Free I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron

accountant came down the hall and moved the bicycle to block the professor’s door. At that moment, the professor flung his door open and began shouting at the accountant, whom, incidentally, he towered over. Within seconds, he lost it completely and slugged the accountant. It was incredibly exciting. The accountant called the police. The police arrived in short order. Since I, owing to my nosiness, had been a witness to the incident, I invited myself to the meeting with the police and my two neighbors. The meeting took place in the professor’s rent-stabilized apartment, which had even more bedrooms than mine. Everyone told his version of events, and then I told mine. I have to say mine was the best version, since it included a short, extremely insightful and probably completely irrelevant digression about the impatience childless people have for people with children (and bicycles). You had to be there. Anyway, when we were all finished, the policeman shook his head and stood up. “Why can’t you people get along?” he said as he headed for the door. “I would kill to live in this building.”
             
    Eventually, I began to have a recurring dream about the Apthorp—although to be accurate, it was a recurring nightmare: I dreamed I had accidentally moved out of the building, realized it was the worst mistake of my life, and couldn’t get my lease back. I have had enough psychoanalysis to know not to take such dreams literally, but it’s nonetheless amazing to me that when my unconscious mind searched for a symbol of what I would most hate to lose, it came up with my apartment.
    Around 1990, rumors began to spread that there was about to be a change in the law: Under certain circumstances, rent stabilization could be abolished, and landlords would be able to raise the rent to something known as fair market value. I refused to pay any attention. My neighbors were obsessed with what might happen; they suggested that our rents might be raised to eight or ten thousand dollars a month. I thought they were being unbelievably neurotic. Rent stabilization was an indelible part of New York life, like Gray’s Papaya. It would never be tampered with. I was willing to concede (well, not too willing) that under certain circumstances there might be some justice in the new law; I could understand that you could make a case (a weak case) that people like me had been getting away with a form of subsidized housing for years; I could see (dimly) that the landlords were entitled to something. But if our rents were raised, I was sure the hike would be a reasonable one. After all, the tenants in the building were a family. The landlords understood that. They would never do anything so unreasonable as to double or triple our rents. This moment of idiotic innocence on my part was comparable to the moment—early in all love stories that end badly—when a wife first discovers the faintest whiff of another woman’s perfume on her husband’s shirt, decides it’s nothing, and goes blithely about her business. I went blithely about my business. And then the building hired a manager named Barbara Ross.
    Miss Ross was a small, frightening woman with pale white skin, bright red lips, and a huge, jet-black beehive of hair on top of her head. The beehive was so outsized and bizarre that it reminded me of the 1950s urban legend about the woman who teased her hair so much that cockroaches moved in. Her voice dripped honey, which made her even more terrifying. She was either forty years old or seventy, no one knew. She wore pink silk shantung suits with gigantic shoulder pads. She lurked everywhere. She lived in New Jersey, but she spent Thursday nights in the building office, and rumor had it that she snuck around in her bare feet, trying to catch the elevator operators napping. She issued memos discouraging children from playing ball in the courtyard. She repaved the courtyard and covered the cobblestones with tar. She had a way of