After my divorce, I took a job teaching poetry to inmates in the Massachusetts prison system. By then, my daughter and I had moved into a large, creaky house in Cambridge with two other single moms and their children. Looking back, I can honestly say that life in that big house could seem as dark and dangerous as the rigors and uncertainties of life in prison.

THIS IS PART 2 of an EIGHT-PART STORY

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8

We were three single moms who’d met through a newspaper ad and rented a large, furnished house on Fayerweather Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My bedroom was tiny and dark, a desk, an awkward bunk bed, harsh overhead lighting. Jofka, my two-year-old, had a much larger bedroom, one that was big and scary to her, on the second floor; every night she would find her way down the stairs to my room and I’d wake in the morning with her cuddled against me, and of course I would wonder what damage this large, unfamiliar, creaky house would do to her soul. But I was too stressed to allow myself to worry about it. Everything I was going through around then was strange, new and frightening to me. 

I had christened the bed with my boss, Roger Davis. Although I didn’t like to admit it to myself, I had a crush on him. I knew he was gay, but there was something between us, a curiosity, a heightened awareness, an awkward attraction. On the day I moved into the house, he drove me over there with my luggage and belongings. I don’t know where Jofka was -- perhaps at the Harvard University communal daycare center where I’d enrolled her. Davis looked around my new room with a furrowed brow, as if he didn’t totally approve of the space. He put down my bags and we stared at one another for a moment. Then, very shyly, we kissed. His mouth was moist and warm.

We didn’t take off our clothes, but we climbed up onto the top bunk and he lay on top of me, unzipped his fly and felt between my legs. I knew I should put in my diaphragm, but was too worried he’d stop touching and kissing me to interrupt the proceedings.

Truthfully, I wasn't sure much had happened. I could briefly feel him inside me, but as far as I could tell, he hadn’t ejaculated and the whole thing was kind of a non-event.

We never told anyone about our moment of intimacy. Eloise Fein, my old high school friend who had introduced us, had no idea there was anything between me and Davis. She was very possessive of him. Although she had a live-in boyfriend, Davis was her best friend, her shining light and she had no intention of sharing him with anybody. She was fierce in that way, liked to compartmentalize her life so that friends were kept separate, like dolls relegated to different shelves. She was, I suppose, possessive of me, too, her old connection who’d shown so much promise and talent back in the day. It was important to her, for instance, that I immediately go into therapy, and not just with any therapist, but with the practitioner she herself had seen for years, a Dr. Burton Leonard who practiced in Newton and ran groups for divorcing people. She schlepped me out there to meet him, the only person, she said, who could deal with my particular problems. And so it was that without my really understanding how or why, I got stuck in a five-thirty time slot that met three times a week, the worst possible hour of the day for a single mom who needed to be quietly at home, running a bath and making dinner for her tired, cranky child.

Cover Image: Kristina Flour

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