absolute sweetheart. She does more household work than anyone else and is very motherly. Most of them are converts—only one came from a big Mormon family.
Carrie has her quirks like everyone else. I know she can’t do anything about the noise she makes when she tosses and turns in her sleep—that’s part of sharing a room. When I want to go out, she offers to fix my hair or pick out a lipstick for me. Living with her is great, because I didn’t grow up with a sister, and I became attached to her. I’m a photographer and I asked Carrie and her boyfriend to model for me so I could get some fresh work on my Web site. Little did I know, her boyfriend had decided to propose during the shoot, which was incredible. Carrie told me that the proposal was even more special because I was there. The age difference between us makes it hard, but it isn’t anything I can’t live with.
There are certain things I’ve had to get used to in a Mormon household—I’ve never been a big coffee drinker, but there’s no Coke, coffee, or tea allowed in the house. And all my roommates have special garments they wear, similar to a slip with cap sleeves. The garments come in all types of materials and are sacred. They’re worn underneath their clothes—even bras go over them. They go to church for three hours, and they don’t shop on Sundays, so they buy everything they need on the other days. I’ve even started seeing similarities between Mormonism and my religion, Catholicism. At the end of the day, we’re all still girls who experience the same things. We’ll gossip when someone brings over a boy, even though we know they’re not having sex because Mormons don’t have sex until they get married. Learning all these things has been interesting. I’ve never seen the musical The Book of Mormon, which everyone says is awesome, but maybe if I had, I wouldn’t have been so taken aback by all this when I first moved in.
The apartment works well because we all lead our own individual lives. Once in a while, we all sit down and eat together as a family on Sundays, which is great. I’m the first non-Mormon to live in the apartment, and once, Sarah said to me, “If you weren’t so cool, I don’t think you’d still be living here because you’re not Mormon.” The next day, one of my roommates said, “I can’t believe those words came out of her mouth. Weren’t you offended?” I didn’t think much of it, because the things Sarah says don’t affect me much. I signed a contract and pay rent, and nowhere in the contract did it say I had to be Mormon to live there. The more I get to know Sarah, the more I dislike her. She’s not someone I want to be friends with—she’s basically a landlady running a dorm of sorts. She makes so much money off of our rent that she’s always traveling around the world. But the other girls are so easygoing and we all get along great. That’s what makes living there bearable, since I know I’m overpaying.
For my next apartment, I’d love to have my own room. But if the rent was good and I really liked my roommate and found an awesome one-bedroom, I would be okay with sharing again. After all, I don’t have anything to hide.
—J, 29 (F)
THE PET FEUD
I LIVED WITH MEGAN for two years in Los Angeles—we’re both animal lovers, and I always knew she wanted to get a dog. I was totally supportive of this, and a year into our lease, she got a cute toy poodle from a breeder—very manageable for our 1,200-square-foot apartment. She went home over the holidays to pick up the dog, and two days later, while she was at home with her parents, there was some kind of freak accident with the dog. She was incredibly distraught when he died. It was so, so sad, and I knew she was upset so I tried to give her a bit of space.
Her parents took her to a shelter to look at other dogs to cheer her up, and that’s where she found another puppy she liked, which she brought back to our apartment. It was a rescue puppy, and five times the size of her original dog, but I was fine with it. Megan took responsibility for everything, and I was more than willing to play cool aunt to the dog, who she named Ruby. There were a bunch of incidents where Ruby wasn’t great, such as when she chewed up my hundred-dollar computer charger. Megan paid me back, and it was okay, because puppies are going to do what puppies do. She bought a massive crate for the dog in the living room, which eventually exploded with toys and other dog stuff. I moved most of my things into my room because I didn’t want them to get chewed or peed on.
Ruby did get better, but she was a forty-pound dog in a two-bedroom apartment. I don’t think either of us knew how big she was going to get when Megan first adopted her—it went from a toy poodle that would fit in your purse to a dog I couldn’t walk because she was so strong. I did love her—I love all animals—but because she was a rescue puppy, she was scared of loud noises. Once she pooped in my room because there was a car crash outside of my apartment and the noise scared her.
A few months went by, and I began to think about getting a cat. I had started working long hours, and was going through an awful breakup. I told Megan that I was thinking about it, and she was very supportive. We went to an adoption day together, where I found a sweet kitten I bonded with immediately. They let me adopt her for a week-long test run, because we weren’t sure how she would interact with Ruby.
The great thing about cats is how independent they are. Mine did typical kitten things like sleep a lot, scratch a few things, and chew the plants a little, but I knew I could teach her to grow out of it. I kept her in my room while I was sleeping, but when I went to work, I left my door open so she could have space to run around. Meanwhile, Megan’s dog was in the crate in the living room.
I started noticing that when I got home, my kitten was in my bedroom with the door closed. This stressed me out a bit, especially after three days in a row, because my bedroom isn’t big enough for a cat to run around in all day. I confronted Megan on the fourth day, and told her it was important for my kitten to be able to run around. Megan never grew up with cats, and it turned out she hates them, so I don’t know why she said it was okay for me to get one. She told me, “No, the cat has to stay in your room during the day, because most of the stuff in the living room is mine. Plus, it’s not fair for Ruby to be in her crate all day and see a cat running around.”
At this point, Megan had already taken over the entire apartment with dog stuff, and I felt like I only lived in my bedroom. Plus, Ruby was peeing everywhere—for the first couple of months, she peed anytime someone came over because she got really excited. The apartment smelled like crap for the first three months with the dog, and I’d bought cleaning stuff and helped her train Ruby, and it surprised me that she did a complete 180 when I got the kitten. It felt really unfair.
When the week ended, I decided to give the kitten back. It was incredibly hard, and I didn’t even tell Megan. When she asked me where the kitten was later that day, I told her that I had taken her back because I felt bad that she didn’t have room to run around in and had to be alone in my room when I was gone all day. Megan tried to cheer me up by buying me alcohol, but I was sad because I did feel I had bond
ed with the kitten. The only reason I felt okay about giving her up was because the adoption agency had told me another family was interested in her.
As soon as our lease was up, I moved out. I wanted a one-bedroom, but at the last minute decided to live with a friend from grad school who also loves cats. That was the one condition of me agreeing to live with her. Now I have two cats and I absolutely love them. I only wanted one at first because I was working long hours. But the rescue agency told me that indoor cats tend to do better when there are two so they can play with each other and don’t get lonely. These two adorable black cats are brothers—I’ve named them Bert and Ernie. They’re pretty much identical and I have a hard time telling them apart without their collars. They’re doing great, and the best part is, my roommate gets along with them really well—she even helps me take care of them from time to time.
—K, 27 (F)
THE ROACH MOTEL
EVA AND I WORK in the same industry, but had never met when she was recommended to me as a potential roommate. Before we started apartment hunting, we scheduled a roommate date to make sure neither of us was crazy. The date went well enough that we’re still living together two years later.
The first place we found was described as a “fixer-upper.” The price was amazing and the location was great, so we said we’d take it at the open house. We filled out the forms then and there, because three other people were looking at it at the same time. Before we even moved in, we were at the broker’s office with the landlady and Eva asked a question about the lease. The landlady turned to her and said, “Why are you so uptight? You don’t need to ask about that.” And went on a ten-minute rampage about how we needed to live our lives and not worry about lease questions. That should have been a tip-off for us.
Two weeks before we were scheduled to move in, Eva went to take a look at the apartment, and that was the first time we saw a cockroach. The place hadn’t been lived in for a month and a half, so we thought it would be okay. The landlady refused to give us her phone number, so the only way we could communicate with her was by slipping notes under her door. After a month or two, she had an exterminator come in, so we figured the situation was taken care of. But the cockroaches kept coming back.
One night, around eleven, I heard Eva scream. A cockroach had climbed up the wall onto her bed, and she had to throw out her bedding and replace everything. I had big closets, and every time I opened them I saw a cockroach chilling there. And I once saw one on my ceiling, which was too high for the roach zapper to reach. I couldn’t sleep until it climbed down—the roach was like Rambo, running across ceilings and walls. Boric acid wasn’t working, so we started putting down glue sheets and traps everywhere. I put a glue sheet under the radiator and the next morning, there were ten roaches stuck there. I finally snapped when I was heating up dinner in the microwave one night and found a cockroach underneath my Tupperware.
Even the exterminator, a nice guy who returned month after month, couldn’t believe we were still having a problem. He told us that we needed to fill in the cracks and holes in the apartment, because the roaches were likely coming from the unit below—where the landlady lived. But she kept insisting that she had lived there for a long time and never seen a single cockroach.
Eva wrote the landlady a polite note saying that the exterminator had recommended that we seal up the holes because the roaches might be coming from underneath. And the next call we got was from our broker, saying that it didn’t sound like we were very happy with the living situation, so we should probably move out. This was after about ten months of living there, with exterminators coming once a month. Apparently our demands were too much for the landlady. When we found a new apartment we liked, we were required to put our last landlord down as a reference. I wanted to lie, but Eva is an honest person, so she put her down and of course we didn’t get the place.
I don’t know how we lived like that for almost a year, but we made it happen. Eva and I bonded over this whole experience. We had completely opposite schedules and didn’t see each other most days, so the cockroach situation made us closer in that we were always chatting online, drafting notes to the landlady, and dealing with apartment issues. There was a frozen yogurt place a few blocks down, and we always went there to vent about the apartment and life in general. In a way, the roaches brought us together. Eva and I used to joke that if there were going to be that many cockroaches in the apartment, they needed to chip in on rent. We certainly didn’t need any extra roachmates.
—S, 26 (F)
THE RENT STIFFER
AFTER I GRADUATED FROM COLLEGE, my friends and I found a great place in New York. It was a four-bedroom apartment with a tiny closet space that could be called a fifth room. Even with only a single twin bed and a very small nightstand in there, the door didn’t open all the way—it was more like a coffin than a room. Five of us moved in together, and the guy who took the tiniest room was actually living with his girlfriend and needed a place to tell his parents he was staying. When he moved out to get married, it was a significant hit to our rent, so we knew we needed to find a new roommate to take his place.
We posted the opening on a Web site that’s like Craigslist for Jewish people—all four of us are Jewish and observe Sabbath and keep a kosher kitchen, which we had to make clear in our post. We said we had a very small room in a nice, huge apartment, and that it’s a good place to crash during the week but is tiny. One guy’s dad came in to take a look at the room for his son, and he said, “This is fine for Will.” We weren’t sure if his son needed to take a look at the room, but he said he would show him pictures.
When Will showed up, he was huge—probably around six foot three and three hundred pounds—and the room was maybe only four by eight feet total. Will was not a pleasant person to be around. On his very first night in the apartment, a basketball game was on TV, and we asked if he wanted to watch. “If I wanted to watch black people run and jump and steal, I can go back to my neighborhood,” he said. He was a shady guy who worked for his dad and paid his rent in cash every month. He also had a menacing odor that filled the room. He was a very hairy guy who never wore a shirt, and once when we were talking in my room, he leaned back against my window and rubbed his back against it like a giant grizzly bear. That odor is still hanging around my room two years later.
When Will moved out, he owed us the last month’s rent and miscellaneous expenses, which came to around $1,500. He left a check with my roommate Aaron, who he’d been paying his share of the rent to, but the check bounced. When we tried to get him to send us another check, that one bounced too. We kept trying to meet up with him, but he always found some excuse not to be there, or showed up at our apartment when we were all asleep.
Will stopped taking our calls and e-mails, and over a year later, we told him, “If you don’t pay us back, we’re going to take this to small claims court.” We gave him a date six months in the future and told Will if he didn’t pay us by then we were going to sue him. He knew he owed us the money, and it was enough money that we took measures to try and get it back.
After Will left, we still wanted to fill the room, so we posted it on the Jewish Web site again. This time, we found Sam, a nice guy I’d gone to college with. Sometime between college and that point, he had smoked his brains out, and was not an entirely functioning member of society. He was a huge slob, but he wasn’t just messy, he was innovatively messy in that he was always leaving his things in places you could never imagine. It turned into a parlor game of sorts with our friends: Where did Sam leave his things? It was always incredibly random—we found his sneakers in the pantry, chewed gum on the kitchen counter, dirty coffee mugs in the bathroom sink, empty Diet Mountain Dew cans on the bathroom floor, a package of Styrofoam plates in the fridge, and a raw onion in the cabinet where we kept the glassware. When I asked him about the gum, he said, “I’m sorry, I forgot I put it there.”
Six months later, Will still hadn’t paid us even though he said he would. Aaro
n, who was studying law, and I went to small claims court, which is an unbelievable experience. We actually had a fun time there. When you arrive, you tell the court whether the claim is being contested or not. If only one side shows up, you move on through to the noncontested process. We met with our lawyer, an older woman, who essentially renders a judgment. We gave her all our documentation, including texts and such, and she looked up at Aaron and said, “Are you in law school?” It turned out she had gone to the same law school as Aaron—we knew from there that we were good. The lawyer put a lien on Will’s credit, which means he can’t apply for a loan or anything until he pays us back. This was about six months ago, and we still haven’t seen the money.
After Sam moved out, the four of us made a unanimous decision to split the cost rather than rent out the room again. We’ve all come to the realization that the kind of person who is willing to live in that closet-size room is probably someone we don’t want to live with.
—M, 28 (M)
THE EX-BOYFRIEND
WHEN I WAS TWENTY-TWO, I moved in with my boyfriend. We’d been dating for about a year when we moved in together, and things went rapidly downhill from there. We only lived together for six months, but it was one of those sad end-of-the-relationship things where we should have broken up earlier but we tried to fix it by moving in together.
Living together was a make-or-break-it kind of situation. I started noticing how much he drank, and all the things that annoyed us slightly about each other suddenly became huge. The smallest things became annoying, like how he pronounced certain words, or his little habits. When you’re not living with someone and not around them all the time, you can suck it up. But when you’re seeing them constantly, it makes you grit your teeth. We had loads of conversations—this isn’t good, how can we make it better, and so on. Living together dragged our breakup out for months, rather than having one “it’s over” conversation.