by Jenny Mollen
“Excuse me,” I interrupted. “Do you live in this building?”
“Umm. Yes?” the man answered with trepidation.
“Oh, good. I was just wondering if I could speak to you for a minute. I live in the building behind you.”
The deliveryman counted his cash, then plugged his ears with headphones and pedaled off. Naomi carried Sid as we hiked up the front steps of the building, moving in on the clearly angst-ridden tenant.
“How can I help you?” he asked in a hurried tone. He had an accent that sounded French but not French and wore several chunky sterling chains around his stubbly neck.
“I—well, this is a weird question, but do you smoke or know anyone in your building who does?” I glanced at Naomi for approval. She nodded back.
“Smoke? No,” he said firmly.
“Oh, okay. Well, what floor do you live on?”
“I—” The man hesitated. “I live on six. But I have to go now, I have a conference call.” He punched a series of numbers into his call box and walked inside without another word.
“Wha—” The door slammed in my face before I could continue. I turned to Naomi, who was grimacing at the door.
“He’s lying. I can taste it.”
“Really?” I asked.
Nothing made me happier than getting confirmation that somebody was hiding something from me, because it instantly justified my unhealthy need to pry into his or her personal life.
Turning to the call box, I impulsively pushed every button and waited for someone to pick up.
Beep, beep, beep. The call box hummed.
“We’re Amazon Prime drones, if anybody answers,” I said to Naomi, adjusting my beat-up Ramones tank to make it look more official.
After several seconds, a UPS man appeared. It was Rico, the same UPS guy who delivered to our building.
“Hola. Cómo estás?” Naomi flirted. Rico opened the door and wheeled his hand trolley full of boxes past us.
“Hi, Rico! How’s the family?” I smiled eagerly.
Naomi held the door for Rico, then motioned for me to enter behind him.
“Everybody is good, thank you,” Rico said, as I awkwardly and uncomfortably adhered to his ass.
Once I was in, I peeled myself off Rico and followed Naomi and Sid into the stairwell. Sid kicked and screamed as we made our way up to the third floor, desperate to negotiate a flight on his own. After spending ten minutes on one step, I decided that not only did Sid’s motor skills suck, they were jeopardizing the entire mission. Soon Jason would return home and start asking questions. Stressed for time, I charged ahead, leaving Naomi to handle Sid. The third floor was dark, with worn-down commercial carpet that hadn’t been redone since the year I was born. I let my nose guide me through the musky hall until I arrived at apartment 305. Stale tobacco residue permeated the air. Yellow nicotine stains framed the dilapidated door. This was the den of the dragon woman, I was sure. I could hear footsteps inside, but I didn’t dare knock.
Minutes later, Sid barreled down the corridor behind me, screaming. Naomi tried to hush him, but it was no use, he’d gone completely rogue. Knowing it was only a matter of time before my rookie ride-along botched the entire operation, I started to panic. I snooped around the neighboring apartments, hoping to catch someone I could turn into an ally. Surely I wasn’t the only person affected by the copious amounts of carcinogen affecting their community. But nobody was home. We waited several more minutes before Sid’s face turned beet red. Standing at arm’s length behind an imaginary wall, he was pooping. He stared straight at me to make sure I wasn’t staring at him, as any direct eye contact during one of his bowel movements was strictly forbidden. Once he’d finished, he was back to his fun-loving self and amenable to being held. I threw him over my shoulder and scurried home, hoping I’d beat Jason.
“They’re back!” Veronica screamed, before we got through the front door. In the time we’d been gone, she had changed into pajamas, applied five more coats of eyeliner, and confessed everything to her brother.
“I was about to call the cops! What the hell were you doing over there?” Jason stormed out of the bedroom, trying to catch his breath.
Veronica looked at me guiltily. “He promised we could watch Dateline if I told him where you were. I’m going through a breakup. I’m weak!”
There was no point in lying. I was too excited not to share what I’d learned.
“We made it into the building! The perp lives in apartment 305.” I went online and entered the dragon lady’s address to see if I could get her name.
“Jenny, no. I don’t want you engaging with our neighbors. We just moved here full-time. This isn’t like Los Angeles. We’re part of a co-op. We live with other people now, and this is not the way to start our relationship with them. Besides, I have a guy coming tomorrow to spray insulation foam in the brick.”
I ignored him, typing frantically. “Baby, it’s pollution and it’s affecting our lifestyle. Let me at least send a message to our board…”
Jason looked at me and shook his head adamantly no. “Jenny, if you send a message I am going to be extremely pissed.”
“Okay,” I said.
Seconds later, I sent a message to the board asking if anybody else was having a problem with the smoke.
Naomi took Sid into his room to change his diaper and break the news that he’d been temporarily fired from the snoop squad until he was potty-trained, had better cardiovascular endurance, and understood the meaning of “inside voice.” Veronica checked her text messages by the window, secretly hoping to hear from One Leg.
“There’s a guy in there,” she said, glancing nonchalantly at apartment 305.
I rushed back over to the window and dropped my laptop in shock.
“NAOMI! It’s the guy!”
Standing on the fire escape was the guy with weird man jewelry that we’d met hours earlier.
“He was lying! He said he lived on the sixth floor!”
Naomi smiled a knowing smile. “Told you.”
“What is happening to everyone?” Jason interrupted, breaking up the viewing party by drawing the curtains closed.
“What? I can’t even wave at them?”
“No! That is the last thing I want you doing.” He turned his attention to Naomi. “My wife has a problem and you need to not encourage her,” Jason explained soberly, as though I wasn’t in the room. Veronica disappeared into Sid’s nursery so as not to get a lecture of her own. “She and my sister have a history of bad behavior, and I am hoping that now that she is a mother and role model she will show some restraint when it comes to invading people’s personal lives.”
“I don’t get what the problem is with a simple wave,” I huffed to myself. “It’s neighborly.”
“He just lit up,” Veronica blurted out, now watching from Sid’s window.
“What? Two smokers!” I ran down the hall to Sid’s room.
Unlike his wife, who smoked strictly out the right side of the building, the wavy-haired man was smoking on the left-side fire escape, the fire escape that pointed directly at our bathroom.
I went back to the computer, where I was beginning to yield results. “Their names are Yosi and Esther Soha. They are Israeli Jews from Tel Aviv. She is an artist and he’s a jeweler. They’ve owned the four-bedroom loft since 1983 and tried to sell it last year on some HGTV reality show. Two sons. One cat. Oh, and according to her Facebook, she bought a set of tea towels off Gilt Groupe yesterday.”
I talked aloud through the entire Dateline episode.
“I am going to be extremely pissed if you try reaching out to them,” Jason warned me.
Of course that just made me want to do it more. Jason could bring up something I wasn’t even interested in doing and just like that I’d be intrigued. It was Pavlovian.
I stepped away from the computer and paced around the room, trying for once to make a mature decision.
“Jenny! I’m serious.” He turned from the couch and scowled.<
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I watched from the window as Esther sat in front of her computer, checking her e-mail. It would have been so easy to reach out and yet…I couldn’t. Not this time. I was stuck between being the woman I wanted to be and being the woman I was supposed to be. I wasn’t twenty-four anymore. I wasn’t even thirty-four. I had to let this go.
The next morning, Naomi and Sid ate pancakes at the table while Veronica sat on the couch, rehashing the last fifteen minutes of her relationship with One Leg.
“He sat in his wheelchair using the fucking leg as a weapon! Who does that? He called me a ‘stubby chaser,’ you know, instead of a ‘chubby chaser,’ like I fuckin’ set out to date a guy with one leg!”
“You can do better,” Naomi said sternly.
“But why does part of me want him back?” Veronica whined.
I bit my tongue, intent on not weighing in. Just then, Jason walked through the front door with the ventilation expert.
“Is everybody decent? We’re going to the back room to do some caulking,” he announced proudly.
Two more workers appeared behind him and wandered into our bedroom.
“He’s cute,” Veronica whispered, checking out one of the workers’ butts as he walked past.
Jason peeked his head out of the bedroom to notify me that all the open airways in our walls had been sealed, and unless I was knocked up, I wasn’t going to smell anything. The ventilation expert showed me the Styrofoam-like substance he used to fill in the gaps. I wasn’t dissatisfied with the work. Part of me felt hopeful. But the other part of me still felt like confronting Esther. If she could see things from my point of view, perhaps she’d be compelled to quit smoking altogether. The expert left an extra can of foam in case I found any forgotten spots before following Jason out.
Once Jason was gone, I ran back over to the window to check on Esther. She was watching the news and drinking coffee. I held Teets’s front paws like a puppeteer, forcing him to use only his hind legs to parade back and forth along the windowsill like he was the dog from Frasier. I knew I couldn’t reach out to Esther directly, but if she were, for instance, convinced that the dog from Frasier lived nearby and found herself compelled to wave to him from across the courtyard, I’d have no choice but to crawl out onto my fire escape and start a conversation.
Unnerved by the puppet show happening next to her head, Veronica pulled a blanket up to her chin and closed her eyes.
I dropped Teets and glared at Veronica. “Are you going back to bed? It’s the middle of the day!”
“I ate seven pancakes. You know I can’t stay awake after I eat. I should have asked for that worker’s number…It’s like on one hand, I’m ready to move on and start dating someone new. But on the other hand—”
“There is no other hand!” I said, finally losing my cool.
“That worker only had one hand?” Veronica’s eyes flashed with excitement.
“What? No! Oh my God, you really might be a stubby chaser!”
Veronica looked up at me, suddenly concerned that she had a problem.
To my surprise and slight disappointment, the Styrofoam spray worked. “Thank God you didn’t send a crazy letter to the board.” Jason sighed every night before bed. Curiously, the board never returned my letter, which I assumed meant they’d read my first book and mutually decided that I was unwell. Days went by and I didn’t smell anything. Then late one Saturday night I woke up choking on what smelled like stale smoke. I sprang out of bed and ran to the window to see Esther sucking down a pack of her signature Marlboro reds. With her window shut! I crept out of the bedroom so as not to wake Jason and stormed off to find Veronica and Naomi.
“Guys! It’s back! Her window isn’t even open and I can smell it!” Veronica’s head slowly emerged from a ball of blankets on the couch like a lethargic turtle’s.
Naomi opened the door to her bedroom groggily.
Slowly, the three of us made our way toward the window.
“Yup, that’s smoke.” Veronica yawned. “Maybe I should start smoking again so I at least have a filter to my face when I come over for visits.”
I pressed my cheek against the window and noticed several small gaps in the mortar binding her brick unit together.
“This can’t go on. I have to do something,” I whined, desperate.
Naomi tore her hair out of a gigantic ponytail on the top of her head. The strap on her mildly inappropriate leopard nightgown slunk off her left shoulder as she whipped her long mane of black braids off to one side, ready for a fight.
“Tonight, this ends.”
Naomi disappeared into the darkness, then reappeared with the extra can of Styrofoam sealant. She placed the can in my hands without saying a word. I knew what had to be done. Though I was certain this would fall under the umbrella of “Things Jason wouldn’t want me doing,” I’d run out of options. I’d tried being patient. But patient was giving Sid cancer. It was time to protect my family—and ever so slightly break the law. The Styrofoam sealant had drastically decreased the amount of smoke getting into my bedroom. I saw no real harm in using my spare bottle of foam to do a little touch-up work on the exterior of Esther’s unit. The way I saw it, Esther loved smoking, so I was doing her a favor.
“Cigarettes are expensive these days,” I reassured myself, as I slipped into one of Jason’s ski masks and a pair of flip-flops. “Why should she want to share any of them with me?”
Veronica applied more eyeliner in the event that a mug shot was in her future and followed Naomi and me into the bathroom. Stealthily, I cracked open the window and crawled out onto the fire escape.
“I hope this works,” I whispered, my heart racing with adrenaline.
Using the ladder, I wiggled down one flight of stairs to Esther and Yosi’s balcony.
Naomi and Veronica hung out the window, watching. Once I was down, Naomi handed me the can of sealant and started pointing out possible cracks. I carefully filled in the holes along Esther’s wall.
“Did I ever tell you how he lost his leg?” Veronica called out in a hushed voice.
“How?” I asked, for once appreciating the distraction.
“His neighbor shot him.”
“What?” I looked up, nearly tripping on the fire-escape grate.
“I’m just kidding. I think he was born with it.”
“Shh!” Naomi smacked Veronica on the head.
“But seriously, do you think we are ever getting back together?”
“No! It’s over!” I whispered firmly. “There, I said it. You need to move on.” I continued working. “Look at everything Naomi has been through in her life. And do you hear her whining? Until you escape South America—”
Naomi stopped me.
“I’m not from South America.”
“You aren’t?” I glanced up, confused. “Where are you from?”
“Guatemala.”
“That’s not South America?”
“No, it’s right under Mexico.”
“Huh. So you only had to cross two borders to enter the States.”
“Sí,” she said.
Somehow the idea of Naomi making her way up from Central America was less impressive than picturing her journey from the depths of the Amazon. Even my housekeeper Lita had made it all the way from Bolivia. Maybe I was giving Naomi too much credit. Maybe she wasn’t such an authority on guerrilla warfare. Maybe I shouldn’t have been hanging off a fire escape with only her and my obsessive sister-in-law supervising. Maybe I needed to work on my geography.
Before I could inquire if Naomi had ever impaled anyone with a machete like she had in my fantasies, a shadow appeared to my right. As I turned, I saw one of Esther’s wrinkled hands lift open her window and ash her dying Marlboro into the abyss below. Trying to be still, I sucked in my stomach and held my breath. If she happened to peer over the ledge, our faces would meet. I closed my eyes tightly, trying to think of how I’d explain what I was doing on her fire escape. Could I be doing some neighborly window washing at two
in the morning? Or maybe I was trying to make it to ten thousand steps on my Fitbit. Naomi put her hand up, cautioning me to stop moving. Then, as quickly as Esther appeared, she was gone.
I rushed back up the stairs and climbed back in the window, hoping I’d finally solved the issue.
The next day was Sunday. Naomi took off to visit her sister in Brooklyn and Veronica headed back to Jersey. Jason and I spent the day drinking cold-brewed coffee and strolling Sid around the city. I’d felt so accomplished and at peace as I went back to bed the night before, but this morning as we were getting ready to leave the house, I found myself riddled with doubt. Was I smelling smoke again? I’d become so obsessed that I couldn’t even say for sure anymore.
I was sitting on a park bench watching Jason swing Sid and replaying last night’s events when an e-mail popped up on my phone. It was from our co-op board, and they’d cc’d Jason.
Dear Jenny, we got your e-mail about the smoke problem and didn’t want to write back until we checked with our lawyers about whether or not we had any jurisdiction over the communal corridor. Sadly, there’s not much we can do about someone else’s building. The only thing we might suggest is reaching out and asking them to stop.
I quickly waved at Jason to solidify our marriage before scouring the area for his phone. I needed to delete the e-mail from the co-op before Jason yelled at me for reaching out. But it was no use, Jason’s phone glared at me from his back pocket. The e-mail from the co-op was waiting patiently in his in-box.
If Jason learned that I’d acted against his wishes and written to the co-op board, he’d know that I hadn’t let the whole thing go—that I was still plagued by the neighbors’ smoke. He’d never let me anywhere near their building. I had to do something quick. It was like I’d already ruined my diet for the day by eating a loaf of bread, so I might as well build myself an ice-cream sundae out of everything else in my pantry.
I’ll start abstaining from neighbors tomorrow, I assured myself.
“Baby, I have to go home, I’m bleeding!” I called out to Jason, using the oldest excuse in the book.