The Bird
SHE waited for her table at the end of the bar and I instantly recognized her: my former roommate, Ashley James. I’d thought about her many times after college. She had since run into my sister while downtown one night and in a tipsy but sincere manner grabbed her by the arm, “Please, please tell Natalie I am so sorry for what happened. I am better now.” - which was something I wanted very much to believe but didn’t hold up in looking at the person before me now.
AMONG other habits, Ashley used to take three showers a day, each about an hour and a half long. In support of this, she set the water heater to “Chernobyl”. She would skip about six classes a week claiming some mysterious illness. Appalled, she insisted indignantly that I use the butter by slicing evenly off the side, not off the top. “The thermostat simply must be set to sixty degrees at night because if I am not in my alpaca sweater I can’t sleep a wink.” And if the silverware wasn’t loaded handles-up she was certain the plague on our hands as we unloaded the dishwasher would render them biohazards. “It just is much more sanitary to only grab the silverware by the handles, so please,” she demonstrated, “keep the handles up, Natalie.” It went on like that for weeks across a panoply of topics. An ennui of pretense and fear, festering in the room across from mine.
“Why don’t you just buy a real car and then you won’t have to drive that piece of shit around anymore?” she’d snarked after the car accident in my Neon, the car I could afford and worked diligently to pay off while in school full time and working forty hours a week. She suggested “a Chevy Silverado like the one Daddy got for me” even though she had no more use for the back three-quarters of the thing than I would. More than once she admitted “My Dad shows me he loves me by buying me things.” Hooray.
Ashley claimed she had a dark past. In retrospect, I believe it. She’d been raped she said, in high school by an ex-boyfriend who was a big, Bubba-type of guy. At a party. He was drunk. She never pressed charges, never named him. She never gave any details more specific than that. Baffled, none of her long-term friends knew when exactly, nor who it could be.
According to our third roommate, during a dinner at the family home, Mr. James made relentless, putrid digs at Ashley about her sex life and what she was like in bed. Meanwhile, Mrs. James (who at the tender age of forty-nine had been diagnosed with ADD, and was actively treating it with Ritalin and Cabernet) tipped back another. The entire family waxed poetic about their pure-bred Great Danes: “You simply must post their ears or else they look so, so common,” they’d agreed, as if a dog without cosmetic intervention was a botched abortion. Then they all nodded and mumbled.
BETWEEN the three roommates, the utility bill for the house came to about $380 for each of the first two months I lived there. The third roommate and I could not afford to continue splitting things in even thirds short of turning to prostitution, plus it was painfully obvious we weren’t using anywhere near as much as Ashley. Hoping at first to avoid confrontation, we began sneaking into the garage to lower the water heater and secretly discussing which marks in the dust on the dial indicated Ashley had gone behind us to crank it up yet again. Turns out you can only have this conversation with someone about ten times before you both decide to do something about it. So we delicately asked Ashley to pay forty percent of the bill - a mere seven percent increase for those of you keeping track. And like a normal, sensible person she agreed. For the first two days.
Then like all crazies she boomeranged with unwarranted indignation. “How DARE you charge me more just because my Daddy pays my bills?! I will not have it! Where does it stop, hmm? Next you’ll want us to pay for your bills too, I suppose? I’ve had it with you two, I’m moving out. I’ve already found a place.”
Days before she left I came home to find my toothbrush in our shared bathroom wet and speckled with black bits. Chuckling at the thought that she lowered herself enough to use any sort of brush in a toilet but also infuriated at the thought of how terribly sick I could’ve become, I briefly considered putting Nair in her shampoo. Honestly, what stopped me was that I didn’t want her defense team to have a valid argument in claiming my murder had been provoked. Instead I left the old one out so she’d think she’d fooled me, put the new toothbrush in my bedroom and a lock on my door. Next she packed both her shower curtain and the pre-existing liner without warning, which meant about three gallons of water landed on the floor during my shower that night. I left the puddle. I knew it would piss her off more than it would me.
Then came the day she was gone. The next utility bill was $68. Just like that. Sweet merciful God, she was gone.
Except she wasn’t. Fragments lingered. As time passed I built a little theory which, to me at least, explained her butchered behavior patterns, her misdirected rage and strange loyalty to parents who really couldn’t care less. It congealed months after the fact, as I sat with the events of one odd afternoon. I’d come home unexpectedly after a class was cancelled to discover the kitchen awash in pancake batter and flour dust. There were even maple syrup fingerprints on the faucet. The dregs of a voracious breakfast drying on a smothered plate. Floor, counters, cabinets, walls - all somehow dirtied. Like a pastry murder scene.
She was in the shower when I’d happened to quietly walk in the front door, took one shocked look at the kitchen and decided I’d wait this one out silently in my bedroom. Who knows how long she’d been in there already, but it was another hour and ten minutes before she got out of the shower and started cleaning the kitchen. Eventually, as she walked out the front door I heard her stop suddenly at the sight of my car in the street.
She thought she was home alone but now she knew I’d seen the whole thing. Her hatred for me was irrevocably piqued from that day forward and although I was too naive to name the thing at the time, it was the unravelling of her secret. It explained the water bills and the illness that made her skip class. It explained the showers - three a day. It slowly dawned on me that there had never been any Bubba boyfriend or party, just self-loathing and a father she couldn’t accuse in the light of day.
NOW more than five years later, she, an engagement ring, and some unhappy looking man were waiting for a table in my restaurant. I stealthily pointed her out to the hostesses and explained with hushed panic why I absolutely could not wait on her, wanting at first to ignore her entirely. Hostesses now safely in cahoots, I kept mulling over the odds and absurdity of the situation. Ignoring her was admittedly not the best approach but it was all I could manage. Naturally, it also tipped the hands of Murphy’s Law that she’d at least be seated near my section - which was precisely what happened because despite my scheming it was truly the only open table in the restaurant.
One hostess quipped that maybe she should offer Ashley a makeshift air-sickness bag if the walk to the bathrooms was too daunting. Another server volunteered to clear plates off their table and ask if there was anything else they’d like to purge. (In case you can’t tell by the perverse sense of humor, these two were good friends of mine who are now married to one another, but I digress.)
I am ashamed to say it took a little while mustering up the wherewithal to do the decent thing. On balance, before she walked in it had been a great shift, full of laughter and dancing. There is a stigma to restaurant work, however, and finding me a servant all these years after graduating would feed into the idea that she wasn’t somehow my equal, that she was right to think of me as the riffraff she’d treated me like as a roommate. Ignoring her, besides being childish, seemed a capitulation to that.
I sidled up to her table.
“Excuse me, it’s Ashley, right? I believe we used to be roommates. It’s been a long time! You look great. How is everything?”
She hesitated, stunned that I was essentially calling us both out, but then kicked onto script, too. Setting the fork at the edge of her plate and resting her hands on her lap before responding, she did what country club women do so well; speak once with their words and twice with their eyes.
“Yes we did; I remember you. Thank you. Everything is perfect.”
“Fantastic,” I smiled, “Please let me know if you need anything. Enjoy the rest of your brunch.” Then I ignored them.
Well, sorta.
A shiny silver Volvo awaited her in the valet lane. I honestly hadn’t been watching for her, but through the irregular antique glass of the front windows I happened to see her leaving while I started to enter an order at the computer. Even from this distance, every hair on her head was in place, every button properly closed on her austere jacket. The same meticulous, dictatorial wardrobe she’d had years before. She seemed somehow skinnier than I remembered. The music and bustle of the restaurant fell away. The things that had transpired between us crystallized and floated, suddenly in full view. All I could think was how terrible it must be to have everything and nothing in a beautiful world you are too wounded to take in.
-
It’s been years since I wrote this, and years more since I first showed it to people. The responses were split. One friend called it a great essay and said she must have been an utter nightmare. Another two said I was a bully for writing this and it was tantamount to a hit piece. Someone else pointed out the poor girl had been through so much, the schadenfreude of it all took away from my esteem as the narrator. I think they are all right, to be honest.
Other things have happened. I’m no expert but I have learned a great deal more about mental health while at the same time better recognition of it has entered the mainstream. People also talk about class issues and micro-aggressions. Mean girls are a thing. Nobel winning economists like Paul Krugman talk about how my generational cohort graduated into economic devastation and our fiscal lives will forever be shadows of what they could have been. The stigma of being a generation of Americans with failed earnings is slowly being upended by reason. My peers who were buttressed through that collapse and allowed to live comfortable lives, in jobs with comfortable incomes and car payments baked-in, may not understand that they dodged an economic hangman’s noose. In America, that means they also avoided crises of self-worth, class, access to healthcare, belonging, and the American Dream itself. I have changed, but so has the world.
Perhaps I sound defensive and perhaps I am. In the same breath that I want to advocate for better on all these fronts, with more equity and more compassion across the board, I also have to acknowledge with frankness that fighting to cling to the middle class while being condescended to is tough. It’s an Ugg on your neck. I am disappointed that working hard has nothing to do with earning respect or decent wages. I am disappointed that children can’t be better protected. Disappointed that hurt people, hurt people. And if you feel like this was a hit piece, then this entire essay reframes me as one of those hurt people lashing out, too. A snake, eating its tail.
There was someone else who I have since met who I had a great deal of compassion for and whose mental health and abuse burden was beyond the pale. They made valiant efforts just to show up for life. They taught me much, including that something like this can take the knees out from those standing too close. The sharpness of their suffering can become the spillover that induces yours. And if you don’t know what you’re dealing with, especially with mental health issues, it can be so diffused and amorphous you may as well be shadowboxing. I don’t even know how to begin to explain the toll that takes but it’s a kind of secondary drowning.
I hope future versions of us both, the ones signing leases and testing the waters of young adulthood — I hope they’ll get it right. Or at the very least, I hope they’ll find ways to relate to one another with compassion. When I reflect back on Ashley and my experience with her, it is through the prism of change. I have more compassion for her. And also for myself. She did not ask for the wounds she carried. I did not ask for a roommate who would belittle and financially drain me. I would have sought backup for her needs if I’d understood what they were. But I was not both wise and young. Instead I was doing the best I could.
It’s clear now, honestly, so was she.