The landlord of our first apartment, Mark, was a short, angry man with a mail-order bride and a great eye for color. In fact, it was the rust-orange kitchen against the army green entryway that sold Henry and me on the place, even though the rent was high and the shared bathroom was grimy.
Mark didn’t mention his wife when we signed the lease, but we saw her pacing outside the apartment the day after we moved in. She was young, pale, pretty in a haunted way, and she wore large pink slippers regardless, we would come to learn, of time of day or season. The tenant upstairs told us Mark had found her on RussianWives.com, that she had moved to America only a year ago.
The initial transition to life in a new town was made easier, for Henry and me, by the distraction of the landlord and his mysterious wife. A glimpse of her fragile silhouette in the doorway of Mark’s apartment left us speculating about her for days. A serious conversation about how to pay off the moving van rental fees was marked by equally serious questions regarding the legality of so-called international marriage agencies. Another day of my seemingly endless job search was offset when Henry came bursting through the door to tell me that his visit to Mark’s place to ask about the water bill had ended with Mark saying, of his wife, “She had been fucked her whole life but she had never been made love to,” a phrase Henry and I took to repeating, with a mixture of disgust and awe, whenever there was a lull in conversation.
As Henry and I went through the stages of a new move–unpacking, garage sale furniture shopping, visiting every Goodwill in a ten mile radius in search of a non-electric can opener– we wondered how Mark’s wife had advertised herself, what had drawn Mark to her grainy picture and brief description. It was hard to imagine the furious man (who, the day after we arrived, had painted the stairway a bright lemon-yellow) looking for love on the badly translated websites that seemed, upon our investigation, at once wholly exploitive and naively wholesome.
When I fell into dark moods– homesick and scared of what having Henry pay all my bills said about me– he would quiz me on the simple things all mail-order brides should possess, according to RussianBridesAgency.com. The full answer was womanliness, beauty, her heart for open feelings, extreme devotion to children, and family-orientation. Saying those things out loud, and joking about them with Henry, made me feel both better and worse, like the first time I was on SingleBrides.com when a cheerful box appeared, listing the potential brides who were currently online.
Sometimes, in the early mornings after Henry had left for work, I’d see Mark’s wife walking up and down the sidewalk in her dirty slippers. She’d pace past like she had somewhere to be, then appear again around the corner of the building five minutes later, having made a full loop around the block. Once I invited her in for coffee, but she just pressed her full lips together sadly and shook her head. It was then that I most wanted to tell her about the profile I had seen for a potential bride, Lidiya, who had written inexplicably, beautifully, of herself, “Any shame is completely gone at this time.” I wanted that shamelessness for Mark’s wife.
On more than one lonely afternoon, with Henry gone at work and the whole apartment building hot and silent, I would stare into the bathroom mirror at my thin lips and flat chest and wonder what I was doing there. Following Henry out to the new town, where he had a job lined up and I had nothing, had seemed back home like it would be an adventure. I hadn’t planned on not finding work. If I had friends in the new town I could have joked with them about it. I would have called myself a kept woman, would have said I was letting Henry take care of me. Instead, alone in the bathroom, I’d think about my feminist mother, every cartoonish “girl power” poster and t-shirt I’d had as a kid, the semester in college when I considered majoring in women and gender studies. I’d wonder how I ended up without plans of my own, how I’d come to be more invested in Henry’s future than mine.
I could remember back to various points in my life in which I’d wanted to be a doctor, or a teacher or, during most of elementary school, a ballerina. I even remembered six years ago telling Henry, before we’d officially started dating but after I’d slept over in his dorm room twice when his roommate was out of town, that I wanted to be an editor.
“Why?” he had said.
“I don’t know,” I’d told him, “but doesn’t it sound sort of glamorous?”
He had pulled the covers up over me in the extra long twin sized bed. “I like you,” he had said, to the blankets. I liked him, too. Sometimes I thought that was enough.
I didn’t have any direction. That’s what my mom said, anyway. I thought about that as I stared into the bathroom mirror until I didn’t recognize myself: what’s direction? I pictured Mark’s wife lying awake at night, depressed and aimless in another language, next to Mark’s compact body in the deep red bedroom I strained to glimpse each time I passed their ground floor apartment.
I started running in late August to kill time. I’d go for miles around the neighborhood, then come home to lie down on my stomach on the floor of the hot apartment, checking the classifieds again and again until Henry got off work. On one long run, I thought seriously about leaving, about breaking up with Henry and moving back home. Just considering it seemed wrong, like I was trying to solve a problem I didn’t have, correcting the one mistake I hadn’t made. I passed Mark’s wife halfway through her loop around the block near mile five. We didn’t acknowledge one another.
That night, Henry put his chin on my shoulder in bed. “Next time we can move where you want,” he whispered. There was a beat of silence and then he got up to turn on the ceiling fan.
“Okay,” I said, then pushed my face into my pillow, thought about how there wasn’t anywhere I wanted to be, and cried while Henry rubbed my back.
Three weeks later, I got a part-time bookkeeping job at a place that sold horse trailers. Around Halloween, Henry and I began referring to the new town as home. Sometime that winter I stopped registering the odd choice of slippers as outdoor footwear. By the next summer, the rust-orange kitchen had begun to seem, upon closer inspection, more brown than anything. The following fall, Henry’s alcoholic cousin slept on our couch for a week and, after he left, Mark told us we weren’t allowed to have overnight guests. A year and a half after we moved in, Henry and I packed up and left for a bigger, less colorful duplex closer to downtown.
There were some things I never forgot about that first apartment: the way the light was softened and diffused by the crumbly balcony above the kitchen window, the six red beads permanently lodged between the floorboards near the closet, the bathroom with its three rough stripes of various shades of blue paint, the meaning of which, after the night Henry and I got high with the couple across the hall, I felt I finally understood. But these recollections paled in comparison to my memory of the mail-order bride’s frank sadness, the way it veiled her face like the thin silk scarves she had hung as curtains in Mark’s apartment, pushed up against the windows, restrained by something that was almost invisible.
I like to wear it farther down on my head when I go to work, then move it up when I get home and “cut loose.” Except that I don’t actually think having a really high, tight bun makes you seem loose.
Argh, I wish my hair were like hers. Or hers.
It also makes Tony feel ballerina-y when I wear my hair like this.
Come on, Tony ballerina! Straighten that spine!
