Sputterpub's Blog

Bertilda is in her early 80s but that isn’t any excuse; she’s been mean and grumbly all her life.

Possibly it’s a personality disorder that merits therapy or at least accommodation, but the fact is, most people don’t want to be around her. Since childhood she has experienced the cascade of friendliness to indifference to confusion to avoidance, without ever connecting the cause and effect. She’ll even tell personal anecdotes to a new acquaintance – memories of an engagement broken, through no fault of her own; or involuntary early retirement with a settlement which proves she wasn’t to blame; or the downsizing at a nonprofit that resulted in her being thanked and released – stories that alert the listener like a flare in a starless night.

She can put on a nice face. It isn’t an act; Bertilda enters most situations with childlike optimism. But she is easily offended and has no filter about expressing her opinion. She was born in Germany and has a stereotypical reverence for rules; nothing gets her on her high horse faster than when she witnesses a transgression. It doesn’t matter if the transgression affects her – she will yell at a jaywalker from inside her place. She’s been known to chastise a neighbor for the way recycling is sorted, and to threaten a police call about a pedestrian with an off-leash dog.

Her condo is the upper floor of what used to be a single family house. There’s a 60ish woman named Anne in the unit below, and a middle-aged landscaper named Jerry in what was once the guest suite above the recessed garage. So Bertilda has the windows that can see over the front hedge. If she’s in, she’ll throw her window open and challenge any visitor. She didn’t mean to offend when she greeted Anne’s old college roommate with “Hi! Are you Anne’s mother?” but the question wasn’t well received.

It doesn’t help that Bertilda still speaks with a harsh German accident. She’s a thin woman and she has some orthopedic problem, so she walks with an Igor-like lurch. Those disadvantages could have been overcome with a sweet disposition, turned to gold with confidence, but in Bertilda’s case they just add to her self-caricature.

She isn’t my problem as much as Anne’s. But I’ve grown close to Anne because of another crazy neighbor – the pyromaniac teen on the south side of my house – and I try to be fair about sharing her neighbor trials as often as she shares mine. We live in a rich, diverse community during the decline of our once-dominant culture, and there’s never a paucity of interesting scenes.

Anne’s lived here longer than I have. She’s put up with Bertilda for a decade. She tells me the woman has always been difficult, but she’s getting worse. She’s developing memory problems that resemble moments of dementia, without losing any of the militant anger. Used to be, Bertilda might go thermonuclear on someone about imperfect parking or failure to empty the dryer lint trap, retreat to her room, and emerge hours later, friendly-seeming and forgetful of her recent outburst. Nowadays she can cycle in a matter of minutes.

I witnessed an explosion recently.

According to Anne, the way they run their Homeowners Association is informal. No one pays dues. Anne takes care of all the common bills and required filings, logs everything on some computer spreadsheet, and Jerry and Bertilda reimburse her every quarter or so. So there’s no budget for capital improvements or common area cleaning or gardening. Everyone pitches in.

The way the “development” allocates yard space is weird but was agreed upon from the beginning. The three households share the front yard and the big space in the back on the other side of the creek. Anne has as her private garden the narrow yard on the south side of the house and the little patch in back between the house and the bridge over the creek. Jerry has a large deck off his place. Bertilda has a private porch/balcony off hers, which thoroughly shades Anne’s little back yard.

Even though Jerry’s a professional gardener, he doesn’t work on the front yard. Bertilda took that on before his time, when she first moved in. She was an antsy, task-driven individual then; she also dusted and swept the shared laundry area in the basement, and usually she was the one to drag the cans to the curb. Jerry kept busy with the large back yard maintenance and all home repairs/handyman-type activities. Anne did her share with the recordkeeping.

In the last several years, Bertilda has been slowing with age. She’s had a few falls and worn several braces. She no longer cleans the basement or handles the cans. She rarely spends time on the front yard either, but only Anne and Jerry have noticed that; Bertilda claims she still weeds regularly and plants deliberately. If the ugly juniper hedge weren’t six feet tall, any passer-by could attest to the mess of a yard; it’s a tangle of dead grass, mangled camellias, structural ivy, and ancient terminal rose bushes.

Anne and Jerry hate the way the front yard looks. They want to tear out the juniper and most other plants, and landscape with drought-resistant natives. They’ve attempted to talk to Bertilda about it repeatedly; they report that she keeps insisting the yard is lovely as is, that it’s her decision to make since she is the only one who ever works there, and that the hedge is vitally necessary to protect the property from vandals or marauders who will trample or invade (she says she watches from her window – she insists that Anne and Jerry just don’t understand the ambient threats).

A week ago Anne and Jerry invited one of Jerry’s colleagues over to consult about what to plant. I was leaving my place to buy groceries when Bertilda stormed out of the house. I paused at the ruckus.

“I hate you Americans!” Bertilda screamed. “You never do any work! I’m the only one who keeps this yard! Grrrrr!” (She actually growled, loudly, and then she almost threw herself back inside.)

Anne and Jerry shook their heads. Jerry’s friend looked alarmed. “She does this,” Anne explained. “She goes ballistic and then acts sweet and friendly.”

No sooner spoken than Bertilda was back in the yard. “What’s wrong with the way the garden looks?” she asked almost reasonably, as if it were the first time the subject ever came up. Jerry started to comment about all the weeds.

“Those aren’t weeds! I planted them myself just last month.” This was spoken with an inflection that was heading for a yell. (Nothing has been planted in that yard for years). No one responded to her claim.

“We need the hedge for protection!” she escalated. “You don’t know; I see out the windows. Without the hedge, everyone would cut across our garden and wreck it!”

“Bertilda…” began Anne –

“Fuck you! Fuck you! I hate you Americans!” and she stormed off.

Fifteen seconds later she was back again. She turned the outside spigot counterclockwise, picked up the hose, and aimed it at Anne.

That was the climax of the vignette. Bertilda shut off the water and went back inside, this time for good. Jerry coiled the hose and spoke quietly to his friend. Anne saw me and we talked too. I told her what I would have done. I was raised with younger brothers, so I have skills. I know how to knee boys in the groin, how to twist out of wrestling holds, and certainly how to kink a hose so no water comes out.

There were two results from that little scene. Anne called the police, and I got included in their HOA tussle. The police came and acted understanding, but they can’t do anything unless/until Bertilda damages property or persons. Neither can Social Services. After I told Anne how I would have stopped the hosing, I got invited to this week’s HOA meeting.

That made sense, for more than busybody reasons. I’m an interested party regarding riparian fauna. The creek runs between my house and the place where weird Jason (and parents) live, makes a 90 degree turn in my back yard, and then slices through my back yard and the three houses to the north of mine before it flows (mostly underground) to the bay. The creek and the trees make an inviting area for local wildlife.

We really don’t mind the deer. They’re flower eaters, true, but the yards are so shaded with trees that we don’t have many blossoms anyway. And deer are so lovely. Then again, it’s a trial when one dies in a yard. The last time that happened the residents learned that Animal Control won’t come onto private property. The advice was to drag the carcass into the street and then call Public Health. That was before I moved into the neighborhood and maybe the rules have changed, but the story has become an area legend and contributes to our fear of encountering varmint corpses.

For excepting the deer, the fauna are unlovely and somewhat obnoxious. The opossums are ugly, the squirrels are messy, and the raccoons make bad sounds, bad shit, and creepy colonies. The rats are as undesirable here as anywhere else, and while the skunks are the least offensive of the list, they suffer from an irreparably stinky reputation. No one wants to encourage yard tenancy, and no one wants to encounter morning corpses.

So when the suggestion arose that Bertilda was feeding critters by strewing vegetable matter from her balcony, I paid as much attention as Anne and Jerry. It was more than a suggestion, according to Anne; she said she’d witnessed a dump from the railing above at least twice. She didn’t want to confront Bertilda alone. She and Jerry called an HOA meeting about pest control and also front yard landscaping, and they invited me to be present about the pest issue.

Well, yesterday must have been one of her forgetful days. Anne reminded Bertilda about the meeting a couple of hours before it started, Bertilda arrived an hour early and was sent back upstairs, and then Jerry had to fetch her. She arrived bearing a plastic Safeway bag, from which she unpacked four clear boxes of grape tomatoes to share as meeting refreshments. Not many people eat unsalted, plain tomatoes as a snack. Not many consumers buy grape tomatoes in October. These tomatoes were not youngsters; nobody wanted to eat one and no one, including Bertilda, partook.

When Anne raised the garbage subject, Bertilda was appalled. She said she hadn’t noticed any food garbage in the back yard. Then it dawned on her that we might be thinking it came from her balcony – without leaving her seat, she leapt to her own defense. She knew exactly where the garbage goes, she asserted, and she wasn’t raised to throw any of it on the ground. She didn’t quite bark “the very idea!” but came close enough that Anne blanched. Anne had prepared an enlarged (plastic-laminated!) reprint of the HOA rules about garbage, intending to conclude the subject by presenting it to Bertilda. I saw her slip the shiny page to the bottom of her notepad when Bertilda defended herself so vehemently, so certainly.

We changed the subject to front yard landscaping. That put Bertilda’s bent back up even higher. We’d been meeting in the atrium-like room at the back of Anne’s unit, and they decided to go look at the front yard. Instead of trooping across Anne’s place we all exited by the back door, downstairs to the area under Bertilda’s balcony on our way to the side yard that leads to the front garden (left) and to my place (right). This meant we all passed through the area under recent discussion.

Indeed: it was peppered with vegetable garbage. And every bit of garbage was a grape tomato. It was like someone had been having fun with a tomato shotgun. Bertilda didn’t notice how Anne and Jerry and I arched our eyebrows and shook our heads.

I knew Jason wasn’t an average kid when I met him. His family bought the house next door in what amounted to an emotional distress sale, so the address was already interesting, and at first I thought that might be coloring my impression of the 15 year old. But my response to his parents was unexceptional, so I suspected he would have been “interesting” no matter where he lived.

Sometimes, “interesting” is my euphemism for obnoxious. The boy walked with a stuttering head-forward posture, spoke too loudly (as if, like some toddler, he was just trying out his voice and unaware of its timbre), called on his mother for help with things beneath his age (like adjusting his shower water and choosing his socks), and attacked strangers with eager conversational nonsequiturs. There was a cast to his round face that reminded me of a person with Down Syndrome. The first time he met me, he threw his body at mine and tried to hug me (I guess that’s what he was trying; that’s what his father murmured as he pulled Jason away).

I didn’t take to the boy. I didn’t want him to feel free to come into my yard. I didn’t even want him to learn my name, because I noted that he overused any name he knew. It wasn’t just his mother he called for so often. He met the weird old woman who lived on the other side of me, and every time he saw her, he yelled “Hi Bertilda. Hi Bertilda. Want to play with me, Bertilda?” too loud and too much.

His parents were lovely. A good-looking couple in their early 50s, John worked as a psychotherapist and Carol was a private school guidance counselor. John’s initials were JJJ; they named their only child Jason for its original “J’s son” meaning.

Another neighbor ventured a diagnosis about Jason. Anne lives in the same small condo arrangement as Bertilda, but she’s normal. She supervises special ed for the entire school district; she said she suspected Jason was on the spectrum. “Fairly functional,” she added, “but not much better than the worst I deal with.”

I don’t understand what autism is. I don’t understand “co-dependent” either. I take what meaning I can from context, but I thought autistic people were so bad at reading social signals that they mostly didn’t try to converse. “Oh no,” Anne corrected me. “Those are the worst cases. The ones you hear about. It’s like everyone thinks migraines are disabling and require dark quiet places, when in fact most headaches, even mild ones, are in the migraine category. Nonverbal autistic kids don’t get enrolled in public schools. I deal with whole families of kids like Jason.”

“Whole families?”

“Oh yeah. Sometimes I think it correlates with wealth. The kids are all white, the parents are all monied. I have two families with three out of three kids testing on the spectrum.”

“Jason doesn’t go to your school?”

“Nope. When I first spoke to Carol I asked, but her answer was unclear and included a comment about home schooling. I think he attends something private but not every day. You know she doesn’t work full-time, right? I assume she’s instructing him in some subjects. She wasn’t open about that or about what ails him. But she sighed a few times, and she murmured something about how she and John were committed to ‘seeing him through this’ and getting him into college.”

“Wow. And I guess he’s got a touch of pyromania?”

“I don’t know what that incident was about,” Anne acknowledged. “But it was scary.”

“Tell me about it. I think I even experienced a little PTSD after the event.”

“Well it was closer to you.”

“I heard the snap/crackle/pop of conflagration. But I thought it was critter noise. You know – raccoons or squirrels or skunks. My back doors were wide open. After a minute or so, it registered that the sound was continuing. I stepped to my doors. There were flames leaping up like twelve feet. Even then, my first thought was a (controlled) bonfire. In this day and age! Then I got it. I ran for my phone to call 9-1-1. By the time I had a dial tone, I could hear neighbors yelling ‘Is everyone out of the house?’ and ‘I already called the fire department.’ Jason was screaming ‘I set the house on fire! Oh god, I didn’t mean it! I’m sorry!’ and aiming the garden house at the flames. Heck, I thought the thing was out by the time the trucks arrived.”

“Wasn’t that amazing? The way they chopped into the house and found all those live embers?”

“Totally. They sure knew what they were doing. But what had Jason been up to?”

“I talked to Carol afterwards. On the sidewalk while the firemen tore into the upper shingles. She was really upset. She said Jason said he was bored in his bedroom and started flicking lit matches out his window. He thought they all blew out on the way to the ground. Obviously not.”

“Seriously. In California. In September.”

“It’s not the first fire incident with Jason. Jerry saw him tossing lit bundles of newspaper into a tree a few weeks ago. He confronted him. Jason said he was teasing squirrels.”

Jerry is the third resident in Anne’s condo. He works as a landscaper, and he does all the gardening for the immediate area. It wouldn’t be odd for him to be in a yard where he’d witness Jason’s arson.

“Shit,” I observed, thinking of all those Criminal Minds shows I watch. I’d learned the psychopathic trinity. “Is he a bed-wetter too?”

Anne smiled sideways. “I think he was. Carol and I have chatted a bit about him. She’s got saintlike patience. Eerie calm. She says he’s a challenge. But he doesn’t torture animals,” she added.

Okay, I thought, but I wouldn’t want to be a squirrel in his yard. Aloud I said, “You know much more about weird kids than I do, but I’m not comfortable around Jason. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t show up at their little housewarming.” I didn’t cop to the fact that I always avoid cocktail-like gatherings, and I treasure my relative anonymity in the neighborhood, so it was more than Jason-aversion that kept me at home that Sunday afternoon, laying low like it was Halloween.

“That get-together was better than I expected. Jason was relatively subdued. Bertilda was the nut case; she didn’t attend but she stood on the sidewalk and yelled about noise that wasn’t happening. The house looked good – much better than when Cedar moved out – except the bathroom was odd. I had to use the toilet and I couldn’t help noticing soundproofing around the door and pink stains on the bathtub grout.”

“That’s familiar. I mean, I’ve seen it before. When we moved to northern California my parents bought a house in Marin. The sellers had been a psychologist and his wife and teenage son. We found pink spots in the bathroom grout. It turned out the boy had attempted suicide with a razor blade, while in the tub. He didn’t succeed, but he left tracks.”

“Well I don’t know if the pink was there when they moved in. I mean, Cedar was anything but stable.”

“She was more homicidal than suicidal,” I countered.

“True,” Anne pondered. “Carol had a bandage on her upper arm. Not Jason. The grout must have been something else.”

I like Anne the best of my neighbors. She minds her own business and respects my privacy. I detect no cognitive issues in her. She and Jerry and Bertilda each have a one-bedroom condo in what was originally a single-family home that became a rooming house and then apartments and a TIC on its way to its current incarnation. The guy who converted it started as a roomer in it when he was in college, then bought it from his landlord, fit it with extra bathrooms and kitchenettes, managed it as three apartments, converted it to TIC and finally condos, and sold it off in pieces, first to Bertilda, then Jerry, and finally Anne. He lived off the property for 30 years and then returned to his native Canada with the proceeds from selling to Anne.
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I’m still a little spooked about that fire. I can summon up the sound of the crackling, the horror of the proximity, and I do that more often than I should. It’s made me pay attention to what happens out the south side of my windows, much like I used to regard the prior resident, an eccentric woman named Cedar who regularly hand-watered the trees on the property. I’m not a weird old woman like Bertilda, who lurks at her window (upstairs front), and is quick to challenge anyone who lingers on the sidewalk or approaches the door. But I do take a look when I hear anything, and I try to make my observation subtle.

Lately I’ve been hearing enough to peek regularly. Bad horn-playing in the middle of the night. I guess the soundproofing isn’t tight. In a way, I’m glad about that, because yesterday and today the sounds changed and now I’m hearing magical tones. Someone singing. It isn’t Carol or John. The voice is ethereal. Almost tenor, almost soprano, with a frisson of countertenor. I’m pretty sure it’s Jason.