Gourdfellas (3 page)

A rock had been thrown. The tactic brought to mind thirteen-year-old boys whose frustrations had reached desperation levels in a dates-and-oil exporting country. It wasn’t the kind of behavior I expected from members of this small, congenial community.

Susan had expressed what turned out to be the minority opinion—that the casino was a morally righteous project that should be endorsed by the town in the name of justice. Nora said she’d called it a reparation. Didn’t that come from the word repair? What would it take to repair the friendships that were close to shredding over this issue? Nora, Elizabeth, Melissa, and Susan had helped each other flourish in the rich Walden Corners soil. I’d read lately about how marigolds and tomatoes, planted near each other, made for a healthier garden. But my friends were behaving more like dill and carrots, natural enemies that interfered with the other’s ability to reach its true potential.

“What’s funny?” Susan said in a constricted voice.

The doctor murmured an apology and swabbed her forehead with more clear liquid.

I must have laughed out loud without realizing it. I had slipped so easily into country metaphors, replacing all the real-estate figures of speech that had been my native tongue when I lived in Brooklyn.

“I was just thinking about marigolds and tomatoes and dill and carrots. You feeling better? You sure look better.” Except for the Herman Munster zipper that would grace her forehead for a while, she did seem almost like herself again.

“Thanks for staying with me, Lili. I guess what hurts even more than my head is that they all disappeared. Melissa, Elizabeth, even Nora. At least, that’s the way it seemed.”

“They were probably stuck in the crowd somewhere,” I said, only half believing myself. “I’m sure they wouldn’t let a difference of opinion cancel out more than twenty-five years of friendship.”

Susan’s silence spoke volumes.

 

By the time I’d driven Susan home, helped her undress, and waited while she left a message at school saying that she wouldn’t be in in the morning, I felt lightheaded, my energy gone. But I still had to drive twelve miles on two-lane country roads and not hit any stray cows that had wandered onto the road in search of bovine companionship. I’d ridden the subway to my parents’ house in Brooklyn in this state countless nights after long talk sessions following a City College philosophy seminar or after tedious, noisy parties that were meant to prove that we were smart, accomplished, and desirable. That took a different kind of concentration, one that assessed the eyes and the body language of other riders.

This took being able to see in the dark.

After a little more than a year of living in the country, eight miles from the town of Walden Corners and far enough from my old life to feel excited, still, by the possibilities of a new start, the beacon of my front porch light had the power to give me a floaty, happy feeling. I parked and stood in the darkness, enjoying the sound of the peepers. How friendly, how peaceful. An hour with a book and I’d call it a night.

Sheltered by the sky, covered by the stars, nourished by the scent of green, new life . . . this was what I’d sought. I wrapped myself in my
bono fortuna
and walked up the back stairs, feeling lighter, happier. The comfort of my own small space—big enough for me, with its fifteen-by-fifteen foot living room with a wall of built-in bookshelves and a fireplace, three snug bedrooms, and a kitchen with enough elbow room for four friends to kibbitz shoulder-to-shoulder while I cooked—colored everything with hope, and I felt some of my worry wash away. Perhaps the fight over the casino could be transformed into a teachable moment about how to resolve differences without destroying relationships.

As a volunteer community mediator, I understood that process. It worked well in a small room with an impartial facilitator. People walked in with a set of demands and, hopefully, walked out with an understanding that settling their dispute would let them put all that energy to other, better uses. No way would I get in the middle, though, with these four women. They’d get around to talking eventually, but they weren’t ready, not yet.

I kicked off my shoes and stared at the blinking message machine in the kitchen. No more trouble, I pleaded silently, not tonight.

I wasn’t enough of a math whiz to calculate the odds that all four messages were cheery greetings or even obnoxious sales pitches from adenoidal telemarketers trying to pay the rent by selling Flex-o-rama Workout Shorts. I hit the play button and started unloading the dish drain. Melissa, calling five minutes after I’d left to remind me about the meeting. A hang-up. A Ms. Janeway, heavy on the Mizz, inquiring about my schedule and the possibility of my writing a manual for new employees for her hotel in Boston. And then my brother’s voice, exultant, excited.

“Call me. Doesn’t matter how late. Just call me,” he said.

As I dialed, I wished I had a bottle of champagne waiting in the refrigerator so that I could pop the cork as Neil answered the phone. I would give him the chance to say it, but I knew exactly what his message meant. He picked up after the first ring.

“Port St. Lucie, here I come! Yahooo!!!” Dance music and loud voices in the background forced him to shout, and I pictured a crowd of happy, sweaty celebrants bumping hips, cheering my brother’s good fortune.

“You better get me some good seats. I’m not driving all the way to Shea Stadium just to sit in the nosebleed bleachers.” My laughter was unexpected, and I just let it roll out until I could breathe again. “Shortstop or second base? Oh, Neil, that’s so great. I’m so excited. I can’t stand it, this is so—”

“Second base. Just for now. They promised me shortstop within two years. Dreams come true, Lili. Hold on. I feel another one coming on.” The only sound I heard was the raucous noise in the background. After a second his “Yahoo!” split the air.

I yahooed with him, holding back the questions. There would be time for details—when he had to leave, the length of the contract, what his agent’s cut would be. For now, after three years in the minor leagues and a lifetime of preparation, my brother was finally going to live a dream that had sustained him since he was five years old. He would play baseball for the Mets.

“Mom’s already all worried about can I take care of myself on the road, and all the women who’ll be swarming me just to get near the glamour and the money. She’s gonna drive me nuts, I swear.”

“Not tonight—don’t let anyone spoil tonight. I’m sending huge hugs, Neil. And raising a glass to your success. I am so happy I can hardly stand it. Go back to your celebration.”

“I love you, Lili. Talk to you tomorrow.”

I guess that’s how the universe maintains equilibrium. One Neil triumph cancels out one Susan disaster.

 

After a night of tossing and checking the clock every half hour, the sound of rain on my tin roof made me want to reach for a book and spend the morning with it propped on my knees as a cup of tea cooled on my bedside table. I managed the fantasy for about half an hour, but by seven I roused myself and stood under tepid water, washing away the lethargy and preparing for another busy day. Breakfast, a brisk walk with my umbrella keeping everything but my shoes and socks dry, and then two hours at the computer working on a brochure for a luxury spa finished off the morning.

I called Susan, got no answer, and hoped that meant that she was feeling well enough to use her time off to run some errands.

I’d been good, had earned time in my gourd studio, transformed from the third bedroom into a space filled with tools, brushes, embellishments, and shelves and shelves of gourds. Entering that space always made my heart beat a little faster. When I first told my Brooklyn friend Karen Gerber about decorated gourds, the pink-tipped spikes of her brown hair seemed to stand up even straighter.

“You’ve gone cuckoo over a
vegetable
?” she’d said. “I thought I could trust you out of my sight for a couple of weeks. Why didn’t you go to St. Barth’s or Martha’s Vineyard or even, God forbid, a Hampton on your vacation? But no, you disappeared into the wilds of West Virginia and Kentucky and North Carolina. And came back a changed woman.”

“I still love good cheese and I read the book review section of the Sunday
Times
first. I like to sit around with my friends and dish. And I will always love walking down Fifth Avenue when there’s a foot of snow on the ground. What do you know about gourds, anyway? Ever meet one? They’re really magical.”

A
whatever
sigh wafted across the booth of our favorite Brooklyn diner. Even after I showed her a gourd I’d bought, a hard-shelled kettle gourd with a Native American design pyrographed on its round belly, she merely cocked one of her thick brows.

“Look at these colors,” I said, running my finger over the translucent richness of the rust, green, and chestnut hues of the designs. “You know, no two gourds are exactly alike. A natural canvas, that’s what they are. And unique.”

“Very unique,” she said, laughing at our longstanding language joke.

“Extremely unique,” I answered.

But other people, at fine craft fairs all over the country, did get it, and after three years my gourds were being accepted into juried shows and were selling to collectors. The twelve gourds I was driving up to a New Hampshire gallery on the weekend, a new series featuring designs based on African textiles and colored to approximate the muted tones of natural dyes, sat on a shelf awaiting their bubble wrap protection. The long-necked dipper that I’d been yearning to start rested on my work table, gleaming in the overhead light.

Dipper gourds, used for decades in the South. Huge kettle gourds that held grain in Central America. Gourds with skins fixed tight to make drums in Africa and Polynesia. When I picked up one of these humble vegetables, I felt a kinship that transcended time and geography, a connection to people I’d never met but who had the same appreciation of friends and family, of the land and its bounty.

If Karen could hear my thoughts she’d roll her eyes and proclaim me sappy. I smiled as I cupped the rounded bottom of the dipper gourd in my hand and turned it to see all its bumps and markings. Vines, that’s what it needed, twining up the graceful neck and joining at the top. I marked two long curves, selected a stylus for my pyrography tool, flipped on its transformer, and pulled on my respirator mask. Beyond sappy, she’d say, but Karen wasn’t here to watch as I closed my eyes and said my version of a prayer of thanks for the gourd and for my part in transforming it.

Still in that peaceful state, I reached for the gourd. And was nearly startled out of my chair by the shrill of the telephone. My first impulse was to ignore it, but I thought about Susan, alone, maybe even afraid. I reached for the receiver.

“Lili? Hi, it’s Connie Lovett. I’ve been knocking on your door but I guess you didn’t hear me.”

Her graciousness and that trace of Southern drawl kept the accusation out of her voice, but a flush of guilt crept up my cheeks. Tuesday. Today was Tuesday, my regular appointment teaching her how to work with gourds.

“I’m so sorry, Connie,” I said as I walked through the hall toward the kitchen. “I must have been lost in gourd space again.”

By the time I’d finished my sentence, I was pulling open the door. The rain had stopped and the sun shone brightly behind Connie. She looked good today, for someone undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. The treatments had turned this beautiful, energetic woman with snapping dark eyes and the clearest porcelain skin into a pale but brave version of herself. She stepped inside, gave me a quick hug, and adjusted the bright blue scarf that covered her head.

“Well, you’re here, and I’m glad. I’m so excited I could hardly eat my breakfast. Can we start? I don’t want to take up our time chatting when I could be learning.”

She seldom spoke about her illness these days. We’d met the summer before, when we both reached for the same watermelon at a farm stand outside of Hudson. One laugh led to another, and Connie and I started meeting at The Creamery for coffee and conversation most Thursday afternoons. A social worker with cases all over lower Columbia County, Connie had to learn how to treat herself with the same care she offered to her clients after she got her diagnosis in February. “Just be my friend,” she’d said after I asked her how I could help. “Don’t treat me like a sick person.”

I’d honored those boundaries she’d established, shutting off the questions and the sympathy she clearly didn’t want.

“Then I guess you’re ready to cut your first gourd,” I said as she followed me down the narrow hall to the studio.

“Can’t wait! I’ve been dreaming designs, and I’ve started a scrapbook to collect ideas. I’m so excited about this.” She stopped in the doorway and shook her head. “I hear you were with Susan at the hospital.”

“Doc says she’ll be fine. I still can’t believe that anyone would think that you can get what you want by hurting someone who disagrees with you.”

“All that person wanted,” Connie said quietly, “was to lash out at someone. The casino—that’s not what it was about. The person who hurt her was angry in his heart. I want the casino to be defeated, but I wouldn’t get physical about it.”

“You’re right. Listen, let’s forget all that for a while. Pick your gourd, Connie. Any one. Look. Touch. Smell. Whatever moves you to choose one of these babies.”

“Oh, Lili, this is like my birthday and Christmas, but better because I don’t have to write thank you notes afterward.” Her eyes shone with pleasure as she moved from shelf to shelf, a tentative hand exploring the surface of one, then another gourd. When she picked a medium-sized pear-shaped gourd, her face glowed with pleasure.

“I know,” she said happily. “The first lesson is cutting a straight rim. I can’t wait to make waves and—”

“Straight cuts this time. First you have to decide where you want the cut to be.”