A Small Crowd of Strangers

by Joanna Rose

  He came and stood next to her, looked at her, looked at the picture, looked at her.

  He said, “You look the same.”

  “Well, it was only last winter.”

  “Big fancy wedding?”

  “Nope. Small wedding.”

  “Did you, like, walk down the aisle and all that?”

  “Nope.”

  Frankie went back out back, yanking on the mess of vines around the hazelnut tree, and she went back to pulling more crumpled pieces of newspaper from boxes in Michael’s office. The small black speakers of the stereo were in a box by themselves, the CD player in a box marked CD player under the desk. She had thought about setting it up, but she didn’t. There was the quiet of this place. Wind in trees. Birds far off. She hadn’t come across her stash of Mozart yet. Maybe then she would set up the stereo.

  She found the tiny painting tied with string in a bow, the tissue paper folded in careful corners around it. Smaller than the wedding picture. She got the hammer and the wedding picture from the kitchen counter and took everything into the bedroom. Frankie was spraying the bedroom window now, sheets of water falling without any sound down the windowpane. She hung them, the painting above, the wedding picture below, on the narrow space of wall between the dresser and the door. Frankie wiped the glass with a white cloth, the window squeaking and coming clean, and then he looked in.

  He yelled, “Those look nice, those pictures like that.”

  She stood back and looked, and they did look nice, and what else she saw was the dark wooden crucifix, hung above the bedroom door, and all she thought was how that was why the hammer had been in the bedroom in the first place. She didn’t like that crucifix being there, though.

  Hot dogs maybe, or sour milk, some old cafeteria food smell, hit her in the face first thing. She went to the main office as directed by the signs with big red letters on every one of the four main doors—

  “Visitors Must Report to Main Office”—and stood at a long counter while people behind the counter talked on the phone, to each other. One guy was even talking to himself, but then she noticed his headset.

  Finally, she said, “Hello?”

  They all jumped to attention and stared, and then a gray-haired woman with long square-cut bangs bounced up to the counter.

  “Hi there, how can we help you?”

  “I’m supposed to meet with the librarian?”

  It was like a reset button. They all turned to each other and started chattering away again, except the one at the counter, who said, “Welcome!” Her voice had jumped several octaves. “I’ll take you right down there, it’s down the hall. What’s your name?” She held out a clipboard. The top page said Visitors Please Sign In, and there was a pen attached on a wire.

  By the time Pattianne heard the question, she had already taken the clipboard and begun the awkward writing of her name, twisting the wire out of the way, and she said, “Anthony. Pattianne Anthony. Bryn.” She scribbled out Anthony and wrote Bryn. She handed the clipboard back to Rosemary. “It’s Bryn.”

  The woman looked at the clipboard and set it on the counter, pushed her bangs out of her eyes, and headed for the door. “Right this way, you just follow me.”

  They walked fast down a wide hall with shining linoleum tiles of blue and green, past classroom doors and display cases. One was full of bowling trophies.

  The library was air-conditioned, but there didn’t seem to be any books. There were rows of computers with kids piled in front of most of them and piles of backpacks on the floor around each kid. Pattianne turned around and looked at the door behind her as it clicked shut. There was a crucifix above it. Kind of a big one, in color, the blood red, Jesus’s eyes blue.

  “Here you go.” The woman touched her elbow and steered her to a desk under a huge framed photograph of Pope Benedict. The man who sat there had a Roman collar and a black shirt and a jean jacket. A woman came out and sat at the desk, and Pattianne realized the woman was no longer at her elbow. Was in fact, gone. The priest at the desk didn’t look up. Instead, he picked up the phone there and started punching in numbers. When he finally noticed her standing there not five feet away, he hung up, hadn’t even started talking, and got to his feet.

  “I’m sorry, did you need something from me?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He sat back down. “Oh. Well, can I help you?”

  “I guess I need to see the librarian?”

  He sat back, smiled all big and easy. “Ah,” he said. “The library position.” He was pretty young, and when he crossed one leg over the other, she saw jeans, and big red-and-silver Nikes.

  Then he said, “She isn’t here. Why don’t you just wander around and I’ll send her over when she gets here.”

  Pattianne looked around and was going to ask when he thought the librarian might arrive, but he was back on the phone. So she moved off a little way, and there, around a corner, were shelves of books. That was a relief. She headed over that way. The first bookcase seemed to be a display of books on sea mammals. Then came a shelf of books about space. Below that was ocean, then desert on the bottom. Each shelf had books spine-out about halfway along and then the rest of the shelf was empty.

  A bell rang, and her heart felt like it dropped, an old panic, late for class. It was 10:05. The kids at the computers just ignored the bell, but a new bunch of kids started banging through the door. They swarmed in and moved past her, looking at her as if she wasn’t there at all.

  She left. Out the door, down the hallway, out the big main doors and into the O-bug, almost without even taking a breath. She drove home and sat in the car outside their house, counting her breaths. When she got to one hundred, she got out and walked.

  Josh and Bruce sat next to each other in the back. So far, two weeks into class, Michael still wasn’t sure if they should stay that way. Bruce had huge, watery blue eyes. Michael was pretty sure he could sleep with them wide open. He’d been busted twice with marijuana, ending up here. Josh had a habit of getting on buses and ending up in other states. They didn’t participate in class. They didn’t even move, really. No squirming or dropping pencils, no wide, insolent, in-your-face yawns. Bruce blinked sometimes. One thing Michael knew about seventh graders was that he had to pick his battles. He was waiting to see if this was a battle. No pre-emptive strikes. You couldn’t win with seventh graders that way. You had to resist them. He’d already learned not to stand by the windows, which was an invitation to the boys to stare outside. Now he stood near the door, across from the windows. He stood straight, his feet planted slightly apart. He didn’t lean or put his hands in his pockets. He would let his face be warm, his voice be friendly, but his stance was firm and authoritative. His heels were stinging in his new brown leather shoes. He’d had plantar fasciitis a couple years ago, miserable. He’d had to have injections of cortisone. Now he hoped it was just these shoes.

  He stood there in his teacher clothes. New khakis with a sharp crease. A light blue shirt with dry-cleaner folds. A tie, which he loved, and which felt weird. He kept catching sight of it there on his shirtfront. It was some other guy’s chest. His dad’s.

  Theodore, who had decent handwriting, was at the whiteboard. Theodore drew comics everywhere, usually faces with stupid expressions, often closely resembling the other boys, which might have been why no one gave him a hard time about being named Theodore. Bathroom walls, desktops. He even drew on his arms, usually with black Sharpies. He had just last week discovered fine-point Sharpies and had tried to draw on his roommate’s capped front tooth.

  Today’s lesson was about clichés. The boys were so unaware of their own language that they usually didn’t realize they were repeating things they’d heard on TV, or in a video. And they were totally mediated, inundated with language. Using clichés made them feel clever. He knew. Sorry, boys, he wanted to say. He knew how nice it was to feel clever at the age of thirteen.

  He started it himself, saying, “Don’t have a cow.” Theodore wrote i
t on the board. A few boys snickered. Josh blinked. Michael said, “May the Force be with you.” Theodore wrote. One of the three boys named Aaron in the front row said, “Wackity wack,” and the snickers rolled around the room again. Bruce was definitely awake.

  “Sorry,” Michael said, before Theodore could start writing. “No South Park.”

  He made a list of clichés on the whiteboard. Raining cats and dogs. Make my day. Day of rest. Sour grapes. Then he asked them to write the same things in their own words. At this point Teddy Keller, who was overweight and red-faced and sat in the front row and so far had raised his hand to answer every question, jumped up, knocking his chair over behind him, and he yelled, “You want us to make up our own clichés?” The whole class broke into laughter. The sullenness vanished. Michael was charmed. Teddy Keller had been arrested for shoplifting from a liquor store. He had scored off the chart on every IQ test he’d ever taken.

  The assignment was to pair off and write a dialogue using as many clichés as possible. The room got noisy. In the back row, Josh and Bruce hunched over a single piece of blank notebook paper. He didn’t expect them to turn in anything.

  But as the class filed out of the room at the end of the period, depositing papers into the wire basket on the corner of his desk, Josh did the same. The paper was wrinkled, and full of pen holes. The writing was scrawled. There were two lines.

  I have a bone to pick with you.

  You piece of shit.

  Michael loved seventh graders.

  At lunch in the faculty dining room, he sat across from Rick Smith. Reverend Rick, the school chaplain. Rick was warm and talkative, but not chatty. He usually seemed to talk about something important. Now, over a tray of shepherd’s pie and green beans, Michael pulled the wrinkled piece of notebook paper out of his folder. He smoothed it on the Formica tabletop. His eyes filled with tears and his throat choked up. He was horrified and started to get up, fake a quick trip to the coffee urn, or grab some more paper napkins. Rick reached out and put a hand on his arm. Michael sat back down. He took a breath. Rick took his hand away. Rick looked at the paper. “All that anger.”

  His first thought was that he wasn’t angry. But Rick was talking about the boys, of course.

  Rick slid the paper back to Michael and said, “They get to me, too,” and then, his voice quieter, “Cup of coffee after classes today?”

  There was a deep flush of embarrassment, and Michael said, “No.” He groped about for why not. “Debate,” he finally said. “I think I meet with the debate team, the debate wannabes,” and Rick laughed and said, “That’s a risk, arming them with the techniques of conversational logic.”

  The shepherd’s pie was crusty and dry and the green beans swampish.

  From far down the block, Pattianne saw the genie, reading a book on a cloud of turquoise smoke over his magic lamp, between the JCPenney’s store and the Ace Hardware Store. The genie’s turban was purple and covered with gold stars. The blue neon square around the sign lit up thinly in the hot sunlight. Lamplighter Books.

  The smell of incense was the first thing she noticed when she opened the door. And bells. And dark, air-conditioned air that touched every part of her. A woman in long blue robes stood back by a desk.

  Pattianne said, “I’m looking for Elizabeth?”

  The woman said, “And you have found her,” in a rough low voice that didn’t sound like her. It sounded like the voice of a tall person. This person was short. She stepped toward the door, into the light. Shorter than Pattianne.

  “I’m Pattianne. Pattianne Bryn.” The name felt strange in her mouth. Not easy, like a lie. Just strange.

  Elizabeth glittered, long earrings of rhinestones dangling from a halo of red hair, and she said, “That’s what I thought.” She stepped forward with her hand held out, a bracelet of silver appearing and disappearing in and out of the wings of her blue robe. Silver rings on every finger. Bare feet, bells at her feet, her saying, “Simon said you’d be by.”

  Her face was very small. Her hands were, too, and cool. Pattianne’s hands were sweaty.

  “Would you like some tea?” A round, gold symbol hung from her neck. “Jasmine?”

  She had a million freckles.

  “Sure,” Pattianne said, and the small woman said, “Come on in, sit, wander,” and went through a beaded curtain into a room in the back, small. The robes were really a long tunic kind of top and gauzy, wide-legged pants. Some people know just how they want to be when they’re out in the world.

  Pattianne never did, never was sure how she looked from one mirror to the next, always had to check, and was never sure what it meant, however it was she ever looked, which today was a blue skirt that went just below the knees, but bias cut, a little swish, and a white shirt and brown, flat, slip-on, slingback shoes, kind of cute, and no stockings. She thought she probably looked like a librarian from New Jersey.

  Shelves of books lined one long wall, with small lavender cards labeling every shelf. Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism. Astrology, Graphology, Numerology. Ufology. Future History. Rumi. In the empty spaces between the books there were incense burners, rune stones, rainbow-colored candles carved to show the inside of the rainbow. A round table was stacked with books, and so was a square table, and there was a small pile of books on a wing chair, with shiny striped upholstery in dark jewel colors, in front of a low table of small wax creatures arrayed on a silky magenta cloth. There were blue stars in the carpeting.

  Elizabeth came back out through the beads. She held two white mugs, and she said, “It’s all kind of in its own order.”

  She bent, set the mugs on the magenta-covered table.

  “The prices are penciled in on the first white page of each book.”

  The gold symbol from her neck swung and circled, hanging over the table and the mugs of tea.

  “Also whether it’s new or used. We have both.”

  The silver bracelet catching light.

  She said, “That’s all you need to know to start.”

  She stood up and raised her hands, palms up, “That’s all,” and leaned back against the desk and said, “Please, have a seat.”

  “That’s all?”

  The waxy creatures on the magenta-covered table were candles in the shapes of Indian gods, or maybe goddesses. Pattianne picked up a book about dreams from the beautiful chair and sat down, set the book on the table. One of the small lavender cards said Light of the World. She picked up a candle.

  “You get a ten-percent discount,” Elizabeth said. “But you can just borrow anything you want to read.”

  The candle had a fierce face.

  “Twenty hours a week,” she said. “That’s Kali.”

  Pattianne set Kali back down.

  “Simon said you used to be a librarian?” She had put on wire-rimmed glasses that made her eyes look big.

  “Yeah,” Pattianne said. “But I always wanted to work in a bookstore,” which had never occurred to her before but seemed like the truth.

  “Great.” The wire-rimmed glasses magnified the wrinkles around Elizabeth’s eyes. When she sipped at her jasmine tea, the glasses steamed up a little bit. “Do you like working with people?”

  Just like that, it turned into a job interview.

  “Well, I never really have.” Instead of saying no. “Worked with the public.”

  “I think . . .” Elizabeth stretched out her bare toes and looked at them. “In this kind of place,” she said, wiggling her toes, “it’s important to let people find their own way.” Each toenail was painted with pale rosy polish.

  “Customers are the best teachers,” she said. When she wiggled her toes, the bells around her one ankle made a small jingle.

  Twenty hours a week. Open boxes of books that were delivered. Ring up sales. The desk had an actual cash register, and a leather-covered appointment book for tarot readings by Elizabeth. “By appointment only,” she said.

  The lavender card on the table of candles was propped on a small copper-wire st
and. The letters were black and Celticish, curves and serifs. The Light of The World Candle Coalition, 624 Elm Street, St. Cloud, Minnesota, the Earth, the Universe.

  They’d left out the United States of America, which she could understand, and the Milky Way Galaxy, which she could not.

  “I can start next week.”

  When she stepped back outside, there was the white cement sidewalk next to the red brick wall of the hardware store, the hardware store window with the sun full on it, slick yellow paint lining the curb, and air shimmering above the black asphalt of the street. Everything was dazzling and hot and dreamy. Michael working. Now she had a job. They could get up every day, have breakfast, go to work. The downtown streets ended after two blocks, and she was back under the trees, out of the sun. It wasn’t any cooler. Houses sat back in green lawns, empty and still—no birds, no lawnmowers, no kids. Michael’s family wanted them to come back for Thanksgiving, and she already didn’t want to go. Maybe they could come here—she’d cook a turkey, Claire could sleep on the couch, they could go to Mass with Michael at Sacred Heart on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and she would stay home and make cinnamon rolls for breakfast, and then she and Michael would drive them back to Minneapolis to the airport.

  The thick air moved past her. Sweat dripped down her ribs.

  The house was cool inside, and dark. She took off her clothes and put on Michael’s basketball jersey, and sat down in the middle of the living room floor and wiggled her sweaty toes. She could paint her toenails. She could wear a bell. She could read all the books in the bookstore, and Elizabeth could tell her future with tarot cards. The air around her, the house around her, the town around her, all quiet and easy and in a good mood, like the earth had stopped turning for just a moment, and the Milky Way was saying, “Hey, what about me?”

  At four o’clock, she thought of orange juice. She thought of dinner. She had to get up off the floor, move, put on clothes, go back outside, into the turning world. She went out the kitchen door, through the shade. The car was in the sun, though, heat waves coming up off the hood, and the car seat was so hot she couldn’t sit. She slid newspapers under her butt. The steering wheel was too hot to touch. She drove with two fingers, three blocks, only one busy street, to the little market, and went in, to air-conditioning, and she just stood there for a few seconds, dazed. She got orange juice out of the freezer and even colder air clouded out, onto the hot skin of her face, her neck, her arms. She stood with the cans of orange juice and thought of potato salad, sliced salami. She picked up a beautiful, overripe tomato.