I’m not really one to give unsolicited advice, but I will encourage anyone to get to know their neighbors. They’re great in an emergency, like when you can’t find your laundry room key, or when you need to get rid of a loaf of banana bread you baked when you were bored. Plus, when you know your neighbors, you’re less likely to go a whole day without speaking to another human when you suddenly fall victim to the blues.
When you really know your neighbors, you feel like someone has your back. For example, Amanda, the smoker with great eyebrows, always asks me about my dates when I pass her in the courtyard. Mel, the single dog dad, thanks me for using the pool when he refills it once per week. Bobbie and Jack, a pair of take-no-shit sisters in their late 70s, have vowed to protect me from an ex-boyfriend by threatening him with a tomahawk.
Bobbie and Jack came to California from Chattanooga, Tennessee when they were teenagers, but their memories of the south haunt them as vividly as one could expect from southern ghosts. Whenever I daydream aloud about a future trip to Graceland, they go quiet and look at each other, nervously.
“Cover up your tattoos in the south.”
“Don’t let anyone know your politics.”
“Don’t walk around Memphis by yourself at night.”
Bobbie and Jack remember seeing crosses burning on front lawns, and hearing uncles tell their father, “I dunno how you control yourself around those girls of yours.” They worry I’ll experience similar things if I’m ever in Tennessee. Plus, Jack hates Elvis.
“Of all the people in the world to be obsessed with,” she once said to me, “Why Elvis?” She grimaced when she said his name as if it were a piece of nasty food.
“You were there when he changed the world,” I said. “You tell me ‘Why Elvis.’”
She grumbled about how she never liked him, and we moved on to the next topic. The following week, she and Bobbie presented me with a nightgown sized baby pink Elvis shirt with a note that said, “Now you can sleep with your King.” Bobbie told me later the whole thing was Jack’s idea.
One October Sunday, when I was halfway through my first mug of coffee, Bobbie texted me.
“Good morning. Do you want the long or short version of why you should avoid Monica today?”
“I want all the details. Wanna sit by the pool?” I wrote.
“I’ll meet you there. Good luck getting out. Move fast!”
I knew “Move fast” meant “Don’t run into Monica on your way here.” I contemplated my half empty mug.
“Shit...ok,” I wrote. “Lemme pour more coffee.”
Thirty seconds later, as I was crossing the parking lot toward the pool with my warm mug in my hand, I heard Bobbie yell my name. I looked in the direction of her voice and saw her and Monica standing near the garbage. Bobbie looked stressed and Monica looked lost. I was merely confused; I thought we were avoiding Monica.
“Stephanie, can you take a picture on an iPad?” shouted Bobbie.
I try not to sound judgmental when I answer technology-based questions that are obvious to people my age. To avoid accidental snark, I asked for clarification.
“As in, is that even possible?” I shouted back. Bobbie nodded.
I tried to discern whether Bobbie or Monica needed my help. Bobbie’s an Android user and doesn’t need to know how iPads work. I looked toward the pool and saw Jack leaning against the railing outside her front door, dressed in her usual sweat shorts and wolf shirt. Our eyes met and she threw her hands in the air as if to say, “I don’t know what the fuck.” I looked back toward Monica and saw the iPad clutched in her thin, dotted hands. Ah.
“Yes, you can take photos with an iPad,” I said.
Monica’s voice shook more than usual as she began telling me she needed to take pictures of her car to send to her son. Behind her, Bobbie rolled her eyes and mouthed, “FUUUCK,” hilariously challenging the slogan on her t-shirt that said “LISTEN TO ONE ANOTHER.” I had to look away to avoid smirking in anyone’s face. I looked back toward the pool; Jack was gone.
I approached Monica and told her to open her iPad. She entered her passcode (which felt like a crisis averted), and I pointed to the camera app.
“You can take pictures using this,” I said.
Monica stared at me. Her mouth hung open in a sort of “Uhhhh...”.
A German immigrant of indeterminate old age, Monica indulges in such eccentricities as wandering the courtyard asking tenants if they’d like their picture taken. Years before I moved in, she got in trouble for printing out Bible verses and shoving them inside people’s mailboxes. Unlike Bobbie and Jack, she speaks in a very soft voice and never, ever swears. Often dressed in thin zip-up hoodies and tennis skirts with a baseball cap over her bobbed gray hair, she can usually be spotted sitting alone on the circular table outside her apartment. Her son lives in Calabasas. I have never seen nor met him.
Before I met Bobbie and Jack last summer by the pool, Monica was the only neighbor I knew. Hours after I introduced myself to her, she stuck an envelope in my doorframe containing a handwritten note that said how nice it was to meet me. A second piece of paper had a prayer printed on it that said something about bathing in the blood of Jesus. It sounded demonic to me, but Christians have funny rules about when it is and isn’t okay to bathe in someone’s blood.
Monica calls Bobbie to talk about Jesus, and Bobbie has no idea why.
“When I was a little girl in Germany, I was never afraid of Hitler,” Monica told Bobbie one night on the phone. “I knew Jesus would protect me.”
“Well,” said Bobbie, “it’s too bad He couldn’t protect the 6 million people who died.”
For better or worse, Monica acts like that interaction never happened: she still calls Bobbie when she’s in crisis and accosts her by the garbage to ask questions about her iPad.
It was clear to Bobbie and me that Monica needed extra handholding on this one. I was happy to help because I didn’t want to be at war with Monica; I wanted to have her back. As the three of us walked toward the rear parking lot, Monica filled me in on what happened. Bobbie, having heard this story several times already, let her own comments flow freely in a low, pissed off mutter.
“Were you in the car when the accident happened?” I asked.
“No!” said Monica.
(“She was,” Bobbie muttered.)
“Someone just came toward me and...”
(“That’s not true,” Bobbie muttered.)
We arrived at the table in the courtyard and Monica sat down to tell me the whole story, panting and shaking like an ancient Blanche Dubois. The whole ordeal boiled down to Monica hitting the concrete column that separated her parking spot from the next one, but Monica’s re-telling contained some extra...flair.
“I was trying to turn into my parking space,” she said, “and I saw a young teenager. I don’t know what he was doing—probably kicking a ball, you know, the way teenagers always do—and I tried to do the Godly thing, you know, so I waited, but because I was watching the young boy, I didn’t see that I was about to hit something, and he didn’t warn me. And then...boom! I hit something. He didn’t even warn me.”
Bobbie led me to Monica’s car: an ancient red Toyota with a Christian fish on the trunk.
“I take it this is why I was supposed to avoid Monica today,” I said.
Bobbie apologized and I crouched in front of the car. The front bumper was completely smashed.
“She really fucked it up,” said Bobbie.
“And it was all some teenager’s fault,” I said.
I took a few pictures, and Bobbie and I returned to the table. Monica had a digital camera around her neck that I didn’t notice before.
“Monica, look,” I said, scrolling through the shots. “Your son will be able to send these to your insurance company.”
“And so now, do I just...?” she said, holding up the digital camera and miming snapping a picture by moving her index finger up and down above the shutter-release button. I didn’t even comment as I took the iPad back and asked for her son’s email address. I sent off the photos and handed the iPad back to Monica. She looked at me as if I had turned water into wine.
“You already did it?” she asked. “Did you take a class to learn how?”
Bobbie snorted and Monica repeated the story about the teenager and the car as if Bobbie and I hadn’t heard a dozen different versions between us. I swigged my now lukewarm coffee and wondered how the hell I was going to escape this never-ending conversation when I felt something solid hit my tongue.
“And my car, it was all scraped...”.
I pretended to listen to Monica as I fished the solid mystery chunk out of my mouth. On my fingertip was a dead, drowned fly. I recognized it as an act of God; He had given me a way out.
“Monica,” I said, flicking the dead fly off my finger, “I’m so sorry, but there was a fly in my coffee, and I nearly swallowed it just now. I need to go inside and scream.”
“Can I take your picture?” she asked as I stood up to leave.
“My darling, that is the last thing in the world I want right now.”
Hours later, when the Sunday evening anxiety set in, I baked a loaf of banana bread and brought it to Bobbie and Jack. Jack made a pot of coffee, Bobbie sliced the banana bread, and we gossiped about whatever was happening with me.
“My ex-boyfriend texted me the other night,” I said.
“What the hell does he want?” Bobbie asked.
“He told me he’s in town for a few weeks.”
“Is this the same one who had you so upset you flew to Seattle to avoid him?”
“Yup,” I said. “I won’t do that this time. I’m not even gonna answer his text.”
Bobbie stared at me with her mouth agape. Jack sipped her coffee.
“I don’t wanna make you nervous,” said Bobbie, “but is he the kinda guy who would show up at your apartment if he thought you were ignoring him?”
My knee-jerk thought was, “No.” My follow-up thought was, “What if?” Thankfully, Jack broke the silence before I could start to spiral.
“If he does that,” she said, “I’m grabbin’ the tomahawk.”
“The what?” I asked.
“I’ve got a tomahawk,” she said, as deadpan and emotionless as before. “If your boyfriend shows up here, you just call Bobbie. I’ll come to your apartment. With the tomahawk.”
I stared at Jack. Her stone face didn’t flinch.
“Jack,” said Bobbie, “it’s not good to threaten people. Step one is calmly tellin’ ‘em to leave.”
“That’s all I’m gonna do,” said Jack. “I’ll just be holdin’ the tomahawk.”
That night after the sun went down, I heard someone knock on my door. I was already opening it when I remembered Bobbie’s question about whether my ex was the kinda guy who would show up unannounced. Oddly—yet thankfully—no one was there: just a silver gift bag with purple snowflakes hanging from my doorknob. Inside the bag were assorted teas, a package of Halls, and a hand-written note in blue pen:
“Dearest Stephanie,
Thank you very much for your pictures you took for me. Very sweet of you.
With Love,
Monica.”
I smiled and dug around the bag for prayers about bathing in blood. Thankfully, Monica hadn’t included any. Perhaps she couldn’t figure out her printer.
During my first year in the apartment, I never sat by the pool. Instead, I sat by my computer, waiting for my boss to call me and inform me the sky was falling. By the second year, when I was fed up with my job and fed up with my boss, I decided to spend as much time as possible by the pool. I still checked my email with compulsive regularity, but the daily sun worshipping felt something like freedom. I tanned beautifully and re-read every Eve Babitz book in my collection.
One afternoon, about a month after I started coming to the pool, I took a seat on a lounge chair and noticed two older women were outside talking to another neighbor, Zena. I had seen these gals a few times walking back and forth between each other’s apartments; they shared a set of keys.
“Do we know her?” I heard one of them (Bobbie) say.
I looked up at the adorable women looking down at me in their oversized t-shirts and basketball shorts. For as long as I have now known them, I’ve never seen them wear anything else (aside from the flannel button downs they rock on shopping day). After working all their lives, they are only dressed for ease.
“Hi, I’m Steff.”
Bobbie, the talkative one, was thrilled to introduce herself.
“This is my sister Jack,” she said, pointing to the stone face woman in the wolf shirt. “You can call her ‘Jackass.’”
“I know Steff,” smiled Zena. “She lives next door to Monica.”
Bobbie nodded knowingly.
“How is Monica?” she asked.
A few weeks later, after reaching a new level of fed up, I quit my job. I’d been wanting to quit for years and had pursued another job months earlier, but it was my father’s idea for me to quit without a backup plan. Whether he regrets giving me that advice or not isn’t any of my business; being unemployed for two months was one of the happiest times of my life. I read. I wrote. I swam. I hiked. I felt like myself. I felt like the sun.
One Saturday in September, after the water cooled down but the air remained hot, I came to the pool and found Bobbie standing outside her door. We made small talk for a while before she walked down the stairs, opened the pool gate, and pulled up a chair near me. I noticed a tattoo on her arm: an outline of a heart containing the letters C B E.
“What’s your tattoo mean?” I asked.
She stared at her arm and sighed.
“Those were the initials of my wife...” she said, her voice trailing off. She took a deep breath and added, “...who I lost on Valentine’s Day of 2020.”
If I were Queen, we’d have countrywide grieving sessions scheduled every single day. Cities across the nation would shut down for hours, like when towns in Europe close for their siestas. Public displays of emotion would be tolerated and encouraged as people gathered in groups to scream and cry and hug. Instead, we act like the pandemic never happened. Or like it’s over. Or like it’s only happening to the unvaccinated, and we don’t have to worry about those people. We don’t think about the children who lost their parents. We don’t think about the parents who lost their children. We don’t think about the husbands, wives, and partners who lost their other halves, or the newly widowed, like Bobbie, who waited out catastrophe with freshly broken hearts. Instead, we think about Normal – it’s so nice things are back to Normal. Well, forget “Normal.” It should be normal to have each other’s back.
I looked at Bobbie. She had tears in her eyes.
“I am so, so sorry,” I said.
She took a breath, but I could still hear the sadness in her voice.
“Do you know anyone who didn’t have a shitty time in 2020?” she asked.
“No one sane,” I answered. “No one with a soul.”
Bobbie told me she and Christie were never legally married, and that she seldom told people they were even together. After Christie died, some neighbors told Bobbie, “I’m so sorry about your sister,” or, “I’m so sorry about your friend.”
“I corrected them for the first time in my life,” she told me. “I didn’t care that we weren’t legally married. I told everyone, ‘She was my wife.’”
My eyes welled with tears behind my heart-shaped sunglasses as I imagined how it would feel to keep my love for my partner a secret, or to shout it from the rooftops only after they were gone. It all felt too big to contemplate; all I could do was cry.
“I should stop,” said Bobbie, “I’m out here cryin’ while you’re trying to get yer sun!”
She made her way through the gate and up the steps. I wiped my eyes while her back was turned and privately promised to check-in with her before too long.
“One more thing, I been meanin’ to ask what kinda work you do,” she called from the top of the steps. There was renewed energy in her voice.
“I’m a writer,” I said.
“Oh, cool! What do you write?”
“Nothing for money,” I said, feeling the golden buzz that kicked in every time I spoke—or thought—about resigning. “I quit my job earlier this month.”
“Why?”
“I got tired of bein’ pushed around by a buncha weird old men.”
She didn’t respond right away, and I couldn’t tell if she was happy for me for if she thought I was an idiot.
“So, you didn’t have anythin’ else lined up when you quit?” she asked.
“Nope!”
I expected her to give me a lecture about personal responsibility, or to shake her head in a “kids these days” kind of way. Instead, she surprised me when she yelled, “Jesus Christ, you’re brave.”
In that moment, for some reason, I allowed myself to believe her.
Bobbie and Jack once convinced themselves that Monica was dead. It was a sunny day in late April, and I was outside reading by the pool in my bathing suit. At that time, Jack was in the habit of handing me a Blue Bunny ice cream cone every time she saw me, and I was in the habit of enthusiastically accepting. While I wasn’t worried about putting on weight, I couldn’t help noticing the elastic of my red bikini bottom felt tighter than the previous summer. When the door to Jack’s apartment flew open, I expected to see her standing there with a Blue Bunny cone. Instead, I saw Bobbie with a face like French vanilla.
“I know you’re out here reading but I need to ask you something,” she yelled. I could tell she was serious from the sound of her voice. She was missing her good-humored Oomph.
I was about three quarters of the way through Peter Guralnick’s Last Train to Memphis, and I wanted to finish it before I left for Seattle the following week (yes, specifically to avoid my ex-boyfriend). 21-year-old Elvis was in rehearsals for The Steve Allen Show and Steve Allen was being a total jerk. The drama was gripping, but I set the book in my lap as Bobbie sat in the chair across from me.
“Have you seen Monica?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Dammit,” she said through clenched teeth. “I haven’t seen her in days and our last phone call was so weird.”
Apparently, Monica called Bobbie to gripe about her back pain. When Bobbie reminded her that she had pain medication prescribed by a doctor, Monica mentioned that someone told her she could skip her medication and take six Extra Strength Tylenol.
“I told her, ‘Monica! That is going to fuckin’ kill you!’” said Bobbie. “I told her, ‘Never, ever take six Tylenol! Promise me you understand!’”
“I’m glad she called you,” I said.
“Well! After she hung up, she called me back five seconds later because she forgot she had just talked to me!”
This made me nervous—almost as nervous as it made Bobbie.
“Bobbie,” I whispered, “are you scared no one’s seen her in days because she’s lying dead on the floor from an overdose of Extra Strength Tylenol?”
Bobbie looked at me and pursed her lips.
“Yes,” she finally said, her voice soft and scared.
“Have you called her?” I asked.
Bobbie looked at the ground. I followed her gaze and noticed her adorable blue loafers. I wasn’t used to this Bobbie—this frightened Bobbie who didn’t know what to do. And then, as quickly as she arrived, Frightened Bobbie was replaced by the one I knew well. The one with all the Oomph.
“I haven’t called her. Because if she’s not fuckin’ dead I don’t wanna be stuck on the phone for hours listenin’ to her Jesus shit!”
Jack came outside. We caught her up on what was happening.
“You’re not going to relax until you knock on her door,” I said.
Bobbie and Jack walked away to check on Monica, and I read more about Steve Allen being mean to young Elvis. 20 minutes later they came back with the news Monica was not dead, and Jack went inside to get me an ice cream. Three days later, Bobbie drove me to the airport at 5am while Jack sat in the backseat.
Eventually, the sun disappears. The old men push us around and we don’t talk to anyone for a day. We want to stand together and grieve, but we don’t have the time or the freedom. What’s miraculous, however, is that if we only look up and smile, we just might meet the kind of people who’ll drive us to the airport at dawn or threaten our unwelcome ex with a motherfucking tomahawk. If you bring the bored banana bread, they’ll bring the Blue Bunny. They don’t even like Elvis, but they want you to have the t-shirt.
There are still people out there who want to have your back, even if all they do is knock on your door to make damn sure you’re not dead. Your job is to introduce yourself. Do it.
These portraits of your neighbors are pure gold. All the layers are there, I can see and hear them so clearly! plus the killer advice I needed to hear 💖
Ah Steff, you imbue a gentleness into your neighbors that are palpable through your words. Won't lie, I got a few sappy tears while reading. They, us, you are survivors in this day to day adventure called life. Our neighbors often blur through our lives until they don't. It can be a shared "hood" experience, illness, or living not so vicariously through our kids or a chance encounter at Ralphs. What I do know, although I can't figure it out, is that Elvis transcends messages to you from people who really dislike him (me, Jack and Bobbie) with memorabilia! Now that is scary! Love you Steff!