*a continuation from yesterday, thanks for reading!!
Interesting too to realize, many years later, that she was a mirror of my younger sister’s resentment and jealousy, whose grievances against me were based as well on jealousy, envy, and our respective successes – or a lack thereof – in the world, in high school, which we somehow, all of us, collectively never get over, do we?
Finally, Josephina enrolled our mutual neighbor, Carolyn S., another resident I had always got along with, in her war on me. Carolyn lived on my right and was not an owner; she sublet her apartment from a landlord who owned about ten units in the building, one Solomon R. of Brooklyn. She was an opera singer and often out of town, occasions I looked forward to (I really prayed for her career to go well, purely for selfish reasons, and with deep sincerity!) as it meant I would be spared the hour or more long intrusion of the inescapable sound of her singing various scales. Listening to anyone vocalize scales can be, I think, equated with Chinese water torture or other forms of deeply maddening aural disturbances like car alarms, wailing sirens, or that ice cream ding-a-ling tune of my nightmares. I generally left my apartment during these hour-long sessions to walk my dogs, do errands in the neighborhood or, last resort, I put headphones on when Carolyn vocalized, but hey, I never complained because that – noises specific and general – are all a part of having neighbors in New York. Buck up, you can take it.
Carolyn and Josephina, bonded over my perfidious person and ways after Carolyn left town for work purposes and I noticed that she was subletting her sublet, a nifty way to save or possibly even make money. The problem was that this was illegal and in violation of our co-op rules. This habit of hers occurred during the time when I was president of the board and, as a result, I found it impossible to ignore her flagrant flouting of the rules and law; after all, it was happening right next door. Did she think I wouldn’t notice? And, adding insult to injury, she sublet very short term, month to month, to other singers, meaning that her going out of town was not a gratifying time for me re: relief from her goddamned scales. The sub-sub-letters vocalized just as she did only they’d do it at 7 or 8 a.m. or 6p.m. or 7p.m. (she was pretty regular at 4-5p.m.) and dammit I was pissed. How to win friends and influence people, by Moj Mueller. I turned her in.
Once she returned from a job out of town in the midst of this ganging up upon me by them both and turned on her stereo, gorgeous music, to a level that made it impossible for me to hear what was going on, on my TV (Masterpiece Theatre, The Cazelets). I knocked on her door then pounded on it when she didn’t respond; she opened it with a knife in hand, a knife pointed directly at my face. Initially I froze, but then said, ‘Uh, please turn the music down, Carolyn.’ She slammed the door in my face and we screamed at one another through the door for a few moments. Then she called the cops. ‘You gotta try and get along’ the cop said; ‘I’ll certainly try’, I responded, ‘hey, I didn’t call you, she did.’ Carolyn’s main complaint about me as far as I knew at this point was the occasional barking of my dogs, to which I responded during one of our heated encounters with ‘well, at least they don’t bark for an hour every fucking day!’
When I spoke to a friend of hers in the building, she said Carolyn had felt threatened by me, a dyke, knocking on her door at night. Uh, I’m not a dyke and even if I were what the fuck was she doing with a knife in her hand? Are you sure you’re not a dyke? (Can you imagine my head exploding, peeps?) Yes, I’m sure and I still don’t see what difference that would make (and by the way, you’re an idiot, which I left unsaid.) This woman, not unlike my mother in her appearance (fat with a bad perm), was a union member and public sector worker. I had respected her previous to this incident and back and forth bullshit. Light bulb moment, moments, realizing I was, as in childhood, surrounded on both sides of my hallway by intense, irrational hostility and no one, not even the sensible Bonnie, Carolyn’s friend, also on the co-op board, was able to see my position except through the light of her own prejudices and fears, her own projections, although Bonnie’s husband sure did. I should have mentioned that, how handsome, charming Cee Otis would confirm my non-dyke, non-whatever (monster?) status.
My mom’s answer to my sister’s acts of hostility toward me was to shrug and go back to her Harlequin romance; she was generally so hostile to me herself, I don’t think she took their constant petty tyrannies very seriously; why would she? And so, the day I stood there after both neighbors spent some venom by screaming at me, I finally, finally got it: sense and logic and good neighborly behavior for years (once, my younger sister and I had been close) were nothing to the stain of a grudge held tight in an unhappy woman’s fist, the fist of my neighbor Josephina, my neighbor Carolyn, and on and on.
When I first left the city I imagined I would seek a house, a home, at the end of a dirt road, neighbor-less, isolated, not unlike the farmhouse where I spent so many years of my childhood. And then the first winter I spent upstate was long and hard, with many feet, not inches, of snow. And through that first winter and year I experienced the good neighbors of a rural town, people who do for you because they just do, expecting nothing except some of the same, if you can, in return. I bought a house next to another family of six, like my own family of origin, like the Gronekes, but so different in temperament, in all ways. Their house is ramshackle, the porch half falling down and I don’t care, I don’t care about any of it, because they are kind, they are helpful, they have wonderful kids, they don’t know, in my experience, what resentment means, or envy, and I am free of the past, finally, and the hallway in which I grew up is dark, disappeared into the farthest recesses of my memory, no longer where I live.
*yes, my neighbors upstate were terrific, until I decided to sell and move to a house that’d been in my family for more than a century, part of a long-standing dream of mine. At the news that I was putting my house in the market they lost their fucking minds. He started sending me threatening emails, that my shed/garage (over 80 years in situ) was on his property (he’d been living next door for about 20 years), as was my fully-permitted carport, which permitting process – required because it was within 6′ of his property line – he’d been invited to participate in along with his lovely (not) wife. They did not show, oops! They were terrific neighbors and humans, really – but they were also hoarders, and change of any kind, including losing a neighbor who never once in 15 years complained about the lack of any basic clean-up or other maintenance on their home, property, or lawn, was scary. Sigh!