Home Alone

Life is not really how I imagined it. I am a newly-minted Assistant Professor, flush from my encounter with the dreaded academic job market (it was almost as bad as it is now, applications to PhD programs came with peel off-warning labels, like boxes of cigarettes). I have a salary, which seems like a lot of money to me, since I have been living off a graduate stipend of 5K and a lot of part-time teaching. In my new life I will have undergraduate students for a whole four years, and graduate students for…longer. I will be living alone, in my own apartment, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

If I had known in 1984 that adulting could be a word, I would have used it, smugly.

My apartment, the centerpiece of my adulting, is unpleasant.  It is big enough, certainly, with a large kitchen and a nice-sized bedroom. It is in indeed Cambridge, but not the pretty part around Harvard. Everything about the space in my new place is ugly. The kitchen cabinets are peeling and persistently sticky from the residue of a few sad floral cutouts with which a previous occupant had tried to beatify the room. The wood floors sag and moan at night. The strip windows huddle up to popcorned ceilings. The living room is almost completely dark and is heated by a giant oil stove with sharp corners. Mostly, though, the place stinks. A few weeks after wondering about a smell both sickly sweet and shockingly bitter, I discover that it comes from the basement of the house my apartment is in, that can only be accessed by my back door, ensuring many visits from my landlady. On none of these visits does she do anything about the smell. “Mice” she says, pointing to a small pile of turds. “Rats,” I say, because the turds look big to me, but mostly just to say something. The house is fenced in with hurricane wire, the backyard filled with bricks and dead grass. The façade of the house, with tis faux wood siding, was replicated along all the adjacent streets. There was nothing to look at, not even anything to envy.

And that is in the fall, New England’s most beautiful season. Come winter, and it does, soon and often, the street fills with grey slush, the apartment with grey light. It costs so much to heat the place that I have to close off the living room, shutting the door on the oil stove which scares and sometimes scars me. There is a lot I don’t remember about that apartment, even when I close my eyes and move in my memory from room to room, something I do sometimes when I am having trouble sleeping. I cannot visualize the bathroom, or the table where I ate my solitary meals. Only the oil stove and the cabinets come fully to mind.

Before I became an adult, crouched in my bed as the heat sputtered and the mice (or rats) frolicked noisily in the walls, I had lived in a series of student houses and apartments, with as many as 21 other people. Ironically, many of the places I lived as a student were—or had been—quite pretty. Take for example, two places I lived as a graduate student in Philadelphia, a turn-of-the century row house and an apartment from, I think, the 1920s. The first, a dark little house on 45th street I shared with five other people, boasted two stained-glass windows, whose ruby light glowed through the dirt and neglect making patterns on the scuffed wood floors. One of the bigger bedrooms was once a living room, entered by etched glass doors without a chip on them. After living in the smallest room for a year, I qualified for the biggest and grandest bedroom that boasted a giant built-in Victorian wardrobe with a beveled mirror and cupids . There were rats (or mice) in that house as well, but they kept their distance, except once when one died, tragically, in the toaster oven.

In the last two years of graduate school I moved from that house to a large 4-person apartment on 43rdstreet. I got the best bedroom—the erstwhile living room with a bay window in which I grew avocado plants from pits when it was still possible to do so. The room was so big, I hosted the weekly meetings of the Progressive Student Alliance there, as well as dances on the shiny parquet floor. The room we actually designated  as a living room was uninspiring, with a slightly musty plaid couch, but my room was a party room. There were doors, big, ornate wooden doors, but I almost never closed them.

If part of my adulting fantasy had to do with not having housemates, with closing doors, and perhaps with not dancing, much (perhaps most) of it, had to do with two ambitions: decorating a home, and cooking for myself. I imagined for myself a color scheme that would lead the eye subtly from room to room; while I would not go for what was then called “matchy matchy” décor, my home would not be a lumber room jumble of mismatched woods. I would have real bookcases that did not involve cinder blocks, and a mattress that no one else had ever slept on. Needless to say, I never quite decorated. My salary, that seemed at first  to be so princely, oozed away  away in heat and gas bills. There was no getting the couch I wanted in the living room because of the oil stove. Nothing I could think of went with or mitigated the filthy shag carpet in the bedroom. I had imagined snuggling up to read in the perfect chair, scaled to my body and colored to my mood. After a few months it was too cold in the apartment to spend much time out of bed. for snuggling of any kind. I bought a very heavy quilt, and some sheets with poppies on them and called it a day—and a night.

Cooking for one went a little better, although it took some time to figure out how not to cook for six, eight, or thirty people. I eschewed casseroles and quiche, not returning to the latter until this very last week when I gave in and made the official Coronation Quiche with broad beans and fennel. I bought tiny quantities of expensive food items—sole, shrimp, heavy cream—and cooked elaborate dishes in a set of new pans bought in the heady first weeks of being employed. I started eating meat, and bought, about once a month, an almost invisible speck of steak and seared it in butter and fancy peppercorns. Since I did not yet have friends, I had no one to eat with. When I started getting to know people, we would meet in restaurants in areas of town I could not begin to afford to live in. I was truly, for better or worse, living alone.

As I look back on what was good and bad about that time, I feel how much my life has changed. Sitting in a largish house—still, alas, only fantasizing about a decorating scheme—I realize that I am almost never alone. My husband lives with me of course, and for now my adult children, who came and went during lockdown as their schools closed and opened again. If the three men I live with are out of the house at the same time, there are four dogs and (only sometimes) a cat. Although the house is spacious, there is almost always some creature, human or nonhuman, less than three feet away from me. The dogs, in particular, wrap themselves around my body if I sit in a chair or lie in my bed.

Today I drove up to the house and saw no one else’s cars in the street or the driveway.  After a raucous greeting, the dogs, unusually, retired to bed and into a canine-only pack. The house was hushed, suspended between comings and goings. The tv was off, and the radio too. Many people in this temporary, even illicit, time and space would sit and read, but I read all the time, creating aloneness though screens and books in rooms full of other creatures. Today I sat in a sunlit patch on the stairs and looked out at the front yard where blue jays and (to me) nameless brown birds were eating from our feeders. I looked at the sunflowers that have grown from older birdseeds and wondered at their reputed ability to turn their heavy heads from west to east with the dawn. I wondered why all of our single-headed sunflowers seem to face north and what rules might apply to the ones with multiple heads growing with a sort of grotesque largeness and grotesque beauty just outside our fence. I looked at our “Roberta” rose bought in honor of my husband’s sister, who died in infancy, and tried to decide if the blooms were peach, or blush, or apricot. I looked down at the Peggy Martin roses I had just planted in honor of my mother-in-law Peg who died a year ago, and wondered if we had the only non-climbing versions of that species in the whole wide world. I thought about Roberta, whom I never knew, and Peg who I knew and loved, and of my mother, Gladys, for whom I have never found the right rose and who hated gladioli. Then the dogs came downstairs and I went to clean the kitchen while they watched my every move in case, just this once, I would feed them scraps.

Being home alone these days has its pleasures, but it is also disorienting. When my husband is away on a trip, I tend not to go to bed until 2 or 3. It is not that I particularly want to stay up, but that without him, some temporal markers and rituals seem to disappear. One way of putting it is that I return, startlingly quickly, to a creaky version of my summer teenage self who almost never saw a reason to go to bed. Of course, that teenage self also slept in the morning; the older me usually has an early appointment, so over the days of Scott’s absence, I lose sleep. It is not insomnia, exactly, but a different relation to the time and to the house. I hear its sounds more acutely, sometimes but not always more fearfully. The dogs shift their positions and lie, stacked, in my husband’s place. I listen to them breathing, coughing, scratching, stirring in their sleep.

As an only child I always both wanted more people around and cherished the times when my parents left me entirely alone at home—something they considered bad parenting iwell nto my teenage years. With them gone, I would take the measure of the apartment, my new, tiny, and temporary kingdom, pacing across it from one end to the other. Now I live the fantasy of an only child—the porous house, the constant sound of the front door opening and closing, the shared dinners and the wrangles over the tv remote. Our household seems both resilient and fragile; we all know that it will reconfigure itself in the months and years to come. I think of future versions of aloneness and togetherness with mixed feelings. The “alone together” of the empty nest. The loneliness of old age and disability. The privilege of solitude. The joy of  sharing space guests and visitors. Mostly, though, I am curious about what is to come and about what “alone” will mean.