Gourdfellas Read online

  Now Marjorie was the one who sounded like a preacher, but a call of yeses and a reply of hisses were the only responses to her sermon. I’d just paid the second installment of my annual property tax, and it shocked me to realize that it had taken me three weeks of hard work to earn that money. I was one of the lucky ones, with training and skills and enough energy to scramble for work that allowed me to make more than the minimum wage—usually.

  “Nope, didn’t think you’d like that. So the other way is to let this one casino come in, and bring jobs and tourist money and new revenues. We can put clauses in the agreement to make sure it stays respectable and we can solve our money problems for years to come. Or we can raise property taxes. Pretty simple decision, I’d say.” Marjorie straightened her spine and leaned over the podium, making eye contact with key members of the crowd. Her pause was almost past the point of dramatic emphasis when she boomed, “I invite anyone who agrees with my way of thinking to join me in forming a consortium to make sure we get what we need around here. And what we need is that casino.”

  A roar, whether in agreement or disapproval, filled the room.

  “Like I need a cow with two heads!” a voice called from the rear.

  “We have to keep this meeting orderly.” Bespectacled Joseph Trent spoke with surprising vigor. I’d only seen him in his day job behind the prescription counter at Trent Pharmacy, where he sported a perpetually worried look and a mild manner. “You want a civilized town, you have to behave civilly to each other.”

  A woman two rows from the stage looked ready to leap over the seats and commandeer the mike. She shouted, “We need to keep our town safe. No gambling, no whores, no—”

  A gabble of voices drowned her out and bodies blocked her way. People were on their feet, surging forward, placards bobbing dangerously close to heads and limbs. How had a town meeting about Oneida Gaming’s plan to build a casino turned into this cacophony of greed and guilt? From my spot near the far left aisle I felt my own anger grow. This wasn’t why I moved from Brooklyn to a small town one hundred miles to the north.

  “I need some fresh air, you know, to clear my head,” I said. “If I don’t come back inside, I’ll wait for you at the car.”

  Nora shook her head. “You go ahead. Melissa can drive me home. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  I shouldered my way past three overall-clad women and pushed toward the side exit. But knots of people, jabbering and poking each other in the chest as though that would make their point, made forward progress impossible. I felt like Sisyphus, only instead of rolling a rock up the hill I was trying to roll myself.

  “Hey, Lili, take a lesson from the martial arts. Resistance doesn’t work.” Seth Selinsky pressed his hand against the small of my back, turning me the way a tug turns a loaded ship. The swell of people pushed us toward the stage. Elbows and fingers and, once, a sharp-cornered pocketbook worthy of the Queen, jabbed various soft places on my body. When the crowd thinned, Seth took my hand and drew me past four laughing teens up the steps to the stage. Before I knew it, we were pushing through a heavy metal door and into the quiet of the parking lot.

  “Go with the flow—isn’t that a karate principle? Anyway, it worked this time. Thanks, Seth.” Even in the dark, his eyes seemed to gleam, but I couldn’t tell whether it was pleasure, mischief, or a simple biological reaction to the absence of light.

  “You going with the flow on the casino?” He sounded curious. We’d been to dinner the Saturday before but we hadn’t talked about the casino. As we walked through the ranks of parked cars, his shoulder brushed against mine. I moved away, still on edge after being in the middle of an unpredictable crowd. He was a single man who made a better than good living as a mortgage broker, and his livelihood depended on city people wanting to move to the southern half of Columbia County. It seemed a fair guess that he’d oppose the casino. We’d gone out at least a dozen times, but hormones and politics didn’t seem like a good mix.

  “I’m a NIMBY on this one. I don’t want to wake up one morning and find that I gave up the energy and diversity of Brooklyn for a garish, late-night, traffic-generating magnet for sleazebags and desperados.”

  His laugh was one of the things I liked best about Seth. “Not In Marino’s Back Yard, eh? Listen, I’ve got to go to Philadelphia next weekend to a mortgage products seminar. Deadly dull but there’s a Picasso exhibit at the museum that I plan to see even if I have to play hooky to do it. If you’d like to join me, I’d love the company.”

  “Thanks, but I’ve got a gallery opening in New Hampshire.” Saying yes would have been a nice but problematic complication, ushering in a new era of weekends away, which might lead to shared vacations and who knew what else. I wasn’t ready for maybe never either, so I was relieved to have a valid reason to decline.

  Seth’s smile might have been a dodged-the-bullet expression that mirrored my own relief, or simple cordiality. He took two steps toward me with The Look on his face, but before he could take me into his arms, shouts churned the warm spring night. I looked over my shoulder to see several dozen people in the rectangle of light spilling from the open doorway. Had the meeting ended already? They were only up to the eighth speaker, with ten more on the list and scores more who would try to get their sixty seconds of airtime before the mandatory ten o’clock end of the session.

  “Something’s wrong,” Seth said, as the wail of a siren got louder and the twin high beams of a county emergency vehicle split the darkness. He started toward the building at a lope and picked up speed. I ran behind him.

  The ambulance screeched to a halt at the open doorway. A tall man carrying a large plastic box and a shorter guy wielding a walkie-talkie hopped down and waded into the noisy crowd. When the cluster of onlookers stepped aside to let the two men pass, I saw Susan Clemants, sitting on the curb and holding a bloodstained handkerchief to her forehead.

  Glad for my subway rush hour training, I pushed past several people to get closer to Susan. Except for the dark streak of blood that trickled toward her eye and the vacant, glazed look on her pale face, she appeared to be unhurt. Kneeling, I restrained my impulse to touch her shoulder or stroke her hair or otherwise comfort her and let the taller EMT poke and prod and check her out, while the shorter one, a sandy-haired blond boy I’d seen around town, held the crowd back.

  “Susan, it’s me, Lili. The paramedics are going to take care of you. Is there anything you need? Jack’s still away on his fishing trip, right?”

  Her pale lips parted, but before she could say anything, her eyelids fluttered and her body went slack.

  Chapter 2

  Country hospitals are quiet. Oddly, people smile less than they did in Brooklyn. A ponytailed doctor with pretty blue eyes bent over a now-awake Susan, probed at the raw wound, then frowned as she waited for an answer.

  Susan’s color had returned along with her consciousness. “No, I don’t know what hit my head. All I know is I was getting off the stage after I spoke. This thing came flying from somewhere to my left. And when it hit me, it hurt like hell.”

  “Looks like it was probably a rock,” the doctor said softly. “There’s grit in there and I have to get it out. I’m going to numb it and then muck around until it’s clean. It’ll take ten, twelve stitches, but I know how to sew a fine seam. If you manage the wound care properly, it won’t get infected. So, you okay with me going ahead?”

  Susan nodded, grabbed my hand, and held tight for the twenty minute procedure. I averted my eyes and let my mind drift. I’d followed behind the ambulance in my car and navigated the bustle of the ER in that state I call essential reality.

  Only Susan and her needs existed. Now that the doctor was taking care of her, I had the mental space to wonder about what had happened in that packed auditorium in the few minutes after Seth and I left.

  A rock had been thrown. The tactic brought to mind thirteen-year-old boys whose frustrations had reached desperation levels in a dates-and-oil exporting country. It wasn’t the kind
of behavior I expected from members of this small, congenial community.

  Susan had expressed what turned out to be the minority opinion—that the casino was a morally righteous project that should be endorsed by the town in the name of justice. Nora said she’d called it a reparation. Didn’t that come from the word repair? What would it take to repair the friendships that were close to shredding over this issue? Nora, Elizabeth, Melissa, and Susan had helped each other flourish in the rich Walden Corners soil. I’d read lately about how marigolds and tomatoes, planted near each other, made for a healthier garden. But my friends were behaving more like dill and carrots, natural enemies that interfered with the other’s ability to reach its true potential.

  “What’s funny?” Susan said in a constricted voice.

  The doctor murmured an apology and swabbed her forehead with more clear liquid.

  I must have laughed out loud without realizing it. I had slipped so easily into country metaphors, replacing all the real-estate figures of speech that had been my native tongue when I lived in Brooklyn.

  “I was just thinking about marigolds and tomatoes and dill and carrots. You feeling better? You sure look better.” Except for the Herman Munster zipper that would grace her forehead for a while, she did seem almost like herself again.

  “Thanks for staying with me, Lili. I guess what hurts even more than my head is that they all disappeared. Melissa, Elizabeth, even Nora. At least, that’s the way it seemed.”

  “They were probably stuck in the crowd somewhere,” I said, only half believing myself. “I’m sure they wouldn’t let a difference of opinion cancel out more than twenty-five years of friendship.”

  Susan’s silence spoke volumes.

  By the time I’d driven Susan home, helped her undress, and waited while she left a message at school saying that she wouldn’t be in in the morning, I felt lightheaded, my energy gone. But I still had to drive twelve miles on two-lane country roads and not hit any stray cows that had wandered onto the road in search of bovine companionship. I’d ridden the subway to my parents’ house in Brooklyn in this state countless nights after long talk sessions following a City College philosophy seminar or after tedious, noisy parties that were meant to prove that we were smart, accomplished, and desirable. That took a different kind of concentration, one that assessed the eyes and the body language of other riders.

  This took being able to see in the dark.

  After a little more than a year of living in the country, eight miles from the town of Walden Corners and far enough from my old life to feel excited, still, by the possibilities of a new start, the beacon of my front porch light had the power to give me a floaty, happy feeling. I parked and stood in the darkness, enjoying the sound of the peepers. How friendly, how peaceful. An hour with a book and I’d call it a night.

  Sheltered by the sky, covered by the stars, nourished by the scent of green, new life . . . this was what I’d sought. I wrapped myself in my bono fortuna and walked up the back stairs, feeling lighter, happier. The comfort of my own small space—big enough for me, with its fifteen-by-fifteen foot living room with a wall of built-in bookshelves and a fireplace, three snug bedrooms, and a kitchen with enough elbow room for four friends to kibbitz shoulder-to-shoulder while I cooked—colored everything with hope, and I felt some of my worry wash away. Perhaps the fight over the casino could be transformed into a teachable moment about how to resolve differences without destroying relationships.

  As a volunteer community mediator, I understood that process. It worked well in a small room with an impartial facilitator. People walked in with a set of demands and, hopefully, walked out with an understanding that settling their dispute would let them put all that energy to other, better uses. No way would I get in the middle, though, with these four women. They’d get around to talking eventually, but they weren’t ready, not yet.

  I kicked off my shoes and stared at the blinking message machine in the kitchen. No more trouble, I pleaded silently, not tonight.

  I wasn’t enough of a math whiz to calculate the odds that all four messages were cheery greetings or even obnoxious sales pitches from adenoidal telemarketers trying to pay the rent by selling Flex-o-rama Workout Shorts. I hit the play button and started unloading the dish drain. Melissa, calling five minutes after I’d left to remind me about the meeting. A hang-up. A Ms. Janeway, heavy on the Mizz, inquiring about my schedule and the possibility of my writing a manual for new employees for her hotel in Boston. And then my brother’s voice, exultant, excited.

  “Call me. Doesn’t matter how late. Just call me,” he said.

  As I dialed, I wished I had a bottle of champagne waiting in the refrigerator so that I could pop the cork as Neil answered the phone. I would give him the chance to say it, but I knew exactly what his message meant. He picked up after the first ring.

  “Port St. Lucie, here I come! Yahooo!!!” Dance music and loud voices in the background forced him to shout, and I pictured a crowd of happy, sweaty celebrants bumping hips, cheering my brother’s good fortune.

  “You better get me some good seats. I’m not driving all the way to Shea Stadium just to sit in the nosebleed bleachers.” My laughter was unexpected, and I just let it roll out until I could breathe again. “Shortstop or second base? Oh, Neil, that’s so great. I’m so excited. I can’t stand it, this is so—”

  “Second base. Just for now. They promised me shortstop within two years. Dreams come true, Lili. Hold on. I feel another one coming on.” The only sound I heard was the raucous noise in the background. After a second his “Yahoo!” split the air.

  I yahooed with him, holding back the questions. There would be time for details—when he had to leave, the length of the contract, what his agent’s cut would be. For now, after three years in the minor leagues and a lifetime of preparation, my brother was finally going to live a dream that had sustained him since he was five years old. He would play baseball for the Mets.

  “Mom’s already all worried about can I take care of myself on the road, and all the women who’ll be swarming me just to get near the glamour and the money. She’s gonna drive me nuts, I swear.”

  “Not tonight—don’t let anyone spoil tonight. I’m sending huge hugs, Neil. And raising a glass to your success. I am so happy I can hardly stand it. Go back to your celebration.”

  “I love you, Lili. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  I guess that’s how the universe maintains equilibrium. One Neil triumph cancels out one Susan disaster.

  After a night of tossing and checking the clock every half hour, the sound of rain on my tin roof made me want to reach for a book and spend the morning with it propped on my knees as a cup of tea cooled on my bedside table. I managed the fantasy for about half an hour, but by seven I roused myself and stood under tepid water, washing away the lethargy and preparing for another busy day. Breakfast, a brisk walk with my umbrella keeping everything but my shoes and socks dry, and then two hours at the computer working on a brochure for a luxury spa finished off the morning.

  I called Susan, got no answer, and hoped that meant that she was feeling well enough to use her time off to run some errands.

  I’d been good, had earned time in my gourd studio, transformed from the third bedroom into a space filled with tools, brushes, embellishments, and shelves and shelves of gourds. Entering that space always made my heart beat a little faster. When I first told my Brooklyn friend Karen Gerber about decorated gourds, the pink-tipped spikes of her brown hair seemed to stand up even straighter.

  “You’ve gone cuckoo over a vegetable?” she’d said. “I thought I could trust you out of my sight for a couple of weeks. Why didn’t you go to St. Barth’s or Martha’s Vineyard or even, God forbid, a Hampton on your vacation? But no, you disappeared into the wilds of West Virginia and Kentucky and North Carolina. And came back a changed woman.”

  “I still love good cheese and I read the book review section of the Sunday Times first. I like to sit around with my friends and di
sh. And I will always love walking down Fifth Avenue when there’s a foot of snow on the ground. What do you know about gourds, anyway? Ever meet one? They’re really magical.”

  A whatever sigh wafted across the booth of our favorite Brooklyn diner. Even after I showed her a gourd I’d bought, a hard-shelled kettle gourd with a Native American design pyrographed on its round belly, she merely cocked one of her thick brows.

  “Look at these colors,” I said, running my finger over the translucent richness of the rust, green, and chestnut hues of the designs. “You know, no two gourds are exactly alike. A natural canvas, that’s what they are. And unique.”

  “Very unique,” she said, laughing at our longstanding language joke.

  “Extremely unique,” I answered.

  But other people, at fine craft fairs all over the country, did get it, and after three years my gourds were being accepted into juried shows and were selling to collectors. The twelve gourds I was driving up to a New Hampshire gallery on the weekend, a new series featuring designs based on African textiles and colored to approximate the muted tones of natural dyes, sat on a shelf awaiting their bubble wrap protection. The long-necked dipper that I’d been yearning to start rested on my work table, gleaming in the overhead light.

  Dipper gourds, used for decades in the South. Huge kettle gourds that held grain in Central America. Gourds with skins fixed tight to make drums in Africa and Polynesia. When I picked up one of these humble vegetables, I felt a kinship that transcended time and geography, a connection to people I’d never met but who had the same appreciation of friends and family, of the land and its bounty.