I don’t want to bore you—there were dozens of notes like these, I could go on all day. And not just stuck to dishes. One was affixed to an air conditioner, which I’d been running on a sweltering morning, easily in the nineties. That one read: Crack a window. In the real world, adults have utilities to pay. –F. Another time, after I’d let my swimsuit drip-dry in the shower, a note slid under my door: Three other people live in this house. Three other people have to share that bathroom. Don’t hang up your UNDIES for everyone to see. –F. Her initial always stung me like a failing grade.

I tried my best not to engage her, but there were limits to what I could bear. For instance, the spoon. She’d placed it at my door, a stray flake of oatmeal barnacled to its stem. Her note read: If you need help washing dishes, I’d be happy to give you lessons. –F. Lessons! The thought of that witch sneaking into the kitchen each night—poring over my dishes in the drying rack, like a schoolteacher searching for typos—filled my throat with blood. On the back of the Post-it, I wrote, Yes, Fredricka, dishwashing lessons sound lovely. Please let me know your availability. I left it crumpled on the carpet by her door. By morning it had disappeared.

Three weeks later she found a broken plate in the sink, and things finally came to a head. Her note—arranged with the plate shards outside my room—read simply: We need to talk. –F. When I knocked on her door, she called for me to enter, and I saw she was sitting in wait for me, propped up against her bed’s headboard in her nightgown—it was three p.m.—and staring at me with queenly severity. I explained that I’d never used the plate, much less broken it, but Fredricka had already deduced that I was the culprit. In gloating tones she walked me through her Sherlockian logic. First, there was the telltale gunk. Who else couldn’t wash a dish? Second, Janey and Miranda were, quote, ‘mature women’ and ‘responsible adults,’ who could be trusted to confess. Finally, there was my own note, which she produced in a ziplock bag with a dramatic flourish: the third-act scrap of evidence. Really now, a grown man. Asking for dishwashing lessons. What was she to make of that? As she held the Post-it out for me to see, I realized she must have been preparing this scene since I’d arrived: she the disciplinarian and I the scolded child. I decided then and there that it was time to move. But in meekness, or deference to this feeble old woman sunk into the mattress, I kept my head bent throughout her harangue. Each time she paused to ask some patronizing question—Did I know why we needed to wash our dishes? Had I ever heard of germs?—I even answered her, in a dutiful monotone, like a student performing his orals: Yes, Fredricka, I had heard of germs. When she was finished, I gave her my one-month’s notice, and she smiled a wrinkly, sagging, triumphant smile.