Paul Maliszewski – on finding a place to live.

Durham, North Carolina
November 13, 2000

Dear Paul,

It may be too early to say, but I suspect I drank the best cup of orange juice in my life at a bookstore in Durham, the morning after our arrival. We had spent our first day here, and what hours of the second we were awake, behaving like lost dogs, directionless, dirty, and ashamed. We wandered listlessly up and down the same four or five streets looking for another apartment, sensing we had to be close to one and would eventually find it so long as we kept looking. The move hadn’t gone that well. Or the move had gone fine, but the apartment we planned to move into – Monique had signed a lease back in June, and I had arranged to have the phone, electric, and gas hooked up in advance – ended up having problems, serious problems, and we had called the moving-in off for now.

We had stopped at the bookstore because we needed to buy a good map. With Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill caught in a paroxysm of building, expansion, and sprawl, our 1999 city map was strictly a historical curiosity. What we really needed was a full-time guide, an individual well-versed in local customs and language, someone undaunted by a place with a Duke Street and a Duke Road, as well as Duke University Road, Duke Forest Road, Duke Power Road, and Duke Homestead Road, all distinct, separate thoroughfares, but each referred to, in the shorthand of the oral driving directions offered by gas station attendants, rental agents, and convenience store clerks, simply as Duke. But a street-by-street map would have to do.

The bookstore didn’t have any street-by-street maps. The guy behind the register said they normally stocked a number of such maps, but they currently had not a one. He could put in a special order; however, it would take a week or two. Monique took him up on it, out of reflex, mostly.

She found me dawdling in the magazine area, and filled me in: no map. We’d need to go somewhere else. Another bookstore was just down the block, we could check there first. But neither of us was all that eager to leave. Getting back in the car meant facing the pressing problem of not having a place that we felt good about calling home.

The orange juice was Monique’s idea. She was going downstairs to get a cup of coffee and asked me if I wanted anything.

I said, “No thanks, I don’t need anything right now.” This is pretty much what I always say when asked wide-open questions regarding food or beverage.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “What about some juice? Wouldn’t you like a juice?”

“A juice, that would be good. Orange juice, if they have it, please.”

This is how I came to have what I am now calling the best orange juice of my life so far. That I hadn’t eaten anything for breakfast made it all the better. That I’d only been able to consume a slice and a half of the pizza we’d had delivered the night before insured that the juice hit my system something like a direct shot of vitamins. Before the pizza, there was a super value meal at a Hardee’s somewhere in Virginia, an episode whose details – a stray cat in the abandoned industrial lot where I parked the truck, a fast-food franchise whose manager eccentrically insisted on serving customers at their tables, Monique saving pieces of chicken to feed the stray – are as difficult to recall now as a confusing dream. The lunch had carried me as far as it nutritionally could. That the juice was freshly squeezed did not hurt its ultimate ranking.

As Monique drove, I operated the map. I had some juice left and sipped at it in between directions. Initially we confined our search to the streets around the apartment we wanted nothing to do with. We drove in ever-widening circles. The car had been acting up. It objected to the heat, tending to stall at stops. Sometimes it refused to start altogether. Monique turned a corner, moved to accelerate, and the Reliant just died. It had enough accumulated momentum to coast to the curb.

We were on the street behind the street of the place we didn’t want. I can’t imagine a nicer place to be in a stalled car. As we let the car and our tempers cool in front of a house owned by someone we didn’t know and never would, the eternally optimistic part of me pictured the people inside, whole families, emerging from the houses, coming out from behind their doors, to help us. Not help us just with the car trouble, which would mysteriously pass, with time, as it always did, but offer us a place to stay, permanent-like. I imagined that they knew of unlisted apartments, owned by friends of friends, who would naturally be overjoyed to rent to us and do their own neighborly part to help out.

Of course, nobody appeared. On most streets I didn’t see any people, never mind whole, big-hearted families. The houses were tightly shut, blinds or shades completely drawn, doors closed, signs of a desire for privacy as much as the presence of central air conditioning.

I found it impossible to shake the feeling, however paranoid it sounds, that these families, or for that matter all of native Durham, knew something we, new to town and frequently lost, could not comprehend. Some code or language, a way of getting along and being at ease that’s specific to every place. Our ease we left in Syracuse. Moving does not imply settling, as I was learning. We had moved here, sure, but we hadn’t settled yet. Moving is but a change of scenery, really. The billboards, the roads, the rest areas, and the other cars scroll by like projected background in some movie, and then you’re just there, wherever. Settling is something altogether different. Settling involves understanding the scenery, perhaps well enough to add to it. Maybe settling means becoming part of the scenery. At any rate, not being settled for any length of time, being rootless, is deeply unsettling. We were caught in that precise brand of limbo, between worlds, our possessions still packed, our progress stalled. We felt unsettled.

I probably have an unnatural worry about the codes by which places operate. The first time I ever traveled to New York City, I stayed up sleepless several nights before. I was not afraid of getting on the wrong bus or subway, of being mugged or taken advantage of. I was afraid that I wouldn’t find a place to eat. I had this idea that all the restaurants were confined to some kind of designated restaurant zone and that I was likely to walk past the very last place I could eat at. In one version of this nightmare, I came so close to discovering the restaurants, but, at the last moment, maybe mere feet away from smelling the aroma that would lead me to dinner, I made a wrong turn that took me farther away from the food I needed.

Later that night, after more fruitless searching, we ended up not quite parked in front of a payphone outside a Ben & Jerry’s. This time the car didn’t so much come to a stop as stall, cough, rattle, and then conk out several feet and many degrees shy of what would be ideal. Monique’s attempt to start it again, to situate the car completely in its parking spot, proved unsuccessful. If contemporary frustration needed its own soundtrack, I believe what might come closest is an engine that cranks and cranks and cranks but won’t catch and just won’t turn over.

Monique asked me if I blamed her for picking an apartment with so many problems. She started crying. I said of course I didn’t, that she was rushed to find something, and anyway how could she know the landlord would be dishonest and not tell us about the neighborhood and not even clean when he said he’d clean? Monique said she’d never in her life picked a good apartment. I said I thought our place in Syracuse was pretty nice, that worked out fine, didn’t it?

Next to us, a couple of parking spaces over, a tan family emerged from their mini-van. There was mom, dad, several children, and a set of grandparents. They all walked as if they were attached together by an invisible cord looped around one another’s waists. They gave us a glance or two and went inside to get ice cream. Monique stopped crying.

We spoke seriously then about returning to get the cats and just leaving, of moving somewhere else and putting some miles between ourselves and the problems. The cats were so confused and disturbed that they now elected to sleep in their carriers. Though we left them open and tried to coax the cats out, that’s where they wanted to stay. Only a day before, in Syracuse, Monique needed to force them into the carriers. I took their staying inside as an indication of how disagreeable all other options seemed. We entertained the escapist fantasy of hitting the road and driving to Monique’s family (in Rhode Island) or my family (in Louisiana). Both destinations were ridiculous, but next to what we faced in Durham, they acquired a peculiar plausibility, a feeling of “why not?” What would more driving cost us, really? Driving was easy, after all.

I asked Monique if we should just move into the apartment she had picked. Did she think we were over-reacting, because we’re tired from traveling? Do we deserve to live there, because, I mean, nothing else is working out for us, you know, and maybe we could get them to fix everything that needs to be fixed and maybe we’ll even get used to the noise, eventually. I’m just starting to feel as if we’re cursed, like we angered someone. Monique said we can’t live there. It’s too loud and the apartment has problems they can’t fix. Did you see those cracks in the foundation and all the walls? You can’t fix that. We can’t live there. We won’t be happy. The next couple of days will be like hell then it’ll get better.

The tan family was still picking out their ice cream. The kids were sidling up to the grandparents and then drifting off on their own. They were all pointing at the menu, maybe asking each other what they were getting, were they getting what they usually get, were they getting nuts or sprinkles, etc. etc. I don’t know how long we sat there without thinking, even for a second, I could really go for some ice cream right about now. We watched I don’t know how many families nearly identical to the tan family drift in together and drift out with ice cream, and the thought never occurred to us. We were there, in front of the phone, because we had planned to locate a motel that would take people who have cats, just so we could sleep in a bed. Monique called several, but all she found was one located somewhere she didn’t know how to find. We were there also because the car stopped there. We thought, let the car rest. We thought, let it cool while we rest and talk. So we sat there some more and talked it over and decided not to look for the motel, to just go back and sleep on the floor of the apartment we found wanting, because it was only one night or maybe two, and we could manage. We could find someplace else to live in the morning, or maybe the morning after that morning, and so that is what we did, and, right then, I believe we started to become settled here, even if only gradually.

Truly,

Paul