I had been assigned to the Yacht Club, an apartment complex I can assure you is (nearly as) sophisticated and swanky as it sounds. The clubhouse is cleverly decorated with buoys and portholes; the sign on the property manager’s office reads “Captain’s Quarters.” In the hundred-degree June heat, I crossed bridges over frothy green ponds and festering streams. I broke through clouds of gnats and mosquitoes. This place was the real deal.
I reached an apartment and took a moment to compose myself. Beads of sweat formed on my forehead and humidity was trickling down my back. The nylon strap of my stupid itchy official messenger bag dug into my shoulder. I sighed and swatted the air. It was barely noon and already miserable. I rapped smartly on the door. “U.S. Census Bureau!” A few moments, and it opened.
“Helloooo,” chirped a little woman with Richard Simmons hair. Her big brown eyes—one looking straight at me, the other resting vaguely on something in the distance—peered out at me from the cool dark of the apartment. “It ees so hot. Will you like to come inside?”
I paused. This is how government workers die, right? One second, an innocent lady is smiling and nodding her curly head at you; the next, her paranoid anarchist brother is leaping out from behind the couch with an ice pick and a psychotic grudge against his former mailman.
Another bead of sweat slid into my eye and blurred my field of vision. I still did not move, but my good eye met hers. Humankind is good, right, at the core? “Sure,” I said. “Thank you so much.”
The apartment was cool, dark, and damp. “Will you like to sit down, please?” she said, gesturing towards the couch. A mustached man nodded toward me and muted the television.
She scurried to the kitchen and pried the lid off of a shiny blue tin. Tissue papers rustled as she fished out tiny tea cookies and put them on a plate. Ice clinked in a glass. A can of orange soda cracked open and fizzled. She scurried back with a little feast and set it on the coffee table. “For you,” she said.
Going through the interview questions as usual, I nibbled on cookies and learned that her accent was Salvadorian. That she lived in the apartment with her father. That she was thirty-five. Finally, I turned to the back page and asked the standard wrap-up questions. “Can you verify your name? Is this the address at which you were living as of April 1, 2010? Is there anyone else who lives here who has not been counted on this survey?”
She stopped. She looked from her mustached father to me to the muted television to the orange soda, back to me. She smiled sheepishly.
“Well, yes.” She blushed. “My boyfriend, he lives here too, usually.”
My business pants were on, of course, and cohabitation is not exactly shocking (thanks, MTV/Friends/sexual revolution/Census questionnaire that offers “Unmarried Partner” as an option). “Okay, we’ll put him on the survey, too.” We started to go through the questions again.
Then, Question 2b. “What is his date of birth?” She giggled. “Well, he’s… 21.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I like younger men,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
I asked the wrap-up questions again. Yes, her name was right. Yes, she was living here on April 1. No, no one else besides the three of them lived here. “Okay, thank you so much for your time,” I said, “and for the cookies!”
She jumped up again, scurrying into the kitchen one more. I heard drawers opening and tissue papers rustling. As I stood to leave, she came back around the bar into the living room. We walked to the door and I turned to say goodbye.
“Here,” she said, pressing a plastic baggie full of tea cookies into my hands. She smiled and nodded enthusiastically, her Richard Simmons curls shaking like little fronds as I walked out of the dark of the apartment and into the blinding, gnatty heat of the afternoon.
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