Stranger Things Happen (27 page)

Alligator, maybe, he says, and I swear he looks just like the
waiter who brought me orange chicken in that new restaurant
downtown. I'm so close, I swear they must see me, but they don't
seem to. Or maybe they're just being polite.

We all get out on the other side and there's a nightclub all lit
up with paper lanterns on the veranda. Men and women are standing
out on the veranda, and there's a band playing inside. It's the
kind of music that makes you start tapping your feet. It gets
inside me and starts knocking inside my head. By now I think the
girls must have seen me, but they don't look at me. They seem to be
ignoring me. "Well, here they are," this one woman says. "Hello,
girls." She's tall, and so beautiful she looks like a movie star,
but she's stern-looking too, like she probably plays villains.
She's wearing one of them tight silky dresses with dragons on it,
but she's not Oriental.

"Now let's get started," she says. Over the door of the
nightclub is a sign. DANCE WITH BEAUTIFUL GIRLS. They go in. I wait
a bit and go in, too.

I dance with the oldest and I dance with the youngest and of
course they pretend that they don't know me, but they think I dance
pretty fine. We shimmy and we grind, we bump and we do the
Charleston. This girl she opens up her legs for me but she's got
her hands down in an X, and then her knees are back together and
her arms fly open like she's going to grab me, and then her hands
are crossing over and back on her knees again. I lift her up in the
air by her armpits and her skirt flies up. She's standing on the
air like it was solid as the dance floor, and when I put her back
down, she moves on the floor like it was air. She just floats. Her
feet are tapping the whole time and sparks are flying up from her
shoes and my shoes and everybody's shoes. I dance with a lot of
girls and they're all beautiful, just like the sign says, even the
ones who aren't. And when the band starts to sound tired, I sneak
out the door and back across the river, back through the forest,
back up the secret passageway into the girls' bedroom.

I get back in the closet and wipe my face on someone's dress.
The sweat is dripping off me. Pretty soon the girls come home too,
limping a little bit, but smiling. They sit down on their beds and
they take off their shoes. Sure enough, their shoes are worn right
through. Mine aren't much better.

That's when I step out of the closet and while they're all
screaming, lamenting, shrieking, scolding, yelling, cursing, I
unlock the bedroom door and let their father in. He's been waiting
there all night. He's hangdog. There are circles under his eyes.
Did you follow them? he says.

I did, I say.

Did you stick to them? he says. He won't look at them.

I did, I say. I give him the branch. A little bit later, when I
get to know the oldest girl, we get married. We go out dancing
almost every night, but I never see that club again.

There are two kinds of names.

The girl detective has learned to distrust certain people.
People who don't blink enough, for example. People who don't
fidget. People who dance too well. People who are too fat or too
thin. People who cry and don't need to blow their noses afterwards.
People with certain kinds of names are prone to wild and
extravagant behavior. Sometimes they turn to a life of crime. If
only their parents had been more thoughtful. These people have
names like Bernadette, Sylvester, Arabella, Apocolopus, Thaddeus,
Gertrude, Gomez, Xavier, Xerxes. Flora. They wear sinister
lipsticks, plot world destruction, ride to the hounds, take up
archery instead of bowling. They steal inheritances, wear false
teeth, hide wills, shoplift, plot murders, take off their clothes
and dance on tables in crowded bars just after everyone has gotten
off work.

On the other hand, it doesn't do to trust people named George or
Maxine, or Sandra, or Bradley. People with names like this are
obviously hiding something. Men who limp. Who have crooked, or too
many teeth. People who don't floss. People who are stingy or who
leave overgenerous tips. People who don't wash their hands after
going to the bathroom. People who want things too badly. The world
is a dangerous place, full of people who don't trust each other.
This is why I am staying up in this tree. I wouldn't come down even
if she asked me to.

The girl detective is looking for her
mother.

The girl detective has been looking for her mother for a long
time. She doesn't expect her mother to be easy to find. After all,
her mother is also a master of disguises. If we fail to know the
girl detective when she comes to find us, how will the girl
detective know her mother?

She sees her sometimes in other people's dreams. Look at the way
this woman is dreaming about goldfish, her mother says. And the
girl detective tastes the goldfish and something is revealed to
her. Maybe a broken heart, maybe something about money, or a
holiday that the woman is about to take. Maybe the woman is about
to win the lottery.

Sometimes the girl detective thinks she is missing her mother's
point. Maybe the thing she is supposed to be learning is not about
vacations or broken hearts or lotteries or missing wills or any of
these things. Maybe her mother is trying to tell the girl detective
how to get to where she is. In the meantime, the girl detective
collects the clues from other people's dreams and we ask her to
find our missing pets, to tell us if our spouses are being honest
with us, to tell us who are really our friends, and to keep an eye
on the world while we are sleeping.

About three o'clock this morning, the girl detective pushed up
her window and looked at me. She looked like she hadn't been
getting much sleep either. "Are you still up in that tree?"

Why we fear the girl detective.

She reminds us of our mothers. She eats our dreams. She knows
what we have been up to, what we are longing for. She knows what we
are capable of, and what we are not capable of. She is looking for
something. We are afraid that she is looking for us. We are afraid
that she is not looking for us. Who will find us, if the girl
detective does not?

The girl detective asks a few questions.

"I think I've heard this story before," the girl detective says
to the fat man.

"It's an old story."

The man stares at her sadly and she stares back. "So why are you
telling me?"

"Don't know," he says. "My wife disappeared a few months ago. I
mean, she passed on, she died. I can't find her is what I mean. But
I thought that maybe if someone could find that club again, she
might be there. But I'm old and her father's house burned down
thirty years ago. I can't even find that Chinese restaurant
anymore."

"Even if I found the club," the girl detective says, "if she's
dead, she probably won't be there. And if she is there, she may not
want to come back."

"I guess I know that too, girlie," he says. "But to talk about
her, how I met her. Stuff like that helps. Besides, you don't know.
She might be there. You never know about these things."

He gives her a photograph of his wife.

"What was your wife's name?" the girl detective says.

"I've been trying to remember that myself," he says.

Some things that have recently turned up in bank
vaults.

Lost pets. The crew and passengers of the Mary Celeste. More
socks. Several boxes of Christmas tree ornaments. A play by
Shakespeare, about star-crossed lovers. It doesn't end well.
Wedding rings. Some albino alligators. Several tons of
seventh-grade homework. Ballistic missiles. A glass slipper. Some
African explorers. A whole party of Himalayan mountain climbers.
Children, whose faces I knew from milk cartons. The rest of that
poem by Coleridge. Also fortune cookies.

Further secret origins of the girl
detective.

Some people say that she was the child of missionaries, raised
by wolves, that she is the Princess Anastasia, last of the
Romanovs. Some people say that she is actually a man. Some people
say that she came here from another planet and that some day, when
she finds what she is looking for, she'll go home. Some people are
hoping that she will take us with her.

If you ask them what she is looking for, they shrug and say,
"Ask the girl detective."

Some people say that she is two thousand years old.

Some people say that she is not one girl but many—that is, she's
actually a secret society of Girl Scouts. Or possibly a sub-branch
of the FBI.

Whom does the girl detective love?

Remember that boy, Fred, or Nat? Something like that. He was in
love with the girl detective, even though she was smarter than him,
even though he never got to rescue her even once from the bad guys,
or when he did, she was really just letting him, to be kind. He was
a nice boy with a good sense of humor, but he used to have this
recurring dream in which he was a golden retriever. The girl
detective knew this, of course, the way she knows all our dreams.
How could she settle down with a boy who dreamed that he was a
retriever?

Everyone has seen the headlines. "Girl Detective Spurns Head of
State." "I Caught My Husband in Bed with the Girl Detective."
"Married Twenty Years, Husband and Father of Four, Revealed to Be
the Girl Detective."

I myself was the girl detective's lover for three happy months.
We met every Thursday night in a friend's summer cottage beside a
small lake. She introduced herself as Pomegranate Buhm. I was
besotted with her, her long legs so pale they looked like two
slices of moonlight. I loved her size eleven feet, her black hair
that always smelled like grapefruit. When we made love, she stuck
her chewing gum on the headboard. Her underwear was embroidered
with the days of the week.

We always met on Thursday, as I have said, but according to her
underwear, we also met on Saturdays, on Wednesdays, on Mondays,
Tuesdays, and once, memorably, on a Friday. That Friday, or rather
that Thursday, she had a tattoo of a grandfather clock beneath her
right breast. I licked it, surreptitiously, but it didn't come off.
The previous Thursday (Monday according to the underwear) it had
been under her left breast. I think I began to suspect then,
although I said nothing and neither did she.

The next Thursday the tattoo was back, tucked discreetly under
the left breast, but it was too late. It ended as I slept, dreaming
about the waitress at Frank's Inland Seafood, the one with Monday
nights off, with the gap between her teeth and the freckles on her
ass. I was dreaming that she and I were in a boat on the middle of
the lake. There was a hole in the bottom of the boat. I was putting
something in it—to keep the water out—when I became aware that
there was another woman watching us, an older woman, tall with a
stern expression. She was standing on the water as if it were a
dance floor. "Did you think she wouldn't find out?" she said. The
waitress pushed me away, pulling her underwear back up. The boat
wobbled. This waitress's underwear had a word embroidered on
it:

Payday.

I woke up and the girl detective was sitting beside me on the
bed, stark naked and dripping wet. The shower was still running.
She had a strange expression on her face, as if she'd just eaten a
large meal and it was disagreeing with her.

"I can explain everything," I said. She shrugged and stood up.
She walked out of the room stark naked and the next time I saw her,
it was two years later and she was disguised as an Office Lady in a
law firm in downtown Tokyo, tapping out Morse code on the desk with
one long petal-pink fingernail. It was something about expense
accounts, or possibly a dirty limerick. She winked at me and I fell
in love all over again.

But I never saw the waitress again.

What the girl detective eats for dinner.

The girl detective lies down on her bed and closes her eyes.
Possibly the girl detective has taken the fat man's case. Possibly
she is just tired. Or curious.

All over the city, all over the world, people are asleep.
Sitting up in my tree, I am getting tired just thinking about them.
They are dreaming about their children, they are dreaming about
their mothers, they are dreaming about their lovers. They dream
that they can fly. They dream that the world is round like a dinner
plate. Some of them fall off the world in their dreams. Some of
them dream about food. The girl detective walks through these
dreams. She picks an apple off a tree in someone's dream. Someone
else is dreaming about the house they lived in as a child. The girl
detective breaks off a bit of their house. It pools in her mouth
like honey.

The woman down the street is dreaming about her third husband,
the one who ran off with his secretary. That's what she thinks. He
went for takeout one night five years ago and never came back. It
was a long time ago. His secretary said she didn't know a thing
about it, but the woman could tell the other woman was lying. Or
maybe he ran away and joined the circus.

There is a man who lives in her basement, although the woman
doesn't know it. He's got a television down there, and a small
refrigerator, and a couch that he sleeps on. He's been living there
for the past two years, very quietly. He comes up for air at night.
The woman wouldn't recognize this man if she bumped into him on the
street. They were married about twenty years and then he went to
pick up the lo mein and the wontons and the shrimp fried rice, and
it's taken him a while to get back home. He still had his set of
keys. She hasn't been down in the basement in years. It's hard for
her to get down the stairs.

The man is dreaming too. He's working up his courage to go
upstairs and walk out the front door. In his dream he walks out to
the street and then turns around. He'll walk right back up to the
front door, ring the bell. Maybe they'll get married again someday.
Maybe she never divorced him. He's dreaming about their honeymoon.
They'll go out for dinner. Or they'll go down in the basement, down
through the trapdoor into the underworld. He'll show her the
sights. He'll take her dancing.