Single, Carefree, Mellow. Katherine Heiny
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is not paying attention. She thinks of all the bars and restaurants along Broadway between 106th and Thirty-sixth and how she and Monique have met for dinner or drinks in almost all of them (this could be the reason they never seem to have any money) and she realizes that Anne could have picked one of those places and then Sasha would have felt bad every time she walked past it, and it would have ruined whatever happy memory she had of being there. But instead Anne chose a bar Sasha had never been to, where she wasn’t known, which she didn’t even like. Sasha never has to go there again.
Sasha probably would have slept right through the appointment with the real estate agent on Friday except that Monique called and woke her to say that she’d just talked to the Brooklyn branch of her office. When they were all on the Upper West Side two weeks ago and went drinking and then had slices of Koronet Pizza with her and Sasha, they all got severe food poisoning, with two of them ending up in the hospital.
“But it can’t have been from the pizza,” Sasha says, “because we all bought slices, and you and I didn’t get sick.”
“Exactly!” Monique says. “Apparently we’re immune because we eat there so much.”
“I don’t know whether to be excited or worried,” Sasha says.
“Excited,” Monique says definitively. “We’re like some new super-species!”
After that it’s impossible to go back to sleep, so Sasha gets up and gets dressed and goes to meet Carson and the real estate agent. She’s only fifteen minutes late, which is really only five minutes late for her, but she can see as she approaches that the agent is tense, though Carson looks relaxed.
“Hello,” Sasha says, as she walks up to the building’s entrance, where they are waiting for her.
“You must be Sasha,” the real estate agent says. She’s a woman in her thirties with spiky brown hair and Sasha can tell from her expression that she was expecting Sasha to be different somehow, more sophisticated, maybe. She wonders if that’s going to be her life from now on if she stays with Carson, people expecting her to be something she’s not.
The apartment is on the third floor of a building on East Sixty-seventh Street, directly across from an ice cream store called Peppermint Park. These are both strikes against it because Sasha has always felt she doesn’t belong on the Upper East Side, and besides, how much weight would she gain with an ice cream parlor right across the street?
But she and Carson and the real estate agent go up and tour the apartment, and Sasha decides that the main thing wrong with it is that there’s nothing wrong with it. She and Monique concluded long ago that you’re not really living in New York unless there’s something wildly negative about your apartment, like the one they lived in where the shower was in the kitchen, or the one in the building The New York Times dubbed “the house of horrors” because so many people committed suicide there. In their current apartment, you can roll a marble downhill from the front door to the back of the kitchen.
The real estate agent says, “I know Carson especially liked this place because it has a room for you to write in. It’s just a little hidey-hole, but I think you’ll like it.”
The real estate agent leads her to an extremely small sunny room with a perfectly square window, and just enough space for a desk and a writer. Currently, Sasha has no desk, she has to use the kitchen table after she clears Monique’s breakfast dishes off it, and the only view is across the air shaft into their neighbor’s kitchen. This has never bothered Sasha, though. She does not even know where she is ten minutes after she starts typing.
She walks over and looks out the window of the hidey-hole, wishing that the stupid real estate agent had not called it that because now she doubts she can ever think of it any other way.
Carson comes up behind her and puts his arms around her. “Do you like this room?”
“I love it,” Sasha says. But really, she is thinking that Monique would love it. She would love that Carson chose an apartment with a room for Sasha to write in. Finally, he has done something Monique would approve of and this thought gives Sasha a little stab of sorrow, as sharp as a splinter.
Carson rests his chin on the top of her head and Sasha leans back against him. Across the street, a man and four children have come out of Peppermint Park, and the man is holding four cones and some napkins, while the children jump up and down around him like pigeons around a picnicker.
“They look happy, don’t they?” Carson asks.
“Yes,” Sasha says softly, but she is wondering how anyone else can think they are happy at this particular moment, when she alone knows the meaning of happiness. She holds it right now in the palm of her hand.
HOW TO GIVE THE WRONG IMPRESSION
You never refer to Boris as your roommate, although of course that’s exactly what he is. You’re actually apartment mates and you only moved in together the way any two friends move in together for the school year, nothing romantic. Probably Boris would be horrified if he knew how you felt. You’re a psych major, you know this is unhealthy, but when you speak of him you always say Boris, or, better yet, This guy I live with. He may be just your roommate but not everyone has to know.
You buy change-of-address cards with a picture on the front, of a bear packing a trunk. You send them to your friends and your parents. After some hesitation, you write “Boris and Gwen” on the back, above the address. After all, he does live here.
You help Boris buy a bed. This is a great activity for you, it’s almost like being engaged. You lie on display beds with him in furniture stores. Toward the end of the day, you are tired and spend longer and longer just resting on the beds.
Boris lies next to you, telling you about the time his sister peed in a display toilet at Sears when she was three. You glance at him sideways. He looks tired, too, although the whites of his eyes are still bright—the kind of eyes you thought only blue-eyed people had, but his eyes are brown.
A salesman approaches, sees you, smiles. He knocks on the frame of the bed with his knuckles. “Well, what do you folks think?” he asks.
Boris turns to you. You ask the salesman about interest rates, delivery fees, assembly charges. You never say, Well, it’s your bed, Boris, in front of the salesman.
When your parents come through town and offer to take you and Boris out to dinner, you accept. But this is risky, this all depends on whether you’ve implied anything to your parents beyond what was on the change-of-address card. You think about it and decide it’s pretty safe, but you spend a great deal of time hoping your father will not ask Boris what his intentions are.
Boris, love of your life, goes to the salad bar three times and doesn’t stick a black olive on each of his fingers, a thing he often does at home. On the way out, he holds your hand. You are the picture of young love. Boris may make the folks’ annual Christmas letter.
You always have boyfriends. You try to get them taller than Boris, but it’s not easy. Sometimes after they pick you up, they roll their shoulders uncomfortably in the elevator and say, “Gwen, I think Boris is going to slash my tires or something, he’s so jealous.”
Snort. “Oh, please,” you say. Later, during a lull in the conversation, you ask casually, “What makes you think Boris is jealous of you?” One of your boyfriends says it’s because Boris found six hundred excuses to come into the living room while you two were drinking wine. Another one says it’s the way Boris shook hands with him. This is interesting. You were still in your bedroom when that happened.
Whatever they answer, you file it away and replay it later in your mind.
You always encourage Boris to ask Dahlia Kosinski out.
When he comes back from his ethics study group and says, “Oh, my God, Dahlia looked so incredibly gorgeous tonight,” you do not say, I heard