The Wrong Woman

I stare at the primitive scrawl of squiggles on the blackboard. I've drawn a map: a birds-eye rendition of my apartment complex, Whispering Willows. In my right hand I hold a piece of purple chalk and in my left is a tumbler of whiskey. I take a gulp then draw an angry face in the centre of the map: this is my neighbour, Clarissa, the source of all my torment.

Mary, whose blackboard it is, is a wellness practitioner. Her coffee table is piled high with books on many subjects, including Buddhism and movies, to wit: The Way of Non-Attachment and The Golden Age of Cinema.

Mary’s best remedy for me is whiskey and chalk. By mapping out my neighbours I’m supposed to get a better idea of the web they’ve spun around me and how I might escape it. The whiskey is supposed to help with that. Mary has some curious methods for wellness but she comes highly recommended.

She lights a stick of sandalwood incense. Its dense fragrance competes with the delicate scent of lilacs coming through the open window.

“Tell me about the purple lady,” she says, squinting at my map from her beanbag chair.

“That’s Clarissa. At Whispering Willows, she is your go-to person for the skinny and the scuttlebutt. And she is the chief web-spinner/shit-disturber in this tale. Clarissa has positioned herself as the pillar of our community...”

“But she’s actually a pill not a pillar?” Mary laughs, but I can’t. The morass of lies Clarissa has lobbed at me is no laughing matter. It has kept me awake many nights.

“And let me guess, like many a nosy parker," Mary continues, "she scrambles the facts and gets everything wrong.”

“Yes.”

“Very Hitch.”

“What?”

“Cock.”

“Excuse me?”

“Hitchcock. He built a body of work on mistaken identities, incorrect information and false accusations.”

I take a belt of whiskey, then wheeze out: “I’ve seen…Dial…M...”

“...for Murder. A good one."

"Start at the beginning," Mary says.

“I was taking Ruggles for a walk and was about to pick up her poop when my phone rang. My first impulse was to not pick up and I should have gone with that.”

“Oh, no.” Mary scolds. “You have to pick up after your dog.”

“My phone,” I say. “I mean, my phone.”

“Oh,” she giggles.

“Speaking of phones,” I say. “You know that kids game, the one where you pass a sentence around a circle and see how it changes?”

“Yes. It demonstrates how rumours get started and spread.”

“Rumours seem to be the lifeblood of my little community.” Recklessly, I stab the map with my chalk. “The story of Whispering Willows could be one giant, ongoing telephone game.” I draw curvy lines from triangle to triangle (they rep condo units), as if we all still have land lines.

"WW is a little pocket of greenery and cooperation, tucked away out of earshot from the hustle of the nearby metropolis," I say, as if making a destination ad. "Consisting of a series of stacked condo units over seven acres of land, this little village boasts a progressive mindset when it comes to successful community living." Or a real estate agent's pitch.

I sit down and put my head in my hands, bemoaning the fact that WW is no longer the safe haven I thought it was. "It is aptly named, not the willow part but the whispering part."

"For the two years I've lived there, I’ve always said that it has the best of both worlds: small town friendliness complimented by big city smarts. But, now..." I take a big slug of my drink, staving off tears.

“So you picked up Ruggles’ poop,” Mary prods.

“Yes.”

“And your phone.”

“It was Lois. The superintendent.” In the top right quadrant of the map I draw a friendly face with bright pink chalk, but she has three eyes. I caution myself to stop slurping back the whiskey.

“Lois wanted me to get a message to Thea.” Thea gets sketched in fuchsia. “She asked me to relay this message: 'Contact Lois in the office at once.' I sent it verbatim to Thea.” I take another hit of the drink, despite my cautionings.

“By coincidence Thea’s dad, Alfred, died that same night.” Alfred goes on the board as a pale green face - the only unused colour left in the chalk box. “The next day I got a DM from Clarissa that said: ‘You purposely exclude me from the loop when it comes to an emergency?!’”

“What emergency? What loop?”

“There was no emergency. There was no loop.”

“Ah,” Mary says. “The telephone game!”

“Yes! Somehow Clarissa heard that I messaged Thea on behalf of the office and she conflated that with Alfred’s death. Later, I would learn that Lois needed to tell Thea her rent cheque had bounced. That was all.”

I scrawl relevant bits of dialogue on the board, matching colour to speaker.

“It’s just like what happened to poor Manny Balestrero,” Mary says, shaking her head mournfully.

“Who?"

“Everyone got it wrong and it ruined Manny’s life. And caused his wife to have a psychotic break. True story. Hitchcock made a docudrama about it: The Wrong Man.”

“Well, Clarissa certainly got everything wrong in this case. Next thing I knew she was publicly accusing me of knowing that Alfred was dying, which I didn’t.”

“No. It was a heart attack, right?"

“Yes. Very sudden. But Clarissa seemed to think I knew about it and kept it a secret.”

"And this affects Clarissa how?”

“The pillar has to know everything. She thinks she’s Florence Nightingale and Mother Theresa rolled into one. If she’d have known, she’d have been at his bedside, healing him, I guess."

Mary puts some music on: New Age stuff, soothing. I sink back into the soft cushions of the sofa to contemplate the colourful representation of fact and chicanery on the board. My artwork is a mess of unintelligible marks but perhaps that best represents my emotional life right now.

Mary jumps up and makes a beeline for the chalk box. She picks up a stick of white and puts a X through my map.

“This whole thing is a MacGuffin!”

“Mac What?”

“A MacGuffin is something that moves a story forward but otherwise has no meaning.”

“Uh…”

“Hitch.”

“Cock!” I blurt. A whiskey-fuelled guffaw escapes my lips. I pause then observe that: “In my case nothing has moved the story forward."

"That's because there is no story except for some warped notion in Clarissa’s mind. Clarissa's mind is the MacGuffin. She is dictating this story. Clarissa is living rent free in your head. Kick her out!” Mary takes her chamois and clears the board. My anguish becomes a soft cloud of rainbow dust.

"But what about my reputation? I have been wronged, like Manny..."

"Poor Manny Balestrero," Mary repeats. "But your situation is different...so far anyway. If you wind up in jail, like Manny, call me. I know a good lawyer."

A gasp escapes my mouth and then another guffaw. It's horrific and it's funny.

"Clarissa is a nosy parker fabricator," Mary continues, "and her lies will take her down. They will take her down, not you. You will live your life ignoring her - and playing hopscotch."

"Hopscotch?"

Mary gives me a hug and a piece of chalk.

I walk home inhaling the perfume of the lilacs. I feel lighter, if tipsy, and I wonder about the MacGuffin Method. Sometimes our narratives are as ephemeral as chalk dust. Sometimes - often - we can choose what we let live inside our heads.

And we can play hopscotch.