10. The Red Ball
My losing battle against an inflatable exercise ball
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When I moved apartments at the age of 23, the previous tenants of my new building had left three things behind: a hideous oversized analog clock, a cheugy “live, laugh, love” poster, and a red exercise ball.
My roommates and I lugged the clock and the poster down three flights and curb-alerted them. But without a chair to our name, the red ball was allowed to stay—the lone living room seating option. My roommate Katie plopped down on the ball as if it had been waiting for no bum but hers.
The idea of keeping the red ball did not enthuse me. I’d been looking forward to graduating from dorm room tapestries and IKEA futons and entering the world of Adult Furniture (a place I’d never been, having lived my entire childhood in a home that my self-deprecating parents referred to as the “melamine forest”). I browsed endlessly through photos of walnut bed frames bathed in morning light, expertly styled mid-century modern living rooms complete with conversation pieces that surely spurred the most invigorating discussions about upperclass existence over espresso martinis. There was no space for the red ball in those photos. In that world, a red ball could not exist.
But we did not live in that world, and my roommates loved the ball. Katie, coordinated and flexible, balanced in a lotus position on the ball’s north pole. Eliza, endlessly resourceful, used a white rock to draw haphazard squares on the asphalt of our backyard and initiate games of foursquare featuring the ball. Emily, our bounciest roommate, bobbed on the ball endlessly—when we watched television, when we complained about our jobs. She loved it more than anyone.
Katie, Eliza, and Emily continued to find uses for the red ball (an extra chair for a houseguest!), but I detested it. When any one of my housemates left the apartment for a weekend, I surreptitiously shepherded the ball to the empty bedroom and breathed a sigh of relief. With the ball out of sight, our living room looked more put together, still many degrees below the pristine staged rooms I lusted over, but on its way.
We’d cycled through three couches to get to this point: two sofas would not fit through our doorframe: the first sofa sat in our backyard until it rained; the second, we allowed to remain lodged in our front stairwell for two weeks before we mustered the heart to dislodge it. After that, we’d purchased a grey futon packaged in a flat box that did not gouge our entryway, but it was ugly, and, even worse, uncomfortable.
We collectively decided we needed something better and bought my then boyfriend’s grown up couch when he upgraded to something even trendier. I felt that our living room was finally coming together. I’d hunted for used furniture and rugs on Facebook Marketplace. I’d nurtured plants on our sunlit windowsills. And now, as a finishing touch, I wanted the red ball gone.
“What does the red ball represent to you?” aforementioned former boyfriend asked me one night. “Why do you hate it so much?”
“It represents the fact that I’ve put so much work into the apartment and no one else seems to care how we live,” I explained. “And the fact that I’m the only one who cleans the bathroom!” I added in exasperation.
I thought he wouldn't understand. His apartment was immaculate. Grown up. He controlled all the lights and their intensity from an app on his phone. He had nurtured a lush jungle in his living room. He’d accumulated art and adult furniture from New York. He had in-unit laundry.
The red ball was holding me back from the tasteful life I could be living, I thought, a life my parents had never cared about or encouraged, and had perhaps eschewed.
In May of 2020, still early in the pandemic when we thought we might emerge from our work-from-home purgatory in a month, I stayed with a friend for several weeks in a remote part of Maine. When I returned home, there was a mischievous, giddy energy in the house.
“We made something for you!” my roommates shouted, unable to contain their energy. And then they presented to me a Google Photos album titled “Kate Doing Things.”
In each photo, the red ball was dressed as me. It did the things I did, taking my place in the apartment.
The ball was making my signature breakfast: oatmeal with banana. The ball was wearing my Doc Martens and sautéing cabbage on the stove. The ball was at my desk writing with my favorite pens, accompanied by a sweet potato (which I had once forgotten to put away after going to the grocery store and left it on my floor for a few days, a non-story my roommates refuse to forget). The ball rolled down the apartment stairs and wore my sunglasses and running shoes, getting ready to go out for an easy jog on the river. The ball learned the Savage TikTok dance which it performed alongside my other roommates. The ball even went over to my boyfriend’s apartment, sat at his kitchen table and sipped a New England IPA facing another ball, which was presumably, said boyfriend, dressed in several articles of his clothing.
We looked at the photos and laughed uproariously. What a comfort to know that all of my routine activities had been performed in my absence. After that, I still disliked the red ball, but a little less vehemently. We co-existed. After all, some of it was me.
Still, I occasionally threatened to discard it. “I hope it’s still here when you get back!” I joked with Eliza when she left for Christmas. “You wouldn’t dare!” she replied. And I wouldn’t. Couldn’t. My roommates loved the ball too much. And I love them.
In the second year of our lease, I found myself doing far less housework. I struggled with mental illness and lost the facetiously self-designated title of apartment MVP. Everyone else was pitching in more: sweeping, vacuuming, acquiring items. I was no longer the sole bathroom cleaner—in fact, Eliza, unaware we owned a toilet brush, stuck her whole arm down the U-bend in the most committed cleaning effort that has ever taken place in our living space. She was the obvious new apartment MVP.
Everyone took a little more interest in making our space a home, and my vision of what our house should look like softened, then dissolved.
When bounciest roommate Emily moved out to start medical school, Eliza and I drove a carload of her stuff across Boston. We piled bags of clothes and various containers of miscellaneous items into the back seat, then Eliza turned to me and said, “I don’t think there’s room for the red ball. Would you be willing to carry it on your lap?”
I knew what had to be done.
I squeezed into the passenger seat with the red ball on my lap, eating a Sabra hummus cup with my arms resting on the ball, above my head. It was an intimate ride with the ball; it filled the cavity created by my seated body, pushed up against my belly and thighs. For a moment when we braked hard at a stop, I felt myself lean into it as the pressure changed, and it felt like it was almost protecting me, my big red airbag.
As we pulled up to Emily’s building, she was waiting outside for us. “I wouldn’t do this for anyone else!” I shouted out the window, opening the car door and letting the ball bounce onto the sidewalk. Emily walked up to us and retrieved the ball, then rolled it into the dorm room that would be her new home.
When we returned to our apartment later that day, it was decidedly more adult, less bouncy. I surveyed the living room, the nails where Emily’s art had hung, the plants that could use a drink, the furniture that let me pretend I was living an adult life. I’d finally gotten what I wanted—the red ball gone, the finishing touch—and now I felt deflated, as if someone had let some of my air out.
Emily came back for one more night to sleep in her nearly-empty room and give me one of the best presents I’ve ever received. Ceremoniously, she handed me a small black bag. I zipped open the drawstring to find a spiky massage ball in the only color that would have been appropriate, the only color that would complete our living room: red.
