Dear Girls Above Me

by Charles McDowell

  I was able to hear consulting whispers between the two girls: “Should we open it?” “What if it’s a kidnapper who’s going to force us to become sex slaves like in that movie Taken?” The girls have a bizarre habit of watching a movie and becoming so immersed in it that they think the lives of the characters are comparable to their own. This was especially worrisome after Claire watched Dangerous Minds and thought it would be fun to become a substitute teacher in South Central.

  The door creaked open. Two sets of eyes under mascara-coated eyelashes gaped at me. They did not have a favorable track record of remembering who I was; plus my beard always seemed to freak them out, so I knew I had only a few seconds before the door closed in my face.

  “Do you know who I am?” I asked.

  Cathy and Claire inspected me further. Once, I thought, just once, could I not be so forgettable to them? I know I’m not exactly Michelle Pfeiffer when it comes to first impressions, but I would like to think I have enough “geeky charisma” to make an impact by the third or fourth viewing.

  “We totes know who you are, silly,” Cathy said to me. Finally. The sixteenth time was totes the charm. They swung their door open hospitably.

  “Yeah, you’re Stephanie’s lawyer boyfriend. How’s all the law stuff going?” Claire asked.

  I’d gained confidence too soon. I really needed to track down Stephanie’s boyfriend and kill him. I didn’t like knowing that there was a better and smarter version of me out there somewhere.

  “Cathy and Claire, I’m Charlie, your downstairs neighbor.”

  Their faces lit up, just as they do every time I remind them who I am. “Charlie!” And with that they whisked me inside their apartment.

  Before I could form my next thought, let alone construct it into a coherent sentence, I had a glass of mimosa placed in my hand by Cathy. The three of us cheers-ed one another and just like that I was a part of their Sunday Funday tradition I’d heard so much about.

  Not sure if it was the “bubbly bit of heaven in a glass,” as Claire called it, or the fact that a mimosa is quite refreshing after you get shat on, but I actually let my guard down. For the first time since these girls had come into my life, I finally stopped analyzing every little detail and got out of their heads (and my own) for a little bit. We were actually conversing, which led to smiling, which evolved into actual relatable human laughter. This was something new; I was laughing with them. This made me laugh even harder.

  Since laughter is indeed contagious, it was only a matter of time before they let their guards down and joined my madness wholeheartedly. The three of us belly-laughed for quite some time, all with unique styles. I went with the “silent laugh,” which every so often included sudden unattractive gasps for air. Cathy chose the “horse laugh,” which was one long impressive guffaw, accompanied by the head movements a horse makes when it neighs. Claire joined us with the “model laugh,” which meant she was more concerned with her appearance during this group chortle than the actual chortle itself.

  I had heard Cathy and Claire suddenly erupt into hysterics before, but this was my first time being “one of the girls.” Dare I say, I was actually happy to be there. Until out of nowhere Cathy shifted from hysterically laughing to hysterically crying. It took me a moment to figure out this new direction, since laughing and crying share quite a similar face, but once I did, my chuckling mellowed.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She was sobbing so hard she couldn’t even get a word out. Claire consoled her by wiping away the streams of mascara running down her cheeks. I prayed that her crying would not last as long as our laughter had. What were the rest of us supposed to do, cry with her?

  After a few hiccups, Cathy spoke. “We know why you’re here.”

  She did? “You do?”

  “Yes,” Cathy responded.

  How was she aware of the burst pipe in my ceiling that was giving me a chance to experience their bodily waste? And more important, why was she crying about it? If anything, I should’ve been the one emotionally affected by this. As well as Pat and Ferdinand.

  “Look, girls, I’m only here to tell you—”

  “How much you hate us. We know!” Cathy belted out as her weeping resumed.

  “Hate you? What are you talking about?” Oh, no, was this the code red? Could this have been the moment I had been so fearfully awaiting? The day Cathy and Claire discovered my letters to them blasted all over the Internet for others to enjoy? Was it time to finally face the music?

  “Didn’t you come here to complain about us like the other neighbors did?” Claire asked.

  Hold the music. “Umm, no,” I responded.

  “So you’re not here to file a noise complaint?” Cathy said.

  “Wait, there are neighbors who filed noise complaints?” I asked.

  “Three of them.”

  “One more and we’ll get depicted from the building,” Cathy said, on the verge of tears once again.

  I couldn’t believe there were others who could overhear Cathy and Claire’s conversations. This whole time I’d thought I was the only one. And three of them actually used the energy required to fill out that binder full of Mr. Molever’s excruciatingly long and tedious complaint papers? What losers. All because of a couple of sweetly naïve party girls, who were maybe just a tad bit loud sometimes? A strange emotion took over my body. The feeling was reminiscent of a time when I was younger and the owner of a toy store accused my sister of stealing a set of the Calico Critters elephant family. I was enraged that this man would even consider my sister to be a toy poacher, regardless of the fact that I could see multiple trunks bulging from her pocket. Even though my sister did have a childhood thievery problem, I did not like someone other than me commenting on it. Was I experiencing a similar sense of protective possessiveness over Cathy and Claire? Only I was allowed to complain about them; anyone else was an interloper. Had over a year of their conversations become my stolen elephant family? I believed so.

  “Does that mean you aren’t going to get us kicked out?” Claire asked.

  Cathy and Claire looked at me with the weight of their destiny in my hands. Of course, a part of me thought about how I could put an end to my upstairs neighbors once and for all. But then I thought that if they weren’t living above me, it would just be someone else. With my luck a couple of gaming nerds would move in and spend hours discussing all the locations of Zelda’s secret flutes. And that wouldn’t help me at all, because I’d discovered those locations years ago. I would much rather have benefited from knowing the “exact location of a girl’s G-spot,” even if that meant suffering through all of Cathy and Claire’s constant chitchat and spontaneous parties. Plus, let’s be honest, I would miss them way too much.

  “Of course not. Why would I want to get rid of the two best neighbors in the building?” I said with ever-so-slight exaggeration.

  The girls leapt up and tackled me, wrapping their arms tightly around my body. “Oh, neighby!” they said simultaneously. The time elapsed between making a decision and then regretting that decision could never be shorter than it was for me after the two of them used the term “neighby.”

  Regardless of the state of my own apartment—a piss-and-shit-stained hallway, a skateboard hanging from the ceiling, and indentations in the wall from when I had really great pretend sex with Bridget—I couldn’t help but sit there with a smile on my face.

  “Well, I’m sorry you wasted this fancy champagne on trying to win me over for no reason,” I said.

  “That’s all right. We were going to get totally wasted from it tonight anyways,” Claire replied. I already knew this information from a conversation I had previously overheard, but I feigned ignorance.

  “Wait, why did you stop by here in the first place?” Cathy asked, reminding me I had something seriously important to tell them.

  I then explained to the girls what had happened just a couple of hours earlier … well, sort of. I don’t feel as if anyone should know that you
’ve bathed in their bodily waste. That should not be the foundation of a new friendship, one I hoped to have with the girls, so I tweaked the story just a tad.

  “So there’s this exceptionally cute little family of mice living in the walls between us, and I’ve figured out that if you flush your toilet just one more time, a pipe is going to burst and flood their little home, leaving them confused and gasping for air, which won’t be there because the water will be rising too quickly, and they’ll have no choice but to hold each other’s little tiny claws and with their little beady eyes wide open, accept their fate.… Death by doody,” I said in a completely unrehearsed rambling sentence.

  “Oh my God, we love mice!” See, I already knew they loved mice, so I used psychology. “We don’t want to kill them!” Claire continued.

  “So you can’t flush your toilet until I’ve gotten the problem fixed, okay?” I asked.

  “Okay! We won’t!”

  When I got back to my putrid-smelling apartment, Pat and Ferdinand were cuddled up on the couch wearing germ masks and viewing the latest episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, each clutching a Swiffer. I wasn’t upset that they’d paused midclean to watch TV; I was upset because they started watching Housewives without me and now I’d be forced to come in as it was ending. Why not just tell me Bruce Willis is really a ghost and get the whole thing over with, Pat?

  The two of them really missed out. Because now they wouldn’t be able to hear my analysis on the state of the season. For example, Pat wouldn’t ever get to hear me say that I’m really proud of the way Camille matured between seasons one and two. She was faced with such adversity, with the divorce and all, but instead of going to Dr. Paul Nassif (Adrienne’s husband) and getting more Botox and collagen injections, Camille retreated to her multimillion-dollar Malibu home and really worked on herself. Unlike Kim; don’t even get me started on her! The way she embarrassed Brandi at that manicure party—

  “Do you wanna watch with us?” Pat asked through his mask, interrupting my mental recap of season two.

  “Thanks, but I’m gonna finish cleaning the hallway,” I replied. The subtext to that being “There’s no way I’m watching this unless it’s from the beginning, I don’t even like missing the opening-credits sequence.”

  I got the third industrial-strength Swiffer they had purchased and began to work through the sludge methodically, almost hypnotically, and saw the grain from the fake wood start to emerge. I was really getting somewhere. As I mopped, swept, and bagged the mess, stopping periodically only for Purell breaks, I began to think about my empty walls (minus Marg Helgenberger, of course). It was time to fill them. I was already picturing my massive Muhammad Ali painting overwhelming the hallway, my vintage James Bond posters filling the living room, glamour shots of Marvin dressed in a tuxedo lined up on the mantel (and he really got into it after the ninth costume change), and my prized Lakers bobbleheads lining the kitchen window. I was going to make my place mine.

  The floor was sparkling; now all I had to do was buy about fifty candles and be sure to keep them far from any throw pillows. As I thought about the kinds of hardware I would need in order to make all the changes I wanted to make, I heard the unmistakable footsteps of the girls above me. I smiled, thinking that if not for them, I wouldn’t have had some of the many profound insights I’d had that year.

  But were they technically insights, since I’d overheard them without permission, or would they be considered more eaves-droppings … or … What? … Wait.… Oh, shit.

  “Oh nooooooo!!! The mice!!!!!! Oh nooo!! I’m so sorry, little mice!!!!” Claire screamed desperately.

  With that, a flood of water poured through the open ceiling, and once again, there I stood, drenched in their wisdom, their insightful eavesdroppings.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d first like to thank the people who are mentioned in this book. Whether you’re my family, my friend, or my barista at Starbucks, you’ve been an influential part of my life and I wouldn’t have stories to exaggerate without you. Some other people I would like to acknowledge: Linda Gillespie (my real-life Mary Poppins), Ali Mann Fenton, Jody Chapman, Eric Kranzler, Enrico Mills, the Mara family, the Webster family, Dave Hackel, Eric Haury, Alyson Hannigan and Alexis Denisof, Joanne Wiles, Zachary Levi, and Kobe Bryant.

  Pam Felcher, I’m grateful for your laughter and for helping me make sense of what I was trying to say. You truly are the Rose Marie to my Dick Van Dyke.… Whatever the hell that means.

  This book wouldn’t be the same without the enormous amount of work done by Justin Lader. Luckily he owed me after I saved him from almost sticking a metal knife in a toaster. Who doesn’t know not to do that!?

  I’m very appreciative to Simon Green, C. C. Hirsch, Kenny Goodman, Anna Thompson, and especially Suzanne O’Neill (my editor extraordinaire) for making this idea something more than a collection of tweets. Suzanne, you set the “editor bar” very high with my first experience of writing a book. I hope to always work with people as encouraging and talented as you. And you’ll be glad to know that I can finally spell Christian Louboutin without having to Google it.

  I’d like to express immense gratitude for the hardworking people at Three Rivers Press: Catherine Cullen, Lisa Erickson, Meredith McGinnis, Campbell Wharton, Mauro DiPreta, and Tina Constable.

  If you actually read the book and didn’t just skip to the acknowledgments, then you know I can often be an insecure neurotic mess. Roon, thank you for always being there and lifting me up.

  I have the most caring family. They are Mary, Malcolm, Ted, Kelley, Lilly, Charlie, Kate, Jesse, Katrina, Beckett, Finn, Seamus, and Clementine. Mom, thank you for infinite amounts of love and support and for choosing me as your favorite child. I’m honored and I won’t let you down. Dad, as a kid I listened to you tell extraordinary stories, later to find out that you invented about 80 percent of the details to make them more entertaining—which is pretty much the synopsis of Big Fish. But more important, you’re the reason I wanted to become a storyteller. Thank you.

  Lastly, I would like to acknowledge the girls above me, Cathy and Claire. Without your wonderful insights on life and your deep affection for alcoholic beverages, none of this would exist. We have quite a complex relationship, which you sadly know nothing about. If you read this book one day, I give each of you permission to slap me across the face, but then let’s three-way hug, okay? More likely, if you read this book and don’t realize it’s about you, I hope you find Cathy and Claire as lovable as I do.