Roomies

by kindle@abovethetreeline. com

  I watch a seagull fly inches above the sand close to the water, and a guy running with his dog, and I smell the salt and the fog and I think, Yeah, change is… good. Certain things that don’t change are good, too. Like the one person I’ve known and have let know me, for as long as I can remember.

  I hit number 5 on my speed dial and wait to hear Zoe’s voice.

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 17

  NEW JERSEY

  It is a Saturday evening, eleven days from my departure date, when my mother pokes her head into my bedroom and says, “Whatcha doing?”

  There is no point denying it. “Watching that video. You know. Neil.”

  And looking for my phone, which I can hear but cannot see. It rang a minute ago, and from the sound of it, I have voice mail or a text.

  “Elizabeth,” my mother says, sadly.

  “I know.” I’ve been watching Zoe’s blog a wee bit obsessively, trying to intuit some excuse or explanation, and feeling awful about the whole mess with Lauren but also feeling paralyzed.

  Five whole days since we’ve communicated at all.

  Eleven whole days until we meet. If we ever do.

  After a few days passed and the sting of it all started to fade, I realized something: If two or three of the most important people in your life are telling you something and you are resisting it with everything you have, there is a distinct possibly that what they are saying is true. That you are wrong and just don’t want to admit it. I guess I’ve been thinking an awful lot these past few days about fault and blame. Like whose fault was it that Lauren and I imploded?

  I am pretty sure it was mine.

  So I e-mailed Housing again on Thursday, and asked them to please disregard my initial e-mail, but they wrote back that Lauren had already been notified of my request and would need to be consulted. I’ve heard nothing definite about new assignments but can only assume it is happening, that I messed things up good.

  My mother comes into my room and stands at the mirror and starts to put her hair into a ponytail, so I close my laptop and hunt for my phone more aggressively. It is probably a message from Mark, maybe about something new to add to our relationship to-do list. We made up—I took the lead on apologizing so maybe I’m maturing at least a little bit?—and have been working our way through the list like crazy people. In the past four days, though I have experienced continued failure on my search for a gift for Mark, we’ve been bowling and mini-golfing; we’ve made out at the movies. We’ve officially picked “our song”—though it’s true that Mark sort of strong-armed that decision. I’d never heard “Breathless” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds before but once he pulled me up to dance to it with shared iPod buds on the boardwalk, how could I refuse? We crossed off slow-dancing, too.

  My mom looks at me through the mirror and cocks her head. “Why don’t you come to Zumba with me?”

  I laugh, or snort. Some combination. Then I find my phone and see the text from Lauren. Should we talk? The very idea of it makes me feel winded.

  My mother is standing up taller. “You’re not going to have very much fun in college, or in life, if you aren’t willing to try new things.”

  This new rational mom of mine is hard to argue with.

  “Fine,” I say, and I study her clothing so I have a clue as to what to wear. “I just need to change.”

  I also need time. Time to figure out what to do. Do I call Lauren? E-mail? Text? And if I do, what do I even say? What is there to talk about if she’s already been assigned a new roommate?

  And so there my mom and I are, twenty minutes later, at the dance school above a high-end photography studio in town, where the windows are full of portraits of big happy families gathered on windswept dunes and color-blocked beach blankets. I am the only person under the age of maybe thirty in the room, which has one massive mirrored wall, but whatever. My mother is so beyond thrilled that I’m actually there with her that her happiness is sort of catching—or maybe I’m just happy that Lauren reached out, and that there might be a chance to salvage things after all. So when my mother introduces me around, I’m not as embarrassed as I thought I would be. For a second I even think that it would be okay if she came to California with me, to help me move in.

  The Zumba teacher is a petite brunet named Meredith who looks around forty, with a medium-length brown bob and really white, straight teeth. She is wearing a cute sparkling top and genie pants and is so limber and lithe that I imagine she could actually contort herself into a tiny bottle or lamp. When the Latin hip-hop beat starts and the class begins to move, I try to follow along—at first just warming up with some basic steps—and I imagine myself being granted three wishes.

  The first is for my mother to always be as happy as she looks here, dancing to this music that makes my ears feel like they’re in a foreign country.

  We’ve added arms; I am getting winded for real.

  My second wish: for everything with Mark to end well, if it ends at all. No cheating, no lying, no bitterness. Please.

  We’re swinging hips; there is some turning.

  And my third wish is this: for things with Lauren to be okay again. I know I can try to grant myself this wish, if I can grow up about it. As I whirl and sweat and try to keep up, I feel myself getting ready to make the call.

  I am—there is no denying—a terrible Zumba dancer. No such thing as beginner’s luck here. There is not a single move I get right, a single sequence that my brain remembers in the correct order. But it doesn’t matter. My mother is smiling and I am laughing each time I goof up, and by the end of class I am wishing for one more wish. I wish my mother and I had started doing something like this together before now, before it feels like too little too late.

  At home after class, we both guzzle a ton of water, then head for the den. We’ve been watching Veronica Mars again these last few nights and my mom cues up the next episode but then she says, “You still haven’t called, have you?”

  For a second I wonder how she knows about Lauren’s text, but she is not talking about Lauren at all. She is talking about my dad.

  I shake my head and she plops down on the couch and pauses the show. “No time like the present.”

  So I go and get my phone and select my father’s number. I am not sure what I even want to happen, maybe for him not to answer. But he does.

  I say, “Oh, hi. It’s Elizabeth. Your daughter.”

  “Elizabeth!” he says. “Hi.”

  I have a zinger I’ve been working on at the ready: “I wasn’t sure your phone would work over there. In Italy.”

  There is silence for a moment, and I imagine he’s trying to decide whether to compound his lie, maybe tell me about some international roaming plan. But then he clears his throat and says, “I can explain.”

  “I doubt it.”

  He is quiet then, and I feel the need to get into specifics. “My freshman roommate lives in San Francisco. She went to the gallery. In case you were wondering how I knew.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, and he clears his throat again. “To be honest with you…”

  “That would be nice,” I snap.

  My mother raises her eyebrows at me as if to say, Easy does it.

  But why should I go easy on him?

  My dad says, “I was caught off-guard when you asked to come stay here. I mean, I’m happy you’ll be here for a few years, but I guess I haven’t figured out what that means for me, exactly. Or for you or us.”

  “Well, I haven’t, either,” I say, and I feel tears start to form; my mother moves closer, puts an arm around me. “But lying isn’t going to help anything. And I mean, Italy? What the hell?”

  “You’re right,” he says. “Of course you’re right. And I’m sorry. I was supposed to spend the month there and it fell through. I thought anything else would sound… I don’t know… like if I said I was busy at work or something… I’m really sorry.”

  I have no words.

  I feel worse than ever about that e-mail I sent Lauren.
>
  My dad is the one who fucked up.

  Not Lauren.

  Not me.

  “Why don’t you come out a few days early?” my dad says, finally, but I think about my mother and all she’s been through and is going through. It feels wrong to let him rob us of our final days together.

  “That won’t be necessary,” I say. “I’m hanging up now.”

  My mother pulls me into a hug, and I cry a little and she says, “Oh, who needs him, anyway?” and then we decide to go ahead and watch the show. But the theme song gets me thinking about Lauren. So when the episode ends and my mother heads up to bed, I step out into the backyard and sit in one of the lounge chairs, its plastic bands cool against my skin. I call Lauren’s number and I can hear it ringing on her end.

  She has probably changed her mind.

  She probably doesn’t really want to talk. Or if she does it is only to tell me that she wants nothing to do with me once we get to school.

  I lie back and look up at the stars—it’s a Big Dipper night—and wait for disappointment to arrive, but then her voice comes through the phone—“Hello?”—and, in spite of everything, I feel a skip of giddiness, like I’ve just seen a shooting star.

  I sit up. “Lauren?”

  “EB?”

  “Yes, it’s me.” I am entirely too nervous, entirely too freaked out.

  I hear voices, laughter, dishes, and she says, “Hi, sorry. We’re just sitting down to dinner so things are a little crazy.”

  “Oh.” I close my eyes and imagine the scene—her big family, a bustling kitchen, kids ricocheting around the room. “I’ll be quick,” I say. “I just talked to my dad, and you were right about him—but you know that—and I mean, well…” I am botching it! “Sorry I sort of suck at this. But I’m sorry. For my e-mail. And the new roommate request. I tried to undo it.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” she says in a rush, like she’s barely been able to hold the words in all this time. After a pause, she adds, “For sending the video the way I did. It was… yeah, I’m sorry.”

  I’m so relieved and also terrified that it’s hard to find enough air to form words. “Have you heard anything? Did you get a new roommate?”

  “I just need one minute,” she says, away from the phone, then to me she says: “They offered me a single.”

  I’m afraid to ask whether she took it, so I say, “Oh, well, that’s good, I guess,” and I feel like I might cry.

  There is an awful lot of noise on her end: happy shrieking. “Sorry, I can’t really hear,” she says. “What did you say?”

  “Please don’t take the single,” I plead, but I don’t think she hears because she says, “Sorry, but can I call you later or tomorrow or something?”

  “Sure,” I say. “Of course.”

  We hang up and I sit there and know that I am too impatient to wait for her to call me later—I’ll be asleep!—or tomorrow, so I open up a new e-mail and let words fly out of me. As I do, it’s like I can literally feel the air around me being cleared.

  Hey Lo,

  So that was weird! Talking on the phone! I know you said you’d call me back but I have to go to bed and also I have stuff I want to be sure to say and e-mail is better for that.

  I’ve been so angry. I guess you could tell that from my first response when you told me about meeting my father. I really felt like you’d betrayed me. But I know you thought you were doing the right thing. And I see now that you were. It doesn’t matter. What matters is what happens next. And I don’t want my deadbeat-dad drama to sour everything. And even though I didn’t feel this way at first, I’m grateful that you’re the kind of person who told me he was lying to me. I am sorry it took me a while to come around to that. I’m not even sure I can explain why I was so mad, I just was.

  At the risk of sounding like a weirdo, I want to tell you how much our e-mails have meant to me in general. I really needed someone like you this summer. Someone on the outside who could look in with a different perspective. So even if we end up hating each other the second we meet—if we even ever do!—I want to say thanks. When I first sent you an e-mail asking about microwaves and mini-fridges, I don’t know what I expected, but certainly not this.

  I really do hope we end up meeting and becoming (staying?) friends but I’ve also been thinking so much lately about how in ten days I think I’ll feel like this completely different person than I am now. In a lot of ways, I’ve been counting on that. A transformation. So I guess the person who shows up at college might not be the person who has been sending these e-mails.

  I’m not making sense, I know. What I really mean is thanks.

  (Have I said thanks yet? Because really I want to say thanks.)

  And sorry. I hope you turn down the single. I already told them it was a big misunderstanding and to ignore my request so if you say that, too, maybe we’ll still be roomies after all.

  Many thanks,

  EB

  Yes: White flag.

  No: F-bombs.

  Maybe so: A copy of the official Berkeley Roommate Agreement. If we end up being roomies, we can either sign it or openly mock it.

  When I hit Send I feel like a weight has been lifted. It is chilly out—I really want a sweater or a blanket—but I mostly don’t want this feeling to end. I find the Big Dipper again, connect the stars in my mind’s eye, and call Mark to tell him about Lauren and my dad and Zumba, and how maybe there’s hope for me yet.

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 18

  SAN FRANCISCO

  I’m in bed with my laptop on Sunday morning, and it’s hard to tell from EB’s e-mail whether or not she’s still at least a little bit mad at me. In a way it sounds like good-bye. On the other hand, she wants us to stay roommates. Though I don’t totally get how she could ever see what happened as some kind of betrayal, now that I’ve heard her voice e-mail feels different. Not quite so… final, I guess. She’s a regular person, like me, leaving home for the first time, scared, excited, imperfect and trying to figure it all out.

  Gertie runs into the room. “Why are you still in bed?”

  “Because it feels good.” My first instinct is to tell her to go back to the TV or whatever she was doing, but she bounces closer to my bed and her curls bounce with her, and that’s impossible to resist. “Come see.” I flip back the covers and scoot over to make room.

  She climbs in and snuggles against me. Where did she get curly hair, anyway? Each of my brothers and sisters looks enough like my parents that no one would ever doubt we’re all blood related. But they also each have some unique, mysterious physical characteristic that seems to come from nowhere.

  Sometimes I think of them all together as a unit, a herd of creatures that need containment.

  Other times, like now, I see the individual miracles that they are.

  “What are you doing?” Gertie asks, her big eyes on my computer screen.

  “Reading a letter. It’s from my friend EB.”

  “Eebee?”

  “EB. Here.” I show her Ebb’s sign-off. “Do you want to see a picture of her?”

  “Yeah.” Gertie’s voice is whispery.

  I pull up the picture Ebb sent, of her in a garden or park or something, standing under a tree with speckles of sun and shade on her face. Gertie leans toward the computer and touches Ebb’s head, leaving a smudge.

  “You know how me and you and P.J. share a room?”

  Her curls nod.

  “When I go to college I’m going to share a room with EB.”

  After she thinks about that for a few seconds, she says, “Me too?”

  There’s a rush of fluids to my nose and eyes. I can’t talk. Fortunately, Gertie loses interest fast when Jack dashes in to announce, “Papa made pancakes.”

  I close the laptop and take a big breath. “We better get some before Marcus eats them all.”

  Throughout breakfast my mom keeps asking—Don’t I want to do something with Keyon? Wouldn’t I like to go shopping with Zoe for a few school things? How about Da
d and I go out to lunch? When she ambushes me outside the bathroom, a few laundry items clutched in her hands, and suggests I go get a pedicure, as if I’d ever done that before or expressed any interest in it, I’ve finally had enough.

  “Mom. I want to stay home.”

  I can see from her face that she’s about to argue with me, maybe urge me to go hang gliding or explore my deeper self in a yoga class. I stop her by repeating, “I want to stay home. I don’t feel trapped. I don’t feel obligated. I want to be here with you and Dad and the kids, and help you clean up the pancake mess. I want to change Francis’s diaper and play Uno for hours with Jack even though he cheats.” My mom’s perky mask is crumbling. My emotions start to let go, too. “I… this… please…”

  She drops the laundry and we more or less weep in each other’s arms for who knows how long. When we finally dry up and rejoin the family, we have exactly the kind of day I want to have: loud, messy, chaotic, hilarious, and maddening.

  At one point, I think, Well, this day is the last of its kind. Next weekend I’ll be preoccupied with making sure I’m ready, and… But as I watch P.J. lug Francis around the living room like a sack of potatoes, and Jack and Gertie actually being quiet during their DVD, I think maybe it’s a mistake to think of anything as the “last.”

  School and my house are only an hour apart. Yes, I’ll be busy, but I’ll be here when I can and when I want. There are going to be hundreds of new kinds of days, and probably plenty of days that look an awful lot like this. I mean, I know it will be different. Maybe Ebb will come home with me on the weekends sometimes. Maybe other weekends I’ll be at Chico to see Keyon. Maybe I’ll get to go see Zoe in Seattle on a break. But home is always going to be home.

  “Be careful, Peej,” I say as Francis dangles from her arms like a bewildered cat. P.J. brings him over to where I’m sitting on the floor and drops him unceremoniously into my lap. He keels to the left but I catch him before he falls over.