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FRESH
YARN PRESENTS:
Simon
and Sonia
By
Cara DiPaolo
 Having
lived in city apartments for the last ten years, my husband, Andrew,
and I have had our fair share of colorful neighbors. In our first
apartment in Chicago, there was the nice young couple of drug dealers,
who after the police confiscated all their stuff, borrowed our phone
one night and forgot to return it. Down the hall from them was the
witty kitty lady, who loved telling us stories about the fascinating
antics of her 19 cats. Later on, we moved next to a kind Greek lady
who even at three o'clock in the morning would get up to knock lurking
evil spirits from our adjoining wall with her trusty broomstick.
In California, there was the thoughtful religious couple who always
apologized when the bi-monthly Christian karaoke hoe-downs they
hosted in their downstairs apartment ran past 9 p.m. Across from
them was the friendly Hispanic woman who took a personal
interest in my health: You're getting fat, Cada. You should go
to the gym. And who can forget the reclusive Asian man who for
hours every Sunday would monopolize all three of the apartment
building's washing machines despite the fact that he only seemed
to have one change of clothes and never actually appeared to leave
his house except to do laundry. And though every one of these
people retains a special place in my heart, none can hold a candle
to Simon and Sonia, the most memorable neighbors of all.
Simon and Sonia were our first official neighbors in Los Angeles,
living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment directly across from our
tiny one-bedroom apartment on Hayworth Avenue. It's hard to describe
Simon and Sonia without sounding rude, because they were creepy
people. Really creepy. Sonia looked like a cartoon drawing
of a witch, with her exaggerated crooked nose, yellow fetid teeth
and wispy white hair that always stuck straight up off her head,
making her appear eternally shocked. She also had a disturbing habit
of staring at me creepily, long after we finished exchanging words.
She'd often end our conversations with: Yeah…Aren't you
a doll! -- and then eye me up and down in a manner that can
only be described as lascivious. Sonia's husband Simon, though less
frightening, had a sickly pallor that was equally off-putting --
his yellow skin and big blue lips always made me think of rotting
bananas. Not an appetizing look, I can assure you.
On top of being creepy, old and sickly, they wore dingy, dirty clothes
that you'd swear they'd just taken out of the trash. In fact, their
entire apartment was done in the style of "dumpster."
Their couches were gray and tattered, their rugs stained and worn,
and every level surface was covered in a film of sticky gray-brown
dust. Flies seemed to flock to them and there were always a couple
cheerfully buzzing around their heads at any given moment.
Simon and Sonia had no real family to speak of, having married much
too late in life for children. And in the six years we lived across
from them, we never once saw a friend stop by for a visit. Just
the flies. Yet, despite the fact that we were secretly disgusted
by them, Andrew and I tried our best to be helpful neighbors. But
it was hard, because on top of everything else -- they were annoying.
The balcony of their place overlooked the street and in the afternoons
Simon and Sonia liked to adjourn to their high box seats and comment
on the theatre of life. My earliest memory is of them sitting up
there, loudly "whispering" to each other, on the day we
moved in. As we struggled sweatily to unload our belongings off
the truck, their raspy, grating voices could be heard from above.
They sure got alotta of stuff! They shoulda moved it all in the
morning when it was cool…then they wouldn't be so hot! Though
we found it amusing at the time, their balcony lookout became the
bane of our existence -- as it gave them a constant window to our
comings and goings.
It was about a month after we moved in that we began to notice a
pattern… of them stalking us. One evening my husband and I
came home just as Simon and Sonia were getting back from Trader
Joe's, or "Smokey Joe's" as they consistently mis-called
it, and being neighborly we of course offered to help them carry
up their groceries. The next day, we just happened to catch
them carrying down their laundry, and again offered our assistance.
Pretty soon we noticed that the majority of our arrivals and departures
conveniently coincided with one of their many chores. I wondered
at first how they always managed to catch us, and soon realized
the balcony was our Achilles' heel.
Often when I was running late for work or just getting home after
a long day, I'd hear the tell-tale sound of chair against cement
above me as Sonia scrambled up to get my attention: Cora, darling.
Before you go anywhere, take out our trash! That was the other
thing, the minor issue of being called by the wrong name aside,
Sonia never said please or thank you, as if my willingness to help
somehow entitled her to order me around. I know real do-gooders
go about their kind deeds without expectation of remuneration or
gratification, but it's hard being nice when the only reward you
reap is a lascivious look from an old lady.
So, my husband and I did what any warm-blooded Americans with annoying
neighbors would do. We avoided them. We plotted our methods of evasion
like we were planning a covert military operation, carefully mapping
out alternate routes of entry and exit. To decrease risk of detection,
we began parking down the street so they wouldn't hear our car pull
up. We snuck up and down our shared stairwell like a couple of thieves
-- refusing to turn on the light, even on the darkest of nights
for fear we'd alert them to our proximity. If we had to go out during
the day, we'd listen at the door to make sure they weren't lurking,
then streak down the stairs like lightening, going around the apartment
building and out the back gate so we wouldn't have to pass under
their all-seeing balcony. If we heard so much as a distant rattle
coming from their apartment, we wouldn't even stop to lock our door.
When we were at home, we took to playing our TV and stereo at extremely
low decibels and creeping around our apartment in socks so we could
pretend to be "out" if the need should arise.
continued...
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