Revisiting May
Every so often, I wonder how many days I lived next to a dead woman.
A few weeks ago, I was late to a party on the third floor of my building, apartment 305. College was the last time I went to a party that I didn’t need to put on shoes to attend, and I couldn’t remember the proper decorum. Barefoot felt wildly inappropriate. Just imagine my naked toes out on display in front of strangers. I might as well show up in my underpants. For a moment, I debated slipping on a pair of boots. But boots to go up two flights of stairs seemed excessive. And of course, I’d just be asked to take them off when I arrived 15 seconds later.
I grew up in a shoes-on household and feel personally affronted when I’m asked to slide off my footwear at the front door.
“With all the dog feces and urine?” My friend Jenny likes to remind me, disgusted at my desire to continue wearing shoes indoors after they’ve been sullied on the sidewalks of San Francisco.
“I built my outfit to go with the shoes,” I always point out, annoyed at how many people I have to explain this to.
“What about human feces, Caroline?”
“Well, I don’t step in human feces if I see it.” It feels ridiculous to have to clarify this, like needing to affirm I don’t believe in murder or hit strangers on the bus.
At a 5 Year Anniversary Party I recently hosted for my apartment and myself, my friend Rachel brought her mom, who asked, “shoes off?” at the door.
“No!” I said. “Whatever makes you more comfortable!” She gave me an are-you-just-being-nice look, so I added, “Seriously, I’m a big believer in shoes-on! They are part of the outfit. Nothing would make me happier.” She was wearing sensible walking sneakers and jeans, but it felt good to exercise my philosophy.
I decided on socks for the apartment party. The hallway is covered with a thick maroon wall-to-wall carpet like something you might imagine in a chic pre-Bolshevik Revolution hotel in Moscow. They vacuum it once a week. Socks felt easy and still considerate of my neighbor’s assumed hygiene requirements.
The event that evening was organized by Victoria of 305, who is doing a Masters degree in Sustainable Community Development. We seemed to be a school project of sorts. I had never considered getting to know my neighbors before this. I’m not a total grouch. I say hello in the hallways, but I assumed after five years, I would live somewhere else, so being “neighborly” beyond casual laundry room chit chat seemed unnecessary. I don’t plan on being in apartment 203 forever, but who knows, Pamela in 201 has been here since the late 80s and boy does she have a great rate on rent. Either way, after six years in the city and five in this building, I’m certainly no longer a passing ship, and I’ve been curious about what it means to intentionally develop a connection to the place I live and the people with whom I share it.
Victoria and Andrew’s apartment is decorated in the classic millennial aesthetic, somewhere between mid-century modern and Etsy shop. Including our hosts, nine of us were there: an elderly couple from the first floor, Daniel (I think was his name) and his Irish wife; Tyler from the third-floor, whom I’d met several times because his dog Joey likes the way my crotch smells; and two other second-floor residents: Morgan, whose King Charles Spaniel Lucy sometimes sneaks into my apartment if I leave the door open, and two men from 205 I hadn’t met before, Jack and Dan.
“Like Jack Daniels!” I said. “That will be easy to remember.” Unfortunately now I can’t remember who is who, but at least I have a 50/50 shot of getting it right.
Jack and Dan live in the apartment next door to mine. It is, arguably, the most interesting apartment in the building.
“So, the couple that lived in 205 before you…” I said to Jack Daniels, the pair of them. “They weren’t there long...”
“Oh god, yea!” Victoria added. She knew what I was getting at. “We could hear them fighting through the floor.”
Nothing bonds strangers together faster than a little shit talk. Gossip and mutual dislike are basically the Gorilla Glue of kinship.
“I once heard her really going at him about his record collection,” I told the group. The exact line was: YOU CANNOT BRING ANOTHER FUCKING RECORD IN HERE UNTIL WE GET A CRIB!
“And she had a baby, right?” Morgan added. We all made a face that suggested something like a collective “yeesh.”
I wondered how much my neighbors knew about me from listening through the walls. I am gifted with an excellent set of lungs, and I tend to speak from my chest, which is a real service to the har-of-hearing in a large crowd, but tricky when you live in a pre-war apartment building with thin walls. It’s a funny relationship, intimate strangers. Romantic, until I consider how many of them have likely heard my lead feet jumping around to Pitbull songs late at night to let out some work stress.
It was Morgan who finally said, “And do you know about the woman in 205 before that couple?”
Jack Daniels (one of them) said, “no.”
“She died in that apartment,” Morgan said. I tried to mask my glee. There’s something morbidly intriguing about telling someone that a person died in their place of residence. I was thrilled to witness it.
“Do you know which room?” One of them asked. We all shook our heads. “What was her name?” We glanced around silently and shrugged.
“Apparently she was sort of a hoarder,” I added. It was the only detail I knew about her life. “Took them weeks to contact a relative to come clean it out.” Jack Daniels took this in with serene curiosity. Disappointing.
Every so often, I wonder how many days I lived next to a dead woman. Two? Five? Would it have started to smell eventually? How long does it take before a decomposing human body starts to smell?
The only dead bodies I’ve ever seen are my pet mouse Budwiser and my fourth grade teacher. Mr. Bell died from colon cancer halfway through the school year when I was eight. Our entire class was invited to go to the wake and the funeral. It was an open casket. None of the parents expected this and made it seem like a big deal, but it really just looked like he was sleeping. Natural enough, I had reasoned back then. We end each day asleep. Why not life?
Our class ended up with a temp named Mrs. Schwope, pronounced: SHH-woe-PEE. Mrs. Schwope had her own ideas for the fourth grade curriculum. We studied two things: birds and multiple intelligences.
One day, we all walked into the classroom after lunch and the desks and chairs had been pushed up against the walls.
“Grab two toothpicks and find a seat on the rug,” she instructed us. We exchanged looks of bemusement as we took a seat on the tightly woven, wiry carpet. It was class-lore by then that Mrs. Schwope was a joke.
“Don’t touch those!” She said to some boys in the back, who had already created slingshots and finger guns with the rubber bands she had strewn around the room. We were to be birds. The toothpicks, our beaks.
“Now you can see how easy it is to really be a bird,” Mrs. Schwope said. “You can only pick up the ‘worms’ with your ‘beaks.’
It’s entirely unclear if this lesson had a point. Perhaps some sort of mad stretch toward empathy? Mrs. Schwope did bring us together though. We relished in our shared mythology. Lamented, occasionally, that the MCAS (our state test) was coming up and no one had done a math problem or read a book in months. But we also loved Mrs. Schwope. She was our Gorilla Glue. We might have never properly learned long division, but I can still tell you a lot about the American Mallard and I’m pretty decent with chopsticks.
•••
Jack Daniels seemed weirdly okay that a dead woman had once been in their apartment. They’d never seen a ghost, or at least didn’t admit to it, so the conversation eventually moved on to work and dating and other mundanities of modern life. As the party in 305 started wind down, I noticed Andrew’s feet.
“Hey!” I said, pointing my right toes in his direction. We had on the exact same pair of socks from a local shop down the street, ankle high with cream and blue stripes.
“That makes so much sense!” Victoria said. “I always see your laundry and almost take it.”
“Well, someone did end up taking my laundry,” I said. “Twice!”
“Oh, did you leave that note on the door about the missing delicates?” The elderly Irish woman chimed in. I had.
“It’s the second time my underwear has been stolen,” I admitted to the room.
“That’s awful. And yours are the lovely lace ones, right?” I nodded, mildly embarrassed to be discussing the details of my undergarments in front of my neighbors.
I wondered how many of their hands hand lifted my laundry out of the wash to make room for their own, only to discover they were handling my intimates. Recently someone’s black boxer briefs got tangled in my clean clothes and sat on my bed for several hours before I discovered them. I suppose that is communal living. You catch glimpses of each other at your most vulnerable, most exposing moments, but rarely exchange anything beyond a breathy “hey” on your way to return a stranger’s boxer briefs to the laundry room.
And if I kick the bucket in my apartment, there are now eight people nearby who can identify my body. Yep, that’s Caroline from 203. The one with lovely lace underwear.
How I spent the rest of May:
watched - the Devil Wears Prada 2 which left me teary and full; seasons one through three of Girls, which in an uncharacteristic twist I have never seen before. The verdict is: hilarious, but sometimes the satire gives me a stomach ache; the end of Rooster season one, seriously if you’re not watching, start; the first four episodes of Killing Eve, another drama I slept on that is delicious and genius and might give me nightmares; Good Bad Things, because I went on a date with a guy who worked on the film. It’s slow, but lovely.
read - the end of The Coin by Yasmin Zaher, finally! I kept getting distracted by television last month, but my god this book is fantastic and unusual. You can read more of my thoughts here, but really you should just pick up a copy for yourself; Go Gentle by Maria Semple, which is witty and wild and wise; this article in The New York Times on cattle ranching, which brought me back to chopping wood and backpacking canyons with students in 2016; the hilarious and open-hearted Substack article, “Love Can Look Like Anything, Even Marriage” by Josh Gondelman for The Playboy Reader; Megan Williams’ poem “I AM IN LOVE WITH YOU BUT I AM CURSED TO SPEAK LIKE GUY FIERI” for HAD, which left me cackling and reminiscing about Abby’s Guy Fieri-themed bachelorette party. I am so grateful for my weird and wonderful friends.
ate - an ice-cream sampler at Philmore Creamery with Alli and Dave for a pregnancy-approved Wood Brother’s pre-game, get the lavender; clover-rich chicken tikka masala, creamy saag paneer, and cozy stewed lentils with for ladies night at Nepa Indian on Divisadero, which proved that you can still have a fun night out with your friends, a glass of wine, and a meal for under $40 in San Francisco; cheese nibbles,white wine, and good company at the Social Study for a post-DWP2 debrief; the best fish and chips West of the United Kingdom at the Pelican Inn with Jenny, Cedar, and Dawson. Yep, I stand by that claim; tiny tarts and agnolotti and a smoky mezcal manhattan with Chris for a delicious, tipsy celebration of friendship at Spruce.
listened - to my All-Time Top Songs playlist for Spotify’s 25th birthday, which is a comical compilation of musicals, Beyoncé, top hits from grad school parties, and of course, Pitbull; three episodes of the Service95 Bookclub podcast, which are the 33 most relaxing minutes of my day. Dua Lipa’s voice could possibly end wars; MEEK’s absolute banger “Fabulous;” this episode of The Daily that had children ask the Artemis II astronauts about space. Shout out to eight-year-old Celine who lives in California, but whose life-long dream is to live in New Jersey. I hope she’s not disappointed.
went - to the second annual Page Street Prom in my favorite gold sequin two-piece. Toes were cold, goldfish were salty, spirits were high; to Monet in Venice at the de Young for a blissful outing of talking about paintings and dating with Rachel; to the see Matisse and the women in hats at the SFMOMA with Chris; my first Bay to Breakers, where I met a lovely gaggle of gherkins at Alamo Square.
misc - sipping whiskey at The Page, where every boy under thirty was rocking the Heated Rivalry hockey mullet, which I am oddly in support of; warm mornings with long skirts on the way to the office; wobbly urban trees; scones and coffee and smiles with teeth and teary eyes and bad dance moves and new friends and sweet pups at the Race to Cure Sarcoma with Hana, David, Georgia, Lane, Emma and her gorgeous family; thirty-somethings in grunge chowing down on gummy worms. The 90s tasted so good, but is that just because high fructose corn syrup was only four random words? Such blissful ignorance.
How did you spend May? You can tell me, and I hope you do, in the comments below.
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I've always used the words "familiar strangers" for people I see all the time but don't know - like the ones on the bus on your commute or that you see at the coffee shop and smile at but never introduce yourself to. But "intimate strangers" is also such a great category of humans that I'd never really thought about. It made me think of one time when my neighbor got locked out of her apartment and asked if she could wait with us until her roommate came back. Ashley and I said "sure, but we plan to watch the Fyre Fest documentary tonight." She agreed that was fine and then the three of us sat on our tiny love seat and watched the doc until her roommate knocked on our door.
This was May for me: It started with a weekend in a backcountry hut in the mountains and ended at a honky tonk bar in Nashville. In between, hosted fam and friends three weekends in a row; also saw DWP2; read The Correspondent, Yesteryear and a bunch of memoirs; listened to Noah Kahan's new album on repeat and watched his doc; planted my garden; started doing pilates again like a good 30-something lady.
Also - in my first apartment in SF, two people died above me! One before I moved in and one during. Spooky.