The Neighbor The NeighborIT IS NOT A NOBLE SENTIMENT TO DETEST one’s neighbor—the rational part of Trudy’s mind knows this. Hatred leads to no good. Unfortunately, these days rationality holds little sway on Trudy’s emotions.
Until a year ago, Trudy would have described herself as the most sensible of people. Just look at my life, she would have argued a little too proudly—a practical job as head librarian, a thirty-two-year marriage to her first and only love in which she was faithful and happy, and she would have bet her last dime that Brian, her husband, would have said the same. Together they crafted the life that they, and in Trudy’s exacting opinion every sane person, would have wanted—a judicious, measured life.
And then all that changed in the beat of a heart. One September morning, when the Santa Ana winds were leaching all the moisture out of the air, Brian went out for his regular three-times-a-week jog and didn’t come back.
In the early months of her widowhood, during those brutally hot September and October days, Trudy was barely functional, managing only to get herself to the library each day and back home late each afternoon. Then, once the front door was closed and no one could see her, she would collapse into her living room armchair and stare out the front window until it was dark enough to climb into bed.
Through those awful autumn and winter months, sitting in the dark, in the living room, evening after evening, playing back in her mind every kind and dear thing Brian ever did for her, Trudy got an eyeful of the new neighbor who had moved his family into the house next door only months before Brian died. And an earful. She learned right away that he is a yeller, a screamer of ugly words, and that she is in for an entirely unpleasant experience living next door to this man.
When Brian was alive she had easily ignored the commotion next door because what she and Brian had built together in their green-shuttered house didn’t leave any room for animosity. She didn’t have the energy or the inclination or the taste for it.
But now, more than a year after Brian’s death, she’s found that life is just chockful of things to rail against. Take the park situation. Even Trudy, who disdains the word “beautiful”—“Rendered meaningless by overuse,” she complains—has been heard to admit that the park adjacent to her library is “beautiful.” Set back from the street so it seems slightly hidden, ringed by hundred-year-old trees that keep the park cool and dappled in sunlight, Sierra Villa Park is an oasis of calm. And so, when the city council raised the question of selling the land to developers, there was a hue and cry in the neighborhood. Condos where neighborhood children now play soccer?! Concrete where the dignity of ancient oaks provides shelter for toddlers to play and for weary mothers to grab a few minutes of respite?! Trudy is incensed! She’s seen the architect’s drawing of the proposed complex. It makes her blood boil.
Pushing aside her natural reluctance to get involved, Trudy decides to draw up a petition. If Brian were alive, he’d tell her to let the politicians handle it. Maybe, if she pressed him, he would have made a call to their city councilman, Scott Thurston, who lives around the corner, and registered his mild objection. But Brian is not here. He has left her to her own devices, and her own device is a neighborhood petition. That’s how her disdain for her neighbor, acquired during those months after Brian’s death, turns into full-fledged, lip-licking fury.
Brian had been fond of the ancient Russian woman who had lived next door to the Dugans since the day they moved in, her small ranch house’s driveway abutting theirs. When Vivianna reached her late eighties and slowed down quite a bit, Brian added chauffeur duties to the list of tasks he did for her, a list that included grocery shopping, lugging the trash cans back and forth from the curb on garbage day, and watering her patchy lawn. Her grown children had been making noise for some time about how their mother couldn’t take care of herself anymore, a sentiment Vivianna disdained. She told Brian that she planned to lock all the doors and windows if they ever came for her.
And they did. The night Vivianna started a fire in her kitchen, locked doors were no impediment to the firemen who burst through to put out the flames. Behind them came Russell, Vivianna’s son, who used the opportunity to take her away. Too quickly, it seemed to Trudy, he rented an industrial Dumpster, parked it in her driveway, and filled it with a lifetime’s worth of memories and debris, indiscriminately tossing out photo albums alongside mountains of saved plastic bags, gorgeous beaded gowns long out of style along with broken furniture. Both Brian and Trudy had to turn away as the workmen piled up Vivianna’s life, higher and higher in the Dumpster. “Sadder and sadder,” Brian said, and he was right.
The son and daughter had the house cleaned and painted and then sold it to the Yeller who lives there now. His name is Kevin. Trudy sometimes hears the wife calling him, “Kevin Doyle!”
“He looks like a giant rodent,” Trudy tells her son, Carter, during his dutiful Sunday afternoon phone call. “This guy who moved into Vivianna’s house. Pointed nose, beady eyes, and an overbite.”
“Now, Mother …” Carter says. Although he restrains himself, she can hear the tsk-tsk he’s desperate to make. She knew he would admonish her. Since Brian’s death, their weekly phone calls consist of her complaining and his admonitions. The interaction is satisfactory to neither but familiar by now and thankfully, Trudy thinks, short.
But when did they ever have satisfactory conversations? Maybe when Carter was three or four and Trudy began to introduce him to the children’s books she had always loved. He loved them, too, and would ask her to read them to him over and over, and that bond lasted until he started first grade and began a life apart from her—friends, sports, the technology that boys seem to inhale into their pores. Every year after that, the distance between them grew wider and wider until finally, when Carter was able to make a choice of his own, he insisted on moving all the way across the country to attend Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, New Hampshire. Ridiculous place to go to school, Trudy has often thought but never said outright to anyone but Brian. “Freezing, in the middle of nowhere,” Trudy would complain to Brian. “Yes, but so far away,” Brian would say because he understood what Trudy didn’t—that Carter was never comfortable with them.
She gets off the phone with him every Sunday afternoon dissatisfied and cranky. And misses Brian even more. Gentle, patient Brian would listen to her rants, shake his head at whatever unfairness she was railing against, and get on with whatever he had been doing, usually gardening, before Trudy had sought him out and unloaded her latest diatribe. The listening and the moving on—both brought Trudy comfort.
Now she has no avenue but action to displace her anger, and so she finds herself, petition in hand, ringing her neighbors’ doorbells. The fact that she knows none of them, not a one, despite her thirty-plus years on the block doesn’t seem unusual to Trudy. She’s never been the sort of woman who stands and chitchats at the curb or makes small talk when out walking the dog. They’ve never owned a dog. In truth, Trudy didn’t feel the need to know her neighbors while Brian was alive. He was the one who would say hello as he gardened out front. He knew them by sight. He waved as they drove by. That was sufficient.
So now Trudy has to introduce herself to her neighbors. At the first house, the woman who answers the door of the small Craftsman, way down at the end of the block, quickly signs the petition. She’s young, maybe thirty, and has the distracted look of a mother of too many young children. Trudy can see at least three running around the living room, carrying on, as the woman, Susannah, as Trudy can see from her signature, tells Trudy how important the park is to them.
“Well, I can’t imagine not having the park.”
Trudy nods. She feels the same way. Good, a supporter.
“Where would the kids play?” and then she shrugs self-consciously and turns her shoulder to indicate the activity behind her. “And how much of that in the house could any one person take?”
As she hands the petition back to Trudy, she says, “You’re so good to do this,” and a fair-haired little girl of maybe four slips in beside her mother, holding on to one of her legs.
“You’re the Story Lady,” the child says, a thumb going into her mouth.
“You’re right. Good remembering. And I remember you from when I read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.…”
The child nods, pleased, and the mother takes the opportunity to say, “We’re so sorry about your husband” and what has been a fine interaction, a moment that feels almost normal, suddenly stabs Trudy in the heart. She doesn’t want to, she can’t, share her grief with strangers, however well meaning. That’s the only trouble with living in Sierra Villa, Trudy thinks as she says good-bye and moves on to the next house, everyone knows your business.
To her relief, the rest of the block goes smoothly and everyone on her side of the street signs. Trudy is fierce in her advocacy and people quickly agree that they must keep the park, that condos on that land would be horrible. To Trudy’s great relief, no one else mentions Brian. And then, there’s only one house left—the Yeller’s, at the corner. Trudy could skip his house and head to the opposite side of the street. She’s tempted to, but she won’t allow herself this weakness. She knocks on what she will always consider Vivianna’s door and a little boy of maybe six opens it for her. He’s blond and solemn, the sort of child whose features seem to have migrated to the middle of his face, leaving lots of cheek and forehead.
“Is your mother home?” Trudy asks him. Far better to speak with the mother than the rodent father. Not that she’s ever exchanged a word with the woman, but she seems more reasonable than the screamer. Trudy hears her speak nicely to the two boys.
But the child shakes his head no to her question; his mother isn’t at home. And then she hears the voice from somewhere inside the house, that ugly voice which disrupts the daily quiet of her house. “Never open the door! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?!” And Trudy sees the little boy flinch and then his father is there. “Get away from here,” he tells his son, who flees back into the house. And it is only Trudy and this man, this Kevin person, facing each other across the threshold. It’s the first time she’s ever been face-to-face with him and she’s surprised at how tall he is. Tall and white skinned and just as menacing as his words.
Trudy chooses to ignore the interaction she just witnessed—the ugliness of it, the evident fear the child has of his father’s anger—and presents the petition. “The city council is contemplating selling the library park to developers,” she begins. He says nothing. “If we get enough signatures on this petition, we may be able to save the park.”
She holds the clipboard with the petition out to him, but he doesn’t take it. Instead he says, “I don’t sign anything. You never know where your signature ends up.”
Trudy can feel anger rising in her like a flush, but she attempts civility. “I can guarantee you it will end up at the city council meeting on the first Tuesday of next month.”
“And then where? Can you guarantee me that it won’t go any further?”
Trudy is nonplussed. She has no idea what he means. But it’s immediately clear to her that he lives as if under siege. “Do you want to save the park or not? You have kids, don’t you want them to have a place to play?”
“My kids play in the backyard.”
“So you don’t care what happens to the park?”
“You got it, lady.”
“How civic-minded of you.” Trudy can’t help it. Her allotment of civility has been used up and he’s not stupid, although she wishes he were, and he immediately gets the sarcasm.
“Get off my property. Do-gooders like you just gum up the system.” And he closes the door in her face. It feels like a slap.
She crosses his driveway to hers—no fence in between, no line of shrubbery. Dammit! They never needed any demarcation when Vivianna was there, and now she regrets the open space with every particle of her being.
In the kitchen she gets herself a glass of water, furious and agitated, shaken really, but she refuses to call it that. That man makes her so angry she could spit! She glares out her kitchen window directly into his, across their two driveways. When Vivianna was alive Trudy never minded the proximity. It was a way to keep tabs on the older woman, making sure she was moving about and everything seemed all right. Now, with the Yeller next door, it feels like the privacy of her kitchen is being violated every single day. Curtains, those frilly things Trudy has always hated, she needs to get curtains! And then she argues with herself, No, I will not give him the satisfaction!
The petition lies on the kitchen table and the first page isn’t even completely filled. Trudy knows she has to go back out there. There’s the whole other side of the street. Seven more doorbells to ring. Oh, how she’d love to just stop. Forget it. But then there’s the park. And the principle of the thing. And the fact that she’s not a quitter. And the fact that she has nothing else to do on this Sunday afternoon.
Sundays were always gardening days when Brian was alive. Not that Trudy gardened. No, that was Brian’s domain, and over the years he made of their spacious backyard an Eden. That’s the way Trudy thinks about it. She couldn’t name more than a few of the shrubs and vines that Brian planted, but that never stopped her from appreciating the way they enclose the backyard in a circle of green, splashed with the vivid colors of their flowers, coral, deep purple, pristine white, and in the summer, the ruby red of the bougainvillea. And years ago, when Brian decided to grow tomatoes, then squash and peppers and eggplant in the summer and lettuce and snap peas and broccoli and cabbage in the winter—they had their own urban farm.
The garden misses Brian, even she can tell. Armando, their gardener, does his best to keep things growing, but he comes just once a week and his job is really only to cut the lawn and tidy up. The extra he does—cutting back leggy shrubbery, watering when she has forgotten to, fertilizing the plants just when they need it—Trudy is grateful for but she truly feels she can’t ask more of him. And so the garden mourns Brian’s absence in its own way.
Enough, Trudy tells herself. Maybe she says it out loud. She’s doesn’t know these days when she speaks her thoughts and when she doesn’t. There’s nobody there to hear her, so she’s not sure.
She takes the petition off the table and heads out the front door. The house on the corner, the opposite side of the street, has a white picket fence. The gate is painted yellow and has a heart-shaped cutout atop it. Too precious, Trudy immediately thinks, where are we, Mayberry RFD? There’s a tiny bench on the small front porch with a matching heart-shaped pillow on it. Trudy almost turns around. These people aren’t going to sign my petition, but they do. A white-haired couple in their seventies is as nice as can be. Neither needs to hear Trudy explain the whole problem. The man simply says to her, “You have honest eyes. Of course I’ll sign.” And then, as Trudy starts to turn away, step down off the little porch, he throws her the curve. “I liked your husband very much.”
Trudy is stopped. “So did I,” she says, “and thirty-two years wasn’t enough.”
“You poor dear” is what the woman says, and Trudy shoots back before she can stop herself, “I’m just fine!”
And then, once the couple has closed their door Trudy has to sit down on the curb, her legs not steady enough to take her to the next house. Those white-haired people, that was supposed to be her future, Brian’s and hers. Growing old together, tottering around in their little house until they were well into their nineties. Trudy would never have admitted it to anyone, but that was her plan for the future. Now all she sees is an empty space where loss is a daily companion. Despite herself, she sighs, then pushes herself to stand and finish the task. She takes a measure of this side of the street. There are six more houses to go.
At the house next to the older couple, a wood-shingled bungalow directly opposite her own, no one is home. She tries the one next to that, a beige, nondescript ranch. And again, no one answers the bell, but there’s a truck in the driveway and Trudy hears muffled music from somewhere inside the house. She tries to remember who lives there but can’t.
She rings the bell again and then knocks smartly on the door. No one appears, but she sees the closed living room drapes move on the large window, as if someone was peeking out. Trudy is sure now that someone is home and it makes her inordinately furious. She’s not some religious proselytizer who will talk endlessly about soul saving. Is that what she looks like?! She isn’t even a Girl Scout with disgusting cookies to sell. She’s a respectable woman, here about a park. Someone should have the decency to answer the door!
She tramps off the porch, elbows the shrubbery aside in order to sidle close to the house, and makes it to the front window. She knocks quickly and loudly and is startled to see a similarly startled male Asian face pop up not three inches from her own. The faces stare at each other through the plate glass until the man disappears and the curtains close and Trudy is further incensed. He is home. He needs to sign the petition.
She marches to the front door and knocks again. In fact, she continues knocking until he finally opens the door and they assess each other. Trudy sees a short man, probably in his late sixties, with steel gray hair neatly combed and parted, wearing a plaid, short-sleeved shirt and well-worn jeans that sag off his skinny frame. His face is impassive as he surveys the chubby little woman with the determined stance who is holding a clipboard. Anger radiates out of her like heat waves. Could she be so angry simply because he didn’t want to open the door? he wonders. But he says nothing. She rang the bell. Let her speak.
And Trudy plunges in. “I have a petition here stating the neighborhood’s opposition to turning Sierra Villa Park into condo units. Our position is stronger the more signatures we have.” She holds the clipboard out to him. He turns his eyes from her face, which he finds mesmerizing in its intensity, to the petition but makes no move to pick up the pen attached by a string to the clipboard. He does nothing. Doesn’t read it. Doesn’t close the door. Simply looks at the piece of paper as if he were waiting for it to do something interesting. He has learned from years of working for irrational people that the best course of action when facing anger is not to engage.
Trudy is now beyond exasperated. “Do you speak English?” she demands of him. “Is that the problem here?”
“You, I think, are the problem.”
“How rude.”
“Yes, rude,” he says, but he doesn’t close the door.
“I live on this street,” Trudy finds herself saying. She has no idea why.
He nods.
“And I work at the library.” Why is she telling him this? His silence is unnerving, maybe that’s it. “That’s why the park matters to me.”
The man picks up the pen and signs his name, Fred Murakami.
“Thank you.” Trudy has to say it.
“You are welcome.” But he doesn’t close the door, and Trudy can’t quite figure out how to get off his porch gracefully.
“That’s it,” she tells him.
“Yes.”
And finally she turns and makes her way down his front path, turning right at the sidewalk and moving to the next house. She can feel his eyes on her back the whole way.
She gets signatures from three of the last four houses and feels, as she walks home, as if she’s climbed Mount Everest. Later that evening, as she eats a bowl of cereal for dinner, she reviews her afternoon’s work and sees that he has signed, “Fred Murakami, Handyman,” even though the petition didn’t ask for the signer’s occupation.
TRUDY BRINGS THE PETITION into the library the next morning and Clemmie looks askance at it.
“I know what you’re going to say and I’m going to ignore it,” Trudy says before Clementine can get her mouth in gear.
“Well then”—and here Clemmie chooses her words carefully—“I was only thinking what would happen if a city official came into the library?”
“You mean like Scott Thurston?”
“Yes, maybe Scott.”
“He’d tell us to put the petition away. He’d say this library is a city service and not a place for a personal agenda.”
“Exactly!” Clemmie feels vindicated.
“And I’d ignore him as soon as he walked out the door.”
They are at an impasse and that is where things are going to stay, Clemmie knows by now. Four years working under Trudy is more than enough time to understand that Trudy doesn’t budge. Truthfully, four months was enough to pick up that predominant character trait—inflexibility.
The fact that she’s young enough to be Trudy’s daughter undermines Clementine’s position even more. And the fact that she looks like Ramona in the Ramona and Beezus books. And the fact that there’s an unquenchable optimism about her. All that makes equal footing with Trudy an impossibility.
But they have worked out a way to be together, these two women. Clementine has carved out areas of responsibility that border Trudy’s but don’t overlap. She greets the public. She remembers the children’s names. She loves to spend however long it takes helping people find exactly the right book. She reads everything new that comes into the library. And Clementine, thankfully, takes care of the two computers they have in the adult section.
Trudy does all the administrative work, usually spending her day in the glass-enclosed office that faces the front door. From her desk Trudy can observe what goes on in the library but not necessarily engage. Only on Thursdays when she transforms herself into the Story Lady, does she mingle with the patrons, and those are mainly children, Trudy’s humans of choice.
But Trudy likes Clemmie, even if she isn’t demonstrative in that regard, and Clemmie has figured that out. When she first started working at the library, fresh out of graduate school, Trudy intimidated her—so curt, nothing soft or yielding about her. But Clementine has learned that’s not entirely true. All the soft places were saved for Brian, and now that he’s gone, Clementine wonders these days whether those same tender spots have hardened off and begun to die.
For her part, Trudy considers Clementine pretty near perfect. Oh, of course, she’s too emotional. And she drives Trudy crazy with her solicitousness, but Trudy sees her goodness and her trustworthiness and her work ethic and her genuine love of books. The whole package, you have to take people as the whole package, Trudy knows by now in her life, and with Clemmie that’s easy to do.
Now Clemmie watches as Trudy takes the clipboard with the petition on it and places it at the far end of the front counter, nestling it among the pamphlets for the Sierra Villa Farmers Market on Friday afternoons and the Pancake Breakfast at the local fire station on the first Sunday of every month.
“Really?” Clementine asks.
And people sign the petition as they leave with their checked-out books, Trudy is gratified to see. Every time another person signs on the dotted line, Trudy shoots Clemmie a look of triumph, and Clementine rolls her eyes.
TRUDY CONSIDERS THE DAY A SUCCESS as she walks the four blocks home and turns onto her street, Lima Street. The signatures on her petition now take up five whole pages, and she’s not done yet. She wants to walk into that city council meeting with a thick wad of petition pages, all signed by irate citizens of Sierra Villa. She flips the sheets, considering the fruits of her indignation as she turns up her brick front path. The fact that her neighbor is zooming up his driveway at the same time in his black BMW convertible with his two sons in their Catholic school uniforms in the backseat barely registers.
But then the yelling starts, even before Trudy can get her key into the front door lock, and she stops and listens. It’s that scene-of-a-traffic-accident feeling—dismay and fascination in equal measure.
“Get in the house!” Kevin Doyle is yelling even as the boys walk up the driveway, dragging their overlarge backpacks, and step onto the front porch. For some reason, he never lets them enter the house by the back door, so much of their life is played out on the long driveway. The older boy, maybe seven, is more talkative. The younger one, the one who opened the door for Trudy yesterday, is quieter. Both are blond with the pasty white skin of their father and the small, pinched features of their mother.
The boys enter the house to the accompaniment of their father yelling, “Close the door, close the damn door!” Trudy is sure that something unnatural happens in that house. Why else would he always be admonishing his sons to “get in the house,” to “close the door”? He doesn’t allow them to play on the front lawn or with the neighborhood children. She stands on her front porch, helpless, feeling that she should be doing something—intervening, protecting the boys—although she has no idea how she would accomplish either, when the Yeller starts his relentless cleaning. He has a power washer, a leaf blower, a car polisher, a chain saw, and various other mechanical devices Trudy can’t name. She knows them all by sound though. They all whine or whoosh or shriek.
Today it’s the leaf blower. He has a complex about keeping his driveway free of anything associated with nature. The sound! Oh, how Trudy hates that sound! So much uproar for so little result. Why doesn’t he take a broom like everyone else and sweep his driveway? With the blower, dirt and twigs and leaves launch up into the air in surprise and then settle back down on her driveway, which bothers him not at all and makes her want to scream back at him.
Instead, she quickly opens her front door and slams it shut with as much force as she can muster, a gesture she knows is lost on him. The whoop of the door closing is no match for the roar of the leaf blower.
From her kitchen window Trudy watches him. He’s got that disgusting cigar clamped in his protruding teeth and that tiny phone earpiece hooked to his right lobe (she hopes he gets a brain tumor from excessive cell phone use), and he’s methodically sweeping the blower across his driveway, right to left, where her driveway resides and where the debris flies over to and settles. Right to left, right to left—dirt and more dirt!
If only she and Brian had had the foresight to build a fence between their two properties as soon as this Kevin Doyle person moved in. A tall, wooden fence so she wouldn’t have to see his rodent face. A very high wooden fence so that all the blowing in the world wouldn’t yield piles of debris on her driveway.
And then it occurs to her that she can build such a fence now. What’s stopping her? Only the habit of discussing every decision with Brian. Only the backbone she received from Brian’s calm wisdom. “Well, Brian’s not here,” she reminds herself. And this time she knows she has spoken aloud in her empty house. Not a good sign for anyone’s mental health.
She gets on her computer and finds the Angie’s List site. Brian bought himself a lifetime membership when they first posted the site because he was hopeless about home repair and relied on Angie’s recommendations when they needed a washing-machine part replaced or a shower floor regrouted. She types in “fence” and up pops a screen full of names; most are handymen or carpenters. She scrolls down and is overwhelmed. There are eight pages of names. This is way more than she bargained for. How does she narrow her search? Does she have to read all the reviews about all these guys? And then her eye catches a familiar name, Fred Murakami, and she sits back in her chair and contemplates it.
On the one hand, she knows who he is. On the other, he’s a most unpleasant human being. But then again, he probably won’t steal from her or disappear with the fence half done. She can easily track him down across the street.
She reads his reviews. They’re all good. He’s meticulous, an Old World craftsman. He takes his time, but his finished product is always worth it. She realizes she has to hire him.
There’s nothing to do but cross the street and knock on his door again. She waits until Kevin Doyle has finished with the leaf blower and has entered his house with a yell at his trademark high volume, “Get away from the window!” (Why, Trudy wants to know, why? What’s wrong with looking out the window?) And then the street returns to its customary quiet. That’s one of the reasons people move up here, Trudy thinks as she crosses Lima Street, the quiet, which is now permanently compromised. The luck of the draw, she laments to herself. Trudy feels like Lady Luck has done an about-face. Until that awful September day last year, she would have considered herself among the luckiest. Now she’s afraid it’s going to be nothing but a slide through bad luck until the grave.
She heads up the cement path to the beige ranch house, and Fred Murakami watches her come, all the while debating whether to open the door. He doesn’t like aggressive women. His wife was no trouble at all, and though she’s been dead for close to thirteen years, he still misses her. No, he won’t open the door.
Trudy knocks with vigor and without stop. Her experience yesterday tells her that he doesn’t like to open his door and therefore, today, she is forewarned and determined. Finally, she wins the contest of wills. He opens the door a few inches, a deep scowl on his face.
“You make a lot of noise,” he says.
“Yes, well, it’s nothing compared to what he does,” and she indicates her neighbor’s house with a turn of her chin. “Haven’t you noticed the leaf blower and the power washer and the car buffer and the screaming, but of course you can’t fix the screaming.”
“I don’t fix screaming,” he says.
“But you could build me a fence along the driveway, couldn’t you?”
“Maybe.” He wants to say, No, I can’t, but the recession has hurt his business and he can’t be as cavalier about turning away work as he has been in the past.
“How much would that cost?”
“Depends.”
Trudy is getting exasperated again. Talking to this man is like wading through a vat of molasses. “On what?”
“The kind of materials, how high.”
“High enough so I never have to see the giant rodent.” And then Trudy realizes what she’s said. She’s spoken out loud the name she acknowledges only in the sanctity of her own mind. More fodder for her concern about her sanity.
“Made of what?”
“Wood.”
“And how long.”
“The whole driveway.”
He looks across the street at her driveway. He can’t see the far end from where he stands in his own doorway. “How many feet?”
“I don’t know,” and now exasperation is getting the best of her. “Bring a tape measure and come and see.”
He doesn’t want to start this, so he doesn’t move. She, however, is not going away, “Now, I mean now! Why can’t you measure it now?”
He shrugs. He can’t think of a reason except for the fact that he doesn’t want to engage with this woman.
“All right, come on, I’ll give you a tape measure.” And she turns and strides across the street, and he finds himself following her rapidly moving back. She walks with as much conviction as she talks.
By the time he gets to her driveway, she’s holding out a carpenter’s metal tape measure, the square box with the pliable steel coiled up inside, and she places it in his hand. As he gets down and measures the length of her driveway, she stands over him and continues talking, sotto voce. “He screams at his children. Do you hear him?”
“Sometimes.”
“Awful. So I want a fence.”
“All right.”
“How much?” she asks as he finishes measuring and stands up.
He studies the length of the driveway and considers. “Twelve hundred dollars.”
Trudy is taken aback. “That’s a lot of money.”
“Not for this fence. I’m giving you a discount. Nobody will build you a fence for less.”
And she believes him. She doesn’t know why she does, but she does. “Okay.” And then, “You need to start tomorrow.”
And again he finds himself saying, “All right.”
TRUDY WAKES UP THE NEXT MORNING with a sense of purpose. Today the fence building starts! But when she looks out her kitchen window, out over her driveway, there’s nothing to see. There’s her empty driveway, looking no different from yesterday, and there’s her neighbor yelling at his boys to “get in the car! Why are you ALWAYS late, Aidan?! Every single morning you can’t get your butt in gear!”
Trudy sees the two boys scramble into the backseat of the convertible, the younger one, Trudy realizes he’s Aidan, tripping over his backpack. Kevin barely waits until they’re seated and then zooms out of the driveway, leaving a waft of cigar smoke lingering in the crisp November air. The fence won’t do anything about the smell, she knows. What kind of man smokes continually from seven forty-five in the morning, which it currently is, until well after midnight? Every night the west side of her house is assaulted by the putrid odor of cigar. He sits on his front porch whatever the weather, bundled up when it’s chilly, stripped to a pair of shorts when it’s warm, and smokes. And talks on the phone attached to his ear. In fact, he seems to work very little and sit there far too much, always on the phone. Who would talk to this man, Trudy wonders, unless they had to?
One night, as she’s closing up the house, shutting windows and thinking about going to bed, she hears him say, “Here’s how we’ll do it. It’s too easy to just fire him. We’ll promote him. Well, he’ll think it’s a promotion.” And he chuckles. “He’ll come work directly under me and then I won’t give him anything to do, not one job, and I won’t talk to him.” Trudy can hear the glee escalate in his voice, which positively skips along as he says, “We’ll freeze him out! He doesn’t exist! … Then he’ll quit. No liability. No paper trail. Hell, he even got a promotion!”
That night, as she heard him plot to humiliate someone, Trudy slammed all her windows shut, but she could tell from his conversation, which didn’t miss a beat, that her protest didn’t register.
This morning she’s waiting impatiently for Fred Murakami to show up. Yesterday, she gave him half his agreed-upon fee so he could go to Home Depot and buy wood. She walks into the living room and cranes her body out to the left to see if his truck is in his driveway. It isn’t. Hopefully, that’s where he is and when she gets home there will be a stack of freshly cut, sweet-smelling cedar planks piled on the driveway.
That is exactly what she sees when she turns onto Lima Street at five minutes after five, a very imposing pile of raw wood stacked neatly with no Fred Murakami in sight. Trudy searches the backyard, calls his name—nothing—so she marches smartly across the street and drills her knuckles on his door.
Fred watches her come from the barrier of his living room drapes and shakes his head. Sighing, he opens his door.
“I see you got the lumber.”
“Yes.”
“But nothing’s been done with it.”
“That’s not true. I’ve set the end posts and stretched the plumb line.”
Trudy has no idea what he just said.
“I work seven to four, that’s it. When four o’clock comes, I am finished for the day.”
“I don’t get home until after five.”
He shrugs. That’s not his problem.
“When will we discuss?” Trudy asks him.
“We’ve already discussed. A wood fence. Along the driveway. Six feet tall. What is there left to discuss?”
“How ’bout this—I want it eight feet tall so I never have to see even the top of his head. He’s a tall man.”
“You can’t have it.”
And he stares at her, not as a challenge but because for him the topic is finished.
“Why not?”
“Building code restrictions. No fence on a property line in Sierra Villa can be higher than six feet.”
“Are you sure?”
And now he is getting angry. She’s implying he doesn’t know his job.
“I have been a handyman for forty-four years. If you don’t think I know what I’m doing, hire someone else.” And he starts to close his door. This woman is too much trouble, just as he thought.
“I don’t want to hire someone else,” she says to him, “I want an eight-foot fence.”
“Too bad,” he says.
“Yes,” she says, “it’s too bad.” Then, “I’ll see you at seven tomorrow morning.”
He closes the door. She walks quickly across the street. He watches from behind his living room drapes. When she closes her own door, he drops the drape back in place and all is quiet.
THE FENCE PROGRESSES. At a pace that drives Trudy crazy. The Angie’s List reviews were right. He works slowly. When she mentions this to him, as if he didn’t know, he simply looks at her and utters the word “meticulous.” Is he reading his own reviews?
Trudy knows there’s nothing she can do about the pace, but knowing and accepting are two different things. She’s sick and tired of accepting things she doesn’t like. The biggest, of course, is Brian’s death. But then the list includes her horrendous neighbor with his screaming and his power tools and his cigars. And her disapproving son with his dutiful weekly phone calls in which neither of them utters a word worth speaking and neither is satisfied when they hang up. And now she has a handyman who works in slow motion to add to the list!
She tells Clemmie all of this one Wednesday afternoon when things are slow at the library. She enumerates the list for her, ending with her handyman woes.
“Oh, I know Fred,” she says.
“You do?” For some reason Trudy is surprised, almost as if she doesn’t quite believe Clemmie has a life outside the library, because that’s the only place she sees her. A failure of imagination, Trudy tells herself.
“My mother always used him, and when David and I wanted to add a deck to the back of our house, I hired Fred.”
“How long did it take?”
“Oh, I don’t know.…” Clemmie thinks about it, then grins. “Forever. He works very slowly.”
Trudy throws up her hands—just her luck to have hired the slowest man alive.
“He is definitely an exercise in acceptance,” Clementine adds, watching Trudy’s face to see how her comment lands. She doubts Trudy has reached the acceptance plateau for any of the items on her list—Brian’s death, first and foremost, her son’s distance next in line. And immediately Trudy turns away from the younger woman, gathers up a pile of returned books to reshelve, conversation finished. Oh, how thin-skinned she is! Trudy’s body language says it all. She felt Clemmie’s words as an implicit reprimand. Clementine could kick herself. In an effort to be helpful, Clementine has gone too far. But no, Trudy comes back with empty arms and the need to ask, “But he does good work, right? Everyone on Angie’s List said that.”
“You will have the world’s most beautiful fence,” Clemmie assures her. Trudy heaves a sigh of relief and gives her colleague a rare smile.
WHAT TRUDY SEES WHEN SHE GETS HOME that afternoon is a work in progress. All the supporting posts, each exactly six feet from the last, have been cemented into place. Around each post Fred has built a small, sloping mound of concrete to eliminate water pooling at the base of the posts.
“Water rots wood,” he tells her the next morning when she asks. “We don’t want that.” The heads of the posts have been rounded off for the same reason. This way the posts will last longer. She nods; that makes sense to her. She is sure Brian would have approved of this man and his thoughtful work.
“Did you know my husband?” Trudy finds the words jumping out of her mouth before she has time to reconsider.
Fred, in the middle of mixing more cement in a large plastic bucket, looks up at her. The topic of dead relatives is one he doesn’t want to even consider. “No,” he says, although he remembers that if he happened to be outside his house early in the morning, Brian would wave as he jogged down the street. Fred never waved back. Waving led to conversation the next time around, something to be assiduously avoided. He doesn’t tell Trudy now that Brian continued to wave despite his lack of response. He just shakes his head no.
“He died,” she continues on despite herself. “One year and two months ago.”
“I know,” Fred says. It was hard not to know. The man collapsing just blocks from this street. The fire trucks racing in. Their neighbor Peggy, who found him, talking about it for weeks afterward. “My wife is dead almost thirteen years now.”
Trudy tries hard to remember his wife and vaguely calls up an image or two of a small Japanese woman who rarely left the house without her husband.
“You know what they say, about it getting easier over time? That’s not true,” Fred says as if reading Trudy’s thoughts.
“How comforting.”
He shrugs. Is it his job to be comforting?
For her part, Trudy wonders why she is having this conversation with a man she hired to build a fence. She already feels much worse for it. Let him build the fence and keep quiet, Trudy tells herself.
From that morning, she and Fred settle into a routine, something that has always soothed Trudy—the repetition of events. He arrives promptly at seven o’clock, as he told her he would. They “discuss” the fence if she has any questions, and only the fence. Otherwise, she says hello to him on her way out and leaves him to it. Increasingly, she has fewer and fewer questions. At a few minutes after five when she gets home, he is nowhere to be found, already finished for the day as he said he would be, driveway swept up and tools put away. He is as regular in his habits as she. They dance to the same beat and that helps Trudy relax.
Even the Yeller doesn’t seem to bother him. Trudy asks him that one morning after she is sure her neighbor has left with the two boys, driving them to the Catholic school several miles west along the 210 Freeway.
Quietly, because the wife may still be home, Trudy asks, “Does it get noisy here in the afternoon?”
Fred has no idea what she means. “No,” he says, “just the power saw sometimes when I need to cut the wood.”
She shakes her head, glances at the Doyles’ house again to make sure the wife isn’t outside, getting into her car. “I mean him.”
Fred shrugs. “When he brings his sons home, he yells at them to get in the house. Every day. Is that what you mean?”
“Exactly!” Then, “Don’t you wonder what goes on inside that house?”
Fred stares at her as if she’s insane. In truth, Trudy occasionally worries that on this topic she’s veering in that direction.
“It’s not my business,” Fred says and turns on the saw, conversation finished as far as he’s concerned.
But for Trudy the obsession isn’t. Now that her mind is no longer focused on the fence building—Fred is in place, the boards are going up—it has more room to ponder the drama next door.
One Saturday afternoon when Fred is not there—he never works on the weekends—Trudy is rinsing out her morning coffee cup when she hears the wife’s heels on the driveway. She has a distinct way of clopping along, as if her shoes never quite fit. It’s the rat-tat-tat of weary feet in low-heeled shoes worn by a heavy woman. She’s walking down the driveway to her car, which is parked on the street, her boys with her. She’s got a gentle hand on the head of the younger one, Aidan, as he trails along beside her. The older one, Carl, runs ahead.
The wife is just this side of being very fat. She never wears pants or jeans, too fat for that. She wears one long, printed skirt or another every day. And, like her husband, she’s always on the phone. But she seems nice. In the year they have lived next door, Trudy has overheard dozens of conversations, and the woman—her name is Brenda—never yells. In fact, she always seems unduly cheerful, telling people all the time that she’s “super!” but Trudy supposes that’s in counterbalance to her husband’s nastiness. And most importantly, she is sweet with her children. She calls them “honey” a lot and praises them often. What Trudy does not understand is how she remains married to the rodent. Doesn’t she see how much damage he’s doing to the boys?
The children are now pushing each other and shoving as boys do while Brenda clomps along to her car, cell phone to her ear. Trudy hears her saying, “They came back at $769,000.… I know … I know … that’s not much movement. We could try a counter at $740,000.… Okay, think about it and call me back. Remember, they have an open house tomorrow, so we should make a decision before that.… Right, just call me.…”
They have reached the street, and although Brenda has opened the back door of her car for the boys to climb in, they have escalated their roughhousing and are now chasing each other around the car and giggling. She is having a hard time ending her conversation and riding herd on the boys at the same time.
She’s gesturing to the kids—Get in the car—and saying to her client, “Good … This is the way it goes.… No, no, it isn’t personal.… Take the personal out of it—”
And then Trudy hears the Yeller slam the front door and come onto the porch and yell at his wife, “Brenda! What in holy hell are you doing?!”
All three of them freeze—the wife and the two boys, who are by now in the middle of the street. Hurriedly, Brenda gets off the phone and starts to usher the boys into the car, but that is not enough for Kevin Doyle. He stomps down the driveway and in full view of Trudy, who has moved to the living room window to get a better view, begins to berate his wife.
“What are you doing? What the hell are you doing?! You weren’t even looking, were you?! Where were the boys? In the middle of the fucking street! That’s where they were!”
“Kevin,” she says quietly as she stands by the driver’s door, but that does nothing to derail the assault.
“You want them dead, is that it?! You want them run over by a car? Were you even watching?!”
The wife stands there without speaking, her eyes on his ugly face, waiting this out.
“I thought you went to college. I thought you had some brains in your skull.” And then he roars, “Those boys are going to be killed and it’s going to be on your head!”
He turns and walks back into the house and slams the door, damage done, humiliation complete. There’s a stunned silence on the street, like an intake of breath; even the birds have been frozen into muteness.
Brenda closes the back door of her car, makes sure the boys buckle up, gets into the driver’s seat, and drives away.
Trudy lowers herself into her armchair and contemplates what she just saw. She’s totally unfamiliar with that kind of behavior. Oh, she knows people scream at their wives and children, but she’s never experienced that kind of vitriol firsthand. Her parents weren’t screamers. Brian almost never raised his voice. The cruelty of Kevin Doyle’s words is what undoes her and makes her fear for the boys. Why is he always telling them to “get in the house”? What happens in that house? If he’s capable of that kind of anger against his wife in a public place, in full view of the neighborhood, what does he do to those boys once the doors are shut and the curtains pulled? What can she do about it?
She has no answer, but as often happens, Life provides an opening. One day soon after the ugly incident in the street, Trudy decides to come home for lunch, something she hasn’t done for the past year. When Brian was alive, they would make dates and meet at the house for lunch and whatever developed after that. Since his death, it’s been too hard to be in their empty house at lunchtime, some part of her still waiting to hear Brian’s car pull up into the driveway and his eager voice call out as he stepped into the kitchen, “Here I am!” as if he were delivering his person as a present, gift-wrapped expressly for her.
But this day she decides to find some courage and go home. There was a classroom of second graders at the library all morning, and Trudy could use a few minutes of peace and quiet.
As she walks up her brick path, she sees Fred at work on the fence, now close to halfway done, and a brown wrapped package on her front porch. She can’t think of a single person who would be sending her something, and when she picks it up she sees that it is, in fact, addressed to the Doyles but deposited on her porch.
She goes to Fred, package in hand. “Did you see who brought this?”
“UPS.”
“But it belongs next door.”
“No one’s home next door. The guy asked me if he could leave it here. I said yes.”
“Why did you do that?” she asks him sharply. “Now I have to talk to them.”
“No, you don’t. Put it on their porch. The UPS guy doesn’t care.”
“All right.”
“I’m going home for lunch,” he tells her as he stands up, dusts off his threadbare jeans, worn to white at the knees. “I’ll be back in thirty minutes.”
Trudy watches him cross the street, open his front door, and enter the house. She stares at the package in her hands. It’s innocuous looking, about the size of a cake box, stamped and sent from the post office. Put it on the front porch and be done with it, she tells herself. And she makes her way up the Doyles’ driveway and onto their porch, where she stands, package in hand, pondering.
Behind the barrier of his living room drapes, Fred scrutinizes her, the need to eat lunch forgotten in his need to watch Trudy. What is this crazy lady going to do now? He watches her ring the doorbell—once, twice, and wait. Didn’t he explicitly tell her no one was home? Why doesn’t she just put the package down and leave? Ah, now he sees why.
Trudy puts her hand on the Doyles’ doorknob. She can’t believe she’s doing this—is she committing breaking and entering?—but she can’t seem to stop herself. The door opens. She bets one of the boys forgot to “lock the damn door!” as the Yeller is always shouting.
She looks quickly behind her, scanning the street. Is she being observed? If anyone asks her, she’ll just say she’s being neighborly, putting the package inside the front door to keep it safe. That’s good. That will work. And then she slips inside the house.
Fred, from the safety of his living room, shakes his head. What a stupid thing for her to do. She could get into a lot of trouble.
Trudy stands with her back against the front door, package in hand, and surveys the living room. Her heart is pounding away in her chest, bombarding her with what she assumes is terror but could also be excitement.
What she sees is a long, narrow room that fits horizontally across the front of the house. There’s a fireplace against the street-facing wall and sliding glass doors on the opposite wall out to a U-shaped patio. The furniture is all oversize, as if giants lived there—a huge leather couch that would swallow Trudy up if she deigned to sit in it, her feet not even hitting the floor, and two high-backed armchairs appropriate for a nineteenth-century gentlemen’s club. The furniture is grouped to face the fireplace. The rest of the room is empty except for small oil paintings of common scenes—apple picking, sailboats on a choppy sea, a farmhouse—positioned high up on the wall. Only the giant rodent can see them, Trudy thinks as her eyes scan the room, a cold and sterile space, no warmth or bright colors or pillows on the sofa, or even rugs on the floor, but nothing out of the ordinary. She’s not going to learn anything by standing in this room.
Trudy knows she should back out, put the package down on the front doorstep, and walk quickly back to her house, but she can’t. She needs to see the boys’ bedrooms. Seeing where they sleep will give her vital information, she’s sure of it.
It looks like the bedrooms are off to the left, in their own separate wing. She crosses the living room and makes a right turn into a hallway. Now she’s really done it. There is simply no explanation for being so far into the house. If one of them comes home and finds her, she’s done for. But that doesn’t stop her. She feels her eyesight sharpen. She knows that’s impossible, but that’s what it feels like. And her hearing gets more acute. Everything feels like it’s happening on another planet, one where the elements in the atmosphere combine differently and all objects are more sharp edged and all sounds explode into her ears. There’s something thrilling about it.
She opens the first door she finds, and it is definitely one of the boys’ rooms. There are bunk beds on the far wall, complete with Spider-Man sheets, and a desk against the window with drawing supplies—Magic Markers and stickers and sheets of faintly brown drawing paper—and the requisite electronic equipment—a laptop, an iPad. There’s a wall of cubbyholes stuffed with essential boy paraphernalia (Trudy remembers them all from Carter’s childhood): a baseball mitt, a bike helmet, a terrarium that now holds pieces of Legos, a deflated basketball, a board game called Tsuro with an elaborate dragon on the lid, and a whole colony of plastic dinosaurs arranged with infinite care into groupings of like kinds. Trudy remembers Carter’s dinosaur phase, which lasted well over a year. Apparently nothing much has changed in that regard. Dinosaurs march in battalions across the wall of cubbies. What she has in front of her is a room any seven-year-old could live in happily. It tells her nothing.
She backs out and tries the room next door. This must be the younger boy’s room, Aidan’s, because there are more remnants from toddlerhood here—a couple of dirty stuffed animals sitting lopsided on top of a bookcase, a brightly colored plastic dump truck filled with tennis balls, a mural of a rainbow painted on the wall above the bed with a leprechaun at the end who looks a lot like Aidan.
Trudy is disappointed and relieved at the same time, relieved that it all looks so normal, disappointed that she hasn’t found any evidence to bolster her belief that something heinous happens in this house. If she’s going to do something, if she’s going to try to help these boys, she needs evidence. And she realizes as she steps back out of Aidan’s room and closes the door that this is exactly why she entered the house in the first place.
There’s one more door in the hallway and it’s closed. She assumes it’s the rodent’s bedroom and she’s tempted to take a look. She contemplates the door, moves toward it, her hand extended, when she hears, “What are you doing?” and she nearly jumps out of her skin.
Fred stands in the hallway, frowning.
“You scared the bejeezus out of me!” Now Trudy can be furious instead of terrified. It’s only Fred.
“You deserve it. What are you doing in here?”
“Something awful happens in this house and I need evidence.” This is said as righteously as Trudy can manage.
Fred doesn’t even answer her. He takes her by the upper arm—she looks down in astonishment at his hand on her biceps—and leads her out, through the living room, the front door, and onto the porch. Next he takes the package from her hands and puts it down on the Doyles’ doorstep. Then he marches her smartly and quickly down the driveway, his grip on her arm tight and insistent.
“There,” he says as he deposits her on her own front porch. In his mind the matter is finished. He turns to the sawhorse he set up that morning and begins to prepare another slat for the fence.
Trudy is left feeling as if she’s been chastised and rescued at the same time, but, true to form, she allows her anger to flood any gratitude she might feel.
“If well-meaning people turn their eyes away when they know something evil is happening, well then … then”—she sputters for a moment and then finds her footing—“then we have the Holocaust!”
Fred, head down, continues to work. He says nothing, hoping Trudy will go into her house and leave him alone. No such luck.
“Children need to be saved. Sometimes even from their own parents.”
“The man yells at his kids. It’s too bad. But there’s nothing you can do.”
And that attitude spins Trudy into overdrive. So cavalier! So unfeeling! So cowardly!
“Don’t you tell me to just sit tight and put up with it!” She’s fairly yelling.
Fred shrugs. He’ll be damned if he’s going to say another word. He takes the cedar plank off the sawhorse and begins to nail it to the supporting crossbars. He hammers longer and harder than he needs to. Trudy stands at his back, fuming, when, above the hammering, they both hear the blasting music of a car radio and turn to see Kevin Doyle speeding up his driveway, the top of his convertible down as always, the cell phone plugged into his ear, of course, the cigar clamped in his yellow teeth and its putrid aroma wafting after him.
Fred turns and eyes Trudy. There is no need for him to say—Look what I just saved you from. And she doesn’t have the good grace to thank him. She simply turns on her heel and stomps into her house, angry still.
She paces around the house, stirred up, agitated. Through the living room, down the hall she goes, then into the small dining room where she no longer eats, and out the kitchen door. Oh, why isn’t Brian here when she needs him? She’d rail and rant and he’d listen and she’d figure out this whole mess! She looks around the heavenly backyard, this place where she feels Brian most fully. It shelters her and surrounds her and protects her from the rest of the whole ugly world.
Help me, she says, not sure whether she’s spoken out loud and now not caring. She’s calling up something—Brian’s spirit or his love for her or something. Help me. And Fred, in the driveway, measuring another plank, hears her because Trudy has pleaded aloud.
Here’s the issue, Trudy explains to Brian, making sure now that it’s only thoughts she’s sending forth and not words, how can what I saw inside that house be at such odds with what happens every day outside of it? Brian, everything inside seemed so ordinary. It could have been Carter’s room when he was a child.
She paces on the patio, trying to sort this all out on her own. If you saw those boys’ rooms, you’d think nothing was wrong. And then a thought occurs to her that makes her stop moving and sink into a patio chair. Is this a normal family? Could the yelling and demeaning simply be ordinary life for some people?
Oh!—and here Trudy sucks in her breath realizing suddenly—isn’t that worse? That those boys think ordinary life always contains such ugliness. Trudy’s heart is suddenly breaking. “Oh, Brian,” she voices into the quiet backyard air. “Oh no.”
Fred, carrying two more slats of cedar over to the sawhorse, hears the lament. He puts the wood down and stands motionless for a minute, paying quiet attention to the two factions wrestling within him.
Trudy, in the backyard, leaning forward in her chair, forearms on her thighs, her head in her hands, hears, “I talk to my dead wife, too, but she never answers me.”
Trudy doesn’t move. She knows Fred is standing there and she understands his presence is a compassionate gesture. She just doesn’t know whether she can accept it. Finally she says, “Maybe she’s had enough of you,” without raising her head.
And although Trudy can’t see it, Fred begins to grin. His face cracks open into a genuine smile and he lets out a sort of guffaw that could be taken as a laugh. Trudy hopes it is a laugh.
“Maybe so,” he agrees.
ON THE FIRST TUESDAY OF DECEMBER, as it nears five o’clock, Trudy tidies up the library. She is always scrupulous about opening and closing the building on time. From the end of the front desk counter, she retrieves the protest petition. There are pages and pages and pages of signatures, hundreds of them, she is very quietly proud to notice.
As Clemmie gently shoos the last people out of the library, Trudy gathers her sweater and petition and keys to lock the library. The two women walk out together, stop on the sidewalk for a moment before Clementine heads to her car and Trudy walks the four blocks home. The sun is almost down now that it’s winter and the air is chilly. There may be frost on the lawn tomorrow morning.
“What’s going to happen tonight?” Clementine asks.
Trudy shrugs. “I’ve never been to a city council meeting before, I have no idea. I’ll hand over these,” she says as she indicates the well-thumbed pages bursting from the clipboard.
“And will you say something? Like a little speech?”
“What for? It’s all here.” The thought of having to speak in public sends a spike of irritation through Trudy. Of course not, she tells herself, nobody wants to hear me speak. Clemmie doesn’t know what she’s talking about. But Trudy, in a rare show of discretion, refrains from telling her so.
“Seven o’clock, then.”
“Are you coming?” Trudy is surprised.
“I love the park, too. I thought you knew.” Clemmie says this softly, without rancor.
“Well, of course. Who wouldn’t love this park?” And the two women look out over the gray green oaks and the winding paths and the gentle hillocks that form the edges of the sunken park.
AT SIX FORTY-FIVE THAT EVENING, Trudy closes and locks the front door of her small house and stands for a moment appreciating the six-foot-tall, meticulously crafted cedar fence along her property line. It is almost finished. And then, as she diagonally crosses Lima Street, she is surprised to see Fred Murakami waiting patiently on the sidewalk in front of his house.
“I thought I would go with you,” he says when she nears.
She shrugs. “It’s a public meeting.”
The two small people fall into step beside each other, their strides matched effortlessly, a serendipity Trudy isn’t used to. At six foot three, Brian was over a foot taller than she, and his legs seemed to take up most of that difference. When they walked anywhere together she had to hurry quite a bit and he had to consciously slow down.
“The fence is coming along,” Trudy says as they reach the end of their block and cross the street.
“Yes. Almost finished now.”
“I feel better—not seeing them.”
He knows she means the Doyles, but particularly the giant rodent as he now thinks of the father.
“Ah, that’s good then, isn’t it? The fence will serve its purpose.”
“Exactly!” Trudy is cheered that Fred immediately understands what she means.
WHEN THEY REACH THE Sierra Villa Elementary School auditorium, Fred opens the heavy door for Trudy and they are presented with a room crowded with residents. Someone has set up two long tables, end to end, at the front of the room, below the stage, with a microphone and a name card identifying each of the five city council members, one at each seat. The burgundy upholstered seats, bolted to the floor and worn from generations of proud parents watching their children’s plays and graduations, are split into two sections by a narrow aisle. It is there that a podium with a microphone attached to the lip has been placed for residents’ comments.
People are milling about, talking to each other, yelling across the rows of seats to neighbors they haven’t seen in a while. Children are darting up and down the aisle and across the stage. The hubbub of so many voices bounces off the walls.
Trudy is taken aback. “Is it always like this?” she asks Fred.
He shakes his head. He has no idea. He’s never been to one of these meetings in his life. He hates crowds—they make him feel small and mean and anxious—but he’s there tonight because Trudy is presenting the petition.
They take seats close to the front and on the aisle so that Trudy can easily reach the podium microphone to present her signed petition pages. But first they have to wait through the reading of last month’s minutes and discussion of new business: whether the bike lane should be extended along Foothill Boulevard, whether a building permit should be granted to turn the empty Southern California Credit Union building into a homeless shelter. There is vigorous debate on both sides of the issues, taking up the better part of an hour.
Trudy tries to be patient, but she finds all this less than compelling. Extend the bike lane, okay, fine, what could be wrong with that? Biking is healthy. Brian would sometimes take out his bike to run an errand or two. He would have liked more bike lanes. And the other issue—of course they should build somewhere for homeless people to sleep. A slam dunk. All those nervous Nellies afraid of people down on their luck should just shut up.
When are they going to get to the park situation? She turns to Fred and whispers the question into his ear. He shrugs and can feel Trudy bristle with irritation. She wanted more than a shrug from him, but too bad. How should he know when the issue of the park will be brought up?
Trudy watches Candace Voltaug, the city council president, shuffle papers as she allows the homeless-people debate to continue. She is just the sort of woman Trudy doesn’t like—self-possessed, self-important, and well dressed. She’s maybe in her late thirties, Trudy guesses, and her hair is colored a startling shade of blond. She’s wearing very high heels, so high they tip her hips forward when she stands. Her finely tailored black suit fits her perfectly and her nails are impeccably manicured. Trudy casts a glance at her own irregularly shaped nails on her small, stubby fingers and looks away quickly—one more thing she never finds time to do: file her nails.
Candace Voltaug has never set foot in the library as far as Trudy knows, and since she almost never misses a day of work, she can be fairly confident in her judgment that this is not a woman who values reading for herself or her children. The longer Trudy sits there and ruminates, the more ironclad the case against the woman becomes in her mind.
Finally, Scott Thurston brings up the issue of the park. And immediately Trudy gets to her feet. She doesn’t even wait to be called upon. She marches to the podium, clipboard plastered across her chest like body armor. She can talk to Scott. She knows him. From time to time he and Brian would stand outside their house and talk about baseball—how the Dodgers were doing—or politics. But no, it’s Candace who is in charge. It’s Candace who won’t relinquish the microphone.
“Identify yourself, please,” Candace demands as if Trudy were some sort of alien life-form that has to be classified.
“Trudy Dugan. I live on Lima Street and I’m the librarian at the La Cruza branch.” Trudy finds it difficult to keep her voice on an even keel—could she be nervous speaking to all these people? Ridiculous, she tells herself, buck up.
“The Story Lady!” a child’s voice rings out from the crowd, and there are a few chuckles from parents.
Trudy ignores all that and continues on. Usually she enjoys being identified as the Story Lady, especially by the children who come to hear her, but now she is on a mission and she won’t be sidetracked. She holds up the clipboard. “I have twenty-one pages of a signed petition from the citizens of Sierra Villa who want to preserve the park, who think the idea of a condo development on that land is …” and here Trudy pauses and searches for the absolutely correct word, “an abomination!”
Now she must be talking too loudly or too stridently, something, because all at once it’s completely quiet in the room—no one rustling about in their seat, no whispering or talking on cell phones.
“What you are proposing is an affront to everything we hold dear in this community!” Trudy is surprised at how angry she is as she stands there. Her legs are shaking.
Candace Voltaug struggles, but she can’t keep annoyance off her face. The last thing she wants is to raise the temperature on this debate, and here’s this angry, little, badly dressed woman stirring things up even before the city council can present their point of view.
“Mrs. Dugan,” she says as calmly as she can manage, “you haven’t even heard the very good and cogent reasons for our consideration of the developer’s offer.”
“There is nothing he can say that would justify destruction of that beautiful park.”
“Perhaps there is,” Candace says through clenched teeth. “Perhaps you might learn something from listening first.”
“Perhaps you would learn something from reading the hundreds of signatures I have here,” and Trudy walks swiftly forward and plunks the clipboard on the table in front of the city council president. And now the two women are eye to eye, both far too angry for the content of their conversation.
“Take your seat, Mrs. Dugan.” This is said as punitively as Candace Voltaug can muster.
“I’m not finished,” Trudy finds herself saying. Where are these words coming from? She has no idea, but she seems to be on some sort of wild ride. She won’t back down, and so she skates ahead on the current of anger that is propelling her.
Slowly Trudy turns to face the now-rapt audience. All eyes are on her. She sees Clementine and her kind husband, David, toward the back of the room, watching her with real sympathy in their eyes. There’s that nice woman with all the children, Susannah, who signed her petition, and the older couple with the white hair from across the street. She recognizes other faces, too, from the library. All these people watching her, waiting for her to say something brilliant or noteworthy or important. Trudy has no idea what that might be, but she opens her mouth anyway and out come words.
“Why is change always good? Newer this and bigger that.
Why is that better? Why do we need to wipe out what we have in service of something we don’t? I love that park.” And here Trudy is mortified to find that her eyes may be filling with tears. “And I’m not the only one. If we build those disgusting cement boxes, will anyone say, ‘Oh, I love my condo. It’s so beautiful. It gives me such pleasure.’ Will anyone say that?” And Trudy answers her own question. “Only if there’s something seriously wrong with their use of language! People love living things—children, nature …” Now her voice falls to a whisper. “Other people …,” and she realizes she has to go sit down or she’s going to be in trouble. But her legs are refusing to work. She looks out over the crowd and her eyes find Fred’s. He’s been watching her intently and somehow he knows she’s in trouble. She can see it in his face.
Trudy whispers, “Other people” one more time and watches as Fred stands up, a short, graying, tidy man who finds within himself the ability to shout in this packed auditorium, “Yes!” as if he were affirming a preacher’s call to arms. “Yes, we need to save the park!”
A couple seated behind Fred stands up quickly and claps. Then another, and a woman in the front row, and then Clemmie and David, and then a whole row of people, and more and more, and through it all Trudy keeps her eyes on Fred, who doesn’t turn his eyes away from hers and slowly he smiles at her and slowly she heaves an enormous sigh of relief as she realizes she can now walk back to her seat and stand next to him. The fact that she’s getting applause doesn’t even register until she’s by his side.