U-Rah-Rah

Six sophomores, one bathroom

During my sophomore year of college, I lived with five Minnesotan girls along the western edge of the University of Wisconsin’s Camp Randall football stadium. The year was 2004. Throughout the fall semester, we regularly awoke to the bright brass melodies synchronized with sharp snare percussion from the UW marching band on game days. The band would begin practice before sunrise, rousing us from our deep slumber and providing an exceedingly loud dose of school spirit. The six of us were, of course, proud to be Badgers, and two of the girls even had season tickets to the games. I don’t remember caring much about the games themselves or the fact that D1 football was happening at our doorstep. But I showed my support - attending the games when visitors came to Madison, cheering from our rickety porch, taking 15-foot-long beer bongs from the third-floor porch of our neighbors, who wore those loud red-and-white striped overalls that could be seen across campus regularly on boisterous autumn Saturdays. I felt an odd sense of pre-nostalgia when I heard the cheers “U-rah-rah-Wisconsin” wafting from the stadium.

The exterior of our tri-plex had peeling poop-brown paint with pee-yellow trim. Along the side alley, we locked all of our bikes to metal pipes attached to the building, sometimes needing to wake one another due to an inability to exit the fray of lock-on-bike-on-lock-on-bike. A steep, heavily trodden stairwell led to the third-floor apartment where we all resided, our various shoes piled at the landing by a big wooden entry door. I remember using the shoes to identify who was home, who had a gentleman, who had dressed up in boots the night before, who had just gone for a run. The windows of the place were always dirty - likely never washed by the landlord, who profited off near-infantile tenants who cared nothing about the shape of the place and everything about the fact that they got to live free of their parents’ clutches while still slightly on their income.

The six of us shared four bedrooms. We called it our hodgepodge lodge. The two of us with the steadiest stream of boyfriends paid $25 more monthly in rent for our own bedrooms, while the other four shared the remaining two rooms. We would chat late into the night, snuggled up in another roommate’s bed, discussing the philosophy professor’s arrogance, the next move one of us needed to make with a boy, the highs and lows and soundtracks of our childhoods. On a given night, there were eight of us snoozing within those rooms, the lights in the living room left on because nobody had learned from their dads to walk around and do checks before sleep. My bedroom had been painted by the previous tenant in a dark mauve, which I loved. I didn’t own a bed frame and didn’t feel the need for one - I felt bohemian having a simple twin mattress on the floor covered with a down comforter and a dark orange duvet. V., S., and I spent evenings on that mattress listening to the Garden State soundtrack and Ani DiFranco and writing quotes on the wall.

The bedrooms surrounded a large living room, which didn’t have much furniture because we had all moved directly from the dorms. We had S.’s old futon and two smaller futon chairs, which were utilized by the many high school friends we hosted to experience Madison’s exuberant party scene. It was on that futon that a friend gathered us all around and told us she was gay. We didn’t tell her that we already knew. We would rent DVDs at Blockbuster and snuggle on those futons, singing along to RENT, laughing through all of the seasons of South Park. We would study, knit, do each other’s hair, and take timed photos of our outfits on those futons. We talked openly about sex. Some of us had had it; others of us hadn’t. We would celebrate when someone was done with an exam, a paper, or a relationship. We did have to reserve the futon with a Sharpie’d sign, because N. had been hogging it for makeout sessions with their boyfriend, whom we all rolled our eyes at.

The kitchen had large black-and-white linoleum tiles and gingham curtains, which S.’s mom made and hung the day we all moved in while she rolled her eyes heavily. The wooden cupboards had heavy doors that didn’t fully close, mostly containing twelve-packs of Dr. Pepper, packages of instant ramen, and so many different brands of peanut butter. We had a standard fridge, which five of us shared, and a mini fridge perched on a small table that B. insisted on having to herself. More often than not, S. would eat stovetop popcorn for dinner. When someone actually cooked a meal, it was a big deal, and we lovingly shared and adored it, fawning over actual pesto. Sunday night family dinners with our neighbors meant spaghetti and meatballs.

The apartment had one single bathroom. If you were showering, there was most certainly someone waiting for you, and if you needed to use the toilet - which was oddly low to the ground - someone was most certainly in the shower. I remember showering with a boyfriend while N. brushed her teeth, chatting with me about an upcoming exam. She didn’t know he was there with me, quietly washing my hair. The bathroom’s fan system was no match for six girls. Damp towels stayed damp, the floor was heaped with dirty clothes and makeup bags for lack of counter space, the mirror permanently fogged. I think there was an old washer and dryer in the basement, four floors down. I don’t remember using it often.

V. had a Honda Civic, and once a week we would all pile into it and go to the grocery store, each with varying lengths of lists based on the stipends our parents allotted us. I had a part-time job at a smoothie shop and mostly ate smoothies for whichever meal my shift overlapped with, and had to keep the majority of my paycheck saved for rent and the apartment’s cumulative budding interest in weed. Most of the time in her car we listened to popular rap music I wasn’t aware of and was impressed by V.’s knowledge of. I remember on one of the car rides, the song “Meet Virginia” came on the radio, and we all got excited, singing loudly. As the song continued, we all got quieter, progressively, so that by the end we were all staring out the windows, mumbling the lyrics to ourselves.

We spent a lot of our time with a group of boys we lovingly called the Shorties because they were all shorter than us. One of them threw up on me one evening. None of us are married to the boys we were with then. After a hairy breakup, the shower boyfriend scaled the tri-plex and entered my bedroom via the porch, which had a ragged yellow couch and some white plastic chairs that would tumble into the corner during rainstorms. The couch, always slightly damp, was where we would have our best ideas late at night while smoking cigarettes and weed and drinking light beer. We would make up songs that we sang into the dark, still playing pretend in our own ways, still children.

During the winter, we heard raccoons running back and forth the length of the apartment above us, in the attic directly overhead. After weeks of listening to the scurrying night after night, N.’s boyfriend set a trap, and the pair ultimately met their demise. We were too afraid to look at the dead raccoons or handle the trap ourselves, so grateful that we had strong and brave men in our lives to take care of such things.

We all had Razr cell phones and had to use T9 for texting. Most of the time, we left them at home because we really only used them to call our parents. What was originally called The Facebook began while we lived in that apartment, and we dipped our toes in, only slightly amused. Pope John Paul II died while we lived there, so we printed out a big photo of his face and put it on our fridge, having a mock funeral for him one Saturday night, complete with light beer and weed.

Occasionally we would go on walks around the nearby neighborhood of big, beautiful professors’ houses, dreaming of days when we would have all of the things we saw in the windows. One night, we heard a man playing bagpipes in his front yard, and we stood there for a long time, listening, leaning our heads on one another’s shoulders. We were each preparing to go on our respective study abroad trips the following year, encouraging and inspiring one another to do what felt right: Sevilla, Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Costa Rica, Nairobi, and London. We had plans for the future and couldn’t wait for them to get started - couldn’t wait to explore, fall in love, move around the world, get jobs, have babies, enjoy the luxury of a full bed frame, with that bagpipe song, the hum of that Badger chant quietly locked inside.