There Goes the Neighborhood

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

I am bringing down my neighborhood’s property values. My father, brother, son and roommate are bringing down my sanity. I did not know there were so many surfaces on which to smear coffee grounds and sauce.

I am living with four men, two large dogs, and a cat who jumps over my Dad’s sleeping German shepherd to sneak to my room in the middle of the night. The rest of the time, he very sensibly gets gone.

I would like to get gone too.

I did get gone last Sunday; I went to Sunset Beach to sit in the darkened J. King Neptune’s on a beautiful day and drink some large pink drinks. I left my house at 4 pm. By 4:30, they were already texting me. “When are you coming home,” they wrote. “Never,” I replied. “LOL seriously when,” said they. “I am completely fucking serious,” said I. “I am running away from home.”

Oh, I was so happy. Between my roommate in the third bedroom, Dad of the Dining Room, and my little brother Johnnycake kicking it on my couch, I could take a night off, and I did. There were three men there to watch my son. I would go and hide in a friend’s Huntington Beach studio, drink mojitos and watch HBO. It was just like a spa weekend, for poors.

My son did not make it to school on time. Three men! And, like a husband who for-real-on-purpose breaks everything when he washes the dishes so you won’t ask him to do it again, it didn’t occur to any of them to make sure my boy’s clock was switched for Daylight Savings. “Oh,” they all said. “Huh.”

It is fairly awesome living with John, Paul, Dad and Ringo, except that it most certainly is not. All four of them are good-humored and pleasant. They’re nice to be around. They are even helpful in certain limited ways. John is a marvelous cook, and unlike Paul and Dad has been trained by our mother to exacting standards in cleaning a kitchen, when he chooses to remember them. When I head off to teach in the afternoons, I ask John to be my housewife. He looks at me with eagerness in his eyes. He will be the best housewife in the land! He cooks from my meager kitchen (I refuse to participate at all, and have not bought groceries in weeks) and quizzes Jimmy on the chapter he makes him read out loud. When I come home, the kitchen is a gloppy sty, but the kid is fed and studied.

Paul, perhaps because he’s trained in the AA way, says yes to every request for help and also, unlike the other men of my household, pays rent. Oh, how I love him for that. He’s also a complete fucking slob and comes into my room, the pretty oasis in which I’m trying to hide, to lurk by my bed while making very loud phone calls.

Dad brings home milk, bread and OJ and offers to be home after school if I need to go out. He usually calls an hour before and says he’s two hours away, but it’s nice that we are on his radar. When I march them all into the kitchen and ask if it’s acceptable for me to come home to this every ... single ... day, he takes up a sponge and starts washing the dishes, without soap, in cold water, his eyes sad as he tries to soothe and help his daughter, who is a raving bitch.

He also takes his toothbrush and uses his thumb to spatter the toothpaste from it onto the counter till it looks like a Pollock canvas of Crest. I’ve never seen anything like it. At least since the weather’s changed, he’s stopped turning the heater up to 75 with all the house’s doors open for the dogs, which he kept doing even after I was shrieking (and cursing, and hitting things, seriously) about my quintupled gas bill. But if I’m going out, to Drinking Liberally, say, he still asks me curtly when I’m going to be home, like I’m not 35 and it’s not my house and I’m gonna have a curfew or something and then I yell at him, and then I pout and don’t go out at all, just to show him who’s boss.

I do not know how people live with four men. Those women, like Mitt Romney’s wife for instance, who have four or five sons and a husband. Do they down Valium by the handful? Do they, like me, retreat to their rooms only to have everyone in the house drop by for some estrogen and so they can hang out in the one place that’s still clean and comfortable until they ruin that as well? Do they, like me, go hoarse from bitching? Who picks up all the scattered newspapers and empty bottles and cans from every horizontal plane? I am looking at two empty Coke cans on the window sill in my room right now, and I do not drink sodas.

How do the Mexican families do it, with their two or three families under one roof? How will you be doing it, when you’ve all been foreclosed on and rents rise so high and you’re doubling up yourselves because we will be a second world nation of poverty and fun?

And honestly, how do these four men live with me? I hide in my room. I don’t help at all, except to take the sponge to which they’re all clearly allergic and wipe up the sauce and the coffee grounds. I haven’t cooked or shopped in weeks. I yell at them for everything (everything!) and the rest of the time, I whine. If they come to visit me in my room—because we’re friends, and they like me!—I snarl at them to get the fuck out! I would not like living with me, I think. My mom has always wanted to live in a commune. Many hands make light work, she’s always lied. By all means, she is invited to come and try for herself. Me, I will yell and get gone.

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