After that “harrumph” from our neighbor Maggie, other things began happening. She blasted music at odd times. One Saturday night, I could hear music pounding from her house, and ended up sleeping downstairs on the couch. That turned out to be a bad idea because she was blasting music on that floor and we could hear it in the bedroom on the floor above.

It didn’t make sense. In the middle of the pandemic pause, no one was having parties that blasted music, but I didn’t put it together than Maggie was losing it until the next day, when Ricky, her almost-former husband, showed up and picked up their daughter Ava. Calvin and I sat in the living room and spied, something we were doing more and more. We watched Ricky talk to the tenants. They seemed upset.

Then things got weirder. Calvin found food in the yard. Music blared at random times. Maggie slowly paced in her front yard and in the back alley, parading up and down with lots of swing, talking to herself or whoever was out. Calvin took the garbage out one night during a Maggie parade and as she sashayed past she flipped him the bird. The next day, when he passed her, she muttered, “Poser.”

We started feeling her presence all the time. Our family of four lives in a 2-story house with a pretty big basement. I work in the illegal addition of the basement, right on the alley. Our thirteen-year-old son, Wyatt* works in what should have been the garage but is now an airless, brightly-lit extra bedroom. Calvin gets the whole ground floor. He is producing multiple television specials even as there is no production. They have puppeteers video themselves or on Zoom. He’s on calls all day, or shooting or directing from the dining room table. He also patrols the front of the house, sitting on the radiator cover and looking out into the yard and street.

Fifteen-year-old Daisy works in her bedroom on the top floor. Both kids join Calvin at the dining room table when they really need to get work done. Just sitting with Calvin, always on calls, always reading scripts, always working furiously, helps the kids get their stuff done. But it also means they are at the mercy of Maggie’s music, and that is a whole can of writhing worms.

Maggie loves Paul McCartney with a passionate, twisted passion. My family loathes Paul McCartney and Wings and frankly, the Beatles too. I don’t want to hear any more Beatles’ songs. I’ve had enough.

Things were about to get much, much weirder and scarier.

*Names are changed. Calvin is the name of the first boy I ever really adored and the first person who told me a joke. Daisy is the name I wanted to name my daughter, except that Calvin shut that down, along with the name Wyatt for a boy. The fake names form the fantasy family I don’t have.