Roommates

“Dogs are like kids. Cats are like roommates.” —Anonymous

I’ve had a lot of roommates. The first one in college was so different than me it was almost comical. Waking up several hours before her first class, Lisa would wash and blow dry her hair, apply makeup, and dress in something she had chosen the night before. I either went to bed with wet hair, which was still damp in the morning, wore no makeup unless I was on a dating warpath, and dressed in whatever emerged from my closet. Lisa had moved in with two dozen frozen steak dinners but after they ran out, I discovered she couldn’t cook, I mean she really couldn’t cook. Once I asked her to boil water for pasta and she put a box of noodles into cold water and turned on the heat. I returned from a late class to find a ball of starch floating in a pot of water. Lisa wanted to marry a Jewish dentist. I wanted to live in sin with a gorgeous man.

photo by Nina Pascal

During my junior year of college, I went to Ireland and ended up with three Norwegian roommates, Tina, Trine, and Kathinka. They were all incredibly pretty and were attending the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. They had rented a nice house with a garden and on the day we moved in they each built themselves a loft bed. I put a futon on the floor. One day they were studying anatomy in our garden topless and our Irish landlady’s ‘bachelor’ son fell out the window, crashing through the toolshed, trying to get a better view. All three of her sons were married but moved back with their mother so she could cook their breakfasts. Every time I brought home a boy, I would discover that boy sitting at the breakfast table, surrounded by these beautiful women like Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, being fed goat cheese and fresh bread, convinced they had found paradise.

Returning to the States, my parents had bought a house off campus for me to live in my senior year. My roommate was a sweet guy named Ken, a roofer who smoked incredible amounts of dope daily. Each morning, I would find a perfectly rolled joint next to my coffee cup. Ken’s girlfriend was so annoying my friends would call the house to check if she was there and if she was, make alternative plans. The house phone was located upstairs between our separate rooms, and she’d constantly call in the middle of the night to see if she could catch us having sex.

My next roommate was a depressed childhood friend. We both had awful jobs and our Hoboken apartment was infested with roaches. I was working as a line foreman for New Jersey Bell telephone and went to work each day in steel-toe boots, a man’s oxford shirt and khaki pants. Abby had a number of hand-me-down Chanel suits once belonging to her mother, much too big for her, safety pinned, and shoes with heels. Her job, working for a self-publishing house was so depressing she would come home and lay face down on her bed, eating tiny spoonfuls of ice cream for dinner. My job was so stressful I ran several miles immediately after work, drank a bottle of wine, and was constantly boiling root vegetables hoping they might offset the alcohol.

When I ran off to San Francisco, I found a gorgeous apartment in Pacific Heights. The downside was my roommate, a middle-aged man (I was in my early twenties) who was a sex therapist and wore caftans. To his credit, he never invited me to the orgies that took place in a location south of the city. I was working as a cocktail waitress in a terrible bar on Fisherman’s Wharf and rarely made it home before dawn.

My first apartment in New York City was a two-bedroom owned by a Columbia professor who drank an enormous amount. I frequently came home to find her face down on the kitchen floor. Since I was newly sober this was not an ideal match. After that I moved in with a fellow sober woman, both of us having rid ourselves of unfortunate men, hers a boyfriend, mine a violent husband. When she moved to LA, I took over the lease and had a series of unfortunate roommates. One who decided to put my antique kitchen table into the hallway, which was promptly stolen, another who came home so drunk most nights she kept the front door wide open. Finally, I ended up with a sweet, in the closet musician, who was studying at Juilliard, but when he finally found his boyfriend, he moved out. After that, I got married, and was no longer in need of a roommate.

I wonder if living with so many different people changed me. I still hide my chocolate, and I still feel relieved when I get home and no one is there. Maybe after all those roommates, solitude feels less like loneliness and more like having the place to myself.

Have you had roommates — wonderful, nightmarish, or weird?

Molly Moynahan