A parquet apartment in Van Ness - #215
To the residents of: South 303
Welcome to Growing Conditions, a summer series of letters to the places I used to live. Each week, I’m writing a letter—sent in the mail and posted here—to an address that grew me. We’re moving one stop down the red line.
To the residents of: South 303
To the residents of: a parquet apartment in Van Ness
It was one stop. One stop on the Red Line from Tenleytown to Van Ness, and an entirely different life. I left the brick Tudor with the gable, the attic room not meant for a body, the boys whose names I was already forgetting, and moved into a one-bedroom apartment with a woman named Mallory and her enormous Maine Coon, Tuck.
It was not, technically, a two-bedroom apartment. It was a one-bedroom with parquet floors, a heavy door, and a hallway like a Best Western. Inside, to the left, a small kitchen. Beyond that, a big room with a wide window. To the right, the bathroom and Mallory’s room. That was it. One bedroom. Two women. So Mallory did what Mallory did: she hired some guys to build a wall.
This, to me, is still a mystery of accomplishment. This was 2009. There wasn’t Taskrabbit—there was just Craigslist, and Mallory’s wellspring of gumption. Nevermind that I don’t even think Mallory was technically allowed to build a wall in an apartment she didn’t own, but she didn’t care. Mallory had a deep sense of justice and no patience for rules that served no one. She let me choose where the wall went. I opted to include one additional outlet, making our shared living room tiny and my bedroom colossal. In the now windowless living room, there was a futon and a litter box, and only the cat used either. Mallory did not believe in staying in.
I still had my mattress on the floor. I upgraded to a cardboard box for a nightstand. But I had a big window, and for the first time in years, I had someone on the other side of the wall who was paying attention.
To save a plant, sometimes you have to prune. Cut it back to almost nothing—no leaves, no height, no beauty—and trust that the roots can push again. That January, they cut the tumor out of my neck. It took six hours of surgery, and required extensive facial-nerve dissection. I woke up without a tumor and with nerve damage. I couldn’t move the right side of my face. I had a drainage bag with a tube coming out of my neck pinned to the collar of my shirt. My Zoloft prescription had run out the same day. I was pruned to the stem.
Mallory gave me her bedroom to recover in. She slept in my room—on the mattress on the floor, next to the cardboard box. Tuck would pad in to check on me every few hours, his enormous body settling at the foot of her bed like a weighted blanket. Those were incredibly low days. But this was a place where I could bleed out, where I could lie in the shambles of surgery knowing someone would see to the repotting.
My boss at the NIH wanted me back that Friday, and I went. I walked across campus, blood seeping through my shirt, the bag still clipped to my collar. She stared at me when I walked in and then didn’t speak to me again. After four hours I told her I needed to go home. “Have a nice weekend!” she beamed. The operable side of my mouth hoisted itself and then collapsed like a push puppet.
I came home to Mallory.
“You should get a cat,” she said. She was wearing aqua leopard leggings. Her streaked brown curls twice the width of her face. If you’ve read the full story of how I came to adopt Alistaire, you know what happened next involved a dead cat, the blood bag, a one-night-stand, and me screaming in the apartment at dawn. If you haven’t, just know this: when everything fell apart, Mallory shot up from bed, turned to the stranger beside her, and said, “We need your car.” In the year I lived with her, three separate men wrote missed connections about her on Craigslist. She had that effect—on strangers, on rooms, on me.
Alistaire came home that same day. A tabby kitten who would move with me from DC to New York to Boulder, who walked through airports on a leash and played fetch in walk-up stairwells. My first adult pet. My first act of choosing something alive and saying: I will tend to you.
Everything grew in that apartment of parquet and temporary walls: cats, girls, friendship. Sometimes it’s not the light or the soil, but the gardener. Mallory saw me at my most pruned—dead-end job, swimming in debt, wracked with mental health problems—and she didn’t water me once a week and walk away. She amended the soil. She built the wall. She handed me her bed and slept on my floor.
Every house before this one, I’d been reading the conditions of a place—the light, the air, the architecture, the geography. Here I learned that sometimes the conditions are just someone who refuses to let you die in the pot.
Mallory did not buy houseplants. Mallory was a gardener.
I love these. At 68 I recently counted moving over 43 times - all over the place. I used to blame it on my work. Now I realize it was my mental health that kept me running. Until I married Carl my husband. He died a year ago on September 7 (his death certificate says the 8th but that's bullshit) and I'm just now ready to start compartmentalizing moving again. I've been here for almost 6 years. Reading your summer series is giving me courage to start looking around and ignoring the great migration that seems to be making it difficult for fun places and COL in my happy range. I have to get creative now in order to continue my journey. I'd forgotten how many times I had a great mattress that I put on the floor to sleep on trying to stay minimalist - when it wasn't chic.
Great writing!
It’s early and I don’t have big words yet but lord you r such a great writer.