On the Same Page

by N. D. Galland

  He laughed the Hank Laugh again. “All right,” he said. “And since I don’t eat honey, I’ll have mine after you no longer have yours, so that makes me the winner.”

  “Hank, you’re already the winner,” she said. “Look who you get as your primary caretaker.” She bowed, ironically, but he was still looking toward the television.

  “Yeah, Anderson Cooper,” he said.

  “I thought you liked Christiane Amanpour.”

  “Not since she cut her hair,” he said.

  THE OLD MANSARD-ROOFED building that functioned as the Town Hall had once been the elementary school. That was before Joanna’s time, but scores of her family had passed through it. For years after it was converted, and clearly in her memory, one upstairs room was kept, museum-like, as it had been on the last school day: the rows of lift-lid student desks, the dusty chalkboard with broken chalk still in the tray, the out-of-tune piano, the cloakroom, the American flag. A slate tablet on the wall had listed students’ names in colored chalk to mark which multiplication tables each had memorized.

  That was long gone, though. The Town Hall had been renovated and expanded, and now all board meetings took place in what had been that classroom. Now it was painted sage-green, carpeted, and wainscoted. It was accessed from the second-floor common area through broad double doors. The large windows were still there from the old days—or rather their energy-efficient descendants were—but now on the walls, in lieu of slate multiplication tables, hung survey maps of the town, and an oil painting of a stone wall by one of the town’s celebrated homegrown artists, who decades earlier had been a student in that classroom.

  There were so many people gathered to witness this particular ZBA meeting that nearly a score spilled out over the threshold into the common space, rumbling to each other. Hank would have been here, were he allowed to stay upright for more than thirty minutes at a stretch.

  She excused herself as she brushed by two men at the back of the crowd. She blanked on names, but she knew them: the owner of one of the Menemsha fish markets, all wool and canvas and an air of melancholy, leaning his shoulder against the wall, and Celia’s boss at the bakery, a short, potbellied, avuncular flirt in a blue flannel shirt. As Joanna passed them, she heard them talking about that idiot Holmes who fell off the roof trying to adjust his satellite dish during a snowstorm. The story had already morphed into a wisecrack. Despite herself, she slowed and turned her head in their direction.

  “Hey, Anna,” said the fisherman, casually, as if they ran into each other every day and he had not just been mocking her injured uncle. “We were just talking about Hank there. How’s he doing?”

  “Does he need a care package?” asked the baker with a puckish smile. She knew, from some hazy memory, that he meant a bag of pot.

  “I’ll ask,” she said, although Hank only tended to self-medicate with alcohol and Jeffrey Toobin. “Thanks. He’s doing fine.”

  As she continued toward the boardroom, each gave her a New England wave: two fingers raised briefly and laconically from whatever height their hand happened to be.

  “Hey, Anna!” said a cheery redheaded woman she nearly walked into. Joanna recognized her as the vet who’d tended her childhood pets, including her long-gone Nubian goat. “How’s the baby?”

  She smiled politely. “You’re thinking of my cousin Lisa.”

  The vet laughed, pressed her fingers over her brows. “Of course. You always looked alike. Well, when you were ten you did.” She laughed again and shrugged. “Anyhow, hope you’re well, nice to see you.”

  She kept walking, swiveling around legs and purses and backpacks. The crowd smelled of damp wool and a more prosaic scent, a musky, musty human scent. Everett had said a press seat would be held for her, so she politely nudged her way through the bottleneck in the doorway.

  Along one side of a wooden table, the four ZBA officers sat facing into the small room. Two men and two women, all wore varieties of the local winter uniform of flannel shirts, jeans, and work boots. She knew from her childhood civics catechisms that four ZBA officers made up a quorum, but the board was supposed to have five. Like many town committees, they were no doubt scrambling for membership.

  Behind the audience lurked the public access camera and its operator, a volunteer for MOCC—Martha’s Own Cable Channel. In the front row, the back of his head in view of the camera, was a sixtyish Jimmy Stewart doppelgänger. This was James Sherman, her counterpart from the Newes. Beside him was the sole remaining empty chair. She moved with her jerky pivoting gait toward it.

  She remembered the lanky, bespectacled James Sherman vaguely from her adolescence. He had been a reporter for the Newes when she’d interned there writing the doomed restaurant reviews. He’d been pleasantly aloof when he was around, and he’d done a few other things to make ends meet, including working at the boatyard doing some specialized boat-mending task she couldn’t place now, something that sixty years ago might have been a full-time calling, but wasn’t anymore. She settled into the padded chair beside him and held up her backpack shyly as if to justify her presence.

  “I’m filling in for Susan,” she said, lowering the pack to the floor.

  He looked suspicious, but then recognized her, and grinned. “Joanna Howes?” he said. “Are you back on the rock?” Then a look of understanding: “Oh, to help out Hank.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sorry to hear about that. Damn, he was lucky,” said James. He made a show of moving his own bag to make room for hers. “That could have been so much worse. And he’s lucky to have you here. How long you down for?”

  “Long as he needs me.” She settled in beside him and reached into her backpack.

  “So, wait, hang on. I thought you had a glamorous international career interviewing famous people. You’re writing for the Journal?”

  “Just temporarily while I’m helping Hank. I’m a little out of my depth with town government, though.”

  He made a dismissive expression. “It’s just the Journal—no offense, but c’mon, it’s an advertising rag.”

  The Journal was not an advertising rag. The Journal was a scrappy everyman-style paper created by disgruntled former Newes workers who felt the Newes had abrogated its responsibilities to working-class Islanders (who made up the majority of year-rounders) in favor of an elegantly romanticized perception designed to cater to genteel summer residents. Most of the original Journal founders had moved on to other projects off-Island, or reinvented themselves into something nonjournalistic. But. Big but. She’d grown up aware of the animus between the two papers.

  Hank preferred the Journal, of course, while Jen and Joanna had been drawn to the art and poetry that regularly graced the pages of the Newes. Joanna had been rhapsodic when she was offered the restaurant-reviewing gig there in high school, an internship Hank and Jen had argued about for an hour before she’d been allowed to accept it. Once on the job, she remembered Everett—who had been the Newes’ community editor, and thus her boss—dissing the unprofessional snarky tone of the Journal. The same paper he now ran.

  “I mean, it’s a pretty good rag,” James was continuing, “but it’s a rag.”

  “You realize that’s an insult,” Joanna said. “I mean, it’s a pretty good insult, but it’s an—”

  “It’s a statement of fact,” said James calmly. “The Journal succeeds if it has enough ads. The Newes succeeds if it has enough subscribers. They’re not even the same species.”

  “If you say so,” she muttered. She settled the laptop on her lap and opened it, turned it on, tried to shake off her emergent pique.

  “I think it’s fine to have a little outlet like that on the island,” he continued, placidly, as if she had no connection to the paper he was dissing. “Helps people appreciate the quality they’re getting with the Newes. Plus, it keeps everyone on their toes, you know?”

  She recalled the elegant old homestead that housed the Newes, and the affectation of disused manual typewriters (not even electric!) colle
cting dust beside the sleek Macs that had replaced them. It was, indeed, an elegant paper. Her pique was superseded by nostalgia. “Actually, I wish I could freelance for both papers,” she said. “Then maybe there’d be enough work to pay the bills.”

  “Hm,” he said, cleaning his glasses with the hem of his sage flannel shirt. “Too bad the Journal has a policy against that.”

  She grimaced. “It’s not the Journal’s policy, it’s the Newes’ policy.”

  He grimaced back. “I’m pretty sure it’s the Journal’s.”

  “That’s not what the Journal says.” She pulled her phone out of her coat pocket, rested it against the laptop screen, and launched the voice-memo app.

  “Why would the Newes care?” puzzled James, almost to himself. “We get first pick of writers because we’ve been around longer and we have the reputation. And I’m sure we pay better. We’re not going to lose someone we want to the Journal, so why would we be precious about it? The Journal doesn’t want to lose people to the Newes because people want to write for the Newes more.” Noticing a hurt look on her face, he added, “Even you! You interned with us all those years back, not with the Journal.”

  “I don’t think the Journal had internships back then.”

  “See, that’s what I mean,” he said, comfortably. “We’ve been around longer, we’ve got it down, we just do our thing. I bet you’re only working for the Journal because Everett called you, right? If the current Newes editor knew you and called you at the same time, you’d be working for us now, you know it and I know it. The Journal is an upstart, and there’s nothing wrong with that, even if it is totally preoccupied with a crass commercial agenda—but Everett’s the one making things complicated and trying to start a competition for writers.”

  “I don’t care who started it. I just want to write things and get paid for them.”

  “Amen, sister,” he said, and then the hearing began.

  When she was a girl and Jen had to work late, Hank—who had a more flexible schedule than Jen did, especially in winter—would get stuck watching Joanna, so she’d been brought to more than a few such board meetings. Despite her discomfort about trying to pass as a newshound, there was something cozily familiar about this room.

  The plump, gray-haired chair of the ZBA, Helen Javier, was dressed in the requisite layers of flannel and denim, but her rubber boots sported a paisley design and she radiated such an earth-mothering energy that, had she been wearing a wreath of flowers in her hair, one might have asked if they were growing there by the roots. Joanna had known her since toddlerhood and had always adored her, occasionally fantasizing that somehow she might be Helen’s changeling offspring.

  “Hello, Anna! Thanks for coming home from the big city to take care of that damn fool,” she said, then turned vaguely in the direction of the camera. “We’ll start the hearing by reading correspondence on the helipad, and then the plaintiff will state his case, then we’ll open it up to public comment.” Shifting her gaze now to the densely packed audience: “When it’s your turn to speak, we ask you to say who you are before speaking.”

  Spread before her on the table was an array of notes and letters. Most of these were printed copies of emails, a couple were typed on textured stationery, and two were handwritten on lined notebook paper, one neat and one scrawled. Helen pushed some of the papers toward the other officers and they each took turns reading aloud. Joanna typed and watched at the same time.

  “To the ZBA”—this in an email—“My family has lived seasonally on the North Shore for three generations. We appreciate it because it is so delightfully rural and quiet . . .”

  “Dear Chairman Javier,” began a missive typed on ivory stationery with an embossed letterhead she couldn’t quite make out. “We are aware that there is a town bylaw expressly forbidding helicopter landing anywhere in town except the airport. Please keep it that way.”

  Next was an email from another neighbor saying almost the same thing. And then another. Then three more. Then a final email: “Mr. Smith is an upstanding gentleman and people should be allowed to transport as they please. I recommend, and request, that you allow him the helipad but restrict usable hours. That should suit everyone. I know my neighbors will give me all kinds of grief for this but it seems fairest.”

  When the correspondence was complete, Helen announced that it was now time for Mr. Smith to have his say.

  A bland fellow in an expensive navy suit, about forty, stood up from the front row. He held a briefcase and was adjusting his maroon tie. His physique screamed College Crew Team, as did his haircut. In Manhattan he would have been just another suit and Joanna would not have registered him in the sidewalk throngs at rush hour. Here, in this rural village in midwinter surrounded by plaid, denim, and camouflage-green flannel, he looked almost provocatively ridiculous. At a guess, Joanna thought he surely used more hair product than the rest of the room combined (including all the women, even the school librarian) and his expensive shoes were hopelessly impractical for January in the country, but sure looked sharp. He did not seem nearly hip enough to have his own helicopter. After a beat, he sat down and decided to talk from his chair.

  “I’m here on behalf of Orion Smith,” he said.

  Ah, that explained it. A minion, she could see all the ZBA members thinking to themselves.

  “Hello,” said Helen gruffly, glancing down at the agenda, the margin of which she tapped absently with a pencil.

  The Minion continued, looking grim. “Mr. Smith received a cease and desist order from the West Tisbury zoning inspector in late December, informing him he was not allowed to use his own personal helicopter on his own private property.”

  “That’s right,” said Helen, too patiently, looking back up at him. “It’s against the bylaws to have a helipad anywhere but at the airport, so he can’t land a helicopter on his property.” Thumbing through papers in a manila folder in front of her, she went on. “If I recall correctly, Mr. Smith disregarded the cease and desist and brought the helicopter back just a week or so ago, making several trips to bring over multiple parties from the mainland?”

  “That’s correct. After he filed for an appeal, which is his right to do, he was using it to shuttle guests to a private party at his home, as the ferries had stopped running for the night.”

  “Is Mr. Smith unable to appear in person?” asked another board member.

  “Mr. Smith’s tenancy is seasonal and he is currently traveling on business. At his request, I am appearing as his proxy to appeal the decision.”

  Once Minion Lawyer was finished, Helen called on comments from the crowd. It was a Thursday afternoon in winter, so they were a lackluster group, but a united one.

  And they were familiar to Joanna. Even the ones she didn’t know, she knew. A particular type often tended toward Island government: hefty men, not fat so much as gristly, radiating a repressed bluster. Each man absolutely definite about his place in his own world, but grudgingly cognizant that the real world was much bigger. As with Hank—an exemplary model—they were boisterous with each other, but with outsiders they tended toward a sheepish belligerence. After decades of painful experience watching their homeland transmogrify into a real estate market, they were wary of being tricked or cheated out of their diminishing resources. Easily a third of the faces in the crowd were that man.

  Everyone was against the helipad, even those who lived miles away from Mr. Smith’s property. A mousy middle-aged woman in batik rayon could barely bring herself to speak at all, but speak she did, sounding like an NPR announcer. She spoke on behalf of the Wetlands Protection Act, a piece of legislation that required only a 200-foot buffer but which implied far more, as they all knew perfectly well, but which couldn’t state more than 200 feet because of lawmakers who were actively determined to poison the planet. Helen very graciously caused her to stop talking. Then there was a brash man in his thirties who started off in a normal voice but—without anyone naysaying him—worked his way into a lather of defensive
ness against the big-city rich people who don’t give a crap about other people’s quality of life. Joanna’s money was on his heading straight from here down-Island for a few beers to blow off steam after. An eight-year-old girl, speaking with permission because she was not a registered voter, said she was worried that if she flew her kite on the beach while the helicopter was flying by, it would suck her kite into its rotors and destroy it.

  “Hard to top that one,” said one of the board members. “I make a motion to close the hearing.”

  Another seconded it, and all four voted in favor.

  Immediately, the same member said, “I make a motion to reject the appeal.” This was immediately seconded, and the board unanimously voted to reject.

  Helen turned to the Minion Lawyer to make sure he understood that was the end of the matter. “It’s in the bylaws,” she said, not unkindly. “If Mr. Smith doesn’t like the bylaws, he has to take it up with the Planning Board and ask them to change the bylaws. And in the meantime, ‘cease and desist’ means cease and desist. No more helicopter rides.”

  “What will happen if he continues to use the helicopter?” asked the Minion.

  “I just told you that he can’t do that,” said Helen. “We’re not allowing him to do it.”

  “What happens if he continues to use it anyhow?”

  The four officers all sat up straighter, as if they’d been tugged. They glanced at each other in surprise. “We don’t have to deal with scofflaws very often,” said Helen. “Generally people are law-abiding.”

  “Maybe we confiscate the helicopter?” one of the other board members posited, half joking.

  “Can we do that?” asked the third. All eyes turned to the administrator who was seated with the largest pile of folders at one end of the table. Other than the Minion Lawyer she was the only person in the room who looked as if she might work in an actual office, and this impression was based mostly on the fact that she had manicured nails. “Rachel?”