Slugfest

David Heller didn’t have an ounce of fat on his rangy body and had no such reservations about the crumb cakes. He plucked a thick square from the box and a gust of brown powder escaped.

“Quite an outburst this morning. Anyone know what happened?” David licked cinnamon sugar from his fingers one at a time.

Nikki launched into a detailed re-creation of events, including a very good, if unkind imitation of Connie Anzalone’s hysterics. “I wasn’t there, but I heard about it in the ladies’ room. That’s where you get all the best info.”

“Her garden didn’t look that bad, but she was pretty upset,” I said. Why kick the woman when she was down? Connie Anzalone was an easy target. The Little Mermaid outfit didn’t help.

“She’ll recover,” Nikki said, mouth full. “And you watch, two guys named Paulie and Vito will be guarding her booth tonight.” She flicked her nose with her index finger, leaving a trail of cinnamon on her left nostril.

David’s eyebrows rose over hipster, tortoiseshell frames. “Do you know her?”

“A little bird told me. Her husband’s connected, if you know what I mean.” Nikki had already downed two pieces of cinnamon cake, so she settled for picking at the topping on her third. “Apparently you don’t get your lawn mowed in her neighborhood without Connie’s husband’s say-so.”

Seven

Michelangelo, da Vinci, Puccini, and all my Italian ancestors were banging on the inside of my head, urging me to uphold the honor of my people. Or at least half my people; the Irish half didn’t mind a bit.

“I think everyone whose name ends in a vowel has to deny they’re in the mob, at least once in their lives,” I said.

“I only know what I was told.” Nikki sniffed. Having denuded the third piece of cake she put it out of its misery and polished off what was left. “You have to admit, she is a fish out of water in this atmosphere.” She paused, and then snorted at her own unintentional joke.

With or without the garish costume, Connie Anzalone was a fish out of water. Apart from her, the Big Apple crowd was comprised of Mayflower bluebloods who probably never touched dirt themselves, smooth-talking hucksters selling Hansel and Gretel–like sheds and sunrooms (Is there no one left selling electric organs in suburban malls?), and garden club doyennes with big hats and short white gloves. With her long nails, white-blond hair, and—shall we say—salty language, Ms. Anzalone was a breath of fresh air. Although her fashion and landscaping choices weren’t my style, she’d managed to get here, and if she didn’t have a right to verbally abuse her neighbors, she did have a right to be pissed off if she thought her garden had been intentionally sabotaged.

I identified with that fish-out-of-water feeling. I’d felt it many times in Springfield, especially on days when money was tight, the phone didn’t ring, and I wondered if I’d made the right decision to leave everything and everyone I knew and move to the suburbs. But all it took was one person to make me feel welcome. I promised myself—and my Italian ancestors—I’d swing by Connie’s booth to say ciao and buona fortuna before the end of the day.

For the rest of the day we shared box cutters, duct tape, and crumb cake, and critiqued one another’s displays. Placement was everything—one inch to the left or right could change destinies, or so I was told. Primo’s sculptures didn’t need much attention, but it took hours to unwrap, assemble, store the bubble wrap, and find the proper arrangement to make them irresistible.

As heavy as Primo’s sculptures were, they would have cost a small fortune to ship, so once again Babe had enlisted the help of friends. If they wanted to stay on Babe’s good side, truckers passing through New York allowed themselves to be shanghai’ed into delivering pieces to the convention center. It had been going on for the past three days, ever since the earliest exhibitors with the most elaborate displays arrived. The good news was that the shipping was free. The bad news was that I was never sure when items would arrive, so I had to be there every day since setup began. Most likely I’d be moving things the next day to make room for new arrivals, so I tried not to obsess about placement. Hopefully all the pieces would arrive by Friday morning in time for that evening’s reception. If not I had a slide show on my laptop, including pieces too big or too expensive to ship.

A veteran of these events, David had his own displays that showed off his chandeliers, sconces, and table lamps to best advantage. He also had a giant copper tub that held hundreds of pinecone-shaped nightlights, his bestselling item.

“We’re all hoping for that one big score,” he said, “but you’ll see, I’ll be refilling this tub all weekend. It makes people feel like they’ve been somewhere if they buy something. And a five-dollar nightlight is easier to say yes to than a torchere in the shape of a weeping cherry tree.”

He had a point. It also explained the popularity of those T-shirts with Someone Went on a Cruise and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt inscriptions.

After perfecting her own booth, Nikki set her sights on mine. “You need a real tablecloth. Did you bring one? No worries. I have one you can use.”

All Primo’s pieces were named, and I was busy labeling them when Nikki came over to help.

“You know, if you move this piece to the left—see it lines up with the P in Primo on the sign—the arrangement will be more symmetrical.” She stepped back to admire her handiwork. I failed to see how that would improve sales but thanked her anyway.

Our three booths were in a ghetto, but a nice, arty one. The smaller, nonfloral exhibits were relegated to an area known as the Garden Shop. If the display gardens got all the publicity and the photo ops, the shops did the real business and paid for the show. Prefab gazebos, fertilizers, and antique pots shared space with what must have been an entire containerload of merchandise from China—chimes, resin figures of St. Anthony, and a hundred different items with hummingbirds or frogs plastered on them. And curly willow. It would be a small miracle if no one was impaled or had an eye put out by one of the ubiquitous corkscrew branches.

Purists grumbled that Kristi Reynolds had no low bar and anyone who put an X on a check could exhibit at the show, but that was generally a sentiment shared by those who didn’t accept that gardening was a multibillion-dollar business and wasn’t just about pretty flowers and afternoon tea on the veranda. A large part of that business involved the systematic genocide of deer, chipmunks, squirrels, and slugs—creatures made lovable by the likes of Walt Disney, Chuck Jones, and various children’s book authors but much reviled by any gardener who’s had her heart broken when her tulips, hostas, and bird food disappeared. Someone once said that gardening was all about sex and death. He might well have added murder.

Eight

This year’s most ballyhooed product was SlugFest, a supposedly guaranteed slug repellent. While that might not register high on the wish lists of most people, to a gardener, it ranked right up there with world peace. And if it worked, its creators could make a fortune—gardeners were constantly looking for a magic bullet to keep the little critters from munching expensive plants and leaving silvery trails all over the garden like so many chalk-outlined bodies. Copper wire, baking soda, beer in shallow containers—the last was my favorite method for dispatching the little buggers. Showing no preference for imported or domestic beer, they slithered into the containers and died with a buzz on. On one hand, plenty of humans wouldn’t mind going out that way, and it beat being crushed under the heel of a garden clog. On the other, disposing of a container of bloated, decomposing slugs was not one of the most fun things I’d ever had to do. Where do you put them? Do you bury them? Say a few words? Leave them out for the birds to deal with? I did that once and then worried I’d caused a nest of chickadees to be born with fetal alcohol syndrome or the avian equivalent.

SlugFest’s booth was six times the size of Primo’s, but as of Wednesday, no one had seen anything other than their rotating hologram, a slug inching toward a hosta and then vanishing, and half a dozen female employees, decked out in salmon-colored polo shirts and khaki pants so unflattering it was a wonder any of them took the job.

Rumor had it that Scott Reiger, the company’s founder, was close to a major distribution deal with an international chemical company, but no samples were on display and no one had gotten as much as a whiff of the