all quiet on the western front

For now.

The drama has been hilarious. Last week my neighbor across the hall's niece moved in for awhile. The niece immediately earned the title Crazy Girl. And that was no cute-ism or affectionate dub. The girl was spun-out nuts. Schizophrenic, delusional, psychotic. Exactly the sort of person I worked with at the Center for the Homeless. She had no concept of personal space. Her eyes rolled when she talked. Nothing she said made sense; she made word sandwiches and changed her name four times within the first two minutes of meeting me and asked me to babysit her kids and offered to pay me a thousand dollars she clearly didn't have and made up all sorts of stories about being a student at Notre Dame. She ordered me to make her coffee, talked back to her aunt, and told me she was sweet. I calmly refused to do anything she asked. She kept changing tacks to try to get me to comply with her. I calmly kept refusing, told her to go upstairs so I could talk to her Aunt Lu, and told my neighbor the girl needed help and where she could take her.

Crazy Girl was around for a couple more days. Anytime her aunt was around she was pretty much under control; she was so out of it she had to be led around by the hand. But when my neighbor was gone, things got out of hand. The music would be turned up so loud I could hear it in my living room with my TV turned up; when I knocked on her door I had to shout at the top of my lungs so she could hear who it was that was knocking, and then she opened the door without a stitch of clothes on. I shouted at her to turn down the music. She glared at me but did what I told her.

Then my downstairs neighbor Tracy's car was broken into and her stereo stolen; the next-door neighbor's garage also suffered a break-in. My car, weirdly, was left alone. No one has ever bothered any of the cars in that back lot.

I left for Chicago the next day, and left my car at the airport; I figured it was safer there. When I came back and dragged my suitcase up the stairs, I noticed there was powder all over the stairs and at the top of the landing. My neighbor Luchenne opened her door when she heard me coming up.

"Oh, it's you," she said. She looked and sounded exhausted.

"What happened here?" I asked.

"I'll talk to you," she said, and went back inside.

I saw Tracy later that afternoon, who said, "The crazy girl set off the fire extinguisher in the hall this morning. Luchenne done called the police on her and they took her away. It was crazy. Every time you go away somethin' weird happens."

So I called the AL, who promised to replace the now-empty fire extinguisher. I mean, sometimes there's no smoke and no fire, but let's put it out anyway! Lu told me Crazy Girl will probably get ninety days for it, so she won't be coming back.

"She was botherin' you anyway," Lu said. "When I hear she have her music up so loud you was complainin', I told her, 'Girl, you got to go. Sarah never knocked on my door about nothin'. You don't bother her.'"

And then I stepped out yesterday to apply for my passport, get a new cell phone (I think I'm in love), head to campus to read on the grass for awhile, and go to the Vine for some drinks with Joan, and the AL called me to ask if I knew anything about the police visit to the house that afternoon to intervene in a fight between Lu and her boyfriend.

"Never a dull moment," I said. "I wasn't home."

So this morning I found broken glass all over the porch, and there's still fire extinguisher powder all over the inside stairs. The place is turning into a dump. I tell these stories to people who live in nice high rises and watch them shudder. But I think it's kind of funny. I never feel personally threatened by any of it -- my car is untouched every morning, I keep out of people's way and stay on everyone's good side and maintain appropriate boundaries, and I have old Betsy standing guard under my bed. And it makes for good stories.