On the Same Page

by N. D. Galland

  * * *

  Helen Javier stepping down after nearly four decades on the West Tisbury ZBA

  Helped to manage the town’s accelerated growth

  By Joey Dias

  In a cozy home of unpainted wooden walls practically covered with philodendron vines, Helen Javier huddles before a woodstove, sipping tea. She and her husband, Paul, built this house in the late 1960s—Paul, a jack-of-all-trades, dug the well, put in the plumbing and the electricity (with some professional friends stopping by now and again to make sure he would not electrocute himself in the shower). The tea is an herbal concoction, of plants grown in her garden this past summer; she drinks it from a mug she made herself back when the Artisans’ Guild was still around. The shawl she’s tucked herself into, at least forty years old, comes from the wool of local sheep—not from any farm you’d have heard of, just from a neighbor who kept sheep because sheep were a cheap way to keep the lawn mowed (“not as good as the goats,” she editorializes. “Plus you can milk goats.”). It was cleaned, carded, dyed, spun, and knitted by a neighbor, who had taken on such distaff projects before the Fiber Arts group was a twinkle in its founders’ eyes.

  It is a scene for a winter idyll and Ms. Javier has earned this moment of rest. After 45 years in the trenches of town growth, she has retired to a home that, ironically, she could not build today even if she had the stamina.

  Ms. Javier was an original board member of the ZBA. She was 29 when she first volunteered for the position. Nobody had any idea back then what they were getting into. “I think my generation is the one who raised the roof here,” she says. “We dove into the scene, so to speak—we were the young Turks when there weren’t that many old Turks, and there weren’t a lot of young Turks after us, to push us out. So there’s an entire generation of us who have pretty much defined town governance. We’re the first wave of Baby Boomers,” she continues, with a knowing smile aimed at the Millennial who is interviewing her. “We came of age knowing we could change the world. Not merely believing we could, as you all do now—which is admirable of you, by the way. But we had evidence. The youth quake of our era was the first of its kind in America, maybe on the planet. I’m proud to have been a part of it, even in this little corner of the world.”

  Ms. Javier is a wash-ashore, although she’s been around long enough that not a lot of folks remember that. She married a “summer kid” whose family name—Pease—suggests an old Island heritage. Their children are Islanders in the strictest sense: they were born here. But their offspring have flown the coop for Manhattan, Denver, and Geneva, returning only for the summers with their own children. The family has cycled through what it means to be a Vineyarder.

  Through it all, though, Ms. Javier continued in her position on the ZBA. In those early days, the assessors went around from house to house with index cards, taking notes of what a parcel of land had cost. The police station was in the police chief’s living room. The town hall was a 2-room shack by the Mill Pond, and the elementary school consisted of 3 rooms. The ZBA never had to adjudicate built-in swimming pools, cell phone towers were unimaginable, and there was no call for affordable housing in West Tisbury—indeed, West Tisbury was the town nobody wanted to live in, because there was no “there” there.

  When she’s not overseeing the careful evolution of her adoptive hometown, Ms. Javier is a science teacher at the Oak Bluffs School, where she now educates the children of some of her former students. With a degree in marine biology, she initially sought a job at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on the mainland, but when the teaching position opened up, she applied and upon getting it, went for a low-residency MA in education at Boston University. “Believe it or not, I made that choice because I like disputes,” she said. “You get to be disputable as a teacher—your job is not to dictate information to your students, but to teach them to think analytically—and that means you have to engage them interactively, so that they listen and reply. No twelve-year-old kid is going to just inhale the material you give them. They’re going to argue, or ignore you, or do things designed to keep themselves from having to really learn. I love taking that on. If I’d been working straight up as a marine biologist, my quarrelsome tendencies would probably have manifested themselves in some unfortunate ways. I’d have ended up arguing with a seal, or being insubordinate to my boss, or exasperating my peers. Put me in a room with twenty truculent junior high kids and I’m in my element.”

  Ms. Javier has a warmth that makes anyone feel right at home almost at once. A self-described Earth Mother, she grows most of her food in the summer, canning a good deal to go into the winter, and most of her wardrobe is from the “free store” at the West Tisbury dump, embellished with some interesting flourish she creates herself. “I think the term now is upcycling,” she says, with a gentle laugh. “Back when I started doing it, there was no word for it. It was just a thing I did.”

  That attitude pervades her entire worldview—45 years of service is just a thing she did; helping to start the Food Pantry is just a thing she did; being part of the initial urge that got the Emvee Players, the nonprofit theater company, started was also just a thing she did. In a spirited but understated Yankee manner, she’s always just doing things.

  The timing of her departure is, she insists, coincidental. She retired from teaching this past semester, and she and Paul are taking a year to circumnavigate the planet by train and by freight boat. They have been planning this trip for nearly two years. However, foresight is never 20/20, and she could not have predicted the perfect storm of events that would decimate the ranks of the Zoning Board of Appeals. She didn’t know that she would be leaving behind her a gaping hole in the already-undermanned ZBA, at a moment when they are most in need of leadership, girding their loins as they are for a lawsuit to be slapped on the town by Orion Smith. Mr. Smith, a seasonal resident, wishes to build a helipad on his property off North Road. With the confrontation pending, Ms. Javier’s resignation seems almost like a retreat from battle before it has begun.

  “That’s got nothing to do with it,” she says with her gentle laugh. “Although I don’t envy whoever steps in . . .”

  * * *

  Joanna went out early Friday, to the bakery where Celia worked. She bought a copy of the Newes, a cup of the Colombian roast Hank liked (but was too cheap to buy for home use), and a bear claw. By the time she got back to the house, balancing these offerings between her mittened hands, Hank had gotten himself up and dressed enough to be presentable. He was in the recliner, seeking the TV remote.

  “Here you are,” she said sweetly, and placed on his side table the coffee, the pastry, and that which would make him spit both of them out: the Newes with Joey Dias’s coverage of Helen.

  She busied herself with invented chores, watching him from the corner of her eye. She wiped the counter, and then the stove, and began to rearrange things in the refrigerator, which was a precarious undertaking. While squatting down by the crisper, she heard the rustle of the Newes’ oversize pages. She pushed the crisper closed and focused on stabilizing the various casserole dishes in the main part of the fridge.

  “What the hell?” Hank exclaimed suddenly. “Anna.”

  “Yeah?” she said with false offhandedness, standing and closing the fridge. “Okay, I think that’s a little more ordered—”

  “Anna, this is your interview with Helen.”

  “Oh. Yeah. What’d you think?”

  “I haven’t read it yet. It’s—you wrote it—this is the Newes. You’re calling yourself Joey Dias.”

  “Yeah, remember I wrote as Joey Dias in high school? That’s just the byline I use there.”

  “Anna,” he said, in a voice tenor with incredulity. “What are you doing writing for the Newes?”

  “I need more money than Everett can off—”

  “Does he know?”

  She hesitated, which gave him his answer.

  “Anna! How can you do that? That’s illegal.”

  She chuckled n
ervously. “It’s not illegal.”

  “It’s gotta be unethical at least.”

  “What’s unethical about it?”

  “Well . . .” He looked befuddled that he’d be expected to have an answer. “Nobody who writes for one paper gets to write for the other. That’s just not done. You gotta tell Everett what you’re doing. You could get in big trouble.”

  “With whom?” she asked archly. “With Everett?”

  “Well, yes,” he said.

  “I’ll get in trouble for telling him? Or for not telling him?”

  “For not telling him—”

  “If I tell him, and he fires me, I’m fucked, especially if he tells Lewis Worthington, who then also fires me. If he doesn’t fire me, but orders me to stop writing for Lewis, then I’m still kinda fucked because I only have one source of income. If I tell him and he doesn’t care, then why should I have told him in the first place?” She hated how reactionary she got when there was tension between them. She also hated how easily she started dropping F-bombs around Hank, but it was the language she grew up with and merely walking into this house lowered her verbal finesse.

  He took a moment to consider her argument, then rolled his eyes and sighed miserably. “Oh, Christ,” he muttered. He stared out the window a moment, his gaze fuzzy, then looked back at her and suddenly grinned with a helpless shrug. He opened his mouth to speak, instead released a pained, voiced sigh, and shook his head. “I dunno. Jeez, Anna, it’s dangerous.”

  “It’s two country newspapers. I’m not going to get shot as a dissident.”

  He giggled a nervous basso giggle. “I don’t know what to say,” he said gruffly. “I think you’re being very stupid.”

  “If that’s the worst you’ve got, I can live with it.”

  “Christ,” he muttered, then settled back into the recliner and opened the paper back to the interview with Helen.

  “But Hank,” she said. His eyes glanced up at her, dolefully. “You can’t tell Everett. Or anyone. You can’t tell anyone. Except Helen knows, of course.”

  “What did Helen say?”

  “She said her inner bad girl is rooting for me.” She grinned tentatively.

  That worked. Hank started to chuckle again, the anxiety gone. “Well, all right then,” he said. “But jeez, Anna, why don’t you just go get one of your big-ticket interviews off-Island somewhere?”

  She bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself from saying she was stuck on the Vineyard taking care of him. “I’ll work on it,” she said gruffly. “I’ve got a sandwich in there for your lunch, and some cheese and crackers for a snack later, okay?”

  “Yes, Mom,” he said, in an ironic tone, and then muttered, “Christ.” He continued muttering to himself as she made a sandwich for herself, brushed her hair, organized her backpack, and put her boots on. The muttering never stopped, and sounded increasingly irritable. Why was he more stressed about her dual identity than she was herself?

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Of course I’m not okay!” he said, with a sudden vehemence that startled the cats. “I’ve got a goddamn broken leg!”

  It was the first time he had acknowledged that.

  THURSDAY MORNING WAS usually the Journal’s staff meeting, but the ferries were canceled due to high winds, and Everett was trapped off-Island, so the meeting was pushed to Friday. As a freelancer, Joanna wasn’t required to go—in fact, if Everett knew she was freelancing for the Newes, he would not have allowed her there. But she was desperate to impose structure on her life to keep from losing her mind while trapped on a rocky little island all winter. So come Friday, she wrapped herself up in layers of Jen’s most gale-proof sweaters and coats, and went.

  As usual, both Island papers were lying on the table. Even in the era of online news, there was a constant game of one-upmanship, since the Journal (published Thursdays) could get the week’s news out in print sooner, but the Newes’ print edition (on Friday) could be more up-to-the-minute. Her Newes interview with Helen had come out that morning, and she was afraid to look at it sitting here in the Journal office, lest she somehow draw attention to the fact that she had written it. Everett was the only one to whom this would be obvious, but surely it would be obvious to him as soon as he recognized the pseudonym. She had only a few hours before she’d be called to the carpet.

  The paper was functioning on a skeleton crew: two front-of-house staff juggling clerical, ad sales, classifieds, and reception; two young bearded guys handling IT and production; and an entire editorial and reporting staff of six: Everett, Joanna, two women younger than her (smart, cutting their teeth before moving on to greener pastures, and unintentionally intimidating), and two middle-aged men (smart, clearly with impressive résumés and nothing left to prove, rewarding themselves after decades of off-Island journalism with a plum job here). They were covering an area one hundred miles square with seven different governmental bodies—the six towns plus the county. They had all bonded in the trenches. Joanna felt like a fraud.

  Everett praised the team for the issue that had just come out and congratulated them on their sweep at the New England Press Awards, a thing Joanna had never heard of, further confirming her fraudulence. “I’m not impressed by awards, but it’s a nice excuse to get off-Island in winter,” Everett said. “Now . . . what’s on for next week? Will the DACA story be ready?”

  “We have to pull it,” said Rosie, one of the young women. She had pale, luminous skin and everything else about her was black: hair, clothes, boots, eyeliner, and an arm tattoo Joanna could only grasp a glimpse of under her long-sleeved T-shirt, and which seemed to be written in runes. In response to Joanna’s puzzled look, she explained brusquely, “There’s a Brazilian student at the high school who’s probably going to be valedictorian, got into Harvard early admission and he’s planning to study genetics. But he’s a Dreamer—he and his parents are undocumented—and they’re afraid to draw attention to themselves or he might get deported.”

  “Oh crap,” Joanna said.

  Rosie nodded unhappily, then began to turn her attention back to Everett. A distant throbbing hum seemed to move through the room, and she paused.

  “That’s the helicopter,” Joanna said. “Too bad we didn’t have enough warning, we could have gotten a photo.”

  Rosie looked at her. She was not rude, but the look made it clear which of them was actually a journalist. Spoiler: not Anna Howes. Anna Howes was the one who interviewed celebrities.

  “So I’m going to wrap up the story about the halfway house tomorrow. Also we’re still working on a piece about the Food Pantry. We found half a dozen families willing to let us interview them if we don’t use their names, but nobody wants their picture in the paper.”

  “Snap some volunteers,” said Everett.

  “That’s what we thought,” she said. “And let’s see . . . Oak Bluffs is considering plans to upgrade Ocean Park and reroute the ferry traffic, I’ll cover that.”

  “Okay, thanks, Rosie,” said Everett, and turned toward Sarah, the second young reporter. There was a melodic bing from right behind Joanna. Her phone.

  Need some more coffee? read the text.

  Thank God she had not programmed Orion Smith’s name in. It was just an off-Island number, which would mean nothing to Sarah or Everett, on either side of her.

  “Excuse me,” she said, and typed in, If I buy my own again.

  It was normal to have phones on during edit meetings, in case a story broke, but if she gave it too much attention she would be expected to share the breaking news with the rest of the table. She set the phone beside her laptop and looked with forced interest toward Sarah, the smallest, youngest, and perkiest person at the table.

  “So, Edgartown and Chilmark both have coastal erosion issues,” she said, with an earnest intensity that made her sound like she was describing a fabulous movie she’d just seen. “There’s a house at risk of sinking into the Gut on Chappaquiddick and we’re negotiating with the owners and
the town to cover it on a week-by-week basis, what they decide to do about it, who they’re working with, what island contractors and experts are doing and who they have to bring in from the mainland, the environmental impact, and so on. In Chilmark the erosion threatens the boat basin. I’m going to get more information at the selectmen’s meeting next Tuesday.”

  Everett nodded as Joanna’s phone tinged again:

  Not buying. Brewing. Come scope out the helipad. House will offend you nicely too. 5:30-ish. Catch the sunset.

  And then an address, off North Road.

  “Also,” Sarah was continuing, “I’m meeting with the chair of the Possible Dreams Auction to discuss a series that we could publish over the summer. I need to crunch some numbers, but the idea is to track how the amount of money from each Dream can be used in Community Services. So, you know, let’s say somebody bids six thousand bucks to go fishing with Keith Richards, what does that translate to in terms of their budget? Is it a year’s worth of mental health counseling for four people, does it cover the expense of one safe house for victims of domestic violence, does it go toward addiction recovery that sends people off-Island, does it all get eaten up in admin and office expenses, and so on.”

  “Nice,” said Everett, looking like a pleased godfather.

  “I’m not sure yet if it should start right after Memorial Day or wait until the Fourth of July.”

  “Let’s see how big it is, and go from there,” said Everett. “Anna, do you have any outstanding stories? I mean besides the helipad, but there’s nothing new with that this week, and I’ve mostly got you on news briefs otherwise, right?”

  She stared at him. Surely there was a productive way to take advantage of the insider status Orion was offering. She could pitch a feature article about him to Everett. Or if the place was really gorgeous, acquire a photographer and do a feature for Architectural Digest or American Home or Oh, jeez, Joanna, shut up, stop hustling.

  “That’s about it,” she said. “So I’m free for other assignments.”