In two days, her new roommate will be here, moving into this cramped and once decrepit rowhouse in Shaw, unpacking belongings into half of the skinny closet that Laura is now clearing out. For the last year and a half, this small room bisected by bunk beds has been Laura’s private enclave. The bookshelves, the dresser, the floor space were hers alone. In the evenings, when she spoke on the phone, no one could walk in with equal claim to her domain. In two days, all that will change.
And that’s good, Laura tells herself. She’s glad the ministry is growing: It’s exactly what she and Clark Massey hoped for six years ago, when they were plotting the details of A Simple House, their Catholic lay ministry devoted to the poor of Southeast. She knows you can’t take a rowhouse with two female missionaries — plus Lucy, the 72-year-old homeless schizophrenic who came with the house when it was donated — and add four more women and expect it to be easy. After all, the four-bedroom house has only one full bath.
Still, when Clark suggested a couple of weeks earlier that maybe they could eliminate clutter in the bathroom by having everyone use shower caddies, Laura recoiled. “I don’t want,” she enunciated, uncharacteristically fierce and emphatic, “a shower caddy.”
“Maybe you all need one,” Clark persisted. “There’s no way six women’s shampoo, et cetera, will fit in the bathroom.”
But shower caddies? Icky, slimy, always-wet-and-dripping shower caddies? Already, Laura had been weighing how much longer she wanted to remain at Simple House. Now her uncertainty was being aggravated by her impending loss of privacy.
The 50 women on my dorm floor at the University of Florida had no problem with shower caddies! We managed to survive with only 4 showers in the bathroom for the bunch of us to share. (that’s 12.5 girls per shower, more than 2X the “hardship” described here, and yes, we sometimes stood in line).