The Tea Bags On My Balcony

The Third Thursday In October

The community room in our building has a drop ceiling, a linoleum floor the color of weak coffee, and a bulletin board nobody has updated since 2014. Folding chairs are set in rows. There is an American flag on a stand in the corner, left over from some election, and a long table at the front where Fred sits with his reading glasses on a cord.

I got there at 6:30, a half hour early, and set the egg cartons on the end of the table, out of the way, with a dish towel over them. I wore my navy cardigan and the good slacks and the silver necklace my husband gave me for our thirtieth. I sat down in the second row, in the middle, and folded my hands, and waited.

They came in slowly, the way people do who do not want to be seen coming. Eddie in his clean flannel shirt. Ginny with her hair still wet, off to the side, with the baby monitor in her pocket, because her sister had the baby. Trish, who took a seat at the end of my row and did not look at anyone. Edith, last of all, on Duane’s arm. Duane is the property manager, a thick-necked man who has coached Little League for twenty years, and he pulled a chair out for Edith as carefully as if she were made of glass.

Craig came in at five to seven with a leather folder under his arm and a coffee in the other hand. He took the seat on Fred’s right, the vice chair’s seat, and arranged his papers in a neat stack, and looked out at the room with the face of a man who has already won. Then he saw me. I was looking at him, and I did not look away, and I saw something small change at the corner of his mouth. He lifted his mug an inch, the way you would toast a person across a restaurant.

I nodded. That was all.

Fred called the meeting to order at seven. He read the minutes. He read the treasurer’s report about the parking lot sealing, which took eleven minutes, and a man in the back asked a question about it, and Fred answered, and the room shuffled and coughed. I sat there with my hands folded and my heart doing something quick and heavy under the necklace.

At 7:34, Fred said, “Item four. Craig, you want to present?”

“Thank you, Fred.”

I will say this for him: he was good. He stood up and buttoned the quarter-zip, and in the voice of a man reading from a script he had practiced in the shower, he talked about the building’s appearance, and property values, and the fact that we are all neighbors, and that sometimes it only takes one person’s choices on a balcony to degrade the experience for everyone beneath them. He said degrade. He said experience. He said he had heard from several residents, and he was only here as their voice.

“Organic debris,” he said, “is a growing concern. Plants, food waste, bird seed, items that come off a balcony and land on the property of others. I think we can all agree that it’s simply a matter of consideration. A seventy-five-dollar fine per incident would be a fair deterrent, and it would protect those of us who live on the lower floors.”

Some people nodded. Edith’s mouth went tight. Eddie looked at the floor between his boots.

“I’d like to put it to a vote tonight,” Craig said, “if there are no objections.”

Fred looked around the room. “Any discussion? Anybody signed up for public comment?”

“Yes,” I said, and stood.

My knees were not entirely steady. I walked to the front, past the flag, and I did not look at Craig. I took the dish towel off the egg cartons and laid them on the table in front of Fred, side by side, and opened the lids.

I will not forget the sound the room made. Not a gasp. More a kind of settling, the way a house settles when the furnace stops. Thirty-four people leaning forward at the same time.

“My name is Lois Ingram,” I said. “I live in 3B, directly below Craig. I’d like to speak about organic debris.”

“Lois,” Craig said, with a smile, “I think maybe this is not the venue.”

“It’s the venue,” Fred said, without looking at him. He had put his glasses on. “Go ahead, Lois.”