Some years back, I lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA, famously known as 1) Home of the university that inspired the movie
Animal House and 2) Home of famed poetess Emily Dickinson... usually in that order, depending on whom you ask. I rented a room on the second floor of a charmingly decrepit old house said to have been owned at some point by Emily Dickinson's uncle. (I learned this when the Emily Dickinson Society visited our home and asked to look around). I had three housemates living upstairs with me, and our landlord and his wife and daughter occupied the first floor.
Anyway, we had a small living room window with no screen that got stuck open one nice spring day, and because none of us could get it shut and the landlord wouldn't come up to fix it, we just kept it open, enjoying the nice breeze it let in. Unfortunately, it also let in a lot of bugs, but this all stopped when a kind spider constructed a web which filled the entire window space. Since she was providing a valuable service, we welcomed her as one of our own and let her stay. Well, one day I was studying her closely for some minutes, marvelling at how she managed her web, when I heard a loud "Hey!" and my vision suddenly refocused past the spider and down into the yard, where I discovered that the landlord's 15 year old daughter had been sunbathing. She gave me the nastiest "You pervert!" kind of look she could muster, wrapped herself in a towel, and stormed inside. Now, I won't lie: I'm sure I
would have enjoyed a brief glimpse of her had I noticed her there earlier, as I was just a few years older than she was myself... but I was innocent of any wrongdoing in this case, and yet she thought I was standing there ogling her! How embarrassing!
A few days later I came home and one of my roommates asked me if I was moving out. "Why?" I asked. She told me that the landlord had been showing my room around to new people. Uh oh...
I went downstairs and did my best to explain things, apologizing for any insult I may have caused as a result of my spider watching, and things seemed to be more or less okay after that, although I wasn't invited to the yearly barbecue.
Then I was coming home from work late at night and met my roommate coming out the downstairs door that went to our little parking lot. My roommate and one of her friends always called themselves "The Two Sexy Bitches", so I greeted her as I usually did, "HEY, SEXY!!"
Alas, it turned out it wasn't my roommate... and the landlord starting showing my room again.
me
