Deena Goldstone - Tell Me One Thing

“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.