18th
One time she trashed my grasshoppers and schooled me on how to clean a blender…
A little bit of background on what you see below:
In early April, I contracted a bedroom in the apartment of a middle-aged French-Canadian ex-foreign-correspondent woman in Mexico City named Brigitte. She was also renting a room to a French Sociologist around the same age as me called Tanguy. They’d begun to develop a friendship prior to my arrival, and the three of us went out to dinner once and got along fine. Aside from that, she was away four days a week teaching a class in Cuernavaca, which kept things relatively low-static until, on her weekends at home, Brigitte began to display the traits of someone who’s never shared her living space with another before. Tanguy and I found the situation unlivable, particularly after Brigitte insisted that the kitchen was not for preparing meals (“Like I’ve told you before, you can get a very good lunch down the street for just seven dollars”*), and signed up as roommates in an apartment ten blocks south.
Irate, and in our last week of cohabitation speaking to me only in Spanish and eventually advanced French- she admitted that this was out of disrespect, as I don’t speak it- Brigitte danced around the issue of returning our security deposits and made little noticeable effort to fill the spaces we’d leave in her home. In Tanguy she was mostly disappointed, though they continued to speak in their quasi-native tongue prior to our departure. This week, amidst news of furniture deliveries and decorative acquisitions, Tanguy detailed his most recent negotiations with the mistress of our former house (imagine these words spoken with bold and buoyant diction):
…
* I normally spend about ninety cents on lunches I make at home, and they’re not just very good, they kick ass.
