Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [16]
A car alarm bleated from across the street. Hope stirred, and flung a long leg over the side of the too-small mattress.
“Hope?” Another kick.
Nothing.
twelve
I gave up and got up. I pressed an ear to our bedroom door, listening for signs of life. When I didn’t hear anything, I opened the door a crack and listened again. I determined that my housemates were either still asleep or not on the premises, so I tiptoed toward the kitchen, stupidly shushing the loose planks in the wood floor that creaked under my weight.
I leaned against the linoleum countertop, content that the only sound inside the apartment was the slurpy gurgle of the coffeemaker. I said my morning prayer: Don’t let them come until I finish my first cup. Despite the rarity of such moments of solitude, I love my apartment. And not just because I thought my post-graduation mailing address would read something like: Jessica Darling, Kitchen-Aid Refrigerator Box, Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11215.
I am extremely fortunate to live in one of two bedrooms in an actual apartment with real (i.e., not cardboard) walls, located in the basement of a gorgeous brownstone. It’s rent-stabilized and usually rented by an academic family whose matriarch is currently on a one-year sabbatical in Europe. And it even comes equipped with a colorful landlord character, Ursula, a fortysomething half-Swede, half-German former fashion model who considers it her lot in life to point out Americans’ many flaws in vivid prose. For example, when I delivered the rent check the other afternoon, Ursula informed me that my eyebrows were all wrong. Besides plucking a few strays here and there, I’ve never given much thought to my eyebrows. But I dropped my head in wait for the wisdom Ursula could wield like a guillotine.
“Zey are like two desperate sperm trying to impregnate your eyeballs!”
The blond giantess turned on her boot heel and pounded up the stairs. I retrieved my head and carried it back down to the basement.
Maybe I’ve got a bad case of Stockholm syndrome, but I’m captivated by Ursula’s cruel humor. I’m not surprised that you feel differently. When you were targeted by one of her insights/insults (something about dreadlocks and cockroaches?), you referred to Ursula as “Jotun.”
“What?”
“Jotun. A fearsome Norse demigod, like those that suffer in the Asura realm in Buddhist culture.”
I had no idea what you were talking about. But you had my rapt attention, as you always did whenever your sentences consisted of more than a three-word subject-verb-object construction.
“They mean well, but always do more harm than good.”
I saw your point, then and now. Even when Ursula is on to something—and in the case of my eyebrows, I have noticed a certain spermy resemblance—her methods hurt more than they help. Still, I just can’t help but love someone who could say something like that.
(How about you? Could you love someone who would say something like that? Oh, that’s right. Whether you like it or not—and that’s not even a question, now, is it?—you already do.)
thirteen
Knowing it won’t last forever enhances our apartment’s many pleasures. (I’m doing a commendable job of not worrying about finding a new place in exactly nine months and twenty-eight days.) Hope and I confirmed the first and best of said pleasures last spring as we sat on the front stoop waiting for our prospective housemates to arrive, before we had even set foot inside.
“According to this historical marker,” Hope said, examining a small bronze plaque affixed to the front door, “this building really was home to the Swedish American Men’s Sporting Society, more commonly known as S.A.M.S.S.”
“SAMSS,” I pronounced. “More familiarly known as Sammy.”
Within thirty seconds,