De Ce Monde Secret de l’ Amelie Americaine

The Missing Eyebrow

Do not adjust your computer monitor. I am, in fact, missing an eyebrow. It is spring time and that means that I just dropped $82 on various beauty impliments in the attempt to primp and preen for Spring mating season…i.e. the time I usually end up dating and hooking up in one form or another.

This spring I found a new instrument to add to the beauty kit, it was small razor with a plastic handle that was specifically designed to shave the delicate skin below the brow. The prospect seemed much more tolerable than the plucking of single hairs.

I had already given myself a pedicure when I took my new device to the bathroom to give it a whirl. I gently shaved the area, however, when I was done I noticed that I had not only shaved my upper lid closely but I had also shaved off most of my remaining left brow. Lucky for me I have a very reliable eye brow pencil.

Home is where the ___is ?

I could live here….but I don’t think the prospect park historical society would appreciate that

…or here, but I doubt that I could fit all of my belongings, plus one dog and two cats in a four by six foot plastic house, although many New Yorkers probably already tried.

But I have in fact woken up to the cold reality that my housing situation needs to change. If American Amelie is not going to run away to Paris or London…just yet, she needs to find new digs. And so begins my quest for “a better apartment”.

You may sigh or groan but I do live a rather cliche New York existence. I found my current home four years ago via a broker. I naively paid a full fourteen percent of the annual rent broker’s fee without even attempting to negotiate. Ah the folly of youth. The broker told me that the former tenant was a very nice young woman who was about my age. I asked him why she left. He said that she decided to go with her boyfriend who was a performer with a traveling circus act. I chose to believe him. He was nice, a little nervous. He fretted over every detail, yet in the end, he got me what I wanted, a rent stabilized one bedroom in the up and coming neighborhood called “Park Slope” Brooklyn.

It was small, but I did everything to make it a home. I painted the walls a pale blue to offset my white formica furniture. I graduated from a futon to a real mattress and wrot iron bedframe. I even hung my grandmother’s hand painted dishes on the walls of my kitchen. My cats ate the mice that came out of holes underneath the sink. And I had found a loving tolerance for the occasional roach that would invade my shoe cabinet or the pet food. It was a little gross, but I had learned to compromise and manage the issue. I was a New Yorker. If the terrorist attack of 2001 hadn’t chased me out of the city then I was here to stay.

Even my dog with his own sever abandonment issues had made peace with his new surroundings. Now he only barked or howled when there was someone at the door . We had all settled in. I had just started a new career, and the next move , I told myself would only be if I finally managed to buy my own place. I was now officially too old to be moving every eighteen months just because ___ You fill in the blanks.

For two months it appearred that I had struck gold. Even thought I was one of only two white girls that now lived in the building, yet my neighbors still helped me lug some of heaviest furniture up the stairs. They were cautious about talking to me yet warmed up somewhat when I handed out halloween candy to the kids who lived in the building. I felt optimistic that this would be the start of a very nice living arrangement. Until that fateful night when I first encountered the occupants of apartment 5A, on my floor, two doors to the left.

Now I realize that in Isabel’s eyes I am a pretentious, over-educated, espresso drinking, piece of shit who paid too much for her apartment. However, this is who I am. Isabel, has lived in the building for forty years. She grew up here. She is more Brooklyn than the Dodgers who have long since left for a sunnier state. When she drinks, she gives everyone a hard time, regardless of race. And if this was only about personality, then she would be the color that gives the building an authentic New York favor instead of some up tight inaccessible Manhattan tower where no one speaks to each other.

However, on that night, during my first year here, when her boyfriend and her son started a fist fight in the hallway. And the boyfriend brought out a steak knife and told the son that he needed to come out and face him, and the only way the fight was stopped was when Isabel’s grandson (who was just under two years old) was pushed between them by the son’s girlfriend. Well I decided that maybe the broker had left something out of his explanation. The police came and complaints were filed. It was business as usual, except for me.

The next day I called the city to ask what I could do (they weren’t helpful), my new landlord (who at the time told me that they had never really hurt anyone else in building), and the broker (who actually said that he would find me a new place if I wanted). Then Isabel knocked on the door. I kept the chain on and opened the door slightly. She apologized and said that she didn’t want me to be scared of her. She wanted to talk to me. I opened the door and let her in.

In the typical “battered woman syndrome” she proceeded to tell me that it wasn’t really the way it looked the night before and that I just didn’t understand the way black people spoke to one another. However I found this amusing considering that Isabel was at the time, the only other white girl in the building. Who was she to educate me about the venacular of this particular race?

I hated moving so much that I decided to stay. This was my home. I paid the rent and it was my right to exist here. I wasn’t going to give up that easily. To say the least it hasn’t been perfect. Needless to say the police have been called on more than one occasion and the landlord is actively looking to evict her. And I, being the guilt ridden, over-educated, girl who wants to reach some kind of equitable end to this story, have tried on multiple occasions to reason with her while maintaining my position that she can’t act like she does. She sighs at me, like it’s my problem. Smacks her tongue like a teenager as if I’m the one giving her the attitude.

I finally learned to just ignore her. She’s tried to humilate me by talking really loud to a neighbor about a recent family death I experienced. I must be the one who needs help. I didn’t take the bait. I continued to ignore her in the hallway.

Until two days ago when Isabel came home with her boyfriend after the bars had closed and they started to quarrel. I think she was, in her own manipulative way, trying to tell him that he needed to leave. He had reinserted himself into her life after she was taken to the hospital at the beginning of March. Since then, he has always been around. They came home drunk, as usual, and began to fight in the hallway. I was awoken out of a dead sleep, by the fight. I grabbed my phone ready to dial 911, when I heard her begin to talk about me. “Well Samantha’s always complaining, etc. etc.” And the boyfriend via his remarks believed her. She is now fixated on me as the source of her woes.

It was then that I realized how she operates. How she manipulated him to take care of her and then, when she didn’t need him anymore, blamed someone else for her problems. She’s a coward. And I no longer need to try and make this situation work. I called my landlord the next morning, and told him, that if she wants to instigate a fight, then I will see her in court. My landlord, this time, agreed.

So either I’m finding a new home or she is…I’m preparing for the possibility that I need to leave.

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