How Steve Weinstein Turns a Backyard Standoff Into a Negotiation Scene
The lawyer wants the squirrels gone. The squirrel wants a visiting schedule. And somebody has to find a calendar.
That is the summit at the heart of a chapter in Steve Weinstein’s comic novel Nuts To You, a story for readers who like their diplomacy with a bushy tail. Pincus Ballnick has spent months at war with the squirrels in his Queens vegetable garden. Now two of them can talk, a peanut-butter cracker is about to change everything, and the family has gathered on the patio to watch. Weinstein stages the whole thing as a courtroom drama with a picnic table for a bench.
Lunch With a Side of Science
The scene opens at exactly one o’clock, when Leanne carries a tray onto the patio that looks like a surgeon’s table. Two shot glasses hold an orange solution that has been fermenting in the morning sun. Beside them are gauze pads, cotton balls, and a sterilized syringe in case the guests refuse the taste. Every item sits in the order Dr. Radcliffe sketched in his written instructions, and the main course is crackers, cheese, and peanut butter. Miriam, ever the hostess, kindly offers the squirrels an omelet or maybe chicken wings. They gag at the thought.
Pincus, meanwhile, has other priorities. He has a date with a card table at three and no intention of missing it. He waits with a Daisy BB pistol on his lap as a backup plan and the impatient whine of a man who has been told to be patient. The squirrels sniff the crackers, take a nibble, and pronounce them not bad. Then everyone waits, and the narrator reminds us that a watched pot never boils, especially when the pot is a squirrel.
“Why Do You Hate Us So Much?”
The first real question comes from Smiley, and it lands like a gavel. Why, he asks Pincus, do you hate us so much? Pincus, in his best lawyer voice, answers, “I hate all animals.” Miriam jumps in with evidence. What about the fish tank he kept for years, and the turtles and snakes he once considered? Richard adds the parakeets Pincus helped him name. Pincus points out that he does not see any dogs or cats hanging around, and that none of them ever ate his vegetables.
Smiley wants to know whether the tomatoes are the whole issue. Pincus asks where a squirrel picked up such language. “From you,” Smiley answers, and the audience can almost hear the objection being overruled. It is the kind of exchange Weinstein does best, a grudge argued so precisely that it becomes tender. Neither side is wrong. Both sides are simply tired of being misunderstood.
Squirrel Court Is in Session
What follows is Smiley’s performance of a lifetime. He rises onto his back legs and sways his arms like a lawyer working a jury, using everything he has watched Pincus do in the backyard, and for a few seconds Pincus sees his own courtroom manner reflected back at him. Zina darts among the watching trees, translating for the elders, a self-appointed cub reporter reading the proceedings out loud. Weinstein clearly enjoys the idea that the squirrels’ first experience of law is a court where the judge is a man with a BB gun.
The arguments come quickly. Why can’t you go someplace else? Pincus asks, ” The neighbors would love the company. “We like your dirt,” Smiley says simply. Why do you dig holes, and why do you take a few bites of each vegetable and leave the rest to rot? Pincus is losing a debate to a squirrel, and his face is starting to match his tomatoes. Richard steps in before it gets worse: “Dad, take it easy. You don’t want the ambulance back here again, do you?”
Terms and Conditions
Then Zina, who has learned about Hollywood divorces from her gossip magazines, offers the settlement that saves the day. She proposes a visiting schedule, a few days a week and the occasional weekend and holiday, in the style of the child visitation schedules she has read about. Leanne, who is recording everything, nicknames the result the garden treaty. Some vegetables will be off limits, some will be fair game, and any digging must take place in the neighbors’ yards, which Pincus does not care for anyway. Weinstein lets the details pile up until the negotiation sounds like a real treaty drafted by very tired people.
The remaining problem is how to remind squirrels about a calendar. Pincus asks whether there is one hidden behind a tree and suggests hiring a pilot to do skywriting. Miriam solves it with the fridge calendar from the veterans’ club and a colorful beach towel, to be hung over a patio chair on visiting days. Mia declares it almost like Winston Churchill signing a peace treaty, and adds that she just learned that in history class.
The treaty text has been open to readers now, and anyone who picks up Nuts To You can find out why the celebration, as the narrator warns, does not last very long.
And that is only a hint…
Because the story still has a surprising twist up its sleeve that readers won’t see coming…
A grudge can be argued to perfection…
A calendar can save a friendship…
A beach towel can carry a treaty…
In Nuts To You, the peace deal of the century is signed over a picnic table!
Author: Steve Weinstein. Book: Nuts To You. Published by Author Path Publishers.
