I’ve talked before about how, rightly or wrongly, I tend to compare the girls. I know I keep coming back to the food, but they’re just so comically different. Ms. B. was always game for anything so long as she could eat it. “Spinach? I LOVE spinach! Beets? I LOVE beets! Brussel Sprouts? My FAVORITE!!!” The Peanut is more, “Cookies? No thanks, I ate last week.”
(Brief side track: When Ms. B. was 7, she and I made a trip to the grocery store where, as she watched me scoop Brussel sprouts into a thin plastic bag, she got so excited she started to spin and jump up and down, chanting, “Brussel Sprouts! Brussel Sprouts! Yes, Yes, Yes!!!” The entire produce section just stopped and stared at us with a look of, “Who IS this kid?”)
Lately, I’ve also found myself playing a game of, “When Ms. B. was the Peanut’s age, she and I …” The most recent example: When Ms. B. was the Peanut’s current age, she and I moved into my first place. Before then, I had lived with my parents for 18 years in the same house in Abilene, Kansas. Then I briefly lived with Ms. B’s father in a place that was supposed to be ‘ours,’ but felt overwhelmingly ‘his.’ When I had “it’ll be okay”-ed myself into a corner so small I couldn’t breathe, I left and moved back home with my parents for a summer. Even though other college kids go back home for the summer, that whole summer felt weird and uncomfortable for me. It was an awkward time for many reasons, but it also highlighted the push and pull between the fact that I was an adult, a mother with a child, but also a kid, a teenager whose parents naturally wanted to know where I was going and when I would be home.
At the end of that summer, when Ms. B. was 21 months old, the age the Peanut is now, Ms. B. and I moved out of my parents’ house, again, and into Apartment G7 on Emery Road. It was a large one bedroom. Ms. B. would have the bedroom, we would share closet space, and I would have the living room. It was walking distance to campus, so I wouldn’t have to pay for a parking pass. Rent was $400 a month, all utilities but electric included. It felt high and pushed the limits of my budget, but was the cheapest apartment I could find that wasn’t scary-dirty and small. I say how much rent was because I’m pretty sure it will seem quaint and laughably low in not too long. Probably already does.
Ms. B. and I didn’t have much stuff and by the time I was ready to go to bed that evening all of our boxes were fully unpacked. I hugged my parents good-bye. A friend stuck around to help me assemble some furniture and, when that was done, left as well. I’m sure I stayed up later, listening to music and fidgeting with the placement of books and dishes. But what I remember the most about that day was laying down for bed, taking a deep full-body sigh, and feeling total peacefulness. It was, finally, just me and Ms. B. and, after two years of feeling smothered and suffocated and like someone else was in control, I had more emotional space than I could fathom.
Apartment G7 had many flaws. The walls were thin, so that I could hear the vocal major who lived above me sing arias while having sex with her boyfriend. It sounds like a bad joke. When I tell people about it now they don’t believe me, but I promise it was true. One neighbor had parties so loud they vibrated my apartment enough to set off Ms. B’s motion activated Sesame Street kitchen. As the bass thumped, I had to listen to Cookie Monster say, over and over, “Oh! Let’s make soup in the red pot!” Ms. B. never woke up. Even then, as now, she slept like a tank. The management was non-responsive. Negligent even. Early one morning Ms. B. and I walked out to find the world had been covered in ice and the steps to the parking lot hadn’t been cleared or salted. I picked her up, not wanting her to fall on the icy steps, and, in true two-year-old fashion, Ms. B. began to fight in my arms, outraged at not being able to walk down the stairs herself. Her thrashing threw me off-balance and I slipped on the steps. Ms. B flew forward into a large pile of snow, unharmed, laughing and thinking she had just been a part of the most-fun-game-ever. I landed on my back on the steps, a look in the mirror later that day showing the striped bruises from the treads across my back.
Even with all of its flaws, I think that first night, that deep peaceful breath, that feeling of space, made me fall in love with Apartment G7.
That fall, two days a week I had an awkward four hour break between two of my classes. My friend Amy commuted in from out of town for classes and had a schedule virtually identical to mine. The large break meant she, too, had four hours she needed to kill, so I invited her to come over to my place. You would think, with as much as we had to do, that we would have used that lengthy break to get some homework done. Nah. She and I were both Edward Norton fans and the original plan was to have an Edward Norton film festival that semester. We would watch a new Edward Norton movie during each lengthy break between classes. “Rounders” was first up. I was fortunate enough to have received new, thick carpet in my apartment before moving in, and I didn’t have a couch. So we popped “Rounders” in the VCR and spread out across the soft, new carpet in front of my glorious 12″ tv.
The windows in my living room faced west and as the day moved past noon the living room would fill with sunlight. Great light can cover up a multitude of bad apartment sins. When I think of that apartment, almost all of my memories are coated in that afternoon sunshine. Laying on the soft carpet, with the sun covering us like a blanket, Amy and I were asleep in probably 15 minutes. We woke up several hours later, sheepish but rested, and decided that we would just start over with “Rounders” the next time. By the third afternoon of falling asleep on my floor within 15 minutes, we started calling it what it was: A scheduled three-hour nap two days a week. We never did get past the first fifteen minutes of “Rounders.” The phrase “Edward Norton Film Festival” became shorthand for “Decadent Napping.”
D and I started hanging out and then dating that fall and he started to join us as well. For an entire semester the three of us would go back to my apartment after our morning class, eat a lunch of hot pockets or tomato soup, and then sprawl out and take a nap in a patch of sunshine on my living room floor. I think I can safely say that all three of us love Apartment G7 if only for the naps.
Apartment G7 is where Ms. B’s personality started to really emerge. Ms. B. would beg me to chase her, running in circles from the entry to the living room to the breakfast nook to the kitchen to the entry to the living room to the breakfast nook to the kitchen. We would have silly dance parties to Disney songs, twisting and jumping and giggling until we were out of breath. Her hair was always a wild halo of fuzzy gold curls around her head. Her hands were always sticky. Ms. B. started to get ornery in Apartment G7, too. She locked herself in the bathroom and D had to break the door to get her out. She shoved all of her crayons in the VCR. She would fight bedtime, always. One night, after fighting her for hours, I put the baby gate across her bedroom door, left her crying, and went to go regain my sanity out on the deck for a few minutes with D. Every few minutes we would open the patio door to hear if she was still going, laughing because it reminded us of this scene from “Ace Ventura.” Apartment G7 is where, as near as I can tell, Ms. B’s first memories come from. She talks about the vague placement of furniture, a large blue papasan chair she would curl up in with her blankets, the walk to the front door, a scary memory of watching me accidentally spill boiling water on my hand.
Apartment G7 was where we were on September 11th, home with Ms. B. who was sick. I didn’t have cable. I learned about it on NPR, at first thinking it must be some sort of “War of the Worlds” type spoof because it couldn’t possibly be real. Apartment G7 is where I first read a funny little kid’s book called “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” It’s where I had my first glass of wine. It’s where I killed my first houseplant.
Apartment G7 is where D and I fell in love, which probably deserves its own story. I was a young single mom. Going out typically wasn’t much of an option for me, so we inevitably spent a lot of time in Apartment G7. It’s where I really started to learn to cook, something that now is one of my favorite things to do. The joke is that when we were 20 years old I started cooking and D never left. I made some weird messed-up dinners in Apartment G7, and D, God bless ‘im, ate them all without hesitation.
I let my lease on G7 go at the end of the year. My cousin was moving out of the dorms and was looking for a roommate. And there was a guy who I had seen around town, and then around my apartment complex, and then hovering around my building specifically. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something ‘off’ about him that immediately made me uncomfortable, and I always kept my interactions with him to a tight polite smile. Then one evening I came out of my apartment, Ms. B. (happily this time) in my arms, to find him sitting on the front steps. As I clutched Ms. B. to my chest and rushed past him, he said, “I notice your boy isn’t coming around any more. You two must be all alone.” (Seriously, can you think of a scarier thing to say to a woman? D, in fact, had left just the week before for a study abroad program). I immediately made a u-turn, walked over to the manager’s office and with my hands trembling and my voice shaking, complained about the psycho who knew way too much about me and was lurking on my steps. I maybe should have called the police, but after that meeting with my property manager, I never saw him again. It was the most responsive my property manager had ever been, although interestingly she was replaced before the end of the month as well. The next year I learned the creep was the manager’s husband when he made the local news. He got into legal trouble for stalking, sexually harassing, and spying on female tenants at another apartment complex. Even though I never saw him again, the whole incident was enough to convince me that I didn’t want to live alone if I could help it, so I agreed to let G7 go and move in with my cousin.
The apartment I shared with her was in the same apartment complex as G7, just one building over, but felt like an absolute depressing dump. It WAS an absolute depressing dump. Located in the basement, it certainly didn’t have the same soft carpet and afternoon sunshine. More importantly, it didn’t have the same capacity for memories, the same feeling of happiness and trying something new while at the same time settling in to something comfortable and natural. It was like dating two brothers, only to learn that while they both grew up in the same house, with the same mother and father, one was a gentleman and one was an asshole. I think the contrast only further cemented my love for Apartment G7, one more reason why I can still feel so nostalgic about something as innocuous as a college apartment ten years later.
