By Emma Bueren
Winter 2017 Kaplan Award Winner
The angriest I’ve ever seen my father is in a Burgermaster. He slams both hands down on the table and shouts— to no one in particular, maybe the restaurant as a whole— “That’s it! I’m going to kill this man.”
My mom gasps, reaching up to shush my father. She flaps her hands around him, trying to soothe him with about the same efficacy of flapping your hands at an unexpected grease fire.
Of course, no one else notices this, because they’re all staring at me.
With my University of Washington sweatshirt and a lanyard around my neck, it was obvious that I was just two weeks shy into my first quarter of college— and now someone had gone and knocked up that poor man’s daughter.
Nobody sees a situation like that and thinks to themselves, “I bet a forty-six-year-old man moved into her dorm.”
===
“If you see an older gentleman around, don’t worry. That’s just my fiancé,” Jasmine* tells me.
She and I are wearing our best “nice to meet you!” faces, the kind where you smile big and nod as fast as possible. Jasmine’s a week late to the dorm, having last minute moved in from temporary housing. Since Jasmine is new, and because I heard she was in temporary housing because none of the sororities put a bid on her, I’m trying to be extra welcoming. I didn’t doubt that if I’d rushed, I’d have ended up in temp housing too.
Having said my hellos, I leave her in the lounge of our cluster, an apartment-style dorm with five bedrooms, a shared living room, and a bathroom.
Inside my bedroom, my roommate asks: “What does ‘older gentleman’ mean?”
She theorizes that Jasmine’s fiancé is probably 25 or 28 max and then we go back to cautiously getting to know each other.
==
It turns out, Dave* is a bit older than my roommate’s ballpark estimate. He’s tall and big, with long hair that says “party in the back, bald spot in the front.” He kind of reminds me of my Uncle Mike, except Dave might be older.
Jasmine’s roommate, Anna*, panics on sight and dips for the weekend, saying she’s going home to visit family.
I try to play it cool, acting nonchalant when Jasmine asks, since Anna’s gone, would it be alright if Dave stayed?
In the spirit of being an accommodating roommate, we— the other six girls and I— say sure, no problem. None of us want to get off on the wrong foot, and while this isn’t exactly what any of us were expecting, college is supposed to be a place where lots of different types of people get along. I was just expecting people with neon colored hair, piercings, or a different culture than the white-bread suburban environment I grew up in.
Well, it’s only the weekend, I tell my roommate. She nods, clearly uncomfortable, so I put on a brave face. Maybe he’s really nice.
Anna decides not to come back. Her hometown is close enough to commute, she tells us later, so she just decided to start going home every night after class. And since Anna isn’t here, Jasmine says to us, could Dave stay another night?
===
A week has gone by, and I’m browsing the dorm’s basement convenience store for some snacks. Another of my cluster-mates is standing off to the side, staring blandly at a wall of toiletries. Kelsey* is the shyest of my new roommates, and lives in the one single bedroom in our cluster. I circle once, hoping she’ll notice me, before I stand next to her and pretend to look at the row of shampoo bottles.
Oh hi, I say. I wasn’t sure if that was you or not.
We make idle chitchat about adjusting to college. Eventually we’ve run out of topics that skirt the real reason we’re both looking furtively around the store.
This is weird, right? I ask, and Kelsey says in a low voice that her parents are freaking out. I haven’t told mine yet— my ill-fated trip to the Burgermaster still looming on the horizon.
I tell her I’ll check in with the other girls and see if they feel the same. Maybe we should talk to the resident director— not our resident advisor, who’s just another student, but the man in charge of McMahon Hall.
We go back to staring at the wall of toiletries before Kelsey finds what she’s looking for: earplugs.
They have loud sex, she says with a frown.
==
Jasmine tells us too much information about Dave. She’s shooting for honesty to put us at ease, but the truth is more alarming than our imaginations.
They met seven months ago, she tells us, on an online forum. He proposed after five, and then moved from Pennsylvania to Washington to be with her.
He’s living with her until he can find a place to work, because for now he’s functionally homeless. The only snag is his criminal record. Dave is a recovering meth addict, and so a lot places won’t hire him. UW’s family housing rejected him because he was a liability, so that’s why they’re staying in the dorms.
She admits it wasn’t a great idea to have him move down to be with her, but if he stayed in Pennsylvania, he was going to do something he’d regret, like kill his ex-wife.
Then she asks Anna, visiting her bedroom for the day, if she wants to see her flog. Anna declines, but not before Jasmine whips out her phone to show her some pictures of their latest sexy photoshoot.
==
The night of our group meeting with the resident director, Dillon*, everyone is sitting stiff-backed in the lounge chairs, awaiting the fallout. The housing agreement we all signed limits us to a three consecutive nights for visitors, and Dave has been here a week.
Dillon is a short man with a doughy body. His gelled hair makes him look too young and he seems determined to be the least helpful man alive.
He listens to Jasmine’s story and tells the rest of us we’re being ageist.
“I don’t think you’d have a problem with the situation if Dave was your own age.”
==
Parents begin to find out, my own included, and now there is pressure from them to solve the issue. We start to feel silly as our parents grow hysteric, asking ourselves if maybe the issue really is our own bias against drastic difference-in-age relationships. It can’t be easy on Jasmine, to constantly have to defend her relationship to the world.
Anna had unofficially moved out. The photo incident sealed the deal, but she told us later that Jasmine and Dave were also both heavy smokers, and their laundry made her asthma act up. She told Dillon this, but he responded that we needed to be sympathetic to Dave and Jasmine.
==
The next two weeks were a mess of group meetings and one-on-ones with Dillon and his boss. We weren’t comfortable with Dave living with us, but every meeting ended with Dillon asking us to look deeper into our hearts. Next to him, his boss nodded with eyes wide and lips pursed with false sympathy. The look on her face said she wouldn’t deal with this problem even if she was paid to— which, of course, she was.
At one meeting, one of my roommates burst into tears out of frustration. Dillon responded by asking her if she wanted to seek counselling.
It wasn’t that we wanted Dave out on the streets, but there had to be a better option than having him live with a group of a freshman girls. Dillon told us that bringing our concerns to him first was “going behind Jasmine’s back,” a move of out of a mean girl’s playbook. He added that gossiping among roommates was not allowed in the housing agreement— the same housing agreement which said that guest can’t stay more than three nights in a row.
We were a mess of guilt and frustration, questioning our every instinct. Dillon told us over and over that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the situation. After two weeks of endless bureaucracy, we started to believe him, even as our families grew more hysterical. Maybe the right thing to do was to let Dave move-in.
==
We were beginning to adjust to Dave, still unhappy, but making-do with the situation. My roommate started locking the door to our dorm room whenever she was inside, and swiveled her head like an owl whenever we heard Dave’s voice rumble in the lounge. She still hadn’t told her parents about the situation. She knew they’d drive from Spokane to Seattle and take her straight home.
She was a quiet worrier, the type to internalize and stew. I’ve always been a loud one, the type who tries to talk her problems away, hoping eventually I’ll find the magic words to make a problem disappear.
I told anyone who would listen. Random kids in my classes, my friends, even TAs. It was therapeutic to have my own fears validated in the faces of my friends. Saying the story aloud made it sound as absurd as it felt. If it wasn’t happening to me, it would have been almost comical. It was the only thing I could think about—so why not use my situation as a fun-fact during icebreakers?
One day in calculus, I mentioned Dave to a new friend and she gasped: “Oh my god, you’re the girl living with the homeless guy?”
==
There was no rule in the housing agreement that we couldn’t gossip about our resident director, so the story was spreading fast. Dillon had to do something. People weren’t going to stop asking, and emails were now being sent to everyone who would listen. A friend who lived in a different dorm asked her resident director if this was okay, and that one gave a vehement, and horrified, no.
A communal dorm isn’t the right place for a couple, I begged Dillon. If she could at least live in a single dorm, sans apartment-style living, it’d be better for everyone.
I don’t know if Dillon had thought of that before I suggested it, but two days later, Jasmine was moving out— another dorm, another resident director’s problem.
The day Jasmine left, we wished her well. We felt guilty that we’d caused her trouble, that we weren’t more welcoming of her relationship, but also relieved. It meant we wouldn’t be greeted with the sight of a shirtless Dave sitting in her room when we walked past her door.
==
After it was over, I would run into Dillon in the dining hall. He’d stare straight ahead as if he couldn’t see me, or, if we had a flicker of eye-contact, he’d quickly look away— the grimy dining hall floor was suddenly very interesting.
When I tell this story, people always want to know what happened to Jasmine. The truth is, I don’t really know. After she moved out, she unsurprisingly lost touch with the girls who’d ousted her over her fiancé. I know the objections followed her to her new dorm, a single room in a long hallway of single rooms. Dave’s constant presence and their tendency to participate in public heavy petting bothered students everywhere. They eventually broke up. Jasmine kept the ring, moved back home, and found a new fiancé. I hope she’s doing well.
As for Dave, I don’t know. Maybe he’s gone back to Pennsylvania, found a job and a place to live, but I hope that I (and his ex-wife) never see him again; after all, I’m more or less the reason he was evicted.
It’s been three years, and I still hear the story occasionally. Apparently, they’ve started using it as a teaching scenario for incoming resident advisors and directors.