I wrote  this years ago while living in France, but never it never felt right to post because I wasn’t sure if what happened was my fault, so I felt a bit guilty. It also didn’t fit into my sunny posts about the joys of living abroad, and I didn’t want to be a downer. Reading it now makes me realize (1) how much I completely blocked this out of my memory, and (2) how terrible of a situation this really was. I think this experience really confirmed to me the importance living alone, or even just living with people you really trust and know. 

So let’s talk about my living situation. I had a room in a preschool teacher’s house and it was pretty sweet. The rent was 250, the room was spacious, and it was conveniently located close to the tram. It was me and the preschool teacher in a three-bedroom house. It was cool. She seemed really nice at first, and welcoming. A bit irrational, but, like endearing irrational; the kind of flightiness that I chalked up to her being an artist. She sculpted, painted, and collected a zillion art books. She went to museums and bought the museum guides and event posters. She was cultured. It was one of the reasons I really liked her.

She told me many times to “fais ta vie” (live your life) and not worry about coming home late or bringing friends over. Although I never used this privilege, she made it clear to me that  she wasn’t my mother and wouldn’t tell me what to do or restrict my hours. She was overflowing with suggestions and questions and chatter in general. She cooked me dinner once and helped me with writing emails and lesson plans. Once I used up the last of the paper towels on the roll and I offered to buy the next round. She told me no, that she had a bunch more. I did anyway, because that’s what you do when you live with someone. 

One weekend she was sick and couldn’t go down to the pharmacy to get her medication. She sent me instead, and I had no problem with it. Another time she ran out of matches and so I went out to get those as well. When she was ironing one day, she needed a new bottle of demineralized water. I picked that up for her as well. I didn’t even ask for repayment since all the stuff she was asking me for wasn’t expensive. On two separate occasions I got her some. She broke a lamp in her room and asked that I pick another up for her and that she’d pay me back. I was going to do it, but then she changed her mind and decided she didn’t like the lamp after all. I tried to help where I could. In some ways, I felt like her daughter. 

I wasn’t all perfect: I have a bad habit of sitting on one of my legs when I’m on the couch and she didn’t want feet on the couch (even with socks). She caught me doing it once.

The first weird thing I noticed was her obsession with the toilet seat. She asked me if I peed standing up because there were droplets on the seat that she always felt when she sat down. I said I didn’t, but apologized anyway, promising to wipe the seat next time. A few days later she then comes again to me with the same complaint saying the seat has never been wet in ” the 10 year’s I’ve been living here”. At this point I’m confused because I know I’ve checked but I can’t prove that it’s not me. At this point she warns me that “it’s not a public bathroom you know, that’s really not correct, it’s not clean”. I become curious and decide to investigate. I notice that when the flush is pulled, it splashes little drops of water on the seat. A third time, she angrily pulls me into the bathroom to show me the water on the seat, and I tell her my discovery. She doesn’t even stick around for me to finish my demonstration but repeats the same warning instead. Oh well, she’d get over it.

It was fine for a week after that. I emptied the garbage and emptied the dishwasher, as I had from the beginning, even though most of the trash and dishes weren’t mine. It didn’t bother me to do it and since I had free time, why not? I think the point where I started to become annoyed was the day she came home during lunch, visibly in a bad mood, and started grumbling about how the dishwasher was never emptied and the house was always dirty. “You know you can contribute to a few house chores if you’re here all day”. I wanted to tell her that I had been helping out around the house, that I hadn’t been there all day, and that this particular day I hadn’t noticed the dishwasher was clean because I hadn’t needed anything from the kitchen. At this point we were only using French, and I found all this a bit long-winded and confusing to explain. so I just said ” I do help when I can”. She responded by challenging me to answer how many times I had emptied the dishwasher since I’d been there. I hate this kind of response and behavior because it’s useless and no one can prove how many times they have or haven’t done something. I became frustrated and annoyed and less inclined to be around her.

We had agreed on my housework chores as : I vacuum the house ( living room, kitchen, hallway, bathroom, water closet, and entryway), clean the sink, and clean the tub. She would mop the floors, clean the toilet, and and do everything else. The first time I did all of these things and cleaned the mirror. She was away when I did it but when she returned a few hours later, her first question to me was “why isn’t the housework done?” I said I had done it. She said that no I had not. She said it was just impossible and that it was wrong that I wasn’t being truthful to her. Then there was the one time after her some moved back in, that I emptied the dishwasher. and she said “no you didn’t”

Around this time, her son moved back in–something she never informed me of– but it’s her house, so I guess she didn’t have to?

She told me to vacuum the house but not to do it while her son was sleeping. Her son works the night shift and so wakes up a little bit later than most. I was up at ten and it seemed that he was still asleep so I decided to go out shopping. When I returned a little later, the son was there in the living room watching TV. I wasn’t going to ask him to move and then turn on the vacuum. “excuse me, can you please leave so I can turn on this obnoxious machine for a few minutes to drown out the sound of your TV?” I decided to wait it out. I apparently waited too long because the lady came back and immediately interrogated me about why the work wasn’t done. I wasn’t going to blame it on the son. So I just said I hadn’t been there to do it.

Up to now, I had still been eating at the kitchen table or in front of the TV but I noticed that whenever I did, I was scrutinized should a crumb fall somewhere, or if I wasn’t using the “right” tablecloth, or when I used the knife that was “too long”. She used the “too long” knives. I still don’t understand what she was talking about. I noticed it more and more: when I was cooking, cleaning, or doing anything, there was always a response. Even when I wasn’t yet finished, she’d always find a fault with what I was doing no matter how small. I became uncomfortable with her critical gaze. I no longer wanted to eat in the kitchen, so I retreated to my room.

She called me a liar.

She called me uneducated.

She asked me if I ever did cleaning at home.

One day as I was using the phone in the living room she came in screaming at me:  “You never ask for permission to use my stuff and that’s so rude! It’s my house!” I was taken aback, because she never told me that I had to ask to use it. And besides, she wasn’t around when I needed to ask. 

What I saw is a bitter woman, left alone, and stressed out by work. She hated her coworkers, she would say bad things about her neighbors, and it seems she was still reeling from her divorce, and the fact that her son never spent time with her. The only domain I think she could control was her classroom of four year old children–and me. She loved them and loved to talk about them. I also felt that she just didn’t…like me. My French was ok then, but not great. I have a pretty good accent, but expressing myself was really a challenge. As a result, everything I said came off as kind of direct and maybe robotic because I just didn’t have the words to convey nuance. Because of my accent, she thought that my french was better than it actually was. One time she was incensed, and going on about something when she stopped to ask me a question. I didn’t understand because she was speaking so quickly, so I asked if she could repeat it. She looked at me as if I were playing some sick game where I was pretending not to understand because I didn’t want to answer. 

Maybe she thought me cold, terse, unamiable. 

“Can you come to the office? Someone left a message trying to press charges against you.”

The final straw was when I decided to do laundry one day. I don’t know if you’ve used a french laundry machine, but they’re very different from the ones in the US; they have a metal “cage” that looks like one of those catchers you put in the kitchen sink, where you put in your clothes. To make it worse, this was a portable washer which had to be hooked up to the water whenever it needed to be used. The point is, this thing was hella foreign to me. So I put my clothes in there, pushed some buttons, and let it wash. French lady had shown me how to use the thing once before, so I felt fairly confident I could use it. Then something happened–and I can’t even tell you how because I don’t know — where the cage got stuck and stopped moving. This is when something very bad happened, and broke the machine. Maybe I pressed the wrong button, let it run too long, or some other deadly combination, but it caused some damage that could not be repaired. I learned all this when the lady came home and walked right to the washing machine as if sniffing trouble as soon as stepping into the house. She called me over and wailed ” it’s going to cost 100 euros to repair now!”

I could see that the machine had stopped working- my clothes like a stick in a grist mill.  A pang of guilt hit me as and I said something like, sorry, I wasn’t careful with the settings, I should have checked with you first. Then I offered to pay for any repairs because that was only fair. She left me there in a cloud of guilt as she went on about not being able to do laundry for a few weeks, and rattled off her usual insults: uneducated (in the way of manners), disrespectful, etc. I avoided her for days after that, making a mental note to find a new place. 

A week later, I had plans to move to a new place, and planned a gradual move in, taking a few things at a time. I let the lady know I was moving but didn’t go into specifics. My room got emptier over the next few days, and I guess she noticed (she would definitely check my room when I wasn’t there) because I got a call at school one day. I was in the middle of teaching when the principal popped her head through the wooden door, and when I had joined her outside, said “Can you come to the office? someone left a message trying to press charges against you. I’m pretty sure it’s a mistake.” 

I was genuinely baffled because I had no idea what that might be about. The principal explained to me that some lady had called rambling about how I had vacated the house without telling her, not returned the keys, and had stolen some of her property. That property, it turns out, was a white comforter that had graced my bed for the past few months. She said the couette was expensive and that I’d have to either return it or pay for it. The principal was recounting this to me as I listened in disbelief. I knew that the comforter was inside the closet, and I laughed to myself at the thought of me taking a giant comforter set across town on the tram. She went on to say that the lady who called sounded distressed, rambly, and angry. I wasn’t at all surprised by that. I was just surprised that she would go so far as to call my school to spew complaints about something so trivial.

My next class period, I told the lead teacher what had happened previously. She seemed surprised that something like this would even happen to me. That’s called harcèlment, she said pointedly, and you should be pressing charges against her. She made me repeat the word in french to make sure I understood and offered to help in any way. But I wasn’t interested in dragging out any drama, I just wanted to be gone from there and to start over. 

I told the lady I was moving out on Thursday, but didn’t specify the time. My day finished around 3pm that day, so I had planned to return one last time to turn in the keys and grab a few other things. Miss Frenchie thought that when I had left for school that morning that I wasn’t coming back. Hence the misunderstanding. That meant that I had to go back and face her after all this drama, with emotions running high. I steeled myself for the encounter as I walked up to the door and planned to hastily remove my last few things. I don’t remember much of the conversation inside the house, but I remember telling her that the comforter was there all along. This seemed to ignite her even more as if it was rude for me to point out something so obvious. This is the very point where I realized that this lady was actually a scary witch (I know, it took me forever). I don’t remember if I asked for my security deposit back, but I definitely did not get it. The one image that sticks in my mind is the last thing she said to me – in enunciated, as if mocking, English- as she slammed the door in my face: “See…you…nevarr!” Her jagged teeth showing through an accented snarl, her eyes twitching and wild, the wisps of reddish hair sent alight by the slamming motion. I sometimes wonder what I did to make someone as angry as that. 

Well, I took my bag and walked out toward the tram, trying to forget everything about that place and that woman. 

Reading this now makes me want to go back and say “omg, get out of there! why are you taking that?!” I’m willing to admit I may have done things that were annoying to this lady, but I didn’t deserve to be treated this way. It just highlighted to me the difficulties of living in a foreign country and what it’s like dealing with language barriers, unfamiliar systems, and sometimes, abuse. There are millions of people who live in subpar situations way worse than this because they have no other options and don’t yet know how to navigate the system. Maybe this story is dedicated to them.