BY JULIET WALLER
Copyright is held by the author.
Seattle, WA 1993
I SAW the ad for the apartment in Spring Rain, the hippy shop where I’d gone to get some tarot cards and crystals. Tarot cards weren’t really my style but my heart was broken and I needed something new to believe in. I called the number from a payphone on a noisy corner, one block away. The landlord’s name was Kevin. Over the din of traffic, he told me how he owned the building that housed Spring Rain and its neighbour, Broadway Copiers. Kevin told me he’d been in the process of converting the upstairs into a living space when he fell in love with Ramona, one of the tarot card readers from Spring Rain. Ramona could not live in a place without a bathtub and for whatever reason, a bathtub could not live in the upstairs space. They were moving into a house with three bathrooms and two bathtubs. “One of them is clawfoot, the other has jets,” he told me.
My heart had been broken by Ethan. Ethan sometimes read to me, perched on the closed lid of the toilet while I took a bath. We dated for 11 months, and lived together for 10 of them. We did not have the scaffolding to sustain a relationship but still, I thought we would last.
I met up with Kevin and Ramona in the back room of Broadway Copiers. The employees there all looked like they were getting slowly electrocuted. Everyone’s hair stood on end, and a constant echo of quiet ouches could be heard as they got shocked every time they touched something. In the back room, we sat in a row on the too soft couch, Ramona and Kevin on either side of me. Ramona smelled delicious, like sandalwood and musk. Kevin smelled of nothing and I wondered how Ramona could love a man with no scent. Ethan had smelled of Speed Stick and bleach. Ethan liked to wear white t-shirts.
Kevin said I could live in the upstairs space for one year. Rent would be $335 a month. No microwaves, no extension cords, and no pets, especially ferrets. Ramona offered me a butterscotch lifesaver just as Kevin said the word ferret and in my mind this is what a ferret tastes like.
I moved in five days later. Even heartbroken, I loved the place. I didn’t care that it was truly one room with one door that led to the rickety stairs out back, that nothing was hidden, not the toilet, or the dishes in the sole kitchen cabinet, or my clothes on a flimsy metal rack. I felt very independent. I’d just turned 23, I made enough money modelling at art schools to pay for rent and food. I found that the barely liveable space inspired my writing and a pile of stories grew on the table next to my college electric typewriter, a Brother with a built-in correction key. I made copies downstairs and mailed them to my mother for editing. I’d found a good place to be lonely. After dinner, I sat with one leg out the window facing the street and smoked a night cigarette. This is when I got sad, thinking about Ethan and how he made us popcorn before we watched TV. I made him use his own bowl because he shovelled handfuls into his mouth while I ate mine one piece at a time. The popcorn inequality seemed so obvious to me but I wondered if that’s why he broke up with me.
A month after I moved in, I thought less and less about Ethan each night. I went out with my friends and didn’t talk about him at all. I got a crush on a guy from Broadway Copiers. One hot August night, as I sat half out my window, I saw Ethan walk down the street holding hands with a woman. I felt a little pang of jealousy. I shivered trying to loosen the squeeze in my heart. I thought how I now knew that Ethan had a new girlfriend but he didn’t know any new things about me. He’d never seen the inside of my apartment where I brushed my teeth and did my dishes in the same sink. The only sink in the place. He didn’t know I slept on the futon that had Kevin left up here. He didn’t know about my dreams of getting a little shock when the boy from the copier place tried to hold my hand.
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Juliet Waller is a Seattle-based playwright, short story author, and playwriting and theatre teacher. Her pieces have appeared in, among other places, The Kenyon Review (as a co-author), Gold Man Review, 3Elements, and Third Street Review.
