If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories (17 page)

Dinner mints!

He’d catch them on his tongue and do a little dance on his artificial leg.

“Stay away from the Prisoners!” the tall pale lady would scream, running across the green, holding her skirts up to her knees.

But she would not stay away from Fatty, whom she’d loved. And also the other one. Witness. His name had been Witness! She did not need to think any harder to remember
him
. His eyes had been pecked out by birds, so they had called him Witness. How could she ever forget? He’d almost scared her to death the first time he’d asked to touch her hand with his own, but his own hand had been surprisingly cool and soft—and those blank holes in his face where he’d once had eyes, when she’d gotten used to them, she could have stared into those smooth sockets all day if they’d let her.
Everything
was in them. The wagons, the gypsies, the campfires blazing despite the rain, the whole history of the Kingdom. The tundra her ancestors had crossed to reach it. Their bark boats in the middle of an ocean with great chunks of ice floating in it. And the men in their reindeer skins, and the women dressed as birds—ten thousand feathers fluttering around their heads.

Now she remembered. She’d watched them hang Witness one afternoon, and then cut him down still twitching, thrown his body
onto the others at the bottom of the drained swimming pool. His eyes had been open. He’d been looking straight at her. And then—

And then nothing. No one. For so long.

How long?

How long did it take for a forest to grow?

She put her hand to the windowpane. It was cold. In the air out there, a bit of snow. What did they call this season again?

Witness?

No, winter.

And wasn’t that also her own name, and the name of her kingdom, and the name of her country, and—?

No. No. Something else was on the tip of her tongue. What could it have been?

Whither, wisdom, whisper, whimper, whistler?

Swimmer, glister, jester, luster, laughter?

She was on her knees with her face in her hands when she heard footsteps climbing stairs.

Psalter, ranter, rooster, banish, answer?

And then she heard the jangling of keys. The clearing of a throat. Static crackling over some kind of radio. Bitter laughter.

T
he check-out line snakes clear down aisle thirteen to the paper towel display, and then up past the plastic utensils and packaged napkins. Everyone seems to be buying their Fourth of July picnic supplies late. It
is
the Fourth of July. Like these others, Chloe has no choice but to stand in the line. The things in her cart, she has to buy. There will be company. It’s the Fourth of July. Last week, her husband, driving to work in his pickup truck, struck a child on a bicycle, and two days ago the child died.

It was only a mile from their own front door, at the bottom of the hill, at an intersection through which they’d passed without incident every day, thousands of times, for years. It was a two-lane road, paved, but in the country. A yellow line ran straight down the middle of it, broken here and there to let the faster vehicles pass the old people and the tractors. There was a stop sign at the end of it. There was a house up on the hill where a nurse lived—a nurse who had already left for her own job by the time Chloe’s husband came running up the driveway, the bloody boy in his arms, calling for help.

He’d set the child down in an old lawn chair and broken down the nurse’s front door to get in, to call 911.

There is an angry man in front of her in the line.

“This place,” he says, shaking his head. “Jesus Christ.”

She nods. The man is cradling four enormous bags of potato chips in his arms. They look difficult to hold. So airy, so insubstantial. But awkward, too. A delicate balance. If you held on too tightly, they would crumble into potato ashes. If you let go, who knows.

“What’s the matter with this place?” he asks Chloe, really
looking
at her, as if she might actually have an answer.

She shrugs. She offers, weakly, “Not enough help?”

The man snorts and looks away. Chloe has given him the wrong answer. He wanted to hear something damning. Something inherent. Something premeditated. He wanted to blame someone
specific.
An older woman in front of the man turns to look at Chloe then as if either criticizing her for being critical, or also waiting for a better answer. The woman’s hair in the bright grocery store appears so thin that Chloe could count the brown spots on her scalp without taking even one step closer. A cartoonish image flashes in front of her of sneezing in the old woman’s direction, and the hair being blown right off her head in a wispy explosion while the old woman, with big, surprised eyes, grabs her naked scalp, feeling around for the hair.

The woman stares at Chloe awhile longer, and then says, as if she, too, had been asked for her opinion, “I don’t know. The whole franchise is bad.”

This, Chloe knows for a fact to be true. When she lived in Pascua, she shopped at its mother-store, and the lines there were even longer, the produce even paler, softer. As at this location, the fruit in the mother-store was always hovered over by a veil of fruit flies. Small moths occasionally wafted down the cereal aisle. Chloe suspected those moths were leaving larvae behind in the Frosted Flakes. Once, at the Pascua store, Chloe had dropped a grapefruit she’d meant to put in a plastic bag. When it hit the linoleum, instead of rolling, it had collapsed at her feet—deflated, putrid. A small crowd of housewives and elderly men had gathered to scoff at it. Disbelieving. Appalled. One old man had suggested that Chloe try to get her money back.

But Chloe hadn’t paid for anything. What would she get her money back for?

Still, it
had
seemed like an injustice, a betrayal, the kind of thing for which a customer should be compensated. The way that grapefruit had shone slickly under the fluorescent lights, and had been, in truth, full of rot, had seemed like a promise that had been broken.

Maybe it was even
more
of an injustice
because
she hadn’t paid for anything,
because
this had just happened to her, and no one owed her a cent, not even a perfunctory apology.

It’s a small town, and Chloe has lived in it for eight years. She’s seen this man, the man in the line ahead of her, around the town on many occasions. Like her, he has a grown child, maybe a few years older than Chloe’s daughter. Chloe has a fairly clear memory of seeing this man standing in the hallway of the high school with his arms crossed, glaring into the face of a boy who looked exactly like him.

But that must have been at least seven years ago, when Chloe still felt like an outsider in the town, when her daughter cried herself to sleep every night because she missed her friends, her father, her old life, her old school. That was back when Chloe still woke up every morning so overwhelmed with guilt that she felt as if the pores of her skin might have released it all over her pillow as she slept.

She changed the sheets every other day.

Her new husband thought this was lovely, this changing of the sheets—evidence of Chloe’s superiority to his first wife. He did a lot of comparison.

You’re so much quieter than Danielle was. You’re so much more organized, so much more understanding. Your food is so much more colorful. You’re so much better with money.

It was so consistent, so constant, that Chloe started to read between the lines.

He never told her, for instance, that she was better in bed than Danielle had been. He never told her that she was more beautiful. He never said that Chloe was funnier, or a better conversationalist,
or more exciting. He’d pat her hip in bed before she fell into a deep sleep and say something cheery like, “I can’t believe how lucky I am. You’re so much more suited to me than Danielle. We’re so much more alike.”

It drove Chloe insane to think of Jay feeling about her the way she’d felt about her ex-husband—
here’s my pal, my companion, my dopplegänger, the opposite-sex equivalent of
me—when what she felt for Jay was outrageous curiosity, nearly scandalous intrigue, regarding every aspect of who he was.

Chloe would lie awake in bed and think to herself, who wanted a wife who was that much
like
you?

So suited.

Suits, in fact, were one of the things her new husband liked to rail against. Men who had to wear them. Those sorry bastards.
Imagine
having to tie a noose around your neck every day before you left the house.

For her part, the reason Chloe had fallen in love with
him
, leaving behind her first husband and her first life, was because he was such a mystery to her. The barn full of implements. The pickup truck. The venison in the freezer. Before she canceled her subscription, a copy of the
Atlantic Monthly
was forwarded to her at her new husband’s. He’d picked it up, and turned it over and over in his hands. “What the hell is this?” he’d asked, as if he’d never seen a magazine before, let alone the
Atlantic
. It set her pulse to racing, thinking of her first husband all weekend on a couch with the
Atlantic
in front of his face, his glasses pushed down on his nose so he could read without them. She might have pulled Jay into bed right then.

So many things about Jay, like this puzzlement at the
Atlantic Monthly,
made Chloe feel knocked over with relief and lust that sometimes it felt like the heavy, dumb, clobbering paws of a big dog against her chest. He was a stranger to her. He was utterly unsuited. Her friends thought she was nuts. Her daughter, during the bad period of her first adjustment to the divorce and the new life, had screamed, “He’s a fucking
redneck
!”

“Gosh,” her ex-husband had said when he’d picked their daughter
up one weekend and met Jay for the first time, “are you planning to teach him to read?” Chloe was a reading teacher. After her ex-husband had left with her daughter, Chloe had nearly swooned with it. The laughter and delight. The honest lust. Jay had come out on the porch and looked at her as if he were completely confused, but happy enough. She’d thrown her arms around him. She’d demanded that, right that second, they go up to the bedroom and fuck.

These feelings, on her dark days, were the feelings she imagined he’d had for Danielle, who’d left him without a nickel. Jay was done, Chloe supposed, with that kind of love. Ready for something simpler: Chloe. Sometimes she still found Danielle’s long black hairs in the dust mop. Sometimes, it took ten or eleven shakes out the back door to get those strands out of her dust mop, or off of her fingers.

But the years passed. Even her ex-husband was no longer angry. A few months before, her ex-husband had actually passed Chloe and Jay, in Jay’s pickup, in his Saab, on the freeway, and Randall had set to honking and waving, a big smile on his face, as if he were astonished to find his two best friends driving beside him on the freeway. What a coincidence! At first, Chloe didn’t even recognize him (new Saab, different color), but then his features assembled themselves one by one into a familiar face. Chloe knew this man well. He wasn’t pretending to be happy to see them, he
was.

And by now her daughter had quit with the bingeing and the purging and had finished a degree in creative writing from the university, with high honors and a slew of poetry awards, and had moved to San Francisco. Every few weeks she called home with some new exciting bit of information. An apartment overlooking the park! A date with a nice guy! A party at the office! A little promotion!

As the years passed, and the radical unforgivable decisions Chloe had made seemed less and less radical, more and more forgivable, Chloe had finally also come to terms with the fact that her husband could love her without being electrified by her, even if she were still, eight years later, still electrified by him. It was enough, wasn’t it, to
be loved so sincerely by someone? It was enough, wasn’t it, to be the best cook someone had ever known, to keep the tidiest house, to be so much fun to go to a movie with? “You’re my best friend,” Jay had said more than once, seeming astonished at his good luck.