The hot plate Rob had been using wasn’t going to suffice now that I was there, needing to cook to keep sane, so Aaron brought in a used avocado-green electric stove, which his friend Steve, a hobbyist electrician, hooked up live to the building’s main power source. We watched him disable the main circuitry for the building, which was in our bedroom, and reattach it, and then like idiots we returned our bed to its nook in front of the electrical circuit board. It hummed behind us, gently microwaving our cerebellums, rocking us to sleep.
I cooked nearly every meal on that electric stove—just as my mom had on hers. When I made a beef stew, at the point when the onions were caramelizing and it was time to add the tomato, I peeled it using one of her tricks: I cranked the heat on the biggest burner and watched as its bright red coils turned from red to chalky-gray, then stuck a fork in the stem end of a beefsteak tomato and held it just above the coil until the skin blistered and popped open and I could quickly peel it away. But a lot of what I made fell flat. I learned the hard way that you shouldn’t make tomato sauce in cast iron because it turns sweet-metallic; it chills the tongue. Twisted up the rest of that evening, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I could get that so egregiously wrong.
Finally, one day, my call came in: a freelance job at a custom publishing company in Minneapolis that came courtesy of Rob’s girlfriend, Pilar. I started getting up early every day to go to work. After pissing in a widemouthed quart jar—trial and error led me to embrace a widemouthed opening over the regular size—I threw it out the window to avoid making any more trips upstairs to the fourth-floor bathroom than absolutely necessary, always looking to make sure that the Circus of the Ridiculous bus wasn’t parked below us. This was all going swimmingly until one bitterly cold day in February when I dropped the heavy window instead of guiding it down, sending half of the pane to the floor. Aaron and Rob both howled at me when the subzero air came pouring in, and for the rest of the winter it wore a bandage of duct tape.
Then I would dress up in business-type attire and drive the Heavy Half to downtown Minneapolis. By every definition of the word, it was a plum job. I knew nothing of publishing but had a recent graduate’s false confidence and enough of a grasp of grammar that I could do the bones of the editing work Pilar needed and write copy when required. For this she paid me well, more than I would make for many, many years afterward. I could make my rent with a few days’ work, and she had me coming in every day. This meant that together with Aaron’s cash from doing stonemasonry, we were able to bank a lot toward our simple-life summer.
—
One day, Pilar took me to lunch at Café Brenda, an upscale vegetarian place near our office. We sat by the window and watched the lunch crowd passing by on the street. A slow-moving guy ambled in front of us, bulked up with layers, and when his eyes met mine, I recognized him. I’d talked to him the night before in Lighthouse Bay, when he’d been standing in front of my door, disoriented, staring at the nook beneath the stairs.
“Where did I sleep last night?” he mumbled.
“I think you usually sleep under the second-floor stairwell,” I said, pointing down the stairs. He looked at me blankly, the buzz in his head almost audible. “Down one floor!” I shouted cheerfully, as if I were in a mall giving directions to a turned-around elder.
Now on the street, he raised his hand and nodded respectfully at me, and I raised mine back.
“Who’s that?” Pilar asked.
“Oh, just a guy from the building,” I said. She laughed because she knew. She sort of lived there, too.
But at work I couldn’t shake the sinking feeling that I should have been enjoying myself more. Real-life editing and writing of corporate material? Swerving between cubicles, my skirt swishing? Going out to lunch in trendy restaurants? This was what I had dreamed of.
At night I let loose large, room-filling sighs of boredom. The technical writing we practiced, while as vibrant as the form could possibly get, felt like an internment in the dullery. Rearranging the English language to inject excitement into boring events felt dishonest to me—a near sin in my authenticity-seeking youth. Worse, I acted childishly at the office, ducking away from the boss whenever I came back after a particularly long lunch, even though I was being paid by the hour.
At one point we were working a lot of overtime, and Pilar asked me to let out one of her coworkers and lock the big main door behind her. I let her out of the thick glass door and dropped the bottom metal pins into the slots to bolt it shut. The woman, middle-aged, with a neat gray-blond bob, smiled politely and looked away. Unlike me, she was at ease with professional distance. Unsure if I should wait with her or go, I chose to wait. The round seconds trundled by. Suddenly I held my arms high above my head and started shaking my body against the glass door in rolling waves, doing a pantomime of a monkey rattling the bars of its cage, mouthing the words, “Get me out of here!” I smiled, expecting her to laugh at my joke.
Her expression froze up to her raised brows, and she escaped into the elevator. I walked back stiffly to the office where Pilar was pouring small glasses of expensive scotch in the conference room, kicking off our late-night editing drive.
“Did you meet Susan, our CEO?” she said, nodding encouragement.
That’s when I knew: Maybe the office life wasn’t gonna be for me.
15
GOOD NEIGHBORS
What I am finding out about myself is that I have a decent ability to adapt to austere circumstances. I’d grown up in a suburban house so warm, so thickly carpeted, that my brothers and I wore shorts on deep-winter ?30-degree Saturday afternoons and rolled around on our bellies in front of the enormous television screen like tropical fish in a tank. My parents liked to keep the thermostat strictly unseasonal—75 in the winter and 65 in the summer—and the windows shut year-round. But somehow I have just spent the cold months living in a nine-story cement building with a belching dragon for a space heater. I’ve become very attached to my winter hat, wearing it inside, even in bed.
Now in the country, I experience a newfound love for summer breezes coming in the window. I walk by myself to the outhouse at night. When we’re outside and I’m too lazy even for that, I can piss on a tree in the pitch-black dark, holding myself at such an angle that the stream flows around stones like the early meandering part of the Mississippi River and always misses my shoes. I can drive Aaron’s old stick-shift truck fast through the oily spring mud of our road and make it, sliding widely, all the way to the end. I cut my own hair. (Not always well.)