A Small Crowd of Strangers

by Joanna Rose

  He said, “She said, ‘How’s that new girlfriend of yours? Tell her I said hello.’”

  She supposed Even-Steven had a mom somewhere, but it had never come up in the conversation.

  She liked being by herself for a while after all that Sunday-morning sex. Sometimes she stayed in bed when Michael left, especially if it was raining hard. She listened to the rain instead of Mozart. She liked to stretch out over the whole futon and get herself off. That didn’t happen when they were actually together, but afterward, as soon as he was gone, it was almost like she was still really making love to him, the wetness and the slipperiness all still there.

  Once he asked, “Don’t you have, you know, orgasms?”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

  And finally, on a warm, cloudy afternoon in June, she went down to the tavern and sat at the bar. She waited around until Even-Steven was finished with the lunch rush, and they were leaning against the bar, and she was sipping on some nasty, bitter imported beer. The gray sky made the day seem timeless, and so did drinking beer in the afternoon.

  He said, “The reason you don’t like beer is that you don’t drink it right,” and he held his bottle up to the light. “Watch.” Then he tipped the bottle up and drank down what was left in it, big swallows that moved down his throat, the white skin of his throat, the Adam’s apple.

  “Listen,” she said. “I have to tell you … I don’t know how to say this, but I won’t be coming around anymore.”

  She didn’t look at him when she said it. She wanted to say I’m sorry, but she resisted.

  “Okay, drink your beer any way you want,” he said finally. He slid his empty bottle to the edge of the bar, and the guy who was bartending grabbed it by the neck and set another full one down.

  She said, “I’m serious.”

  He was quiet, didn’t say anything until the new beer was half gone, and then he set the bottle on the bar. He pushed his glasses back up on his nose—they were always slipping down his nose—and he leaned back in a farsighted kind of way, looking at her. He said, “I thought we had a good thing.”

  There was a bit of a flutter in her throat. “Me too.”

  He looked right at her for a long minute, his eyes small and round and pretty, his long, lazy body. He turned back to the bar. He said, “Damn.”

  By mid-summer she and Michael were as coupled as you can get, and he didn’t even know it. He was in Minnesota on a fishing trip with his father. Michael had an interview at a private school, and they flew there together, then went wandering around in the creeks with hip boots on. Michael called it hassling trout that were smarter than him.

  She knew she was pregnant even before she went to the clinic, but she didn’t believe it. Michael was so careful, such a gentleman with the condoms, checking the box with a little shake when he left sometimes, and she just thought no no no the whole time the doctor at the clinic was explaining to her yes yes yes. When the doctor asked her about the dates of her last period, she tried to remember, and what she remembered was tickly little orgasms with Even-Steven and the beginning of Sunday-morning sex on Sundays.

  She had to get it done by herself, before Michael got back from Minnesota.

  There were three appointments on hot, blue, sticky summer days. She signed pieces of paper at the clinic, and the women there were kind-faced and patient, what’s your group insurance number, do you have a middle initial. The doctor said, “This is seaweed”—something small and stiff that felt like a tampon, late in the afternoon before the last appointment. She said, “It will dilate your cervix. It will cramp a little bit.” And then the next morning she said, “This will hurt a little bit.” Pattianne lay on her back with her feet up in the stirrups, and it was like having a pelvic exam. There was that speculum they use to open you up wide, except there was a loud noise, a machine sound. She took two days off work, and then there was the weekend, and she lay in front of the fan in a T-shirt with a thick pad between her legs. She read two mystery novels that she had read before, drank limeade. There was a postcard of a sunset over Lake Superior from Michael, and she set it on the bookcase without even reading it.

  He called on Sunday afternoon. “Dock of the Bay,” courtesy of Jen. When Otis Redding finally stopped whistling, she left. She walked down to the river. The sidewalk was cracked and patched with tar that stuck to her sandals like gum, and sprinklers were cutting off and on in the commons, and kids ran around screaming in the spray, and the people on the river walk were slowed way down, like they all had thick pads between their legs, and finally she just sat on a bench that was empty except for a couple pieces of the Times, which she couldn’t read because she kept running up against this blank wall of Michael in her head. She thought of lying, and she wondered what it would be like to tell him the truth, explain to him exactly why they weren’t supposed to have sex for two weeks. She couldn’t imagine what words to use, or what his face would look like, shocked, or disgusted. Or relieved. Gulls out over the river were screaming louder than the kids in the sprinklers. She just couldn’t get her brain to do it, to try to come up with some words.

  She ended up just not saying anything. She ended up ignoring the doctor’s advice a week later, and made love with Michael, watching herself from somewhere in the room, watching her own face, the face with the closed eyes, the face that Michael kissed and kissed until his long body arched and arched and then he fell on top of her and she couldn’t see her face anymore, just her hands, him holding her wrists down against the blue-striped sheet. After a while, a few days, a couple weeks, she felt lucky, it all seemed to happen quietly and then go away. Sometimes she would find herself holding her breath for no reason, and there it would be, and then the thought she wasn’t thinking would just go away on its own.

  They’d had Starla until she was so old she peed everywhere and couldn’t walk anymore. Pattianne was there with Jen, crying herself breathless, touching Starla’s soft Spaniel ears, while the vet gave her the shots. Starla’s brown eyes opened, and stayed open, and she stepped off into somewhere else, on her own.

  Michael’s birthday was at the end of September, a Saturday this year. Twenty-six, and he thought about how that was closer to thirty. How the gap in their ages was narrowing, if only for a few months until her birthday in January. He went to his parents’ house for breakfast, with flowers for his mom, yellow ones. He gave his father a set of power golf balls. He gave Claire a pair of socks with monkeys on them. Giving each other gifts on their own birthdays was a tradition. It had started when Claire was about four or five and had a birthday party. She didn’t understand how things worked, and kept trying to give her presents back as the kids left.

  During breakfast, in the middle of mimosas and French toast with strawberries, his aunt Alice called. She was his godmother.

  “Thank you for the card,” he said. “And the check.” She sent him a check for ten dollars every year. His parents had started a savings account with the first one. There was $250 in it now.

  His birthday present sat on the dining room table, a sweater. His mother always got him a sweater. Except one year, when he first started grad school, and she gave him a tie. That made him feel a little weird, and the next year she went back to giving him sweaters. This one was blue.

  When he was a little kid there would be a blue sweater vest each for him and his dad under the Christmas tree. They opened them on Christmas Eve and then wore them to Midnight Mass, where they both took off their heavy winter coats and laid them neatly on the seats. The dark church lit with candles. The Christmas songs he knew the words to. When they got home, he and Claire were hustled off to bed, and he would lie awake for a long time, singing Christmas songs.

  In the morning Michael would put his sweater vest on over his pajamas. Lots of cute pictures, Christmas pictures of them all, and it wasn’t until second grade that he realized his mother and Claire wore matching Christmas outfits too. Then one year Claire wore a red dotted dress and his mother’s wa
s dark green. The next year they went to Aunt Alice’s church for Midnight Mass. It was up in Tarrytown, and they’d left early in the evening, without opening any presents, and come home very late.

  They went to Mass on Christmas Day the next year. His dad had become a deacon, and served at Mass, wearing a dark suit and tie. Michael was nine, old enough to be an altar boy. He’d been nervous. His mother and Claire were out there where he couldn’t see them, and everything was different.

  After Mass, he had to put out the candles with the long-handled snuffer. He loved that snuffer. The church slowly emptied, making him feel a kind of panic, but he was careful not to smash the wicks. When he was finished, he went into the vestry and removed his alb, hung it carefully in the closet, took out his coat and put it on, and they would be waiting in the vestibule, ready to go home. He soon was allowed to wash the priest’s hands and ring the bells.

  Looking back on it, he couldn’t remember when he had stopped getting sweater vests. He couldn’t remember when he had started imagining getting small sweater vests for his own son one day, or when he had started picturing a little girl and a wife in matching Christmas dresses.

  After his birthday breakfast he drove back to Montclair, to Pattianne. He didn’t know why he was so nervous. He was sweating on the back of his neck.

  Saturday was busy in the neighborhood around the dry cleaner’s, and he had to park two blocks away. He took the package out of the glove box. It was a little painting from a shop in the town where he and his father had stayed when they went fishing.

  He’d tried to call her from Minnesota. He couldn’t get ahold of her. He knew she didn’t usually carry her cell phone with her. When he went into the little shop with his father to get postcards, Michael had fingered the turquoise necklaces.

  “Just a little souvenir for Pattianne,” he said.

  He tried to remember if she wore necklaces, but he didn’t know. He knew she wore earrings, sometimes dangling ones, sometimes the other kind.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  The dangling ones hung there in that space under her ear, where he could kiss her and she’d give out a little sound.

  His father cleared his throat gently, flipping through the postcards on the rack, and he said, “Something a little less intimate than jewelry might be more appropriate.”

  The necklace slipped through his fingers, onto the glass counter, and it slid to the floor. He bent quick to grab it, feeling his cheeks flush. He bought the little painting. The woman in the shop had wrapped it for him in brown tissue with a straw ribbon.

  He hadn’t given it to her right away, when he got back, in August. She had asked him about the fishing, and Minnesota. When she asked him about the interview, he saw that now there was a future to be considered, and that she saw it, too.

  “I think it went well,” he said. “I’ll hear about it by the end of September.”

  Neither one of them seemed to know what to say next. Making love to her, he felt the distance of just that two weeks of being away. He saved the painting for his birthday.

  Now he ran up the stairs to her apartment, getting even sweatier. She was waiting at the open door, in the funny striped shirt and her big overalls. Dangling silver hoop earrings in her ears tangled with her hair. There was so much to know about her.

  He held the present out to her. “It’s a birthday thing we do. Give each other presents.”

  She wandered back into the room, pulling opening the straw ribbon. It floated to the floor, and he picked it up, following her in.

  “Claire started it. She kind of didn’t get it when she was little, and now we always do that.”

  And now Pattianne would do it, too, be part of this birthday thing.

  She unwrapped the brown tissue paper, and it floated to the floor too.

  “We give each other presents,” he said. He picked up the tissue paper. “On our birthdays.”

  He was out of breath. The oil painting was no bigger than a postcard, smears of color like the dark sky over the lake.

  He said, “It’s the lake.”

  There was a strange silence there between them. He wanted to pull the long curl of hair loose from the intimate silver earring.

  It was a silence she had become attached to. Michael Bryn could chat up a storm. He talked to her landlord about deferred maintenance, he talked to the waiter about running shoes. He seemed to have an unending supply of details in his head that he could come up with at will and match to any person. But sometimes he ran out of details with her. They were uncomfortable together sometimes. She thought about marrying him.

  She took the oil painting when she went to visit Miss Mimi Stein in October. Every year, on Columbus Day weekend, they drove together in Miss Mimi’s Oldsmobile to Pigeon Swamp State Park, feasting their eyes on the fall foliage.

  Miss Mimi had been the first person she’d met when they’d moved to Cranbury, when she was ten. She was the Avon lady, and she came to their house, not to sell Avon, but to say hello, since she knew they were there, because she had her polished fingernail on the pulse of the neighborhood. Her lipstick matched her fingernails. Pink. Not red, like Pattianne’s mother.

  Miss Mimi had said, “This shade is called Buttons ’N’ Bows.”

  She talked about the neighborhood, about the boys who used to live in their house, how they used to hide behind the barberry hedge and throw crab apples at cars. She said, “Those boys were the dickens,” and she winked at Pattianne, and leaned against the kitchen counter, black patent leather pocketbook hanging from one elbow, while Pattianne’s mother measured coffee into the Mr. Coffee. Miss Mimi drank her coffee black. They took their cups into the living room, a quiet beige-and-gold room.

  Her mother said, “You have homework.”

  Miss Mimi said, “Come and visit me sometime, Pattianne Anthony.”

  She went into Jen’s room and listened, kneeling on the floor at the heater vent. They talked about playing bridge, about tulip bulbs, about being allergic to cats, about blue eye shadow. Miss Mimi didn’t believe in blue eye shadow.

  “I have a nice charcoal gray,” she said. “It’s very subtle for daytime wear. A frosty pearl gray for evening. I’ll bring you some samples.”

  When Miss Mimi left, everything was quiet except for the sound of the cups and saucers, her mother taking them into the kitchen. Pattianne got up off her knees and waited a minute. Her knees had flat red circles from kneeling, and she rubbed at them before she went down to the kitchen.

  She said, “She lives in that house with the white flowers.”

  Her mother said, “Don’t you go bothering her.”

  Miss Mimi’s cup had a pink kiss mark on the gold rim. Buttons ’N’ Bows.

  “She said come over and visit,” Pattianne said. “She doesn’t have any kids.”

  “That’s because she doesn’t like kids.”

  Pattianne felt bad about that. But Sundays were long and boring, her mother in the living room with her copy of the Sunday paper, her father reading his in the den, Jen off somewhere making friends. Miss Mimi would be working in her flower garden. She would wave. She wore lavender gardening gloves. Pattianne finally leashed up Starla and walked along the sidewalk to the small gray house with the shrubs and white flowers.

  That first day, she asked her, “Why do you have so many white flowers?”

  Miss Mimi pointed to a patch of thin lily leaves shivering in a breeze outside the window. Tall shoots of orange flowers hung above the leaves.

  “That color breaks my heart. I wait for those lilies to bloom all spring. One year they bloomed late. Or maybe the delphiniums bloomed early. Anyway, they bloomed together that year. Blue and orange. It changed my life. I had been a white person until then.” She laughed, her wet laugh, her flowered handkerchief. “Moonlight gardens had been my favorite. All white flowers, with some dark purple to look black, some lavender to look silver. But then that blue and orange happened to me. Lord.”

  “How did you know?
” Pattianne asked another time. The white flowers were like pillows of lace everywhere. “About a moonlight garden?”

  “There’s a famous moonlight garden in England,” she said. “It’s called Sissinghurst. I saw pictures. So I bought a book. Come here.”

  Miss Mimi’s books were her treasures, and they filled up a whole room at the back of her house, a room she had built just for her books. If the dark green drapery was pulled back from the wide window, there was the window seat.

  “Window seats,” Miss Mimi said. “Are not good places to sit and read.”

  She was right. It was uncomfortable to sit and read there, for very long anyhow, and besides, there were two chairs and a small sofa, all cushioned and upholstered, and lamps here and there everywhere, and a library table in the middle of the room at one end. The library table was long and had a single wide drawer that held sharp pencils in a black wooden tray, a perfect gray eraser, a magnifying glass, a small pad of lavender note paper. Pattianne wanted a library table at home instead of the blue-painted desk where she did her homework.

  There was a dictionary stand, too, with a huge Oxford Dictionary that had pages like tissue paper, an amazing dictionary, a whole story for each word. Pattianne was in love. She wanted to look up words in a dictionary so big it would have its own stand.

  Her mother said, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  The walls of Miss Mimi’s library room were floor-to-ceiling books. They were in order. Grouped by subject, except for the fiction, which wasn’t even in there, it was in the apricot- colored guest room, where it took up two walls of shelves.

  “Fiction,” Miss Mimi said. “Alphabetical by author. Easy.”

  Poetry books were thin, and a hundred of them could take up no more space than the half-high book case that ran along the wall of the hallway leading back to the library. The anthologies were the fat books along the bottom shelves.

  “Poetry,” she said. “Easy.”

  But the books in their groups in the library were stacked up and lined up and piled up and stuck in here and there. There was religion and nature and history, and a lot of books about books and books about words. There were big books about art and architecture, and there were atlases. There were books about how to take photographs and how to grow gardens and how to drink tea and how to name the birds.