(Originally published in The Missouri Review)

Copyright Daniel Akst
All rights reserved

The first person to answer our ad wasn't suitable at all. Under "last residence" on the form we made up for these prospective roommates she put down a place with "manor" in its name, and during the interview Mother seemed airily indulgent, almost humoring, and didn't even take any notes, which told me the woman had no chance. "Manor my foot," Mother said later, and I could see jutting from her mules the sharp, painted nails and the toes crabbed from years of cutting-edge footwear. She was sure that the "manor" had been a mental institution, and her judgment in such matters was usually sound.

The next person wasn't much of a fit either, it turned out, although she actually moved into my old room for a couple of weeks. She ran an elevator at Lord & Taylor, white gloves and everything, and I must say that Mother's instincts about this straight-backed individual turned out to be right, or if not then her instincts simply got sufficiently in the way of things to cause trouble. It wasn't all our fault; I admit our housekeeping wasn't up to the standards of someone in a position like hers, what with the tub and all ("so many rings you'd think it was Saturn," she wrote to her sister in Providence, on a postcard I was sure she wanted me to read), but she was someone who let little things get to her, like the cafe au lait the three of us drank, Mother and I and the cat, that is. I confess that we never offered her any, but we felt, Mother and I, that that would be crossing some line between family and tenant. Miss Butterman's remonstrations about the evil effects caffeine was sure to have on "young ladies and dumb animals" fell on deaf ears. "Well now it seems that Miss Butterman, a complete stranger to man, child or beast, is going to tell me how to raise a family," Mother said with haughty surprise, as if her needing any advice of this kind was so preposterous that you just had to laugh. Miss Butterman didn't approve of our smoking together, either.

I'm not even sure I approved, for that matter. It was confusing. Like any adolescent, I wanted to hide some things from Mother, the usual stuff at least, but there was little that she minded except the air of normality that I craved. We were supposed to be co-conspirators. She cut holes in my bra cups, tried to sponsor my exploits, explained all about boys. They sounded dumb in her telling, but I was still pretty leery and went to school with my books firmly clasped to my chest, flanked by a bodyguard of girlfriends and gossip.

I was becoming a project for Miss Butterman, who tried to get me to stand up straight and wear white gloves to school. The gloves part wasn't so bad, actually; I created quite a stir in those things, touching someone's arm in a show of intimacy and noblesse, or fingering an earring to show off my jawbone. A couple of other girls started wearing them, and then one added a pillbox hat, until it got too hot out and we gave the whole thing up. It was true, we were without discipline. In New York in the early Eighties, nobody had discipline. We’d never even heard the word. Anyway, the gloves couldn't save Miss Butterman. When we finally got rid of her she said I was the one she really felt bad for, but I think by that time she felt bad for herself. She was a born aunt, I concluded, and for almost a full minute I lamented the tragedy of her thwarted destiny.

Then we had to pay for another ad, and this time Mother said she was going to be more accurate in describing us, so as to spare everyone disappointment "down the road." In retrospect I see that Mother didn't just want a roommate, she wanted a man, and in the age before personal ads were common (Mother of course would have called them common anyway) this was a golden opportunity she wasn't about to forgo in favor of some "fastidious spinster," a term she favored almost as much as "my foot." She had excuses; she felt the place needed a man, there were things to be fixed, items to be "put up," a certain earthy fragrance missing. "The place smells too flowery, too ferrous with just the two of us." She was always sending me to the dictionary with her high-toned pronouncements. "You know, I think we'd be safer with a man," she'd say all of a sudden, as if she had just thought of it. "In case of an intruder, or a catastrophe of some kind."

Mother worried about such things, I knew, but she worried most that her worries would etch themselves on her smooth features and she would lose the girlish quality she most prized in herself. As a matter of fact she was starting to look a little worn to me, and since the economic climate in our apartment had required us to double up in bed, Mother’s worries had had a very direct impact on me. Not wanting to get fret lines, she'd sleep with her palm against her forehead, her elbow sticking straight up, to keep herself from frowning all night and ruining her looks. She never did get a wrinkled forehead, but sooner or later she'd fall into a deep sleep and the elbow would come crashing down, often striking me in the face. Sometimes this would happen three or four times a night, leaving me sleepless and grumpy the next morning. Once she came down squarely on my nose, and when I woke up unable to breathe I was sure she had broken it. I think the bleeding finally made her stop.

With the very first man who showed up, we seemed to hit the jackpot. "You see?" Mother said later. "With a man things are different." And they were different. Peter was an orator, a polymath, an enthusiast, a sufferer of the world's sorrows, and as it turned out, penniless. He showed up that first day in a black beret, his mouth surrounded by a bronze mustache and goatee, blue eyes shiny in a way we'd later call twinkling, shoulders back, pot belly thrust cheerily forward as he surveyed the world before him with never-ending surprise and amusement. His speech was stentorian, his smile cat-like and wide. We thought he was adorable.

Peter moved in and, like a tomcat who delineates his turf by spraying, enveloped our little cloister in his maleness. What was now his room took on a sourdough smell that seemed to waft out into the hall; you'd pass through it as if through a cloud on your way in or out of the apartment. Or you'd walk into the bathroom after his shower and know. The whole apartment really did smell different, of soap and musk and cheap after-shave. The effect on Mother could only be described as aromatherapy. She became even more careful about her attire, wearing shoes and stockings even in the house. Her preparations reached a sort of apogee in the late afternoon, when she knew he would soon return from his three-day-a-week job at a library not far from home.

Peter made money this way, but he was mainly an author. He was writing a book on how to use Post-its to organize the material for writing a book, and before long there were Post-Its all over his room, covering the walls, climbing up the desk lamp and down the legs of the table, as if an avant-garde artist had moved in and shingled the place in yellow slips of paper. Sometimes I'd catch him in there with his head in his hands. I felt he was getting an inkling that Post-Its were not ideal for organizing your thoughts in order to write books.

"Dostoyevski didn't have Post-Its," I needled at dinner one night. Unlike other tenants, Peter was invited to take meals with us. "Darwin didn't even know about Post-Its."

"Genius does what it must," he answered, grandly indulgent. "Talent does what it can."

"I don't understand."

"You will someday," Mother said with a knowing smile, which I recognized as a cover. She didn't understand either.

"Dostoyevski wouldn't have needed Post-Its," Peter explained patiently, giving my Mother an irritating look that said something like, what do the young know? "But the rest of us mere mortals often find it useful to have a little help from technology. And I daresay old Charlie Darwin would have taken a trunk full of Post-Its along on the Beagle had they existed at the time. Didn't Leonardo make the earliest drawings of the things we now know as Post-Its?" His eyes got that shiny look that was supposed to be a twinkle. "Didn't Einstein postulate that a piece of paper that sticks again and again was entirely within the realm of mathematical possibility?" Mother, staying on the safe side, arranged a blank face.

We chalked up Peter's pedantry to the Y chromosome that seemed to explain so much else about him. All of these things struck us as quintessentially male, even though we had not cohabited with a member of this strange tribe since I was the tiniest of babes. Peter drank six-packs of Schmidts, for example, "because it is beer, and because it is cheap," as he explained. When he grew comfortable with us, he belched, albeit with a kind of intentional, post-modern relish, as if it wasn't so much a venting as an ironic comment on the need to vent, and on the distance gained from these echoes of manly crudeness one could now safely recreate.

He lacked our prickliness. I'd seen Mother with one of her friends at times just bursting with umbrage, taking every comment as a pinprick to unleash the stuff all over some unsuspecting observation. "Well I don't know what you mean by that," Mother would say, in a kind of Margaret Dumont impersonation, only serious. I'd do it myself, sometimes, to her. It was a way to be, it kept people on their toes. Sometimes ours was a home for the flayed, sensitive even to the critic's breath. Peter wasn't like this at all; he didn't take much offense, even when he ought to have, and he had the ability to shrug things off, or brood right through them, I could never tell which.

He was balding, too, although very hairy elsewhere, and he wore heavy shoes, in which he sauntered up and down the long hall between his room and the kitchen as if to let us savor the clomp-clomp-clomp on the old wood floors. I think he sensed that we were fascinated and impressed by the deep maleness of him. He screwed the lids onto jars so tightly we couldn't get them open, and when we noted this, marveling more than complaining really, he laughed and kept right on screwing them down the same way. It got so I wouldn't think of eating peanut butter unless he was around to get the lid off.

I called him Peter Rabbit, but he charmed me too. I admit it. When spring came we were all getting along pretty well, despite the emergence in Peter of a few unfortunate habits that tried Mother's limited patience. He was typically behind on the rent, and therefore became sheepish about his appetites, which in our abstemious household ranked as Brobdingnagian. He ate more than Mother and I put together, even when the fare reflected his own terrifying culinary propensities, and he went through tons of soap, toilet paper and other disposables. Mother held her tongue, but I would emerge from the bathroom in a rage when that new bar of special bath soap I'd just unwrapped was reduced to a sliver in a puddle on the sink. I knew where the soap was going; we were doing Macbeth in English class, and I had seen Peter wash his hands. He would lather them extravagantly up to the elbows, breathing hard through his nose, splash water all over the place rinsing them off, and then hold his arms with his fingers pointed skyward like a surgeon who's just scrubbed, until he could nudge the door with a hip and get his hands on the towel hung behind it.

Peter's lack of a grip on this problem was made clear to us when he came home one day with a dozen eggs, emptied them into the door of the refrigerator, and then marched the styrofoam package into the bathroom. In the days ahead, he filled each of the depressions in this egg-carton with slivers of soap that he had compressed into balls about the size and shape of an egg, until before long the carton was filled with a dozen such soap eggs, one or two sprouting curly little hairs from Lord knew where. Mother tried to make him get rid of it, but he argued that it was a perfectly sensible measure gleaned from a book of household hints perused in a second-hand bookstore downtown, and although she didn't let on, I knew she was shocked--I could see an eyebrow starting to levitate before I looked away in embarrassment-- to hear me take his side, for by then I was in love with him.

I think it was those ablutions of his that got me. In the morning I pretended it was really interesting to watch him shave around his mustache and goatee, although mostly I watched the hair on his thick arms and the subtle movements of their sinews as he dragged the razor across his skin. The sound made me shiver a little, like a nail on a blackboard, but I didn't care. I loved the way he splashed water on his face, and the sound of it against the old tiles all over the walls and floor, pieces of the ceiling hanging down in strips like stalactites from the roof of a cave. He shaved in a T-shirt, which was not a bad look for Peter, though the V-neck drew attention to his belly in a way I might have avoided. Still, it was better than the towel I'd occasionally catch a glimpse of him in, his wet hair plastered down over his forehead as he hastened for his room, looking like some Roman caught in the baths just as the barbarians arrived. He was such an odd duck, I was coming to see. It was fascinating to be in love with him.

I had youth on my side. I took to lounging in Peter's room when he was out, reading his books and soaking up the faintly doggy odor of the pill-covered woolen blanket with which he made up his bed. It was the only made bed in the house, of course, and I liked that he had brought this martial tradition into our lives, as if some drill instructor had bounced quarters off the fabric until he'd got it right. Peter had never been in the military, but he acted as if he had. His heavy black shoes were always luridly polished, and he possessed worn leather kits for this and for his toiletries as well. In my kid sister role, and as the daughter of the landlady, so to speak, I could get away with hanging around his room, and besides, it was a refuge from Mother, who had tried to forbid me only to have Peter insist he didn't mind. I thought of sticking my tongue out at her, reasserting my girlishness this way in order to throw them both off the trail, but decided against it. One could push Mother too far.

One warm afternoon as I drowsed through biology, our class was blown to pieces by a bomb scare. It was late enough in the day and in the term that the principal didn't insist, as he had in the past, that we all hang around the schoolyard in the heat lest bomb scares be encouraged by the reward of shortened school days, and so I went home with a balmy breeze in my skirts and just that slightly nervous feeling I always got toward the end of a school year as each day came to a close. I slammed the door as usual to announce myself and started toward the kitchen when I heard a lot of rustling in the room I shared with Mother, who usually lurked elsewhere in the apartment by day.

"Mother?"

"It's all right, dear," she said airily. "Peter was just helping me with the latch on back of the door. We'll open up in a minute."

"If only we had a drill," I heard him say loudly.

In the sepulchrally lit bathroom, I ran a hot shower, noticing how no one ever cleaned the white deposits from the metal showerhead; with the water pouring out of it, it was like a sunflower. I undressed carefully and beheld myself for a long time in the mirror over the sink, looking at Peter's straight-edged razor and the shelf full of pills and rubbing alcohol and other temporary problem solvers that could become permanent with such ease. Then I looked down at the yellow styrofoam carton on the sink, a farmhouse with giant silo etched in blue on the lid. With another of those nail-on-a-blackboard noises, I opened the carton and, selecting with care, withdrew one of Peter's soap eggs. It was a variegated one that must have been made of several kinds of soap--white Ivory, green Irish Spring, pink Dove, all moulded together so that it looked fit almost for the Easter we had just passed. Wielding it like a rock, I scrawled SO WHAT on the mirror.

"Lily?" I could hear Mother calling faintly. The shower was noisy. "Lily?"