Was he interested in the old camera that Pip’s grandmother had loaned her? He was not. Hilderbrand, the landlord, in food stamps? We could not. We knew that this was the only way we could make money without compromising ourselves. Perhaps she did not even read this section of the paper. Every day we listened to hundreds of messages from men, waiting for that one special lady who would pay our rent. The ad ran for a month and our voice-mail box overflowed with interest. Did such a thing exist? We would also consider a woman of average means who had saved up her money. We were targeting wealthy women who loved women. Finally, the Portland Weekly accepted it it no longer sounded like blatant prostitution, and yet, to the right reader, it could have meant nothing else. We went at it with determination-three weeks in a row we wrote and rewrote and resubmitted an ad to the local paper. With this goal in mind, Pip came up with a new plan. We needed time to consider ourselves, to come up with a theory about who we were and set it to music. There had to be a more dignified way to live. Everyone had a rotting carpet and a door to pay for. Everything that we had always thought of as “The World” was actually the result of someone’s job. But once we were hired-as furniture sanders-we could not believe that this was really what people did all day. Next we focussed on employment we went hardly anywhere without joyfully filling out an application. But we’d met when we were children and we seemed destined to sleep together like children, or like an old couple who got married before the sexual revolution and are too embarrassed to learn the new way. One of us lived in a perpetual state of longing. One of us had always been in love with the other. This was tremendously exciting for one of us. We decorated with paper streamers and Chinese lanterns and we shared the ancient bed that came with the apartment. And it was easy to find an apartment when we got to Portland, because we had no standards we stood in our tiny new studio and admired our door, our rotting carpet, our cockroach infestation. We were anxious to begin our life as people who had no people. Her mom had gigantic swollen legs that were a symptom of something much worse and she was heavily medicated with marijuana at all times. She had the opposite problem: her mom would let her go. At all those ages I had dreamed of this day I had even imagined sitting on this porch, waiting for Pip for the last time. Then I sat on her porch and pretended that I was twelve or fifteen or even sixteen. On the way to Pip’s house, I cashed my graduation checks. They would never have let me go, so I didn’t say goodbye I packed a little bag and left a note. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but, embarrassingly enough, we had parents. In an ideal world, we would have been orphans.
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