A Small Crowd of Strangers

by Joanna Rose

  Michael whispered, “New dryer?”

  “Of course,” her mother went on. “It’s from Sears.”

  “We have a Sears coffee maker,” Pattianne said, and Michael jumped upright and tapped his finger against the front of the coffee maker, the German name there in bold black letters.

  Pattianne said, “Isn’t Braun a Sears brand?”

  “I don’t believe so,” her mother said. “Sears doesn’t have its own brand. There is KitchenAid, Mr. Coffee, and that German brand, Krupp. There isn’t a Sears brand.”

  Have you ever seen a yellow-headed bird? Where have you hung our wedding picture? Is it in the dark upstairs hallway, by your own?

  “Well,” she said. “Tell Dad hi.”

  “Goodbye, dear.”

  Michael took the phone and hung it up. She put her hands into the big pockets. A knotted tissue, a circle of used Band-Aid, a book of matches. How long after you quit smoking do you stop having matches in all your pockets? Warm air blew across the kitchen floor from the vent.

  She said, “Coffee?”

  Michael said, “Cups!”

  The hoar frost was all wet drips. There were two trees in the side yard, copper beeches, with old, thick trunks and masses of dark purple leaves. Between them, maybe in the neighbor’s yard, a maple with bare, lofty branches.

  He went to Mass, and she did the Sunday puzzle. He came back, and there was football, and it was so still and clear on their street that it felt like a painting on glass.

  The next Saturday, Michael headed off to the ecumenical men’s group. He didn’t really want to go, but he went. The map was open on the seat next to him. He liked sleeping late, curled up around her. She liked making love in the mornings. Then she’d go back to sleep. He’d get up, put on coffee, and go for a run on roads through the neighborhoods. When he got back, he’d make French toast.

  Today might be the day. There might be a baby starting right this very second.

  The heater in the O-Bug was cooking his ankles, but his nose and ears were cold. He tapped the button three or four times fast. Sometimes that made the heater kick on. The wheels crunched on the gravel along the side of the road, and he realized he was aiming for a small group of election signs on the corner of State Highway 21 and Old Grasse Road. He came to a slow stop, tapped at the button a few more times. Sometimes he had to pull the button off and poke at a wire in there with a pencil.

  The election signs were leaning into each other along the weedy ditch. They were starting to pop up everywhere. He usually ignored them. He voted on tax issues that were about public education. He’d voted for Al Gore because he thought George Bush was unintelligent. Then he might have voted for Kerry, but his father had a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker on his car, and he’d never actually had a bumper sticker before. They didn’t discuss politics at home. Michael had just moved to his apartment anyway, and hadn’t re-registered.

  The candidates seemed to be more about social issues in this election. Gay marriage made him uncomfortable, and he didn’t know why. Same with immigration. His mother’s housekeeper was an older German woman from Pennsylvania. He thought people who came to the country illegally should be sent home. Except for political refugees. Except for children. He knew he needed to be more informed. He didn’t approve of uninformed voters. All the campaigns were a lot of hooey. It was advertising. Just because it was in red, white, and blue didn’t make it true or important. He discounted them as sensationalism.

  Until he saw the sign with jagged horizontal line. It was like the line on the heart monitor above his father’s hospital bed, where, in neon green, it had steadily maintained its small, even peaks, and the quiet beep tone. He would find himself staring at it. He would find his mother staring at it too, as they waited, and his father slept. He found himself loving it.

  And now here it was, in red, white, and blue.

  Under it were the words Abortion Stops a Beating Heart.

  The cardiologist had shown them diagrams of heart cells, explaining how certain cells were possibly being attacked by a virus. How different heart cells had different functions. The work of certain cells was to beat in unison with the other cells. If they were separated in a laboratory, they didn’t beat in unison at first, but after a while they did. He remembered being emotionally overwhelmed at learning this. He’d excused himself, said he had to use the restroom, and left the office. He walked out into the hall and leaned against a window that looked out to the river. The office was on the tenth floor, looking down on the Raritan River, and it made him dizzy. He’d felt his own heart beating.

  A pickup truck zoomed past him, laying on the horn.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he muttered. He checked his rearview mirror and headed on to St. Wendel.

  Herman Walter lived in a yellow house on the edge of town. He opened the front door as Michael walked up.

  “Good morning,” Michael said, walking through the door.

  Herman Walter said, “Glad you could join us,” and laid a bony hand on his shoulder. The hand was warm. Michael felt the strange sting of tears in his eyes.

  Two men sat on a couch. Rick Smith sat on a dining room chair next to the couch. Another man sat in an easy chair next to the fireplace. Herman Walter gestured to a dining room table. There was coffee, and cups, and a plate of cookies, and a stack of white paper napkins. There was a tablecloth, and the sun was shining on it all. Michael remembered the sun glinting off the Raritan River. He remembered that Herman Walter didn’t drink coffee. He reached for one of the small cups and saw that his hand shook slightly. He took a cookie instead, and a napkin.

  Herman Walter moved a dining room chair into the living room and positioned it next to Rick’s, and Michael sat. He set the cookie on the edge of the coffee table on the napkin. There was some conversation going on, and he was startled when Rick turned to him and asked him something.

  He said, “Fine. thanks,” but he could tell from the way Rick stared at him that it had been the wrong response.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I think I’m coming down with a cold. Ears are plugged up.”

  But then Rick reached out and took his hand, and Michael realized they were all doing that, they were starting with prayer. He joined in, taking the hand of the man in the easy chair. The words of the twenty-third psalm rumbled gently around him. His heartbeat sounded in his head.

  Then the man in the easy chair, who was from St. Mark Lutheran, spoke about the pioneer cemetery just outside town. He wanted to clean the grave markers.

  “The families are gone,” the man said. “Some of those names haven’t been spoken aloud in fifty years.” Maybe it was the man’s low, quiet voice, but Michael found it unbearably sad.

  Then they got around to the public prayer project.

  There was a charter school in St. Joseph that had removed the words under God from the Pledge of Allegiance. Rick felt it would upset the children further if they were to show up and pray in front of the school. Herman Walter said they could pray there on a Sunday, and the men nodded and voices mumbled yes, good idea. Someone asked what other ideas anyone might have, and Michael heard the Lutheran man say, “Planned Parenthood.”

  Michael sat up straight in his chair. Praying on the sidewalk in downtown St. Cloud was overt and political. But it was just praying.

  He said, “Are there legal issues?”

  Herman Walter said, “Yes.” Then he pulled a cell phone from his pocket. “I can check—it’s a matter of distance.”

  Michael bit into the cookie. It was a gingersnap.

  Pattianne liked Kuan-Yin. She was made of stone and stood about three feet tall, and she held a little metal lantern. The lantern was lit, and the lamp on the desk was lit too, and the Kali candle on the Light of the World table was lit—small points of light here and there in the bookstore. Outside it was dark midday, wind blowing grit against the window, and whenever the door opened, the cold shot into the bookstore. Snow was predicted before evening, although nobody in St. Cloud seemed t
o believe the weather predictions.

  The door opened, and the cold came in along with a guy in an orange hard hat. He took off the hard hat and shut the door and held the hard hat in front of him, and when the white crane floated past his face, he raised a hand to it.

  He said, “Oh,” and he tucked the hard hat under one arm and said, “Ho, that’s real pretty,” and he bent low under the cranes and came in.

  Pattianne turned the The Compassion of Kuan-Yin face down on the desk. She said, “Cold out there.”

  He looked in at her and nodded. An older guy. He came in a few steps and stopped, and he looked at the bookshelves along the wall and tucked his hard hat more firmly under his arm. He looked at the Light of the World and unzipped his coat partway. A sage bundle on the tea ceremony table was burnt and black and sat in a teacup. He looked at it and the mustache under his red nose wiggled a little.

  “Sage,” she said. “It cleanses the air. A Native custom of the American southwest.”

  He sniffed the air. The mustache was red too. Not as red as his nose.

  “Sagebrush,” he said. “Yeah, I know about sagebrush.”

  He unzipped his coat the rest of the way, a puffy nylon parka and a round belly. He shrugged around in his coat.

  “Sagebrush and greasewood,” he said. “Sagebrush and greasewood for miles. I worked a highway project in Arizona once. Sagebrush and greasewood for miles. Air was pretty clear, too, I got to say.”

  His boots were coated with white dust.

  He said, “You got any books about Buddhists?”

  “Lots.”

  He was a big guy, tall, bushy red eyebrows like the mustache. She walked in front of him, past him. He didn’t follow her.

  He said, “I probably only need one.”

  Buddhism was the biggest section in Lamplighter Books. Tibetan Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, yoga, mandala calendars. He switched the hard hat to the other arm and chewed on his mustache.

  “Right here,” she said.

  He stepped around the Light of the World, looking at the table.

  “They’re Hindu,” she said. “Those candles.”

  “That little gal you got lit there, she doesn’t look too friendly now, does she?”

  He stopped again a few steps in front of the Buddhism section, took his hard hat, and held it in both hands behind his back.

  “I got a girl,” he said, and he cleared his throat. “She’s been in school in Madison.”

  He looked back at Kali.

  “She’s a good girl,” he said. “She’s back now.”

  He faced the Buddhism section and squared up his shoulders.

  “She’s a good girl,” he said. “I never was much for church-going, but her mother pretty much raised her up Lutheran. Now she says she’s Buddhist. My girl. Not her mom. Her mom says whatever, says she’s a good girl, so for me to don’t worry.”

  He stepped one step closer to the bookshelf, leaned his face toward it a little bit.

  “Kind of dark in here,” he said.

  “You’re right.” She was being compassionate.

  He looked up when she turned on the lights.

  “So,” he said. “I asked my girl”—looking around Lamplighter Books—“I asked my girl what this Buddhist stuff means. She said how I should come here and get a book. She used to come here and look at books before she went to school. College. In Madison.”

  He took a step closer to the shelf, and Pattianne could feel the cold coming off his nylon parka.

  “I like to read books,” he said. “You got any Tom Clancy? He writes books. Not about Buddhism, I don’t think.”

  She reached past him and pulled a book from the shelf. “You need a basic book about Buddhism then?” More compassion.

  The thin yellow book called Buddhism Without Beliefs was the only one she’d really looked at in the Buddhism section, a beautiful book, a narrow pleasing shape, a painting on the cover of a man in a boat. She held it out so he could see the cover, could maybe take it out of her hand.

  He leaned back and looked at it. “Buddhism Without Beliefs,” he said. “I was thinking maybe of a paperback.”

  “You can have a seat,” she said. “Take a look at it. Read a little bit of it.”

  The beautiful chair was empty for once, no books stacked there for once, just Kali burning away right in front of it.

  “Nope, nope,” he said. “That’s okay. So, how much is it?”

  “$12.95. Plus tax.”

  He leaned closer to it.

  “It’s pretty basic,” she said. “I don’t know too much about Buddhism, but I liked it. It’s pretty, well, basic.”

  “Well,” he said, “okay.”

  He took a step back and looked at Pattianne instead of the book.

  “I’ll pay cash,” he said. “You got a sack? It might get dirty. It’s pretty dirty in my truck. That’s my truck.”

  He waved his hard hat toward the front of the store, at white, dirty pickup truck parked out there.

  “Picks up a fair amount of dust,” he said.

  He looked up at the cranes on his way back out the door, and shut the door and stood out there for a moment and put his hard hat back on. He waved at her through the window before he got in his truck, which had an orange-and-black sign. Follow Me.

  The cranes were still swinging when Elizabeth came in.

  “Quiet in here,” she said.

  She took off her gloves and rubbed her hands together.

  “Cold out there,” she said. “I don’t think it’s really going to snow, though.”

  “Shall I make tea?” Pattianne said. “Jasmine?”

  Everything seemed so perfect.

  When she got home, Michael was on the phone talking to his father. He’d met with the prayer guys again, and she didn’t really want to hear about them. Herman Walters was creepy. She went into the kitchen and got out Joy of Cooking and was leafing through it. She wanted to fill the house with the smell of something wonderful. That would be her prayer.

  She did wonder if Michael actually prayed, though, besides with those guys. He’d been trying out soufflés since he found a soufflé pan at St. Vincent de Paul. Maybe he prayed for the soufflé to rise. There were times when he talked like he was talking to himself. Maybe he thought she didn’t see, or maybe it was praying. Talking to God. His soufflés always rose.

  Father McGivens had said, “God doesn’t need our prayers. We need our prayers. To pray is to open our hearts to the divine mystery.”

  Which was actually pretty cool.

  Michael came into the kitchen, and she said, “How’s your dad sound?”

  “Great.” He looked over her shoulder at the cookbook. “Well, better. I think. His voice is stronger. Talking more.”

  “Hey,” he said, wrapping his arms around her. “Have you ever made homemade gingersnaps?”

  The first time she wore the new pants to work, the cold wind went up each leg. By the time she got to Lamplighter Books, she was freezing. She took off her coat and hung it up in back and waited for Elizabeth to notice her pants, but she was on the phone.

  Then bells rang at the door, and there was Angela in a fuzzy, crocheted beret of neon blue.

  “Hey,” Pattianne said. “Hi.”

  The beret matched Angela’s eyes. She held a flyer up. “Ecumenical Men’s Prayer Circle” in thick, Gothic letters across the top, all spelled right. There was a dove in each corner. The participating churches were all listed in three rows, and behind the names was a gray cross like a shadow.

  Pattianne said, “You drew all that by hand?”

  “I took a lettering class at the junior college,” Angela said, and she winked. “Calligraphy.”

  “Maybe Elizabeth’ll want to put it up in the window.” Pattianne took the flyer by the corner. “It’s really nice.”

  “Thank you. You are so sweet,” she said. “I always was a doodler.”

  She stepped back and looked at Pattianne up and down.

  “And l
ook at you, all dressed up like the caliph of Hans Christian Anderson,” she said. “We been reading Hans Christian Anderson, me and the girls.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and then didn’t know what else to say so she said, “I love your beret. Did you make it?”

  “Gosh, no,” she said. “Well, I got to run around and put some of these up places. Safeway has a bulletin board, and so does the community center, and of course the co-op.”

  And jingle, jingle, she was out the door. She got into a red station wagon with three little blond heads in the back seat, and she drove off with a loud pop and a puff of exhaust.

  “So, hello, sorry, I was stuck on the phone,” Elizabeth said. “Hey. I love those pants. Especially with that top.”

  And she shook her hair.

  The long, blue-faded-to-purple top that was maybe a dress made Pattianne feel like she had a cardboard face and was trying not to smile.

  “Here,” Elizabeth said, “wear these,” and she dangled a long string of purple and black beads from her fingers. “Maybe someone will see them on you and want to buy some.”

  Customers never even looked at those beads. Pattianne set the flier on the desk and bowed her head, and Elizabeth slipped the beads around her neck and then stepped back and looked, with her head a little sideways, her lips doing this kiss sound, like she was calling a kitten.

  She said, “Cute.”

  Thanks seemed like the right thing to say, but Pattianne’s head went into a spiral. She didn’t want Elizabeth to think she was thanking her for the beads, since she didn’t think she was giving them to her, just letting her wear them. And she wasn’t sure if maybe she wasn’t trying to get her to buy them, since nobody ever even looked at them. And she wasn’t thinking of buying them, except now maybe she guessed she was, since here she was thinking about it, except she never wore beads. And she never wanted to be cute before, and didn’t want to be cute now, but it was different when another short person said cute.

  Elizabeth said, “What the fuck is this?” She pointed to Angela’s flyer, not touching it. Her nose did something wrinkly on one side.

  “Oh, yeah, Angela.”