I.
“No jeans,” said the landlady, as she leaned over to tie her running shoes. She wore black tights and a turtleneck and would add a green fleece vest and fanny pack before taking off. It was a cool February morning.
“When I e-mailed my client to confirm the location of the play, he wrote back, ‘And no jeans,’ exclamation point.” The tenant stood at the top of a spiral staircase, a hand on its white railing. She nodded, following the landlady’s story and looking for a transition to pancakes.
“I replied, ‘Are diamonds okay?’” the landlady continued, “and put a smiley face. He answered, ‘Only if they’re real.’”
The tenant had never seen the landlady in jeans. The landlady wore pajamas at home, workout clothes when she went out—though she didn’t go out much.
“Oh, e-mail,” the tenant said. “It’s half funny, half not funny.” The tenant had a knack for writing e-mails that said everything but what she meant, leaving the recipient to supply the conclusion. The landlady inevitably got it wrong.
“So what time do you want to eat?” asked the tenant.
“Right,” the landlady said, “we were going to make pancakes, weren’t we?” And here she glanced down at her running outfit. “Well, if you want to make them….”
Once the landlady left, the tenant pulled Betty Crocker off the cookbook shelf. She hadn’t touched the books since Thanksgiving, shortly after she’d moved in, when she’d fallen in love with the landlady’s kitchen: the miniature lamps, the Elvis bust next to the sink, a cookie jar in the shape of a fat mustachioed chef. She’d looked at the landlady’s photos on the fridge and spent many happy moments on a kitchen stool, reading the cookbooks while waiting for water to boil. This was before the tenant realized that she wasn’t supposed to be in the kitchen at all.
The apartment had two levels. The landlady lived on the ground floor and sublet the basement, her son’s old room, for more than half the apartment’s monthly rent. The basement room had bunk beds, a foldout couch, a desk, a fridge, a microwave, and a toaster oven, but no running water. This circumstance brought the tenant upstairs to get water, use the bathroom, wash dishes, and enter and leave the apartment. In short, the tenant constantly passed through the landlady’s quarters. And this is where the drama took place.
CAST OF CHARACTERS: two women, one young, one old, both lonely.
THE TENANT, an aspiring writer in her late twenties who is in New York to study journalism.
THE LANDLADY, a sixty-year-old former actress who teaches aerobics in the city.
SCENE—Brooklyn, New York. A long and narrow apartment. On the right, a bathroom. In the back, a small kitchen. On the left, a long dining table. In front of the bathroom, a spiral staircase leading to a basement, positioned such that to get to the bathroom from the top of the stairs, one must pass in front of the kitchen’s open doorway. Against the wall separating the kitchen from the rest of the room, a couch. Above the kitchen, a sleeping loft, accessible by a ladder near the dining table. A hallway leads into the apartment from the right, past a pantry closet.
It is a few days before Thanksgiving, and the tenant is mixing up cookie dough in the kitchen.
Enter THE LANDLADY.
II.
“You just started?” said the landlady.
“I’m in the middle of it,” the tenant replied. “Do you want me to clear out of the kitchen?”
“No, that’s fine. You didn’t think I would be home until 7 or 7:30. What a day. The trains weren’t running. I was on the train for 45 minutes, waiting, and I knew I would be late. When I finally got off the train, found a payphone, and called my client to tell him I couldn’t come, I could hear him, but he couldn’t hear me.”
The landlady left her bag on a chair and huffed over to the dining table. Hurriedly, the tenant stashed her biscotti dough in the fridge, washed her dishes, and went down the spiral staircase. Smells of cooking meat soon followed.
“Would you like a barista burger?” the landlady called.
III.
The next day, as the biscotti toasted, the tenant sat on the kitchen stool, flipping through a cookbook and occasionally opening the oven. While the cookies cooled, she did the dishes and swept the floor, covering her tracks.
That afternoon, the Time Warner repairman came to look at the landlady’s modem; the internet connection, which the landlady was obligated to provide, was spotty. For this trouble, plus the tenant’s youth and ease with computers, not to mention her financial advantages, the landlady seemed to bear the tenant some resentment. The landlady had asked the tenant to be home during the repair appointment, so she sat on the landlady’s couch petting the cats and answering the repairman’s questions.
“What would you say if I offered to make dinner for us?” asked the tenant, once the repairman had left.
“Okay,” the landlady said, baring her teeth in a smile.
When the tenant returned from the grocery store, the landlady was talking loudly on the phone about the network connection. The tenant cut up her meat and quickly put it in a marinade. She found the rice in the cupboard, put it on to boil, trying to finish dinner before whatever was going to happen did. The landlady hung up and muttered to herself, “She thinks she’s so smart.” Then, suddenly, she was shouting:
“This isn’t working!” the landlady said. “This can be your last month. I need someone who uses the kitchen less, who doesn’t need the internet. I need my kitchen.” The tenant ran to the dining table, where the landlady sat.
“It’s my kitchen,” said the landlady, her voice low.
“I want to make dinner for you!” cried the tenant.
“I don’t want it. I’ll throw up.”
The tenant rattled around in the kitchen, then disappeared downstairs. A few minutes later, she reappeared with a suitcase and left.
The tenant spent the night at a friend’s house, but she didn’t move out. On the surface, she stayed because it was too much trouble to move. In truth, she stayed because what had attracted her to the apartment in the first place had been the landlady herself.
IV.
The landlady had showed the tenant the apartment on a brisk October day. The basement, with its spare walls and wooden floor, was basically a dance studio with a bed, the kind of apartment the tenant had dreamed of. But what sold her on it was something that might have turned others away.
“So that’s the room,” the landlady said, and started to climb the spiral staircase. Midway up, she began to cry.
“I can’t do this anymore,” the landlady said, leaning against the white railing. “I’m sorry.
She’s like me.
“Do you want me to leave, come back another time?” the tenant asked.
This is how I look to other people when I cry.
“No,” the landlady said.
On another evening, months later, the landlady would ask, “Why do you choose to stay?”
But on that night, the tenant followed the landlady upstairs.
“So tell me about you,” said the landlady, red-faced but somewhat recovered.
“Well, I went to Oberlin College,” the tenant began. The landlady started crying again, but the tenant decided to continue as if she hadn’t noticed.
She’d gone to Oberlin because she loved the arts and played the violin, but she hadn’t gone to the conservatory after all; she had majored in biology. After losing her first lab job, she’d decided to do what people had always thought she would do: write.
The landlady, hair in a gray bun, listened intently the way dancers do, alive and alert even standing still. Like the tenant, the landlady had blue eyes.
“An old friend of mine went to Oberlin,” the landlady said. “He was a wonderful, wonderful pianist. He died at 35.”
Then the landlady showed the tenant several New Yorker covers done by one of her aerobics clients, a famous cartoonist. The tenant found this irresistible.
That night, and on nights to follow, the tenant would see the warning signs—and head straight for them. She wanted it to be okay to cry on the stairs, or during the algebra test, or in the orchestra audition. By moving in, the tenant thought, maybe she could make it okay for both of them.
One day not long after the biscotti incident, the tenant was washing dishes in the kitchen. The landlady entered, determined to communicate something.
“The kitchen is my therapy,” she said. “It’s what I can afford. But are you like that too?”
The truth was that the tenant did love being in the kitchen. It was one of the many ways that she and the landlady were alike. She wished they wouldn’t eat alone when they could eat together.
“I don’t need the kitchen the way you do,” was all the tenant said.
V.
“Fran Handel* is in the hospital,” said the landlady when the tenant got home one December day. It was a few days before the tenant’s Christmas break. The Handels were the landlady’s Wednesday-night clients. The husband was the New Yorker cartoonist; Fran had Alzheimer’s.
“I’m sorry,” the tenant answered. She still had on her coat and backpack. The landlady didn’t invite the tenant to sit, so this was how they talked, standing at the boundary between their domains.
“I don’t need to burden you with this,” the landlady said.
“No, it’s fine. Are you going to go visit her?”
“I don’t know,” the landlady said.
The next afternoon, the tenant went upstairs to ask after Mrs. Handel.
“I need to call her,” the landlady said.
That evening, when the tenant heard the clanking of bottles and cans that signaled recycling going out, she climbed the stairs with her few recyclables hoping to add them to the landlady’s bag and take it out. The landlady heard her coming.
“What? What? GO AWAY!” the landlady shouted.
The landlady wrote the tenant an e-mail. She hadn’t appreciated the tenant’s inquiry about Fran Handel. The landlady had called the hospital, at the tenant’s prompting, and Fran hadn’t recognized her.
They went a few days without speaking. They were still in that state when, the day before the tenant was to leave for the holidays, she rose early, went up to the kitchen, and planted a gift in the silverware drawer. She had picked out three spoons, two silver-plated antiques and one stainless-steel soup spoon, which she imagined might replace the round plastic spoons she’d observed among the landlady’s utensils. Most New Yorkers accumulate plastic cutlery from meals ordered in, and it so happened that the landlady used these plastic spoons for eating little yogurts on subway platforms. But the tenant didn’t know that; she saw the spoons as a sign of poverty.
“Thank you for the spoons,” the landlady said, breaking the silence, as the tenant passed through to leave for the day.
In the afternoon, the landlady gave the tenant a gift.
“My mother made this for me, and I want you to have it,” said the landlady, holding out a blue sweater
“Thank you,” the tenant said. She examined the cable-knit pattern, the short sleeves and glass buttons, like the bathroom doorknob.
“I hope you like it. It’s more of a spring sweater.”
“Of course I do.”
In the bathroom, the tenant tried it on. “It brings out my eyes,” she reported, “as it would yours, of course.”
*Fran Handel is a pseudonym.
VI.
The tenant left to spend Christmas with her parents in another state, but the landlady came along in her thoughts. On Christmas morning, she sent the landlady an e-mail to wish her a nice day—a conservative message, since there was a chance the landlady would spend Christmas alone. Her son was still asleep, the landlady replied, and they would have bacon, eggs, and cinnamon babka when he woke. Happy to know the son was there, the tenant imagined the landlady mixing up babka dough in her kitchen by the light of her little lamps, waiting for it to rise. The thought propelled the tenant to make cinnamon rolls for her own family. As she baked, she thought of the landlady so many times that “landlady” could have been an ingredient in the recipe.
When the tenant returned to New York and the landlady mentioned offhand the babka that she had picked up at Union Market for Christmas breakfast, the tenant felt as if a piece of a set, which she had taken for reality, had fallen over.
VII.
With the spring semester starting, the tenant barely saw the landlady. In an effort to remain friendly, the tenant asked the landlady if she’d like to have dinner. The landlady agreed. When the tenant offered to prepare beet and ricotta crostini, the landlady rummaged through the pantry looking for canned beets, telling the tenant she could always use whatever was there.
“Are you sure you want me poking around in your pantry?” asked the tenant as they cooked, side by side. She was rubbing a raw beet against a grater. “You’re sure it’s not too intrusive? I know there are times when you don’t want me up here at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, like that night when you were upset about Fran Handel. You didn’t even know why I’d come upstairs, and you were already mad at me.”
“I thought you were trying to take over like you did with the Time Warner man.”
“You asked me to be there,” the tenant countered.
“In case we needed to check to see if things were working in the basement.”
The tenant grated her beet, focusing on the red knob’s steady destruction.
“I think you should find another situation,” said the landlady.
“I’m sorry for the conversation to turn this way.”
“Turn what way?”
“To go from making dinner together to talking about me moving out.”
“I’m not telling you to move out. I want you stay. I’d want anyone to stay. You probably know that by now.” A beat passed. The landlady was talking about money, the tenant realized.
“Gives you an edge, doesn’t it?” the landlady said, sipping her wine.
“No,” the tenant answered. She didn’t want one.
“Really? Or is that just a MacBook answer? Am I going to get an e-mail about this later, or two days later?”
That afternoon, the tenant had sent the landlady an e-mail in which she’d tried to describe the disappointment she’d felt when things she thought were so full of meaning—like the babka—turned out to be coincidences. The tenant explained how, in an effort to be sensitive, she perceived things as meaningful when they weren’t, because the alternative was to assume things were meaningless. The “babka e-mail,” as the tenant later thought of it, left the landlady baffled. And, apparently, angry.
“Open this,” said the landlady, handing the tenant a bottle and a wine key. The tenant struggled.
“I’ve only used the kind with arms, that looks like a person,” the tenant said.
“The expensive kind.”
The landlady took the bottle back from the tenant, and it tipped as she pulled out the cork. The tenant reached for it, then pulled back her hands.
“Stop being so controlling,” said the landlady.
“I get it,” the tenant replied.
Beets grated, crostini toasted, steak and salmon cooked, the landlady offered her food.
“Ma’am,” said the tenant, adding a layer of linguistic armor, “do you want me to take this downstairs?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
“Why do you choose to stay?” asked the landlady.
“Because we planned to make dinner together. I can’t just run away.”
“I read your e-mail,” said the landlady, once they’d sat down. “I thought it was very hostile, and I told you so in my reply. I think you’re a very hostile girl.”
Across from each other at the dining table, they chewed their food.
“Don’t put your soul in an e-mail,” the landlady said.
One day, she said, a client had made her wait a long time in a hot room. Finally she’d told the client she felt sick and had gone home. Her client had e-mailed her, later, asking how she felt. “I don’t want to live,” the landlady had replied.
“If I hadn’t sent that e-mail,” the landlady said, “I would have just woken up on the kitchen floor the next day. That woman ruined my life.” The client had gotten the tenant at the time to let her into the apartment. They had found the landlady, passed out on the floor, and had taken her to the hospital. Everyone found out about it.
“I don’t have a lot of friends around here,” the landlady said. “That must be hard to hear.”
“Yes, it is hard to hear,” said the tenant, staring into the landlady’s blue eyes. “But mostly, I’m just so sorry that you have it to say.”
“Really?” the landlady replied. “Thank you.”
That was it, the calm in the swirl of injury and tenderness. Soon thereafter, the landlady slumped forward in her chair at the dining table, nodding off from the wine. The tenant excused herself, washed her plate, and, before retreating downstairs, returned to face the landlady.
“I’m sorry I intruded on you this evening,” the tenant said.
VIII.
The tenant found something comforting in forgiving the landlady. The tenant herself didn’t blow up at people, exactly, but she did break down. She suspected that things did not always work out the way you thought they should, even when you tried, and the landlady’s corpus of frustrations confirmed this.
Not surprisingly, things did not work out on the morning in February when the landlady had suggested she make pancakes before the jeans-free play.
When the landlady came home from her run, the table was set and the tenant stood in the middle of the kitchen holding the toaster-oven pan, upon which lay a charred dish towel, still burning orange. The salvaged pancakes, which had been warming in the toaster oven when they caught fire, sat next to Betty Crocker on the counter. Elvis smirked.
But the landlady did not get angry, and the pancakes were not too burnt, nor were they late to the theater.
They sat in the back row. The landlady’s earrings glinted.
“A nod to diamonds?” asked the tenant.
“Oh, they’re real,” the landlady answered.
Moon Over Buffalo was a comedy, about a dysfunctional family of actors, in which everything that could possibly go wrong did. The actors circled in and out of doors, just missing each other.
“That’s why I left acting,” the landlady said at intermission. “My family was too much like that. I know it sounds weird, but I just wanted to be normal. Instead, I was playing these really heavy roles.”
“What plays were you in, when you acted?” asked the tenant.
“There was ’night, Mother. Then an acquaintance asked me to do Hedda Gabler.”
“Who were you?”
“Oh, I was Hedda,” the landlady said.
IX.
Spring was underway and summer threatened. The tenant was applying for internships. The landlady was going to Fran Handel’s to make dinner and asked if the tenant wanted to go with her. The tenant declined, last minute, in favor of writing one more cover letter.
The following evening, the tenant went up to the bathroom and, as so often happened, passed the landlady as she crossed the kitchen doorway.
“Hi,” said the tenant. The landlady was just standing against the counter, silently, looking beautiful, gray hair framing her face. She didn’t answer.
“Oh,” the tenant stammered. She used the bathroom and, on her way back past the kitchen, turned her head away.
A few minutes later, the tenant’s phone chimed. An e-mail from the landlady:
“Hey. Hope you’re doing fine. Ain’t it nice you got a mommy and daddy who love you. Lucky girl. I could say a whole lot of shit here, but really, I don’t want to talk to you anymore. I hope things work out well for you.”
Then from upstairs came the piano music. The landlady sometimes put on loud music to get back at the restaurant next door for hosting loud parties. But this piano music, the tenant knew, was directed at her. There were wild dances, brooding passages, gentle ones. It made her shiver.
“Suddenly [Hedda] is heard playing a wild dance on the piano,” Ibsen wrote in “Act Fourth” of Hedda Gabler. Hedda is in the inner room, in the back. In front, Hedda’s foolish husband, Tesman, is curled up with Hedda’s rival on the couch. He calls to Hedda to be quiet. Then, back in the inner room, Hedda shoots herself.
“I hope things work out well for you,” the landlady had written. For once, the tenant hoped the e-mail meant nothing.
She wanted to run to the landlady. But she didn’t.
The piano music continued from upstairs. As long as it doesn’t stop, the tenant thought, frozen to her chair.
“Bing!” went the phone.
“Yeah, I really don’t want to talk with you,” wrote the landlady, “because it always seems to be such an inconvenience to you, no matter what. So, I plan to do what I would like to do and if it should bother you, so be it. Maybe we’ll talk then.”
The e-mails flashed back and forth, on and off, yes and no. “GO AWAY!” meant “I need you.” “Happy to talk” meant “I need you, too.”
X.
THE LANDLADY, wearing pajamas and a long, gray sweater, stands in the kitchen, the inner room, facing the toaster oven.
THE TENANT stands in the kitchen doorway.
THE LANDLADY (looks at toaster oven): I guess the reason I hate you is that you know what it’s like to be loved.
THE TENANT: I know I am lucky. It’s not fair.
THE LANDLADY: Maybe we just shouldn’t talk anymore.
THE TENANT turns to go back downstairs. THE LANDLADY murmurs, and THE TENANT turns back.
THE LANDLADY: That’s it? We’re never going to talk again?
THE TENANT (after a pause): I hope it won’t be that way.
THE LANDLADY: Then why aren’t we talking now?
THE TENANT: How was your dinner last night?
THE LANDLADY: It was terrible. I needed you.
THE TENANT: I’m sorry. I thought of you carrying all that stuff by yourself.
THE LANDLADY: No, I do it all the time. The thing is, I don’t think Fran had a good time. She just kept staring at me.
THE TENANT: You did your best. And work today, how was it?
THE LANDLADY: Awful. Everybody tries to tell me how to teach my class.
THE TENANT: I’m sorry.
THE LANDLADY: Why are you sorry? It’s not your life. Leave me alone.
THE TENANT: I was worried about you when I heard that piano music.
THE LANDLADY: Why?
THE TENANT: I read Hedda Gabler last night, and Hedda plays the piano at the end.
THE LANDLADY (smiling): No, it’s beautiful music. It reminds me of the pianist who went to Oberlin. And died, cancer of the pancreas (sobbing). He was my first love.
(THE TENANT hugs THE LANDLADY.)
THE LANDLADY: All the people I care about are dying, and I’m still here.
THE TENANT (knowingly): So the music is sad for another reason.
THE LANDLADY: What?
THE TENANT (pedantically): It represents your boyfriend who died. Can I give you a big hug and leave you alone? (They embrace again.)
THE TENANT: I’m glad we talked.
THE LANDLADY: It just always seems an inconvenience for
you.
THE TENANT (relieved): It’s not. It’s probably my fault that you feel that way.
THE LANDLADY: No, it’s not you; I admire you.
THE TENANT: I admire you, too—(THE LANDLADY starts to interrupt)—I admire you because you’re a good cook, you’re nice, you acted in this amazing play that’s four acts long (voice rises on “long” ).
(THE LANDLADY takes the tenant’s hand.)
THE LANDLADY: I’m so glad you’re here.
THE TENANT: Goodnight.
(THE TENANT blows a kiss and exits downstairs.)
Ashley P. Taylor is a Brooklyn-based writer of journalism, essays, and fiction. Her essays have appeared in LUMINA Online Journal, Hazlitt, Catapult, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Brooklyn Rail, and Entropy and have been listed as notable in Best American Essays 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. Her short fiction has appeared in Vol. 1 Brooklyn and Joyland.
