The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters With the Human Race

by Sara Barron

  ANSWER: Jan mentioned her diabetes all the time because doing so manipulated certain spineless individuals into doing things for her she could easily have done herself.

  I didn’t know much about diabetes at the time other than that it sometimes involved orange juice. I thought it was like rheumatoid arthritis insofar as it severely limited movement. And that was because Jan presented it that way. And that was how I wound up washing her back. I washed it nine times in the nine months that we lived together. The first time she asked, the request had followed a string of others, and I’d been thrown too off guard to tell her no. I’d been asked to roast a chicken, snake a toilet, and fix her television set.

  Jan: Sara! Fix the TV! I can’t do it! I got diabetes!

  Me: Jan, I’m sorry. Electronics are hard for me to understand.

  Jan: Well, I’m not doing it. I need you to wash my back.

  Do you see how if it were asked that casually and on the tail end of a conversation you already wanted to be over, you’d say yes? Although I didn’t say yes, really. What I said was, “You want … me to … what?”

  And Jan responded, “CAN’T YOU HELP A PERSON WHO IS SICK TO WASH HER BACK?”

  And that’s when I said yes. Or, more specifically, “Oh. Okay. Sure. Should I just … go run the water … now?”

  What I was thinking at the time was this: Yes, it’s weird to wash your roommate’s back. But I love my new apartment. I don’t want Jan to throw me out.

  I wondered whether or not the back washing might not be an unspoken condition of my tenancy agreement. Additionally, I had this bizarre flash wherein I felt like if I didn’t wash her back, it would mean I was cruel to the elderly.

  So I ran a bath. I left Jan alone to get in. After a time she yelled, “Ready!” and that was the point at which I entered the bathroom myself. I squeezed a little liquid soap on a Buff Puff. And then I washed my landlord’s back.

  If you manipulate me into washing your back once, shame on you. If you manipulate me into washing your back nine times, shame on me. After the fifth or sixth time, these activities came up in conversation with my friend Maggie, who was of the opinion that washing my landlord’s back was “fucked up” and that I was “fucked up” for doing it. “What? Are you, like, into it or something? I mean, you can tell me if you are.”

  I told Maggie no, that I didn’t think I was subconsciously aroused by washing the backs of the elderly. Of course, one never knows what motivates her on the baser levels, but what it felt like consciously was that washing Jan’s back was not as horrible as having her yell at me or kick me out if I refused.

  So there were eight more times Jan asked me. And eight more times that I said yes.

  QUESTION: How did someone so crazy afford such a nice kitchen table?

  ANSWER: Someone so crazy affords such a nice kitchen table by virtue of being a trust-fund baby, all grown-up. Jan explained this situation as a cleverly manipulative wind-up to getting me to snake her toilet.

  I’d been in my bedroom with the blinds drawn one weekday afternoon. I’d given up on Mole Woman and was now spending most of my free time masturbating. Jan had walked in unannounced to find me on my air mattress reading Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth. (If you, like me, struggle with most available pornography, if you’ve exhausted the lesbian fantasies of your tween/teenage years, allow me to recommend pages 214 to 220 of Sabbath’s Theater. You’ll see what I mean when you get there.)

  “What’s going on?” Jan asked. “What are you reading in the dark for, in your underpants?”

  “I get headaches from the sun,” I said.

  “Weird,” she said, and then she leaned against the doorframe. “I know what you’re thinking, you know. You’re thinking, How can Jan afford this place? Jan wears pajamas all the time.”

  Mostly, I’d been thinking about how vulnerable I felt conversing in my underwear. Second to that, though, I had been thinking exactly what Jan suspected me of thinking.

  It’s always a mistake to think the seemingly deranged are not perceptive.

  Jan went on to explain that her father had invented a brand of calculator so successful that she, his daughter, had been forever freed from work.

  “And I never got married or had children,” she continued. “So who knows where all that money goes.”

  “Well,” I said, “where do you think it will go?”

  Jan shrugged. “Don’t know,” she said. “Probably just to someone who’s been nice to me.”

  Jan stared me square in the eye when she said that last bit—“someone who’s been nice to me”—and I had, I swear, to actively suppress the urge to scoop her up into my arms and rush her to the bathroom for her bath.

  It’s true that since moving in with Jan, my own financial situation had improved. I had transitioned from greeting and shirt-folding at Banana Republic to waiting tables at a Midtown Olive Garden, and what this meant, financially, was that I’d moved from living at the poverty line to living one inch above the poverty line. The upward mobility was impressive, I know. However, at the rate I was going, I was still several lifetimes away from earning the kind of money I would need to live alone and/or achieve other long-term goals. I had just two:

  1. To afford to buy a home instead of just renting a home.

  2. To afford various fertility treatments (for when I tried to conceive at the age of forty-five and it didn’t go so great).

  These had been my long-term goals. But on the day my diabetic landlord talked around the word “inheritance,” two blossomed into three:

  3. I would care for Jan until she died. She would reward me with an inheritance as a result, which I could then put toward my home and impending fertility issues.

  It would not be an easy task. Jan was a difficult person and being nice to her was hard. That was true if we were talking week to week. But year to year? How long did she have? Ten years? Maybe twenty? Could I carry on that long? And if I could, well, would she really leave me any money?

  Jan continued, “Anyway, my toilet’s clogged. But you’ll make sure to fix it, right? Since I’ve got diabetes?”

  I pictured it, this mountain of the future. This mountain of immeasurable wealth.

  “I will,” I said, and proceeded to Jan’s bathroom with a bounce in my step and, in my hand, an unwound wire hanger.

  QUESTION: Why did Jan pick a tenant on the basis of said tenant’s hair?

  ANSWER: I don’t know why Jan picked me as a tenant on the basis of my hair. But what I do know—what we all know—is that doing so signifies an unorthodox approach to life. To go a step further, doing so signifies that a person’s approach to life is indisputably psychotic, and that that indisputable psychosis will show its face at every turn.

  Here it bears mentioning that I enjoy a bit of robust shower singing. I always have, and I did it a lot while living with Jan for no other reason, really, than that I’ve done it a lot always. But shower singing with Jan around was different because Jan liked joining in. I’d be singing in my shower and since Jan rarely left the apartment, she’d hear me singing every time. If she knew the song, she’d come to my bathroom door, throw it open, and sing along.

  “ ‘THE RUM TUM TUGGER IS A CURIOUS CAT / AND THERE ISN’T ANY CALL FOR ME TO SHOUT IT!’ Good song, Sara. Good.”

  Jan’s sing-alongs were consistently shocking, which is to say I was never not surprised. I’d hear her voice, panic, and say, “Jan? Is that you?” and she’d laugh and shout, “What? No! It’s the real Rum Tum Tugger!” Or—musical song choice depending—“What? No! It is really Eponine!”

  JAN AND I lived together for a total of nine months. During those nine months, I had sex once, which is to say there was significantly less sex than there was back washing of a certain special someone. The event felt terribly precious, and this was in light of the fact that my partner in crime was a Burning Man enthusiast who measured in at five-foot-four.

  I’m not talking shorter than I am if I’m in heels, I’m talking shorter t
han I am. Done.

  The Burning Man and I had been set up by Gwen, a mutual friend, and although Gwen had good intentions, she had horrific matchmaking skills. The Burning Man showed up to our date late and wearing a backpack, and then proceeded to talk almost entirely about Burning Man. On the rare occasions when the Burning Man permitted me to speak, he wouldn’t look me in the eye. He preferred scanning the room as I spoke.

  Now, in fairness, the Burning Man surely had complaints of his own about me: Like that I showed up in an unsavory thrift-store ensemble. Like that I slapped myself to stay awake as he spoke incessantly about Burning Man.

  All in all, it was an unpleasant evening out. The thing was, though, our mutual disdain was this weird sort of turn-on, and that, I think, was how we wound up having sex.

  A little booze, a lot of self-loathing. You wind up having sex with people you despise.

  The Burning Man and I arrived in my bedroom. We got on with the usual business of things, but not before I forgot to draw the curtain on my window. It faced the street. Things went relatively well for, I don’t know, eight minutes? Maybe ten? But then I noticed the Burning Man watching himself in the mirror. It was all very American Psycho, that scene in the movie where Christian Bale is having sex with the prostitutes prior to bashing their heads in with some sort of radiator part, and he makes a face in the mirror that’s all like, “Well, aren’t I the sexy king?” It was an unsettling thing to have evoked, and it wasn’t helped by the frequent knocking of the small man’s forehead against my chin. Nevertheless, I’d hoped to forgive and forget. However, this proved difficult when I noticed his expression shift from “Well, aren’t I the sexy king?” to “What is going on outside the window?”

  “Is that the landlord?” he asked. “The one who’s diabetic?”

  I looked out the window. And there, at midnight, was Jan. I couldn’t tell you what she was doing there other than staring and waving.

  “Hi, Sara!” she mouthed through the window.

  “Hi, Jan!” I mouthed back.

  If I am walked in on in a public bathroom stall, and if we, as humans, are to be divided into two distinct groups—those who shout, “Someone’s in here!” versus those who shout, “Sorry! I’m so sorry!”—I’m a “sorry” type, no question. If any portion of my body is to be involuntarily seen naked, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m not the victim so much as I am the one who’s committed the crime. So it is that when my landlord stares me down and waves at me mid-coitus, when she appears jovial in lieu of annoyed, it is simply in me to wave back. I prefer repressing my annoyance. I prefer to let it bubble to the surface later on.

  Jan and I exchanged greetings, and then she stood there for a moment, and then came back inside.

  Well. You can just imagine where the sexual momentum was at that stage. There’d been the mirror gazing, the chin knocking, the cherry-on-top that was the verbal interaction with Jan. I could not have felt any less engaged, and so was delighted when the Burning Man did an awkward slither of a dismount and said, “Uh, well, I should get going, I guess. I’ve got a full day of work tomorrow. And I’ve got all my Burning Man photos, which I have to edit down and post to Facebook.”

  I slapped myself in the face.

  “That sounds … rewarding,” I said. “But also exhausting. So, well, like you said: it’s probably time to go.”

  TWO WEEKS LATER, I was out for a power-walk through Prospect Park. I had originally planned on a run, but quickly I learned that I am not actually capable of breathing while I run. And this, it turns out, is a problem. So I stopped with the running and shifted into power-walking.

  I power-walked into the park, past the band shell, the long meadow, and into the woods. It was there in the woods that I saw a homeless man asleep beneath a tree. He had scored himself a mattress, and the setup, as a whole, had the look of a canopy bed.

  Seeing the homeless man lying there in his canopy bed was sort of like stumbling upon Sleeping Beauty. I do not mean that he looked drugged, just that he looked peaceful.

  I stared at the homeless man for a minute or two before he awoke to see me staring.

  “Hello,” I said.

  He pointed at my power-walking shoes.

  “Dyke shoes,” he said.

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  But the homeless man had already fallen back to sleep.

  The confusion I felt over the shoe exchange did not mitigate the jealousy I felt over the sleeping setup. The homeless man had looked so peaceful there in the woods, on his mattress, under his tree. Surely he had his own trials and tribulations, but at least he could have intercourse in peace if the chance for intercourse arose. At least he didn’t have to wash another person. At least if he had the chance to wash himself, he didn’t have a landlord singing at him.

  At least he didn’t have a landlord.

  The moment you envy a homeless man is the moment you must facilitate personal change.

  In a rational moment, I knew I couldn’t cope with Jan long-term. Or short-term, for that matter. It just wasn’t worth it. I could not endure, and earn an inheritance, and pay for my own fertility treatments. I knew I had to move. Which meant I knew I had to get another roommate. Which meant I had to ask myself the painful but inevitable question:

  Who next?

  If I may, for a moment, presume that you have not undergone an emotional battering at the hands of a male almost-model, only to follow it up with Diabetic Jan, I’ll report that the experience leaves a dramatic impression of roommates, and their capacity to top one another. It raises the questions: What worse roommate options are there? Would they continue to get worse? Would they ever not be awful?

  These questions caused me terrible anxiety. The anxiety loosened my grip on reality, and that loose grip on reality had me thinking weird, unlikely things:

  I am jealous of a homeless man.

  Perhaps my mom will help me out.

  So I left the homeless man alone. I raced home to call my mom.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “How’s it going?” I said.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “I’m having a hard time with my roommate,” I said.

  “The diabetic?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “So could I maybe have some money? It would help me move out.”

  “You have a job to earn money, to help you move out.”

  “But if you gave me more money, I could get my own place.”

  I heard her sigh: the audible eye-roll.

  “Sara, I don’t have my own place. I’m in the basement at the moment, hiding from your father, who’s annoying.”

  My mother hung up the phone after that, and in the moment she did I heard a crash in Jan’s bedroom. And then:

  “SARA! COME FIX THE TV!”

  I knew that leaving Jan was but a step down the rabbit hole toward some impossibly worse option. But that was just the risk I’d have to take.

  I made a mad dash from my bedroom to the kitchen. I rummaged around for an onion, which I promptly sliced and sniffed. I walked toward Jan’s bedroom with tears in my eyes. I knocked lightly on her door.

  “Jan?” I called. “Are you in there?”

  Jan opened the door.

  “What?” she asked. “The hippie dwarf stopped calling?”

  “No,” I said. I wiped at my tears. “It’s my mom. She’s … she’s … she’s just been diagnosed with diabetes.”

  Jan paused. “What kind?” she asked.

  I paused. “The bad kind,” I answered. “So I need to go home. I mean, I need to move home. To be with her. I think it’s the right thing to do.”

  Honest communication is important, but only for those in lasting relationships. With landlords and tenants, it’s better to lie, to preserve someone’s feelings. It’s better to have an effective way out of your lease.

  13

  Not All Italians

  I lied about my mother having diabetes, and doing
so proved effective: Jan let me break my lease. The impending freedom was nice, but the downside was that Jan felt rejected. She stopped talking to me in those last weeks we lived together, and while this made for an uncomfortable at-home dynamic, it also meant no more washing of the back. This, in turn, meant I had some extra time to spend on Craigslist. I’d search the “Rooms/Shared” section, and then I’d scan the studios. I still could not afford a studio, but it felt like a treat just to look.

  I was shocked to find the odd, affordable option. Nothing in my price range, to be clear, but the odd scrap of an apartment that wasn’t quite so wildly outside my price range either. Were they hellholes? They were hellholes. Still, though, it was nice to know that they were out there. I studied a handful of options located in previously unknown neighborhoods: Woodside, Sunnyside, Rockaway. Bed-Stuy, Bushwick, Brownsville. I crunched some numbers. I determined that if I saved a small amount of money every month for one year, that by the end of that year, I could maybe—just maybe—afford one. Of course, I could maybe—just maybe—be raped or pillaged if ever I walked around outside in such affordable neighborhoods. But wouldn’t that be worth it to avoid another roommate? I thought that it would, and returned to the “Rooms/Shared” section. I searched for another apartment complete with another roommate. Something “for now,” you see, so I could set aside the necessary money for the hellhole of my future. For a hellhole to call my own.

  I MOVED FROM Park Slope to Astoria, Queens. There were several key reasons why the neighborhood appealed. It was a quick commute to my Olive Garden job, for one thing, and for another, its rents at the time were comparatively cheap. This made my studio goal more manageable. Astoria lacked the wealth and beauty of a place like Park Slope. The apartments were all short and squat, and the large Greek population meant that all privately owned businesses smelled a little bit like feta cheese.

  I’ve always enjoyed acclimating to neighborhoods by endearing myself to local deli owners. Some people like doing this at bars, but I find delis less intimidating. Days after my Astoria arrival, I popped into a local spot called Athena’s Face to order a sandwich and apple turnover. The man behind the counter, busy though he was undermining his Omar Sharif resemblance with a knee-length jean jacket, met my sandwich order with the question, “Sheep? Lamb? Goat?”