My window. Photo by Sophie Haigney.

In our Winter issue, we published Mieko Kanai’s “Tap Water,” a story whose remarkable first sentence spills across more than two pages and describes the interior of the narrator’s new apartment as if it were the architecture of her emotional landscape. Who among us has not resolved to stop obsessing over some small piece of our home, only to fail? Inspired by Kanai’s story, we’re launching a series called Home Improvements, in which writers consider the aspects of their homes, gardens, and interior design that have driven them to distraction.

I moved into an attic room in a tall house last March. It is a lovely house on a pretty street. The offer of the room seemed to have fallen into my lap at a time when I needed it badly. It was not too expensive, and it was in a redbrick old-fashioned neighborhood I would come to love; it seemed too good to be true, and it would not in fact last, because the rent would soon go up. But for the time being I even have a little balcony with a view of the highway and of a billboard reading “Kars4Kids.” My room is oddly shaped and small but in a way I like—someone who once stayed there compared it to a ship’s cabin and I thought yes, that’s right, my little cabin.

There was only one real problem, which I noticed on my second night sleeping there. The window next to my bed rattled. At first I thought it was typical highway noise, just amplified, but soon it became clear that the glass was flapping, wobbling, shaking. The sound it made was a strange stuttering, occasionally high-pitched, almost verging on whistling. I asked my roommate to talk to the landlord, and the landlord failed, for weeks and then months, to appear. I took a video of the noise in the middle of one sleepless night and sent it to my roommate for validation. He responded, “OMG that’s like a horror film.” The window didn’t rattle all night long, or even every single night—it was intermittent, which made the experience even more strange and like a fever dream, because I would wake up at odd times and then drift back to sleep and then wake up again and in the morning feel like perhaps I was exaggerating the problem to myself. Sometimes for a few days I would think the rattling had resolved itself, but then it would come back, loud as ever. I was not sleeping very much or very well, but my window wasn’t the only reason for this. Read More