Mary Kubica - Don't You Cry

It was a listing in the Reader that brought me to Esther.

“You can’t be serious?” asked my sister, Madison, when I showed her the ad: Female in need of roommate to share 2BDR Andersonville apartment. Great locale, close to bus and train. “You have seen the movie Single White Female, haven’t you?” she probed from the edge of her twin-size bed, science flash cards spread out before her, proliferating like rabbits on the bedspread.

I picked up a flash card. “You’re never going to need this junk, you know?” I asked, staring at the garbled definition on the back. “Not in the real world, anyway.”

And then Madison gave me that look like she always did and said, “I have a test tomorrow,” as if that was something I didn’t know.

“No shit, Sherlock,” I said, tossing the flash card back on the heaping pile. “But after high school,” I mean. “You’re never going to need this crap.”

I was the last person in the world who should be giving anyone advice on anything, the least of which was education. I had graduated five months ago from college, a crappy college at that, one which didn’t quite make the cut of best colleges in the US of A. But the tuition was cheap, or cheaper than its counterparts. They also let me in, the same of which couldn’t be said for the other colleges to which I applied thanks to a little thing known as learning disabilities. Between the ADHD and the dyslexia, I was a lost cause. Or so said the multitude of rejection letters I received from the colleges to which I applied, with the big, red Rejected stamp across the returned applications.

That’s quite good for the self-esteem. Really, it is.

Or not.

I spent the first two of my eight semesters on academic probation. But when the dean threatened to dismiss me from school, I got my act together and cracked open a book. I also remembered to take my Ritalin from time to time, and admitted to the learning disability, which I wasn’t too keen on having to do.

But still, somehow or other I managed to graduate from college with a 3.0. And yet no one needs academic advice from me, least of all Madison, my little sister, on schedule to graduate with high honors. And so I shut my mouth. On that subject at least.

I had, by the way, seen the movie Single White Female. Of course I had. But desperate times called for desperate measures, and I was desperate. I was twenty-two years old, five months post–college graduation and desperately in need of fleeing my parents’ suburban home where they lived with my mastermind sister and her smelly guinea pig. Madison was still in high school, a science geek with a whole medical career ahead of her. That or an embalmer, maybe, with her whole morbid fascination of things that were dead. She had a taxidermy squirrel she bought on the internet with her allowance, the same thing she planned to do with the guinea pig when it finally kicked the bucket—skin and stuff the pathetic thing so she could set it on a shelf.

Madison was happy as a clam living at home. She couldn’t understand my need to get out. It was more than just dullsville for me; it was nails on a chalkboard, the way my mother’s minivan greeted me at the suburban Barrington Metra station each day after work, Mom behind the wheel, always on my case to know how the day had gone.

Did you make any friends today? she had asked that first day of my new career as a project assistant at an illustrious law firm in the Loop, as if it was the first day of kindergarten and not a job. I got the job based on a little white lie, claiming interest in law school when law school didn’t interest me at all.

Did you learn anything new? my mother asked there, that day, in the front seat of her car.

Nope, Mom. Nothing.

But I did, didn’t I? I learned how much the job sucked.

And then my mother and I drove home, where I was forced to listen to the parental figures go on and on about how Madison was oh so smart, about how Madison aced another exam, about how Madison had already been accepted to some smarty-pants college, while I’d picked one based on the simple fact that it was cheap and they’d actually accepted me as opposed to the mass of rejections I received following a poor performance on my SAT.

I had to get out. I was feeling suffocated, smothered. I couldn’t breathe.

And that’s when it happened. I was riding the Metra home from work when I flipped open to the classifieds and saw the ad in the Reader. Esther’s ad, a beacon in a dark night sky. I’d looked for apartments before, but my entry-level job barely paid minimum wage, and though I tried cutting corners—studio apartments, garden apartments, apartments on the south side—the simple fact was that I couldn’t afford an apartment in Chicago all on my own. And an apartment outside of Chicago was out of the question because then not only would I need an apartment, I’d also need a car, some mode of transportation to drive me to and from the train station rather than mother dearest.

Female in need of roommate to share 2BDR Andersonville apartment. Great locale, close to bus and train.

I was sold! I called immediately and we made arrangements to meet.

The day I was to meet Esther for the first time, I mentally prepared myself for a meeting with Jennifer Jason Leigh. Truth be told, Madison had psyched me out with the whole Single White Female bit. To make matters worse, I watched the movie before our meeting, watched as Jennifer Jason Leigh, aka Hedy, turned all psycho or whatnot, assuaged only in the fact that, as the one moving into Esther’s apartment, I was in fact the Jennifer Jason Leigh in our situation, and she the charming Bridget Fonda.

And indeed she was charming.

Esther was running late that day, held up at work by a coworker who’d called in sick. She phoned as I was heading to the apartment, and we made plans to meet instead at a bookshop on Clark, where I soon found out she worked. Just a part-time gig while she finished up a master’s degree in occupational therapy, she said. She was a singer, too, the type who performed on occasion at one of the local bars. “Just something to pay the bills,” she said, though in time I would come to learn it was more than that. Esther had a secret craving to be the next Joni Mitchell.

“What’s an occupational therapist?” I asked as she led me through the stacks of books to a quieter spot in back and we sat on blood-orange poufs meant for children’s story time, apologizing for dragging me down to the bookshop and veering me away from our original plan. It was a Saturday; the shop was full of cosmopolites, browsing the shelves, picking their books. They looked smart, every single one of them, as did Esther, though in a cool, contemporary sort of way. She was doe-eyed and polite, but possessed traces of an inner devil, be it the sterling silver nose stud or the gradient hair. I liked that about Esther right away. Dressed in a cozy cardigan and cargo pant ensemble, Esther was cool.

“We help people learn how to care for themselves. People with disabilities, delays, injuries. The elderly. It’s like rehab, self-help and psychiatry all rolled into one.”

Her teeth were aligned successively inside her mouth, a brilliant white. Her eyes were heterochromatic—one brown, one blue—something I’d never before seen. She wore glasses that day, though I learned later they were only for show, a prop for her role as book salesman. She said they made her look smart. But Esther didn’t need faux glasses to look smart; she already was.

The day we met, she asked me about my job and whether or not I’d be able to afford my half of the rent. That was Esther’s only qualification, that I pay my own way. “I can,” I promised her, showing my latest paycheck as proof. Five-fifty a month I could do. Five-fifty a month for a bedroom of my own in a walk-up apartment on Chicago’s north side. She took me there, down the street from the bookshop, just as soon as she finished reading to the tiny tots who pilfered from us the blood-orange poufs. I listened to her as she read aloud, taking on the voice of a bear and a cow and a duck, her voice pacifying and sweet. She was meticulous in the details, from the way she made sure the little ones were attentive and quiet, to the way she turned the pages of the oversize book so all could see. Even I found myself perched on the floor, listening to the tale. She was enchanting.