This first conversation set the tone for our relationship. I would be the scientist, rushing headlong into the unknown, and May, my faithful assistant, her lab coat flapping, as she hurried after.
6
After that Sunday, we were inseparable. Thanksgivings were spent together with my family in Long Island, and spring breaks with hers in Alabama. For a few weeks after our sophomore year, instead of going home, May came to stay with me in Long Island, and the following year, she joined me in Greece.
We were more than friends; we were a duo, a team, a stage act—Iris and May! Exaggerating our differences, we defined ourselves in relief of one another. May, a technical virgin when she arrived in New York, became the petite, wide-eyed, innocent Southern Belle, while I, nominally more experienced, became the tall, jaded, fast-talking New Yorker. More accurately, we were both just kids from the suburbs.
In 1998, at the end of our sophomore year, we decided to get our own place and rented the first and only apartment we saw. If we didn’t take it on the spot, the realtor warned us, as we stood a few feet away, huddled in nervous deliberation, someone else would surely scoop us on “this exceptional deal.” It was a one-bedroom railroad on the first floor of an old tenement on West Fifty-seventh Street close to Tenth Avenue, a no-man’s-land between Hell’s Kitchen and the Upper West Side, which I later dubbed, “Hell’s Kitchenette.”
The apartment had mice and bugs and a deeply slanted wood floor broken up near the radiator where they came and went freely. It had three windows, one in the bedroom that opened onto a narrow airshaft with a view into the neighbor’s kitchen, and the other two, eye level with the garbage dump out front and extending all the way up to the ceiling.
“The twelve foot ceilings really add to the spaciousness,” the realtor said. The floor of the apartment totaled 425 square feet. “These French doors are brand new,” she added, opening and closing the slatted balsa-wood partition that separated the “bedroom” from “the living room.” “And it’s walking distance from the subway.” Three long avenues, it couldn’t be much further. But we didn’t see any of its flaws then; we saw “brand new French doors,” we saw high ceilings, we saw potential. We couldn’t believe our luck.
For furniture, we shopped exclusively at the Salvation Army. We bought four red and white rolling chairs—“We’ll have everything on wheels! ”—and a large glass dining room table, which made May nervous. She was accident-prone and thought the glass frighteningly fragile. She suggested we might do better with something wooden. I brushed off her fears. “How can you possibly break it?” I asked, knocking on its sturdy surface.
And then there was the couch, our favorite piece—a charming striped thing about to buckle beneath our weight. We’d buttress it with magazines, course books, and photographs that we took of each other in our Halloween costumes, in wigs that we donned even when it wasn’t Halloween but just a Thursday, and architectural drawings of the fort we built one night by piling all our furniture into two towers and throwing a blanket over the top; we photographed that, too. We took tons of pictures back then, and we’d store them all usefully beneath the cushions of our collapsing couch.
We claimed our respective sides, naming mine “San Juan” and hers “San Sebastian.” The couch was an island, we said, surrounded by the flotsam of empty liquor bottles, splayed alternative weeklies, crayon drawings, broken cigarettes, and the occasional renegade Jenga piece, toy soldier, or mix tape. We were Robinson Crusoes of the West Side and engineered the whole apartment to fit our late-adolescent idea of civilization. To get off the island, one had to alight to one of the rolling chairs—our dinghies. We made a game of it—as the floor was on an incline, rolling toward the kitchen was a delightful adventure, but getting back out to the living room, a harrowing ordeal—we made up games for everything.
Peeking down from my pirate’s lookout ten feet up—over the edge of my loft bed—I’d call down to May through a megaphone I’d crafted out of colored construction paper: “Who’s that on the phone?”
“It’s your idiot boyfriend,” she’d say, putting him on hold.
“You talk to him.” I’d wave my hand. “Pretend you’re me.”
This was one of our favorite “science experiments.” My boyfriends would call and she’d pretend to be me, while I waited to see if and when they would catch on. We conducted lots of “experiments”—the all-Baby-Ruth-and-Diet-Dr-Pepper diet, the “let’s-call-all-our-friends-and-tell-them-we’re-in-jail-to-see-who-offers-to-bail-us-out” hypothesis, or the time we attempted to package smoke. I took a long hit off a freshly rolled joint, exhaled into an empty Diet Dr Pepper bottle, and spun the cap quickly. We would stop the smoke from diffusing, save it to breathe in again later. Peering through the clear plastic, had we done it? Would we find a little white cloud floating inside tomorrow?
The apartment, like our couch, fell apart almost immediately. Or rather, it had been a wreck to begin with and its flaws just began to show. In the three years we stayed, the paint peeled from the heating pipes; the roof leaked in the bathroom—regularly in a steady drip that increased in urgency every day, sometimes so much it seemed as if it were raining—mice moved in, we could hear them scratching in the walls at night; and the small kitchenette on the far end of the apartment, connected to the bedroom by a long narrow hallway, became crowded with dirty dishes we could not clean fast enough.
And then the light high above the sink blew out. Unable to change it without calling the super, we left it dark. Did we need a kitchen anyway? Blocking it from our minds, we abandoned the room to time. The kitchenette became a frightening unlit cave downstream of our island, filled with culinary relics and crustaceans—worldly cockroaches who’d been living in the apartment long before May and I arrived and would continue to live there long after we left—that we’d venture into only sparingly and always on tiptoe.
Even the glass table exploded. One night, after taking her nightly sleeping pills—May’s father, a doctor, mailed them to her regularly—May stood on one of the rolling chairs to close the top window shutter, slipped, and crashed through the table behind her. I wasn’t home at the time, but staying the night at my “idiot boyfriend’s.” At 1:00 AM, the phone rang.
“I’m sorry, Iris. I broke the table,” May said groggily.
We rushed over and found a pile of broken glass where the table had been and May, resting in her silk nightgown, on the island nearby. She was bleeding from a small cut on her leg. Miraculously, she’d only a scratch. “I was so worried about you—” I said. “I was so worried,” she interrupted, not hearing me through her haze, “that you’d be mad about the table. I know how much you loved it.” My boyfriend and I began to clean up. “I made such a mess,” she said, as she climbed up to her bed.
The next day, using the legs from the broken table, I made a new table using a large magnetic backgammon board I’d brought back from Greece. May was amazed at my engineering, which involved opening the board which folded in the middle and laying it perpendicular to the parallel lines of the two sets of table legs. “Voila!” I said, “a new table/ gaming center!”
We began playing a lot of backgammon after that, and then, growing bored, invented a new game based simply on the set’s magnetic properties—if you faced the pieces one direction, they’d stick together, while placing them in opposition caused them to fly apart. Laughing, we’d chase each other all over the board, the winner declared after she’d driven all her opponent’s pieces out. We called the game “War.”
Your first apartment—a milestone in your journey toward adulthood. We called ours “the clubhouse.” Sharing a bedroom, we installed two loft beds, one of seven feet and the other, “the castle,” rising a majestic ten feet off the ground—a nice auxiliary for the weighty questions that plagued us in those days. “Should we get high or really high?” I’d ask May, before rolling a joint and alighting with her to one of our beds.
“The castle” had to be specially made. “We don’t build ’em higher than seven feet,” the man at the loft store told me. I drew a picture of what I wanted. “But you won’t have enough room above you!” he insisted. “Let me worry about that,” I said. To stabilize it, the structure had to be attached to the wall, and a safety partition added to the side to keep me from rolling over and falling to my death. “It’s magnificent,” I said when it was finished. I then set about covering it with white Christmas lights, which I attached to The Clapper, so that every morning it glowed with May’s applause.
Turning the radio on, we’d climb up to May’s bed and sit with our legs dangling over the edge and look through the airshaft at our neighbors looking back. I passed May the joint. “Sitting on the edge of my bed . . .” May sang when “Dock of the Bay” came on, “watchin’ the time roll ahead. Watchin’ our neighbors walk in, and then we watch them walk away again. We’re just sittin’ on the top of my bed, wastin’ time. . . .” I’d whistle, exhale a long plume, and then hatch an idea for our next home improvement project—“a lifeguard chair next to the window! We keep the top shudders open so we can look out on the street, and the bottom shutters closed to maintain our privacy!”
Today, when people see photographs of us from that time, thinking we were perhaps ten or twelve years old, they are shocked when I tell them we were nearing twenty-one, for even our expressions during that period had become vaguely childlike.
For decoration, I covered the inside of our apartment door with my steadily growing collection of black-and-white postcards, among which I hid two black-and-white photos of May and me. May: looking glamorous at a masquerade ball we’d thrown at our Soho dorm for my last birthday. Me: in a vintage swimsuit, half submerged in the kiddie pool we’d installed in our dorm-room for the “pool party” we’d thrown before that—we’d moved all our furniture, including our beds, into the hall.
In the corner, where the glass table had been, we placed a mini-trampoline we’d rescued from a dumpster. We were always on the lookout for great new pieces, so when we spotted a twelve-foot-long cardboard candy cane lying on the curb among the trash, we immediately knew we needed it. Spilling out from a loft party in Soho at 4:00 AM, I saw it first. Our only thought was of how to transport it; the thing was so large, so unwieldy. We ended up holding it against the outside of a cab, our arms looped around it through the open windows.
Four in the morning. May riding shotgun. Me in the back passenger seat. The cab driver yelling when I drop my end, again, onto the road. He stops the car short and I wake with a start before opening the back door to fetch my end. The driver lays into me. May rushes to my defense, telling him indignantly, “Stop yelling! Can’t you see she’s tired?”
When we did finally get the thing home, it was much too large for our small apartment. It would fit neither upright nor sideways, and so we had to place it on a diagonal, a candy cane hypotenuse bisecting the living room, extending from top right corner to lower left. Accessing the bathroom from that day forward required an impromptu round of limbo—another game!
Winter nights, lying aloft in our skyscraper beds, unable to sleep, we’d speculate about our futures. Blinking in the dark, I’d imagine a husband for May, describing various scenarios in which her husband, a concert pianist who’d grown unhappy and jealous of May’s tambourine playing (I’d given her a tambourine for her birthday), wished, midlife, to switch to the tuba. “The tuba won’t pay the bills!” May would protest. He’d be alcoholic and would hide his schnapps in the large horn, which May would find and drink herself, resulting in more terrible fights.
Then she’d do the same for me: My husband would be a very wealthy businessman whom I’d despise and who would give me a gaggle of children who’d also irritate me. Regularly, I’d lock myself in the parlor where I’d remain all day drunk, playing with an electric train set and maniacally working a Hula-Hoop to keep svelte. I’d give explicit instructions to the servants to keep the children out of the west wing. My hair would grow wild, my nails long and curling.
Sometimes we’d remark on the oddness of our being twenty years old and sharing a bedroom. “Do you think our husbands will mind the sleeping arrangements?” May asked, giggling through the dark, having just described a future in which, despite all the changes time would bring, the condition of our shared bedroom, with its twin loft beds soaring high into the night, would remain. I laughed. “They’ll just have to get used to it, I guess.”
5
Fall, winter, spring. And in summer we’d separate, leaving the apartment to boil without us. May would return to her family in Alabama and I’d visit mine in Greece where I’d update “the books.”
“An influx of Germans,” I reported upon my return, summarizing my amorous adventures to May.
For all the privileges of summer, however, we couldn’t wait to get back, to resume the duo, to resume our experiments. And so, in the August before our senior year, we returned two weeks early. May would use the time to go on auditions, she told her parents, while I, having already changed majors, told mine I’d need to prepare for my upcoming internship at
The New Yorker.
It was the summer of 1999 and the city was hot. The buildings themselves seemed almost to be melting. Every day brought reports of record highs. A weatherman fried an egg on the sidewalk. The mayor reminded us, “Drink water to prevent dehydration, check on neighbors, the elderly, and seek out the city’s air-conditioned cooling centers.” Surviving the heat became the first priority of every New Yorker. May and I had no air conditioner but had set up a circuit of fans to ameliorate the blaze, to blow the hot air into our loft beds and all around the apartment, across the trampoline, under the candy cane, over the island, and through to the next room—a trade wind you could follow on one of our rolling chairs.
Submitting to the heat and its command to do as little as possible, we forsook our previous plans and spent the days lounging on our island, sipping cold beer and waiting for our pot dealer to arrive. We’d turn up the radio—always oldies, always CBS FM—and May, growing impatient, would bounce on the mini-trampoline, a full-body alternative to waving a paper fan. I told her this would only make her hotter, but she persisted, up and down, singing along to her favorite song—“Big Girls Don’t Cry”—resting only to rehydrate during weather and traffic updates.