Tea Cups & Tiger Claws (13 page)

“I want to meet Grandma Railer! Tell that lady to
do what I say!” yelled Veronica.

“
Sarah, did you show Veronica your new stuffed animal? Would you like to see it Veronica? It’s called a Gonk, and Sarah will even let you keep it if you like it enough. Would you like that sweetie?”

“Mo
m, that’s mine,” said Sarah.

Veronica threw herself onto the floor and
began throwing a very efficient temper tantrum.

Abigail gave
Sarah a wide-eyed SOS stare and then said, “Look Veronica! Sarah’s going to get the toy right now.” Sarah plodded off unhappily to the hallway by the front door that led to her bedroom.

Veronica pounded the carpeted floor with her hands and feet
in the traditional temper tantrum manner. “I want to meet Grandma Railer!” she screamed repeatedly, interspersed with ear piercing screeches.

Abigail
knelt by the body and tried massaging her niece’s back. This brought forth louder screeches than before. Abigail leaned back and closed her eyes. Her head and shoulders shook nervously. “Sarah, please hurry,” she yelled.

Veronica continued kicking and screaming and Dorthea figured
that an accomplished brat like that could easily go on for a good hour. Suddenly Abigail stood up and yelled, “Sarah! Where are you?” She charged toward Sarah’s room.

Dorthea, who’d been entertaining a crazy idea during the whole scene, rushed over to Veronica, knelt down, and pulled the skinny little girl off the
floor by the back of her dress. Surprised, Veronica stopped screaming and looked up. Dorthea leaned down and whispered into her ear.

When Abigail and
Sarah came back a minute later, they saw Dorthea on the couch, just as when they’d left, with Veronica standing politely by her side.

“Dear little Veronica
has decided that six year olds shouldn’t be throwing temper tantrums. Isn’t that right, Veronica?” said Dorthea.

“Yes. That’s right.” Then
she saw the furry stuffed animal in her cousin’s hands and walked up to her and took it. “Aunt Abbey said I get to keep it.” She hugged the toy and skipped happily from the room, leaving behind a basket full of Barbie dolls.

By the time the
Town Council meeting rolled around on the fourth Tuesday of the month, everyone in town had lined up on one side of Dorthea’s hotel or the other. When she entered the council chambers, however, she saw only friendly faces. People smiled at her and nodded and said hello. A man she’d never met led her down the stairs to a front row seat that had her name on it. The flatlanders had come out in force, upwards of two hundred of them, but not the upper crust flatlanders who lived for the pat on the head from their masters on the hill, or the middling crowd who didn’t mind buttering their bread on both sides if they could get away with it, but the bottom dwellers who liked having a good time more than they liked staying in line. And on that score Dorthea didn’t deceive herself; most of them had come out in favor of the hotel for the simple pleasure of backing the Town Council into a corner and watching them try to wriggle free. They favored the hotel, but most of them would be hard pressed to say why. Heaven help her when they stood up to speak.

She didn’t see anyone from the hill. No surprise there.
That’s not how things worked in Prospect Park. As with all important matters, the hotel had already been decided by a higher authority, and the good people on the hill had no reason to doubt it. And they had no reason to subject themselves to an unfriendly mob, unintelligible speeches, and the usual Town Council droning about garbage hauling contracts and sewer service rates. 

A three foot half wall separated the tiered
, amphitheater style public seating from the ground level business side of the room. Dorthea saw the dais where the councilmen, who had not yet entered the chamber, sat in high back leather chairs behind an intricately carved giant curved desk. They may have spent their time voting on toilet paper budgets and proper bunting for the fourth of July parade, but they looked like Supreme Court Justices when they did it. Below the councilmen, on both sides of their curved structure, stood ordinary desks where un-exalted clerks were already at work. In the aisle to her immediate left, on the public side of the room, stood a wooden podium, behind which a line of people had begun to form. They mumbled to themselves, sometimes referring to papers rolled up in their hands, sometimes practicing grand speech making gestures. When one of the clerks saw them, he told them to sit down until the proper time.

At seven-thirty sharp, the
councilmen filed in, one of the clerks called roll, and the mayor called the meeting to order. But if the good people thought bare knuckle time had arrived, they were mistaken. First the mayor introduced one of the local ministers who then made a long, flowery prayer. Then the clerk told everybody to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. Then the mayor lobbed words back and forth with the clerk and the other councilmen having to do with minutes from the last meeting and whether they should be approved, followed by a unanimous, mumbling vote of “Aye” by the entire council. Next the mayor said something about a last minute amendment to the list of consent items and the clerk stood up and read aloud from a list that contained items such as financial reports, hiring of staff, and a new street sweeper on order from Elgin, Illinois. One of the councilmen made a passionate speech about the item he wanted removed. The other councilmen yawned, blew their noses, and cleaned their glasses. After the certain item got removed from the list, the mayor told the councilmen to vote and they all mumbled “aye.”  

Finally, after almost an hour, the mayor looked out over th
e crowd and announced that instead of the laundry list of individual items they usually considered, they would, as agreed to in the consent agenda, consider only the zoning variance and building permit for the proposed hotel. The crowd erupted with a cheer, and the mayor reminded them that they weren’t at a football game. The mayor then asked to hear the planning department’s recommendation. A different clerk, across the room from the other one, stood up and recited like a bored eighth grader a list of bad things about the hotel. The people grumbled. When they grumbled too loudly, the mayor tapped his gavel and stared out over the crowd. The grumbling stopped and the clerk finished his inspirational message. Then, after laying down some ground rules, the mayor opened up the meeting to public comment.

A
little, wiry man with greased back hair and a brown weathered face jumped up to the podium. He wore a white dress shirt, dirty brown pants, and old, scuffed shoes. A line quickly formed behind him.

He cleared his throat a few times and said, “I hereby do requisition this august body of
—”

“Please state your name and who you represent,” said the first clerk.

“I don’t represent no one,” said the man, looking confused.

“Name please,” said the clerk.

“Ned Chambers.”

“Address?”

“Number three…uh…Yucatan Downs.”

The people groaned
. Dorthea closed her eyes and hoped this wasn’t the beginning of the end.

“Proceed
,” said the clerk.

He cleared his throat and started again. “I hereby do requisition this august body of the
Town Council of Prospect Park California to accept this official petition signed by me and my wife and my mother-in-law and three different cousins to name the aforementioned hotel ‘The Newfield Excelsior Arms Hotel.’” He took a folded paper from his shirt pocket and eagerly held it out to the clerk. The clerk looked at the paper like it contained the plague.

“We are not here to name the hotel,” said the
mayor sternly. “We are here for public comment about the zoning variance, the building permit, and whether the hotel should be built at all. Next please.”

“Well it’s got to be named don’t it,” said the man, before the restless crowd told him to sit down and the
person next in line pushed to the front.

Fortunately for Dorthea, the crowd in that
auditorium didn’t need a flashy speaker to rile them up. A person needed only to say something good about the hotel and make a little sense when they said it. When one of the first speakers, a stooped lady with white hair and a voice that barely filled a paper bag, said that she’d studied every similar sized town in California, and had found that each one had at least one hotel or motel within a nine mile radius from the town’s center, the people erupted like they’d just heard the Gettysburg Address. That’s when Dorthea got the feeling that the miserable flatlanders might come through after all. Even the ones that froze, and only managed to croak out a few skinny words in favor of the hotel, got cheered. And the ones who’d rehearsed a bit, and those who fancied they had a knack for whisking people around with their words, gloried in the kind of response they’d probably always dreamed about. After each sad story about dashed family reunions due to lack of accommodations, and frail mothers and fathers put up in sleazy Santa Marcela motels and spending half the day riding buses just to visit their children in Prospect Park, the people broke out spontaneously, chanting, “ho-tel, ho-tel, ho-tel,” over and over again. The mayor didn’t take kindly to this, or to the brief swell of unbridled boldness that it inspired. When one man jabbed his finger into the air and called out the snobs on the hill to come down off their high horses and account for their naked discrimination, the mayor beat him back into line with the sound of his pounding gavel. But that didn’t stop the people from clapping and cheering and stomping their feet at every opportunity. Dorthea sat back and soaked it in.

In the middle of
the ruckus, at its very height, Dorthea saw the eyes of the councilmen dart in unison to the top of the public side of the auditorium. Then she heard a gasp and saw turning heads and craning necks. She looked as well and saw Judith on the top aisle, glaring down on the assembly. The crowd hushed and their fevered emotions quickly turned cold. Their curious eyes followed the queen as she walked purposefully along the upper aisle before turning right to the aisle that led down to the podium. When she got to the line of people waiting to speak, the last person in line, a middle-aged man, pretended not to see her. He fidgeted with his hat and looked at his feet. She stared at him. He stole a quick glance, fidgeted some more, and then left to go to his seat, along with everyone else in line. She stood alone at the podium, and that’s when she saw Dorthea, sitting just to her right. The ladies made eye contact. Judith set her jaw, focused her gaze, and, without saying a word, said many words, unpleasant and easy to understand. For her part, Dorthea smiled and admired her sister’s outfit, a mauve slender column sheath dress with matching opera gloves and a helmet hat covered in small pink flowers. Forty-five years of luxury had taken a toll on her but she looked stylish, as usual.

“
Lady Judith,” said the Mayor, “on behalf of the entire Town Council, we are truly honored by your presence.”

She ignored him and looked out over the crowd
with a wide, sweeping gaze, and then said, “Here we are, the deprived, suffering souls of Prospect Park. You poor, poor things, having to live in beautiful, crime free neighborhoods, in one of the most exclusive towns in the world. It must be more than you can bear. And all because you don’t have a hotel five minutes from your front door. Well, let me tell you this, if you don’t know how good you have it now, you’ll surely know when you don’t have it anymore. When your streets look like Santa Marcela’s, you’ll know it then. Did you ever stop to ask yourselves how Prospect Park became the envy of the state? Of the country? Belligerent mobs storming city hall didn’t do it! Tasteful, cultured people did it! And it took years. You should think about that the next time some malcontent comes whispering in your ears.” Judith didn’t look at Dorthea, but other people did. Then Judith turned to the Town Council.

“And no one
deserves more blame for this fiasco than you! Instead of nipping it in the bud, as it deserved, you’ve conjectured, and entertained notions, and fostered discontent until a little irritation has turned into a flaming red infection. And still you don’t stop! While we trust you with our wellbeing, and pay you handsomely to protect our interest, you turn the people against us, invite them to city hall, and help them stab us in the back!” She stared at the councilmen. They didn’t move a muscle. “Well, it’s over now,” she continued, “You’re going to do your job and put an end to this nonsense.”

She appeared to be done talking but the councilmen didn’t seem to be sure. They stole inhibited glances at
one another.

“What are you waiting for? Do your little vote. I’m
sorry to have to say it, but I’m not leaving until you do.”

“But mother, what about me?
I want to talk too,” said Veronica, who stood at the top of the aisle, standing next to her cousin Sarah.

“Not now
, Veronica.”

“
Father Promised! He said I could talk!”

“He said no such thing.
Sarah, take Veronica to the car.”

“He did too! He promised me! He promised me!” A
nd, as Sarah tried to take her cousin by the hand, Veronica went into her temper tantrum routine, this one of the standing, stomping variety.