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.