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In Apartment I answered to no one, owed no one. Her lines inspired a fierce tenderness toward my own melancholy: “I want and want my grief-each cell must have its fill-and I want more of it.” I read the brazen and bewildering poems and felt braver: Cisneros smoking cigarettes in Paris, refusing to wash any man’s clothes, to bend to anyone, even if she was lonely. The glossy, lipstick-red dust jacket featured a woman reclining on a green sofa, naked except for white shoes and a book draped over her chest. I would go outside, stroll through our suburban neighborhood, and come back in to eat something simple before retiring to my bedroom to read.įor my thirteenth birthday, my mother (prudish in all areas but literature) gave me a copy of My Wicked, Wicked Ways, a collection of poems by Sandra Cisneros, my favorite writer. But it felt exhausting, performative.Īpartment was about the absence of social exchange, freedom from measuring myself against others through external determinants of my likability, my goodness, my value. My retorts were quick, I chose dare over truth, could make anyone laugh. I experimented with a curling iron and lipstick, high heels from Payless. I joined my friends in “normal” teenage chatter: boys we liked, our weddings, outfits circled in magazines. I didn’t know anyone there was no romance. But in Apartment, I pretended I was renting my bedroom from strangers and that I lived there alone alone alone. I’d talked on the phone and bustled about like I’d seen women do. Playing house a few years prior, I’d cooked dinner and scolded imaginary children while waiting for my husband (played by a giant stuffed bear) to come home. When I was already beyond the acceptable age for make-believe, I invented a game called Apartment.