seemed overly worried about how this worked. Things were getting serious with the pilot, I presumed.
Paula laughed. “Of course they mind! But that’s too bad. I need a little me time. Even our worst trip is a vacation from my regular life.”
Like most flight attendants with children, Paula was a “slam clicker” on trips. As soon as she’d get to the hotel room she’d let the door slam-click shut behind her, never to reappear until pick-up the following morning. The next twenty-four hours were filled with bubble baths and room service, soap operas and books in bed, peace and quiet and waking up to the morning light instead of a husband who needed help finding his socks or the kids crying for breakfast early in the morning. Because of her job her husband couldn’t take her for granted and the kids got to know their father in a way most never do.
“Trust me, Jane, they’ll be grateful I have this job when they’re older and we’re flying around the world for free,” added Paula.
When Jane wondered out loud if her boyfriend could be as patient as Paula’s husband, Paula, the nerdiest of us all, had this to say: “It’s pretty amazing what men will put up with for a blow job.” All of us laughed, even though Jane and I would later admit that neither one of us could imagine Paula doing something like that.
“It’s the quiet ones you have to worry about,” I told Jane when Paula was out of earshot. Before, I never really believed the saying, but now I knew it to be true.
The following day Jane looked at me mischievously. “She must do it a lot.”
I didn’t have to ask who she was talking about or what “it” meant. We’d both been traumatized by the revelation.
Like Paula, Grace was another roommate who was rarely around, not because she commuted or had kids, but because her boyfriend was in the military and stationed in Japan. Holed up in her room, she spent hours talking to him over the phone using discounted calling cards that seemed way too good to be true, even though she purchased packs of them at Costco. Grace began Skyping before I’d even heard of the word. She was on top of the latest means of communications and always trying to educate the rest of us in the house about things that seemed a little shady at the time, like using the computer as a phone. Grace had been dating her boyfriend for years. Sadly, they rarely saw each other. That was okay because she was strong, and whenever she began to feel weak, she read the Bible or distracted herself by taking the train to Koreatown to pick up treats she grew up on as a child that she would later force upon us.
“Don’t knock it before you try it!” Grace once said, holding up a jar of something pink swimming in red liquid. None of us were up to trying it.
As much as Jane would have loved to have thrown away whatever it was Grace always brought home from her excursions into the city, she never did, not even when Tricia complained about needing extra room to house twenty Tupperware containers of vegetable soup. Paula, always the peacemaker, offered to reorganize the fridge to make it all fit after Dee Dee decided to get rid of the tomatoes, onions, and jalapenos she’d brought from Arizona by whipping up fresh pico de gallo for all of us to share. Whatever was left over she’d take to the crew working her trip later that night.
The most interesting thing about Grace was not that her childhood reminded me of the Broadway show
While I loved hanging out with Grace, Jane got on better with Agnes, which I couldn’t understand because Agnes and I didn’t exactly click. Then again, maybe I didn’t try hard enough to make things click. When she spoke I could barely hear her. And when I did hear her I didn’t always understand what she was saying. Jane found her to be deep. I found her to be a little… well, different, considering she couldn’t remember how to work the microwave and coffeepot no matter how many times I showed her. I don’t think she knew how to work the oven or the fridge, either, because Agnes couldn’t have weighed more than 110 pounds. The girl rarely ate. At five-feet-nine, she looked like a model, that’s how willowy and pretty she was. Like Grace, Agnes had a strong connection to God, but unlike Grace she was quiet and pretty much only spoke when spoken to. With long strawberry-blond hair, light blue eyes, and fair skin, Agnes looked as angelic as she acted. On her days off she, too, would hole up in her bedroom, only she preferred the company of a good book to a phone or a computer. Rarely did she hang out with us, and when she did it never lasted long, because if we weren’t bickering and gossiping, we were sharing things unfit for virginal ears.
Grace was the first one who noticed Agnes might be up to something. We were all sitting on the couch when Agnes tiptoed through the living room and into the kitchen, grabbed a loaf of bread, a container of mayo, and a couple of wrapped-up packages of deli meat, and without saying a word started for the stairs. Jane had seen her do this once before and wondered if there might be a connection between the sneaky sandwiches and the late-night hang-up calls we’d been getting for the last month. I thought the calls probably had more to do with Tricia’s stalker, but Dee Dee wasn’t so sure since the stalker and Tricia had recently made up and were trying to rekindle what they once had. Jane rolled her eyes. Paula brought up the empty baby stroller she’d noticed outside our front door the previous week. Dee Dee had seen it too, but figured it belonged to the neighbors who had young kids. Jane didn’t think so—both boys were too old for a stroller. Anyway, she’d seen it behind the house next to the recycling bin and figured someone must have left it inside Yakov’s cab. She was just happy to see he’d placed it near the right bin. Then she wondered why Yakov didn’t use it to repair the broken washer since he had a tendency to do weird things like that. That’s when Tricia ran through the front door and yelled out she had to get ready for a date, she was late. Paula worried about Tricia dating the stalker again, but Grace reminded Paula that Tricia had asked us to stop calling him the stalker, since his name was Steven. Jane made a face and Dee Dee started laughing. Paula offered to open another bottle of wine. When Agnes reappeared to put the secret sandwich ingredients back in the kitchen where it all belonged, Grace asked her what was up.
“Oh, uh… I was just hungry,” she said, and disappeared back up the stairs.
It was an unwritten rule that in our crash pad no men were allowed to spend the night—well, no local guys. This rule was established by Jane after Grace ran into one Tricia’s boyfriends in the kitchen early one morning. Grace didn’t find it amusing to see him standing there in his tighty-whities. Jane was appalled to learn he had eaten her banana. Paula couldn’t believe we were making a big fuss. Dee Dee was too tired from the red-eye from Buenos Aires to care. If anyone was involved in a long-distance relationship, it was perfectly fine to have the person over, even for a few nights. In that type of situation, it was safe to assume we probably knew him well (or at least, a lot about him) and there was little chance of his being a frequent visitor. Otherwise, no boys allowed. Not only because it wasn’t safe to have strange men spending the night in a house full of women, but because the last thing we wanted to do was hear or see Tricia—I mean a roommate—having sex. So imagine our surprise when it turned out to be Agnes and not Tricia breaking the rules.
None of us knew how long it’d been going on, and we didn’t want to know, either, because Agnes’s stowaway boyfriend was creepy. And old. Twice her age, at least. Jane was the first one who saw him in person. She came home early from a trip that had been canceled and found him sitting on the sofa with his shoes on the table, watching a horse race and drinking Dee Dee’s Diet Coke as if he owned the place. The worst part: he was there alone and unsupervised. Well, we thought that was the worst part until we found out more about him. When we confronted Agnes, we learned he was a single father with a gambling addiction who unofficially moved in with us after he lost his house. Agnes took care of his little girl, a precious child who called her Mommy, while he blew money she’d lent him at the racetrack. The dirty stroller, we realized, belonged to him. We were horrified to know how long he’d been around and not one of us had a clue. Agnes had wanted to have children for so long. When pressed as to why she would allow someone like him run her life, she admitted it had everything to do with the child. A few days after we banned him from the house, I spotted the stroller in a park two blocks away. I scanned
