If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories Read online

  A kind of love blossomed between them, like the love between a mother and her child, perhaps—especially after the accident and the months of recuperation that followed, when Buttons was Karen’s only source of affection and companionship after her sister, who’d returned to Karen’s life to nurse her back to health had died when her cell phone exploded in her hand, killing her instantly in front of the elementary school where the children had just run out the front doors to be greeted by their parents, and the ten million pieces of Karen’s sister’s carnage rained down on them as they screamed.

  Now, every spring, Karen planted impatiens for Buttons just so he could dig them up.

  It was difficult learning to adjust to life with only one arm after so many years of having two, but Buttons was a great help to Karen. Bringing the mail to her. Licking the tears from her cheeks. Somewhere, she knew, some other woman was driving for hundreds of miles with Karen’s arm embedded in the grill of her car. She’d find it someday, and never know whose it was, or where it had come from.

  Probably, she was Conrad’s wife. Probably, Conrad would recognize the arm as Karen’s as soon as he saw the hemp bracelet he had braided for her and his own toenail at the center of it, and have a heart attack, dying in their driveway in front of their home, surrounded by his screaming daughters and his wife. His son would hang himself in the public park, but, it being Halloween weekend, he would be taken simply for a macabre decoration for several days.

  It would not be until many years later that Karen would begin to realize how selfish she had been, having an affair with a married man. The chain of events it might have begun. How little she’d known then of love, she realized. And family. The humble, hopeful vows people took to get themselves through this life intact. How a betrayal, even of a stranger, was like a tiny spot of rust that eventually ate away everything. The vast lacy decay spreading its terrible veil clear across the country. She’d been a tourist back then, taking nothing in, giving nothing back. Who was left to whom she could confess? Who was left to offer forgiveness? Who would she be in the universe, when her soul was sucked back up into it, without this?

  It wouldn’t be for another decade that Buttons, grown elderly on the pillow beside hers, would need to be taken to the veterinarian. By then, two new couples had come and gone from the bungalow next door. They’d moved out when pieces of Elizabeth continued to surface at random intervals in their toilet bowl. Her only friend back at the office, Melissa, had been swallowed by a sink hole that no one but a few corrupt developers were aware lay just beneath the parking lot of the shopping mall, waiting to swallow someone.

  “Buttons hasn’t eaten for days,” Karen said, handing him over to the veterinarian with her one arm. “Can you help him, Doctor? Buttons is a good little dog. He’s never hurt a soul.”

  The veterinarian looked at Buttons for a few seconds, and then he looked up at Karen. He cleared his throat. He said, “Ma’am, I don’t know how to tell you this, but—Buttons—Buttons isn’t a dog.”

  Outside the veternarian’s office, Karen heard the familiar, tinny music of the ice-cream truck, and then the squealing of brakes, and then a child’s shriek cut off abruptly, as if the shriek itself had been yanked out of the child’s mouth and stuffed into a pocket.

  The child’s own father, as it happened, was driving that ice-cream truck when his only son dashed in front of it.

  Karen nodded sadly, feeling the tears gather in the corners of her eyes, but also feeling swollen with wonder at this strange life and her own role in it, full of a kind of regret that was also a kind of genuine awe, before she said to the veterinarian, “I know.”

  Joyride

  Hey,” my dad said, tossing the keys onto the couch beside me, “why not take the old family convertible for a joyride, pal?”

  He wasn’t joking, but it wasn’t what he wanted to say, either. What he really wanted to say was that it bothered him to see me sitting on the couch with a copy of National Geographic on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

  When I was younger, he used to say, “Hey, pal, why don’t you go outside and throw rocks at birds, like all the other red-blooded American boys?”

  And maybe he didn’t really mean go throw rocks at birds, but, instead, I’m not sure I like you, or, I’m frightened that I don’t like you—and still he would have been happy if I’d done it. Thrown rocks at birds. It would have proven something about me, and it would also have given him the excuse he’d been looking for all my life to spank me, or deck me. To teach me a lesson.

  Mom walked through the room then with a smile that showed all her teeth, even the back molars. Sometimes she might smile that way and say, “Oh, Jim, leave the boy alone!” But today she was trying hard to have a Good Weekend, and didn’t want to provoke him, so she only smiled.

  “Okay, Dad,” I said, and picked up the keys.

  I put down the National Geographic, walked past him, across the living room, out the front door.

  It was summer. Everything was green. The green that a shard of an old Coke bottle turns after a long time in the sea. Or something equally green. Maybe even something twice as green. My father had already taken the roof down. I pulled his convertible into the street.

  Grandma was asleep when I got there. She was in her chair, but leaning forward, draped over the tray attached to her wheelchair like a rag doll. Her roommate was lying so still on the opposite bed that she looked completely dead. Her eyes were open. When I walked past her, she chuckled. Her name was Eve L. Mason, and it was like a cold trickle of pure evil, that laughter, and I was careful not to turn around and look at her. Once, when I was much younger and my grandmother was new to the nursing home, Eve L. had whispered something to me. My father had been wheeling my grandmother around in the hallway. I couldn’t hear what Eve L. was whispering. She indicated with a few bony fingers that I should come over to the side of the bed. She whispered again, and I still couldn’t hear her, so I leaned down, and she sprang up and grabbed me by the ears and pulled my face to hers, cackling. Her breath smelled like a trashcan full of old leaves that have gotten wet. Night after night after that I dreamed of Eve L. pulling me down, down, down into dead leaves. “Just ignore her,” my father had said.

  “Grandma?”

  I touched the back of her head. Her white hair was so tenuous and brittle, but long and floating about her head in wild wisps, that it was like air that had calcified. As if shallow breaths had risen and stiffened in frayed strands around my grandmother’s head.

  She lifted her face but didn’t open her eyes.

  How, I thought, looking at her eyelids, could such thin lids keep the light out.

  For a frightening second I thought she might have been looking at me through them.

  “It’s me,” I said. “Grandma. It’s Mark.”

  The eyelids sprang open.

  She blinked away the milk—six, seven, eight times—and then she smiled.

  I knew, looking at her, that anyone who didn’t know her would probably fail to register the smile as a smile. As pleasure. As joy. What they’d see instead was the wrecked body around the smile. The misery of her old age. The blindness.

  But, if you knew her, you’d see that she was incredibly happy to see me.

  A few months earlier, I’d taken Hilary Agnew to the prom. She’d been the one who asked me—shoved a piece of paper across the biology lab table that said, “Mark. Would you like to go to the prom with me? Hilary.”

  I had no way of knowing for sure, but my feeling was that some friend of Hilary’s might have written that note. If Hilary had any friends. Or maybe an older sister, or her mother. When I saw her in the hall later, and said, trying to smile politely, “Sure, Hilary,” she’d only shrugged, bitten her quivering bottom lip, her eyebrows also trembling, as if she might cry, as if I’d agreed to attend her funeral.

  But she’d worn an amazing dress.

  There were layers and layers of satin involved in that dress, and, under the satin, there seemed to be lac
e. It was a pale purple, with straps that held it elaborately around her chest and neck, and then crisscrossed in a dizzying ladder down her bare back.

  It would have been easy to see only that dress. The frivolous, girlish, ecstasy of that. But, if you looked closer, what you saw at the center of all that—Hilary—was still a small, depressed girl with mascara smeared under one of her eyes. She drooped in the dress beside me in her parents’ living room while her mother grimly took pictures. She dropped in the dress in my father’s car beside me. When we pulled up to the high school, I turned the keys off in the ignition and said, “Hilary? Is this what you want to do?”

  She looked down at her elaborate lap.

  After what seemed like a very long time, she shook her head, and a tear fell off her face, disappearing in the satin.

  “Is there—anything wrong?” I asked.

  So quietly I almost couldn’t hear her, she said, “No.”

  Her mother was standing on the front porch when I brought Hilary home.

  The expression on Mrs. Agnew’s face, even before she could have recognized who it was pulling into her long, winding drive, did not betray the slightest shred of surprise.

  “Grandma. Want to go for a ride?”

  Behind us, Eve L. parroted me in a nasty little voice, “Grandma want to go for a ride?”

  My grandmother slapped her knee with her curled and rigid hand, and said, “Yes, I, do.”

  I took the tray off her chair and put it on the floor, and pushed my grandmother past Eve L. into the hallway and down the long, whimpering corridor to the front door, and then out into the bright sunshine.

  The nurses and aides at the front desk did not seem to notice us leave, or, if they noticed, they apparently did not feel it was any of their concern.

  My father’s car was the only one in the lot. I wheeled my grandmother to the passenger side, and opened it. I scooped her out (she was as light as a skeleton—a skeleton in a polyester dress) and set her down in the seat. When I leaned across her to buckle her belt, she giggled. I didn’t know what to do with the wheelchair, so I left it sitting empty in the parking lot. The sky was clear, and who would steal a wheelchair.

  Anyway, at that time, I thought we would only go for a short drive, and be right back.

  In a few years, I would be a sophomore in college, and a girl I’d had a crush on for a year would come stumbling down the hallway of our dorm with a bottle of Wild Turkey in her hand.

  Her long, dark hair was a mess, and her lips looked engorged, so red they looked like a wound more than an orifice.

  She’d stumble and fall to her knees right in front of the open door of my room, look up, and slur, “I know you always want to fuck me. It’s okay to fuck me.”

  I would stand up.

  I would go to her.

  I would lift her up and carry her, as light as my grandmother, but less alive, and put her down on my roommate’s lower bunk.

  With one hand, she would bring the Wild Turkey to her lips and slug hard from it, and with the other, she would unbutton her blouse. I would sit at the edge of the bed, and as she rubbed her hand on my crotch, I would close my eyes, and what I would see was the way the wind blowing through the open roof of my father’s car had lifted my grandmother’s white hair, and placed it down again carefully on her shoulders. How she’d tilted her head back and opened her mouth to the sky.

  The Foreclosure

  This happened during one of those terrible months when my life was purely about jealousy. Jealousy, envy, resentment, spite. I woke up every morning tangled in them like barbed wire. I lay down to sleep in a prickling gown of them every night. I woke up angry and tired.

  I hadn’t always been that way. There’d been a time in my life when I would never have believed you if you’d told me how consumed a person might become with the desire for a thing, and that I might become such a person. Men, I’d wanted. A sense of accomplishment. Recognition for the talents I’d imagined I had. I’d even occasionally longed to feel the solid perfumed weight of a baby against my chest. During the dead months of winter, I’d craved the sun. During the long hot months of summer and pavement I’d dreamed of ocean breezes. But I’d never pined, as I was pining in those months, for a thing.

  I had been raised by frugal parents who never spoke about money. We never had much, but there was always enough. I never heard my parents argue about how to pay a bill or if one of them had spent too much on something. They never mentioned how I might make money myself someday. When I said I wanted to be a poet, that I was marrying a painter, they gave us their blessing, and then they died. My mother’s cancer followed my father’s heart attack. There was no inheritance, but there was no debt. It was as if they’d taken care to sweep the floor behind them, moving backward out the door so as to leave not a trace of themselves when they left.

  Before we married, my husband and I used to say that we would be happy in a shoebox together. A shoebox next to some railroad tracks. A damp shoebox. Some newspaper for our bed. We would lie beside one another in the sweaty rumpled twin bed in my apartment and describe the awful squalor in which we knew we could find complete contentment. A shoebox shared with a shoeboxful of mice.

  But then we lived for five years together in an apartment with thin walls, patchy carpet, neighbors above and below us who stomped and shouted at one another and played music only they could appreciate so loudly we could recite the lyrics to their grating songs. The pets they were not supposed to have in their apartments would yowl and bark and whine through the nights when they weren’t home, and then yap and meow with pitiful relief when they returned, slamming the doors behind them, cracking open the tabs on their beer and soda cans. When a truck drove through the street, it shook the whole building so completely you could really understand that the building was made of plywood, sawdust, nothing, and a few slaps of diluted off-white paint over it all. The water in the shower smelled like moldy cheese if you didn’t run it long enough, and if you ran it too long it was stone cold by the time you stepped in.

  My husband and I both worked long days in cubicles to pay the rent, and some months we had to appeal to the landlord to give us an extra week. The landlord would wait until after he thought I was out of earshot to say to my husband, “You pay me on time, or I throw you out.”

  It was during this period of time that more and more people were getting thrown out. Of their apartments. Their jobs. Their houses. Some of the women I worked with talked about how lucky they felt to have their jobs, or their husbands, or their cars. They were just trying to hang on. But others seemed poised to take advantage of the situation. They talked about the sinking economy, and the tanking of the job market. They’d say things like, “We’re going to wait just a few more months, and then we’re going to snap up a house. People are getting desperate. Soon you’ll be able to buy yourself a mansion for a song.”

  I could not, myself, imagine such a song. The song of our bank account was always hovering just under three hundred dollars. The song of our gas tank was always a quarter of a tank. What would such a song sound like? Could it afford lyrics, or would it be played on some kind of wind instrument?

  No.

  No instrument.

  Just wind.

  I neither felt thankful for what I had nor hopeful that anything better could be had because others were losing what they’d once had. My husband never spoke about making art, as he used to call it. I wrote no poetry.

  It was during this time that I began to get up early to walk through the surrounding neighborhoods on the weekends while my husband was still asleep. I would walk quickly so that I could get as far away from our block as I could, as quickly as possible. Our block and the ones surrounding it were renters’ blocks, seeming always to be over-hung with gray clouds, as if the clouds had gathered on purpose over our rooftops because we couldn’t afford blue sky.

  Our blocks were immediately adjacent to blocks that also looked temporary, but not as temporary as ours. There were house
s, at least. Boxy houses, some of them divided into two or three residences. Duplexes. Triplexes. Close to bus stops. Convenient to convenience stores, where people like my husband and I bought canned soups and packaged bread at outrageous prices because we didn’t want to have to put gas in the car to get us to the cheaper stores. But there were signs of a slightly more permanent life on those blocks. There would be an occasional bike locked to a mailbox out front, or a plastic pool that hadn’t been used in years.

  Beyond this neighborhood, there were a few blocks of houses that had once been owned, it seemed, by people who’d lived in them for many years and taken good care of them but were now being rented out to strangers, or to relatives down on their luck. Screen doors that wouldn’t close properly might be blowing around in the wind. Garbage cans no one bothered to bring in waited at the end of the driveway. But there was a dignity under it. Hollyhocks that might have been planted decades earlier, tended back then, were still blooming here and there along a weathered fence.

  These neighborhoods were preferable to ours, but not by much. It was past these neighborhoods where I found my heartache. The farther I walked, the more I discovered to long for, and to admire, and to despise.

  Each of these mornings, I tried to take a different route, discover a new little pocket of unbearable, unattainable beauty: Little brick bungalows. Light-blue clapboard. Porches with rocking chairs. Windowboxes stuffed with foliage. Here, in these distant neighborhoods, it was late spring the way late spring was meant to be. The weather was glorious, as if choreographed for flowers. Blue sky. Swirling clouds. The grass was so green it looked as if it might shatter if you stepped on it.

  I would not look directly at the houses I passed. I would glance at them furtively, sidelong, and will myself not to stop, not to stare.