The Off Season

by Amy Hoffman

  “Petition, meeting—it sounds boring.”

  “It won’t be boring, Baby!” I insisted. “We’ll hang out on Commercial Street with clipboards and talk to everybody. Community organizing—we bring it to a vote. The spraying stops, once and for all. Eventually, the water clears up, and we can all stop paying for Poland Spring.”

  “And what will your employer think of that?” teased Baby.

  “Screw Stop & Shop,” I said carelessly. “They have a monopoly on food. What do they have to worry about?”

  “Screw you too,” she said, standing and stretching and knocking the plastic chair onto its side. “Get over here.”

  I ended up feeling glad I had found a nice throw rug, which padded the floor.

  Dreams R2B Realized

  The thing is, my relationship with Janelle had not ended because I didn’t love her anymore, and her renewed rejection caused a terrible stab of pain. I had thought that maybe, if I produced a really great result for her environmental protest, she would be at least slightly grateful—slightly in my debt. The balance would shift.

  I looked into the town bylaws and discovered that we needed only one hundred signatures to get an item on the agenda for a special town meeting, which sounded manageable. I bought clipboards and pens at the hardware store and decided to spend a few hours in front of Town Hall on my next afternoon off. Baby was working in her shop, Miss Ruby was feeling wheezy, and Tony was driving one of her sponsees to the dentist, so I was on my own. I figured that if I got a good start, it would encourage the others when it was their turn.

  Margot was performing in front of Town Hall with a new sign: “Dreams R2B Realized!” Not wanting to compete, I waited for a break. Margot shook my hand and signed with a flourish, so I had an outstanding first signature. I felt encouraged: if Margot understood the issues, others would too; the petition drive would be successful, and Janelle would stop being so angry—at the world, and at me in particular. Of course it would also be a step toward cleaning up the Cape environment—but I’m not sure the political-ecological impact was uppermost in my mind. Following their troubadour’s example, a couple of people in Margot’s audience signed too—although it later turned out that they were tourists and not eligible to vote.

  Then I saw Patsy. “Hey, Rev!” I called. She was sure to be good for a signature. Maybe even a sermon. According to the sign board outside the church, the previous week had been blessing of the animals/vegan Sunday. She might want some related topics. “Sign my petition?”

  She crossed the street eagerly. “Good for you,” she said. “Where do I sign? What’s it for? The Human Rights Campaign?”

  “No, it’s not anything gay,” I said, although my feeling was that only a straight person would consider the Human Rights Campaign gay. The group had a storefront in town that sold anything that could be emblazoned with its equal-sign logo, from oven mitts to truck flaps. Some anarchistic person had printed up a lot of stickers with an alternative, greater-than sign, but those never caught on, because who can remember from algebra class which way the little dagger points for “greater-than” and which way for “less-than” (besides Janelle, that is)—so some people displayed the stickers backward, and then others thought they were antigay and ripped them down. Reverend Patsy looked disappointed, and I explained: mosquito-borne diseases, pesticide spraying, water pollution, cancer. Her face slowly turned pink, as if her collar was suddenly too tight.

  “This petition presents an ethical dilemma,” she said.

  “What?” I said. “It’s just to start a discussion.”

  “But what’s there to discuss? How can we deprive people of protection?” she asked. “We know for sure that the mosquitoes cause disease, and the threat is imminent. The cancer connection is much less certain.”

  “It is not, Patsy! I bet you have women with it in your congregation!”

  “I do, yes,” she said. “But what makes you think it’s because of this?”

  “When was the last time you drank P-town water?” I asked.

  “Oh, that,” said Patsy. “That’s a rumor. People just don’t like the taste. The testing shows the water’s safe.”

  “And you believe that,” I said.

  “And the spraying, too. It’s for the greater good,” said Reverend Patsy. “I always sign petitions, Nora, but I can’t in good conscience join you on this one.”

  “All right, I can respect that,” I said. But Patsy wouldn’t go away. A few people stopped to see what was going on, and she shooed them off.

  “Don’t you have something to do over at your church?” I prodded her. She seemed to spend more time wandering Commercial Street than she did in her office.

  “Wait here a minute,” she said. “Don’t go away.” A couple of dishwashers from a nearby restaurant, Moldovan college students who had outstayed their summer visas, had come outside for a break, and she approached them, shaking her head and pointing at their cigarettes. “Very bad,” she enunciated. “Bad. Get sick.”

  The students laughed. “Whatever, bitch,” said one. The other pulled at the neck of his T-shirt, clearly fascinated by Patsy’s clerical collar.

  “We have a quit-smoking group at the church,” she pushed on, realizing their English was more fluent than she had assumed. “You are welcome to join us.”

  “Church! No way, bitch,” said the student, who apparently thought this was the correct American form of address for an older woman. “Church don’t like the gays. Don’t like the boys like us.”

  “No, this is a different type of church!” Patsy tried to explain, but they turned their backs on her. Finishing their cigarettes and dropping them on the sidewalk, they went back inside. Patsy pushed the butts together with the side of her sneaker and, taking a tissue from her pocket, gathered them up and put them in the trash. She rummaged in her backpack until she found a small bottle of hand sanitizer and squirted a blob into her palm.

  “Be prepared!” she said, rubbing her hands together with effortful cheeriness. “It’s so bad for them, especially at their age.” I felt a sudden respect for her well-meant interventions, but then she turned her attention back to me. “Don’t you believe in climate change?”

  This was infuriating. Janelle had convinced me that her cancer was a result of man’s environmental depredations, and now Reverend Patsy was looking at me as though I were some sort of Neanderthal Republican. “Of course I do! That’s the whole point!”

  “I don’t see it. Suddenly there are all these new diseases. We have to respond somehow, don’t we? Maybe spraying isn’t the best way, I admit that.” Tears sprung to her eyes. “But if it saves even one life I’m for it!”

  “But what about women with cancer? What about Janelle?”

  “What about our vulnerable children and elders?” she cried. “I’m sorry to say this, but Janelle was ill before you got here. Now, she’s getting better.”

  “I know that! But I’m talking about our environment, here, on Cape Cod. And the women of the future! What about their environment? Their lives?” I tried crossing the street but she followed, and being trailed by a minister turning people away was doing nothing for my petition.

  She looked at me sorrowfully. “You’re a friend, Nora,” she said. “But your action is just terribly wrongheaded.”

  “Right,” I said. “I would have thought you’d be in favor of democratic debate.”

  “Democracy is a value. But so is the interconnected web of all existence of which we are a part,” she recited.

  Margot started singing again—you would have thought that at least one drag queen, if that’s what Margot was, could come up with something more original for an encore than “My Way,” although I guessed the alternative was “I Will Survive,” which is equally annoying. Discouraged by the challenge of competing with both Margot and Reverend Patsy, I put my pens in my shirt pocket and tucked the clipboard under my arm. “Okay, I give up,” I told Reverend Patsy. No way was I going to rush to get my boxes out of her study,
I decided, and I wasn’t attending her church service, either.

  The Shopping Cart Protest

  You must’ve got off on the wrong foot,” said Miss Ruby.

  “You try it, then,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. Tony’s walking and nutrition program had started to take effect. Miss Ruby was getting out more, and she had recently abandoned her gray sweats for a new uniform of denim overalls and red T-shirts. She had had Dorothy at the T-shirt shop make several with her name spelled out on the back in rhinestones: MISS RUBY. “Town Hall was the wrong place to try to get signatures,” she said. “It’s all day-trippers. You need to go where the townies are.”

  When it was time for my next shift, she gave me a ride on the back of her scooter, and while I went into the store, she hung around in the parking lot with her clipboard. Maybe she was right about Town Hall, because she collected fifteen signatures in front of the Stop & Shop before she got bored and left.

  She was very pleased with herself when I got home. “Now you’ve got something to work with,” she said, having become an expert. “The first ones are the hardest; nobody wants to stick their neck out.”

  “Great, only eighty-four more to go,” I said, “counting the one I got from Margot.” Calling the meeting was going to be more difficult than I had thought.

  “And listen to this—I got a ton of compliments on my shirt; I bet I could get more customers for Dorothy without half-trying.”

  I didn’t have a lot of faith in Miss Ruby’s follow-through—but the petition drive seemed to galvanize her. When my next shift came around, she offered me a ride again, and this time, along with her clipboard, she brought a stack of flyers for Dorothy’s shop. “It’s a great deal,” she said. “You want one? You get a 10 percent discount on rhinestone work, and I get a commission for every flyer that gets turned in.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Sparkly isn’t really my style.”

  She looked at me with pity. “These shirts are the best quality, Nora—not like the cheesy ones from the center of town. Dorothy says they’re odor resistant—you don’t even have to wash them as much as a regular shirt.” She twirled around slowly to show me. She had an undiscovered talent for sales, I thought, hoping Dorothy appreciated it.

  Miss Ruby dropped me off and went to stand at her post by the store entrance. I had been behind the counter for about an hour, and a scrum of customers was bumping at one another’s heels with the wheels of their shopping carts, when I heard Miss Ruby shouting, “Nora, Nora, Nora!”

  I looked up from the slicer to see her running, or at least moving faster than I had ever seen her go, past the customer service alcove and through the bakery department. “Slow down!” I called. “Miss Ruby! Stop! You’ll have a heart attack!”

  “Nora, Nora, Nora!” she kept shouting. “It’s Janelle!”

  Now I was running.

  “Hey, deli lady!” a customer yelled. “You can’t just leave like that!”

  “I got three hungry kids at home,” another yelled at me as I rushed by. “You ought to be fired!”

  Apparently unable to explain what was going on, Miss Ruby grabbed my hand and pulled me through the automatic doors and into the parking lot. I imagined Janelle collapsed, Janelle bleeding, Janelle gasping as her lips turned pale and her eyes rolled back into her head. I didn’t know how to imagine Janelle—the Stop & Shop parking lot had never seemed like the setting for a disaster. “Over there!” Miss Ruby pointed. “She’s chained herself to the buggy return!”

  I stopped short. “What?” I said. “Why?”

  Miss Ruby shrugged.

  The spark of hope I had felt that Miss Ruby had mistaken someone else for Janelle—unlikely, given Provincetown’s racial makeup—or that she had misinterpreted what she had seen flickered out when I got a closer look. It was definitely Janelle, sitting on the ground, her old Brooklyn-style bicycle chain wrapped around her waist and locked to the metal cage full of shopping carts.

  She had bought us those bicycle chains shortly after we moved in together, after her bike had been stolen—the third one, she had said. “Good riddance,” I had said, since it was the bike with which she had run into me, climbing the hill on Bradford Street—but then I reconsidered: if it hadn’t been for the bike accident, we would never have met. So I had become proud of our bike chains, even a bit sentimental about them: Manufactured especially for use in the city, the links were supposedly forged of special hardened steel, fastened with a patented, cut- and pry-resistant U-lock. They weighed a ton and were hugely inconvenient to lug around on errands, and they were so intimidating I sometimes hesitated to take mine out; even coiled on the shelf it looked dangerous, like it would bite if I approached.

  In Provincetown, where we assumed the thieves were less sophisticated, we had reverted to our old, flimsy cable locks—and now Janelle had found a new use for her Brooklyn chain. Next to herself she had propped a large sign:

  NO MORE

  hormone-treated meat

  antibacterial cleaners

  poisonous cosmetics

  cigarettes

  SAFE PRODUCTS NOW!

  I sat down next to her. “Isn’t this a little extreme?” I asked.

  “Afraid for your job?” she said, clearly refraining from adding, “you sniveling coward!” That hadn’t occurred to me—but it really would have been ridiculous to lose another position to Janelle’s cause, especially since I hadn’t stuck my neck out all that far, or even accomplished anything much. “Did they send you out here to try to sweet talk me?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “They know nothing about me and you. I thought you were hurt or something. Miss Ruby was in a terrible panic.”

  Janelle looked up at Miss Ruby balefully. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with me,” she said. “Management refuses to meet with me, so I’m simply taking the logical next step. Just let them try to get rid of me now!”

  A siren started wailing in the distance and grew gradually louder. “Whoa,” said Miss Ruby. “Count me out of this.” She handed me her clipboard and went off to get her scooter.

  I was pleased to see that she had collected another page of signatures. I turned to Janelle. “Great, now the cops are coming. Honey, please, please unhook yourself so you don’t get fined or arrested or something. That’s the last thing you need; you should be taking it easy.” I showed her the clipboard. “See? We’re working on getting the insecticide spraying banned—that should help with the water.”

  “How would you know what I need?” said Janelle. “I’m staying right here; that’s the whole point.”

  She was hyped up as I had never seen her before. I wondered if it was severe anxiety, which I could understand, or a misprescribed drug. In the evolution of her response to her disease, she seemed to have gone beyond anger to near-insanity.

  A police car screeched into the parking lot, skidded in a half circle, and pulled up beside the cart return with a flourish. At the same time, a bicycle cop pedaled through the parking lot entrance, and the day manager, a big Cape Verdean woman who was usually quite benign and friendly, stalked out of the store. We were surrounded.

  “Are you all here just for little ol’ me?” said Janelle. Her obnoxiousness was new, too.

  The officer from the car, a gray-haired veteran with an I’ve-seen-it-all expression, said, “All right, ladies, you’re creating a disruption of business here. Time to move along.”

  Standing next to him, the bicycle cop nodded in agreement. “Just do like he says, and this won’t go any further,” he said.

  I stood and brushed off my apron.

  “Nora, go inside,” said my manager. “Find a new apron, please; the lot is filthy.”

  “I was trying to help,” I told her.

  “Traitor!” Janelle hissed at me, doing nothing to unlock herself.

  “This is your final warning!” the policeman from the car bellowed suddenly.

  “Warn away,” said Janelle. “I’m not leaving until
these people agree to talk to me about all the horrible stuff they sell.”

  “How dare you say ‘these people’!” said the manager. “We are doing our jobs! We are providing a service! Go to Orleans if you don’t like our store.”

  “I will, eventually,” said Janelle. “But I thought I’d start locally and branch out.”

  “You are being ridiculous, my girl,” said the manager. “I wash my hands of this.” She brushed her palms together several times and turned to go back inside. “Remove her quietly, please,” she said to the policemen as she left.

  The gray-haired officer rummaged around in the trunk of his car and pulled out a large hacksaw. “I’m sorry to have to do this, young lady,” he said. “But I can’t let this situation continue. Don’t worry; I’ll try not to hurt you.” He began sawing at the chain around her waist as she watched.

  “You’re not going to get very far with that thing,” she advised him.

  After failing to make even a scratch on the link after several minutes of effort, he realized Janelle was right and turned to the bicycle cop. “Go down to the station and get me the bolt cutter.”

  “Also useless,” Janelle pointed out.

  “Let me try something, sir,” said the bicycle cop. He knelt down beside Janelle and briefly examined the lock. Then he pulled a plastic stick pen from his pocket and with his thumbnail flipped the little stopper off the end. Working it into the lock’s guaranteed-unpickable round keyhole, he twisted it, and suddenly, the mechanism popped open. The chain around Janelle’s waist fell to the ground. “Wow,” he said. “I saw this on the Internet but I didn’t think it would actually work.”

  Janelle stood, brushed herself off, and started walking away. The policemen did nothing to stop her.

  “Go on home,” the older one yelled after her. “Sleep it off.”

  “That’s disrespectful,” I objected. “She knew exactly what she was doing. It was a legitimate direct action against something she sees as harmful.”