Chapter 3 #2
I nodded warmly, pretending I had my own dog-sitting sexual harassment problems. This was my first introduction to Lisette’s chaotic energy.
She has a tendency to bound around the room like an untethered electron, but she is nearly impossible to dislike.
I watched as she dragged a large Army/Navy style duffle bag out of the bedroom and plopped it into the middle of the living room floor.
“All my stuff fits in one sack, don’t worry,” she said, her slim neck hunched as she rolled up a pair of jeans.
“I had to leave my boyfriend in a hurry a few years ago, and since then I’ve kept stuff really compact.
Not that I had a lot to begin with. I had six older brothers and sisters.
My whole childhood was hand-me-downs. Do you ever watch those shows where the lady has a walk-in closet just for her shoes? That’s my dream.”
I nodded. “I think I’d need a house first.”
“You and me both. Once I pack, I’ll call Paul.
He’ll let me stay with him. Unless his mother is staying with him, but I think she’s gone home.
She was there for a couple of weeks. Can you imagine your mother coming to stay and not leaving for weeks?
Not that my mom would, my mom was great. Until she died.”
“I know what you mean.” I thought of my mother who had never showed up on my doorstep mostly because she couldn’t be bothered to travel that far. Two hours on a bus to New York was two hours when she wouldn’t be chatting up single men at her favorite bar.
“I’ll pull the sheets in the bedroom and then you can settle in there and I’ll take care of cleaning the rest of the apartment.”
I looked around. “Actually, do you know where I could get a cup of coffee? I really just need a coffee. I can bring you back one if you like.”
Lisette put down the pile of clothes she was carrying and looked straight at me. “I make the best coffee.”
A few minutes later, I was seated at the dining table with a mug of coffee that said, ‘I don’t spit, I swallow’ on it in a gleeful comic font.
Lisette did not make the ‘best coffee,’ but it was very drinkable, and it put me in a much better mood.
I finally had a chance to take in my new apartment as Lisette wandered around picking up random items. There was the living room with a distant view of the main harbor, a small comfy sofa and some hanging plants on what looked like fishing net baskets.
The kitchen area formed the center of the apartment, with pale wood cabinets and a bright blue counter that opened up into the living room space.
The bathroom was a tiny closet with a miniature shower, small enough to compete with some of my New York tenement apartments, tucked into the hallway near the front door, and the back of the house was made up of the large bedroom, which would be pleasant and bright once Lisette had finished her whirlwind of cleaning.
“So Paul is your…?” I asked politely.
“Paul’s the best,” Lisette replied as she walked by with a toothbrush. “And he has way more space now that his wife left him. He’s in my improv group.”
I said nothing. I knew from my college years that as soon as you inquired about somebody’s improv group, you would immediately get invited to a show, so it was best to feign temporary hearing loss.
“You should come to one of our shows!” she cried, unprompted. “We’re really good. We’re called the Newfingers.”
“That’s fun.”
“Paul’s the best one of us, but Mark’s pretty good, too.
” She rattled on about the strengths and weaknesses of these two men whom I had no intention of meeting, let alone watching on some tiny stage doing prop comedy about their sexual misadventures.
I wasn’t paying strict attention by this point.
She had cleared out the bedroom, so I walked inside to start arranging my stuff.
“Those sheets come with the apartment!” she called, referencing the pile on the floor. “I’ll wash them in the basement.”
“I can get the wash started.”
Lisette stuck her head in the bedroom. “Sure, that’d be great. Just don’t let Mrs. Mahoney bother you.”
“Charlotte told me.”
“She acts like she owns the building, but the washer and dryer are for both apartments.”
“I’ll get these sheets going.”
I walked downstairs with the sheets knotted up in one hand to find the basement doorway.
Sure enough, the first-floor apartment door was cracked open, and a pair of blue eyes peered out at me with the flat stare of a hired assassin.
When I turned to say hello, the door shut again.
That must be Mrs. Mahoney, destined to be my nemesis.
I’d had neighbors like that in New York, so I wasn’t too intimidated; I could probably turn on my Brooklyn charm and bring her around to tolerating me.
It was a skill I had learned from years of apartment living: the key was to ignore any hostile behavior directed toward you and ask them for advice about the neighborhood food.
When I arrived back at the top of the stairs, I could hear Lisette on her phone, and I paused to listen through the door.
“No, I understand. I—Paul, I totally understand. I’ll find something. It’s no big deal.” I waited for her to end the call before coming inside. Lisette turned to me, a forced smile on her face.
“Paul can’t take me for a couple of days,” Lisette said.
“I can call my church, though. There’s lots of old ladies there with empty rooms, and they’re bored now that their Haitian refugee family moved to Gander.
Someone should be able to take me in. I’ll be this week’s arts and crafts project in the basement. ”
“Okay,” I said, then added impulsively, “or you could stay. On the sofa, I mean. If you need to. If it’s really just for a couple of days.”
“Not really?” Lisette gaped at me.
“I mean, if you don’t mind me having the bedroom…”
“No, of course. That would be incredible. Paul can take me, just not until Tuesday. And I work in a coffee shop. I can bring you really good muffins at the end of the day.”
“I love muffins. I think we have a deal,” I said.
“That will give me time to talk to the women at the church, too.”
Later that night, sitting in the bedroom without a functioning lock, I wondered if I was insane to let a stranger stay with me whom I had only just met.
I was probably lonely, with Laura away. But I also liked Lisette.
I sensed in her stories something like the chaos from my own childhood, the quick moves where your stuff went into a duffel bag, the inability to keep track of times and dates.
It sounded more familiar than I wanted it to be.
The next morning, I woke up to light pouring into my eyes and reminded myself that this far north the sunrise would be insultingly early.
I stumbled up out of Charlotte’s comfortable bed and wandered over to the back window.
As soon as I opened it, there was the faint smell of fish and cow manure.
I tried to tell myself it was romantic, that it meant I was in some remote, lonely corner of the world where my horizons would be broadened and my soul renewed.
This was likely to be more convincing once I’d had my first cup of coffee.
I shuffled into the living room, where I saw that Lisette had rolled herself into a perfect cocoon on the sofa.
“Sorry,” I whispered, as I began to putter around the kitchen looking for coffee-making ingredients. She sat up almost immediately and gave me a tired smile.
“Let me!” she cried. “I don’t mind at all. I’ll show you how it’s done.”
“In the meantime, I’m going to stumble over to the eastern windows and glare at the sun for a bit. It rose at least half an hour earlier than in Brooklyn and I’m feeling resentful.”
Lisette laughed. “You can scold it for me, too,” she said. “It’s like that friend who always tries to convince you to go running.”
Lisette and I made a good couple of days of it, as it turned out. She was away most of the time at the café where she worked, but when she was home, she was careful about being quiet when she came in, especially if she saw that I was on a video call for work.
“Did he just say, ‘Good-bye, rock star’?” she asked me after I got off a work call with Kedar.
“That’s my boss. Corporate people talk like that.”
“They call each other rock stars?”
I laughed. “Kedar is very, very positive. Everyone he works with is the best. Everything we’re doing is amazing. Every article I write is a home run. It lets us both pretend we’re not working in finance, which is an incredibly boring industry.”
“I want someone to call me a rock star.”
“First you have to hit some home runs,” I said.
“Maybe that’s my problem. No home runs.”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “You just worked a full day at a café. Did anyone spit out their coffee in front of you?”
“No.”
“Did customers complain to your manager?”
“Nobody does that here.”
“Did you get into a fistfight with the guy delivering the milk?”
“No.”
“You just hit a home run, Lisette. Gold star.”
She laughed. “Americans are crazy.”
“I am not arguing with that, but corporate people are especially crazy.”
Later, as she headed to bed, I said, “Good night, rock star.”
“Good night, rock star,” she called back, laughing. It already felt like we were better friends than we were. I suspected Lisette had that effect on people.
The next day, my best friend Jasmine called me up. Jasmine, Lucas and I had been brunch buddies for over a decade. We were all in our late thirties, all perpetually single, and we managed to have a good time pretending to be fabulous while debating the life choices of characters on TV shows.
“Hey, Chica,” she sang out. Jasmine has one of those voices that can turn a two-syllable word into a Mariah Carey song. “How is the ‘New Found Land’? Are they having a lot of July 4th festivities?”
“Shockingly, no, given that it’s not their Independence Day. I guess July 1st is Canada day, but I arrived late enough that I missed any parades.”