6
February crawls through Boston with its claws out.
Snow turns to slush. Salty footprints track through halls.
Traffic cones and folding chairs stand guard on vacant parking spaces.
The B line experiences 20-minute delays, with shuttles from Sutherland to Boston University East.
Bar windows display painted shamrocks beside “Go Celtics!” scrawled in green.
Meanwhile, Andy and I find our roommate rhythm pretty quickly.
Andy wakes up at 7:30 AM every day, Monday through Sunday, goes for a jog, then takes a shower before starting work.
I am somewhat less regimented, waking up when God wills it and usually showering at night.
Andy buys groceries on Thursdays and Sundays, and cooks for both of us every evening.
I assign myself most of the remaining chores to balance things out—trash, bathroom, vacuuming, etc. (I don’t want to be a crappy roommate and an imposition.
It’s like, pick a lane.) Oh, and we stop staying up until 3:00 AM every night, which was admittedly not sustainable.
So now it’s day six of roommate-hood, and I’m very stressed, but not because of my living situation.
It’s because of this stupid presentation to the board tomorrow that I had to rush to get prepared on time, and am not confident it’s any good at all.
I can already see my night sprawling out before me: seated on the floor of my bedroom scrolling back and forth through my slides like the information in them is going to become more impressive upon the twelfth glance.
As a lifelong overthinker, I’ve developed some coping mechanisms for days like this.
My favorite one is distraction. So as I disembark from the train and start walking home, I call my mom looking for Minneapolis’s hottest gossip (among women of a certain age who happen to live in my mom’s neighborhood).
It’s snowing pretty hard now, with a few inches on the ground already.
The phone rings four times before she answers.
“Hi, sweetie!”
“Hi, mom. How are you?”
“I’m good, I’m good. I’m just whipping up some Snickers salad for book club, here let me put you on speaker.” I hear the click of the phone as it’s placed on the countertop, and her voice sounds a bit farther away when she asks, “Can you hear me still?”
“Yep, clear as a bell.”
And then she’s off.
My mom has the energy of a firework show.
She’s very entertaining and always has stories to share, and when she decides she wants to talk about something, there’s almost no hope of wriggling your way out of the conversation.
Today’s topics include: the wonders of acupuncture, her boyfriend Billy and his new birding hobby, and a bit of drama she saw on Facebook.
“But anyway honey how are you? How’s work?”
“Work’s great,” I report. “Same old, same old.”
Between you and me, I haven’t really kept her in the loop about the exhibit launch. It’s not like a secret or something—I’ll tell her about it afterwards. It’s just that she’s happy when I’m happy, so it’s easier to report back once the stressful part is behind me.
“And what about Elliot?” she asks. “How’s he?”
“Oh, um, we actually broke up over the weekend.”
“You did? Oh my god honey, are you okay?”
“Yeah, it’s all fine,” I insist. “I feel really good about it. And I’m gonna be living with Andy until I can find a place on my own, and his place is really nice. He has a spare bedroom and everything.”
“Andy? Really?”
I can see where this conversation is going from 1,400 miles away as I answer, “Yep.”
“You didn’t want to live with Lia?”
“Well, she’s in a studio, so there isn’t really space for me.”
“Hmm.”
“What’s that ‘hmm’?” I try to keep my tone light.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I just don’t really see you living together. Andy’s a nice enough boy, but he’s sort of standoffish, don’t you think?”
I shake my head but keep walking. “He only seems that way until you get to know him.”
“Well you’ll make your own choices, I’m sure. But I have to tell you, living with an emotionally repressed man isn’t for the faint of heart. I would know, I lived with your father for almost 20 years.” She laughs at herself, all Midwestern charm, but it doesn’t land with me right now.
“He’s not emotionally repressed, mom. Really, he’s just shy. I promise.”
I can feel her shrug through the phone. “It’s up to you, Sophia.” (She’s the only one who ever uses my full name earnestly.) “ But I’ll be hoping you find a nice place of your own soon.”
“Thanks.”
After a beat, she asks, “You would tell me if you weren’t happy, right?”
“Yeah, of course,” I say immediately. “But I am happy. I’m doing great, really. The breakup was my choice and I’m honestly feeling good about it all.”
She lets out a long sigh. “Good, I’m glad.”
“Hey mom, I’m getting to the apartment now so I’ll let you go, but have fun at book club. Tell Dianne and Margie I say hi.”
“Okay, I will. Love you.”
“Love you too.”
I feel like a mess when I walk in through the apartment door. My cheeks are raw and my glasses are covered in melted snowflakes and the string of tension in my gut from work seems to have double knotted itself during the call with my mom.
Do you ever leave a conversation feeling bad and you’re not even sure why?
That’s this. I’m replaying the call in my head as I unzip my boots and place them on the shoe rack, then hang my coat on the hook by the door.
Did she sound upset with me? Or worried?
I wish she wouldn’t worry. Was I too snappy about the Andy thing?
Maybe I should call her back and apologize. I’ll do it as soon as I eat something.
Andy doesn’t seem to be home yet, so I walk into the kitchen and grab a jar of peanut butter and a big spoon. And I’ll tell you, peanut butter is a criminally underrated dinner. It’s super fast and fills you up and tastes delicious. What more could a girl want?
No sooner do I place the first glob into my mouth than my best friend comes trudging through the front door, heavily laden with grocery bags like a lanky beast of burden. He sets the bags down and reaches up to take out his earbuds, the bottom four inches of his pants soaked from the snow.
“Hey.”
“Hey, you,” I mumble around the peanut butter.
He looks from the jar to me and back again. “You hungry? I stocked up.”
Of course he did. Thursdays are grocery days after all—the regimented freak.
I swallow my unladylike mouthful, then cross over to him to grab some bags as he takes off his coat and shoes. “Honestly, I’m not that hungry, but do you want to do something tonight? I’m kind of fixating on work stuff and I think entertainment would help.”
“Hmm,” he muses, picking up the rest of the bags and placing them on the kitchen table. “Do you want to leave the apartment? I think it’s Third Thursdays tonight at the Gardener.”
“Andy! Yes! That’s perfect. Let’s do it.”
Third Thursdays is this after-hours event at the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum that happens on the third Thursday of every month, obviously.
They set up bars all throughout the museum, and usually have live music and dancing, and you can still see all their normal exhibits too except with a way smaller crowd than usual.
I haven’t been in years but now that the idea is out there, I probably have to go for work…
right? You know, doing recon about successful museum events, so I can make our exhibit launch better? Seems like the least I can do.
The momentum of this great idea has me up and heading towards the door when Andy steps into my path, catching my upper arms with both hands and halting my progress.
“Hang on.” He physically rotates me back towards the kitchen. “Groceries. Refrigerator. And I want to change, then we can go.”
“Right. Okay.”
We quickly unload Andy’s cloth grocery bags into the fridge and cabinets, then he folds them and places them into a drawer below the microwave. And if the fact that Andy folds his cloth grocery bags doesn’t tell you the kind of person he is, I simply don’t know how to make you understand.
He goes into his bedroom to change out of his snow-damp clothes and I sit back down at the table, reclaiming my peanut butter spoon and nibbling on another big scoop as I scroll through Instagram. Lia’s account is at the top of my feed, right where it belongs, and I click through to her profile.
The top three posts are a pretty perfect encapsulation of her brand.
The first is a ridiculously hot picture of her in a bright orange bikini outside in the snow.
She’s all long hair and longer legs, tan skin glowing against stark white as she lounges across her apartment building’s front stoop.
(Lucky neighbors!) The caption reads “All this snow makes me miss the beach. Thanks @stitchlady.official for helping me bring this suit to life and live my summer fantasy! Get your own sewing machine today with a 10% discount through the link in my bio” followed by a series of hearts and sun emojis.
Of course she made the swimsuit herself. I mentioned she’s my role model, right?
The second picture is of a handmade pink and red sweater.
Lia’s sweaters are art. And that’s not me being hyperbolic about how good they are—her sweaters are literally art pieces that get shown in galleries around Boston.
Don’t ask me how she does it, but she crochets pictures and text onto the sweaters.
And people pay big bucks for not only the original pieces but also printed photos as wall art.
It’s nuts. The one I’m looking at right now depicts the head and shoulders of a woman on the front of the sweater.
Her eyes are closed, chin tilted up, and she’s grabbing her own neck on the border between suggestive and violent.
It’s so… expressive. I can’t imagine drawing something this beautiful on paper, let alone making it with yarn and a crochet needle. Insane.
The third post is a video that starts “Hello, ladies!”
Lia’s wearing a low-cut bodysuit and wide-legged jeans with her hair pulled into a perfectly messy bun.
The white glitter around her eyes matches her bright white smile.
“Welcome back to embroidery club. Today is lesson three, and we’re learning a cute little stitch called the French knot…”