Lurkers

by Sandi Tan

Around their fifth or sixth encounter, they introduced themselves to each other. No plans for any whisky meetups were made—they knew their kind of drinking was best done alone.

  She found it soothing as she drank in the solitude of her living room that Raymond was doing the same in his house across the street. She often watched him from one of her upstairs rooms. Framed brilliantly in his picture window, he was like a silent movie that replayed itself over and over every night. He sat in his favorite armchair with a crystal tumbler of something, holding animated conversations with people she never saw, conducting symphonies she never heard. Once in a while he would get careless and stagger around the house with his robe wide open, forgetting that a window worked both ways. It was delicious how she never ran into him at the supermarket or the bank or the drugstore—it was only ever Union Liquors.

  It was also at their liquor store that he asked her, a few weeks ago, “When are you due?”

  Mortified that he’d noticed her recent weight gain, she accepted his misguided joshing with a chortle.

  “No, seriously, my dear,” he said, “you shouldn’t be drinking like this if you’re having a baby.”

  Kate dropped two slices of bread down the toaster and twisted the lid off the strawberry jam. While she waited, famished, she gulped down her third glass of milk.

  The greeting card sat on the kitchen counter. Her mother had a habit of sending her goofy cards—Hanukkah cards for Valentine’s Day, get-well-soon cards for her birthday and Kwanzaa cards for no other reason than pure silliness—but never before had the greeting matched up so fully with the actual occasion. The card opened to reveal a very pregnant mama squirrel. Shit.

  She hadn’t told Mary-Sue about her pregnancy; yet it seemed as if her mother, with her uncanny sixth sense, had simply known. Congratulations! chirped a chorus line of squirrels. They’d had no contact in over a month, and the card was probably just a friendly reminder for her to call. Mary-Sue had always been nothing less than kind and generous—a nun with a checkbook. She’d never known the real Kate—violent, haunted, ruled by chaos and disappointment. A Vietnam whore.

  She could kill Bluto. Him and his busted condom. He hadn’t called her since that night, which was just as well since she didn’t want anything more to do with him. Their encounter might as well have been a hallucination born of a lonely spring night.

  Yet certain facts remained irrefutable—that girl Brittany had made the news, still missing. And the incubus was no dream. It grew daily in size and temperament; it had very specific demands and exacted very specific punishments if those demands weren’t met. At four months, it had become harder for Kate to deny or disguise her state. She sometimes still harbored dark thoughts about getting rid of it.

  On the bright side, she knew that Mary-Sue would welcome the baby with a benevolence that Kate didn’t herself possess. Mary-Sue would detach the reality of the baby from the reality of its provenance and overwhelm it with a love that would render history inconsequential. Nothing would matter beyond the fact that it was flesh and blood, and yelping for supervision . . . Not that this made it any easier to pick up the phone.

  The August heat was hard on her body. She’d already thrown up that morning, running from her bed to the toilet, hand over mouth, at seven. Now, the merciless sun was beating down on the house, unearthing old stinks. A sick dog with halitosis. A poorly covered grave. Dead babies floating down a muddy river.

  She rushed again to the bathroom.

  Kate knew her own history of terrible impulses only too well. Only a few years ago, she had been a grade-school teacher in south Los Angeles, with its appalling teacher-student ratio. She taught math, reading and writing at an elementary school where not once did she meet an Edward James Olmos who prescribed calculus for self-respect.

  Kate got goosebumps the first time she heard “motherfucker” coming from the mouth of a seven-year-old girl, but that was dignified compared to the other things the kids called one another. The baggy-pants look began for boys in the first grade. The girls wore gaudy spandex and had sopping infections from DIY pierced ears. Spot checks uncovered cigarettes, bullets, condoms, even a handgun in her third-grade class—her most prized student, Keneesha, kept a hunting knife in her lunch sack. Protection from what or whom, it was never clear. The child didn’t want to say, and the school shrink gave up.

  There was a boy named Marco in her class, a six-year-old Filipino Mexican, slight even for six. He did his homework on time, never called her any names and stayed out of trouble. His mother sold fake Louis Vuitton purses at a swap meet downtown, his father had worked construction until a falling scaffold took off his arm. Like many of the kids at the school, he spoke mainly Spanish at home; his English came dented by the barrio, and he tried hard to shake its imprint. Then things got strange. Often when Kate would be writing on the blackboard, this kid would fix his eyes on her. She would feel him watching her every move, staring at her breasts, her hips. It wasn’t a crush, that much she knew. The boy was six. She could tell that he didn’t like her, didn’t trust her and was sussing her out for some other possibly criminal opportunity. In looks and manner, he reminded her of somebody from the past but she couldn’t quite place who.

  One day as she was driving out of the school parking lot, she saw him waiting for the bus. His eyes met hers, but instead of flinching or smiling a hello, he kept on staring. It was like a contest. She had to look away. When she stopped for kids at the crosswalk, Marco materialized, his palms pressed flat against her window.

  “What are you, Miss Ireland?” he asked. “Who are you?”

  She hit the gas. The nerve of the little prick.

  The next day at school, Marco accosted her in the hallway. Again, he stared at her in his searching way.

  “Miss Ireland?” A rosary dangled from his hand. “Did you come to save me?”

  She gestured for him to walk ahead of her.

  “My mother received a message from God,” he kept on, looking back at her as he walked. “She said there is an angel at my school. She said the angel will save me.” At the stairwell, he turned back to look at her again as he held on to the handrail and carefully descended the steps.

  “Well, kid, that’s a nice story,” she said.

  Suddenly, she watched him close his eyes and swoon, his legs giving way under him. He plummeted without resistance down the stairs, head and shoulders first, landing at the bottom of the staircase in a passive, twisted heap. He was still clutching the rosary. Students and teachers rushed over. Some of the kids made catcalls and laughed. Kate raced down the steps to where Marco was, calling for the school nurse. The kid’s mouth poured blood, and one of his arms made a right angle in the wrong place. He murmured when they tried to move him but otherwise made no complaint.

  Kate was called to the principal’s office. In a fit of keenly felt déjà vu, before gentle, gray-haired Principal Simmons could even question her about the incident, she bolted from the room, yelling “I’m done!”

  She then gave private English lessons to foreigners, immigrants who wanted to improve their language skills in order to land better jobs or post comments on the Internet without getting heckled by creeps. Her sideline was accent augmentation, targeting those who wanted to pass as native speakers for professional or romantic reasons.

  To improve their conversational skills, she asked her students to talk about their lives, and their confessions produced some of the strangest and sweetest stories of new American striving. There were three Thai sisters who wanted to expand their massage-parlor business into the gated suburbs, a Russian mail-order wife sent to learn English by her dying televangelist husband, a Peruvian car dealer who’d been in the US for twenty years and wanted to branch into Hummers.

  Mr. Park, the Korean pastor across the street, had been her single dullest student. Unlike her mother, she’d never warmed to him, but he asked to hire her and the terms had been more t
han fair. Her tasks were simple: drive to his church twice a week and teach his staff rudimentary English, then stay on to converse with him for a couple of hours more. He swore her to secrecy, saying he didn’t want anyone to find out about his lessons. She inferred that by “anyone,” he meant his wife and daughters. His chauvinism—sexual, cultural, generational—was there in the way he sat, with his legs apart, one peasant foot perched on the seat like a pasha. It was there in the way he coughed, his open mouth exposing his tonsils for all to see. It was there in the leisurely way he scratched his balls, then slyly ran his fingers across his nose.

  The funny thing was he actually spoke the language better than he let on; it was just his accent that was a bit hard to penetrate. He said his daughters laughed at him whenever he tried to converse with them. Inhibited—although he didn’t put it that way—he retreated into pidgin and monosyllables. By default, Kate became the only person he could talk to, and he seemed to really enjoy her company. He told her about his past as a badminton champion in South Korea, and how he missed the charred beef aroma of street carts selling galbi late into the night. Several times he tried to hug her after class, praising her for being “such a good listener.”

  But she really wasn’t. When he confessed that he had ambitions of becoming a writer in English, Kate encouraged him to put his stories down on paper so she wouldn’t have to hear him stutter on pitifully about them. He got to work immediately, writing hard every day. The next week, she was surprised by the quantity of his output—sixty pages—having expected only a tedious haiku or two. The quality of the work was another matter altogether. But these were language lessons, not fiction workshops. She concentrated on fixing his English and made no comment about his chosen subjects—lechers, philanderers, the full gamut of completely revolting men. Obediently, he wrote his stories out several times over, his grammar and handwriting improving with each successive draft. She was considerate about them, using value-free terms like “different” and “unexpected.”

  When he finally assembled his stack of six short stories, as polished as he could make them, he invited Kate for coffee at Starbucks. To celebrate, he said. There she found him trying to read the ads at the back of the LA Weekly, his mouth open like a carp. She was mortified when the barista took them to be a couple.

  As they sat down, Mr. Park thanked her for her continued encouragement and asked if she could help place his stories in reputable newspapers or journals. His primary interest was to impress his “very clever” daughters, both of whom adored The Simpsons and South Park, and possessed, according to him, “the very sarcastic type of humor.” Eventually, he’d want to go on to write novels or television sagas, with his clever daughters’ help, perhaps. Epics involving a whole cross-section of society, “like Charles Dickens and Simpsons, all together.” He would tell the stories of everybody, rich and poor, Korean and black, Latino and Jewish, and he’d make their lives intersect in refreshing ways. He clasped his hands together: “Old world plus new world!”

  He waited eagerly for Kate’s response, the soy foam canopy on his latte growing cold and quietly sagging.

  Kate’s face was red. She tried to find something nice to say.

  “Mr. Park, I really . . . I’m not sure I know what to tell you.”

  “Yes? You see it?” He tapped the table for emphasis. “I pay you extra if you find publisher for me. Our secret. Two hundred dollars.”

  His offer wasn’t just idiotic, it was incredibly insulting. Kate pushed out a smile and said, neutrally, “I don’t think you should be thinking about ditching your day job yet.”

  “No!” Mr. Park guffawed, hearing only what he wanted to hear. “No, I don’t quit until I make bestseller! I have responsibility of my family. I am not old maid like you.”

  Confident in his talent, he sat himself erect, pulled his knees apart and cleared his throat noisily. A few people turned to stare, but he remained oblivious. He hacked a lump of phlegm into his napkin and left it crushed up on the table, perilously close to Kate’s coffee. She pursed her lips.

  “How should I put this?” she finally said, pulling her cup away. “Your stories aren’t good enough for publication anywhere. I mean, quite honestly, they’re garbage.”

  “But you said . . .”

  “I know what I said. And I’m sorry for misleading you. I just didn’t want to hurt your feelings.” She looked at him. There was soy foam on the side of his mouth—or what she hoped was soy foam. “Mr. Park, your clever daughters would be horrified. Some of the attitudes expressed in your stories, Americans will find downright . . . disgusting.” She hadn’t meant to use that word, but she was inspired by his loogie.

  Mr. Park nodded too quickly. He took in her words as he drank his latte in large gulps. Once he was done, he swept his hand briskly across the tabletop to clear it of crumbs and stood up. He thanked her for her time and, avoiding her eyes, left.

  The whole way home, he thought about his next badminton match with his daughters and how he wouldn’t let them win again. He didn’t do them any favors deceiving them into thinking they were better than they actually were. God help him if they ended up man-haters like that Miss Ireland. And to think he once found her dangerously attractive. He knew she’d never warmed to him—Western women seldom did, her mother had been a rare exception—but he thought he would gradually win her over, story by story, draft by draft, check by check.

  His wife had been right all along; he should have let the girls study Korean. What was Spanish going to do for them? It was bad enough they already thought in English. He sensed trouble farther down the road. Already they questioned him and disrespected him at every turn—this would mutate into hate and shame. Oh, the way they looked at him sometimes. As if he were the stupidest person in the world, put on this earth by God just to annoy and embarrass them. Clever as they were, his girls were raised wrong and there was no one to blame now but himself.

  In Mr. Z’s car, a kind of off-key, weird old song played.

  Trumpet and piano. Then someone singing off-tempo defiantly about “sudden cheese” and “strange foot.” And blood.

  Rosemary felt Mr. Z watching her from the corner of his eye.

  “Like it?” he asked.

  “Um . . . yeah.”

  “It’s called ‘Strange Fruit.’ Know it?”

  She shrugged.

  “Billie Holiday.”

  “Oh, yeah! I’ve heard of him.”

  “Her.”

  Oh, hah. It was southern breeze, not sudden cheese . . . And it’s strange fruit hanging, not strange foot . . . Duh.

  “It’s probably one of the most powerful songs of the twentieth century, and one of my personal favorites.” He looked at her. “I might use it in our play. What do you think?”

  “It’s a cool song.”

  “I’ll burn you a CD of it if you like.”

  She nodded: of freaking course, I like.

  He stopped the car on a quiet, sloping street called Mount Curve. Rosemary and her sister often pedaled up it on their bikes, panting like dogs, then spun around and sped down without braking.

  The day was overcast. Used cotton balls sequestered the shy blue sky.

  “Think it’s going to rain?” He pulled up the handbrake.

  “It’s been grey and muggy like this for days. Nice and moody. I like it.”

  He cleared his throat. “So, I think workshop today went great.”

  Funny he should have mentioned that. She was dying to ask him what the session had been all about. There was still no script and no one was part of the workshop other than the so-called male lead Arik and herself. Mr. Z spent the whole time talking about French movies and making the two of them hold hands. They were supposed to work at seeming like “a convincing couple,” which she at first misheard as “a conceiving couple.” She hobbled around the rehearsal room like a pregnant lady until Mr. Z asked her why
she was walking so strangely.

  “What do you think of Arik?” Mr. Z asked.

  “He’s okay.” Tall, wavy brown hair, shadow ’stache, dimply like an Armenian-American Josh Hartnett. She wondered what it’d be like to lie in his fuzzy arms.

  “Just okay? I know for a fact he thinks you’re foxy.”

  Rosemary made a face. Foxy? What a word.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Don’t believe me?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “I’m telling you he’s really into you. It was electrifying just watching the two of you together.” He looked at her. “There’s nothing wrong with being foxy, you know.”

  She squirmed again and looked down at her hands.

  “Well, I guess he is kind of conventionally cute.”

  “Finally! An opinion.” He squeezed her arm. “Brava.”

  She smiled, turning away so he wouldn’t see her blush. Her cheeks prickled. She gazed out at a short tree brimming with bright orange apricots in somebody’s front yard, set against a storybook cottage painted in robin’s-egg blue. She and Mira had been watching these apricots ripen in slow motion for weeks. She loved this house, always had—it stood out on a street of faux adobe-style boxes painted in various shades of taupe. Three fat crows were working on the fruit that had fallen onto the freshly mown grass. She imagined that anytime now Snow White or Grumpy or Doc would come charging out of the little house with a broom to shoo the birds away.

  “What do you think of this cute little house?”

  “It’s, like, my favorite. Whoever lives there’s probably really happy. And well-adjusted. When I was little, I used to fantasize about living there.” She saw his smile and instantly felt like a moron for sharing such unguarded enthusiasm.

  “Like apricots?” He called them A-pricots, like a country boy.

  “Um, I guess they’re okay.”

  “Then why don’t you run out there and go grab us a couple?”

  “That would totally be stealing.”