by Bennett Sims
The Bookcase
1.
From WBEZ Chicago it’s This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I’m Ira Glass. Every week on our show of course we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme, and this week that theme is… ‘Over My Dead Body.’ Stories of regular people who want something so much, want one particular thing so badly… that they’re willing to fight to the death for it. Our show in four acts today, each of which starts with a thing and ends in a showdown for possession of that thing. Act 1, ‘The Will To Power’: in this act a family is torn apart by strange provisions in their parents’ will, devised as a practical joke from beyond the grave. Act 2, ‘Citation Needed’: how one writer decides to sit vigil over his Wikipedia page, once anonymous users begin revising it. Act 3, ‘Partially Furnished’: what happens when you have to fight your landlady, really physically fight her, for a piece of furniture that you both know is yours. Act 4, ‘The Magic Matzo’: a new short story from This American Life contributor Etgar Keret, about a very special dumpling and the lengths to which people are willing to go to get it. Four desirable objects, four ferocious showdowns—you don’t want to miss it. Stay with us.
2.
If you’ve heard episode 529 of This American Life, you’ve heard my voice. I’m Act 3, ‘Partially Furnished.’ The guy who fought his landlady for a cheap bookcase. I had been telling this story for years before I was invited to tell it on TAL. My ex-girlfriend, Michelle, always hated this story.
Her problem, I’d assumed, was simply that she’d heard it too often. The bookcase in question, which had come with me when I moved into her apartment, remained a showpiece in our living room: a six-by-four monument of white particleboard taking up the entire front wall, where the thrift-store eyesore of it—better suited for a dorm than a home—clashed with the rest of her furniture. Whenever friends took a special interest in my books, surveying the spines along its shelves, I liked to share the anecdote. ‘I ever tell you how…?’ During the time that we were together, Michelle must have endured dozens of performances of this monologue. In the first couple of years she would listen graciously, pretending to laugh along with the guests. But eventually I would catch her rolling her eyes when I began, subtly excusing herself to use the bathroom. ‘They only have to hear the story,’ she told me once. ‘I have to live with it.’ Finally one night, as we were lying in bed after a party, she started to recite my monologue back to me. I had told it so frequently in the past five years, she claimed, that nothing in the narrative was fluid or improvisatory. Each detail, each transition, and each beat had long since ossified into its final form, a script that she could deliver herself if she had to: ‘This was the summer after college’; ‘All it lacked was a bookcase.’ In the dark of our bedroom, I felt my face growing hot with self-consciousness, though she wasn’t being spiteful or unfair. It really was my favorite story.
Then, one morning last year, the call came from Chicago. An intern explained that an old acquaintance of ours, Carleen, was now working at WBEZ, where she happened to be present when TAL producers were pitching ideas for the upcoming ‘Over My Dead Body’ episode. Carleen had mentioned my bookcase story, and Ira had just loved it. He would be in town the following weekend and wanted to meet to record a quick segment. Flustered, and flattered, I agreed. The intern would email the details.
When I told Michelle the news, she didn’t even attempt a smile. ‘And you’re going to do it?’ she asked. ‘You’re going to appear on the show?’ I said of course, and she said that was great. But she said it in that flat, trapped voice hostages have, when someone with a gun at their back is telling them to say everything’s great. So it came as no surprise that afternoon when she suggested we have a talk.
After dinner she walked me through her misgivings regarding the interview. We were sitting in the living room. She’d taken her place, cross-legged, on the sofa; I was on the ottoman opposite, with the bookcase behind me. Her misgivings involved three ‘prongs,’ she explained, mischievously. She was using the word to needle me, I knew: academic rhetoric she’d picked up presenting conference papers. She asked me not to interrupt, not until she’d finished with all three of them, then reassured me that this was nothing serious, just something she needed to get off her mind. On the glass-topped coffee table between us she’d set down two tumblers of whiskey, a ritual she’d developed for alleviating difficult discussions.
The first prong was that it was a nasty story. ‘You bullied an old woman and stole her bookcase,’ she said. I must have flinched, for she added, ‘—is one way of looking at it.’ I nodded for her to continue. ‘In your shoes,’ she pressed on, ‘someone else might be ashamed. But there isn’t a friend of ours you haven’t bragged to about your exploits. And casting yourself as the hero every time, playing up her age and playing it for laughs.’ In our mid-twenties this had seemed charming, she said, but now that I was thirty, and the story hadn’t matured at all, she could no longer ignore the callousness in my treatment of Fredricka. And who knew what our friends were thinking? The way I gloated over this poor, lonely woman, as if she were a cartoon, as if she had it coming to her. ‘Consider it from her point of view. How do you think she tells the story to her friends?’ Fredricka did not have any friends, though I resisted the temptation to say so. Michelle gestured to the space beside the sofa, as if insinuating a scene, and I realized that she was waiting for me to imagine the woman telling the story to her friends. I stared into the space, taking a sip of whiskey, and visualized three blue-haired ladies sitting around Fredricka, covering their mouths in polite gapes of horror. I said I supposed I’d look like the bad guy, from her point of view. ‘Right,’ Michelle said. ‘Like a thief and a bully. A tormentor. Antagonizing her.’ Even without the proviso against interjecting mid-prong, I knew this would have been a bad time to correct her, for instance by noting that I could not have been a ‘thief,’ since the bookcase was rightfully mine, or that Fredricka had been the one who bullied and tormented me. That that was the whole point of the story. I took another, larger sip from my tumbler, inhaling deeply before I drank: the bouquet was strong, and the bourbon burned. I nodded again for her to go on. That was all, she said. For five years she had listened idly by as I regaled everyone with this monologue, and before tonight she’d simply never wanted to be a scold about it.
But now, she said—and this was the second prong—she felt she had to say something. Because here I was, about to go on national radio and tell my version of events to a sympathetic host, and not only that, but to a sympathetic audience, which must number into the millions once you account for podcast subscribers. Had I even considered the fact that Fredricka herself might come to hear it? How did I think she would feel if one day she turned on the radio and heard her bully’s voice, blithely narrating one of her most traumatic experiences, all while Ira Glass snickered away? It was one thing to monopolize a narrative in our living room—one thing, among friends, to embellish a story—but…
Here I did have to bite my tongue. It was just like her to accuse me of narrative monopoly, or ‘monophony,’ as she would call it. Michelle’s the kind of angel you can’t badmouth anyone around: empathy is a sixth sense with her. If she and her colleagues were sharing departmental gossip, and I joined in by griping about someone stealing my lunch from the office fridge, Michelle would instantly pause. ‘Well, we don’t know,’ she would say, thoughtfully. ‘Maybe she had her reasons for raiding the refrigerator.’ She must have been unusually hungry, for one thing. Had I considered that the woman could be pregnant, diabetic, bulimic, broke? ‘Imagine things her way.’ One of our earliest fights as a couple, in fact, had been about this habit of hers. Always willing to advocate for the absent party: offering charitable explanations for their behavior; questioning the objectivity of my caricatures; giving voice to the voiceless. And making me seem inconsiderate and cruel in comparison.
I didn’t understand why Michelle was so quick to defend people she had neve
r met, or why she trusted their version of events over her boyfriend’s. But during that first fight she’d insisted that trust had nothing to do with it. Being a ‘polyphonic storyteller’ was simply the adult thing to do: if I tried to incorporate other people’s perspectives into my own, if I took their motives into consideration and really cultivated a ‘dialogic viewpoint,’ I would come across as fair and reasonable. ‘To your friends, you mean,’ I’d said, childishly. She’d sighed.
Michelle folded her arms across her stomach and eased back into the sofa. ‘You’re not mad?’ she asked. I shook my head. The third and final prong, she promised, would sting less—or less personally—than the first two, for it had nothing to do with me. What bothered her most wasn’t that I’d agreed to tell this story in a public forum—it was the forum itself. ‘We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if it were Judge Judy you were going on. At least there Fredricka would get her say.’ But TAL was by its very nature a monophonic institution. All its stories were one-sided. Fredricka would not be trotted out from backstage to confront me, and Ira would not challenge my version of events. It wasn’t the show’s MO to cross-examine its guests: they were meant to sound like honest, sincere, relatable narrators. This was why all the episodes followed such a rigid formula, according to her. Reporters selected human-interest subjects from the listener demographic—middle-aged, middle-class, usually white—and these ‘regular people’ proceeded to tell their mildly amusing stories, complaining in wry but soul-searching monologues about their despotic bosses, evil exes, and overbearing parents. The audience identified with them automatically, because they were them. And Ira only ever encouraged guests on with his ‘“heartfelt” voice,’ filled with ‘spittle and sympathy’ for the story they were telling. ‘And what better host really, on a show for narrative narcissists,’ Michelle asked, ‘than Glass? He just reflects your own story back to you. Validates your most flattering selfimage.’ Ira was guaranteed to take my caricature of Fredricka for truth; ditto my rectitude in the bookcase debate. It was up to me what to do with that trust. Either I could abuse it, by vilifying Fredricka as usual and making myself out to be the victim/hero; or I could give a more complicated account of the conflict, detail the moral ambiguity of both our roles. If I didn’t speak up for Fredricka, no one would.
She reached toward the coffee table for her tumbler, which had gone untouched throughout her lecture. I had already finished mine and felt warm and calm. I remembered that this was my opportunity to respond: having finished all her ‘prongs,’ Michelle was waiting to hear what I would have to say about them. She needed to know—needed for me to show her—that I could be mature, sensitive, compassionate: the kind of man she could grow old with. I told her that she was welcome to sit in on the interview, if she wanted. Then I added: ‘Of course you’ll have heard it all before.’ I said: ‘I’m just going to tell my story.’
3.
I ever tell you how I got this bookcase? It was for my first apartment. I was living with my landlady at the time, a crabby old woman named Fredricka. This was the summer right after college. I’m talking seventy, maybe eighty years old. She stayed up front, in the master bedroom, and I lived in back, next door to the other boarders: Miranda and Janey, recent grads I rarely saw. Easily the worst landlady I’ve ever had.
I knew going in, just from the interview, that Fredricka would have preferred not to have to live with me. ‘I usually don’t rent to boys,’ is how she put it. This was after she had already led me on a tour of her flat and sat me down in the parlor. She was this withered, scowl-mouthed woman, with crazed white hair and droopy blue eyes. As I read over the lease, she explained that no one else had answered her ad. She was willing to make an exception for some boys, of course, but no, quote, ‘undesirable types,’ which for her meant fraternity brats and trust-fund kids, spoiled children who were used to having maids pick up after them all their lives, and who didn’t know how to wash their dishes or sweep their messes. Fredricka hadn’t raised her son that way. Et cetera. I didn’t have a trust fund, or belong to a fraternity, though I doubted these details would have much mattered to her. The clear subtextual caveat of her lecture was, you know, Danger. Keep Out. Abandon All Hope Ye Brats Who Enter Here. I smiled as affably as I could. She didn’t want to live with me? So she did not want to live with me. She wasn’t my ideal roommate, either. The flat smelled like a nursing home, and the creak in her voice—I can’t do the creak. Ye-e-es? No, I can’t. Imagine old vampire movies, that hinge-rich sound when the coffin starts opening. That was her voice. Just unbelievably evil and sour and mean. Yet here we were: I couldn’t afford a place of my own, and she couldn’t afford to be choosy. Very simply, we did not like each other.
The bedroom itself, though, was perfect, and what’s more, it didn’t smell so bad with the window open. For a modest month-to-month rent—utilities included—I could have a private space in a beautiful neighborhood, furnished with a bed, dresser, and desk. All it lacked was a bookcase. I requested a rental application and moved in within the week.
At first, there was a grace period between Fredricka and me. It helped that we almost never crossed paths. I spent my free time exploring the neighborhood, and in the flat I mainly lurked in my room. Fredricka, when we did encounter one another, maintained the minimum of civility: how was I liking the neighborhood, the weather—that sort of thing. When I happened to mention that I was in the market for a bookcase, she even said she’d keep an eye out for one.
About the bookcase. Technically, Fredricka was the one who found it. First she checked her storage room in the basement. Nothing. Then, a few days later, she knocked at my door, breathless. I had to come quickly, she said. Her neighbor was dragging his bookcase to the street as trash, and she’d flagged him down for me. Out on the sidewalk, she watched as he and I tried to haul the thing into the building. Shuffling backward up the narrow staircase, peering over the frame, I smiled down at her with what I thought was a grateful expression. But for no reason I could discern, she just glared back at me. Then, tetchily, she hovered behind us as we made our way down the hall. Both times that I scuffed the wallpaper, she gasped theatrically, and once her neighbor had left, she thrust a water spritzer and a washrag at me without a word.
Whatever goodwill had existed between us exploded in that moment. And, ultimately, after four months of mounting acrimony and mutual resentment, I moved. That’s the short version. The long version—if you want to bear with me a minute—requires cataloguing at least a few of the small, petty, spiteful things she did to antagonize me.
For one thing, Fredricka was unavoidable. She passed long days lying in bed in a white nightgown, glowering at the television, waiting for someone to do something she could scold them for. Bedridden, she somehow managed to maintain a panoptic knowledge of all goings-on in the flat, such that if her tenants transgressed any of the hundreds of obsessive details in her lease—by leaving a light on, the faucet dripping, the refrigerator door ajar—the iron-eyed old harridan would crawl out of bed and hobble down to the offender’s room, leaving them a mercilessly worded, martinetish Post-it note to find in the morning.
I discovered this for myself about a week after the bookcase incident, when—upon leaving my room—I almost stepped on a plate outside my door. It was one I’d washed and stacked in the drying rack the night before. Squatting down to inspect it, I found a Post-it note stickied to its center: You missed a spot. –F. The plate looked spotlessly pink. And then I saw, beside her note, a forensic little thumbprint of grease, which her naked eyes couldn’t possibly have been hale enough to see. I picked up the plate and went to the kitchen. She was sitting in wait at the table, and she sucked in her cheeks as I entered. When I apologized, she sneered: ‘Don’t say you’re sorry. Just make sure it doesn’t happen again.’
I don’t want to bore you—there were dozens of notes like these, I could go on all day. And not just stuck to dishes. One was affixed to an air conditioner, which I’d been running on a swelterin
g morning, easily in the nineties. That one read: Crack a window. In the real world, adults have utilities to pay. –F. Another time, after I’d let my swimsuit drip-dry in the shower, a note slid under my door: Three other people live in this house. Three other people have to share that bathroom. Don’t hang up your UNDIES for everyone to see. –F. Her initial always stung me like a failing grade.
I tried my best not to engage her, but there were limits to what I could bear. For instance, the spoon. She’d placed it at my door, a stray flake of oatmeal barnacled to its stem. Her note read: If you need help washing dishes, I’d be happy to give you lessons. –F. Lessons! The thought of that witch sneaking into the kitchen each night—poring over my dishes in the drying rack, like a schoolteacher searching for typos—filled my throat with blood. On the back of the Post-it, I wrote, Yes, Fredricka, dishwashing lessons sound lovely. Please let me know your availability. I left it crumpled on the carpet by her door. By morning it had disappeared.
Three weeks later she found a broken plate in the sink, and things finally came to a head. Her note—arranged with the plate shards outside my room—read simply: We need to talk. –F. When I knocked on her door, she called for me to enter, and I saw she was sitting in wait for me, propped up against her bed’s headboard in her nightgown—it was three p.m.—and staring at me with queenly severity. I explained that I’d never used the plate, much less broken it, but Fredricka had already deduced that I was the culprit. In gloating tones she walked me through her Sherlockian logic. First, there was the telltale gunk. Who else couldn’t wash a dish? Second, Janey and Miranda were, quote, ‘mature women’ and ‘responsible adults,’ who could be trusted to confess. Finally, there was my own note, which she produced in a ziplock bag with a dramatic flourish: the third-act scrap of evidence. Really now, a grown man. Asking for dishwashing lessons. What was she to make of that? As she held the Post-it out for me to see, I realized she must have been preparing this scene since I’d arrived: she the disciplinarian and I the scolded child. I decided then and there that it was time to move. But in meekness, or deference to this feeble old woman sunk into the mattress, I kept my head bent throughout her harangue. Each time she paused to ask some patronizing question—Did I know why we needed to wash our dishes? Had I ever heard of germs?—I even answered her, in a dutiful monotone, like a student performing his orals: Yes, Fredricka, I had heard of germs. When she was finished, I gave her my one-month’s notice, and she smiled a wrinkly, sagging, triumphant smile.
