Back in D.C., Van and I bought enough black-and-white cookies for all my roommates. I wasn’t sure which of them would be home or how many new people Van would have to meet at 1938 House. The house was a hub of social activity on weekends, which was both a plus and a minus for me, since Lucas was with his wife and there were always plenty of people around to distract me but there was never any quiet. Mal had many extracurricular study groups, and she threw a lot of parties. Practically all the young professionals of Washington were likely to turn up over the course of a night, looking for a boozy party thrown by a chic political radical with a great music collection.
The house was huge. Five of us lived there, and often a sixth crashed on the living room futon, somebody’s friend in town for work or a partygoer too drunk to go home. Downstairs, the rooms flowed into one another—the living room at the front with a big bay window, a cavernous dining room in the middle, and the kitchen at the back. For parties, we shoved all the furniture into one corner and turned the whole space into a dance floor.
Upstairs were four bedrooms of various sizes, ranging from the smallest (mine) to Adrian’s, which was large enough for a couch and TV and had a fire escape, where he sat to have loud fights on the phone with his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Charmaine. The third-floor attic had been turned into a bedroom without a door, where Katherine lived, though she was often away, socializing with young embassy and White House types at rooftop parties in Foggy Bottom and Georgetown.
Inside, Mal was on her knees beside the sealed-off fireplace, wearing an apron over a short skirt and scrubbing the floor like Cinderella in a porno. In two to four years, depending on how quickly Van matured, a scene like this could be fodder for his fantasies; I felt like covering his eyes. Mal whirled around and greeted Van boisterously. I stood off to the side, contemplating Mal’s scrubbing, which appeared to be merely moving dirt from one pile to another.
I had met Mal my first month in D.C., when I’d been living on the sofa of a boy I’d known in college who could cook only two things. Because he offered to share his meals with me, and because I spent every night with my cheek pressed against his IKEA futon, for seven nights I ate this boy’s carrot soup and dense loaves of bread. We mostly talked about college; he had been an ultimate Frisbee–playing philosophy major and now had an AmeriCorps position at the D.C. Department of Transportation. I had the sense he felt his best years were behind him.
On the eighth night, in order to avoid beta-carotene poisoning, I’d gone to a nearby coffee shop, bought lattes and sandwiches for both of us, and stood looking at the bulletin board papered with notices about community events.
A woman appeared beside me and tacked up a flyer for a clothing swap. She had an under-shave haircut on one side, which I never felt cool enough to pull off but which looked amazing on her. The other side swooped dramatically across her forehead and was dyed a grayish-purple, the ends tucked into a chunky-knit infinity scarf in a mustard color. I’d later learn that she was Korean American, that she worked at Greenpeace, and that she was a member of the D.C. chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. I liked her immediately.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m Ellie. The clothing swap looks great.”
“Mallory.” She stuck out her hand, and I put down the tray of lattes to shake. “It’ll be a lot of fun. You should join!”
“Thanks, I think I will. I’m new to D.C., so I’m doing all kinds of ‘making friends’ activities.” I didn’t usually introduce myself to strangers, or tell them I had no friends, but I was emboldened by my status as a transplant in need of community.
“How long have you been here?” she asked.
I reflected. “A week.”
“You have a place to live?”
“I live on the couch of a philosophy major I knew in college.”
“That’s clearly temporary. Philosophers don’t last in Washington.” We walked together through the café door. “Do you need a room? There’s an opening in my group house.”
“I do, actually.”
“Oh, cool. I’ll schedule you an interview.”
“An interview? Should I prepare anything?”
She hitched her messenger bag up farther onto her shoulder. I noticed a “Love Has No Gender” pin affixed to the shoulder strap. “It’s a social-justice-themed house. We’ll have you answer questions about your career,” she said. “Your interests. Your social values.”
“My social values? Is that code for something?”
“Like what?”
“Like you’ll ask for my Girl Scout merit badges or something?”
She laughed. “Yeah. Bring your sash.”
The Sunday of my group-house interview, my mother was visiting from Florida to help me “get settled.” She’d rescued me from the philosopher’s futon, and we were staying at a hotel in Georgetown. Before my mother married Boris Gettleman, we would have been at a bargain motel, with stale corn muffins and weak coffee in the morning. But we lived in a Boris Gettleman world now. He had paid for a place with fluffy pillows, faux marble in the shower, boutique pastries by the front desk. My mother was on the plush carpet, doing push-ups. I was sitting on the bed, eating a hibiscus donut.
“Eighty-seven,” she grunted. “Eighty-eight.”
I took another bite.
“Join me, Ellie. It feels so good to do this in the morning.”
“No thanks, Mom. I’m still working on breakfast.”
When she finished her set of one hundred, she jumped to a standing position. “I’ll change, and then we can go?”
“You’re not coming with me to my group-house interview.”
“I think it will make you look very committed. You brought your mother as a reference!”
“It will not make me look committed. It will make me look insane.”
She began vigorously toweling her hair. “Don’t you want my opinion of the place? I’m very intuitive about spaces. Just ask Boris. I turned down twenty-six homes before I found the right one for us. And it’s perfect.”
“This is not Tallahassee, Mom. It’s not a buyer’s market. There is only one house, and I want to live there. You have to stay here. Or take a walk, whatever. Go to a museum. I’ll be gone like an hour.”
She nodded briskly, stooping to pick up the socks I’d kicked off and laying them on top of my suitcase with a pat. “Whatever you say.”
“This is informal,” Mallory said when I arrived. She and her roommates were sprawled across various items of furniture, flotsam of suburban nineties’ childhoods and particleboard ticky-tacky moved once or twice too many times. I sat across from them on a metal folding chair.
“Although it’s harder to get into 1938 House than Harvard,” Nick joked. He had introduced himself as a politics nerd who worked as a “policy analyst” at the Department of Energy. “Analyst” seemed like the third-most-common job in D.C., after “consultant” and “lawyer.”
“Did you go to Harvard?” I asked.
“Me? Uh, no.” Nick shifted in his chair. I would later learn that college was a sore subject for him. He’d taken six years to graduate from Cornell, after an embarrassing incident involving a lacrosse player, two hundred dollars, and an impeccably written essay about the French social critic Montaigne.
“Group living isn’t for everyone,” Adrian chimed in. “Obviously we want to find someone who is a good fit for us.” Adrian clerked for a federal judge, and he seemed the most laid-back of the bunch. He was wearing cowboy boots. Many displaced Texans, I had learned, wore cowboy boots in D.C., even with their suits and ties, even, sometimes, with shorts, like a bat signal that alerted other Texans to their presence.
“So yeah. We can give you a quick tour, and then we just have a few questions to see if you’re a good fit,” Katherine said. She was the blond leggy one, a social secretary at the Moroccan embassy. I hated that she’d repeated the term “good fit.” It conjured childhood trips to the mall, trying to stuff myself into various too-small outfits while my mother watched.
The 1938 House tour was brief. It had a grubby chic aesthetic. The furniture was ugly, but there were geometric prints hanging on the walls, candles and trinkets arranged pleasingly on the mantel, plants dangling in the windows. My bedroom—I’d already started thinking hopefully of it as my bedroom—was just off the staircase and shaped like a triangle. On one side was a mattress that looked as if it had been slept on by many people. Half of one wall was painted pink. “We think the landlord once tried to paint and stopped,” Adrian explained.
“I love it,” I said.
The interview consisted of five questions. Three were about my personal habits. The fourth question was why I had decided to move to D.C.
“I moved to D.C. so I could use impact as a verb,” I said.
The roommates seemed to like this answer, but I mentioned my Apogee job too, just in case.
The final question was, What social issues did I care about the most? I thought for a minute. The anecdote that came to me was about how I was once seated on an airplane next to an older man who reached under his seat, pulled out a life preserver, and put it on. He wore it unselfconsciously the entire trip. Other passengers snuck glances at him as if he knew something they didn’t. Of specific importance was that we were flying over land from New York to Pittsburgh.
This story came to me and I repeated it. “We’re all living in the shadow of terror and tragedy,” I finished. “But I want people to be able to practice their art, be happy, enjoy each other, have enough money, and grow and change.” That’s what I said.
There was a long silence. Finally Nick broke in. “So…Social Security reform?”
“I guess I’m more of a generalist,” I said.
“Great to meet you, Ellie,” Adrian said.
“We have a few more candidates to interview, but we’ll be in touch,” said Mal. She winked at me, and I beamed. Even if I didn’t get into this house, I was glad to have met her. I hoped we would become friends.
Now Van, Mal, and I settled at the dining table, eating our black-and-white cookies out of little wax paper bags. We set up the Monopoly board that Mal had taken from the living room shelf we called “the House Shelf.” Everything on it came from previous 1938 House tenants now long gone, including a waterlogged copy of The Catcher in the Rye inscribed To our rascally Sam, Love, Bubbe and Zayde. Van liked his cookie a lot, and he liked Mal—I could tell from the little contented expression on his face.
“The really preposterous thing about this game is that we all start with the same amount of money. When has that ever happened?” Mal said, dealing out the Pepto Bismol–pink fives.
“Mallory is an anti-capitalist,” I said aloud, tapping the words into a text to Van at the same time.
“I’m a socialist,” Mal said.
“She says she’s a socialist. I’ll explain when you’re older,” I said, punching in a text for Van.
Van wrinkled his nose in confusion. Mal shook her head. “No way. How old are you, Van?” Van held up ten fingers. “Awesome. You’re coming to my next socialist feminist reading group. You’re never too young to be a comrade.”
When Nick came home, we cooked pasta for dinner and had a spaghetti-throwing contest to see whose spaghetti would stay on the wall longest. Van won. “It’s because of his throwing arm,” I said.
“Is that pride I hear in your voice, Ellie?” Mal said, bopping my arm.
“I love this kid,” Nick said, watching Van toss a strand of spaghetti in the air and catch it with his mouth.
At eight, I got a string of panicky texts from Colette, saying that she was overwhelmed and in no condition to drive. My stepmom is having a nervous breakdown. Van’s going to stay with us tonight, I texted my roommates on our group chat. I explained to Van that I would put him to bed in my room, that there would be a party downstairs but that I would come back up periodically to check on him and make sure he was sleeping, that I’d sleep in a sleeping bag at the foot of the bed, and that in the morning he could wake me up whenever he wanted another black-and-white cookie. I sent him the message via text also, because I knew he wouldn’t be able to catch everything by reading my lips. I was a little proud of myself for doing a good imitation of a big sister.
Do you want to take a bath before bed? I texted him, recalling Dad pouring water over Van’s soapy head as he lay in the tub, his ears fitted with little plugs and covered with a plastic band. But that must have been when Van was only two or three.
“Shower,” Van signed. I felt confident he’d said “shower” because the sign looked like water coming down from a showerhead.
“Great,” I said brightly, gesturing toward the closet. “Let me get you a towel.”
From downstairs came a loud crash and then a distinctly Nick-sounding “Fuck!” and Mal yelled, “Nick, watch it!” They were preparing for the party, hanging a sheet on which they would project some obscure experimental film while people were dancing. I’d been to enough 1938 House parties to know that all those young D.C. people would turn our house into a scene of vibrant chaos. I decided I wouldn’t drink and that I would go upstairs early to watch over Van. I wouldn’t be able to sleep with the music pounding below, but I wanted to take good care of him, to be responsible.
Behind my eyes, I saw my father’s body heave in the morning light. What was the sound of his body falling? In my mind he went down like a Summer Christmas tree, needles swishing the floor.
In my room, Van pulled the covers up until only his blond head stuck out from the sheet. He smelled of my passion-fruit shampoo and Nick’s sharp body wash for men. The day was over. It had been the longest time the two of us had ever spent alone together. “Good night,” I signed. That one I knew. I’d been signing it to him since he was a toddler.
I wanted my father; I had his son. I wanted to write poetry; I had a reporting job. I wanted Lucas; I had a group-house party. These feelings were dark and shivery in me, like cold night water. At the door, I paused to switch off the overhead bulb. The room went black. I lifted my hand to tell Van I loved him, but there wasn’t enough light.