Chapter 12. Stuck in the Humdrum
Stuck in the Humdrum
To be, at any point, an unremarkable woman, unmade-up, is to be largely an invisible one. My looks fluctuated with my fortunes. I’d been pretty enough, enough of the time to get used to the attentions of men, enough so that I noticed the absence of them now they were withdrawn. While a quasi-public personality, I was always fussing in my mind about how I looked and if I was getting my due attention, gauging where I fell in the rank order. But now, mired in no man’s land, that tension flowed out of me like grain out of a hole in a sack, leaving just the empty bag. Working at the library, I sat in the bowels of the old building in front of the glowing green graphics on the computer screen, cataloging incoming material; whom was I supposed to look good for? Once in a while, due to the ebb and flow of staff, I was farmed out to hang the daily newspapers or to sit at the door checking people’s briefcases as they left Room 316. Either way, I garnered no admirers.
This was now my world. The advantage, I felt, of existing on such a low level was that it gave one a clearer sense of reality: cast in among the ever-shifting staff of work-study students—interchangeable, imperceptible—people revealed more of their true nature to me during that time than ever before. There was no nervousness or need to impress; they just weren’t that concerned. They were as casual as if no one was home. This was the exact opposite of being with a celebrity: then, no one acted like themselves, and you never knew where you stood.
So I sank into, gave myself over to the drone, to the immunity of not caring. My hair grew long without style; it either hung lank and unbecoming, or was bundled back out of the way, exposing my unreflective moon face. I gained weight stealthily, steadily, taking my sensual satisfaction in eating, finding peace dozing in the arms of slipcovered cushy chairs. I seldom read or listened to music; I watched TV. It authenticated my comatosia—I absorbed the waves, but sent no signal out. The light in my eyes dimmed; my vision grew smaller.
So this was making your own way, being on your own. Not all it was cracked up to be. It could be grim. But I liked this bleary drowsy dreariness, making each day exactly the same as the one before, putting another tally mark up on the wall. I thought the point was to see how many short even lines I could rack up. Like floating on the mercy of painkillers after a great trauma, I was so tired, and I was so comfortable wafting through the white noise, I thought I could go on like this forever.
But Morgan, true to her nature, unexpectedly decamped one day without adequate notice and without lifting a finger to find someone else to replace her. Now we would have to interview for a new soul to share the rent; none of us could afford a larger share. Whenever anyone flew the coop, waves of silent anxiety would sweep through the house. ‘Another one got away and I’ll be stuck here forever,’ was the thinking. We would’ve kept all the escapees here, stuck in the mud with us.
To be mistress of our own space is all we really wanted. To open the refrigerator door and see that all the food was one’s own, not packaged and separated on the shelves into little unassailable fiefdoms. To handle objects not branded with the proprietariness of someone else’s surname. Never enough money for a home of my own. Time is draining through my fingers, my youth slipping by. Now there was the tedious interview process for a new inmate, and the inevitable spate of obscene phone calls that would, Janet assured us, follow when our number appeared in the paper advertising for a roommate for an all-female house.
Several weeknight evenings were depressingly taken up with these interviews. The first serious candidate was actually a very nice woman, and we were going to accept her, but at the last minute she sprung the fact that she had a cat, a black cat called Poppy. I was charmed (dear Izzie, dear Ben); it would bring life into the house, make it a home, and I suggested we give her a try, but immediately I was shot down. No, the Heits would never allow it, and the cat would scratch the upholstery. Besides, she was a sneak, she should have told us up front, Janet pronounced, though I, for one, understood her strategy.
“A total waste of time,” Meredith sniffed.
Next came a series of strange people, too strange, really, to consider, and after that, just as we were getting desperate, rent due, came Jean. I liked her immediately; I liked her a lot. A nurse with Medicine Nonsectarian, part of the International Refugee Council. She had spent time abroad serving alongside her husband in various refugee camps. Recently divorced, she did mostly administrative and recruiting work now, up and down the East Coast, on the road most of the time, speaking to various nurses’ groups. Her ex-husband was keeping their old place; she just needed a place to crash two, three days out of the week. She wouldn’t get in anyone’s way. Her life seemed romantic to me, the work of her life noble—helping others, on the road, on her own—a nomadic angel to the dispossessed and miserable. She made me ashamed of my fondness for the humdrum. To have someone like her after Morgan would be a fabulous thing; she stirred something long dormant in me.
“Do you have secret pets?” Janet asked. “If so, please say so now.”
“I’m on the road three to five days a week,” she reminded us.
We huddled after she left. “I vote for her,” I said. Janet and Meredith were not so taken.
“She’s way, way, way too old. She must be like, what, thirty-two? Why would someone in her thirties want to rent a room in a house with a bunch of girls? What’s wrong with her? We’re gonna be the ones to find out? Uh-uh.” Janet made it sound as if Jean had a disease.
I turned to Meredith.
“I think not.”
I chafed against this small-minded democracy I had entered into, irritated to the bleeding point. I had finally had it. I wanted something better, someone better. I broke my suspended cobwebbed trance. I threw my weight behind Jean, arguing quite strenuously. “Look, this is it! How long are we gonna screw around?” Surprise at my uncharacteristic outburst of feeling caused the identical expression to register on both my housemates’ faces. (What’s this?)
“She’s only going to be here a little bit; you’ll have the downstairs bathroom practically to yourself.” This to Meredith, who occupied the only downstairs bedroom, and who quickly realized that, at night at least, the lower level of the house would be hers. That point was the selling point with her, and Jean was in.
Image: Cat scratch Poppy. Source: British Library digitized image from “Songs for Little People, with illustrations by H. Stratton,” London, 1896. Public domain. Edited by J. Weigley