The ruckus began around sunset. It was fake-springtime that evening, a mild day in late February, around 6:00. Most of the neighborhood was home from classes or work, although many planned to go out later. That’s the way of college towns, especially places like Berkeley, set as it is among a city, near the coast, diverse.

Frankie and Edie heard the noise and identified it as a raging human voice, adult male, but they couldn’t make out the words. Each behaved typically: Edie edged to the window and tried to peek outside without moving the curtain, while Frankie raced to the adjacent glass and did everything she could to see what was going on. That put her face, surrounded by its aura of blonde unruly curls, right in the middle of the lower pane, like an illuminated portrait. She was seen more than she saw.

The angry man was big, black, and not old. Now they could hear all the “fucks” and “muthafucks;” now Frankie could see that he was beyond angry. He moved his limbs like he was going to throw them at cars and buildings. He saw Frankie and headed for the door of their apartment.

The roommates had a few characteristics in common, but not many. Most of their crowd didn’t understand their close friendship. They were both female, first-borns around 20, white. Each was Jewish, and had spent at least adolescence in California. That was about where similarity stopped.

Frankie was born and raised in LA. Edie hailed from New York and moved to a suburb below San Diego when she was 10. Frankie was short and blonde and what’s now called apple-shaped: she had big boobs and tiny hands and feet. Edie was taller than average, dark haired, and of the pear variety, with little breasts and sturdy legs above feet so large her family mocked her about them. That may be because her younger siblings were brothers. Brothers are skilled at teasing. Frankie grew up with two little sisters; her family was so female that she never read Sunday comics or watched war movies, or learned how to fart and burp at will.

The roommates had been at Cal for two years. They both understood the local environment. Each knew the difference between gunfire and backfire: car exhaust noise didn’t make the windows rattle. They weren’t as good at distinguishing small bombs from earthquakes, except that earthquakes didn’t often occur. So neither was that surprised to have a crazy raging outside. But the last thing Edie wanted was a closer encounter. Frankie didn’t want the guy in their faces either, and didn’t seem to understand that her impulsive curiosity acted as a provocation.

For the next thing the young women knew, the rager was in their living room. They seldom locked their door before full dark, but the way he slammed it open made them think a lock wouldn’t have stopped him. They backed up as he stormed into the middle of the room.

He appeared to be around their age. He was well enough dressed and obviously well fed, and he was beyond enraged. His language was English but at first he was not articulate. They heard cursing they would have had trouble spelling. Rage rage rage and rant.

Edie and Frankie had retreated to the edge of the day bed they used as a couch, but neither sat. The backs of their knees were flat against the mattress and their eyes were locked on the madman. That’s when he leaned to his right, picked up the white curtain rod Frankie had meant to throw away, and started slapping his left palm with it, in emphatic cadence with his speech.

It was one of those cheap white metal rods, flat and bent at its corners. It was no more threatening than a yardstick in a teacher’s hand. But the dude was terrifying.

“I got as much right to this place as you,” he insisted, and both women, diehard liberals, silently agreed. They weren’t about to give the apartment up to him, but they didn’t have a counter argument.

“This should be my place. Fuck all. I should chase y’alls out o’ here. Fuckin’ shit. Aargh!”

Then something happened in Edie. Maybe it was connected to upbringing – her dad had modeled righteous indignation so well that she and her brothers took it in like nourishment, like father’s milk. Frankie’s pop was known for occasional raging too, but in general he was a softer man. Maybe it was all the daughters. Maybe it was the failure to earn the liberal arts degree he thought he was heading for before the Navy. Maybe it was the more decadent LA environment – Frankie had grown up around a lot of drinking, pills, and divorce. Each daughter had assumed some of the paternal bias, so Frankie shared her father’s satisfaction with wealth earned from real estate (the family business had been electrical parts distribution, which never did that well, but they purchased their own warehouse space when LA was cheap), and Edie joined her engineer father in revering professions and higher education and trying to conceal disdain for those in sales.

Whatever the cause, Edie started to get angry, and her ire overrode her fear. She straightened up, pulling her legs away from the day bed. “How dare you?” she enunciated with a growl in her rising tone. “That’s no way to speak to people! For shame!” and as she took a step and a half toward the intruder, he edged away. “Talk about rights! You have no right to speak to a person like that!” He was moving toward their door.

Edie felt bearish and protective. She seemed even to herself to grow taller. “You get out now!”

And he did. He even bent his head forward a little as he backed out of the front doorway. He murmured what was probably “I’m sorry” or “‘Scuse me.” He pulled the door closed as his face/belly/feet retreated through it.

Edie turned around to Frankie. Her roommate almost leaped into her embrace. The young women wrapped their arms around one another in a full frontal hug. They shuddered together; neither could tell whose body was leading the way in adrenaline dissipation.

Each has narrated the episode several times since it happened. Their recollections agree perfectly. Neither would ever recommend Edie’s way of handling such a situation. But both are heartily grateful that it worked then, and so impressed by the memory that they’ll never forget it.

(Fifteen years later, Edie’s son came home with an assignment to find words with one, two, three, and four of each vowel in it. They had no problem with As, Es, Is, and Os. It was U that challenged them. Edie tried to sell “unvacuumful,” but there were no takers. Ultimately the only words they could think of with four Us were unscrupulous and tumultuous.)