Apartment Impartment

The last week of summer break before my fourth year of college, my mom took me shopping for all the household staples I’d need for my first time living in an apartment. Nothing too extravagant as my new place was fully furnished and only two blocks off campus. Bedding, towels and kitchen supplies mostly. Then my dad took me shopping for things he felt were important that Mom had not procured. Most importantly, vise grips. “No daughter of mine is going out into this world without vise grips.” To this day, I’ll occasionally send him a little note when I use them. He wasn’t wrong. They can come in pretty handy.

I have continuing appreciation for their efforts. When I go into stores at the beginning of the Cornell and Ithaca College fall semesters and see students left to their own devices it’s not always pretty. “Dude. Do you think we’ll need, like, a pan or something?”

I had two roommates, and for the most part we got along well. Perhaps ridiculously, the one thing we absolutely couldn’t agree on was peanut butter. We were all completely committed to our brands and there was no compromise to be had. Luckily there was plenty of cupboard space for all three jars. One time there was a fight over how to split the heating bill. Don’t ask me how we managed to overcomplicate it so much, I think it was something like someone going home for a weekend and thinking they shouldn’t have to pay for those days. It resulted in my roommates insisting on keeping the place cold to keep future costs down and one morning I woke up and could see my breath inside. Not OK.

There was also a month when our phone bill was quite high. I mean really high, because of all the calls to Iraq. Of course, we all knew we weren’t making those calls, but how to prove it? Then one day we came home and one of those calls had recorded on our answering machine. My roommate took the tape to the language lab to have it interpreted, all geared up for the international intrigue, but it was just friendly people talking and telling jokes. It turned out all the telephone lines for the apartments above and below us were bundled together in the same chase. If you took the phone jack cover off the wall you could see them all, and if you knew what you were doing, physically tap into them. Luckily, it was the phone company that figured that out, and we didn’t have to pay.

Even though my parents had helped me move in, on a hot summer day when the elevator was broken and I lived on the eighth floor, I was excited for them to visit that fall, to see I was capable of keeping myself alive while living more independently. A nice feature of the apartment building was each unit had a balcony. Perhaps not surprisingly for Penn State, you could often spot some beer kegs out there. On the Friday afternoon that my sister and parents arrived, I met up with them and then proudly walked them to my home. As we started getting close, my heart sank as I could see something had gone wrong with one of the kegs on a balcony above the main entry and beer was streaming down the side of the building. Upon arrival I could see the sunken entry courtyard between the sidewalk and front door was full of standing beer, with a head on it. As we waded through, I awaited the parental displeasure and repercussions. Was I in trouble by association? Was I moving back to the dorms? Finally, my dad broke the silence. “This is shameful!” When I went to Penn State, we knew how to tap a keg!” Phew! I got to stay.

That balcony led to more heartbreak the following year when early in the fall semester someone dropped a beer ball from an upper balcony onto the roof of my roommate’s car. It was a real hardship for her to pay to have it fixed on her poor college student budget, and the repair took forever. She vowed never to park there again, and instead parked remotely, causing her to go well out of her way walking back and forth to her car. It was a real inconvenience for her, but she felt better that way. She did park there one more time, the night before graduation, so she could pack up her stuff to move out the next day. She figured many of the residents had already left, so it should be safe. Nope, that night someone dropped another beer ball on her car.

I had several friends in the same apartment building, and against all the odds we were directly above one another. Three women on the fourth floor, us on the eighth, and three guys on the tenth. On the Sunday night after our Thanksgiving break, the phone rang, and it was our tenth floor friends telling us to look out our balcony door. Sure enough, there was a rope dangling in front of it. My one friend had told his father over the holiday that he was nervous being on the tenth floor because if there was ever an emergency there was only one stairwell down. The rope was their solution.

Let’s break that down, shall we? First of all, good luck to a normal person climbing ten stories straight down on a hardware store rope without even so much as a single knot in it to grip. Secondly, the layout of the building couldn’t be more straightforward. A single corridor with apartments on both sides and a stair at each end. More importantly, we were architecture students, actively studying this very thing – that the code demands there be two means of egress, which would mean two stairways. We were dumbfounded how it was possible he had never noticed the second set of stairs. “You mean the trash room?” he asked. Slowly we realized that he had confused hearing the fact that the back stairway had a hatch in the wall that opened to a trash chute down to the dumpster, with thinking the stairwell door led to a trash room. Since the hatch was where we had all been instructed to place our trash, we of course asked him what he had been doing with his garbage since August. Without ever looking in, he’d been opening the door to the stairs, hurling a trash bag into it, and closing the door. I guess his brain was otherwise engaged, he was a brilliant designer.

One of my roommates was on a tight budget, so she waited until Sundays when the long distance rates were down to call home to talk to her stuffed animals. Yes, you read that right. She and I had several debates about reproductive rights, with her strongly pro-life. I was really concerned for her the Friday afternoon I came home and found her crying in the bathroom because she thought she was pregnant. She was going to wait until Monday to find out for sure, but that sounded like a rough weekend to me, so we literally walked to a walk in clinic to find out for sure. Imagine my surprise to discover not only was she not pregnant, but she hadn’t done anything that could lead to pregnancy. She honestly didn’t know how that all worked. Her Middle School nurse has some explaining to do! But it certainly opened up her thinking on the subject.

I am so fond of this cast of characters and our time together. But I didn’t mind getting a little apartment to myself after graduating, either.