Tell Me One Thing (28 page)

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.

“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.

I STOOD IN FRONT OF A SMALL
Spanish house, most likely built in the 1920s, with a large arched living room window facing the
street and two or three bedrooms hidden behind in a separate wing. If you had lived in Los Angeles for as long as I had, you knew these houses. They had thick walls and curved doorways, beautiful hardwood floors, and high, pitched ceilings in the public rooms.

I rang the doorbell and immediately heard the manic scatter of a dog’s nails on wood and some serious deep-pitched barking. And then Owen opened the door and I was presented with both of them, jockeying for position in the open doorway—the dog, enormous as promised, and the man slender and apologetic.

My immediate thought was that this was absolutely the wrong dog for this man. There was a dissonance about it—large, powerful, willful dog and besieged, boyish owner.

“Bandit, sit!” Owen said firmly. The tone was right. The dog ignored him. “Sit!” was said in a louder voice with the same result. “Excuse me,” Owen said to me and closed the door. I heard scuffling and Owen’s voice repeating the command to sit and then silence. Slowly the door opened to reveal a now-seated, extremely hairy, huge-headed, eighty-five-pound black dog and a somewhat more composed man in his late thirties facing me. His dark hair was cut short and framed a sharp-featured face that carried a hint of the child he must have been—animated and curious.

“He’s a Briard …” Owen said, an attempt at an explanation.

“I can see that.”

“Do you know the breed?”

“Smart, spirited, devoted,” I said.

“Pushy, dominant, stubborn,” he countered with.

I nodded. Briards could be all those things. “You didn’t know that when you got him?”

“I sort of inherited him. From a friend.”

“And you couldn’t say, ‘No thanks’?”

He shrugged, then grinned at me, somehow amused at the predicament he’d gotten himself into. “Obviously not.”

And we both turned and examined the still-seated dog, whose eyes had never left Owen’s face.

DURING THOSE FEW YEARS I WALKED DOGS
for a living I discovered you could learn an awful lot about a person by walking into their empty house. Most people have no idea how revealing all the detritus of their life is: which magazines they subscribe to, whether they make their bed, what they choose to leave out on their bathroom sink, what they had for breakfast that’s still sitting on the kitchen counter. I never snooped. I had a firm rule against opening medicine cabinets and dresser drawers, but what was in plain view was usually enough to give me some substantial clues.

In Owen’s house there was practically nothing. A dining room table, round and made of oak, with two mismatched chairs. A living room empty of furniture, the floor covered by a worn but still beautiful old rug in shades of deep blue. One bedroom held a bed, pristine white walls, and nothing else. A second bedroom was completely outfitted as a working office—desk, gray metal filing cabinets, several phone lines, bulging manila folders stacked on a bookcase. On his kitchen counter were several bottles of unopened wine and a box of Cheerios. On the refrigerator there was a snapshot of a little girl, maybe three, at the beach, her blond hair wispy and blown by the wind, squinting into the camera and holding out a starfish by one of its legs. His child? There was no way to know.

THE ARRANGEMENTS WE MADE WERE THESE
—I would walk Bandit five days a week, middle of the day, unless I heard from Owen. He gave me a key and said anytime between noon and two would be fine with him and Bandit. There was a dog park not too far
from his house, and if I wanted to take Bandit there and let him run around, that would be fine, too.

The first few days I showed up, Owen was at the door to greet me, always polite, always grateful, and somehow rueful that I was doing this task for him, as if he felt he should be walking his own dog. But gradually, as I became a fixture, I saw less and less of him. Most days as I walked up the front path, I would see Bandit through the large living room window dancing with excitement, running back and forward from the window to the front door. As I would let myself in, Owen would yell hello from his office but not emerge.

My relationship began with Bandit and that was fine with me. It was no accident that I was struggling to master a profession that required a single-mindedness of purpose and a self-imposed isolation. I relished the solitary hours each day broken only by conversation with the canines I walked. People were harder. I exhausted myself trying to meet expectations I was sure they had of me—perpetual good humor, constant attentiveness, smart conversation, and never a moment of neediness. All the dogs asked of me is that I show up on time and get them out of the house quickly. That I could do without breaking a sweat.

WALKING BANDIT MADE IT ABUNDANTLY CLEAR
that Owen wasn’t much good with boundaries. The Briard was affectionate and rambunctious but obviously believed he had as much right to make decisions and lead discussions as I did. He would not turn left when we hit the sidewalk in front of the house, because the dog park loomed several blocks to the right. He would listen to my firm and calm voice telling him to sit at each intersection and then blithely pull me across the street. No one had broken the news to him that he was a dog and, as such, was supposed to take his lead from the humans in his life.

I could tell without ever sharing a personal conversation that Owen valued spontaneity over protocol and exuberance over orderliness and that rules held no sway in his universe. I had found my polar opposite.