If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories

by Laura Kasischke

  “Isn’t that beautiful?” Melody had said.

  “Hell, yes,” he agreed.

  But something blocked his throat—mucus, phlegm?—and Melody seemed to notice.

  “Don’t you think that’s beautiful?” she asked again.

  “Yeah,” he said, “Definitely. Yes.” But she looked at him longer than she usually did.

  Soon after that, Melody stopped shaving her armpits or her legs. “Do you mind?” she asked, holding up her arm, under which a little nest had grown. “It’s just so unnatural, shaving.”

  No. It didn’t matter to him in the least. He liked it. The muskier she was the more she seemed like another human being—not like his other girlfriends who smelled like Pine Sol and looked like pictures. They had sex straight through her periods. Cunnilingus even! Blood on everything. Yes! On his face, in his hair, on the dormitory walls. They had sex straight through the winter until it was spring, and the lawn of the college commons was hopping around with pregnant birds. On his way to class one morning, Tony crushed a pale blue egg under his shoe by accident, and gagged, scraping it off with a leaf. Everything was having sex.

  This was, of course, the common life, but his common life was animated by an extraordinary love. No one had ever loved this way before. Technicolor! Tony was charmed! He’d been chosen! This was your Average Joe pumped full of light and oxygen and set afloat.

  After the semester ended, Tony and Melody moved out of the dorm into a sublet together. He would walk down the street on his way to his job at the library, and suddenly be transported by the realization that, back at the studio apartment, his girlfriend was rinsing out his cereal bowl! It was incredible, waking every morning next to Melody, or waking to hear her puttering around in their kitchen (only a few feet from their bed on the other side of a plywood partition) making a pot of coffee for them. It was incredible, finding her beaded earrings on the bathroom sink. Her toothbrush leaning casually next to his in the toothbrush holder! It was only for the month of May and half of June, but in that span of time they became an elderly couple, complete with routine and cat (until it got out.) Simple chores became an adventure in adulthood, in manhood. Tying up the garbage bag to take it to the trash can. (“Sweetheart, I’m taking out the garbage now!” “Okay, hon. Thanks!”) It was as if, when he did these chores, he became his own father, and also an entirely new man. The first man. When Tony found Melody at the kitchen sink rinsing out their coffee cups, he felt such a rush of pleasure and satisfaction he had to wonder if this was normal. Had his father felt this way watching his mother fold the laundry? Had any man ever felt this way?

  But he’d also known what was coming. After their nearly two months of bliss, their two-month separation. Still, he hadn’t known that he would be sick with anxiety (literally sick—feverish, nauseated) when Melody went off to Camp Wishy-Washy to be a summer counselor. (“Tony, don’t make fun of it!”)

  A moat of time. A penal institution of time. Threatening everything. Undermining every crystalline detail of his ecstatic existence.

  It would be the end of this perfect world, he knew. And he’d been right. They were still together after those two months were over, but nothing was ever the same.

  The second girl pinned her donkey’s tail exactly at the spot where the poster-donkey lacked a tail. Obviously, she’d been peeking out from beneath her blindfold, but this girl was a born actress, had even pretended to walk completely in the wrong direction for six or seven paces, pretended to grope the air in the right direction, before, bingo!, she pinned the tail on the donkey.

  Tony’s daughter wasn’t fooled, either, and shouted, “You were peeking!”

  “No I wasn’t!” the other girl snapped back with what sounded like practiced defensiveness—a girl with a sister, probably older, was Tony’s guess, and his daughter seemed to sense this girl’s superiority when it came to such arguments, and dropped it.

  “Next girl!” Melody chimed in. She was expert, as always, at keeping things moving. No matter what it was, Melody knew that if you rushed at it fast enough with a broom in your hand you could sweep it under the carpet before anyone noticed it was there.

  Melody hadn’t been gone to Camp Wishy-Washy for two nights before Tony had started flipping out. Drank a lot of beer in front of the fuzzy black-and-white TV before he fell asleep, and then woke up in their sublet bed in the morning feeling as if he’d been punched hard right between his ribs.

  “I miss you,” he said to her picture, held by a black magnet to the fridge.

  “I miss you,” he said, leaning into his own reflection at the bathroom mirror, letting the pathos breathe its steam all over his face, smelling like beer.

  But it was a lot worse than missing her. It was like grief. She was dead. He called in sick to his job at the library, and started drinking beer right after he finished his bowl of Grape Nuts in the morning. He lay on their bed. The ceiling was a swirling mess of plaster and paint, and beyond it were layers of shit he couldn’t even imagine. Insulation. Wires. Sawdust. When he closed his eyes he didn’t see Melody. He saw, instead, what he could only have described as an artist’s rendering of a guy named Bud.

  Bud was the lifeguard Melody had slept with at Camp Wishy-Washy the year before. She hadn’t described Bud to him, so Tony Harmon had created a picture of Bud from the tics and features of guys he’d felt intimidated by in the past.

  Bud had the piercing blue eyes of his sister’s last boyfriend, the one who’d called him Squirtlet. He had the shaggy blond hair of a guy he’d gone to high school with, a guy who’d played electric guitar in a band, who Tony always suspected his own girlfriend, Cindy Malofsky, had a crush on (although she denied it tearfully in his car and in the cafeteria and once on her knees at a playground while the mother of some toddler playing in the sand eyed them suspiciously). Tony couldn’t have told you where the mouth of Bud came from. Mark Spitz, maybe. Some godlike swimmer. The chipped front tooth of a frat boy who’d come to Behavior Modification every day, snow or shine, wearing a muscle shirt while the girls practically fell out of their desks to get a better look at his rippling and hairless flesh.

  The pain of looking into Bud’s face was terrible—like seeing his own inadequacies under a microscope—but it was all Tony could do. Look. That artist’s rendering was tattooed on his eyelids. It didn’t matter how much beer he drank, it was still there.

  And Melody’s first phone call from camp to him (from some cabin office, shouting over the background noise of a lot of rowdy teenagers) made things worse. He pictured her in her short-shorts, wearing love-beads and braids, with Bud standing in the doorway behind her feeling her up with his eyes. It didn’t matter that she’d sworn up and down that Bud wasn’t going to be there this summer, that Bud had gone up to Alaska this year to fish on the big boats (whatever the hell the “big boats” meant: Melody always said it as if it were common knowledge that the waters of Alaska were full of large and small boats, and we all knew which kind of boat Bud would be on) and, besides, she had no feelings for Bud anymore. “I’m with you.”

  Tony shouted into the phone, hoping it was loud enough for Bud in the background to hear, “I love you!” and she whispered it hoarsely back. “I love you, too.”

  It had lasted only four minutes, that call, but Tony lay with the phone in his hand for hours afterward, drunk on his back on their bed, playing it over and over in his mind.

  Was it his imagination, or had she emphasized the word too?

  “I love you, too.”

  (“‘I love you, too,’ the beautiful girl whispered, impatiently …” was the way he’d write it in a story.)

  And when could she call him again, he’d demanded to know. Please, Melody, when will you call again so I can be sure to be home?

  But she just couldn’t be sure. Day after tomorrow if they had some free time to get up to the cabin where the only phone at Camp Wishy-Washy was. “They really discourage phone calls here,” she’d said. She might as well have said they were u
rging her to put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger. “I have to go,” she’d said. “I’m so sorry. … Like ten people are waiting for this phone.”

  Tony had said nothing. She kept saying good-bye apologetically until he’d forced her to hang up to his nothing. Then, for a long time he’d kept the phone to his ear as he listened to the dead air, almost hoping he’d hear something he could hold against her—maybe a click, and then the line to Wishy-Washy reconnected: “Hello? Hello? This is Bud, Bud the lifeguard. Who’s still hanging on to this connection?”

  But the connection just hummed itself into dial-tone eventually, and then a recording came on politely asking him to hang up and try his call again, and then that turned into a high pitched screeching that was supposed to scare him into slamming down the receiver—but he still didn’t. He threw up, drank some coffee, went back to bed, where he stayed, and then in the middle of the night he got in his car and drove straight up to Camp Wishy-Washy—probably driving a hundred miles and hour, but he didn’t remember anything about the drive except stopping at a filling station. There was a hole in his gas tank, so Tony could only put a few gallons in it at a time, and when the gas started splashing onto the black-top, the kid who was pumping it said, “Hey, there’s a hole in your gas tank.”

  “I don’t have a gas tank,” Tony said flatly, and the kid just stared at him.

  A sign nailed to a post marking a rutted dirt road said, WELCOME TO CAMP MICHI-WAU-LU-K.

  “Fuck you,” Tony said to it, and stopped, looking ahead. He knew his old Honda would never make it down that road. The car only weighed about twenty pounds and the tires were smooth as glass, so Tony parked it under the sign and started to walk. This was really the woods. There were things flying and whining in his ears. He was that prince cutting his way through the vines to get at Sleeping Beauty. He walked for miles without hearing anything but those insects and the wind flapping around in the leaves.

  The cheater won the prize. A little goody-bag. The only thing Tony Harmon knew for sure was in that goody-bag was a whistle, because the cheater started running in circles blowing it so loudly he finally had to put his fingers in his ears.

  “Cake!” Melody shouted loudly enough to be heard over it all as she stepped off the deck into the backyard bearing it, in flames. She placed the cake in front of their daughter, and Tony had to hold himself back from blowing out the candles, which seemed like an absurdly dangerous thing to put in front of a little girl with long hair. But his daughter blew them out faster than he could have, and then screamed, over and over again in triumph, clearly trying to over-shadow the game winner with her whistle.

  The cake itself was like some sort of surrealist representation of a vagina—all pink at the center surrounded by pinker roses made of frosting but looking a lot like damp flesh, and a miniature Barbie doll doing a go-go dance in a bathing suit at the center. “Can you please go in and get the soda and the ice bucket?” Melody asked him wearily as he stared at it.

  “Of course,” Tony said, and turned toward the house. There was certainly no reason for her to have said it as though she expected him to refuse, or to explode. He was only too happy to go inside and get whatever she wanted him to get.

  Stepping through the sliding glass doors, the cold of the air-conditioned interior came again as a shock. He hadn’t realized, until it began to evaporate on his skin in the kitchen, that he was drenched in sweat. Tony stood in the kitchen and looked around until he located three big plastic bottles of soda waiting for him on the counter, and the ice bucket, which was also sweating and had left a ring of water on the kitchen table.

  Jesus.

  That would take the finish right off the cherry, and Melody would probably blame him, but Tony couldn’t have cared less. There was no way he was going to wipe off that ring. Fuck the ring. Fuck the table. He grabbed the three warm bottles in one arm and the ice bucket in the other, and stomped through the kitchen. He was about to put everything down again to free himself up to open the glass doors when he thought about the water working away on the finish of the table:

  No, it wasn’t his table anymore, but his daughter was going to be sitting at that table for the next ten years, he supposed. That little blotchy baby covered with blood and goop squirming under a heat-lamp would soon be a sullen teenager eating a lettuce leaf and a scoop of cottage cheese for dinner some night at that table, and she’d look at the water ring on what might once have been the family’s lovely kitchen table (her father and mother had bought it together at Handcrafters the year they’d moved into the house on Periwinkle Lane) and see how stained and shabby and ugly it had become in only a decade, and she’d think, God, I hate this life. Tony vividly remembered thinking similar things about his own life when he was a kid while looking at the plaid couch in the living room or his mother’s ratty slippers on the bathroom rug. So, he put the soda bottles and ice bucket down and went back inside, grabbed the rag Melody always kept tucked into the handle of the refrigerator door (“Don’t wipe your hands on that; it’s just for the counters”), and wiped the ring.

  There.

  He felt good about it.

  He’d spared them something.

  He was tucking the towel back into its spot, and then Melody was tapping on the sliding glass doors. “We, need, soda,” she said, mouthing on the other side exaggeratedly in case he couldn’t hear her through the window, although he could hear her perfectly, and then she cocked her head in that crazy-robin way she had that made him want to kill, and mouthed, “What, are, you, doing?”

  “What are you doing here?” Melody asked. It was early evening by the time he got down to the cabins. It had only taken an hour or so for him to walk the rutted dirt road to the Welcome Cabin, but by then the sun was in the middle of the sky bearing down in green-gold beams of light that crisscrossed each other in the clearing, where an old school bus was parked and empty. (He’d even stepped inside, to make sure it was empty.) There’d been no one in the Welcome Cabin to welcome him or to tell him where he might find his girlfriend who was a counselor at this camp, so Tony had started walking down a footpath he’d chosen from three other possible footpaths, and had walked down it for a long time until it dead-ended at a very small dark lake on which a few rowboats knocked against a weedy dock lazily in the light breeze, and he stopped.

  There had been a humming overhead—cicadas, but not like the ones he usually heard in jagged bursts in the summers where he grew up. Here, there were hundreds and thousands of cicadas humming invisibly overhead, making a somehow shiny and impenetrable music, the kind of music an orchestra full of mirrors might have made.

  Tony stood at the edge of that lake and watched the random knock-knockings of the rowboats for a while, and then went to the edge, and pissed into it—a bright golden arch which hit the surface of that darkness and smashed it into jigsaw pieces.

  Tony opened the door and handed the ice bucket to Melody and carried the soda bottles, their necks dangling between the fingers of one hand, out into heat. At the picnic table his daughter was doing what looked like some kind of Irish jig on the picnic table bench. She had pink icing all over her mouth.

  “I’m here to see you,” he’d said.

  Melody was wearing the cutoffs he loved more than everything else in the world put together. There was a frayed rip right under the left cheek of her ass, which gave a glimpse of the white flesh there and made his heart race every time he noticed it again. There were seven or eight depressed-looking teenage girls around her—every one of them butt-ugly—and Melody, at the center, like a lily in a field of thistles.

  “Oh,” she said. She started shaking her head. “Oh my God.”

  “I need to talk to you,” Tony said later, back in the kitchen, after Melody had cleared the mess off the picnic table and left the girls to run in insane circles in the backyard neighing like horses. Her back was to him as she leaned over the garbage can, hauled out from under the kitchen sink. She was scraping frosting off a fork with a knife.
It was one of those hopeless activities, one of the millions of Sisyphean tasks Tony had watched his wife perform in the years since she’d become a mother. Pointless, endless tasks. She always had a bottomless list of chores that would only get done in order to need to be done again. Feed the baby, wash the clothes, water the plants, wipe the counters, load the dishwasher.

  Surely it was this life of mindless detail that had turned her against him—not anything he’d done, not a lack of love. She just didn’t know it. She was such a good woman, the kind of woman who would want to believe she loved her own virtues, who enjoyed her duties.

  But who could love these duties? For God’s sake, Tony had learned that much about women in college. That they hated housework and blamed men for it. He’d read The Women’s Room. He’d read The Awakening. Melody, who’d quit reading as soon as she was out of college, had understood herself less than he understood her. The Feminine Mystique. Herland. He knew what she wanted, what she needed.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  She said nothing.

  “Look,” Tony said, touching her arm lightly. She didn’t pull away, but she didn’t stop what she was doing either.