4 1 PORPER By Maia Penfold I llustration by Barbara Sekerka w w X' were living on ■ M / the edge. I lang- W V in g on to th a t edge with our fingernails. Somehow hang ing to gether. Look ing back, tha t ’s what’s remarkable. A b o u t t h a t summ e r. 1981. Eugene. Oregon. Living on peanut butter sandwiches, Ballpark hotdog s , a n d M a r l o ’s desserts. Marlo, a music jnajor from Ithaca, New York, massively overweight, devoured Harlequin romances, was desperate for marriage, attended church every Sunday, told the raunchiest, most off-color jokes, and had a laugh that could bring the ceiling down. She’d bring a pan of praline dreams, raspberry cheesecake or marble cake. Too sweet, too heavy for our tastes and too often, but it was free food, and our food budget was near zero. Sometimes she had a Kelly Girl temp secretary job. She had a shag rug—extra-long shag in red white and blue—patriotic seaweed, painful to the eyesight. There was no getting used to that rug. Jack, I’d known since we both lived in the same neighborhood in San Francisco, Bernal Heights, where he managed the coffeehouse. I’d get home from Crocker Bank and head for salad and maybe lasagne and caffe latte at Jack’s place, the Bonview Cafe. He thought I was after him or maybe just after his body. He let me know about the man in ■4 his life. When I invited him to the party at my place, he brought a bouquet of deep blue delphiniums three feet high. Years later Jack had exact recall for all the details of the evening, who was there, what they said, every nuance. All I remember are his delphiniums. “ I like to make a big splash,” he said. Now I was sharing his apartment in Eugene and I wasn’t paying any rent. “ How long can this go on?” I asked. “As long as it needs to,” he said. My mother was never as good to me. He never made me feel that I was in the way in that small apartment. But then he never invited me along to the movies or even to a free concert of the U. of O. Five days a week he was taking care of three-year-old Marisa in Apartment #4 while her mom Linda worked in Intensive Care at Sacred Heart Hospital on the 3 to 11. Linda thought it was too boring for Jack, she was afraid she’d lose the best childcare she’d ever been able to get. So she bought a $1000 Curtis Mathis color TV with remote control and HBO and Showcase Theatre. “ Linda’s from Texas,” Jack said. “She does everything in a big way.” The building was big and funky; it had been lived in by nuns who worked at Sacred Heart. Until Northwest Christian College bought the land it was on. Then O.J. Martin, our landlord, bought the building and moved the whole thing one block west to a spot behind Dairy Queen at the corner of 13th and Hilyard. When I got up I fixed my cup of instant and walked out onto the balcony where I had a third floor view of treetops and the plastic Dutch Dairy Queen girl twirling slowly atop her red roof and of work in progress < on Sacred Heart’s glossy new high-tech x ■ wing. Jack’s friend Peter slept with him in the large alcove at the top of the narrow spiral staircase. The apartment was on two levels. It had very few right angles, it was all triangles and trapezoids, and upstairs there were skylights and slanted ceilings and the balcony. Our housemate Neils works nights at the posh Valley River Inn as a janitor. He was a blue-eyed blond Finn from Michigan. Not really bright, but gorgeous. Jack called him a dumb blond. Unkind but true. He slept behind the curtains separating kitchen and livingroom on a sofa pulled out to make a bed. I slept in that same bed, on those same sheets, till he got home. Then I got out, he got in, sheets still warm. I was trying and trying. I tackled Eugene’s biggest office building, all 10 stories of it on Main Street, walking through every door passing out my resume and talking to people. Business was bad, they were cutting back, they had a hiring freeze, they were closing next week; they were even more discouraged than I was. Liquidation sales everywhere, lumber business belly up, jobs scarce as proverbial hen’s teeth. I was desperate and didn’t want to continue sponging off Jack however kind and generous he was. I read every help wanted ad in the classifieds. WANTED: Live-in Housekeeper. Room and board plus salary. Newport. Clinton St. Quarterly—Fall/Win ter 1988 35
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