A Small Crowd of Strangers

by Joanna Rose

  The golf bag was stained yellow around the bottom with what looked like dog pee. The thin, white netting of the wedding dress hung down to the painted cement floor. The bottom of it was tangled up on a pink tricycle. There was a small football helmet underneath it. He wondered if the little girl had gone from the trike to a two-wheeler. If the little boy had ever caught a long pass. He took the vase to the counter. An old guy sat there in a red padded kitchen chair.

  Michael wondered what had happened to the bride.

  The old guy took the vase. He turned it over in his thick fingers. Michael wanted it back.

  “McCoy,” the guy said. “Real McCoy. Ha, ha!” He pointed to the name there. “Chip in the rim, damn shame. Dollar.”

  Michael had learned about McCoy, and Roseville, and Sebring, the names on the bottom, the light colors, like they’d faded. The candy-colored Fiestaware.

  Secondhand shops made him feel sad, though. He’d wander, looking over things that seemed to be about someone else’s leftover life. He didn’t know why he would want to feel sad on purpose.

  Late at night they pulled into a Comfortel outside of Fort Wayne. He plugged in his charger first thing, right next to the bed. He’d wake up in the dark and check it to make sure it was charging.

  The school offered faculty housing, 1325 South Fifth, on a dead-end street that might have been called a cul-de-sac in a different kind of neighborhood that had been built in a different decade, maybe the forties. Pattianne thought it looked cottage-like. There were wide yards and trees, chokecherries and sugar maples, old and overgrown, which she had identified from Flora and Fauna of the Upper Midwest. The backyards wandered into each other, changing shape and size at dusk, no fences, no border beds, just the lights of other houses shining through the trees, through the thickets of sumac and berry vines and drying bracken fern. Lightning bugs, and the winding wheeze of cicadas. Small, heavy things dropped from the trees in the dark, and there were sounds that only come into a house in the summer. Because the windows are all open, because it is too hot to do anything except notice every little thing, how those sounds become summer sounds—a car driving slowly along the gravel at night, a kid yelling on the next street, a screen door banging shut.

  After the sun went down, the air grew closer and hotter. Corn sweat. The crops in the miles around the town released their moisture as the earth cooled at night, and just when it seemed like the day’s heat was gone, the very air became a hot, wet blanket. Heat like that made her think she might panic. It made her wonder what was she going to do, like there was anything she could do about it, that heat, on the nights before school started, when Michael was out being the new English faculty member, the new baseball coach, at the St. Cloud School for Boys, which was not named after St. Cloud, and was not even actually in St. Cloud, Minnesota. It was in St. Joseph, which was part of St. Cloud, and Cloud was just French for Claude. It was a school for boys with behavioral problems.

  She didn’t mind the empty evenings with nothing to do except take long, cool baths with Avon Skin-So-Soft bath beads. Miss Mimi wrote that they also keep mosquitoes away. She’d sent a basket full of kitchen and bath stuff, bath beads and bath powder. Cocktail napkins with scenes from famous Impressionist paintings. A scented candle. And Flora and Fauna of the Upper Midwest.

  Pattianne sat in the cool bath water and looked at the colored pictures. Chokecherry. Sugar maple. Sumac. Bracken fern. When it got too dark to see by the light of the candle, she got out and put on Michael’s high-school basketball jersey. Number 12. It hung long over her thighs, and the thin-washed nylon barely touched her wet skin.

  She went through the house in the dark, the narrow hallway, the paneled door of the linen closet, to the kitchen, a room like an afterthought, with a slanting ceiling and a row of windows. The linoleum was cool and gritty. She got ice cubes from the freezer without looking inside, trying not to let any of the light from the refrigerator get on her. Heat making her crazy. The sound of ice cubes in the glass, the sound of vodka splashing. It was all part of the coldness of ice cubes, all part of the craziness of that heat.

  They drank a lot of screwdrivers. Jen told her that all the orange juice potassium in screwdrivers would help them adjust to the humidity.

  The sky over the black shapes of the trees was dark pink, and she stood watching it through the kitchen door. A moth banged softly against the screen. Sweat gathered on the outside of the glass in her hand, and she leaned against the doorframe, the smells of dusty screen and cooling woods and Skin-So-Soft. She touched the icy glass to one breast and then the other, running it across her nipples, under the basketball jersey on the cool damp skin of her stomach. And then, “Excuse me, Mrs. Bryn?” and there was Frankie, only she didn’t know it was Frankie, hadn’t even met Frankie yet, didn’t even think that there might be someone out there, on the overgrown walkway outside the kitchen door. A weird squawk came out of her, and the glass smashed on the floor. “Shit,” he said out there in the dark. “I’m sorry.”

  She backed away from the door, glass on the floor, and a guy out there in a white T-shirt.

  “Who are you? Never mind, what do you want? Never mind, who are you?”

  He said, “It’s okay,” and he stepped back away from the door.

  It was just some kid. Her nerves jingled in her elbows, her knees. Her nipples.

  He said, “I’m Frankie, from the school.”

  “So who the hell is Frankie from the school?”

  Frankie-from-the-school stayed down on the walkway out there, a skinny white T-shirt in the dark.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m pretty late. I’m just dropping off the lawn mower and the tree saw.”

  “What lawn mower?” She slapped around on the wall for the light switch. “What tree saw?”

  “I do the yards, but tomorrow I won’t have the truck.”

  “What truck?” A piece of glass sliced open her foot. “Shit.” It didn’t hurt, but there was that sick slithering in her stomach. “Goddamn it.” There was blood, red even in the dark of the kitchen, and she hopped to the counter, and black red drops dripped after her.

  “What happened? Oh man, you stepped on that glass.” And Frankie the-guy-from-the-school opened the door, and he was in the kitchen, in work boots with glass crunching under them.

  He said, “Where’s the light?”

  Her head going no, no, no, and she got a dishtowel and held it to her foot.

  “No, no,” she said. “It’s okay, come back tomorrow and Michael will be here.”

  Frankie grabbed the string hanging from the fluorescent ceiling light and gave it a tug.

  “Please, you can go,” she said. “Michael will be home any minute.” Trying to cover up in the sudden blue-white light.

  He said, “I’ll clean the glass up.”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  She tried to look at the cut, and the blood welled up, and her stomach slithered, and the strap of Michael’s basketball jersey slipped down off her shoulder. She stood there saying no, no, no, that’s okay, and the shirt slid down, too, and she stood there, one breast bare.

  She yanked the strap up.

  “Oopsie,” he said. “Go twelve.”

  That’s how she met Frankie.

  Classes started just after Labor Day, still hot, still summer, and Michael was up and out early, running four miles, back in the shower, half-dressed by six o’clock, aiming for the seven o’clock church service that started off the school days. He came into the bedroom, unbuttoned khaki pants hanging on his narrow hips, his hair wet. Her husband.

  He said, “Get up, wench,” and he stood in front of the mirror and ran his fingers through his hair. “Fix me some breakfast. I’m off to the world of the employed.”

  He might break into “Roll on, Columbia” any moment. She pulled the sheet over her head.

  Actually, this sounded more like he was leading up to his Paul-Bunyan-in-the-north-woods schtick. She pulled the pillow under the sheet with her and said,
“Just push the button on the coffee pot, it’s all loaded up, ready to go.”

  “Hey,” he said. “I’ll make French toast.”

  He left the room, through the hall, and a pan landed on top of the stove.

  The bedroom window faced north, into the backyard, a tangle of hazelnut tree and vines keeping the window dark and dirty. The walls were white, all the walls, in the whole house. She thought about painting the bedroom dark green and pulled her bathrobe out of the blankets on the floor.

  The living room was full of sunlight. She stayed out of there in the mornings. The kitchen was still in shadow. Michael broke eggs into a bowl at the counter, his back to her.

  He said, “Are you going to check out that Cathedral High job today?”

  The coffee dripped in the glass pot.

  “This afternoon,” she said.

  She sat down and watched it, drip by drip.

  Michael set a glass of tomato juice in front of her and said, “We’re out of orange juice.” He laid a piece of toast into the bowl of egg. He always toasted the bread for French toast. He claimed it was the way to make perfect French toast.

  “A high-school library job would be great,” he said. “And I talked to the woman who has the scoop, she knows you’re applying. And there’s John the Twenty-Third Middle School kind of attached.”

  The wings of his shoulder blades made her heart hurt.

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, what?”

  There were dimples down low on either side of his backbone, wide, downy dimples.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I know we’re out of orange juice.”

  She got up and stood behind him, pressed up against his smooth back, laid her hands on his shoulders. He flipped the French toast with a flourish of the spatula.

  “Perfect.” He didn’t actually flip the spatula itself this time. “Always toast the bread first, and you get perfect French toast every time.”

  Every time, her angel-winged boy. Husband.

  He set a plate of French toast in front of her and said, “You know Simon—he’s a counselor at school? Well, his wife has a little bookstore here. He said she might be needing someone part-time, but I don’t know why you’d want to work part-time in a bookstore when you could get a great gig like head librarian in a high school. I mean, he said he’d mention it to his wife—her name’s Elizabeth—and I didn’t want to say don’t bother.”

  She slid the plate across the table to him.

  “I’ll just have some coffee for now.”

  After he left, she sat there. The sun from the living room edged into the kitchen, the morning slipping away, far-off sounds outside somewhere, and the coffee got cold. When she was ten years old, she went to six-thirty Mass every morning all through Lent, walking through the dark to Saint Thomas Aquinas. It was the nuns’ Mass. Nuns in short black veils filed in and sat in the front row. There was no sermon, no music, just the scuffling of feet, the creaking of the kneelers, the priest’s low chanting. There were small, empty sounds in the big, dark church. Closer to Easter, as the sun came up earlier, the stained-glass windows lit up during Mass.

  There were moments here, now, when the air held everything still. They seemed to be about this faraway place, those moments. St. Cloud, a lazy little street. She felt her life all around her. Mostly they were mornings.

  The truck door slammed out front, and Frankie called out, “Hello, House,” the way he did at all the faculty houses, although apparently only during the daytime. His face showed up at the kitchen screen door, and she pulled the bathrobe close and stayed sitting.

  “Hello, Frankie.”

  He said, “I smell coffee.”

  It was a short, cotton robe, not very sexy, or revealing.

  She said, “I’ll bring you out some.”

  “I’m working on that mess of Virginia creeper in the back.”

  She said, “I’ll make another pot.” He disappeared, and in another second, there was the clanking and squeaking of the truck’s tailgate. She started another pot of coffee and went and got her cutoffs and T-shirt from the bedroom floor, and thought about putting up a curtain on the bedroom window, and went in the bathroom to get dressed. She pulled her hair back in an elastic. When she went outside with the coffee, he was standing by the house around back. There was an old red wheelbarrow, a rake, clippers, gloves. Bright orange flowers grew along the back of the house. He pulled on the gloves and said, “Touch me not.”

  She stopped. She held out the coffee.

  “Thanks,” and he took the mug in his gloved hands. At the end of his thin arms like that, they looked like Mickey Mouse’s hands. He reached out and ran a fat, gloved finger along the orange flowers, and there was a soft, popping noise, and tiny black seeds sprayed out. “Jewelweed,” he said. “We used to call them touch-me-nots.”

  “Oh.”

  He gulped down some coffee and set the cup down in his wheelbarrow. “It grows everywhere,” he said. Inside the red wheelbarrow were the words So Much, painted in neat black letters. He took one of the gloves off again, pulling it with his teeth, and he took a spiral notebook out of his back pocket. He had a crooked front tooth. “Listen to this,” he said, with the glove hanging in his mouth. He took the glove out of his mouth. “The seeds shoot up to eight feet,” he read. “They grow everywhere from the southeast up into Canada. At eight feet at a time, it would take a plant 650 years to go one mile.”

  He stopped and looked at her. “Cool, huh?”

  He put the notebook back in his pocket and the glove back on his hand and said, “Okay now.” And he reached into the vines all tangled around the hazelnut tree and started yanking. “I’m supposed to take this hazelnut out,” he said. “Too close to the house.”

  “How come there are no nuts?”

  “Birds,” he said. “And squirrels. I’ll clear it all out and you’ll get some light into the back bedroom.”

  Sunlight was slanting around the back corner of the house now, dust sparkling the air.

  She said, “I like it dark in there.”

  “Red squirrels,” he said. “And thirteen-stripe squirrels.”

  The sparkling dust was settling in his coffee. He backed away, pulling on the long vines, scattering red and brown leaves, and she got out of the way. His face was freckled and tanned. His arms were freckled and tanned. A bright red leaf was caught in the top of his hair. Cute. Maybe twenty-one, twenty-two. Maybe more. How you couldn’t tell with some guys.

  “Well,” she said. “I’ll be inside if you need anything.”

  “Red foxes, too,” he said. “Course you don’t see them too much. They stay away from the houses usually, except this time of year. They like hazelnuts. They steal from the squirrel stashes.” He stopped and frowned at the Virginia creeper, or maybe he was frowning at the hazelnut branches. He had thick reddish eyebrows, like his hair. He looked at her, frowning.

  “Thirteen-stripe?” he said. “Thirteen-line?”

  He went back to yanking the Virginia creeper. He was out there all morning, and she was trapped out of the bedroom, him working right there at the window. She did the crossword at the kitchen table, and after a while she went into the living room, sunlight reaching into every corner now. Bare walls and bare wood floors, bookcase, chair, couch. For weeks, there had been just the blue glass bowl on the shelf of the bookcase, a fragile, handmade, round bowl that she was afraid to touch, a wedding gift. Then she had put her terra-cotta rabbit up there, too, and the McCoy vase, and Michael put a clay duck up there too.

  He said, “They make them out of plastic now.”

  She said, “Old.” It had faded painted eyes.

  “Antique,” he said. “When things cost that much, they aren’t old, they’re antique. We needed to rescue it.” He rescued things. Like the bike, a silver Raleigh with no brakes.

  Her carved wooden elephant went up there next, with the rabbit and the duck, all facing the same direction, a small wildlife parade. And then Grandma Anthony, a hand-tinted
studio photograph, her cheeks young and faintly pink. She was posed leaning to the side and looking away a little bit, wearing pearls, gazing off in the direction of the parade. Since then Pattianne hadn’t set out much else, just the green deer lamp that Michael had rescued from a yard sale. She hadn’t really unpacked it, just moved it from the bedroom. The eyes caught the light at night and kind of gave her the creeps.

  She wandered into the front bedroom, Michael’s office. Boxes were stacked against the wall, all the stuff he’d had FedExed.

  “Not a verb,” she’d said. Michael loved verbed nouns. He Xeroxed things instead of copying them, and he Windexed the windows of the O-Bug.

  Their wedding picture was in the top of the first box, a frame of openwork silver, Michael in a dark suit, white shirt, white tie standing above her, her sitting in a wing chair, the skirt of her dress sweeping down to her ankles, those strappy little shoes. The black-and-white photograph made her silvery-green wedding dress look white, bias-cut damask, short cap sleeves, a low, scooped neckline, neat and elegant, kind of Jackie O. She went in the kitchen to look for the hammer, looked in the pantry, looked out on the back step. Then she went in the bedroom and there it was, the hammer, on the dresser. Frankie banged on the window and yelled in, “Hey, got any more coffee?”

  “It’s cold.”

  In a moment, he was at the kitchen door. She took the hammer and went out there, the picture under one arm.

  “Come on in. I’ll heat it up on the stove.”

  He came in. “That’s okay, I like it cold.”

  She waved the hammer at the pot. “Help yourself.”

  He tilted his head sideways, looking at the picture. “That you guys?”

  “Yeah. Wedding picture.”

  “Fancy,” he said. “You hanging it up?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “But I haven’t decided where.”