Senior Moments

Senior year in college, I lived out in the sticks in a rickety old house with three friends. (Well, two friends and a flaky girl who went to school with us.) We rented the place for the ridiculous sum of $400 a month, if memory serves, from a guy who’d inherited it from his mother.

Back home in Maryland after graduation, I mused to my former housemate Joyce: “I wonder if the old lady died in the house or at a hospital.”

Giving me an odd look, Joyce said, “She died in your room. I thought you knew that.”

She probably froze to death, because the house didn’t seem to have a shred of insulation. The cold wasn’t so bad on its own, but any wind blew right through. The storm windows made as much sense as jewelry on a pauper … or a corpse.

“I’ve been trying to think what this place reminds me of,” said a visiting friend, deciding: “It’s like a bunch of shacks stuck together.”

To me it seemed more like a collection of rec rooms. Most of the ceilings were covered with acoustical tile, while the walls sported the kind of flimsy paneling that once graced basements across the land (real wood in the older part of the house, simulated in the newer part). My room even had a linoleum floor.

The property was fairly large, and we were responsible for cutting the grass, using an ancient, rusty riding mower. The steering wheel was long gone, replaced by two pairs of vice-grip pliers. They did the job, but it’s not a solution I would recommend for, say, a car. Trash pickup was once a week, and if we forgot to haul the cans out to the road, we had to either wait a whole week or find somewhere else to dispose of it – usually a dumpster behind a big store or a strip mall, furtively, after dark.

I developed a neurotic habit that year without realizing it: whenever I went grocery shopping, I had the feeling we needed margarine. This went on for some time until Joyce called me over to the refrigerator one day and pointed out the vast oleo stockpile at the back. Years later, I would have a similar episode with Calvin Klein underwear.

Something weird seemed to happen whenever I left town. After a trip to the mountains, I returned to find a dead chicken on the lawn like some hillbilly version of a Mafia threat. It was a huge, black thing, and stranger than its presence was the lack of any evident trauma. No blood, no missing feathers – it was as if the poor thing had just been strolling by and had a stroke.

A few months later, when I noticed a nasty odor in the kitchen, my housemates couldn’t smell it. I went home for spring break, but Joyce stayed behind. When I got back, she said, “Oh my god, you were right! I used the oven the other day, and the smell was so bad I had to turn it off. We need to find out what’s in there.”

So powerful was the fetor, we expected to discover a family of rats or maybe a python. It was therefore a surprise to find just a small, desiccated mouse stuck to the broiler. We threw it out, but avoided using the oven for the rest of the year.

After spending Easter weekend at the beach, I found a message from Joyce that my grandmother had called. When I called her back, she said, “A woman answered the phone earlier. Was that your maid?”

Choking back the laughter, I managed: “No, that was my roommate.”

“Oh,” she said, pausing. “You live with a woman?”

“Two of them, actually. Two girls, two guys.”

“Oh.”

I later called my dad to make sure she hadn’t had a heart attack. But first I shared the conversation with my maid, who enjoyed it as much as I did.