In November 2011, four years after her initial diagnosis, my 64-year-old sister Ellie was dying of ovarian cancer. As I’d promised months earlier, I traveled by train from my home in Madison, Wisconsin to San Francisco and moved into her one-bedroom apartment to assist her in the last few months of her life.
Her apartment building was one of a connected block of hulking two- and three-story buildings on Mission St. in the unglamorous Excelsior district. I kept a low profile there, since my presence violated the terms of Ellie’s lease. At Ellie’s request, I particularly avoided her nemesis, the woman who lived in the apartment above us. This woman had a practice of chanting repeated phrases for long periods of time, the eerie sounds filtering through the ceiling, sometimes accompanied by strange, chaotic recorded music. Ellie claimed to be worried for the woman’s sanity, but she was also upset by the chanting, complaining that it got under her skin and interfered with her work – although, by this point, her only remaining project was editing a book-length manuscript on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath for an old friend.
Like all the buildings on her block, Ellie’s had a metal gate at the street-level entrance unlocked by a key. Her apartment was located up the stairs and to the back and rented for $1500 a month. Across from her lived a tall Hispanic man with a gigantic San Francisco 49ers blanket or flag stretched across his front window. I rarely saw him, but I knew his name was Danny and that, unlike the woman upstairs, he was not a problem.
I don’t remember the chanting woman’s name, but I will call her Claudia. Claudia was a mystery. I had seen her only from a distance, through the window, dressed in sweat clothes and digging and puttering in the backyard. She was medium height, a little heavy, with short, dark hair. Besides the chanting, all I knew about her was that she had intimidated my sister — not an easy thing to do — so I was scared of her as well. Ellie had told me stories. It seems that Claudia had commandeered the grassy part of the small backyard, relegating Ellie to the concrete area just outside the basement door and a narrow strip of soil by a fence where she had planted flowers I now tended. Then she’d accused Ellie of spying on her through the window while she worked in the yard. For these reasons, I was supposed to stay off the grass, a terrible loss, since one of my favorite things in the whole world is lying on a grassy lawn in the sun.
The only other thing I knew about Claudia had to do with clothespins. Ellie already required me to follow precise instructions about her laundry, which involved taking things in and out of machines at different times and laying her dry turtleneck shirts in a careful, layered fashion in the basket — but there was also the Claudia restriction. For whatever reason, the chanting woman was very picky about her things and didn’t want Ellie using her clothespins in the basement laundry room where I hung up her clothes from clotheslines strung from the ceiling pipes. Claudia had written her initials in magic marker on her personal clothespins, and I avoided using them.
***
Then came the morning when Ellie died, in her bed, as her best friend Fran and I watched over her. That, of course, is a whole other story. That same day, in the early afternoon, the people from the mortuary came over, wrapped up Ellie’s body, and carried her out. I watched them – an attractive young woman and an older man — maneuver the body clumsily down the stairs, and then Ellie was gone. Later I took a walk in the neighborhood and encountered a man trying to sign me up for an environmental organization. I said, “Not now, my sister just died,” but he kept right on pitching anyway. That, too, is another story.
That evening, I heard the sound of the bell at Ellie’s front door. Not the buzzer from the street, but the quieter, more musical bell in the hallway. I opened the door, and there stood Claudia and Danny. They had seen the body carried out, they said, and wanted to know if everything was okay. Neither of them, it turned out, had been aware of Ellie’s cancer or imminent death. Both offered condolences. As we stood close together in the dim hallway, I was struck by Claudia’s gaze. In her roundish and grave face, behind her rimless glasses, her dark eyes had a look of utter clarity. I don’t know how else to describe it. She was so present. She said if I needed anything, to just ask her, and it seemed to me that she was absolutely sincere.
As I closed the door behind me and sank into Ellie’s small couch, wonder and relief spread through my body. I wasn’t an intruder in the apartment building any longer. I didn’t have to hide. I lived in a place with people who were known to me (and I to them), and who supported me, or at least accepted and sympathized with me. Of course, I wanted to tell Ellie about this development, for us to savor the irony and surprise. Claudia, the mysterious chanting woman, was not necessarily the monster we had thought her to be. Or perhaps she was monstrous — some of the time — and angelic at others.
I lived in Ellie’s apartment for a couple more months attending to details and planning a memorial. Friends came to help sort and carry things away, but mostly I was there alone — sorting documents, making phone calls, and disposing of physical items. While still able, Ellie had given away a lot of her things and simplified her finances, so the process went smoothly. Still, there was a lot of stuff, including some boxes stored in the basement garage behind Claudia’s large pickup truck. I assumed I’d slip in sometime and remove the boxes when the truck was gone, but it seemed to always be there. So, after a couple of weeks, I gently knocked on Claudia’s apartment door and waited apprehensively in the hall.
I didn’t know who would greet me — the preternaturally calm and generous-seeming woman who had offered her help, or the “chanting woman” who had terrified my dying sister. The person who opened the door was neither. This Claudia was cordial, a bit distracted, brisk, and agreeable. In other words, quite ordinary. She agreed to move the truck, and the next afternoon, the truck was gone. In my remaining weeks, I never saw her or her personalized clothespins again.
Image by Liana S. on Unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- Clothespins - October 1, 2024