Adult Stories

The day of my landlady’s 70th birthday, I got the phone call that would change my life (and which would have ended my landlady’s if I hadn’t answered). It was from one of her few friends she hadn’t alienated. “Please go downstairs and check on her,” she begged me. “I think she is dying! And she won...

Over the years, I noticed that most of my landlady’s few friends stopped visiting her. I also grew increasingly concerned for those animals, who had no choice to live in such squalor. When I tried to bring it up with her, she admitted she hadn’t vacuumed in ages because the vacuum cleaner was broke...

I had met my landlady through friends of friends from my hometown. She was a white woman who had become a Sai Baba Hindu in the 1970s and had an inappropriate sense of her connection to Indian culture. She was older and looking for a tenant who’d shovel her walk when it snowed and help out here and...