But I did fall for a spaceman, as it turned out, fell pretty hard. I met him in the parking lot at the twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart. We used to have a regular old Wal-Mart that would close at nine o’clock and when they turned it into a Super Center a lot of people in Bovary thought that no good would come of it, encouraging people to stay up all night. Americans go to bed early and get up early, my daddy said. But I have trouble sleeping sometimes. I live in the old trailer park out the state highway and it’s not too far from the Wal-Mart and I live there with my yellow cat Eddie. I am forty years old and I was married once, to a telephone installer who fell in love with cable TV. There’s no cable TV in Bovary yet, though with a twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart, it’s probably not too far behind. It won’t come soon enough to save my marriage, however. Not that I wanted it to. He told me he just had to install cable TV, telephones weren’t fulfilling him, and he was going away for good to Mobile and he didn’t want me to go with him, this was the end for us, and I was understanding the parts about it being the end but he was going on about fiber optics and things that I didn’t really follow. So I said fine and he went away, and even if he’d wanted me to go with him, I wouldn’t have done it. I’ve only been to Mobile a couple of times and I didn’t take to it. Bovary is just right for me. At least that’s what I thought when it had to do with my ex-husband, and that kind of thinking just stayed with me, like a grape-juice stain on your housedress, and I am full of regrets, I can tell you, for not rethinking that whole thing before this. But I got a job at a hairdresser’s in town and Daddy bought me the trailer free and clear and me and Eddie moved in and I just kept all those old ideas.
So I met Desi in the parking lot. I called him that because he talked with a funny accent but I liked him. I had my insomnia and it was about three in the morning and I went to the twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart and I was glad it was open—I’d tell that right to the face of anybody in this town—I was glad for a place to go when I couldn’t sleep. So I was coming out of the store with a bag that had a little fuzzy mouse toy for Eddie, made of rabbit fur, I’m afraid, and that strikes me as pretty odd to kill all those cute little rabbits, which some people have as pets and love a lot, so that somebody else’s pet of a different type can have something to play with, and it’s that kind of odd thing that makes you shake your head about the way life is lived on planet Earth—Desi has helped me see things in the larger perspective—though, to be honest, it didn’t stop me from buying the furry cat toy, because Eddie does love those things. Maybe today I wouldn’t do the same, but I wasn’t so enlightened that night when I came out of the Wal-Mart and I had that toy and some bread and baloney and a refrigerator magnet, which I collect, of a zebra head.
He was standing out in the middle of the parking lot and he wasn’t moving. He was just standing still as a cow and there wasn’t any car within a hundred feet of him, and, of course, his spaceship wasn’t anywhere in sight, though I wasn’t looking for that right away because at first glance I didn’t know he was a spaceman. He was wearing a long black trench coat with the belt cinched tight and he had a black felt hat with a wide brim. Those were the things I saw first and he seemed odd, certainly, dressed like that in Bovary, but I took him for a human being, at least.
I was opening my car door and he was still standing out there and I called out to him, “Are you lost?”
His head turns my way and I still can’t see him much at all except as a hat and a coat.
“Did you forget where you parked your car?” I say, and then right away I realize there isn’t but about four cars total in the parking lot at that hour. So I put the bag with my things on the seat and I come around the back of the car and go a few steps toward him. I feel bad. So I call to him, kind of loud because I’m still pretty far away from him and also because I already have a feeling he might be a foreigner. I say, “I wasn’t meaning to be snippy, because that’s something that happens to me a lot and I can look just like you look sometimes, I’m sure, standing in the lot wondering where I am, exactly.”
While I’m saying all this I’m moving kind of slow in his direction. He isn’t saying anything back and he isn’t moving. But already I’m noticing that his belt is cinched very tight, like he’s got maybe an eighteen-inch waist. And as I get near, he sort of pulls his hat down to hide his face, but already I’m starting to think he’s a spaceman.
I stop. I haven’t seen a spaceman before except in the newspaper and I take another quick look around, just in case I missed something, like there might be four cars and a flying saucer. But there’s nothing unusual. Then I think, Oh my, there’s one place I haven’t looked, and so I lift my eyes, very slow because this is something I don’t want to see all the sudden, and finally I’m staring into the sky. It’s a dark night and there are a bunch of stars up there and I get goose bumps because I’m pretty sure that this man standing just a few feet away is from somewhere out there. But at least there’s no spaceship as big as the Wal-Mart hanging over my head with lights blinking and transporter beams ready to shine down on me. It’s only stars.
So I bring my eyes down—just about as slow—to look at this man. He’s still there. And in the shadow of his hat brim, with the orangey light of the parking lot all around, I can see these eyes looking at me now and they are each of them about as big as Eddie’s whole head and shaped kind of like Eddie’s eyes.
“Are you a spaceman?” I just say this right out.
“Yes, m’am,” he says and his courtesy puts me at ease right away. Americans are courteous, my daddy says, not like your Eastern liberal New York taxi drivers.
“They haven’t gone and abandoned you, have they, your friends or whoever?” I say.
“No, m’am,” he says and his voice is kind of high-pitched and he has this accent, but it’s more in the tone of the voice than how he says his words, like he’s talking with a mouth full of grits or something.
“You looked kind of lost, is all.”
“I am waiting,” he says.
“That’s nice. They’ll be along soon, probably,” I say, and I feel my feet starting to slide back in the direction of the car. There’s only so far that courtesy can go in calming you down. The return of the spaceship is something I figure I can do without.
Then he says, “I am waiting for you, Edna Bradshaw.”
“Oh. Good. Sure, honey. That’s me. I’m Edna. Yes. Waiting for me.” I’m starting to babble and I’m hearing myself like I was hovering in the air over me and I’m wanting my feet to go even faster but they seem to have stopped altogether. I wonder if it’s because of some tractor beam or something. Then I wonder if they have tractor-beam pulling contests in outer space that they show on TV back in these other solar systems. I figure I’m starting to get hysterical, thinking things like that in a situation like this, but there’s not much I can do about it.
He seems to know I’m struggling. He takes a tiny little step forward and his hand goes up to his hat, like he’s going to take it off and hold it in front of him as he talks to me, another courtesy that even my daddy would appreciate. But his hand stops. I think he’s not ready to show me his whole spaceman head. He knows it would just make things worse. His hand is bad enough, hanging there over his hat. It’s got little round pads at the end of the fingers, like a gecko, and I don’t stop to count them, but at first glance there just seems to be too many of them.
His hand comes back down. “I do not hurt you, Edna Bradshaw. I am a friendly guy.”
“Good,” I say. “Good. I figured that was so when I first saw you. Of course, you can just figure somebody around here is going to be friendly. That’s a good thing about Bovary, Alabama—that’s where you are, you know, though you probably do know that, though maybe not. Do you know that?”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment. I’m rattling on again, and it’s true I’m a little bit scared and that’s why, but it’s also true that I’m suddenly very sad about sounding like this to him, I’m getting some perspective on myself through his
big old eyes, and I’m sad I’m making a bad impression because I want him to like me. He’s sweet, really. Very courteous. Kind of boyish. And he’s been waiting for me.
“Excuse me,” he says. “I have been translating. You speak many words, Edna Bradshaw. Yes, I know the name of this place.”
“I’m sorry. I just do that sometimes, talk a lot. Like when I get scared, which I am a little bit right now. And call me Edna.”
“Please,” he says, “I am calling you Edna already. And in conclusion, you have no reason to be afraid.”
“I mean call me just Edna. You don’t have to say Bradshaw every time, though my granddaddy would do that with people. He was a fountain pen salesman and he would say to people, I’m William D. Bradshaw. Call me William D. Bradshaw. And he meant it. He wanted you to say the whole name every time. But you can just call me Edna.”
So the spaceman takes a step forward and my heart starts to pound something fierce, and it’s not from fright, I realize, though it’s some of that. “Edna,” he says. “You are still afraid.”
“Telling you about my granddaddy, you mean? How that’s not really the point here? Well, yes, I guess so. Sometimes, if he knew you for a while, he’d let you call him W. D. Bradshaw.”
Now his hand comes up and it clutches the hat and the hat comes off and there he stands in the orange lights of the parking lot at three in the morning in my little old hometown and he doesn’t have a hair on his head, though I’ve always liked bald men and I’ve read they’re bald because they have so much male hormone in them, which makes them the best lovers, which would make this spaceman quite a guy, I think, and his head is pointy, kind of, and his cheeks are sunken and his cheekbones are real clear and I’m thinking already I’d like to bake some cookies for him or something, just last week I got a prize-winning recipe, off a can of cooking spray, that looks like it’d put flesh on a fencepost. And, of course, there are these big eyes of his and he blinks once, real slow, and I think it’s because he’s got a strong feeling in him, and he says, “Edna, my name is hard for you to say”
And I think of Desi right away, and I try it on him, and his mouth, which hasn’t got anything that looks like lips exactly, moves up at the edges and he makes this pretty smile.
“I have heard that name,” he says. “Call me Desi. And I am waiting for you, Edna, because I study this planet and I hear you speak many words to your friends and to your subspecies companion and I detect some bright-colored aura around you and I want to meet you.”
“That’s good,” I say, and I can feel a blush starting in my chest, where it always starts, and it’s spreading up my throat and into my cheeks.
“I would like to call on you tomorrow evening, if I have your permission,” he says.
“Boy,” I say. “Do a lot of people have the wrong idea about spacemen, I thought you just grabbed somebody and beamed them up and that was it.” It was a stupid thing to say, I realize right away. I think Desi looks a little sad to hear this. The corners of his mouth sink. “I’m sorry,” I say.
“No,” he says. “This is how we are perceived, it is true. You speak only the truth. This is one reason I want to meet you, Edna. You seem always to say what is inside your head without any attempt to alter it.”
Now it’s my turn to look a little sad, I think. But that’s okay, because it gives me a chance to find out that Desi is more than courteous. His hands come out toward me at once, the little suckers on them primed to latch on to me, and I’m not even scared because I know it means he cares about me. And he’s too refined to touch me this quick. His hands just hang there between us and he says, “I speak this not as a researcher but as a male creature of a parallel species.”
“You mean as a man?”
His eyes blink again, real slow. “Yes. As a man. As a man I try to say that I like the way you speak.”
So I give him permission to call on me and he thanks me and he turns and glides away. I know his legs are moving but he glides, real smooth, across the parking lot and I can see now that poor Desi didn’t even find a pair of pants and some shoes to go with his trench coat. His legs and ankles are skinny like a frog’s and his feet look a lot like his hands. But all that is unclear on the first night. He has disappeared out into the darkness and I drive on home to my subspecies companion and I tell him all about what happened while he purrs in my lap and I have two thoughts.
First, if you’ve never seen a cat in your entire life or anything like one and then meet a cat in a Wal-Mart parking lot in the middle of the night all covered with fur and making this rumbling noise and maybe even smelling of mouse meat, you’d have to make some serious adjustments to what you think is pretty and sweet and something you can call your own. Second—and this hits me with a little shock—Desi says he’s been hearing how I talk to my friends and even to Eddie, and that sure wasn’t by hanging around in his trench coat and blending in with the furniture. Of course, if you’ve got a spaceship that can carry you to Earth from a distant galaxy, it’s not so surprising you’ve got some kind of radio or something that lets you listen to what everybody’s saying without being there.
And when I think of this, I start to sing for Desi. I just sit for a long while where I am, with Eddie in my lap, this odd little creature that doesn’t look like me at all but who I find cute as can be and who I love a lot, and I sing, because when I was a teenager I had a pretty good voice and I even thought I might be a singer of some kind, though there wasn’t much call for that in Bovary except in the church choir, which is where I sang mostly, but I loved to sing other kinds of songs too. And so I say real loud, “This is for you, Desi.” And then I sing every song I can think of. I sing “The Long and Winding Road” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “Everything Is Beautiful in Its Own Way” and a bunch of others, some twice, like “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Then I do a Reba McEntire medley and I start with “Is There Life Out There” and then I do “Love Will Find Its Way to You” and “Up to Heaven” and “Long Distance Lover.” I sing my heart out to Desi and I have to say this surprises me a little but maybe it shouldn’t because already I’m hearing myself through his ears—though at that moment I can’t even say for sure if he has ears—and I realize that a lot of what I say, I say because it keeps me from feeling so lonely.
The next night there’s a knock on my door and I’m wearing my best dress, with a scoop neck, and it shows my cleavage pretty good and on the way to the door I suddenly doubt myself. I don’t know if spacemen are like Earth men in that way or not. Maybe they don’t appreciate a good set of knockers, especially if their women are as skinny as Desi. But I am who I am. So I put all that out of my mind and I open the door and there he is. He’s got his black felt hat on, pulled down low in case any of my neighbors are watching, I figure, and he’s wearing a gray pinstripe suit that’s way too big for him and a white shirt and a tie with a design that’s dozens of little Tabasco bottles floating around.
“Oh,” I say. “You like hot food?”
This makes him stop and try to translate.
“Your tie,” I say “Don’t you know about your tie?”
He looks down and lifts the end of the tie and looks at it for a little while and he is so cute doing that and so innocent-like that my heart is doing flips and I kind of wiggle in my dress a bit to make him look at who it is he’s going out with. If the women on his planet are skinny, then he could be real real ready for a woman like me. That’s how I figure it as I’m waiting there for him to check out his tie and be done with it, though I know it’s my own fault for getting him off on that track, and me doing that is just another example of something or other.
Then Desi looks up at me, and he takes off his hat with one hand and I see that he doesn’t have anything that looks like ears, really, just sort of a little dip on each side where ears might be. But that doesn’t make him so odd. What’s an ear mean, really? Having an ear or not having an ear won’t get you to heaven, it seems to me. I look into Desi’s b
ig dark eyes and he blinks slow and then his other hand comes out from behind his back and he’s got a flower for me that’s got a bloom on it the color of I don’t know what, a blue kind of, a red kind of, and I know this is a spaceflower of some sort and I take it from him and it weighs about as much as my Sunbeam steam iron, just this one flower.
He says, “I heard you sing for me,” and he holds out his hand. If you want to know an exact count, there’s eight fingers on each hand. I will end up counting them carefully later on our date, but for now there’s still just a lot of fingers and I realize I’m not afraid of them anymore and I reach out to him and the little suckers latch on all over my hand, top and bottom, and it’s like he’s kissing me in eight different places there, over and over, they hold on to me and they pulse in each spot they touch, maybe with the beat of his heart. It’s like that. And my eyes fill up with tears because this man’s very fingertips are in love with me, I know.
Invaders: 22 Tales From the Outer Limits of Literature Page 38