Pictures of You: Victoria Barrett

 

“First Apartment, Spring 1996,” by Victoria Barrett

 

In the fall of 1995 I was twenty-one years old, living with my mother in an apartment in my hometown. I had flunked out of college that spring and slunk home with my head hanging, vacillating between deep, deep shame and panic. I was a Smart Kid. My smartness had, growing up, been the only thing about me that mattered. What I wanted once I was on my own at school was to be loved, smart or no: loved by family, loved by a boy, loved by friends. Failing that, I would have liked to be admired. Failing that, well, I didn’t know what I wanted. That summer and fall I worked a day job dispatching truck drivers and waited tables at night, convinced I was the kind of loser who had already done at age twenty-one every worthwhile thing she’d ever do. I wanted to go back to school—I was determined that I would—but more immediately, I needed to live somewhere else. The fights were getting nastier and more severe. My mother had been hitting me, throwing at me whatever came to hand, telling me she wished I hadn’t been born since I was twelve. By this time there was nothing left but the fighting.

Yet she didn’t want me to leave. Terrified of being alone, she had called the restaurants where I applied for second jobs to tell them not to hire me. She hid my keys when I wanted to leave for a night with friends. When I finally rented an apartment, she pounded on my head with her fists until I held both of her arms down and threatened, if she didn’t stop, to break them. That night when I left to finalize the lease, she promised I would come back to find all my clothes and books and sentimental junk in a pile in the parking lot, burned. There was a foot of snow on the ground. The parking lot was full of stuck cars, unshoveled. I took my chances and left in my tank of a car, handed down from my older sister, its weight bearing me over the slick roads.

It was the first and last time I raised a hand in defense against her aggression.

My apartment was two rooms plus a bathroom in a run down brick mansion on a block that was cut in two directions by active railroad tracks in the town where I went to college. It wasn’t a part of town where students lived—those were all too expensive. My neighbors were everyday people we sneeringly called townies on campus, with everyday jobs and everyday lives. The apartment’s ceilings were at least ten feet, the windows so big that I could sit comfortably on their sashes, reading, for hours on nice days. The rent was $311 per month, including heat and water. The landlord didn’t mind that I painted fish on the bathroom walls and stenciled suns, moons, and stars above the sink and stove.

I thought I had a lot of stuff, but I had lived with my mother, in a dorm, or in a sorority house for all my life to that point. I had a lot of sentimental crap and boxes of clothes, most of which no longer fit me but which I didn’t want to throw away, scarcity being what it was. But I didn’t have furniture or functional items, the kind of possessions you need to keep a house. I had a handed-down waterbed and some cheap bookshelves and a few lamps, but no place to sit or eat or study. I had posters and a handful of books and a few dented-up pots and pans but no desk. I had a bicycle and the twelve-year-old, handed-down car.

I got a job waiting tables twelve shifts a week. I worked and went to bars with friends and lived, for a time, unencumbered. It was a taste of the life I would have lived if I hadn’t gone back to school, or gone to school in the first place. It was, for a little while, glorious. I saved what money I could, bought a $30 desk and a $40 parlor seat at a used furniture store that used to be a grade school. You wandered through the classrooms, room after room of other people’s discarded junk, no doubt much of it scavenged from dumpsters behind apartment complexes when the students moved home each May. These were the first things that were truly mine—not gifts, not hand-me-downs, not purchased from after-school-job money while living on somebody else’s dime. Mine. Without strings.

The friends with whom I spent my time were mostly my coworkers, college students who would finish school, move on to their adult lives, forget me. It wasn’t a life I could sustain in the long run, happy as I was. And I began to notice I wasn’t smart anymore. I struggled to retain information that wasn’t contained in a Tex-Mex menu, to articulate a full thought, to maintain an argument. If I wasn’t a Smart Kid, who was I? I subscribed to news magazines, started going to the public library. I worried that everything I knew about myself was slipping away. I didn’t know then, and still don’t know now, whose Smart Kid I was. Did I need to be smart? Or did my mother need me to be smart? It remains impossible to say. In any event, I worried. I applied to be readmitted to college and appealed the rescindment of my financial aid. Happiness, unencumbered, I knew would be short-lived. I had to go backward to move on.

I reupholstered the parlor seat. I built a treehousey table and bench from pallets, flower pots, and orange crates stolen from the mercado across the street. I made pillows from cheap calico fabric with a thirty-five year-old handed-down sewing machine. I made a tiny coffee table from a collaged piece of scrap wood, with hot-glued flowerpots for legs. I bought a papasan chair from Pier 1 but saved money by making my own cushion. I put party bulbs in the antique chandelier. I filled that little apartment with one proto-Pinterest-fail after another, and a few efforts that could have passed as successes. Once an old friend visited and told me, “This is like being inside your head.”

I don’t ever remember seeing my mother inside my apartment, though I’m sure at some point she was there. She kept a two-bedroom apartment for months, telling me, “I know you’re going to need to move back.” I never did.

I was readmitted to school and saved frantically, hoping I could come up with enough money for the semester I’d have to cover before I could secure financial aid again. All summer I worked every shift I could, stashing money wherever I could hide it until I got it to the bank, saving up every penny. As August approached, a friend from work asked me to come to his apartment. The friend and his roommate were self-proclaimed Jesus freaks. I don’t remember whether they went to church. I know they read the New Testament, and they prayed, and they were kind on principle. At the apartment, we talked for hours. The roommate had won a classic Corvette in a radio contest, sold it, and was giving away the money. As I left, he tucked a check for $700 into my hand. “For school,” he said. Because he believed in me. I never saw him again. Another couple gave me $500. This, and the thousand or so I had saved, would be enough.

Just after the semester began, my financial aid was reinstated, so the money I had already spent was refunded to me. Neither the roommate of the friend nor the couple who’d given me money would take it back. Help someone else when you can, they told me. I still do.

But for too many years, the person I helped was my mother. I don’t know why I maintained contact after I moved, or for the 17 years that followed, years when I spent time, heartache, money trying, failing, failing again to make her happy. I never could.

I live now in a house made beautiful by my own hands, and my husband’s. My mother lives four blocks away, but I don’t see her anymore. We have a baby son who’s never met her. Many nights I dream of introducing them. Someone asked me, “What good would she bring to his life?” I couldn’t honestly answer.

In the end the apartment, like most good things, turned sour. The landlord sold the building to a couple who were hostile right away. They wanted to evict me for the fish and the suns and the moons, but their contract and state law prohibited it. What they could do was come into the apartment while I worked or went to classes or studied at the library and clear out whatever cash they found, and also refuse to renew my lease when it expired. It didn’t much matter—I was already on my way somewhere else. I rented a house in the part of town where the students live with some roommates and moved on. I don’t know what came of the new landlords, but the grand old house is gone now. In its place stands a strange concrete-block cube that looks like a bomb shelter but is actually a single family home. They took out the railroad in the intervening years, too, and the mercado is long closed, forgotten. It’s better this way, wiped clean, only real in memory.

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Victoria Barrett’s work has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, Colorado Review, Confrontation, and The Massachusetts Review. She serves as the editor and publisher of boutique fiction press Engine Books. Victoria lives in Irvington, a neighborhood in Indianapolis where the streets are named after writers, with her husband, Andrew Scott, their two cats, and a dog named Mosley. Learn more about her work at victoriabarrett.net.