You’re just like the Europeans
Memoirs of a recovering ex-roommate part 3
My soon-to-be-ex-roommate glared at me and defiantly brandished the mop.
“You’re just like the Europeans!” she shouted. “You’re just like the Europeans who came and pushed my people off their land!”
When I moved in with Peggy, I had no intention of recreating the ruthless European colonization of North America in a small university apartment. It just sort of happened.
* * *
Peggy was a Cree woman in her late fifties. My first impression was that she was really nice—but like many first impressions, it proved to be wildly incorrect. Within hours of moving in, I learned the horrible truth: she was too nice.
Way too nice.
If you’ve known a way-too-nice person, then I don’t need to tell you that they’re oddly terrifying people to deal with, because it’s so obvious that their excessive niceness is a facade erected by some hideous inner demons. Aye, when the way-too-nice smile their way-too-nice smiles at you, their eyes are translucent crock-pot lids, through which you can see the frothing of an unholy stew of suppressed rage—and you know that someday they’re going to blow like Krakatoa and rain fiery death upon any hapless bystanders who happen to be about. Including, in all likelihood, you.
Speaking of translucent crock-pot lids, our kitchen was the arena in which Peggy’s disturbing way-too-niceness found its most unwelcome expression. For she constantly offered me food in a forced and desperate manner that never failed to put me off.
Where a normal roommate would say, “hey, help yourself to my leftovers if you feel like it”, and not particularly care if you didn’t feel like it, Peggy would thrust her victuals at me with wide, almost tearful eyes that implored:
“Please, please, please take some or you’ll break my heart and I’ll know I’m a bad person.”
So I usually accepted some food, but it felt like it was me doing her the favour.
Of course, this compulsory food-giving business wouldn’t have been so bad if Peggy’s cooking hadn’t been so bad. She had a singular talent for forgetting pots on the stove—one night she boiled some perogies for over an hour, to the point where they disintegrated into a weak cheese-and-potato soup. (Which I graciously ate, but only because I wanted to wind up my girlfriend.)
Then there was Peggy’s pot luck special. Every month or so the building hosted a pot luck, and Peggy would make a platter of what she claimed was traditional Cree cuisine: a bannock-like bread with the consistency of Kevlar, and a noxious substance that looked and tasted like rancid hummus. Few at the pot lucks touched it, so the bulk of it always came back to the apartment, where she foisted it on me.
All I can say is, if Peggy’s ‘traditional cuisine’ was an accurate representation of what the Cree used to eat, then I think I understand why some of her ancestors welcomed their first European visitors with such enthusiasm.
But that wasn’t the most difficult aspect of dealing with Peggy—as I quickly learned, she was morbidly afraid of interpersonal conflict, to the point where a simple difference of opinion was feared like a machete attack.
If I disagreed with her on any domestic issue, no matter how gently, she would seethe with wordless rage and retreat into her room, slamming the door behind her. In the privacy of her room a pen would be drawn like a sword from a sheath, and the ‘anti-Peggy’ would spring into action: a strange, shadowy figure who left strongly-worded notes around the place, addressing trivial concerns that normal folk would have no difficulty working out face-to-face.
Her notes had a strangely paranoid and accusing air, an unmistakable clue that the Krakatoa crock-pot of her cranium was creeping ever-closer to critical mass. One day I removed the extra toilet paper from the bathroom so I could clean the floor—and when I forgot to put it back, Peggy left a note that sharply accused me of hiding the toilet paper, as if this were part of an intricate and diabolical plot against her.
It was impossible to talk face-to-face about anything she said in her notes, so the only way to cool these pyroclastic molehills was to write a long, conciliatory letter, slip it under her door, and wait for the delivery of an equally long and conciliatory reply.
I shared Peggy’s apartment for seven months, and although there was a major note-passing incident every month or so, our face-to-face interactions were peaceful and friendly. Until, that is, she finished her degree and prepared to move off campus.
I vividly recall the moment Mt Peggy blew. A week before she moved out, I asked if I could measure the dimensions of her bedroom, explaining that I planned to move into her room after she left, and I wanted to know if my furniture would comfortably fit. She consented, and as I knelt on the floor of her room with my measuring tape, I looked up to see Peggy standing over me with a strange, ashen look on her face.
Something about my measuring the room was upsetting her on a profound level. I stared at her, she stared at me, and I knew with certainty that something deranged was about to happen.
“You’re trying to push me out of here, aren’t you?” she snarled.
“What?”
“You are. You’re pushing me out of here. Get out!”
With that, she threw me out of her bedroom. From that moment until her exit a week later, she was on the attack. Pathologically nice Peggy vanished in a puff of superheated steam and I met paranoid, note-writing anti-Peggy, face-to-face, for the first time. It was a week of unparalleled rudeness, insults, accusations, and unclassifiably crazy shit.
Alas, Peggy had secretly despised me from the outset, and now, with her departure set and the clock ticking down, she had no reason to keep up the pretense any longer.
Her behaviour became unbelievably petty. When she talked on the phone, she intentionally shouted bits of her conversations for me to hear:
“Yeah, my packing is going okay, but my roommate is trying to push me out of here, so things could be better.”
She would frequently mutter half-audible, derogatory comments about white people, and when I asked her speak up, she’d theatrically reply, “Oh, nothing.”
She also got rid of absolutely everything in the shared spaces of the apartment—the shower curtain, a quarter-full bottle of dish soap, the plug from the bathroom sink—even though she’d previously made a big deal about how I was welcome to keep all of that stuff.
When I came home to find the dish rack gone, I almost laughed. Wasn’t this situation politically-incorrect enough without the Indian-giving?
But throughout it all, I kept my mouth firmly closed. Call it bad upbringing if you will, but I was raised to eschew trading cheap shots with women my mother’s age. I had always been polite to Peggy, and became even more so as the insults flew.
However, there were times when my civility was sorely tested, as you’ll see in the following tale of furniture and fate....
* * *
A few days before Peggy’s departure, I returned from a final exam to find the kitchen table had vanished. With barely-restrained glee, Peggy announced that she’d sold it for five dollars. This was an astonishingly cheap gesture, as Peggy had paid nothing for that table—she’d found it abandoned in the basement.
I was amazed that someone had paid five dollars for that piece of junk. The table was so small that two people had difficulty eating off it at the same time, and its legs were so rickety that it would collapse if it weren’t pushed into a corner (and in fact, sometimes it collapsed anyway). One leg in particular was just there for show—it didn’t support any weight, and when one inadvertently brushed it, it fell off.
No sane human would pay five bucks for that table. My suspicion was that the buyer didn’t realize how unstable the table was, so I half-expected it to be returned for a refund in the near future. I looked forward to it.
The next day I wandered the building, looking for furniture that had been abandoned in the halls by vacating tenants. Imagine my delight when I came upon our old table, leaning crookedly against a wall!
I laughed wickedly. Clearly, its purchaser now saw it for the pile of crap that it was, and had thrown it out. I cheerfully lugged it back to our apartment, partly because I needed somewhere to eat, but mostly because I wanted to see the look on Peggy’s face when she saw it had returned.
Shortly afterward Peggy came home, and there I was, nonchalantly eating my lunch at the table she’d sold the previous day.
She gaped. “What?! How?!”
“I found it in the hall,” I said. “I guess its new owner realized that it can’t stand up on its own, and chucked it.”
She gave me a dirty look. I’d turned the table on her, and we both knew it. The table was back, and now it was mine... all mine. Bwa ha ha!
But, alas, my triumph was short-lived. The next day I came home to find the table had vanished again. I couldn’t believe it. Peggy emerged from her room and greeted me with a smug smile.
“Um, where’s my table?” I asked.
“Well!” she shouted, with a gleam in her eye that showed she would immensely enjoy what she was about to say. “This morning I ran into the woman who bought that table, and she said that she was very unhappy that someone had stolen it from her.”
Oh, shit.
“Stolen it? It was out in the hall with no sign on it, and one of its legs was off. I thought it was thrown out.”
“Really,” she retorted in a puff of self-righteousness, “You could have knocked on her door and asked, couldn’t you?”
It was a bogus retort, and she knew it. The unwritten law of the building unambiguously stated that unclaimed furniture in the halls was legally abandoned. If I hadn’t taken it, someone else would have.
“Anyway,” Peggy said, building up to her big climax, “I marched her right back here and said, ‘look at this.’ So the table is back where it belongs, no thanks to you!”
Muttering something uncomplimentary about white people, she stomped into her room and slammed the door.
Damn. The table had turned again.
A few days later, on the morn of Peggy’s departure, the purchaser of the table dropped by to bid her farewell. It turned out that the mystery buyer was one of Peggy’s oddball friends, a salt-and-pepper-haired New Ager who never shut up about psychic energies and astrology and angels.
Well, I was right about one thing: no sane human had paid five bucks for that table.
“Hey Glen, I was thinking you might want to apologize for stealing that table,” Peggy said, clearly gunning to embarrass me.
I greeted her friend with a carefully contrived air of sheepishness. “I’m sorry about the table,” I said, smiling warmly. “I thought you’d thrown it out.”
“That’s all right,” she said cheerfully, clearly not interested in the unpleasant encounter that Peggy was trying to provoke. “I’d just put it outside for ten minutes so I could mop my floor.”
“Oh dear,” I replied. “You really have to be careful about leaving furniture in the halls, especially at the end of the semester when everyone’s moving in and out. You have to put a sign on it, or people will think it’s abandoned.”
“I know, but I just put it out for a few minutes.”
I shrugged, still smiling warmly. She obviously didn’t get it.
“But do you know what the funny thing is?” she continued. “This morning I put the table out in the hall again, and it vanished again.”
I stared at her in disbelief, my warm smile frozen on my face. And then she opened her mouth, and with an air of complete earnestness, uttered one of the stupidest sentences I’ve heard in my life:
“Oh well. I guess God just doesn’t want me to have that table.”
And that’s how I learned that the good lord intervenes in the acquisition of used furniture. And what a divine intervention it was! Thanks to God’s meddling, Peggy made five dollars selling a crappy table she got for free; the table was stolen twice; neither I nor the woman who bought the table ended up with it; I was accused of petty thievery; and the table ended up, well, God knows where.
Good one, Jesus.
* * *
I’ll never forget the night Peggy left. As she packed up the last of her possessions and mopped out her room—with the new mop I’d just bought, as she’d given away our old mop—she pelted me with a perplexing barrage of accusations. In classic passive-aggressive style, Peggy had kept meticulous mental files of my crimes (of which I was unaware at the time) and stored them away in her secret grotto of resentment—a grotto that was now being spelunked with gusto.
“You’re pushing me out of here!”
“How can you say that, Peggy? You’ve graduated! You’re leaving of your own accord!”
“You stole that table!”
“That’s not fair, Peggy. You know that was a simple misunderstanding.”
“You didn’t offer me any of your birthday cake!”
I reeled. My birthday had been five months before. “I’m sorry, but that was only because the cake was crap!” I shouted, cringing because my girlfriend, the author of said cake, was sitting right next to me. “I barely touched that cake!”
And on it went. Finally she glared at me, brandished the mop, and shouted the immortal insult that I will forever remember her by:
“You’re just like the Europeans! You’re just like the Europeans who came and pushed my people off their land!”
I stared at her, dumbfounded. What could one say?
In retrospect, I find the whole thing perversely amusing—honestly, what sane parallel could be drawn between my behaviour and that of the colonials? Did the colonials steal the TP from the teepee? Did the colonials not offer her ancestors any of his birthday cake?—but at the time, it was really upsetting.
Peggy and I may have had our quibbles, but I bore no real malice toward this kooky old lady; in fact, I even liked her in a strange sort of way. So being made the target of such anger, resentment, and even racism, from someone I had lived with for seven months, from someone I thought I knew, and who I thought knew me... it made me feel kind of sick inside.
I scrambled to find some words. “Well, I’m really sorry I hurt your feelings, Peggy,” I said, miserably. “I never meant to make you feel bad about anything. Ever.”
“I don’t care,” she muttered. She backed through the entrance hall towards the front door, speed-mopping the floor where she’d just walked like she didn’t want to leave even an invisible footprint behind.
“I’m moppin’ my way out of here!” she shouted hoarsely. “I’m moppin’ my way right... out... the... door!”
With that, she backed out the front door, dropped the mop, and walked away, never to return. It was, unquestionably, one of the strangest exits I’ve seen.
And that, dear reader, is the story of my successful plot to colonize apartment #429, Louis Riel House. •
Completed in 2004 for inclusion in the Wasting My Youth manuscript, expanded from the original version of There can be only one.
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