Tenemental

by Vikki Warner

  SILVA AVENUE

  As a result of their relentless economizing, my parents got us out of Sunny Acres when I was ten. They bought a small, lifeless three-bedroom ranch house a few miles down the road, in a quiet neighborhood of simple suburban houses just off one of the two main roads in town. I remember their relief upon moving in, despite the fact that the house needed work. There must have been a saturation point for them with the trailer park, as there may someday be with me and my house—a point at which the annoyances and the little indignities become too much, and you clutch your tiny nest egg and say screw it, peace out.

  Bland and ordinary as the place was, it was our house, a place where our little triad could prosper. The house was shabby, but not falling apart. Over our first few years living there, my parents got right to work painting, putting in new floors and carpeting, staining cabinets and doors, replacing the old windows. My mom painted every room a utilitarian, dispassionate white, which my dad said was like “living in an aspirin tablet.” The house feels close—there are a lot of walls that a more adventurous homeowner might alter or tear down. The overall interior effect is of a series of small, white boxes—none of the six rooms is much larger than any of the others.

  It makes some sense that I didn’t love the house, at first, as much as I’d loved the trailer—I missed the unconventional layout of the trailer and the snug-ness of my closet lair. I missed the trailer’s crank windows and how they swung open from the bottom. I missed the few friends I’d had back at Sunny Acres. There were only a couple of kids in the new neighborhood, which abutted a loud, traffic-clogged road. I was bordering on my teenage years and prone to the attendant aloofness and snobbery. But I started to come around. This house did have something that the trailer didn’t: a basement. I cranked my boom box, laced up my roller skates (white leather with fat orange wheels), and cruised that smooth-ass concrete for all it was worth. Sometimes I invited my new friend Andrea, who lived across the street, to join me. Upstairs, another perk: blessedly free access to MTV in its late-eighties glory days, a gift from the basic cable gods. I wore a spot into the carpet in front of the TV, finally getting the pop culture education I desperately wanted, and just in time to prep me for high school.

  My bedroom was one of the aforementioned white cubes; it had a ceiling fan and two small windows in the corner that faced the road at the back of the house. The closet was too small to inhabit, and I guess by the time I was twelve, I was over that. I had a plywood desk in the corner with a frustrating pre-internet ultra-low-memory Smith-Corona word processor perched upon it, and a couple of bookshelves to house my radio, favorite paperbacks, and a small collection of CDs. As I got a bit older, I commandeered my dad’s old Zenith turntable, with its cool cone-shaped speakers, and started buying records at yard sales for a dime or a quarter each. I was a religious listener of American Top 40 with Casey Kasem, and I loved the pop music of the time: Madonna and Prince and Roxette and Neneh Cherry. But I was also in love with sixties and seventies rock and topped off my room decor with posters of Jim Morrison: An American Poet, as well as my ultimate obsession, my homeboys Led Zeppelin. Weekends, I’d sleep over at my friend Lisa’s; we’d watch our worn VHS copy of Led Zeppelin: The Song Remains the Same that we’d split the cost of, and she’d fall asleep while I’d stay gloriously awake and fantasize about being born twenty years earlier so I could see this overwrought spectacle in the flesh, so I could sway and bathe in the languid ink-blue light of 1973 at Madison Square Garden. The boys at school were so dumb. Give me Jimmy Page! Lisa and I read in Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga by Stephen Davis that Page dated a fourteen-year-old in the early 1970s; far from being horrified, in our cluelessness we figured it meant we had a chance.

  But I don’t think I was Jimmy’s type. Until adolescence, when my mom took pity on me and bought me a single pair of contact lenses—which I wore until they were ripped and infectiously dirty, fearing the parental rebuff associated with asking for a replacement pair—I sported grandma glasses that obstructed half of my face. My clothes were bought off the clearance rack at the Sears outlet or TJ Maxx. I was short and thin, with brown hair and brown eyes. I blended into the crowd, staying fairly neutral other than my baggy, black classic rock T-shirts. As the girls around me started to get curvy, grow boobs, and face the sexual scrutiny of their peers, I hunkered down in my pseudo pupal stage, inhabiting a gawky middle ground of having dire crushes on boys, acting tough and uninterested anyway, and then going home to play with my Barbies.

  The summer I turned fifteen, my best friend called to ask if I wanted to work a catering job at the exclusive prep school where her dad had the very official title of Business Manager. The pay was fifty dollars—half a year’s worth of my abysmal two-dollar allowance. As soon as I saw that check with my name on it, I was hooked. The type of work was beside the point—I would have done any job with equal enthusiasm—I just wanted to bust out and make my own money.

  Shortly after that first one-off work day, I was offered a regular spot on the schedule, working in the dining hall after school and on weekends. I was going to be a lunch lady. (The official job title was “server,” but tellingly, the only people who had that title were women. Let’s just go with “lunch lady.”)

  The lunch lady is not a particularly admired or well-loved archetype. She is an object of pity and ridicule, tasked with slinging food of questionable provenance at little punks for whom sassing her is a competitive sport. Her greatest skill is portion control, whereby she can save the institution a few pennies by making her ice cream scoops of mashed potatoes a smidge less plentiful.

  It wasn’t sexy, but it was my new job; it paid $5.50 an hour (the minimum wage in Rhode Island at the time was $4.45), and I was going to embrace it. I was in the strange position of being the same age as the crowd I was serving; depending on which kid was next in line, this could be fun or it could be embarrassing and dehumanizing. These kids made my public-school friends look budget. They were the children of famous artists, of liquor barons, of corporate CEOs, and they smelled like a whole other echelon of wealth I didn’t even know existed. One kid ever so helpfully let me know that I should give him as much food as he wanted, because “my parents pay your salary.” Harsh them-and-us differences were in high relief. Luckily, though, it was the dawn of the age of grunge, and my work style—typically a thrifted flannel shirt over my company-issue polo shirt, stretchy black skirt, striped knee socks, and china doll Mary Janes—was quite au courant, other than the lame polo. Designer labels were out, tatters and rips were in, so we all looked about the same.

  I wrapped up my last two years of high school with waning enthusiasm. My classes were not the problem—it was the people around me. My class was full of overachievers with an annoyingly high level of school spirit—people who simultaneously got stellar grades, showed up for everything, ran track, killed it in academic decathlon, and drank and smoked all weekend. I just could not hang. I judged them all, unkindly, hating their perkiness beyond any reason. I found the pockets of freaks—theater, chorus, literary magazine—and I uneasily stuck myself in with them. I did well in school, but I was nowhere near the top of the class. I got a scholarship to the state university and committed to go there, if only to avoid student loans.

  School sucked; my real friends were at work. The work itself may have been mindless, but my two best girlfriends worked there with me, and we made everything into a joke. We stuck maxi pads on the wall in the ladies’ bathroom; we snuck out bottles of nasty white wine in our backpacks; we put hot sauce in each other’s cups of Coke; we dabbed sour cream on the earpiece of the phone, and then yelled, “Phone’s for you!” to whichever cook was on duty. There was a troop of slightly older skater guys who worked there as dishwashers and who we were always falling all over ourselves to impress. They listened to punk cassettes in their food-scrap-covered work area and skated on the loading dock during break time. They flung hot dishrags at us and openly ogled our knee-sock-clad legs when we
sauntered by, trying to look as fetching as possible while carrying thirty-pound boxes of cream cheese. Some making out took place among the juice machines and in the back of the storeroom. It was a disgusting, charged, slightly abusive, often unsupervised workplace, the kind of job that sounded perfectly fine to Mom, but was actually a haven for indulging all the bad bits of our budding personalities.

  As we finished high school, both of my best friends left for college and new adventures. Kurt Cobain and Jerry Garcia died, Bill Clinton may have had sex with that woman in the Oval Office, and it felt like a listless new era. I was officially enrolled at the University of Rhode Island, which had recently been voted the number one party school in the country. A born commuter, I lived at home and appeared on campus in my parentally funded Honda ten minutes before my first class, promptly zipping back toward the exit ten minutes after my last class. The campus was filled with obnoxious, white-hatted frat boys who were just getting into Dave Matthews Band and the local hell-on-earth jam band, Foxtrot Zulu. In my giant Minor Threat T-shirt, ripped jeans, and skate shoes, and with a calculated perma-scowl on my face, I let them know that I did not want to party, did not want to get to know them, did not want their sexual attention.

  After a year of commuting from my parents’ house, I took my eighty-two-dollar-a-week lunch lady paycheck, teamed up with three friends (two of whom worked with me), and rounded up an apartment. In a sign of how much I adored college life, the apartment was fifteen minutes further away from school than my parents’ home, meaning I had a commute of over an hour each way. But the apartment was $500 a month, and split four ways that meant all I had to do was swing a very quaint $125 a month. My parents let me know in no uncertain terms that I wouldn’t be getting their help with groceries, books, or gas, but they’d still pay the insurance on my car. I was not permitted to bring my laundry home or store any stuff in the basement. Once I moved out, I wouldn’t be coming back. Although they were probably just being tough with me, and would have helped had I fallen way behind, I wanted to show them that I was independent and could shoulder all of the work and school and financial responsibility by myself. I never asked them for a thing. Still haven’t.

  ROMA STREET

  The new apartment I shared with my besties—Heather, Erin, and Samantha—was a third-floor three-bedroom (we made the living room into one more), not dissimilar to the one I live in now, in a triple-decker probably built in the 1930s. The kitchen was in the center, the three bedrooms in a row on one side. There was a pantry with big, old cupboards and a small tiled bathroom. A wooden porch ran across the front of the house. The sole source of warmth was a clunky gas heater in the kitchen, and with all the bedroom doors closed, in the winter the temperature differential was fierce enough that I wore multiple layers and a hat to bed.

  We decorated with whatever we all brought from home, plus found trash-night furniture and the occasional thrift or yard sale score. Heather’s dad, an artist and class-A scavenger, unearthed trinkets and old signs for us to decorate with. All four of us were in school, and we all had jobs, so the apartment was a beehive of women rushing in and out, casting off outfits and wiggling into new ones, gulping down bowls of cereal and checking the answering machine. When we could scrounge a little down time, we would make crafts, watch 90210, go dancing, discuss our love for Deee-Lite and Björk, and stage impromptu photo shoots in which we’d dress in our favorite seventies-era clothes and fall into our best sweet/hot nineties poses on a secondhand futon.

  Despite the multitudes of college boys seemingly at our disposal, only Samantha dated men from school. The rest of us chose from the same extremely limited pool of skater/musician/ne’er-do-well dudes we’d known and/or worked with for years, who to their credit were exponentially more fun and adventurous than the featureless human lumps at school.

  Bristol, Rhode Island, the little town we lived in, has since been condo-ized and made upscale, but it was a classic New England fishing village then: a picturesque place characterized by stunning old houses, factories on the waterfront, and boats clanging on the docks. It was beautiful and scrappy; I loved its high-end/low-end duality. I was enamored with having everything I needed—the bank, the post office, the library, the bakery, the liquor store—within ten minutes’ walk. Our house was in the most crowded section of town, a jumble of skinny one-way streets with tenement houses packed in about as closely as they are in Federal Hill. Most of the neighbors were of Portuguese or Italian extraction; accordingly, you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a church, bakery, or butcher shop. Although I was only fifteen minutes from my parents’ house, Bristol felt infinitely more present, more alive to me.

  After a year or so in that first apartment, Heather came home one night and said, “There’s an apartment for rent in the boys’ building.” The “boys” were four of the dudes from our little crowd—all of whom we had some sort of history with—and their building was a cute duplex right in “downtown” Bristol. Her current boyfriend lived there, and so did Erin’s, so needless to say, they were on board. I was worried about the huge rent increase—this place was $650 per month, meaning I would be on the hook for $162 every month. That forty-dollar difference was eight hours of work and half a paycheck. But the apartment was adorable, the location was perfect, and we’d be a united front of coolness in the building. It was intolerably cute: boys on one side, girls on the other. We gave notice to our sweet, elderly landlady and packed up.

  HOPE STREET

  We four felt very adult upon moving into our new, slightly tonier apartment; we wouldn’t need to re-purpose any rooms to make bedrooms, and it had a big kitchen and living room. Our new landlord was an elderly lawyer everyone called the Judge; his building management style was sufficiently hands-off that he allowed us to paint the kitchen a tremendous shade of salmon that I can recall today with extreme clarity. The apartment was on two levels: Erin and Samantha’s bedrooms were downstairs, off the kitchen, and Heather and I were on the upper level, at the top of a squeaky, narrow set of stairs; we shared a huge walk-in closet that was centered between our two linoleum-floored, attic-style rooms. My room was narrow and its sloping ceiling contained a single skylight window, under which I put up a shelf and installed a few spindly plants. My desk and the Smith-Corona word processing torture device went into a dark, vortex-like corner, from which I wrote the million-and-one papers that stood between me and finishing college at last; my bed went directly under the skylight, with a dresser and TV at its foot. My trusty bookshelf, loaded down by now, was by the door. I tacked up a poster of Björk and my favorite yard sale art, arranged my CDs and records, and settled in.

  Though we all spent plenty of time cloistered in our rooms, upon flinging open our doors there was a ready-made party just outside. The liquor store was next door. We often climbed out the kitchen window and sat on the little patch of roof overlooking the street, yelling at passersby, smoking, clutching beers, listening to Black Flag or Misfits. Our house was a stop for the local high school kids who walked around aimlessly in the afternoons; they’d stop by with their skateboards and sit on our stoop or come inside and bug us. It was a welcoming place, and a good-natured one, not nearly as depraved as it could have been.

  After a couple of years of idyllic young adult fun there, though, suddenly I couldn’t muster up much excitement for the place. I was in a relationship with a brooding small-town guy who was friends with the whole crowd at the house, and it had become miserable. He was bitter about my going to (and imminently graduating from) college, more annoyed than supportive of any limited successes I had, and he seemed to want to keep me closer and closer to home. I had a visceral reaction to that; although I was rather passive as a girlfriend then, I knew when something was the wrong thing.

  I broke up with him, dragging it out because I didn’t know how to do it, and his insecurities flared. First, he threatened to jump off the bridge, then he threatened to hang himself. Once he realized he wouldn’t be able to stop me from leaving with intim
ations of self-harm, he started coming after me. He grinningly held me down on the bed and choked me. He stole my keys to keep me immobile, and then mentally tortured me, begging me to come back and using rote abusive man-speak like, “If I can’t have you, no one will.” I once caught him trying to get onto the roof to peer into my room through the skylight.

  Everyone in the house knew what was going on, though they probably didn’t know the extent of it. I wanted to keep it private, out of a childish embarrassment and pride. When it would spill out into the open, friends would ask him to leave, tell him he was out of line, vaguely take my side. Heather told him off pretty effectively a few times. I don’t think my housemates knew day-to-day whether we were patching things up, or whether I was frantically trying to get away from him. Though I knew it was the latter, I didn’t ask for help.