––What is your outstanding memory of the apartment?

Cohen: I slept with the windows open. I liked the city sounds, the voices in the street, the sirens well into the night. In my memory, the windows were huge. They extended up nearly to the ceiling and came down almost to the floor. One windy night, the cross breezes churned up so wildly they lifted the covers right off me. Up they’d go, the covers, hovering a good quarter-inch above the surface of my body; then they’d settle once more. Over and over, the wind made this dance, made the pale sheet and the thin blanket levitate in the darkness and float back down. I lay awake a long time, enchanted.

Ferris: All the kicking. I've never found another place like it for all the kicking.

Mattison: My outstanding memory is of the pleasure of living with those three women.  The apartment itself was nondescript, but I do remember cockroaches in the kitchen.  I also remember the playground of the nearby school, which was under my window.  I’d be awakened by the shouts of children, and I’d watch them.  The littlest ones chased one another like puppies, randomly, running in one direction until something made them run in another direction.  They were so different from graduate school!

Packer: I lived there for five years, so I don't think I have a single outstanding memory.  Two images come to mind:  I'm sitting at my little gate-leg table and reading the vast Sunday edition of the New York Times, always in the same order:  Arts and Leisure first, then Magazine, then Book Review.  I must've done this two hundred times.  The second is cooking in the tiny kitchen.  There was only just room to turn around from the stove and sink and chop or stir something on the butcher block cart I'd installed.  But I threw my first dinner parties in that apartment and I remember assembling multi-course complex dinners in that kitchen, despite having to put the dirty dishes on the floor sometimes to make room for my work.


––How did your tenancy end?

Cohen: The loneliness, the self-made loneliness, began to unnerve me. My slide into an almost monkish existence came to seem like it might be an unhealthy indulgence. I picked up and moved to Brooklyn.

Ferris: In tears, heartache, superstition, anguish and death.

Mattison: At the end of the academic year, all my roommates got married.  I wrote a poem I didn’t show them, of which the first line was “Three roommates had I, and they all got married. . . .”  We were bridesmaids in one wedding in Kentucky, and we all went to the second one in New Jersey, but I was spending the summer traveling in Europe—which cost almost nothing in those days—and I missed the third.   As they announced their engagements, one by one, I felt a little strange, but only a little.  In the fall I rented a studio apartment of my own, a block away. and finally lived alone.

Packer: I let go of the apartment when I decided to leave New York and enroll in the Iowa Writers' Workshop.  Much of the furniture wasn't worth trying to move, so I got some friends to help me carry it down to the sidewalk.  When we went back downstairs a little while later, every piece had been taken––by some recent arrival, I'd like to think, furnishing her first apartment.


Jaime Clarke is the author of the novel WE’RE SO FAMOUS, editor of DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME: CONTEMPORARY WRITERS ON THE FILMS OF JOHN HUGHES, and co-founder of POST ROAD, a national literary magazine based out of New York and Boston