STUDIO FOR RENT
As a child, I was keenly aware of my surroundings, and enjoyed a great deal of input into the selection, and placement of our household furnishings, developing a penchant for interior design at an early age. This made for a particularly uncomfortable situation for me when, as a young adult, I lived for a while in someone else's home.
The deal was, I'd rent this woman's house (with everything in it), while she was visiting family abroad. She must have been in her eighties, so as anyone might imagine, she had a lot of stuff. There was barely one square inch of space available for me or my few things. God help me if I tried to move anything to make a place for something of mine, I'd have to walk around and around just to find a place to put it. I don't know what she took with her because it looked like she'd left everything behind.
There were heavy Art books, and dried out plants struggling in crusty glassware, and knick-knacks of every description: sad looking ceramic clowns, metal-sculpted seagulls, macramé slings holding dead ferns in glazed pots, and photos of family that ( judging by the hairstyles and eyewear), were taken in the sixties. There were dozens of dusty Cassette Tapes featuring hits from Tijuana Brass to John Denver, and even older records in cardboard boxes stacked across shelves made of cinder block & boards, partially covered with miniature Indian rugs, and water-stained Mylar placemats. The seeker roots of a hungry Split-Leaf Philodendron insinuated themselves between books and boxes scouting for new places to grow.
It was easy to see the large, rectangular room had a lot of potential. It's rough-sawn, knotty pine walls were symmetrically punctuated by pairs of French doors, none of which looked like they'd been opened in forty years. Bedsheets had been pinned across the doors to cover the glass, and were wedded snugly into place by a sophisticated system of undisturbed spider webs filled with dead flies. The two foot sections of wall space between the French doors are stacked with numerous oil paintings on thick, hand-stretched canvases, sometimes four, five, six deep. They weren't very good paintings, more like ideas she'd started, and meant to get back to—but never did.
On a stack of newspapers piled high on a metal folding chair sat an old Zenith Television set. It weighed a ton, and the remote control made a spring-loaded clicking sound, requiring several attempts before the TV would respond. The antenna (augmented with aluminum foil and a wire coat-hanger) only picked up two stations, and one of those was Spanish language, so fortunately I had no reason to change the channel.
If one studied the scene carefully, they could make out an area that functioned as the kitchen. It amounted to a toaster-oven, blackened from years of use, sitting on top of an even older microwave, (quite possibly the first one ever made), both being supported on a long folding table. Below it, the small refrigerator, hidden by a collection of grocery sacks, had a section for ice—so swollen with frost—the ice cube tray had become permanently attached. An empty five gallon water bottle, still upright in its pottery dispenser, had become a pedestal for a lanky plant originating from a section of shriveled sweet potato rooted in a lime-encrusted pie tin. It shared the table with several half-empty boxes of cereal, Pop-Tarts, Instant Maxwell House Coffee, and Mason-jars full of well-worn paint brushes. The sink was the deep, utilitarian type, perfect for hiding a handful of dirty dishes in cold dishwater until such a time it became necessary to reuse one. An artist's easel served double-duty as a hall-tree on which she hung clothes, towels and a pink chenille bathrobe whose pockets bulged with wads of Kleenex tissue and throat lozenges.
It appeared as though the bathroom had been added after-the-fact. There was no door to it, just a piece of cotton yardage similar to the material one might see worn as a Moo-Moo on a heavyset woman in the mall. The shower was a freestanding fiberglass booth containing a white plastic chair taking up all of the floor space. My first day there, I attempted to remove the chair so I could take a shower, but after carrying it around and around, naked, with the hot water steaming-up the room, and not finding anyplace for it to go, I returned it to the shower, and for the first time I my life—sat down to bathe.
I did not know the woman personally. I spotted "Artist-Studio" in the Penny-Saver, and only negotiated with the daughter over the phone, but judging from the room's contents, I'd say the woman was an intellectual, (from back in the day when there were such things); a feminist (judging by the subject-matter of her half-finished paintings), obviously a liberal Democrat-- no, make that a Libertarian; probably an Atheist, or maybe a Universalist, (though it's doubtful she entertained after church). I heard a phone ring once, but was unable to locate it in time to answer.
The living area consisted of one chair—a green leather recliner permanently imprinted by her ample frame, layered with garishly colored, zig-zag patterned, hand-knitted lap blankets. Adjacent to the recliner was a basketful of TIME, & National Geographic magazines, and a flimsy floor lamp boasting a blinding, one-hundred-fifty watt bulb. A graveyard of misguided moths peppered the tops of the magazines suggesting the woman hadn't cleaned since the Kennedy assassination.
The bed was a twin mattress on a metal frame tucked cozily into the corner, surrounded by boxes of winter clothes she had collected but had yet to donate. Next to the bed was a reading lamp resting atop a stack of spiral notebooks, which were on top of a two-drawer night stand full of medication bottles; and below—a matted rug to spare one's naked feet from touching the cold concrete floor. I was secretly grateful her knitted slippers stretched enough to fit my big feet, but disappointed none of her prescriptions were remotely recreational. There was one extra chair, metal, like from an old office, positioned at the foot of the bed to accommodate one who might be visiting.
The rent was really cheap, so I accepted the unfashionable surroundings as a given, and for nine months tried to be respectful of her things, believing she would eventually be returning, and would appreciate finding everything as she had left it. It was not until the end of my stay I learned, the woman had died in that same twin bed a month before I moved in. The daughter, unable to cope with the task of reclaiming the space; not wanting to spook a potential renter, had intentionally misrepresented the situation.
It pains me to think of what I could have done with the place—all those French doors! I could have transformed that chaotic mess into the gleaming Garden Studio it was meant to be, but by the time I learned of the woman's true status, the daughter had sold the property, and I was obliged to move.
MyKa
iMyKa
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