If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories

by Laura Kasischke

  He’d set the child down in an old lawn chair and broken down the nurse’s front door to get in, to call 911.

  There is an angry man in front of her in the line.

  “This place,” he says, shaking his head. “Jesus Christ.”

  She nods. The man is cradling four enormous bags of potato chips in his arms. They look difficult to hold. So airy, so insubstantial. But awkward, too. A delicate balance. If you held on too tightly, they would crumble into potato ashes. If you let go, who knows.

  “What’s the matter with this place?” he asks Chloe, really looking at her, as if she might actually have an answer.

  She shrugs. She offers, weakly, “Not enough help?”

  The man snorts and looks away. Chloe has given him the wrong answer. He wanted to hear something damning. Something inherent. Something premeditated. He wanted to blame someone specific. An older woman in front of the man turns to look at Chloe then as if either criticizing her for being critical, or also waiting for a better answer. The woman’s hair in the bright grocery store appears so thin that Chloe could count the brown spots on her scalp without taking even one step closer. A cartoonish image flashes in front of her of sneezing in the old woman’s direction, and the hair being blown right off her head in a wispy explosion while the old woman, with big, surprised eyes, grabs her naked scalp, feeling around for the hair.

  The woman stares at Chloe awhile longer, and then says, as if she, too, had been asked for her opinion, “I don’t know. The whole franchise is bad.”

  This, Chloe knows for a fact to be true. When she lived in Pascua, she shopped at its mother-store, and the lines there were even longer, the produce even paler, softer. As at this location, the fruit in the mother-store was always hovered over by a veil of fruit flies. Small moths occasionally wafted down the cereal aisle. Chloe suspected those moths were leaving larvae behind in the Frosted Flakes. Once, at the Pascua store, Chloe had dropped a grapefruit she’d meant to put in a plastic bag. When it hit the linoleum, instead of rolling, it had collapsed at her feet—deflated, putrid. A small crowd of housewives and elderly men had gathered to scoff at it. Disbelieving. Appalled. One old man had suggested that Chloe try to get her money back.

  But Chloe hadn’t paid for anything. What would she get her money back for?

  Still, it had seemed like an injustice, a betrayal, the kind of thing for which a customer should be compensated. The way that grapefruit had shone slickly under the fluorescent lights, and had been, in truth, full of rot, had seemed like a promise that had been broken.

  Maybe it was even more of an injustice because she hadn’t paid for anything, because this had just happened to her, and no one owed her a cent, not even a perfunctory apology.

  It’s a small town, and Chloe has lived in it for eight years. She’s seen this man, the man in the line ahead of her, around the town on many occasions. Like her, he has a grown child, maybe a few years older than Chloe’s daughter. Chloe has a fairly clear memory of seeing this man standing in the hallway of the high school with his arms crossed, glaring into the face of a boy who looked exactly like him.

  But that must have been at least seven years ago, when Chloe still felt like an outsider in the town, when her daughter cried herself to sleep every night because she missed her friends, her father, her old life, her old school. That was back when Chloe still woke up every morning so overwhelmed with guilt that she felt as if the pores of her skin might have released it all over her pillow as she slept.

  She changed the sheets every other day.

  Her new husband thought this was lovely, this changing of the sheets—evidence of Chloe’s superiority to his first wife. He did a lot of comparison.

  You’re so much quieter than Danielle was. You’re so much more organized, so much more understanding. Your food is so much more colorful. You’re so much better with money.

  It was so consistent, so constant, that Chloe started to read between the lines.

  He never told her, for instance, that she was better in bed than Danielle had been. He never told her that she was more beautiful. He never said that Chloe was funnier, or a better conversationalist, or more exciting. He’d pat her hip in bed before she fell into a deep sleep and say something cheery like, “I can’t believe how lucky I am. You’re so much more suited to me than Danielle. We’re so much more alike.”

  It drove Chloe insane to think of Jay feeling about her the way she’d felt about her ex-husband—here’s my pal, my companion, my dopplegänger, the opposite-sex equivalent of me—when what she felt for Jay was outrageous curiosity, nearly scandalous intrigue, regarding every aspect of who he was.

  Chloe would lie awake in bed and think to herself, who wanted a wife who was that much like you?

  So suited.

  Suits, in fact, were one of the things her new husband liked to rail against. Men who had to wear them. Those sorry bastards. Imagine having to tie a noose around your neck every day before you left the house.

  For her part, the reason Chloe had fallen in love with him, leaving behind her first husband and her first life, was because he was such a mystery to her. The barn full of implements. The pickup truck. The venison in the freezer. Before she canceled her subscription, a copy of the Atlantic Monthly was forwarded to her at her new husband’s. He’d picked it up, and turned it over and over in his hands. “What the hell is this?” he’d asked, as if he’d never seen a magazine before, let alone the Atlantic. It set her pulse to racing, thinking of her first husband all weekend on a couch with the Atlantic in front of his face, his glasses pushed down on his nose so he could read without them. She might have pulled Jay into bed right then.

  So many things about Jay, like this puzzlement at the Atlantic Monthly, made Chloe feel knocked over with relief and lust that sometimes it felt like the heavy, dumb, clobbering paws of a big dog against her chest. He was a stranger to her. He was utterly unsuited. Her friends thought she was nuts. Her daughter, during the bad period of her first adjustment to the divorce and the new life, had screamed, “He’s a fucking redneck!”

  “Gosh,” her ex-husband had said when he’d picked their daughter up one weekend and met Jay for the first time, “are you planning to teach him to read?” Chloe was a reading teacher. After her ex-husband had left with her daughter, Chloe had nearly swooned with it. The laughter and delight. The honest lust. Jay had come out on the porch and looked at her as if he were completely confused, but happy enough. She’d thrown her arms around him. She’d demanded that, right that second, they go up to the bedroom and fuck.

  These feelings, on her dark days, were the feelings she imagined he’d had for Danielle, who’d left him without a nickel. Jay was done, Chloe supposed, with that kind of love. Ready for something simpler: Chloe. Sometimes she still found Danielle’s long black hairs in the dust mop. Sometimes, it took ten or eleven shakes out the back door to get those strands out of her dust mop, or off of her fingers.

  But the years passed. Even her ex-husband was no longer angry. A few months before, her ex-husband had actually passed Chloe and Jay, in Jay’s pickup, in his Saab, on the freeway, and Randall had set to honking and waving, a big smile on his face, as if he were astonished to find his two best friends driving beside him on the freeway. What a coincidence! At first, Chloe didn’t even recognize him (new Saab, different color), but then his features assembled themselves one by one into a familiar face. Chloe knew this man well. He wasn’t pretending to be happy to see them, he was.

  And by now her daughter had quit with the bingeing and the purging and had finished a degree in creative writing from the university, with high honors and a slew of poetry awards, and had moved to San Francisco. Every few weeks she called home with some new exciting bit of information. An apartment overlooking the park! A date with a nice guy! A party at the office! A little promotion!

  As the years passed, and the radical unforgivable decisions Chloe had made seemed less and less radical, more and more forgivable, Chloe had finally al
so come to terms with the fact that her husband could love her without being electrified by her, even if she were still, eight years later, still electrified by him. It was enough, wasn’t it, to be loved so sincerely by someone? It was enough, wasn’t it, to be the best cook someone had ever known, to keep the tidiest house, to be so much fun to go to a movie with? “You’re my best friend,” Jay had said more than once, seeming astonished at his good luck.

  Still, it had only been, it seemed to Chloe, about a week since she’d grown used to this—all of this, her whole life, her strange decisions, like the decisions of a stranger—and accepted it, herself, and what she’d done.

  Was that possible, to feel the passage of time so differently than the clocks and calendars registered it—or was that, as she suspected, some sort of distortion, like the little warning stenciled onto the bottom of the rearview mirror? Looking backward, she only thought that what she was seeing was the way things back there actually looked. Those things were smaller, distorted by hindsight, forever lost to actual understanding and analysis. Certainly, surely, Chloe could not honestly have named the date, pin-pointed the very moment, of her acceptance of everything after eight years of vicissitude and guilt?

  No.

  Yes.

  Truly.

  It was true. Chloe had recognized it even as it was happening: She was standing in the kitchen, pouring coffee into a cup, and Jay was pulling the front door closed behind him, brightly and casually telling her to have a good day.

  “Be careful driving!” she’d called out to him.

  It would have been less than a hundred and twenty seconds later that he was scooping the bloodied child up in his arms, running.

  “I hope this is hell,” the man in line ahead of her says, “because if there’s something worse waiting for me, I don’t think I can stand it.”

  Chloe would have pretended to chuckle if she could. She knows there’s no point in the rage she feels, the impulse to tell the man in front of her in the check-out line what hell might really feel like, that hell might be a party in your backyard the week after your husband in his pickup truck has struck a child on a bicycle, two days after that child has been taken off life support—a party you’d thrown every year for the last seven years and which everyone insisted you should throw again this year, for your husband’s sake, and which you’d foolishly, until this very moment, believed they were right about. A party for which guests would begin to arrive in about an hour, and you hadn’t even wiped off the picnic table yet or set out the lawn chairs.

  This man. In addition to that one time in the high school hallway, Chloe thinks she might remember having seen him once or twice at the post office. (He’d been grumbling there, too. But everyone had. A line clear out the door that time.) There’s something about his face that makes Chloe think of Jesus, if he’d gotten to be about fifty years old. The eyes are dark and full of suffering, but he also looks too intelligent to put up with too much more bullshit from this world, unlike Christ. He needs a shave. He is, she realizes, a very attractive man.

  She looks into her cart:

  She’s got the beer, the crackers, the Cracker Barrel cheese spread. The salami and rye bread. The chips and pretzels. The French onion dip.

  But there were other things she should have gotten, should have prepared. Things she put out every year. Things her guests might have grown to expect. The meatballs. The fruit salad. But Chloe has neither the time, now, nor the heart to cut radishes into flowerets. Surely, they’d understand. The guests who hadn’t already heard the news would find out fast from the whisperings behind the garage, and from the zombie-mask on her husband’s face—a gray, damp-plaster thing he went to bed with every night now, woke up with, wore all day.

  “Fuck. Fuck!” Jay had shouted after he hung up the phone.

  He was standing at the edge of the bed in his boxer shorts, holding the phone in one hand and pounding his naked chest hard with the other.

  Chloe had been lost in a dream in which she was making love with her boyfriend from college. The smell and the taste of it was exactly as it had been. Twenty-five years ago in a dorm room in a single bed. Joni Mitchell singing on the stereo.

  And then the phone had rung.

  The child had died after two days hooked up to machines, and a prayer vigil. They were donating the organs. No one blamed Jay. Her husband’s fist left a bright red circle on his chest where he hit it. He hit it again.

  “So what’s your holiday look like?” the man ahead of her in line asks, looking at the beer and festive junk food in her cart.

  Chloe’s mouth opens, and she tries to form a word, but has no idea what the word would be. She swallows, still with her mouth open, and the man’s face changes. It must look to him like she is about to cry. He says, “Are you all right?”

  She shakes her head. She takes a step backward, pulling her cart with her as she goes, and the line behind her buckles, it seems, like some kind of human bridge—some grumbling, some sighing, an annoyed intake of breath. Perhaps they are envious, or pitying, or disdainful to see that Chloe is leaving the line for good, doing the unthinkable, absenting herself from the line she has been standing in for such a long time, finally even abandoning her cart, walking backward as she watches the man ahead of her recede with a concerned look on his face before he, too, steps out of the line and follows Chloe with his arms full of chips, which he dumps into her abandoned cart before taking her arm, guiding her out of the store and into the parking lot, to his car, leaving the cart and the line and the chips behind them for all of eternity.

  The Skill

  Impossible that Greta would be the first to learn this secret, this subtlety, this skill, whatever you wanted to call it. And to learn it so simply, so much like learning a first language. Like water pouring into a glass until it was almost full. That there weren’t others who could also do this seemed so unlikely, but she’d never heard anyone speak of it, and never would. Not a word on the subject in the library. Not a single helpful Google hit.

  It was so easy. All she’d had to do was stare at it—and even from a distance of twenty feet, and through the windshield of her stepmother’s car, which separated herself from the suffering pigeon while her stepmother was in the grocery store, shopping for something for dinner.

  (“Want anything?” “No.”)

  All she’d done was watch it and whisper under her breath, precisely four times, Please die, Please die, Please die, Please die.

  And all at once it had stopped its pitiful, heartbreaking hopping, its scrambling effort to get away from the parking lot that had killed it (some bitch in an SUV, who hadn’t even slowed down) and to get back to something like nature. Grass. Tree. Nest. Wondering horribly what had happened to it, and what might happen next, while realizing that getting back would be impossible now. It would be like trying to go back in time. Before the affair. Before the divorce. Before her father remarried the mistress. Before they’d moved to this awful town so far from her real mother. To get back to the time when he’d called her mother his Morning Glory, and her his Baby Dumpling-Daisy.

  That world was gone.

  She had watched the whole thing happen. The pigeon in a swooping flight, heading for some scrap of bread near the wheel of a parked car, and the speeding SUV, and even with the windows rolled up Greta had heard the smack and witnessed the broken way the bird fell out of the air to the ground.

  And then the struggle, the hopeless situation, the curb, too far away, and that SUV making a left turn out of the grocery store parking lot as if nothing had happened at all.

  Greta’s stepmother made a face when she came out of the store and saw the dead pigeon on the pavement, and veered her shopping cart far around it. She took a long time putting the paper bags in the trunk, and when she plopped back down into the driver’s seat she said to Greta, wearily, “Is anything wrong?”

  “No,” Greta said, never mentioning the pigeon, which her stepmother also never mentioned, even when they passed with
in a few feet of it while driving out of the parking lot, and Greta looked out at it, hard:

  A wad of pale purple feathers now. No blood. One beady eye—the only eye Greta could see—open. A damp, dark peace was in that, she thought, and thought of her father’s face the day she rode a bicycle toward him without training wheels for the first time. … “You got it, girl!” he’d shouted. He was sweaty and red-faced and out of breath, as if he were the one who’d been peddling unsteadily down the sidewalk toward himself, as if there were something like riding a bicycle in watching a child ride one.

  On the pavement, looking up with that one eye, the pigeon seemed to be looking up at its own self flying away from itself.

  “So, are we going to ride along in stony silence, Greta? Maybe I should turn the radio on?”

  Greta shrugged a shoulder, and continued to stare out the window long after the pigeon was long gone.

  The rest of Greta’s childhood wound through a kind of thicket, and she emerged from it wearing a blindfold that someone had tied around her face that day in the grocery store parking lot. Some witch, some devil, some fairy godmother or guardian angel had tied it behind her head and whispered, Don’t take it off, whatever you do. And she never had, although she’d spent all those years knowing that she could.

  It had tortured her and sustained her. This secret, supernatural power. This skill. She’d look at the side of her stepmother’s face beside her in the car for a few terrifying seconds, and then look away, vowing never to look at the woman that closely, ever again, and she never did.

  She did her homework and cleared the table after dinner. She took the garbage out on Fridays. She introduced her stepmother to her classmates and boyfriends at college, sent her cards on Mother’s Day, thanked her for every meal she ever made, and held her in her arms on the day of her father’s funeral as her stepmother sobbed and sobbed as if she were the little girl who had lost her father.