On Blueberry Muffins and Murder

When I lived in New Orleans, I had a terrible fear of being robbed. Not robbed on the street, some hooligan swiping the cheap orange purse from my shoulder and jogging towards the bayou, but robbed in my apartment. Ransacked, bludgeoned. Maybe robbed isn’t the right word. I had a fear of being broken into.

At night, I’d hear a noise from the living room and freeze. Of course it was someone creeping through the apartment to murder me! Why wouldn’t it be? The bathroom had pink tiles. There was a grand piano in the front hallway that didn’t work. The lease said, “No ghosts since 2005.” It was the last place you’d want to rob, but a wonderful locale for murdering.

My girlfriend ordered me a white noise machine. She also joked that since I’d taken the side of the bed closest to the bathroom, the murderers would murder me first.

* * *

Around this time, I was working for a nonprofit. It was my first “real” job after grad school, the kind that came with health insurance and a handful of days off. I remember how excited I was to buy patent leather shoes and don sensible blouses. I even had my own office. Sure, it grew humid and soggy on rainy days and I had to answer phone calls from disgruntled elderly women who complained that the building’s facade was looking ratty, but it was mine. 

Every day at lunch I’d tell my coworkers it was time for my “jaunt.” I’d mosey through the neighborhood for thirty minutes in my work clothes and call my mother. Palm trees, lizards, pink houses with white, peeling balconies. I quickly figured out which shoes led to blisters. Palm trees, lizards, pink houses with Mardi Gras beads. Across from the office there was a coffee shop with ripe blueberry muffins and strong coffee. One of my coworkers and I started what we called the Sisterhood of the Traveling Five Dollar Bill. If I was getting coffee, she’d give me the five. If she was getting coffee, I’d hand it back. When I was feeling down, I’d treat myself to one of those big blueberry muffins and pretend it would solve everything. Palm trees, lizards, pink houses with termites in the walls.

* * *

“I’m terrified of being murdered in my sleep,” I told my therapist in passing. It was the beginning of the session. I was only making conversation, the same way you might say to the person changing the oil in your car, “Crazy, all this rain we’ve been having.”

“You’re afraid of being murdered?” she stammered.

“I mean, yes,” I waved my hands in a pshaw motion, “but that’s not really what I want to talk about today.”

My therapist took a deep breath. I wonder how often clients talk like this, how often they want to discuss the spilled milk instead of the trauma.

“Sure,” she conceded and recommended I invest in a security system.

* * *

The longer I worked at the nonprofit, the more blueberry muffins I ate. Sometimes I’d gobble down two a day, allowing the sugar crystals to crumble willy nilly into my keyboard and slow me down. Meanwhile, one of my coworkers would waltz in every few weeks and declare that she was back on her crazy diet. She had two of these. One that involved powdered cheese and one that involved juice.

As the months wore on, I came to dread the sound of the phone. Every day it would be some combination of whiners, fools, and octogenarians on the other end. 

“Young lady, have you seen the sidewalk?” they’d demand. “This organization looks like a dump!”

I started wearing Birkenstocks to work—they were far more comfortable than my loafers—and writing unabashedly sassy replies to committee members who had been rude to me. I let papers languish on my desk alongside the muffin wrappers.

“You should really stay late and finish that,” the dieting coworker would say of a project. “Show them you’re in this for the long haul.”

* * *

One night, at three in the morning, my doorbell rang. I sat up, thinking, is this the polite murderer? I hadn’t even known about the doorbell until that moment, on that muggy New Orleans night when I felt certain I was about to die. It rang again. Maybe, I mused, if I didn’t answer the door, the murderer would give up. But even if he threw in the towel, I still wouldn’t be able to sleep. He would rob me either way.

A few minutes later, I heard a thump against my bedroom window. It wasn’t the thump of a baseball bat or a gun, but a shoe. A sneaker. It was a dull, goofy, sneakerish kind of thump, so silly I had no choice but to look out the window.

In the driveway below stood not a murderer, but my upstairs neighbor. She was barefoot with a German Shepherd, weeping.

“Thank you,” she sobbed when I opened the door. “The dog was whining so I took her out to pee but then the door locked behind me. I don’t have my phone. I’ve been out here for hours.”

Eventually, she calmed down enough to call her boyfriend from my phone. I think I gave her a glass of water. If a murderer was lurking in the bushes, he must have gone home, for I was not visited by anyone else that night, neighbor, slayer, or otherwise.

* * *

On my twenty-seventh birthday, I took the afternoon off. We could do things like this if we worked overtime. I’d add up the extra hours on a Post-it note next to my computer, wondering how long it would take to earn a whole day off, and will the phone not to ring. My birthday was on a Wednesday. I went antiquing by myself, then met a friend for beignets on Magazine Street. While the antiquing was pleasant and the beignets were lavishly stuffed with strawberries and cream, what I remember most was feeling that I had suddenly become old and dumpy and boring. It became a mantra. Old and dumpy and boring. Old and dumpy and boring. I said it in the shower and on my jaunts. I said it when I turned on my white noise machine. Maybe somebody really should come and murder me, I thought at the sound of a creaky floorboard, then I wouldn’t have to go to work.

* * *

Is this universal, I wonder? To experience a point in life where your happiness hangs on by a thread? My thread was a blueberry muffin. It was a five dollar bill, passed back and forth, and a thirty minute walk. I held onto these things for dear life, dangling over—what seemed to me at the time—a very dark abyss.

* * *

When Covid hit, everyone in the office started working from home. Gone was the Sisterhood of the Traveling Five Dollar Bill. Gone were the blueberry muffins. But also gone were the excruciating phone calls and the loafer-induced blisters. I answered emails not in a damp office but in a gold armchair from which I could see my potted plants and my neighbors, walking their poodles as slow as you please. On my newly languid lunch breaks, I took long bike rides through Audubon Park. I deposited books in the various Little Free Libraries of Uptown. Once, when I realized I needed a lid for my saucepan, I biked around the neighborhood until I found one. 

With each bike ride, murder seemed less and less likely. I came to realize a creaky floorboard was just a creaky floorboard, a rattling window nothing more than a rattling window. As I pedaled away from the palm trees, the lizards, and the ugly pink houses, I felt the way my upstairs neighbor must have felt when I opened my door that night: deeply and desperately relieved.