Mary Biddinger
Too Much Charge
The new year loomed like a pair of torn pantyhose in a ditch. Neither of us wanted to touch it. My roommate kept flipping our Scarecrows of America calendar back to November. I couldn’t reach the bin where we stored our cat’s Baba Yaga costume. Somebody kept buzzing our apartment intercom looking for “Sheila.”
My roommate had decorated the radiator covers for Christmas: cloven hooves trimmed from spare felt, Dickensian waif silhouettes in charcoal. I was obsessed with a scratchy blue flannel even though it felt like aggressive dermatitis. It belonged to yet another ex-boyfriend, the one who relocated to Yellowknife because Chicago “lacked authenticity.”
On our new year resolution roster, my roommate applied one glittery holographic sad face sticker to the category of romance. We killed a few hours roller skating in the utility room. The housekeepers laundering Victorian garments of ancient inhabitants of the top floor—left over from the building’s vaudeville days—called us hookers in Polish. My ancestors were straight out of Podlaskie Voivodeship, which I couldn’t even pronounce, and I think the housekeepers could tell.
In 1986, a crime show film crew working in our apartment building released an accidental fireball that cascaded up to the twelfth floor, blowing doors off hinges and melting a few kitchens. Too much charge, the stunt master had claimed in a newspaper clipping. We reeled around a corner and down the half-flight of stairs, claiming to catch a shiver of ghost smoke left over from the inferno crew. My roommate shared an old trick of enveloping yourself in the nearest floor-length drapes, becoming virtually invisible. The housekeepers shuttled past us with their borax, curses, and bundled reeds.
Trick Ethics
For such an old hotel, the doors of the Sheridan Arms sure were flimsy. I thunked and thunked in borrowed platform boots. Down the street, workers and their sledgehammers pledged to make the artisanal cheese chateau more modern. I tried to touch nothing but found my fingerprints everywhere. My hands always felt greasy in 1999, whatever I was doing, swabbing a stray cat’s ear mites or assembling a fake authentic vaudeville hatbox. Arranging dates with a fake boyfriend as cover for dates with an even more fake boyfriend, keeping my roommate in the double dark.
Some roommates are tragedy-proof. Know them by the cuffs of their khakis, the reliability with which they conceal a mini-pack of tissues in an oxford pocket. My roommate never identified as tragedy-proof, and perhaps I did, but only on paper. Filling out the university housing survey felt like a flashback to my old summer job at Clothestime, with all the trick ethics. If your roommate secrets a mock-pieta necklace retailing approximately $8.99 and returns it the next day, packaging intact, is that a crime and do you report? I nicked the backs of my hands with a tag-trimmer, stood in line for grilled cabbage at the end of my shift.
According to the Tribune archives, a total of seven people had been murdered at the Sheridan Arms, two in the same night, and this brought a chill. Which was the more hideous crime: taking off all your clothes in front of a semi-stranger and watching each item fall to the floor, stepping outside a hotel room door for one minute in nothing but bracelets too byzantine to remove, or inventing a story that involved both? Dishonesty with a roommate is like sitting down at the piano and playing a fake song, then claiming the lyrics are too provocative to sing.
Even the most stereotypical hotel neon evokes pounding Rolling Rock on an empty stomach while perched on a bar stool in denim booty shorts. Once inside the Sheridan Arms hotel room I opened a solitary bar of Dial like it was a freak condom. Peered across the alley at my apartment building, as if I was leaving one body at home while the other hovered in two inches of hot water. Meanwhile my roommate was underlining every sentence in a research article using yellow highlighter.
How long until my date was standing at the door whispering something original like knock, knock? The rubber gloves in my purse belonged to my roommate. Cherry Chapstick on my bottom lip belonged to my roommate. 250 square feet of almost-lake view belonged to me until exactly 5:00 pm EST. I entered my ritual of peering under the bed, opening the closet, unfolding the ironing board that smelled like divorce and damp ribbons.
Curator of the Year
It was a period of “laying low” after the pedagogy awards ceremony fiasco. I was still mortified after penning a mini invective against the presumed winner, drinking two pitchers of beer (out of the pitcher), then unexpectedly winning and performing a revolting dance at the podium. But within the confines of my favorite Potterybarn, which we frequented daily, I was simply another style curator. Sometimes I finessed the merchandise into more positive angles. Polished the weekender spoons against my tank top. At the awards ceremony podium I could barely hold the novelty award check steady, but still executed the drop it low as if no time had passed since undergrad. I tried to abandon this memory in a glass carafe filled with seashells.
One Pottery Barn sales associate lingered next to my roommate, who was pondering the cost-effectiveness of homemade rattan, and then fifteen minutes later that same clerk was perched on my roommate’s knee talking about Swedish up-dos and pillows stuffed with alternative down. I was doing a great job of not thinking about the particulars, such as what kind of beer was in those pitchers (Miller Lite) and which jukebox songs I’d played on repeat to pump up my outrage before the awards ceremony. After the ceremony my roommate hand-fed me dates and made guillotine gestures at the bartender, but I just kept railing on about Scott Fennell and his feckless pedagogy paper on passive assessment.
At least I still had Pottery Barn, I thought, running through every retained fragment of dialogue from the post-awards reception, where my roommate claimed to be re-clasping my bracelet but actually tied my wrist to a railing. Around 8:00 pm we needed to make a purchase before Pottery Barn closed. My roommate strolled to the cash register with an armful of wooden beads, a six pack of plastic lemons, and a perfumed drawer buddy. I (accidentally) slammed one tiny sweet dreams bar soap onto the counter.
The Autumn Spark
Fall semester clocked in like a hung-over cashier. My roommate double-fisted dissertation hours, while I enrolled in a full load. Two classes overlapped by twenty minutes, which felt like a not-so-secret affair. Philosophy of Rhetoric, Wharton and James. Any time away from campus I spent attempting to read two books at once (one for each thigh.)
I was dating a guy who thought bats hatched from seeds. Let’s wash this beach blanket, he said, we might have picked something up from the trees. Beautiful like a roast beef sandwich. I had to stop my roommate from pinching him when he dozed on our secondhand divan, surrounded by my students’ “Remembering Events” essays.
One autumn afternoon I was cramming two novels at once, boyfriend snoozing in the center of the living room floor. His garments swayed in a breeze from the ceiling fan, which only had one speed. I lingered simultaneously on a description of clams and a treatise on liminality. Then the party girls on floor twelve started tossing lit matches out their window.
We had to spend three hours on the curb. My roommate lugged a typewriter down the fire escape, bit the head off a gingerbread scarecrow. The boyfriend kept running hands through his hair, even though it had long ceased being cute. I imagined my student papers drifting into the flames, at this point merely a smolder, then hunkered one book into the crease of the other.
The One Where We Trick Tourists into Learning How to Dance
I own three different tourist disguises, but the most convincing includes three layered tank tops, low-rise distressed jean shorts, and a straw hat with plastic feather in the brim. I whisk on silver-pink iridescent lipstick and grab my shell necklace and I’m ready to rock the plaza.
Historically the plaza was dominated by flamenco demonstrations and noncustodial fathers herding children to the cotton candy cart. The flamenco demonstration was equally compelling and off-putting. The dancers wanted nothing to do with onlookers. It made us feel like we’d walked in on a stranger who forgot to lock the bathroom stall.
My roommate purchases a performer permit template and ream of 20-pound paper from a guy named Eddie who has a tiny office on Clark. The bootleg template spits out of our living room printer and I endorse it with my finest bureaucratic flourish.
Of course we have to arrive at the plaza separately. My roommate brings the boom box, bag of marabou boas, and mini trophies purchased from the party store.
It pains me to pay for a taxi, but we need to maintain verisimilitude. I smile at the taxi driver and tell him yes, it’s my first time in Chicago and I can’t believe how big and clean it is.
My roommate convenes a modest crowd, the plaza sidewalk chalked with foot outlines like we stood on in junior high when learning the electric slide. The flamenco dancers are nowhere to be found. A few weeks later, a fifty-word diatribe will appear in the Chicago Reader regarding the loss of culture downtown.
I stop at the cotton candy cart and order two pink-and-blues.
My roommate works the crowd. Speaks into a microphone that isn’t connected to anything, but does not need amplification. Are you ready to rock? Are you ready…to rock?
A couple with matching Cubs jerseys ventures into the circle my roommate has drawn in glitter chalk. I set down my cotton candy and step in like a dorky cartoon rabbit.
Have you ever danced before, my roommate asks, tips the mic to my face.
Um, just square dances back in my home in Iowa and whatnot, I say.
I follow my roommate’s lead, align flipflops with the footprints. I’m clumsy at first as if dancing had been banned in my hometown and I only attempted it in a crawlspace under my family’s split-level where I stashed a JC Penney catalog since its families looked so happy with their untangled dogs and unnaturally green lawns.
Then, as the kids say today, the beat drops.
I rip the straw hat from my head and fling it into the crowd, where a noncustodial dad catches it in his teeth. Peel off two of the three tanks, revealing a nude cami that matches my skin.
Almost everyone screams.
I slide my body across the plaza with sick delight, like a lava lamp cracked open and spilling forbidden contents.
My roommate shrieks with excitement as I writhe up the plaza stairs and whip my hair.
From the cornfields of Iowa, can you imagine, my roommate exclaims, then passes my hat to the crowd, waves copies of a dance how-to pamphlet (printed on 20-pound paper) for sale. Now she’s ready to take her show to the finest nightclubs and boudoirs in the Midwest.
Afterwards we dump the contents of my hat onto the Bennigan’s bar counter—mostly singles—and decide to split an order of seasoned fries.
Mary Biddinger's flash fiction has recently appeared in Always Crashing, DIAGRAM, Gone Lawn, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. These stories are part of a project that chronicles the adventures of two graduate school roommates in late-1990s Chicago. She is also co-editor, with Julie Brooks Barbour, of A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers, forthcoming from the University of Akron Press in spring 2024.
