“you are beautiful”
Earlier this week, I was excited to make my debut at Essay Fiesta, a monthly live lit show produced by Karen Shimmin and Willy Nast. It was a great evening. I feel ashamed to admit that I’d forgotten what beautiful writers Karen and Willy are. I need to see them more, both at EF and elsewhere around town when they perform.
Anyway, I think the essay I wrote is still a work in progress, but here it is as written (which is pretty close to how it was delivered).
Every morning when I wake up and look out my window, the parking lot of the Swedish American Museum tells me that I am beautiful. It says so with big white letters affixed to the iron fence that defines the lot’s borders. The letters declare “you are beautiful”.
I understand the parking lot’s affirmation is intended not just for me. There are, for example, the people who drive past it. Neighbors walking their dogs. The dogs themselves. Maybe even the shops in my apartment building, like the Woolly Mammoth Antique Store where, no matter how many times you ask, the taxidermied two-headed goat is definitely not for sale.
I moved into this apartment three months ago, after ten years of living in a Lakeview studio apartment that faced nothing so complimentary as this parking lot. My old place was the kind of dwelling for which mini blinds were considered an amenity worthy of its own bullet point in the apartment listing.
The current place also has mini blinds. But the bathroom tap always drips. The ceiling fan will not work unless I turn on the vestibule light. None of these things bother me so much. I do not know that the only reason why they do not is because I am beautiful. But it certainly does not hurt.
Every apartment I have ever lived in had it’s good points and it’s bad points. I try not to look back at the last two decades of my life with any regret about leaving behind affordable apartments in what realtors like to call “up and coming” neighborhoods. But for all this time I have had this problem, of not being comfortable, not feeling at home enough, in my actual home.
I used to think it began when I was in college. I do not know who started it. Was it me, a chubby New Yorker who lived with two parents and four siblings in a small three bedroom apartment, or my roommate Angela, a laidback chainsmoker from Virginia whose favorite drink was Doctor Pepper. We must have made an odd couple, as she was very tiny and tended to slouch while I always wore the kind of gardening clogs favored by garden gnomes. I had moved into her double room after realizing I could no longer afford my single. We set up our ashtrays side by side in the window, made room for my CD’s next to her stereo, and began to dress and undress in our respective closets.
Maybe it was because we were not as close friends as I had thought we were. But if we were not, then why did I move into her room in the first place? It is not that I was uncomfortable with the possibility of situational partial nudity. There had been times in my childhood when I would find my father at home, almost drunk on half a Bud Light, sitting around in his underwear while picking out Jethro Tull on his guitar. So if I happened to catch her flailing about while putting on a pair of overalls, it would have not have been any kind of a deal.
Who cared if another girl in the dorm, my friend Emily, would leave the door to her room ajar and sit in her open bathrobe and play Minesweeper? That was her hobby, kinda like how Emily’s roommate Celi and I would overpluck our eyebrows into Kate Moss-like oblivion on a regular basis. It was the early 90s, and riot grrls were a thing, so between my asymmetrical haircut and pastel nail polish I wore ironically why was I not occasionally flashing people as I stomped around Hyde Park in knockoffs of Steve Madden chunky heeled shoes?
Because the room was never mine to begin with. I had asked Angela if I could move into her double to save money, and she said yes. She may have resented me for replacing her original roommate, thus taking up the extra space she might have otherwise used to store her collection of Doctor Pepper cans. But I will never know.
After that first year, Angela took her cans and her better stereo and moved into an apartment off campus. I went to work for the resident masters of my dorm, helping to plan and host events for students in exchange for free housing. I lived alone, with a coveted view of a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and within range of the bag pipers who would take to the Midway Plaisance early on Sunday mornings to practice.
Over the years, I lived with several roommates in different places. Despite being an adult, I never quite got the hang of being at home the way they did. I thought making yourself at home was just a figure of speech, not a thing you actually did. I worried about getting too comfortable, as if that was a reasonable fear to have in your own house. And even if I did start hanging around my roommates naked while playing Minesweeper, or become fond of playing Jethro Tull in my underpants, what harm would that do? At worst, I would lose a roommate. But most likely I would have just given them material for a funny story to tell their parents before getting chased back into my room by the cat.
Right after I moved into my current abode, my friend Nadine came to visit. She was another person I met in college but unlike Angela she and I remained friends. Nadine, much like my friend Emily, was comfortable with herself and her body. It was fun to tease her about her constant nudity in our early twenties because she was always the first person to laugh. Having been raised by hippies in New Hampshire, she had learned to develop a good sense of humor and a sense of self.
She invited herself to Chicago because she knew that the ten years I had spent living in Lakeview were not good ones. I had become a hoarder. The apartment was barely functional, and because I procrastinated instead of packing I ended up throwing out most of my possessions. Clothes and shoes, gifts from friends and even my college diploma were hurriedly stuffed into garbage bags and hauled away by two giants from “College Hunks Hauling Junk”. Nadine wanted to make sure that this time I would furnish the apartment like I deserved. Like I should have been doing all along.
Having spent too much money on the move, I was anxious about buying stuff that, post-hoard, I had convinced myself I didn’t need. I could sleep on this air mattress for the summer. These paper plates from the dollar store are awfully sturdy for being, you know, paper. And doesn’t my television look great on the floor?
Nadine did not agree.
And who was I to argue? Nadine was the master of thrift and economy, making pasta for pennies as a starving graduate student. She was the breadwinner for her family of three. She has successfully kept her sourdough starter alive in her refrigerator for a number of years.
Nadine is the kind of friend whose presence is immediately consoling. Whenever she leaves after a visit, I always feel like I have just been tucked safely into bed.
So instead of taking furniture I did not want from well-meaning friends so I didn’t offend them by saying no, I did as I was instructed and parked myself at my laptop so I could buy reasonably priced adult furniture from my friendly multi-national Swedish ready-to-assemble furniture emporium. Nadine and I and our other friend Jacinda drove to a wonderful antique shop in Roscoe Village where I bought a little mid-century kitchen table with leaves and a pink and green striped wing chair without having a meltdown. We re-measured the windows, debated whether or not I needed a nightstand, and tabled the bath mat debate after it got out of hand.
It was hot that weekend, in the nineties and humid, so we took turns taking frequent cold showers. The conversation was constant, so if I spent more time than I meant to, standing topless by my open window and maybe possibly okay definitely flashing the people coming out of the Middle Eastern Bakery across the street, it was not a big deal. Like the parking lot next to the bakery reminded me, I was beautiful. And as long as I could see the parking lot, I knew that I was safely at home.
