The first time we saw Lola in her pink housedress and rubber boots, shuffling across the road to show us the small rental house she owned, we had lost our faith in landlords.
It was 1972. A year earlier, when Leah and I were nineteen years old, we’d left Colorado and hitchhiked up the Al-Can together. It wasn’t unusual for adventurous, single girls to head for Alaska, but everyone assumed we’d each embarked on the journey in order to find a man. What we really wanted was just to get on with living our lives far away from our families.
My family and Leah’s family attended the same church. There’s no way we could stay in the same small Colorado town and not get found out, so we hatched the plan to head to Alaska. Everyone thought it was unsavory for two church-going girls to embark on such a journey, but since everyone knew about the high ratio of men to women in Alaska, they didn’t put up too much of a fight about our going.
Our year away from home had been eye opening. Anyone new to seven-month-long winters and never-ending summer days could say the same thing, but I doubt that most people experienced the same renting trouble that Leah and I experienced once we landed in Anchorage.
Our first landlord was Bob and he was great ninety-eight percent of the time. But the things about us that didn’t seem to bother him when he was sober, he felt free to comment on during the two percent of the time when he was drunk.
One summer night, he had some friends over for poker, and when we walked toward the mother-in-law cottage we rented in his backyard, he yelled out his screened window, “Hey girls, come on in. An hour or two with us and you might decide you like dick after all.”
He acted genuinely surprised and disappointed when we moved out at the end of the month.
Our next landlord was Regina, and besides being crazy, she raised our rent after we wouldn’t do LSD with her and her boyfriend on Christmas Eve. Our time living in her little conglomeration of log cabins was short-lived.
We were hopeful that our most recent landlords, Mr. and Mrs. Pitman, would mind their own business and leave us alone. And we were careful around them. We even lied to them, telling them that we were just two single girls waiting for our boyfriends to get home from Vietnam. We’d had a decent six-month run of renting from them until one Saturday in mid-August when Mr. Pitman revealed his true nature.
“Mrs. Pitman would be heartbroken if she knew about the two of you,” he said after a Bloody Mary fueled morning of mowing the grass around the duplex. “She doesn’t think your way of life is natural.” He wiped his brow with his arm. “Hell, I don’t think it’s natural either, especially for a couple of nice-looking women like yourselves.”
Then he looked us over. When his gaze stopped on Leah’s chest, I knew it was time to start poring over the classified ads again.
We bought the Anchorage Times every day, but none of the advertised rentals seemed like a good fit. The landlords either lived too close by—a problem with people in our situation—or the price was too high. We’d almost resigned ourselves to staying in creepy Mr. Pitman’s duplex when we came across an index card pinned to a bulletin board in the Laundromat.
The card was hung vertically, and an intricate, pencil-drawn tree took up three-quarters of the space. Above the tree it said, Small house for rent. Wooded neighborhood. Fenced yard. No price was listed, so we called the number from a payphone. We made arrangements to go see the place.
We had trouble finding it because the streets weren’t clearly marked and the directions I’d taken from Lola Miller weren’t exactly easy to follow: First turn left off of Northern Lights onto Haddock Street, then follow that road until you see the house with the jeep. Then turn left and go around a bend. Then when you get to a place where the spruce trees have been cut and a trailer is on the side of the road, go about another half mile. When you see the house with the ducks in the yard, you’ll know you’re on the right track. Take your next right and then you’re there. Finally, after driving around in the rain and looking for a house with ducks in the yard, we found what we thought was the right place to turn.
“I want it,” Leah said, before we’d even gotten out of the car.
“This might not even be it,” I said. But I looked at the door and knew it was the right place. A tree, in the same design as the one on the index card, was carved into the front door.
I wanted it, too.
The house was green and small—tiny, actually—but it looked well put together. The unassuming front of the house faced the street, and a newish-looking wooden fence enclosed the backyard. A chimney jutting out of the roof suggested a woodstove—something we both wanted—and the raspberry patch in the vacant lot next door was dripping with overripe berries. Lola Miller said she would meet us there at five o’clock, but we were ten minutes late since we’d had trouble finding the place.
“What if we lost our chance?” I asked, but right after I’d spoken the words, we saw a small, dark-haired woman step out of the house across the street and begin to head toward us. She looked up just long enough to give us a cursory wave, and then she walked the rest of the way with her eyes on the ground. Even with the rain coming down hard, her steps were small, and her movements slow.
When she finally arrived next to our truck, keys to the house in hand, she was nearly out of breath.
“I’m sorry we’re late,” Leah said. “We got a little turned around.”
“It’s fine,” Lola Miller said, looking up at us again finally. Her skin was so pale it was nearly translucent, and her brown eyes were set back far into her face. Her lips were bright red with lipstick, applied recently, as though lipstick alone was all that was required as far as appearance was concerned.
“Mrs. Miller,” I said, since I was the one who had spoken to her on the phone, “I’m Annie, and this is my friend Leah.”
“Please call me Lola,” she said.
“Lola, is this the house? Because it looks like it would cost more to rent than what you quoted us on the phone,” I said.
“Yes, this is it,” she said. “I suppose I could get more for it. I don’t know though, I’m new to all of this. Do you want to have a look around?”
Lola struggled to get the key in the lock with her shaky hands. Watching her was not confidence inspiring.
Inside the house, there were men’s boots and jackets in the arctic entry. In the living room there were Life magazines on the coffee table and a sweater folded over the back of the sofa.
“When will the house be vacant?” I asked Lola Miller.
“It’s been vacant for almost a year,” she said, without offering any explanation for the personal items strewn about the house.
Behind Lola’s back, Leah gave me a look. It was a look she reserved for the times when words couldn’t be exchanged. She’d given me that look on our way up to Alaska, when a man in a station wagon picked us up and instead of talking like a normal person, he sang all of his conversation with us. “Where are you going, young women of grace?” he’d asked us, in operatic form. It went on like that for two hours through Canada.
And now, at this house that seemed perfect in so many ways, we could tell that something was wrong. Really wrong. Maybe Ms. Lola was crazy.
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you the first month for free if you can clear the stuff out of here. There’s not too much because my son only lived here for a month. He still wasn’t entirely moved out of our house across the street when he died.”
Leah and I exchanged looks again.
“Oh Lola, I’m so sorry,” Leah said. She was so good in these kinds of situations. She always knew what to say, unlike me who wanted to slink out the door unnoticed when things got uncomfortable. “What was your son’s name?”
“Darren,” Lola said. “He couldn’t cope well with things.”
She didn’t offer more information. Instead she continued showing us through the house. It didn’t take long since there were only five rooms including the arctic entry—a kitchen, living room, bathroom and bedroom. The stovepipe we’d seen was attached to a woodstove that had clearly never been used.
“We put in the woodstove for backup, in case the electricity ever went out, but we never had a reason to use it,” she said by way of explanation.
Lola then took us into the backyard. It was completely overgrown, like nobody had touched it all summer.
“How are you girls with yard work?” Lola asked.
“Good. Really good. I don’t mind shoveling snow, either,” Leah said.
This time, I was the one giving Leah the look. Potentially renting this house from Lola Miller made me nervous. Lola made me nervous. I’d only been around her for a few minutes, but I could sense that she needed more from us than rent money, and I wasn’t sure if we were the ones to help her.
“How do you feel about dogs?” Lola asked. “Because this backyard was designed with a dog in mind.”
That was when Lola Miller started crying.
Right there, in that moment, I saw the biggest difference between Leah and myself. While I started backing toward the door, Leah went right to Lola. She put her arms around her shoulders and led her toward the sofa. She sat her down and then went into the bathroom and returned with a box of tissue.
“I gave myself a year,” Lola said, between sobs. “But maybe it’s too soon.”
“It’s okay,” Leah said to her in her most soothing voice. “If you’re not ready to rent the place out, we’ll understand.”
“Do you like the house, though? Do you think you’d like living here? It only has one bedroom, you know.”
“Well, Mrs. Miller—I mean Lola, we only need one bedroom. And I think we’d love living here. It might even be good for you to see people living over here.”
Lola stopped crying and looked up, first at Leah and then at me. I wanted to exchange a look with Leah, but for the first time, Lola Miller was looking up at us for a sustained amount of time.
Leah and I had agreed that this time around we’d work hard to hide our relationship with each other from any potential landlord—it seemed like the most prudent thing to do if we found a place we really wanted—but now Leah had blurted out that we only needed one bedroom.
“You might be ready to rent the house out, but maybe not to people like us,” Leah finally said to break the uncomfortable silence and to aid Lola Miller in her state of bewilderment. “You wouldn’t be the first.”
That was just like Leah to give people the first out, to give them the words they might not know that they were looking for.
Lola Miller straightened her hunched shoulders. She grabbed another tissue and blew her nose.
“Let me tell you girls something,” she said in a voice stronger than I thought possible out of someone who just moments before seemed so meek. “A week from tomorrow is September 4, and do you remember what happened last year on September 4?”
“We were just moving here in September last year,” I said carefully, because I felt like giving the wrong answer would not be okay in this situation.
“I remember,” said Leah. “We’d just arrived in Anchorage, and it was all anyone could talk about.”
I remembered the headlines now.
“My husband and my son were on that airplane. It crashed right into the side of a mountain in the middle of the day.” Lola stood up and walked toward the front door.
At the doorway she turned back to look at us.
“Every day for the past year I’ve played the last conversation I had with my son over and over in my head. ‘You don’t need to be so afraid of flying,’ I told him. ‘You just pull yourself together and get right on that airplane and it will be over before you know it,’ I told him.”
She leaned her head against the doorframe. “He had trouble coping, you see, with everything. He couldn’t go to the store by himself. As a boy he’d get sick just going to school. He was thirty-two years old and moving into this house right across the street from his parents was his single biggest accomplishment. Getting on that airplane was his second biggest one.”
“I’m sorry if I’ve upset you,” Leah said. “And I’m so sorry for your loss. I can’t even imagine what this year has been like for you.”
“I’m not upset with you,” Lola said in her steadiest voice yet. She lifted her head from the doorframe, and ran her fingers through her hair. “I know I must seem a mess, but every day for a year now I’ve wondered about that moment of impact. Every day I’ve wondered if either of them even had time for a final thought before the plane crashed into the side of that mountain. Every day I’ve wished I hadn’t pushed my son toward every single thing he was afraid of.” She paused for a second and then said in almost a whisper, “That, my dear girls, is a lot to cope with.”
Lola Miller opened the front door of the little green house that a few years down the line we’d eventually buy from her and stepped down onto the lawn. She walked a few paces toward her own home before she turned back.
“After the year I’ve been through, I think there are worse disasters than two women sharing a bed, and I’d be a fool to let something like that bother me. A damn fool.”
Then Lola continued across the street. She walked twice as fast as when she walked over. She no longer kept her eyes on the ground.