Envelope or Flat?

Ellen Davies, with her small mouth, glasses and short clipped hair – one of those people whose face shapes and arrangements remind  you first of an animal before any other human you’ve known. She is a member of the faculty and in the glass display case outside the office I’ve arranged eight books on a purple cloth with a small placard reading: “Celebrating Faculty Authors: Ellen Davies.” I’ve been in the department for about two months now and I’ve added just one book to the original seven, but everyone says the case has only really served as a place to put all of her successes.

I once went into Ellen’s office to ask a logistical question about scheduling a teacher’s class on the African Diaspora. As I side note I asked her what Diaspora really meant and she calmly and instantly responded to the question, like a doctor explaining a complicated diagnosis in strictly medical terms. She spoke patiently, articulately, with no pause for contemplation, in no words that I actually recognized and with references to countries I didn’t know existed.
“Oh. Ok” I said, understanding nothing but my ever-decreasing awareness of history, mankind and the world both in specific and in general.

I once delivered a message from Ellen to Maggie, a particularly together graduate student and Maggie’s eyed went wide and shifty “Did Ellen say she needed that from me today?”
And I thought, ah, everyone is a little afraid of Ellen’s ability to make them feel like they should just give up and try to find a job playing naked patty cake.

Today, however, Ellen had something to mail. She came in  with a manila envelope, attached a university label, wrote an address, consulted our official “Postage Help” sheet and finally turned to me and said, “Is this a letter or a flat?”
“A what?” I asked.
“Well there are two distinctions here: envelope and flat. Which one is this?”

And I couldn’t help but laugh. Ellen, whose words always come out as thought she’d written them down first.
“An envelope or a flat?” I asked through giggles.
“Yeah,” she said, frowning and looking at the postage stamp rules again. “A flat?” she guessed, and smiled. We looked at the sheet together. “Isn’t an envelope and envelope?” I asked. She looked at me and laughed outright, “I guess sometimes it’s a flat.” We chuckled and clucked over the guide for a bit before finally deciding that she was holding a flat for about 91 cents in postage. I handed her a roll of stamps and said, “I think I’ll leave you to that,” assigning her the loathsome task of adding them all up. “I think it’s three,” she said and we both laughed again as she walked the flat over to the outgoing mail.

The Apartment

I should have known.

When I came to look at the apartment I was disappointed at the shape of the first room I entered. It wasn’t unlike a few others I had seen in Chicago – long and rectangular with one side broken into three small walls. Basically, or specifically, like a giant coffin. This room had the benefit, at least, of having windows where the giant corpse’s head would be. Only there were two where there should have been three and that third wall stood with an oppressive whiteness pushing you into some other room, where there might be room to breathe.

What recommended this place over the others I had seen was that this rectangular final resting place was not the ONLY room in the apartment beside the bathroom. Already I had been to so many places where the manager stood in the center with dirty boots on unfinished wooden floors and said, “So. This is it!” and I would look to the corner where there was a stove three inches bigger than an Easy Bake Oven and a skinny fridge that stood like a homeless person feeling displaced in a stranger’s living room. Oftentimes the apartments were still occupied and there would be an unmade and abandoned looking bed in the center of the floor, the sheets unfairly exposed and a ceiling fan loosely tied to the ceiling overhead. “You’ve got your stove, fridge, some closet space…” the manager would rap on a closet door big enough for my sneakers and a few thin facecloths and then remember, “Ah, and you have the bathroom,” and here we would enter the bathroom. The bathrooms weren’t bad. A couple of stained toilets or the occasional flickering light fixture, but the manager would turn on the faucet briefly and gesture vaguely at the miracle of running water and I would feel satisfied that things might feasibly work in the apartment. That was something more than living on the street, after all.

So when I came to this place, I wasn’t surprised to find the familiar rectangular room. But when the unwelcoming windowless white wall suggested ominously that we leave immediately, I was surprised not to be confronted with the manager’s familiar “So here we are!” Instead, we actually proceeded down a miniature hallway into the kitchen. “Oh!” I said, and then, correcting myself “Oh.” Everyone knows that you’re not supposed to get excited when being shown an apartment, a car or anything else that is going to cost you a lot of money over a long period of time. It’s like saying “I’m sorry,” when confronted with someone you just got in an accident with. To say your sorry is to admit that, previous to the unfortunate collision, you were shamelessly drive-dancing to some song you would never confess to liking at a cocktail party. In both situations, you are going to give yourself away and end up in the kind of story that makes all of your friends shake their heads and pat you in a way that’s supposed to be comforting, but makes you feel like you should finally be institutionalized. Normally I would have tried even harder to keep my reaction in check, except I was already beginning to guess that my new manager friend was a bit challenged in the perception department.

Her boots were much like the ones the other managers wore. They were construction site tan with rope like laces and hard rounded toes. Her hair looked damp and accidental, like she had run it under water without remembering that it is made of a material that doesn’t dry for months. It fell constantly in her face and she swatted it away while she marched through the apartment. “Actually, yeah, let’s go to the bathroom first.” She walked around hunched over and stepped with unnecessary weight. She looked down, constantly frowning, as though she had a puzzle in her hands that she just couldn’t solve – or a ring of unlabeled keys and a door that needed opening. “Yeah. Ok. Yeah,” she said continually, convincing me of nothing.

The bathroom was close to the kitchen and was less encouraging than the idea of a multi-roomed apartment. The curtain had been moved a bit and the tub had brown splotches and was peeling its top layer. There was a dirty pail with a brush by the drain and it was obvious that someone was working on the kind of repair that has nothing to do with professionals. The toilet looked like a dinner-time, gag inducing scene out of a cop show, where you have to look away and listen to one of the tight shirted girl cops says something like, “Well, at least we won’t be hurting for DNA samples,” and then we cut to a man in a lab with a tube of dried poop flakes who declares, “Looks like we’ve got our man.”

But instead of recommending the next step toward arrest, the manager simply said, “Oh yeah well. We gotta clean that so,” and then proceeded to run the water and, as was the tradition, vaguely gesture. “Works,” she said and I tried to discern whether or not there was an element of surprise in her voice.

We went on to the bedroom: a short but no less rectangular room with one window at the far end. “Bedroom,” she said. I walked around. There was a large empty closet that used to have doors. It didn’t escape me that this room, the bedroom, was in a place separate from both the entire living room and all of the fixtures normally associated with a kitchen. Peeling tub and germ infested poop bowl aside, this place was a lot better than some of the other places I had been. The kitchen had a separate entrance and lots of light and windows. All of the appliances seemed to work. There was a fridge meant for use by adult humans as well as a functioning stove. It’s true that the trip from the living room to the kitchen meant walking down a slight incline, the floors were that warped, but I could live with that. It was very Willy Wanka, and that was ok.

The manager volunteered the possibility of the second floor opening as well, so we went upstairs to check it out. Here was an identical apartment with finished floors, a bathtub with a small black circle stain where the water came out (but otherwise clean and functional) and a similarly funky toilet situation, but possibly not beyond a gallon of bleach and about ten to twelve new toilet brushes. And if the cleaning didn’t work, I would simply have to think of a clever disclaimer to proceed every guest hoping to use the bathroom, “Sorry bout that toilet. I had to flush the contents of my fridge and my dead plant yesterday.” Or “Sorry about that toilet. It used to be a nice yellowish poop brown but the color is chipping off and it’s white in places…”

The kitchen had all new cabinets and counter tops and Deb, the manager, said that the new refrigerator and stove would be coming in that week. In the meantime, there were baby teeth spaces in between walls and counter tops, waiting for their arrival. “The cabinets are nice.” I told her.
She looked up at me for the first time, “You think so?” she asked.
“Yeah, they look new.”
Deb put all her stuff down and looked at me again, “Yeah. Thanks so much for saying so.” She let out a long, deep breath, “Yeah. I worked really hard on those, pickin em out and buyin them and puttin them in. I think they’re real nice lookin. Don’t you? That’s all good materials you know?”
“Yeah,” I told her, looking from the cabinets to her big, open face. Her cell rang then and she picked it up:
“What. Yeah. Yeah. Mmm. I did call. I DID. Shutup. Hey listen…yeah. Well. You’re gonna have to do that. I can’t do that. Listen. I…hey, I’m with someone. The apartment. Yeah. Well shut up then. Shit. Hey, I gotta go. Hey…” long pause, “Fine. Yeah YEAH! Fine.”

And then she was back with me, soft again in an instant, “I’m glad you like the kitchen,” she said, admiring the cabinets. And after a pause she looked at me and said, “I just want someone nice in here. You know,” and wiped away her hair with a flat hand.

The bottom line was: I had a subletter moving into my current place in a week and I simply needed to get something. This place was fifty five dollars more than my current place per month – but the street parking was fantastic and it had more than one room. The upstairs apartment was much nicer than downstairs and I could feasibly have people over without saying, “Have a seat. It’s ok. It’s my bed but I used it as a couch all the time.” I looked at the manager, who said her name was Deb, and said, “Ok. So how do I apply?”
“Oh. Ok. Yeah,” she fumbled in a giant bag from which she took a ring of keys and two notebooks. She handed me a piece of paper with a singed corner and said, “This thing here is the layout. So you know. You know. Yeah. And so here…” and she flipped through her notebooks, “So here is the application. I didn’t have time to make a new one so maybe you could just cross the other stuff out and put yours.” And she handed me an application, complete with name, social security and bank information already filled out by another person. I hesitantly crossed out all of the other person’s info and wrote my own. Thinking, “It’s just an application. If I change my mind I can always just say forget it. But maybe I should ask for this paper back after. If I say forget it…maybe I should…” But I rented the place anyway.

 

(to be continued…)