tenants were men who weren’t allowed in the rest of the house, and I’m honestly surprised that this isn’t a story about how I was kidnapped and trafficked by a man missing his front teeth and doused in Cutty Sark.
do I have a septic tank
whose responsibility is the sidewalk
if we never attach the water hose to the icemaker, is that bad
is there a way the mailbox is supposed to, you know, be
I thought hard water was just a made-up thing to get me to buy shower spray
the washing machine stinks—is that a real problem
why does the lawn have to be mowed so often, and how do you oil the mower or put gas in it, and if so, do you pay a guy to do that
how many types of batteries do I really need to keep on hand at all times
“vacuum the freezer coils”?
try to replace this interior door ourselves or just move into a hotel for the winter
when was I ever supposed to learn how to measure blinds
how often do I really have to go in the garage
is defrosting the refrigerator still a thing
When my parents divorced, my mom and I moved from that house to this two-flat on the other side of town, across the street from both the church and the middle school I would eventually attend. My mean grandma owned and occupied the first floor of the building. Other than a man who occasionally came by to mow the lawn, no actual caretaking of the house took place. At least not in an explicit way that I can remember, and certainly not in a way that translated to me. There was a shed at the back of the house that my grandma made me keep my bike in. Remember, this was firmly in the Jason Voorhees/Freddy Krueger era, so I was 100-percent prepared to get murdered when having to retrieve my sky-blue Schwinn Stingray from that crumbling outhouse because she didn’t want me tracking in any “outside dirt.”
There was a crawl space under that frightening-ass house, too. A perfect forever home for your local killer clown! I had to go to church all the time because we literally lived across the street from it, and one Halloween, instead of letting us take to the streets to partake in the devil’s holiday, the church threw an “autumn party” at which we sat very chastely, dressed up as good boys and girls, listening to the Christian version of “Monster Mash” and eating sugar-free candy. Someone had snuck in a VHS tape of Silent Night, Deadly Night, and when the septuagenarian chaperone fell asleep, we crowded around the TV and I got to see my very first soft-core boobs. Then I watched in horror as they were impaled by a murderous Santa Claus. (What kind of psycho would do that to boobs?!) I walked home later that night with my heart hammering in my prepubescent chest toward the darkened shed no one really knew what to do with and the crawl space no normal person would have a real use for, then went upstairs and slept fully clothed with all the lights on, breaking at least two of the Top Five Black Mom Rules.
I remember being a teenager in the summers, and absolutely roasting in the third-floor walk-up Section 8 apartment we moved to when my gram decided to buy a condo because not taking care of that scary old house had grown too expensive. I filled old Snapple bottles halfway with tap water and crammed them into the freezer, pulling them out a couple hours later to drip melting ice on my forehead and tongue, trying to convince myself I felt less hot even as my flesh bubbled away from my bones like pieces of fried bologna in a hot pan. I had no idea what a window-unit air conditioner even was, let alone that there was an alternate universe in which I could not spend every July morning afraid to eat breakfast on the cracked vinyl of our kitchen chairs for fear of ripping