“Do you like school?” she asks him.
He shakes his head.
“Do you have a rotten teacher?”
He looks up at her, surprised that an adult has made that kind of judgment about a teacher. In his house, no one would say that.
“She’s okay.”
“Then what don’t you like about it?”
Ricky shrugs again, hoping that if he doesn’t say much, she’ll stop asking him questions.
“That doesn’t tell me anything, a shrug. Tell me one thing you don’t like about it.”
“It’s boring.”
“Okay, I get that. Tell me one more thing you don’t like.”
Ricky doesn’t know what this lady wants him to say, why she keeps asking him questions, but he figures he has to come up with something to tell her. “The boys’ bathroom smells stinky.”
And Trudy laughs. “I bet it does. But I have a hunch there’s something else about school that you don’t like.”
Jeez, this lady won’t leave it alone. Ricky risks a glance up at her and she’s looking straight at him. She’s not letting him off the hook anytime soon, it’s obvious, and so he tells her, “I’m in the dumb kids’ reading group and everybody knows it.”
“Ahhh,” says Trudy, “I see.”
They walk together in silence. That answer seemed to satisfy her. Maybe now she’ll stop asking him things. But when they get to the intersection, she starts talking again. “I have a secret for you.”
He gives his all-purpose shrug again. He doesn’t think this lady can tell him anything he’d like to hear.
“Being able to read right away and being smart have nothing to do with each other. Smart kids can have trouble reading.”
After they cross the intersection, eyes down again, Ricky begins kicking a small stone as they walk. Trudy watches him. She wants to tell him to stop that, it’s annoying her, but she doesn’t. She walks and waits. Finally, he says without looking at her, “Is that true?”
“What do you think I do every day?” she asks him and then continues on without waiting for his answer. “I help kids read books and I’ve been doing it for almost as long as your mother and father have been alive, so I know it’s true.”
He doesn’t look at her as she explains and he doesn’t ask anything as they continue their walk. She watches the boy. She’s not sure he believes her.
WHEN THEY GET BACK TO HER HOUSE, Armando and his helper, Faustino, are just finishing up, loading the heavy mower back into the truck bed.
“Armando,” she says, “I need to show you something in the backyard,” and she hands Ricky the three books she chose for him. “You bring these back next Friday and we’ll get three more.”
The boy takes the books but doesn’t seem happy about it.
“Say thank-you to Mrs. Dugan,” Armando tells his son. The boy mumbles something, but Trudy isn’t interested in gratitude.
In the backyard, away from Ricky and Faustino, Trudy tells Armando what she suspects he doesn’t know. “Your son can’t read, Armando. He doesn’t understand the first thing about letters and sounds and how they make words.”
“Mrs. Dugan, he’s only eight. He has time to learn all these things.”
“No, what I’m telling you is that he’s not going to learn these things without some help. Can you help him with that, or your wife?”
Armando shakes his head. “Maybe if he was learning to read in Spanish, then—”
“Bring him with you every Friday. We have the summer. Every Friday. All summer.”
“No, Mrs. Dugan, I couldn’t—”
“You want him to fail in school? You want him to drop out? Because that’s what happens to kids who can’t read.”
“No, of course not, but I couldn’t ask—”
“You’re not asking. I’m telling you—bring him to me.”
And they look at each other in silence. Trudy’s gaze is clear and determined and, Armando suddenly sees, eager. He understands she wants to do this for him, for his son. For herself as well.
“Thank you” is what he says.
So now, on Friday afternoons when he looks into Trudy’s kitchen window, he sees she’s not alone. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, head bent over a book, busy teaching Enrique how to read. His son squirms and rests his head in his hand and sighs a lot—Armando can tell he is anything but pleased to be there—but Trudy pushes ahead and Armando knows that this is the summer that his son will learn something new. He will learn to read.
The Neighbor
IT IS NOT A NOBLE SENTIMENT TO DETEST one’s neighbor—the rational part of Trudy’s mind knows this. Hatred leads to no good. Unfortunately, these days rationality holds little sway on Trudy’s emotions.
Until a year ago, Trudy would have described herself as the most sensible of people. Just look at my life, she would have argued a little too proudly—a practical job as head librarian, a thirty-two-year marriage to her first and only love in which she was faithful and happy, and she would have bet her last dime that Brian, her husband, would have said the same. Together they crafted the life that they, and in Trudy’s exacting opinion every sane person, would have wanted—a judicious, measured life.
And then all that changed in the beat of a heart. One September morning, when the Santa Ana winds were leaching all the moisture out of the air, Brian went out for his regular three-times-a-week jog and didn’t come back.
In the early months of her widowhood, during those brutally hot September and October days, Trudy was barely functional, managing only to get herself to the library each day and back home late each afternoon. Then, once the front door was closed and no one could see her, she would collapse into her living room armchair and stare out the front window until it was dark enough to climb into bed.
Through those awful autumn and winter months, sitting in the dark, in the living room, evening after evening, playing back in her mind every kind and dear thing Brian ever did for her, Trudy got an eyeful of the new neighbor who had moved his family into the house next door only months before Brian died. And an earful. She learned right away that he is a yeller, a screamer of ugly words, and that she is in for an entirely unpleasant experience living next door to this man.
When Brian was alive she had easily ignored the commotion next door because what she and Brian had built together in their green-shuttered house didn’t leave any room for animosity. She didn’t have the energy or the inclination or the taste for it.
But now, more than a year after Brian’s death, she’s found that life is just chockful of things to rail against. Take the park situation. Even Trudy, who disdains the word “beautiful”—“Rendered meaningless by overuse,” she complains—has been heard to admit that the park adjacent to her library is “beautiful.” Set back from the street so it seems slightly hidden, ringed by hundred-year-old trees that keep the park cool and dappled in sunlight, Sierra Villa Park is an oasis of calm. And so, when the city council raised the question of selling the land to developers, there was a hue and cry in the neighborhood. Condos where neighborhood children now play soccer?! Concrete where the dignity of ancient oaks provides shelter for toddlers to play and for weary mothers to grab a few minutes of respite?! Trudy is incensed! She’s seen the architect’s drawing of the proposed complex. It makes her blood boil.
Pushing aside her natural reluctance to get involved, Trudy decides to draw up a petition. If Brian were alive, he’d tell her to let the politicians handle it. Maybe, if she pressed him, he would have made a call to their city councilman, Scott Thurston, who lives around the corner, and registered his mild objection. But Brian is not here. He has left her to her own devices, and her own device is a neighborhood petition. That’s how her disdain for her neighbor, acquired during those months after Brian’s death, turns into full-fledged, lip-licking fury.
Brian had been fond of the ancient Russian woman who had lived next door to the Dugans since the day they moved in, her small ranch house’s driveway abutting th
eirs. When Vivianna reached her late eighties and slowed down quite a bit, Brian added chauffeur duties to the list of tasks he did for her, a list that included grocery shopping, lugging the trash cans back and forth from the curb on garbage day, and watering her patchy lawn. Her grown children had been making noise for some time about how their mother couldn’t take care of herself anymore, a sentiment Vivianna disdained. She told Brian that she planned to lock all the doors and windows if they ever came for her.
And they did. The night Vivianna started a fire in her kitchen, locked doors were no impediment to the firemen who burst through to put out the flames. Behind them came Russell, Vivianna’s son, who used the opportunity to take her away. Too quickly, it seemed to Trudy, he rented an industrial Dumpster, parked it in her driveway, and filled it with a lifetime’s worth of memories and debris, indiscriminately tossing out photo albums alongside mountains of saved plastic bags, gorgeous beaded gowns long out of style along with broken furniture. Both Brian and Trudy had to turn away as the workmen piled up Vivianna’s life, higher and higher in the Dumpster. “Sadder and sadder,” Brian said, and he was right.
The son and daughter had the house cleaned and painted and then sold it to the Yeller who lives there now. His name is Kevin. Trudy sometimes hears the wife calling him, “Kevin Doyle!”
“He looks like a giant rodent,” Trudy tells her son, Carter, during his dutiful Sunday afternoon phone call. “This guy who moved into Vivianna’s house. Pointed nose, beady eyes, and an overbite.”
“Now, Mother …” Carter says. Although he restrains himself, she can hear the tsk-tsk he’s desperate to make. She knew he would admonish her. Since Brian’s death, their weekly phone calls consist of her complaining and his admonitions. The interaction is satisfactory to neither but familiar by now and thankfully, Trudy thinks, short.
But when did they ever have satisfactory conversations? Maybe when Carter was three or four and Trudy began to introduce him to the children’s books she had always loved. He loved them, too, and would ask her to read them to him over and over, and that bond lasted until he started first grade and began a life apart from her—friends, sports, the technology that boys seem to inhale into their pores. Every year after that, the distance between them grew wider and wider until finally, when Carter was able to make a choice of his own, he insisted on moving all the way across the country to attend Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, New Hampshire. Ridiculous place to go to school, Trudy has often thought but never said outright to anyone but Brian. “Freezing, in the middle of nowhere,” Trudy would complain to Brian. “Yes, but so far away,” Brian would say because he understood what Trudy didn’t—that Carter was never comfortable with them.
She gets off the phone with him every Sunday afternoon dissatisfied and cranky. And misses Brian even more. Gentle, patient Brian would listen to her rants, shake his head at whatever unfairness she was railing against, and get on with whatever he had been doing, usually gardening, before Trudy had sought him out and unloaded her latest diatribe. The listening and the moving on—both brought Trudy comfort.
Now she has no avenue but action to displace her anger, and so she finds herself, petition in hand, ringing her neighbors’ doorbells. The fact that she knows none of them, not a one, despite her thirty-plus years on the block doesn’t seem unusual to Trudy. She’s never been the sort of woman who stands and chitchats at the curb or makes small talk when out walking the dog. They’ve never owned a dog. In truth, Trudy didn’t feel the need to know her neighbors while Brian was alive. He was the one who would say hello as he gardened out front. He knew them by sight. He waved as they drove by. That was sufficient.
So now Trudy has to introduce herself to her neighbors. At the first house, the woman who answers the door of the small Craftsman, way down at the end of the block, quickly signs the petition. She’s young, maybe thirty, and has the distracted look of a mother of too many young children. Trudy can see at least three running around the living room, carrying on, as the woman, Susannah, as Trudy can see from her signature, tells Trudy how important the park is to them.
“Well, I can’t imagine not having the park.”
Trudy nods. She feels the same way. Good, a supporter.
“Where would the kids play?” and then she shrugs self-consciously and turns her shoulder to indicate the activity behind her. “And how much of that in the house could any one person take?”
As she hands the petition back to Trudy, she says, “You’re so good to do this,” and a fair-haired little girl of maybe four slips in beside her mother, holding on to one of her legs.
“You’re the Story Lady,” the child says, a thumb going into her mouth.
“You’re right. Good remembering. And I remember you from when I read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.…”
The child nods, pleased, and the mother takes the opportunity to say, “We’re so sorry about your husband” and what has been a fine interaction, a moment that feels almost normal, suddenly stabs Trudy in the heart. She doesn’t want to, she can’t, share her grief with strangers, however well meaning. That’s the only trouble with living in Sierra Villa, Trudy thinks as she says good-bye and moves on to the next house, everyone knows your business.
To her relief, the rest of the block goes smoothly and everyone on her side of the street signs. Trudy is fierce in her advocacy and people quickly agree that they must keep the park, that condos on that land would be horrible. To Trudy’s great relief, no one else mentions Brian. And then, there’s only one house left—the Yeller’s, at the corner. Trudy could skip his house and head to the opposite side of the street. She’s tempted to, but she won’t allow herself this weakness. She knocks on what she will always consider Vivianna’s door and a little boy of maybe six opens it for her. He’s blond and solemn, the sort of child whose features seem to have migrated to the middle of his face, leaving lots of cheek and forehead.
“Is your mother home?” Trudy asks him. Far better to speak with the mother than the rodent father. Not that she’s ever exchanged a word with the woman, but she seems more reasonable than the screamer. Trudy hears her speak nicely to the two boys.
But the child shakes his head no to her question; his mother isn’t at home. And then she hears the voice from somewhere inside the house, that ugly voice which disrupts the daily quiet of her house. “Never open the door! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?!” And Trudy sees the little boy flinch and then his father is there. “Get away from here,” he tells his son, who flees back into the house. And it is only Trudy and this man, this Kevin person, facing each other across the threshold. It’s the first time she’s ever been face-to-face with him and she’s surprised at how tall he is. Tall and white skinned and just as menacing as his words.
Trudy chooses to ignore the interaction she just witnessed—the ugliness of it, the evident fear the child has of his father’s anger—and presents the petition. “The city council is contemplating selling the library park to developers,” she begins. He says nothing. “If we get enough signatures on this petition, we may be able to save the park.”
She holds the clipboard with the petition out to him, but he doesn’t take it. Instead he says, “I don’t sign anything. You never know where your signature ends up.”
Trudy can feel anger rising in her like a flush, but she attempts civility. “I can guarantee you it will end up at the city council meeting on the first Tuesday of next month.”
“And then where? Can you guarantee me that it won’t go any further?”
Trudy is nonplussed. She has no idea what he means. But it’s immediately clear to her that he lives as if under siege. “Do you want to save the park or not? You have kids, don’t you want them to have a place to play?”
“My kids play in the backyard.”
“So you don’t care what happens to the park?”
“You got it, lady.”
“How civic-minded of you.” Trudy can’t help it. Her allotment of civility has been used up and he’s not s
tupid, although she wishes he were, and he immediately gets the sarcasm.
“Get off my property. Do-gooders like you just gum up the system.” And he closes the door in her face. It feels like a slap.
She crosses his driveway to hers—no fence in between, no line of shrubbery. Dammit! They never needed any demarcation when Vivianna was there, and now she regrets the open space with every particle of her being.
In the kitchen she gets herself a glass of water, furious and agitated, shaken really, but she refuses to call it that. That man makes her so angry she could spit! She glares out her kitchen window directly into his, across their two driveways. When Vivianna was alive Trudy never minded the proximity. It was a way to keep tabs on the older woman, making sure she was moving about and everything seemed all right. Now, with the Yeller next door, it feels like the privacy of her kitchen is being violated every single day. Curtains, those frilly things Trudy has always hated, she needs to get curtains! And then she argues with herself, No, I will not give him the satisfaction!
The petition lies on the kitchen table and the first page isn’t even completely filled. Trudy knows she has to go back out there. There’s the whole other side of the street. Seven more doorbells to ring. Oh, how she’d love to just stop. Forget it. But then there’s the park. And the principle of the thing. And the fact that she’s not a quitter. And the fact that she has nothing else to do on this Sunday afternoon.
Sundays were always gardening days when Brian was alive. Not that Trudy gardened. No, that was Brian’s domain, and over the years he made of their spacious backyard an Eden. That’s the way Trudy thinks about it. She couldn’t name more than a few of the shrubs and vines that Brian planted, but that never stopped her from appreciating the way they enclose the backyard in a circle of green, splashed with the vivid colors of their flowers, coral, deep purple, pristine white, and in the summer, the ruby red of the bougainvillea. And years ago, when Brian decided to grow tomatoes, then squash and peppers and eggplant in the summer and lettuce and snap peas and broccoli and cabbage in the winter—they had their own urban farm.
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