The names and identities of the characters in this story have been changed to protect the innocents.
The three of us lived in a triple-decker, on a middle floor of a drafty 1906 wood frame, just beyond the “defoliation line” dividing leafy Cambridge , MA from the blue-collar street car suburb of Somerville. Proudly named Caldwell Avenue, it was a just a short alley without an outlet, right past an oriental rug store eternally going out of business. Long before craigslist, I found my room there through an ad in the paper. Susan was looking for replacements of two roommates: Sal, who left for NY, and an Indonesian woman who never lived there (she lived with her boyfriend but had her family believe that she lived with Susan).
I was back from my summer job in NY for a weekend and was house hunting with Aubrey. We first went to see an apartment where “a female roommate was sought”. The rent was cheap but we had to be careful stepping through a jumble of amp cords and dust bunnies nestled in their kinks. Long-haired emaciated guitarist who played for spare change in Harvard Square answered my inquiry about the wording of his ad: “Look at this place! We need a girl to clean it up”.
It was time to check out chez Susan’s. She opened the door with a towel on her head and said that she already sort of rented the place to a nice German guy. It looked like there was just enough room for one more. I instantly liked the spirit of the place. The rooms were bright and one was suffused with a pastel glow from a stained glass window. The floors were warm lacquered wood and the walls clean white. Susan announced that we will have to share food. I was not sure about how that was going to work, but, on the other hand, I did not want to label every single egg like someone else I knew. I said yes.
While I was back in Manhattan, a friend who was going to England asked if I could store his bed for a year. I had no furniture, so I gladly accepted. I gave them the address and they carted it off to Susan’s. Interestingly, the bed consisted of two I-beams pilfered from a construction site and two doors. When I moved in in September, I had to lug the heavy metal and plywood into the front room. It turned out that the room where Alberto dropped off the bed was already claimed by Dieter the German.
Dieter, who was not blond and square jawed at all, had only one question: “whether I was going to cook Polish food”. Our roommate coexistence was sweet. We were all busy in different ways: Susan biked every day to her non-profit job, Dieter was pursuing a PhD in the School of Government, and I was continuously leaving after dinner “to work in the studio” till at least midnight. We took many happy trips together to the Star Market grocery store (Savenor’s, the Julia Child’s hangout, was right around the corner, but was too fancy). I remember one day making a shopping list, and insisting that we needed “soap dish”. Somehow my sleep-deprived brain was not arranging the words correctly. Susan and Dieter were staring at me open-mouthed. “Why?” “Because we are out”, I shouted, “It is all gone, used, no more”. I should have said dish soap.
We decorated the place with cinder blocks, milk crates, and draped a white cotton throw over a threadbare pink couch. We had great parties, if neighbors calling the police is any measure of success. Dieter turned out to be an excellent dancer and Susan was great to talk to about anything. At the end of the school year, though, Dieter was leaving to move in with Tom from his department, and Susan was thinking of going to school in New York. For the summer, however, we needed someone to rent the back room. A parade of candidates moved through our sunlit rooms while I nervously twisted my necklace beads interviewing people. We instantly took to Bobbie the Glassblower, a gentle soul who made gilded cherubs in a basement workshop off The Square. He did not materialize as a subletter, though. We ended up spending three months with Todd who traveled from San Francisco on the Green Tortoise and scared us a little by doing heaving shirtless push ups and pull ups on the porch.
I distinctly remember one of the potential housemates who sat crosslegged on the kitchen floor, asked if we did not mind if she did yoga often, and posed a lot of personal questions. We liked her a lot. She seemed thoughtful, centered, and responsible. It was a disappointment, however, when at the end of the interview she stood up, thanked us, and told us she will make sure to have our names changed in her novel.
