I was, I want to be clear, very calm. I explained that we had been late because of the parking, that Ben had received a late mark, that I would be grateful if she could make sure to leave the driveway clear in the mornings. I said it the way you say something when you are trying to be a reasonable neighbor and expect a reasonable neighbor in return.
Ezoic
Denise said, “You’ll survive.”
I thought, at first, that I had misheard her.
“Sorry?”
“It was one morning,” she said. “You’ll survive.”
She closed the door.
I want to tell you that I escalated immediately after that, that I had the spine to begin the documentation and the calls and the process right then, in late May, before it went on for twenty-two mornings.
But that would not be honest.
What I actually did was knock on her door twice more in the following two weeks, once with Mark alongside me, and have the kind of civil but entirely ineffective conversations that people have when they are trying to be reasonable with someone who has decided that being reasonable is for people who lack conviction. Denise was not unkind during these conversations, exactly. She listened. She said things like “I hear what you’re saying” and “I’ll try to be more mindful.” She did not change her behavior in any measurable way.
Mark also spoke to her on his own, I discovered later, a couple of weeks into all of this. He hadn’t told me because he thought it hadn’t come to anything and didn’t want to make things feel more complicated than they were. Mark is the kind of person who believes things can be managed quietly if you approach them with enough goodwill. This is a quality I genuinely love about him, and in this particular situation it had not worked.
