christine
Right before the end of freshman year, my roommate transferred to Barnard. I probably didn't have anything to do with her decision, right? A lot of freshmen wanted to be in NYC instead of where we actually were, including me: I'd already made plans to transfer right after the first quarter.
Unfortunately for Plan-A Jenn, Plan-B Jenn had developed a fascination with another student because of his coat, which was probably corduroy with either a sherpa collar or a fur one (I remember thinking "wow he looks so warm in that thing"). That same student would go on to email me after almost hitting me with his car, initiating a correspondence that was, to my mind, pleasantly combative. By winter break I'd decided to stay where I was, but I was too mortified to tell anyone why.
When I learned that my freshman-year roommate was transferring I felt a twinge of envy, but mostly I felt unnerved. Had I contributed to her decision to entirely leave the geographic region? It was true she'd seemed exasperated by my presence, but she would acknowledge only my proclivity for playing Half Life right after lunch. Well, sometimes she wanted to trade clothes; there was also that. We didn't understand each other, was the thing. I remember feeling persistently confused. (I think at the time I also resented how much Joni Mitchell I was having to listen to.)
My anxiety escalated as people in the dorm began to pair off, choosing roommates for the following academic year. I was very passive and leisurely about this selection process—waiting to be chosen, asking people who they were planning to live with as if I were gathering dirt on who had a prom date so far, regretting not making better friends with a girl, any girl in the building, and dying inside—and pretty soon there were just three unpaired people, one of whom was me. Ah: I had fucked up.
Here is where I need to do some boring scene-setting. I lived in a dormitory where getting your pick of rooms was based on "points." I and another freshman had been co-chairs of some sort, a position ordinarily reserved for sophomores; now she and I were the only two future sophomores with a shit-ton boatload of points, whereas our peers had only been able to pick up a few points at a time, doing odd jobs here and there. (Being a co-chair felt extremely try-hard and uncool, until you consider that we could choose whatever rooms we wanted, which was fucking awesome.) My co-chair had already chosen a roommate. There was one "single" dorm room in the building—one lucky student, any gender, could live solo on the bottom floor—and I was obviously planning to lone-wolf it and nab that room, which was at that moment occupied by a reclusive music student, a boy.
Still, there was the matter of.... Sorry, this whole story depends on throwing another dorm resident, a then-teenager, straight under the bus. I will call her Amelia, since I don't know any Amelias in real life despite its being, allegedly, a top-10 name (for incoming newborns).
So there was the matter of Amelia. Her parents came to visit her at the dorm every weekend, and her parents stayed in her room, for the full weekend; by this point Amelia's roommate had been experiencing a sustained eight-month meltdown. Amelia was obviously unpaired, as I was. The third unpaired person was Christine.
Christine approached me. "I have a proposition for you," she said, possibly attempting some degree of rizz. Then: "We could combine points and get the best room in the dorm!" She proceeded to share her vision.
I wasn't understanding Christine, since the "best" room in the dorm was obviously the single, and I had enough points all on my own for that, no need to forge an alliance. So Christine had to clarify: "And then Amelia could have the single!" It would be more convenient for Amelia, Christine reasoned to me. What a nice thing we could do for Amelia.
Ohhhhh.
I took a deep breath as the full force of Christine's ask hit me. I genuinely had not considered that I was about to condemn Christine to nine months in hell. I remember wishing she'd opened with that detail—that it was cruel to force someone to room part-time with Amelia's parents—but in retrospect Christine was far too dignified for explicitness, and far too nice to bring up Amelia's parents at all. Nevertheless, Christine was hiding a plea for mercy inside of a "let's get the best room together!" sales pitch. I absorbed what Christine was saying.
"Okay," I finally said. I am not a monster.
No, but seriously, what even was my headspace?? Christine probably thought I was selfishly grabbing the single. I probably thought, by taking the single, I was avoiding inflicting myself on anyone else: Amelia's parents weren't even a shadow of an apparition of a thought in my mind.
If I'd felt momentarily magnanimous about relinquishing the best room, this was short-lived. It turned out—all previous fears confirmed!—I had a reputation as an absolutely terrible roommate, as a total slob and utterly oblivious besides. And now I was finally hearing about it! Terrific!
Christine's own reputation wasn't "bad," per se, but she was very button-up in that she literally wore button-ups. We teased her a lot about this: she wore so much J. Crew so consistently, she could identify corduroy's numerical wale count from all the way across the room. ("Wale count" is the number of humps, or "wales," per inch—kind of like measuring bandwidth. Wide-wale corduroy is exactly what it sounds like. I was, and continue to be, a 5-wale person; Christine was a 13-wale person. You can see the problem here.)
Other freshmen had started to joke about the looming disaster—the inevitable implosion, the invariable sinking of the Titanic—that was destined to be Christine's and my chosen living arrangement. My shock turned to dread: my carelessness, inconsideration, and slovenliness were one thing, but I hadn't even thought yet to be terrified of living with Christine. Until now I'd thought she would be trapped with me.
I was spiraling. I needed to nip my growing terror in the bud, and fast. This time, I was the one who approached Christine. I asked her, wide-eyed, if she'd heard what people were saying about our odds.
She had; it was no secret. Now I was really scared. Maybe this was a bad idea? But Christine was resolute, confident. All we had to do was commit to the vision—to not drive each other insane—and stick to it.
In retrospect: Amelia. And her parents and their rolling suitcases, and Amelia's current roommate, who had rings under both eyes and who answered "how's it going" with groans. Fair. But all I could think of, in this incredibly self-absorbed, not-yet 19-year-old way, was this horrible idea that my presence was inherently intolerable, for reasons no one had ever stopped to explain to me, and that the correct solution was to restrict my interactions with other people. Honestly, it was probably the action figures. I already collected them, and then I discovered eBay, making a dresser-top clutter situation a little bit worse.
In the fall, Christine and I began to design our giant, grown-up room. I suggested keeping the beds bunked so that we could do even more with the space; Christine maintained that we had well enough space to work with, and that unbunked beds were like having two couches. Our aesthetics were basically the same, I just hadn't fully appreciated the importance of putting pictures in frames. (Until then I'd associated such a practice—framing—with my great-aunt fussily redecorating my bedroom.) My penchant for maximalism could be reined in. Christine's aversion to pop culture in favor of the erudite suited me fine and, anyway, we liked the same color palette. Our room looked better than anyone else's.
She had a sensitive nose, though, whilst I had recently taken up smoking as a gag. I really liked smoking, but I also didn't want to mess up a good thing—so, after every cigarette, I'd take a shower before reentering our room. And then I'd change into fresh clothes! Totally normal behavior.
Christine's behavior was equally unhinged. She would remove her headphones and ask me if it were all right to put on a song. Which was never Joni Mitchell. So my answer was always yes, of course it was all right. I started using headphones, too, now that I was domesticated.
I began to enjoy tending to our little arrangement, searching around for ways to be even more considerate. Even though it wasn't my own inclination, I started going to bed at the same time Christine did, just so the room would stay dark for her. This sounds a little like self-abandonment but, more than that, it sounds like Christine was a positive influence.
Then she asked if a boy could stay with us. She explained he would be visiting her from England—an expensive trip. I probably had a few questions, but everything seemed in order. Now her eyes were bright. "He's a professional chef!" she told me, as if to assure me of my excellent decision-making.
I'd forgotten he would be staying with us, until I walked into a gorgeous, dimly-lit picnic in the center of our dorm room, right on the floor. I was embarrassed. I hadn't remembered what day it was; I apologized. Instead of shooing me out, Christine welcomed me in, and this beautiful young man engineered a third plate before my eyes. I sat down cross-legged and, without a word, he put a glass of wine in front of me—meticulously and artfully chosen by him to be paired with dinner. He described the wine to me. I tried to look impassive, but this was my very first alcohol. It was either white or red.
I remember we talked into the night, laughing. At one point I asked, with absolute sincerity, how people in England even start dating? I'd visited England a couple years prior, where social boundaries felt so much less fluid, to the extent that just "making friends" seemed to me a Sisyphean task. (It was unusual to have a foreign ambassador sitting tipsy in my very own space, and this thought had been eating at me for a long time, so I blurted it out.)
"That's a good question," he said, startled. He considered it. "I think," he said slowly, "you go out, in the morning you wake up next to somebody, and that's when you decide if you'd like to see them again."
My God, the little shriek that must've come out of me. What a magical, sophisticated world we had created in our big little room.
A few months later I woke up in the night. I remember it was sudden. One of us had been having a tough time lately, and I think it was, atypically, Christine. I sat up in bed. I turned and looked across the room, and I saw Christine in silhouette, also sitting up—a perfect mirror image. Our room was dark and still. I squinted, trying to see if she were facing me. It seemed like she was.
"Are you awake?" her dark outline whispered at last, very soft.
"Yes," I whispered back.
I heard a click, and now Christine's face and shoulders were lit up in the dim warm beam of a clip-up reading lamp, her face drawn, her bed somehow perfectly made despite her being in it, her sheets rumpled in a straight line like a sash across her waist. Oh. Yes, that's right, she was the one who had been having a tough time. Yes, and I hadn't known how to articulate my worry, and I still didn't know how, so we just sat there looking at each other.
"Would you like to have gelato?" she finally asked, her voice still soft, but with a little more strength.
"Yes," I said.
She got out of the bed, unlatched our door, and disappeared into the hall. She always wore a full pajama set, a striped shirt buttoned all the way to its collar, with long sleeves, matching wide-legged bottoms. She was somehow never barefoot—always in sheepskin slippers. She quietly returned with a pint and two spoons, latching the door again behind her.
I didn't know what gelato was. To be completely honest, I still didn't know what gelato was up until last month. I was reading the side of an empty pint of gelato—because I felt a bit ill—and then I said "oh shit" and made a mad scramble for the Lactaid. I recounted this experience to my dietitian the next morning, that I'd always thought gelato was dairy-free, but no, it contained much, much more dairy somehow. My dietitian told me, of this delayed self-administration of Lactaid, "Better late than never, surely!" and then proceeded to explain to me what gelato is. I've already forgotten again.
I will not be describing any immediate subsequent housing situations, but many of them reaffirmed in me a strong desire to live alone. Looking at this again now, however, I think I believed I could just float into various configurations and be okay—that everyone would be just as emotionally generous, just as observant, just as benevolent, as kind, as Christine was.
A few years later I would run into Christine in the Jewel-Osco near my apartment, where we were both pushing carts. Hers likely contained vegetables, big leafy splays. We had already fallen out of touch, and I remember it was difficult to catch up.
Finally I said to her, very firmly as my eyes welled up, "You are my favorite roommate."
Her face broke, and she nodded. She said, with matching emphasis, "You're my favorite roommate, too."
We smiled at each other blearily, and that was where we parted.