THE HOUSE ON MAIN STREET
On Wednesdays there’s a farmers’ market downtown. My roommate Melinda bikes the three blocks to Town Square Park and returns with a bag of deer sausage or a whole chicken. She’s a small girl, about five feet tall with the tiniest shoes and panties I have ever seen, but she eats a lot. Other times, she brings home goat or dove or squirrel. She’s also here to get her PhD, but she’s from New York City and hates everything about this place except its strange meat and the proximity to New Orleans. I told her that my brothers used to hunt raccoons but they didn’t eat them—they gave them away to black people. She said that was racist, but it’s just the truth, that’s what they did, and I don’t really see how it’s racist. Perhaps just something I shouldn’t have mentioned.
I frequently feel compelled to confirm her worst suspicions of us because she’s always saying it’s too humid here and there are no dateable men, that people holler at her when she’s jogging or riding her bike, all of which are things I hate as well, but she makes me feel like it’s my fault. And where the fuck are the sidewalks? she asks me, as if I have personally decided that this town would be better off without them.
Today Melinda has brought home a chicken. She likes chicken best, boils the entire thing in a pot. I stand in the kitchen and look at it. The pot is full, the fat bird bobbing on the surface. I rarely eat meat now because I hate the bloody bags she carries up the stairs, leaking all over the place, and the flesh-colored bodies plucked clean. While her chicken boils, she has sex with a third-year PhD student, a guy who’s struggling with his religious convictions. He is blond and tall, which is my type, but he’s also Baptist and clean-cut and gets along well with everyone, which is not.
The water bubbles over, chicken fat getting everywhere. Melinda never cleans the stove. She’s opposed to cleaning entirely, so far as I can tell, and because I didn’t make the mess, I won’t clean it either.
I’m tense whenever she’s in the house, and the only way to ease this tension is by talking to her. She tells me how many pull-ups she can do, how the training is going for her next marathon. I ask about her poems, which are about apples and trees and never become more than apples and trees. I guess my main problem with her is that she doesn’t seem to be afraid of anything.
I take a beer from the refrigerator and sit on the counter, look out the window that she leaves propped open with a wine bottle. There’s a stray bottle out there on our flat roof, and I could easily climb out and pick it up, but it’s been there so long it has become part of the scenery. My previous apartment had the best counter sitting, a recessed window that made me feel like I was tucked away where no one could see me. I lived there alone and everything was mine, but my divorce money has run out and my ex-husband doesn’t think it’s funny anymore when I call him up and ask him to send me a check. I am no longer his responsibility, which is a great relief to him. It’s a great relief to me too. I don’t want his money. It’s like I was calling him up to ask for something he could never give me, was never able to give me, and was only doing it to offer him the opportunity to say no.
When I finish my beer, they’re still at it. There is nothing more disgusting, really, than people enjoying themselves so thoroughly when you’re miserable.
I toss my bottle cap, which I’ve been clutching so tightly there’s a ring in the center of my palm, out the window and take the last beer from the refrigerator. The blond guy will have to leave soon to go to church, and this makes me feel a little better. I know he’ll hate himself, and he’ll hate her for making him hate himself. In half an hour he’ll be staring at the back of the pretty church girl he likes who is dating someone else, someone stronger than he is, stronger than he could ever be. He’ll look down at his wrinkled khakis and know he’ll never have her.
I remove the bottle from the window and turn on the air conditioner. Then I call Ben, wake him from a nap. Ben does whatever I say because he’s in love with me and sometimes I sleep with him. He always lets me initiate things, and I do it whenever I feel like what I owe him is more than I want to owe.
“Let’s go drinking,” I say. “I’m out of beer.”
He says he’s tired and hungover and then sighs and tells me to give him an hour. An hour is a reasonable amount of time so I agree. I’ll have to shower and find something to wear. I’ll have to put on some eyeliner and smudge concealer under my eyes. I know where we’ll go, where we always go: the karaoke bar where people drink at every hour of the day. It’s a dive but there’s a jukebox with plenty of Johnny Cash and the toilets always flush and they don’t care how drunk you get. Some places will kick you out if they see you fall off a barstool or fold your arms on the bar to have a catnap but not Shenanigan’s.
The blond guy mumbles something, undershirt going over his head. Maybe he’ll run home and make himself presentable before church. Maybe he’ll punch himself in the chest and tell God how sorry he is for having sex with an atheist from New York City, once again, how he will stop, how he has already stopped because it was the very last time.
Instead of showering, I lie in bed staring at the tops of trees.
Our apartment takes up the entire second floor of an old colonial. We each have two large rooms and our own bathroom. We share a kitchen, a dining area, and a small alcove where our washer and dryer are stacked. A man and his dead lover’s son live in the renovated space below—they don’t like each other, but they each own half and it’s a bad time to sell (according to Melinda). I listen for their raised voices, for any voices at all, but it’s always so quiet down there. I imagine them eating and watching television in their house slippers, completely separate, as if the other does not exist.
Ben calls me from his car. I put on my favorite pair of jeans and a clean shirt, check my face in the mirror, and then stand on the toilet to check my body. I need new clothes and shoes. I have no idea how I’m managing to live off my graduate student assistantship—it is so little money—but I am. My peers take out loans so they can go to fancy dinners, buy dresses and high heels.
“Thanks for coming to get me,” I say, settling myself into the passenger seat of his gray four-door sedan.
“No problem. Where do you want to go?”
“We’re not going to play that game, are we?” I ask, flipping the ashtray closed.