Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

Doesn’t that sound like a pleasant, late-Fifties-era sitcom? Something that helped shape an evening of quality family entertainment in its slot between My Wacky but Ultimately Deferential Wife! and Flash Gordon versus the Communists! Alas, none of those three shows exists (although I badly, badly wish they did.) My Samoan Flatmate!, much like Liquor Run Follies and The Shouting Bad Words Hour, is not a sitcom, but my life.

Caveat: My Samoan flatmate is a very, very kind and pleasant person.

Qualification: She is utterly bizarre.

Some of her wacky traits are just garden-variety odd. She yells at the TV during Dancing with the Stars (the New Zealand version, which ensures that I’ve never heard of anyone.) She has long, loud phone conversations while standing right in front of the bathroom door, ensuring that her mixture of Samoan and English will be further punctuated by other people’s excretion noises. She has attached a feeble vine to the living room wall with pins, so that it looks like a bizarre allegory of the Crucifixion for the edification of the other house plants. She has a cyst on her eye that may allow her to look into the future. I could handle all this. Child’s play for someone who used to live in the “Turtle House.” But My Samoan Flatmate is no slouch when it comes to eccentricity. She doesn’t stop at ocular deformity or exhorting the hydrangeas to repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. These are merely warm-ups.

MSF is an elementary school teacher, which has corrupted her speech into something that frustrates adults. Whether or not you agree, however eagerly you respond, regardless of how fervently you express a wish to do as she suggests, she will repeat everything she says at least three times:

MSF: Can you move your shampoo out of the shower floor? I’m afraid I’ll trip on it.

Me: Okay.

MSF: It’s quite dangerous to have something in the floor of the shower.

Me: I’ll move it in just a second.

MSF: Maybe you could put it in your room. Or on the shelf in there.

Me: Okay.

MSF: It’s just that when you put your face under the shower, you know? I’m afraid I won’t see.

Me: Sure.

MSF: It’s quite dangerous.

She sacked me with this non-versation before I even got upstairs. I kept moving towards my room, trying to imply that I only had time to change my jacket and then I really had to go to my Hebrew lesson, but she was implacable. For reference, another example of something that is “quite dangerous” is the placing of the cut-out circle of tin from opening a can directly into the recycle bin. She spent five minutes one day explaining to me how I should put this circle in the bottom of the can, and then bend the open end shut, sealing the fateful disc within. Or maybe I could not open the can all the way, but leave a tab connecting the can to the cut-out. But still close it. Because it’s quite dangerous. People could cut themselves. On the edge. Of the can.

MSF believes in the equitable division of labor, which is why she came up to me with two small grocery bags of trash, each of which was about a third full, and asked me (six times) if I would take one out in the morning and she would take the other.

MSF insists that the microwave door be left open at all times when the microwave is not in use.

MSF Does not understand that there are liquors aside from whiskey:

MSF: Is that your whiskey in the freezer?

Me: It is mine, but it’s gin.

MSF: Your whiskey will freeze.

Me: No, it won’t. Gin is usually kept in a freezer.

MSF: Whiskey will get on everything. The bottle will break when it freezes.

Me: Gin doesn’t freeze in the freezer. It has too much alcohol in it.

MSF: Really? I never knew that about whiskey.

She was actually correct, because the freezer at the house is so cold that it did freeze my gin into a weak, hard-to-pour slush.

The most ominous thing MSF does is save eggshells. There are a few neat stacks propped in a carton on the counter, which is odd enough, but the other day I found an entire shopping bag full of eggshells in the pantry. I have never actually seen her eat an egg. She does not add them to the compost. She does not seem to fill them with confetti and break them on her friends’ heads at Easter. She does not paint them with elaborate Ukrainian designs. She hoards them, for when they are needed.