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.
Wishing
I LOVED A MAN ONCE. LOVING HIM TOOK ME by surprise. He wasn’t the man I was supposed to love, but he was the man who swept me away.
I showed up at his front door with no expectations. A friend had recommended me, that’s what Owen had said when he called. “Michael’s two beagles are in love with you.”
I had been walking Huey and Dewey for the past year and Owen, newly returned to the house he owned in L.A., needed someone to walk his dog. That’s what I did to pay the rent back then. The rest of the time I tried to write.
“I’m afraid it’s a big dog,” he said in that first phone call.
“I walk big dogs as well.”
“A very big dog.”
“Maybe I’ll charge by the pound, then,” I said and he laughed. I liked that — that he laughed.