Deena Goldstone - Tell Me One Thing

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.”