Tenemental

by Vikki Warner

  At home, the work was slow-going, unskilled, and soul-sucking. Within a few months of moving in, I started to think I was too young to have so little fun. Suddenly I felt tied down by a bunch of adult bullshit. I’d somehow deluded myself into thinking it would all be fun. As anyone who has done this will tell you, the end result—having a comfortable, well-maintained, attractive place to live—is pretty great, if you ever get there. But nothing leading up to it is actually fun, especially if you are an amateur with little upper-body strength.

  In my grandparents’ time, of course, I’ll bet I would’ve had a husband, two kids, and a house by age twenty-seven. And I wouldn’t have had the luxury of complaining about having to be an adult. But I also probably wouldn’t have had a full-tilt, full-time job and a stressy commute. I also likely wouldn’t have been the only one financially supporting the household.

  Nonetheless, the work had to be done, and in response James and I took on the personae of two people stuck in an elevator: we were only working together in order to extricate ourselves from a problem. Trapped, we ground it out, sanding, painting, and fixing doorjambs. We thought our malaise as a couple was external and temporary; maybe once the bathroom was fixed or the dryer installed, we’d revert to loving one another.

  When we tried to update even the simplest of items, though, we quickly learned that this house laughed in the face of modernization; its very beams and planks and every inch of its horsehair plaster rebelled against it. PennHenge knew it had the upper hand, that it was bigger and older than James and I were, and much more stubborn. Hardware store items marked “standard size” or “fits any ____” taunted from shelves; purchased with optimism, they quickly became nonstarters, tossed into a pile of other stuff that couldn’t be bent or jammed into place. PennHenge and its neighbors were thrown together quickly and with more improvisation than would be considered acceptable by today’s standards. This was economy housing, built speedily but with a kind of rigid integrity that made it heavy and immutable, even if its lines were imperfect.

  On the first very cold day, sometime in mid-December, I was leaving the house when I heard the peculiar sound of rushing water coming from the basement. It didn’t sound like the washing machine; it didn’t sound like the shower lines. When I rounded the corner at the bottom of the stairs, I stopped in my tracks as I saw little waves lapping up against the bottom stair. Scanning the expanse of water between myself and the far wall, I found the source: the pipe leading to the washing machine had frozen, and an alarming amount of water was bursting forth. I sighed a single Zen “shiiiiiit” and ran back upstairs to cram on my rain boots.

  James was at work. I didn’t even consider calling him: this was a crisis, and there was no time to deliberate. Instead, I called Fred, my plumber friend, and asked him what I should do. I ran back down into the fray. He said slowly, without urgency, “Well, I wouldn’t stand in the water if I were you; it could be electrified and you could electrocute yourself.”

  I shrugged. “Too late, dude. I’m already in it.”

  “Oh. Okay, then, no harm done I guess. So go over to the main water line, and shut it off.”

  “Any idea where that would be?”

  “Uh, I don’t know exactly, probably toward the front of the house.”

  I waded out and located the item in question. I had never noticed it before. It was a dirt pit with a single pipe sticking out of it, and a valve with a big red knob.

  Fred said, “Turn that thing counter-clockwise as far as it will go. That’ll shut off the water and you’ll be able to call someone to fix the pipe.” It dawned on me that I had to find a go-to plumber and I had no idea where to look in those pre-Facebook times, when the world was dark. The deluge slowed, the sloshing and dripping let up, and I stood there for a minute, shocked by the episode (but not by an electrical current). I experienced a momentary assortment of life-condemning thoughts, but then I discovered my single best landlady trait, the one natural attribute that qualifies me to do this job. Without thinking much about it, I became calm. My mind and my body relaxed into the task at hand, focused, facing it. The emergency portion of this thing had ended. Now all I had to do was clean up the water, call a plumber, and spend some money to fix the broken pipe. There was nothing to freak out about.

  Shop-Vac in hand, suctioning dirty water, I amused myself by picturing the scene as an old maritime painting of a miniature boat manned by yellow-jacketed sailors, struggling against tiny whitecaps perched atop a dark, roiling sea. Having made it through the first misadventure, I thought, Well, if that’s all it is, I can handle this house thing. Like the hardy sailors in my mind, I pictured myself struggling through the storm, persevering to face the next crisis. Sometimes that’s what life is, and it’s not as bleak as it sounds.

  Renter-go-round

  After a year at PennHenge, Tamara and Jack let me know they were moving out. Jack came upstairs, tapped on my door, and delivered the news with little fanfare: Tamara was pregnant. They needed to be near her family. Moving on was a natural next step. They’d had fun, but had to leave.

  I closed the door and leaned on the wall. Nothing in their departure implicated me as a bad landlady or all-around horrible individual. This was just logistics. Somehow, though, I felt stunned, as if I’d been dumped in the midst of what I thought was a perfect relationship. I never expected them to stay forever—renters are always moving, always seeking a new city or situation. But now I saw the future, and it promised rapid-fire move-ins and move-outs, with brief moments of quiet in between. A year goes by in a day. Everyone at PennHenge was straining to leave adolescence, to feel sure of something for once, and our lives were full of newness and babies and breakdowns and breakups.

  I had failed to visualize what it would be like to live with tenants, and likewise, what it would be like to watch them leave.

  Even considering these first stirrings of upheaval, I could feel good that we’d made it through a year. The lights were on and the bills were paid. But progress was slow, and the house was still in a state of raw need. For every fault we fixed, a new one was noted.

  Having survived one winter with windows that could be open or closed with little change to the interior climate, James called a window salesman, a friend of his family. James had spent some time installing windows for his dad’s home improvement company, so we had agreed to DIY this thing. Even so, we counted the number of windows in the house; the grand total was forty-three windows, and I feared the likely cost of replacing them, not to mention the time we’d need to invest to install them. Window Guy came and measured each one, the two of us following him around asking questions. Because James was once “part of the crew,” we were granted the luxury of skipping Window Guy’s full-bore sales pitch—the smoke and mirrors normally employed to plump the bill were nullified when you were speaking to someone from a contractor family. Still, the price tag to buy forty-three of the most basic model windows—white vinyl and white hardware with absolutely no ornamentation, including a discount and sans installation—was around $6,500.

  James’s brother, also a contractor, delivered the stacks of windows tidily wrapped in plastic. A salty bunch, he and his crew smoked and cracked jokes while they reviewed the process: remove the wood holding the old window in place and then remove the glass a pane at a time, fit the new window into the newly opened space, stuff the edges of the frame with as much pink insulation as it’ll take, and put screws through the frame in the holes provided. After we got that part done forty-three times, we’d deal with replacing the inner frames, skinny wood pieces that served to cover the vinyl edge of the new window and the wisps of insulation stuffed into the crack. “Cool,” I said, already doubting my own ability to handle a single window. We had a window install party, and a few friends donned their work gloves on a chilly Saturday for pizza, beer, and the thrill of manual labor.

  That afternoon, the house a buzzy whirl of drill sounds, the grapevine turned up a couple. They showed up unannounced to look at the
recently vacated first-floor apartment. We hadn’t done shit other than to tell a few people that we had a place available, but the news had gone around.

  Elvin and Caroline were impish and conspiratorial, a pair of fresh-faced cuties who were really into one another. Their jean jackets were stitched with doom metal patches; they looked mildly tough, but they smiled a lot. They came upstairs to talk to me—by then they’d already stopped in to check out the apartment, and decided they wanted it, no intervention needed on my part—and we spent ten minutes talking over the logistics of the move-in and the utilities and their two cats. Then they left, still adorable. James and I looked at each other, astonished: new tenants had simply fallen into our orbit—no sweating over Craigslist or tacking up flyers. We didn’t even consider any further vetting. They wanted to live here, they weren’t total ogres: good enough.

  Out of forty-three windows, we got half done that day. The rest fell to James and me and our handiest tenant, who happily worked until his portion of the job was done. James and I were less prompt. For the next few months, whenever there was a spare hour or two, I’d tentatively bug him: “Do you, ah, do you think maybe we could do a window?” I felt I had to ask, although I was relieved when he’d say no. I was happy to stay inert, pushing the task away again and again. The remaining stack of windows taunted us; finally, it began to dwindle. The last two—well, the last two disappeared.

  Having happily quit my Boston office job and draining commute, I’d begun working at a coffee shop and trying for freelance writing gigs. A tremendous pay cut was involved in adopting this newly relaxed, noncorporate lifestyle, but I figured there were always temp jobs should things become dire. I only knew that I wanted my time to be my own, I felt like garbage, and I couldn’t stand another summer of yearning for the sun while ensconced in fluorescent cubicle lighting. I wanted to see if I could get a writing career going in any sense of the word, and I didn’t mind living on the cheap while I attempted to scale the walls of the publishing world.

  A timid, forlorn gastroenterologist had recently diagnosed me with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). I found this diagnosis totally unsatisfying—basically he was telling me, “You’re a nervous lady, and you poop a lot and we don’t know why, so here’s some pills. Eat more fiber.” The pills were meant to slow my digestion, but they only dried out my mouth while my butt continued its spree unabated. I stopped taking them after a couple of weeks. Now that I was taking my stress level down a few pegs, and eating enough fiber to build a shed every week, I assumed I’d be feeling better soon.

  One evening in December, I was working at the coffee shop, slapping stickers on to-go cups and listening to this one Pat Benatar record we played over and over (why “Hell Is for Children,” I’ll never understand). We were gabbing, relishing the slow period before we closed for the night. The phone rang, and my coworker answered it. She passed it over: “It’s James.”

  “Hey.”

  “Hey. I have some bad news.”

  “Oh shit, okay, what is it?”

  “Ugh. It’s pretty bad.”

  “Oh my god, all right, what is it?”

  “The house got broken into. I just got home, and the back door was wide open so I knew something happened. I can’t tell what’s gone yet. I called the cops.”

  I felt very hot and tingly, suddenly hyperaware and ready to tip into a rage.

  “Fuck. No! I’ll be home in five minutes.”

  “Okay. Just so you know, it looks pretty crazy. The apartment doors are kicked off the hinges.”

  I pulled shakily into the driveway and entered what had become an unfamiliar place. All three apartments had been overturned, our stuff rifled through, drawers dumped and mattresses upended. James was assembling a quickly growing list of the things taken: tools, a table saw, my broken laptop, a TV, an elderly digital camera, guitars. The last two replacement windows were also gone—an especially irritating loss considering they were measured to fit the windows in my apartment and wouldn’t work well anywhere else. My gym bag containing a sweaty sports bra and the ugliest capri-flare kelly-green sweatpants ever created. As James had warned me, the doors to all three apartments had been kicked in; the ones that had come clear off the hinges had been picked up by the intruders and placed against the wall. Looking for any potential clues of the burglars’ humanity, I chose to believe that this door-leaning meant they still had a shred of caring, that this had been a crime of desperation and not one undertaken with unnecessary cruelty.

  The dismantling of the doors shook me more than the loss of our stuff—none of it was of much value except for the guitars, which were not expensive but carried emotional weight. James and I made a doleful trip to Home Depot to buy every type of bolt, bar, and latch we could put our hands on, but it haunted me that anyone of reasonable strength could get in with a pair of steel-toed boots and a little motivation. Another chain on the door wasn’t going to hold anyone off. We could only hope to subsist on our sparseness; there was nothing much left to take on a repeat visit.

  The police were of little help; a cop came, hours after the fact, and yawned his way through a laundry list of questions. I know these guys deal with burglaries every day, and it becomes a ho-hum endeavor to investigate them, but this officer seemed to believe that my simply living in this neighborhood meant I should expect to be violated early and often. Somewhere around “Well, you know, you moved to this street, it’s rough out here,” I checked out, plunking myself on the couch, hand to forehead, unable to expend the suddenly unthinkable level of effort it would take to refute him.

  This became a common refrain of life at PennHenge for me, a single white woman with a fairly wispy appearance. The (usually white) men who come to the house in some service capacity—plumbers, cable guys, cops, electricians, contractors—have often been perfectly comfortable commenting to me on the unsuitability of the neighborhood for “someone like” me. Most of the time this disapproval takes the form of a gruff sadness: “It’s too bad what’s happened to this place—the drugs, the crime. It used to be so nice.” Less commonly, but still alarmingly often, it is a panicky racist rambling, a fear-steeped monologue that surfaces as soon as the man realizes I’m friendly, a talker, possibly a willing sieve for his opinions. Before I can get my bearings, the guy is going on about “the blacks, the Muslims . . .” and I’m backing toward the door. I only wanted the toilet fixed, bro.

  A Cambodian American man I know, a guy of about fifty, born and raised in Providence, asked me where I live. First, he congratulated me on owning a place in a trending neighborhood in town, a place where property values are climbing after having topped out in the tonier, dog shit-free areas of town. We talked about that for quite some time. Then, almost as an afterthought, he told me that when he was a teenager, I suppose in the seventies, he and a bunch of Cambodian friends tried to go to some Italian festival on the Hill, and were violently chased out of the neighborhood. He softly chuckled as he recalled the details.

  I mentioned the story and his calm retelling of it to an acquaintance, who said, “Oh yeah, people of color were not allowed into Federal Hill until recently. It was just known.” A chilling choice of words—“not allowed.” Only recently did I begin to understand what this wistful “old neighborhood” parlance stands for: the time before Providence’s densest neighborhoods were available to people of color. The time before white families left; before the neighborhood became what it is today: a multi-cultural zone comprised of people of all racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. Is that what these men were harkening back to? Is there coding in the tsk-ing and the “so sads”? Is their protective pity talk born out of something nastier than just pathetic nostalgia?

  This shit is just swirling all around us, every day, in this city, state, and country.

  And yet, I still need to get the toilet fixed. How diplomatic can I be and still let such a man know that I do not agree with him, that I’ve lived in the neighborhood for a decade, that it suits me quite well, that I respect my
neighbors and do not wish for a reversion to the old days of quiet tyranny and wall-to-wall white in Federal Hill? That if there’s a reason to get out, it’s the house itself, and not the people with whom I share the street?

  Elvin and Caroline hadn’t been in the house long when the break-in happened; I was mortified that this was their intro to living at PennHenge. They were grossed out by the intrusion, and they were annoyed that they’d lost things. I was afraid they’d move out, but they seemed to take it in stride. They continued to settle in, putting up leopard print curtains and arranging their old furniture and one million VHS tapes, DVDs, CDs, and records. They tacked up rock show and movie posters. The cats continued to familiarize themselves with the apartment; the humans sank into the couch and began the continuous movie marathon that defined their home life. If they were home, there was a movie on—the weirder the better. They were sweet people who liked dark shit. And not just in their choice of filmed or recorded entertainment; they both had a potent somber side that ruled them as much as their funny irreverence. These two seemed united by dark shit, as if their gloom was their central connection. Not to say they weren’t also a good time. We had boozy all-night backyard fires that often ended in some innocent object—a chair, usually—getting tossed into the blaze, or in Caroline baying at the fire on hands and knees, the strands of her long hair whipping just out of the flames’ reach.

  On the plus side, the break-in provided a springboard for me to meet my neighbors on one side, an elderly Italian couple named Angelo and Fiorella. They’d emigrated from Italy to the United States in the sixties, and had lived on Penn Street ever since. I had stealthily admired Angelo’s stunning head of thick, lustrous white hair from our third-floor window, which overlooked the concrete and dirt lot where they were often at work on one project or another. I knew they’d been observing us too, this band of strange folks who’d been making noise in (but also slowly beautifying) the house next door. Since they spoke rapid-fire Italian together, and seemingly no English, I figured we’d not get to be friends. But one afternoon I went outside, and through a broken slat in the fence, Angelo introduced himself and his wife. I had trouble understanding his accent; he either said he’d heard the break-in in progress, or he’d heard about it from someone. Either way, he was none too happy about it or “these bad people” who’d steal anything they could put their hands on. He was happy to see we were in the house, though, as it had been empty for a long time, the old windows left wide open and the rain coming right in. (I knew then why some of the windowsills were cracked and falling apart.)