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Motion to Rescind
Episode 2 of 3 of Let the Record Show by Joan Pemberton · free to read
The fourteenth was a Thursday, and the board met the second Tuesday, which gave us one meeting to un-pave a pond.
I called Norm first. He laughed for a full minute, which I timed out of habit. Then I told him the contractor had measured, and the line went so quiet I could hear his television.
“The fourteenth,” he said. “Theresa, the election is in January.”
“I know.”
“I have run unopposed for nineteen years. Nobody runs against a man who has never done anything. They will run against a man who paved the ducks.”
Arlene was worse. She did not call at all. On Sunday she fed the ducks at seven, in her robe, and when I waved from my porch she waved back the way you wave at a car that let you merge. I had known her twenty-two years. She had never once waved at me like traffic.
Word had gotten around. There were twenty-three residents in the folding chairs. A man I had never seen brought a lawn chair from home. Arlene sat in the front row with a bag of cracked corn in her lap like she was holding the ransom.
Norm called it to order. He looked at my steno machine. I looked at him.
“Is the typewriter on?” he said.
“Stenotype.”
“Let the record show,” Norm said, “that I was kidding.”
I took it down. Let the record show that I was kidding.
“Theresa, you can leave that out.”
“Section four point three.”
“I am aware of section four point three,” he said. “Everyone in this building is now aware of section four point three.”
Mrs. Mercer had her calculator out already. “The contractor bid is thirty-eight thousand five hundred,” she said. “Fill, compaction and asphalt. Pond upkeep is forty-two hundred a year.”
“So we’re done,” Norm said.
“So it pays for itself in nine years and two months,” she said, and wrote that down, too. She had her own notebook. She did not trust mine.
“I move we rescind the pond motion,” Norm said.
“Second,” Gus said.
Section four point one let any member in good standing make a motion, which in thirty-nine years nobody had ever tried. Then a woman in the third row stood up. “I move the board president buys donuts for every meeting.”
“Second,” Gus said.
Nobody objected. Nobody wanted to be the person who objected to donuts. I typed it: no objection.
Norm put his face in his hands. “I move we fire the stenographer.”
“Second,” Gus said.
“Objection,” I said.
It came out exactly the way it used to come out of defense attorneys, crisp and a little bored. The room went quiet. Even Gus opened both eyes.
“You can do that?” Norm said.
“Anyone can do that. Before adjournment. Section six point two.” I looked out at twenty-three faces. “That’s the whole rule. If somebody objects, it dies.”
“Then I object to the pond,” Norm said.
“You can’t. That meeting’s over. You’d have had to object last month.”
The man in the lawn chair raised his hand and asked whether he could move that his neighbor’s boat be removed from the neighbor’s driveway. Gus seconded it before I could stop him. The neighbor, who was sitting two rows back, objected with real feeling. It died.
People applauded. This was turning into the best-attended meeting in the history of the association, and it was all my fault.
“Fine,” Norm said. “Motion to rescind. It’s been moved and seconded. Does anybody object to saving the ducks?”
Arlene turned around in her chair and gave the whole room a look she normally saved for geese. Then she turned back and looked at me, and for the first time in a month it was not the look you give traffic.
Nobody said a word.
Norm sat back like a man who had gotten away with something. I put my fingers on the keys to type no objection.
Then Mrs. Mercer cleared her throat.
She had not stood up. She didn’t need to. She had been treasurer for twelve years and had watched forty-two hundred dollars a year go into a pond and come out as algae.
She closed her notebook. She folded her hands over her calculator. She looked at me, not at Norm, because she knew who was writing it down.
“Objection,” she said.