Tell Me One Thing

by Deena Goldstone

  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.

  “Really,” Trudy answers.

  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.”