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 8 of an EIGHT-PART STORY

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

I  began to have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach every night when I drove home. What condition would my housemate, Lina De Vries, be in? The situation had deteriorated so badly that I was thinking of finding another place to live. 

It was hard to work in the small bedroom that was my refuge from the world just across the hall from Lina’s. I’d be hyper aware of every sound coming from that room, the door opening and Lina traipsing out in a dingy negligee, muted jazz on her stereo, a burst of laughter, a surly male voice. But mostly in the spring of that year there was silence, and that, on a continual basis, was more disturbing than the loudest noise.  

While Lina was wrestling with her demons, her daughter would lie forlornly on the living room couch, so needy of her mother that it was painful to witness. And that, I eventually learned, was the issue. Lina was thinking of giving up custody because she no longer felt fit as a mother. She was kind of having a nervous breakdown. Within days, her ex, Shelly’s father, arrived from California to remove his daughter from the house. With Shelly gone, all hell broke loose. Not feeling safe, Jofka and I moved in with Davis for a few days. 

Which was fine except that I had to go back to the house for my typewriter, books, some clothing. Davis went with me.

As usual Lina’s door was closed, but while we were gathering my things it burst open and out flew Lina with a large, serrated kitchen knife in her hand.

A knife that was pointed straight at me. 

Davis inserted himself between me and Lina. “Back up and get out of here as fast as you can,” he whispered. Luckily, Jofka was in daycare when this happened. I did as Davis suggested, backing up with my legs wobbly and my heart in my throat. Lina had looked at me with real hatred in her eyes and I didn’t want to be there one more second.

From the big house on Fayerweather Street, Jofka and I moved into a second floor apartment on a street of houses built so close together that everyone knew everyone else’s business. I didn’t mind that. My immediate neighbor, who was Irish Catholic and divorced, had six children, the youngest exactly Jofka’s age. She also had a Portuguese boyfriend, a fisherman who regularly brought home lobsters for us to eat. But the best thing about her for me at that time was she drank as much as I did, so I’d go over there in the afternoon or evening and we’d sit around her kitchen table, both of us getting soused. That was the way it went for the next three years as I wrote stories and attended graduate school and took care of my daughter. What I really wanted was the warm feeling of alcohol constantly dripped into my system and I set out with a vengeance to achieve this.

Cover Image: Ye Jinghan

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