A hollow banging caught my attention. I'd heard the sound many times and it always resulted in a small amount of confusion. Was someone "knocking" on my screen door or my neighbor's? Somehow, the sound on the metal frame made it impossible to determine the proximity of the visitor.
I got up to peek through the blinds and see if someone wanted my attention. A look to the left showed no one at my door and a glance to the right showed a tall, thin person with what seemed, on cursory inspection, to be spiky blond hair. The viewing angle of my neighbor's door through the blinds was too extreme to clearly see who was there, but that person rapidly became more insist in her attempts at ingress. When no one answered her pounding, she started demanding, "Open the door! You must open the door!"
My neighbor is a petite young woman with a toddler and a Master's degree in biology. She's from India and has been in America for a few years while her husband works at a local university and things aren't always what she'd hope for here. Her unhappiness spills out from time to time as she feels isolated and dissatisfied with life here. It's a club she and I are in together.
She once remarked to me that a dangerous-looking man beat on her door and insisted that she open up. He was looking for the same apartment number in the building next door and had gotten confused. That complex is identical to ours and delivery people and visitors often mistake one building with the other. Superficially, they appear to be the same, but they have different owners and the other building offers low-income housing and ours does not. Three fires broke out in three months over there. Police once swarmed the area and threatened to tase a man if he didn't submit. By the time I got to my window to see, his jacket and water bottle lay on the ground that he'd dropped to in order to avoid being stunned.
Circumstances make it clear to those of us in this building that people who visit that building aren't always looking for convivial conversation and companionship. It's a magnet for shady characters who are likely calling upon other shadier characters or at least those who consort with drug dealers and deadbeat dads who stalk their exes. Sometimes those characters can't read building numbers and make their way to us.
As I heard the commotion, I worried that another suspicious character had mistaken "2785" for "2765" and I knew my neighbor was afraid to open her door when her husband wasn't home. I grabbed my keys with the intent of pretending to check my mail and see if there was trouble that I could do something about. Sometimes, the mere presence of another person, even a fat, middle-aged woman like me, will spook an interloper with malicious intent and the problem will be safely and easily solved.
As I walked out, I simultaneously saw the door to unit 16 finally open up and I identified the person who was aggressively trying to get my neighbor's attention. Several months ago, the woman who owns the building in which we're renting an apartment swooped through my place in response to an ongoing problem with our nearly deaf and ancient neighbors. We wanted to change apartments so that we were above a car port rather than elderly people with serious hearing impairment. The landlady sniffed imperiously that, "Switching apartments is just not done! We don't do that." Mary didn't allow tenants with a problem to move to one in which they wouldn't have that problem, but she did bang on her renters' doors like a deranged lunatic and demand that they open up.
To carry out my charade, I looked at the keys in my hand and chose the mail box key even though I'm sure such selection would go unnoticed by the two parties down the walkway from me. I knew the box would be empty as I'd gotten the mail earlier, but I wanted to make my presence as I walked by appear normal and credible. I couldn't hear everything that was said as I passed by, walked down the steps, and peered with feigned curiosity into the hollow mail box, but fragments of Mary's agitated speech floated in the air. "My partner saw a man on your couch... You need to fill this out with the name of everybody who lives here... Then we'll decide if we'll still let you live here!"
After pretending to check the mail, I returned to my apartment and strained to catch more of the conversation. My neighbor's voice was soft and confused and Mary just kept repeating her bullet points in her tirade. My speculation was that a visitor may have smoked in their place and Mary's partner, Gary, saw that and they were threatening to toss the family out because of violations of the fire codes. I later learned that the truth was much less logical than my fiction.
I had seen Gary skulk around the area the previous day, but thought nothing of it. He seemed to be looking for something and passed by me as I hauled my dry clothes up from the laundry room. As he passed me by, he asked, "Miss, are you 11 or 13?" I answered, "No, I'm 17," though I actually am not my apartment number. I am a writer, an intellectual, and a person of passion and sensitivity, but I figured he preferred to reduce me down to a tidy number in our brief exchange.
I thought Gary was checking out recently vacated apartments as our building seems to be in a constant state of flux. Instead, he was presumably peeking in everyone's front door to see how they were living on his property. The drama I'd seen was precipitated by his report of seeing a strange man on the neighbor's sofa who he did not believe was on the lease. The notion that such a person may have been a visitor seemingly did not occur to him, but the truth is that my neighbors never have any guests so he likely saw a ghost, had a psychotic episode and hallucinated, saw my neighbor's husband and didn't realize it was him, or saw someone in another person's apartment and confused the units.
Regardless of the origin of this fiction of an unauthorized person residing in that apartment, Mary went batty at the notion that a veritable tribe of Indians were cramming into the one-bedroom apartment that my neighbor has been renting for over two years. She spied a small, thin mattress that was placed in front of the window for the toddler to play on so he doesn't fall and hurt himself and ranted about how another person must be living there and sleeping on that mattress. Mary went so far as to say one could not keep a bed or mattress in the living room and ordered that it be removed. Many months ago, I sat and spoke to my neighbor in her place for well over an hour and I know for a fact that the only person small enough to fit on that padding would have to be younger than ten and the only person who could be comfortable would be one that liked sleeping on bare floors as it is as thin as a matzo.
Later, the property manager came by to smooth over the feathers ruffled by rich-entitled-white-lady nuttiness. He asked me what I had seen and I related what I'd witnessed. During our exchange, he revealed that Mary was preoccupied with telling people how they could live inside of the dwellings she was being well-paid to permit them to occupy and that she'd similarly harassed another tenant on the other side of the building. It is insufficient for her to soak us to the bone for rent money while not fixing the plumbing that is so bad that toilet contents will often float back up to the tank in the middle of the night or attending to floors so thin and hollow that they actually seem to amplify unpleasant sound all over the apartment; she also wants to tell us how we can arrange our furniture and what we can and can't do in any particular space.
My neighbor cried to her husband when he came home. I asked the property manager if Mary was getting the help she needed. I also wondered when she'd show up beating on my door one day to tell me that my husband and I can't sleep on the sofa bed that we keep in our living room. The drama concluded, we all said goodbye, closed our rented doors, and every single one of us hopes to find another apartment soon, including the property manager who is just as unhappy as the rest of us.
