“I was being thorough,” I said.
“You were being yourself,” she said, which she means as a compliment and I take as one.
She asked me what I would say to someone in a similar situation. How to handle a neighbor who won’t stop.
I thought about it.
“Document everything from the beginning,” I said. “Photograph things. Note the dates. Read your lease — actually read it. Know what the complaint process is before you need it.”
“And then?”
“Knock first. Always knock first. Give people the genuine chance to be reasonable, because most people are reasonable when approached reasonably.”
“And when they’re not?”
“Then you stop appealing to their reasonableness and you appeal to the structure instead. The process exists for exactly this situation. Use it without apology.”
Carol was quiet for a moment.
“And the whole — bringing him the packages, inviting him in when his mother died —”
Pregnancy & Maternity
“Separate,” I said. “The complaint was about the tea bags. The rest was about being a neighbor. Those don’t have to collapse into the same thing.”“Most people would have held the grudge.”
“Grudges are expensive,” I said. “They cost more than towels.”
Carol laughed again.
“You know what the lesson is,” she said. “Don’t mess with the woman in 3B.”
“The lesson,” I said, “is that being the woman who doesn’t complain doesn’t mean being the woman who accepts anything. There’s a version of reasonable that knows exactly what it will and won’t absorb. I am that version.”
I poured my tea.
“And keep your lease somewhere you can find it,” I said. “You never know when you’ll need to know what it says.”
The cushion cover still doesn’t quite match the chair.
I’ve decided I like it that way.
The towel he still owes me is, I suspect, never coming.
That’s all right.
Some things you write off.
The important things — the balcony, the mornings, the eleven years of a life built carefully in a building I chose and continue to choose — those I kept.
