A Small Crowd of Strangers

by Joanna Rose

  The parking lot of the Sears store was full, and she had to park pretty far back. The air was so cold it snapped at her face as she walked through eleven rows of cars. And then, right by the door of the store, the road worker sat in a big blue station wagon. The Sunday funnies were spread open across the steering wheel, and music and cigarette smoke drifted out the open window. Today was Friday. Sunday funnies on Friday.

  “Hey, hi,” she said.

  He didn’t jump or even look surprised to see her standing there all of a sudden. He turned the music down, some toe-tapping showtune, from Oklahoma! maybe. She was glad he’d turned it down quick before it could get stuck in her head.

  “Hello there,” he said. “How you doing, young lady? Out hitting the big sale? Ho.” The cigarette smoke was pipe smoke. He set the pipe in a beanbag ashtray on the dashboard next to a box of apple-cranberry juice with the straw sticking out.

  “Big sale?”

  “White sale,” he said. “I’m waiting on the Mrs. in there, buying up some white folks, ho. That’s a race joke.” His short hair was that pale pink color that red hair gets when it goes gray. He had hat hair. Maybe from his hard hat. “Probably not very funny,” he said. “Race jokes aren’t ever funny, but it seems like they should be, as long as they’re about white folks. My girl says not so, though—no such thing as a funny race joke.”

  Pattianne pictured hordes of happy consumers within. “Maybe I should wait until after the sale,” she said. The ring of cash registers, the thrill of the hunt.

  “Sale runs all weekend,” he said.

  “You have the Sunday funnies already?”

  “Last Sunday,” he said. “Science tidbits, I always save out the science tidbits. I was reading up on fireflies. They flash more when it’s really hot, it seems, and these fellows don’t seem know why they flash at all. Listen here.” He rattled the paper. His fingernails were trim and neat, even though the skin on his knuckles was red. All his skin was red. He was sort of a red-skinned white person. Small hands. “Heatless light called bioluminescence,” he said. “They might be flashing secret messages to other fireflies. Ho.”

  “We used to catch them in jars,” she said. “My sister and I. In New Jersey.”

  “They don’t even have fireflies out west,” he said. “But I hear they have silver water in the ocean out there instead.” He stared out past her up into the gray sky, and his eyes were that same color gray. “The Pacific Ocean. The great weather-maker. I read that.”

  “The boys used to smash them on their arms,” she said. “It made kind of a smeary glow.”

  She’d thought his eyes were blue, before.

  “I hope to see that for myself someday,” he said, looking at her, and yes, blue eyes. “Silver water,” he said. “They got that out west, in the Pacific Ocean. Not smashed fireflies. I was always just as glad we had a girl, I have to tell you.”

  Pattianne didn’t ask him about Buddhism. It seemed like privileged information somehow, like she could only ask about books if they met in the bookstore, like the privacy of the confessional. Instead, she looked at the tall white brick walls of the Sears store.

  “Well,” she said. “I guess maybe I’ll come back when there isn’t a sale.”

  The letter from Miss Mimi was a stiff square of creamy paper, her messy handwriting that used to be only a little neater. She had spoken with Pattianne’s mother, sent her best wishes to Michael, and she was moving out of her house, to Valley Village, maybe in the spring, and Pattianne should give her a call.

  Valley Village was a retirement community landscaped out of the rolling farmlands around Cranbury. Tiny apartments, housekeeping, medical care, a dining room, planned activities.

  “My friend Iris lives there,” she said when Pattianne called her. “Last week, I went with her on their bus trip to Chadds Ford to see the Andrew Wyeth paintings. Iris moved into Valley Village after her Herbie died, three years ago.”

  At first, after someone died, people said passed on, or passed away. Eventually they said died.

  “You’re selling your house?”

  “Sooner or later,” she said. “It will take some doing.” She coughed delicately. “Excuse me, dear.”

  Pattianne heard her turn away and cough again. She would be taking a sip of water. There was always her water glass nearby, a small glass with violets painted on it. It was part of a set of juice glasses. There was a set with cherries too, and a set with ivy leaves. Pattianne always chose her glass with a certain amount of care when she visited Miss Mimi.

  Miss Mimi laughed her wet laugh. “I’ve been here thirty years,” she said. “The roots are deep, and the closets are full.”

  The small gray house, with white trim and black shutters. Pattianne could never live there, just down the street from her mother and father, just down the street from her childhood, from the beige living room, the den with the television turned on. She had always wanted to just get away from there, fields all planted and fenced, private drives that went into business parks and world headquarters and places like Valley Village.

  Here, the prairie started up and went for a thousand miles west.

  Miss Mimi said, “Are you coming home for the holidays?”

  And she meant when, not if, because your husband’s father is gravely ill, and of course you are coming home.

  She said, “Are you keeping your feeders filled with sunflower seeds for the songbirds?”

  Yes.

  The living room got dark, and Pattianne lit a Miss Mimi candle, a thick blue one, and set it in the window in an orange Fiestaware saucer. For Michael, to bring him home. She opened red wine, and chopped up sweet red peppers, and mixed olive oil and anchovy paste. She didn’t know how things were between them when he was gone. She kept looking into the living room as it got dark, as the candle glow got bright and filled the bare, clean window.

  When he came home, the house smelled like dinner, and she kissed his cheek and said, “We have to make plane reservations for Christmas.”

  He kissed her back, came into the warm house, said, “I already did.” He reached past her and turned on the deer lamp, and the candlelight dimmed. She folded the blanket on the couch, and he hung up his big jacket.

  She held out Miss Mimi’s letter. “She’s going to move out of her house. She sends her best.”

  “I have to call Mom,” he said. “I have to talk to Claire too.” He went into his office.

  She brought him wine in a glass with a blue stem, hand blown. There were three of them, a dollar each.

  “Sangiovese,” she said.

  “Thank you, darling.” He laughed and spoke into the phone. “No, I was talking to my lovely wife.” And then he talked to her again. “Father McGivens sends love.”

  She didn’t know how things were between them when he was here either.

  Saturday morning, he was gone early. Maybe he’d said debate tournament in Bemidji, or maybe she’d dreamed that, like maybe she was dreaming all of this. She got up a long time later and reheated the coffee. The floors were icy, and she pushed the thermostat up moderately high, and then higher. A light dusting of new snow blew in gusts and swirls around the yard. She went into his office and looked through a box of paperbacks until she found an Elmore Leonard book she couldn’t remember. She could get curtains for in here too. By the time the heat vent in the kitchen was rattling happily away, she was back in the bedroom, where the dark brocade over the window kept the day in here with her, not out there with icy bits of wind, and she was asleep before the plot got familiar.

  Sunday morning, she made cinnamon rolls from tubes when he went to Mass, whopped them against the edge of the stove, popped them out, and baked them on the cookie sheet. The house smelled sweet and yeasty when he came home from Mass.

  He said, “Great minds run the same channel,” holding up a whole bag of cinnamon rolls from the bakeshop next to Sacred Heart.

  And she said, “Fools think alike.”

  They ate them all, he read
the sports page, she did most of the crossword, saying, “More coffee, my darling fool,” and “Pass the cream, oh Great Mind.”

  He didn’t remember that particular Elmore Leonard book either. The Golden Gophers were playing U of M on TV. While he brought the TV out of his office and set it up in the living room, she put his big jacket on over the Loretta Young robe and went out and scattered the last of the bird seed around the front yard, the world all black and white and shades of gray.

  Sunday. Easy. Eventually Michael snored a quiet, buzzing snore, and she curled up next to him and lay Elmore Leonard open in her lap. The snow kept blowing. The window was full of white winter daylight. She prayed the phone wouldn’t ring, and it didn’t.

  On Monday, she headed back out the highway, thinking plain white tab-top curtains on black iron rods. Two windows, eight screws. A brand-new bag of sunflower seeds rested on the seat next to her. She drove into the cemetery and turned off the O-Bug. The sunflower seeds spilled down between the seats when she ripped open the bag with her teeth. She got out into the cold gray day and dug her hand deep into the bag. The seeds were sharp and slippery. She tossed them, one handful, two, and they clicked and slid on the icy snow. Then she got back in the car and waited until the chickadees came, landing and hopping around all the seeds, black and white and gray, pecking and beeping and then flitting away so quick she couldn’t see their tiny wings. They were different from New Jersey chickadees. They had brown caps instead of black. If ashes were mixed in with the seeds, maybe the chickadees would eat the ashes too, and then fly away, up into the bare tree, beeping that long beep, beep, over and over. Beautiful. Like early mornings at Grandma Anthony’s house in the summer, chickadees in the ginkgo tree. And Grandma would come to her bed in the screened-in side porch and say, Wake up, Pattianne chickadee.

  Pattianne wanted her ashes mixed with birdseed. They could feed her to the chickadees. She didn’t know if that would make her a chickadee or not. She would have to ask Elizabeth. Maybe you couldn’t circumvent reincarnation that easily. Or else that was reincarnation, which made sense. She wasn’t too worried about God. There seemed to be plenty of room for God in that idea. Jesus was just Jesus. There were chickadees and candles.

  She went back home instead of to Sears for curtains.

  Planned Parenthood was on Belmont Street, about five blocks away from Lamplighter Books. Everything in St. Cloud was about five blocks away. Their house five blocks from the library, the little grocery store about five blocks another direction. She went past Lamplighter Books, past a thrift shop and a tap-dancing studio, her own heels tap-dancing on the sidewalk, a small-town morning. She hated pelvic exams, and now she was proud of herself for making the appointment, getting it over with.

  The reception area was done in the quiet colors of all Planned Parenthood offices everywhere, and there was the usual dusty ficus by the window, and magazines on a blond wood table. Glossy, colored brochures in a plexiglass holder said Birth Control & You in flowing lavender script. The woman at the desk didn’t look like the road worker at all.

  The exam room had colored diagrams of the female reproductive system on the wall, colored photographs of Minnesota on the ceiling.

  The doctor was a woman, and she said, “Call me Maureen.”

  “This may pinch,” Dr. Maureen said. “This may be uncomfortable for a second.”

  They always said that. Like it sometimes didn’t. Like it sometimes wasn’t. The world was full of lies.

  After she got poked and pinched and was sitting in a chair next to the examining table, instead of lying face up on it looking at a picture of fall maple trees that were way too red for a doctor’s office, Dr. Maureen asked her more questions. Did she want to continue oral contraceptives? Yes. Has she thought about a patch? Yes.

  Dr. Maureen stopped putting check marks on the clipboard and waited.

  “No patch,” Pattianne said.

  “Okay.” The doctor clicked her pen shut and put it in her lab coat pocket. “Any questions?”

  “It said something about headaches on the form.”

  Dr. Maureen had the kind of mouth that pursed to show she was listening.

  Pattianne said, “Just ordinary everyday headaches?”

  “There is no such thing as normal everyday headaches,” Dr. Maureen said. She pulled her pen back out. “Do you get headaches every day?”

  “Oh, no,” Pattianne said. “I just meant, you know, headaches that you sometimes get, what kind of headaches that might mean, on the form.”

  She clicked her pen. “What kind of headaches do you get?”

  The kind where light stabbed eyes. The kind where sound cracked her face bones. “Just from reading too much. I probably need new glasses.”

  “This is really in reference to severe or chronic headaches,” clicking her pen and putting it back in her pocket.

  The kind where your heart beats like a fast tickle in the throat.

  “So,” Pattianne said. “Exactly what is a migraine?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Don’t worry. You’d know if you had a migraine. They tend to be quite disabling. They’re quite serious, especially when it comes to taking any kind of drug. They’re not just a bad headache, so don’t worry.”

  Back at the reception desk, Pattianne filled out a long, yellow form that ended with a space for a signature. She signed PT Anthony as messily as she could, essentially unreadable, and paid in twenty-dollar bills. The receptionist handed her six small squares of plastic with the yellow and white pills lined up in their clear pockets. She put them in her pocket, and they made a small noise that she tried to quiet with her hand wrapped around them.

  She started for the door, and the receptionist said, “Wait a sec.”

  “I don’t need a receipt.”

  The receptionist said, “Katie or Marianne can walk you out if you want.”

  Two young women stood up, and the smaller of the two stood up on her tiptoes to look over the shade on the window. The sun came in over the top of the shade and lit up her short spiky hair, shades of purple and magenta.

  “They’re just praying,” she said. “It looks pretty quiet.”

  Pattianne moved like she was in a dream, across gray-blue carpet with pink crisscrosses in a pattern that made her dizzy, next to the short woman, that purple hair at the edge of what she was seeing. What she was seeing was people at the end of the narrow walkway out to the street. What she was seeing was people on their knees praying.

  “They won’t bother you,” someone said.

  “We just have to walk through their circle,” someone said. “They move apart when they see you coming.”

  “Sometimes they just sing,” someone said.

  “They have those kids out there again,” someone said.

  The three L children. And Lily Smith. Other people.

  “There’s another way out,” the punky girl said. “You have to go through the bar next door. Where did you park?”

  “I walked. I guess I’d rather go through the bar?”

  The punky girl said, “I’ll show her.”

  She wore overalls, and she headed down another hallway and through a steel door into a smoky little bar. A guy sat in the sun by the window. He poured tomato juice into a glass of beer and looked up when they walked past him.

  The girl said, “Hey, Jackson,” and he raised his red beer to her, a Harley-Davidson T-shirt over thin arms, a cigarette smoking in the ashtray.

  Pattianne wanted to stay, bum a smoke, have a red beer with Jackson. She followed the overalls. “Are they there every day?”

  “We’re not open every day,” the punky girl said. “But every day we’re open, yeah.”

  They went down a narrow hallway, past a bathroom, past a messy office.

  “The same people, every day?”

  She said, “I’m only here part time.” She opened a back door. Two dumpsters and an alley full of sun. She said, “Where are you going?”

  “Work.”

  “
They don’t cause too much of a fuss. They know we only do referrals here.” She touched the very tip of Pattianne’s elbow. “Are you all right?”

  How such small kindness can bring such big, quick sadness.

  “I just have a headache.” And Pattianne turned her sad-filled face away, and the wind blew grit into her eyes.

  They thought they were saving lives. If she was trying to save someone’s life, she’d do more than kneel in the sun and sing. If those praying people thought murder was happening, how could praying and singing be enough? How could they think it’s okay to murder for Middle East oil, or for someone else’s national boundaries, but not for freedom in your own body? How all this sounded like a letter to the editor in the Sunday New York Times.

  She didn’t believe she was a murderer. Michael would think she was. If he knew. If he knew anything. Right now, she didn’t like him. There had been love growing, and she couldn’t find it now. She didn’t like his father or his mother or his sister or Sister Anne What’s-Her-Name. She hated Father McGivens.

  Bells rang from high up in the windy, sunny sky. Late for work. She turned toward Lamplighter Books. Brown shoes, gray cement, heels hard, the cadence of prayer, the cadence of footsteps in empty space where she did not love him completely anymore, empty space where she did not feel like tap-dancing up the street.

  The small bells rang their small sound, and the cranes spun in a circle, except the white one, which seemed not to move at all, how they did that sometimes, those cranes. One would hang perfectly still as the others bobbed and bounced. Elizabeth stood up from the bottom of Dreams, her bracelets chiming, long blue sleeves fluttering, beads of amethyst around her neck. “Oh, good, you’re here.” And she shook her hair.

  She was glad Pattianne was here. Pattianne was glad too. Glad was easy.