Ever since watching a few too many Mob movies, I’ve been secretly partial to "Ave Maria." Considering that my faith in God has seen some dark days and that I’m technically Jewish, I’m a little uncomfortable admitting this. But when it’s sung by the right person, with a Vienna Boys’ Choir sensibility rather than operatic gusto, I get all, well, touched.
Marlena and Oliva, the mother and daughter who, until recently, lived in the apartment below me, were not, in my estimation, the right people to sing "Ave Maria." But being musically challenged didn’t stop them from singing it, loudly, at five o’clock each morning. At first I found this difficult, later maddening. Ultimately I thought it might make me a religious person, so desperate was I for salvation from their voices.
Everyone has a neighbor who plays music too loud or parks in your spot. And when you live in a city, you have that much less space of your own, that much less room between you and your neighbors. So when there’s friction, or when your neighbor climbs onto the roof during a hurricane — wearing a shower cap for protection — and cleans out the gutters (as another of mine once did), you might call him crazy. In most cases, this would be an exaggeration. But, in the eyes of the Police Department, the Department of Social Services, and everyone who lived on our block, "crazy" was an apt — if politically incorrect — way of describing Oliva and Marlena.
And "Ave Maria" was just the beginning, an hors d’oeuvre to the great feast of bizarre behaviors I would witness in the two years I lived in their company. There was the time Oliva planted pretzel sticks in concentric circles in our shared garden, like a sign from the God of Frito-Lay. Or when Marlena decided their cat was Satan and refused to let it in the house, even as it cried every night beneath her bedroom window — and mine. Or when a dispute had the two yelling, "Yes!" "No!" "Yes!" "No!" for three hours until someone called the police. When they arrived, Marlena opened the door and asked, "Are you agents from heaven?" That was probably one of the more appealing greetings the officers had received during their years on the force, but it did not stop them from bringing Oliva and Marlena in for psychiatric observation.
On that occasion, the two stayed in state custody for a month. But even as I enjoyed the break from "Ave Maria," my relief was guarded: it’s hard to picture anyone in a state-run mental institution and feel very good about it. But among the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest scenes that played in my head was the equally disturbing image of Oliva and Marlena coming back, torturing their cat and, via "Ave Maria," me. My concern for both their welfare and mine led to the same questions: why wasn’t someone doing something about this? Where were their families? How could they be released from the hospital when they were so clearly ill? This is how I thought of them: as a problem I — their unwitting neighbor in an apartment with paper-thin walls — didn’t deserve. As a problem someone else should fix.
Oliva and Marlena returned to my building as they had many times before: walking down the street in slippers and hospital robes, pacified by heavy medication that they threw away as soon as they had the opportunity. A week later they were throwing holy water on passersby and singing at all hours of the night. I took solace in telling friends and family about my neighbors’ latest antics. During these times I thought of Oliva and Marlena with a strange fondness, even a sense of ownership: my crazy neighbors. I wasn’t exactly protective of them — I was too scared to get that close and nearly crazy myself from lack of sleep — but I felt tied to them in a way that is, whether we like it or not, so often a part of city living. You know your neighbors’ business because physical space leaves you no other choice. And in the case of Oliva and Marlena, they were, at times, the most dynamic and interesting — albeit maddening — thing around.
The day I moved out, Oliva and Marlena watched from their front window as my friends and I loaded up the U-Haul. At first Oliva snarled at us, her expression punctuated by an emphatic middle finger. But soon she was waving joyfully, holding back the curtain as Marlena bounced around her. We waved back, and I thought: they’re sending me off! What a perfectly bizarre end to my time with them.
A week later, when I went back to my old apartment to drop off my keys, a man from the building next door stopped me. "Do you know what happened to that old woman who used to be out here all the time?" he asked. I laughed — because of course I knew that old woman. She had been, for a time, my old woman. Her "Ave Maria" my exclusive torture.
Then I saw the window, patched up with plastic.
"She just went nuts and started throwing things out the window," he said. "There were cop cars everywhere." I had seen Oliva and Marlena do a lot of strange things, but nothing like this. I must have looked stunned because the man added, as if by way of explanation, "Those religious people. They get so into it, they just go crazy."
Somehow I doubt that’s what happened to Oliva and Marlena. But then, I’d never really known what had happened to them, what was happening to them. What had made an impression on me was the novelty and horror of their behavior, the way they lived an illogical but undeniably dynamic existence. And that I, by virtue of being their neighbor, had been witness to it. Leaving in the U-Haul, I’d thought my story had an end, the kind we look for when we leave a place. But it was only that: my story. Theirs was continuing, probably in the hospital into which they had disappeared so many times before. Only now could I miss them, now that they truly were someone else’s problem, someone else’s cross to bear.
Rebecca Wieder can be reached at rebezca@juno.com
