The Stranger Next Door

by Joy Fielding

  “Way to go!” someone enthused in passing.

  “Are you okay?” a young woman asked, long legs approaching cautiously. I recognized the black-and-white string bikini and the baseball cap, knew she was the girl I’d seen earlier, talking to the lifeguard.

  “I’m fine.” I noted the lifeguard was standing directly behind her, and that he was suitably tall, blond, and muscular. The expression on his bland, bronzed face wavered between gratitude and resentment.

  “I just wanted to thank you,” the girl continued. “Those are my brothers. My mother would have killed me if anything had happened to them.”

  “You should keep a closer eye on them.”

  She nodded, glanced up the beach to where the boys were wrestling in the sand. “Yeah, well, I told them . . .” Her voice disappeared into a passing breeze. “Anyway, thanks again.” She looked past me at Josh.

  “You interested in a job?” the lifeguard joked uneasily.

  “Just do yours,” I told him, but he was already backing away, and he dismissed my admonishment with a wave of his hand, as if swatting at a pesky insect.

  “My purse!” I said, suddenly remembering I’d dropped it on the shore. “My shoes . . .”

  “Right here.” Josh lifted them into the air, like a proud fisherman displaying his catch of the day.

  “My God, look at you!” I exclaimed, realizing he was almost as wet as I was.

  “We’re quite a pair,” he said, leaning his face toward mine.

  I held my breath, didn’t move. Was he going to kiss me?

  A clump of hair promptly fell into my eyes, and I brushed it aside impatiently, feeling particles of sand attach themselves to my eyelashes, like globs of errant mascara. Great, I thought, trying to picture myself through his eyes. A regular beauty queen, I could almost hear my mother say.

  “Terry?” a familiar voice asked from miles above my head.

  I looked up, shielded my eyes. Alison loomed between me and the sun like a giant eclipse.

  “Terry?” she said again, crouching down beside me. “My God, I can’t believe it’s you!”

  “Alison! What are you doing here?”

  “I have the day off. What’s going on? Somebody said you saved two little boys from drowning.”

  “She was magnificent,” Josh said proudly.

  “Until I almost drowned myself.”

  “My God, are you all right?”

  “She’s magnificent,” Josh repeated, extending his hand toward Alison. “I’m Josh Wylie, by the way.”

  Alison took his hand, shook it vigorously. “Alison Simms.”

  “Alison’s my new tenant,” I qualified.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Alison.”

  “You too.” Almost reluctantly, she relinquished his hand. “So, has Terry invited you over for Thanksgiving yet?”

  “Alison!”

  “Terry’s only the best cook in the whole wide world. You’re not busy, are you?”

  “Well, no, but . . .”

  “Good. Then it’s settled. Don’t worry, Terry,” Alison cautioned, “I’ll help.”

  I’m not sure exactly what happened after that. I remember wanting to wring Alison’s lovely, swanlike neck. I also wanted to throw my arms around her and jump up and down with joy. At any rate, perhaps sensing my ambivalance, Alison muttered something about meeting with me later to discuss all the necessary details, then made a hasty retreat, disappearing into a swirl of pink sand. Josh drove me to my house, waiting in the car while I ran upstairs, towel-dried my hair, and changed out of my wet clothes. Then he drove me back to work. Neither one of us said anything until he pulled up in front of the hospital. Then we turned simultaneously toward one another.

  “Josh . . .”

  “Terry . . .”

  “You don’t have to come to dinner on Thanksgiving.”

  “You don’t have to invite me.”

  “No, I’d love to invite you.”

  “Then I’d love to come.”

  “Really?”

  “Jan’s taking the kids that night, so I have no particular plans.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t be anything fancy . . .”

  “I don’t need fancy if I have the best cook in the whole wide world.”

  I laughed. “Well, that might be a slight exaggeration.”

  “She’s quite a character, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “A real whirling dervish. Slightly fey, very charming.”

  Charming, fey, I think now. Not the words I would use to describe her.

  What words would you use? I hear Alison whisper slyly in my ear.

  “You’ll explain to my mother why I didn’t come back to see her?” Josh asked, indicating his wet clothes.

  “Can I leave out the part where I almost drowned?”

  Josh laughed. “What time next Thursday?”

  I quickly mulled over everything I had to do to prepare. It had been years since I’d cooked anyone Thanksgiving dinner. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d bought a turkey. It’s not something you normally buy when you’re cooking for one. “Seven o’clock?”

  “Seven o’clock,” he repeated. “I’m thankful already.”

  I stepped out of the car and skipped up the hospital’s front steps, turning back as I pulled open the door. My hero, I thought, watching Josh drive away, my head pleasantly antly dizzy with anticipation, the sound of the surf still ringing in my ears.

  EIGHT

  Okay, so are you ready for your whole new look?”

  Alison, wearing blue shorts, a white halter top, and hot-pink nail polish on her bare toes, stood outside my kitchen door, her arms loaded with an interesting array of bottles and tubes. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She looked about twelve.

  My own hair was freshly washed, as per her instructions, and wrapped in a white towel that matched my white terry-cloth robe. “What’s all this?” I stepped back to let her inside.

  “Creams, oils, emulsions.” She deposited the various items on my kitchen table and arranged them to her satisfaction. “What’s an emulsion anyway?”

  I thought back to my years at nursing school. “Any colloidal suspension of one liquid in another liquid,” I said, almost by rote, startled by how easily such long-forgotten nuggets resurfaced.

  “Colloidal?”

  “A colloid is a gelatinous substance which when dissolved in a liquid will not diffuse readily through either vegetable or animal membranes.”

  Alison looked at me as if I were some new form of alien species. “Could you try that again?”

  “It’s a liquid preparation that’s the color and consistency of milk,” I said plainly.

  She smiled, lifted a medium-sized glass bottle of white cream into her hands. “That would be this one.”

  “How can you buy products when you don’t know what they are?”

  “Nobody knows what they are. That’s why they cost so much.”

  I laughed, thinking she was probably right. “What else have you got here?”

  “Let’s see. There’s a pore-purifying microbead face wash, and an alpha hydroxy exfoliating peel-off masque—that’s masque spelled with a que, which means it’s really expensive. Then there’s a botanical, gentle facial-buffing cream, another botanical cream with collagen and woodmallow. What’s that? Never mind,” she said in the same breath. “Then we have a soothing eyecontour mask—this one spelled with a k, so it’s probably not as good—a milky refiner, not to be confused with the aforementioned milky emulsion, an oil-free moisturizing lotion, and a tube of concentrated apricot oil. Did you happen to catch my casual use of the word aforementioned?”

  “I did.”

  “Were you impressed?”

  “I was.”

  “Good.” She dug into the right-side pocket of her blue shorts, pulled out several small bottles of nail polish. “Very Cherry and Luscious Lilac. Your choice.” From her left-side pocket emerged cotton balls, emery board
s, and assorted tiny implements of torture. Then she reached behind her and extricated a large pair of scissors from her back pocket, waving them before my eyes like a magic wand. “For Madame’s new do.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” I wavered, pulling the towel off my head.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to do anything drastic. Just even it up a bit, maybe take an inch off the bottom. You said you have cucumbers?”

  “In the fridge,” I told her, trying to keep up with the conversation.

  “Good. Then what say we get started?”

  What could I do? Alison was so enthusiastic, so confident, so persuasive, I really didn’t have a choice.

  You want to be gorgeous for Thanksgiving, don’t you? I can still hear her ask.

  And the truth was, I did want to be gorgeous for Thanksgiving. I wanted to be drop-dead, knock-’em-down-and-drag-’em-out gorgeous for Thanksgiving. For Josh.

  Not that you aren’t gorgeous already, Alison had quickly amended.

  All week I’d been walking around in a stupid haze, singing along with the radio, humming merrily off-key as I doled out medications, even waving a pleasant “Hello” to Bettye McCoy as she hurried those overgrown furballs past my house. And why? All because some guy I liked had been nice to me.

  No, more than nice.

  Interested.

  Interested in me.

  He’s only using you, I could almost hear my mother say. He’ll break your heart.

  Yes, he probably will, I agreed.

  But I didn’t care. It didn’t matter that Josh was still carrying a torch for his ex-wife, that he had two kids and a dying mother, that a serious involvement was probably the last thing he was looking for. It didn’t matter that we’d had only one real date, a lunch date at that, and that I’d almost drowned during it. What mattered was that he was interested.

  Good enough to eat, he’d said.

  I felt an almost forgotten tingle between my legs.

  What do you really know about this man? my mother asked.

  Not much, I was forced to admit.

  That didn’t matter either. Josh Wylie could have been an ax murderer for all I cared. Sadistic killer or not, he made me feel things I hadn’t felt in years. He resurrected emotions so long and deeply repressed I’d forgotten I had them. At forty, I felt like one of those silly teenage girls you see giggling in the mall with her friends: And then he said; and then he said. I was fourteen again, in love with Roger Stillman.

  And look what happened there, my mother reminded me.

  “We’ll do your hair first,” Alison was saying now, a comb appearing from out of nowhere to drag the wet tangles of my hair across my ears and forehead Alison sat me down and knelt in front of me, her palm turning my chin from one side to the other as she studied my face. She smiled, as if privy to my innermost thoughts. Could she see Josh Wylie in the reflection of my eyes?

  I heard the scissors, felt the blades snipping at the air around my head, moving closer. “I’ll clean up later,” she announced as I felt first one tug, then another, and watched in horror as several wet clumps of hair fell to the white tile of the kitchen floor.

  “Oh, God,” I moaned.

  “Close your eyes,” Alison instructed. “Have faith.”

  With my eyes closed, the sound of cutting was even more intense. It was as if those scissors were slicing through all my protective outer layers, snipping away my secrets, sapping my strength. Samson and Delilah, I thought dramatically, taking a series of long, deep breaths, deciding to roll with the punches, go with the flow.

  “I’ll wait till after your facial to blow it dry properly. We can go into the living room now,” she instructed as I stepped over the hair lying across the white tiles, like a small area rug. “Don’t look,” she said as a shudder shook my shoulders. “Have faith. Trust me.”

  I’d already laid a bedsheet across the living room sofa in preparation for my “night at the spa,” as Alison had laughingly referred to it, and now I stood paralyzed in front of it, waiting for Alison to tell me what to do.

  “Okay. Lie down, with your head at this end, and your feet . . . here. That’s good. I want you to be really comfortable. You’re going to enjoy this,” Alison said as if she wasn’t sure. “Now, you get cozy, and I’ll bring all the stuff I need in here.”

  “The cucumber slices are in the fridge,” I reminded her, closing my eyes, my fingers darting about my neck, feeling for hair.

  “You didn’t have to slice them,” Alison called back from the kitchen. “I would have done that.”

  I heard her rifling around in the fridge, heard the tap running, listened to the sounds of cupboard doors opening and closing. What was she looking for?

  In less than a minute, Alison was back. “We’ll start with the exfoliating masque.”

  “Is that with a que or a k?”

  She laughed. “The expensive one.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “Okay, so close your eyes, relax, think pleasant thoughts.”

  I felt something cold and slimy being spread across my face, like molasses on a slice of bread.

  “This might feel a bit weird as it starts to harden.”

  “Feels weird now.”

  “You won’t be able to talk,” she warned, slathering the product around the outlines of my lips. “So it’s best if you stay still.”

  Did I have a choice? Already it felt as if my face were encased in cement. A death mask, I remember thinking. Death masque, I amended, and might have laughed were it not for the stiffening of the muscles around my mouth. “For how long?” I asked through barely parted lips.

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Twenty minutes?” I opened my eyes, started to sit up.

  Firm hands settled me back down. “Relax. The night is young, and we’re just getting started. Close your eyes. I’m going to put the cucumbers on them.”

  “What are the cucumbers for?” I asked, although I was no longer able to pronounce the hard c’s and the noun emerged as more of a verbal blur than an actual word.

  “They reduce swelling. What kind of nurse are you that you don’t know that?” she teased. Then: “Keep still. It was a rhetorical question.” She fitted the cucumber slices gently into the empty circles around my eyes. Instantly, the room darkened, as if I were wearing sunglasses. “You like that word, rhetorical?”

  “Good word,” I managed to say without moving my mouth.

  “I’m trying to learn three new words every day.”

  “Oh?” That was an easy one.

  “Yeah, it’s kind of fun. I just open up the dictionary and point to a word, and if I don’t know what it means, I write it down and memorize the definition.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, let’s see. Today I learned three very interesting words: ineffable, which means incapable of being expressed or described, like ineffable happiness, you know, so great you can’t describe it. That’s one. Then there’s epiphany, which was a real shock because I thought I knew what that one meant, but I was wrong. I was really wrong. Do you know what it means?”

  “A revelation of some sort,” I managed to squeeze out, although the effort required all my concentration.

  “An epiphany is ‘the sudden, intuitive perception or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something,’ ” she recited, then paused. I could feel her shaking her head. “Do you want to know what I thought it meant?”

  I nodded my chin, careful not to disturb the cucumbers at my eyes.

  “Promise you won’t laugh.”

  I grunted. I couldn’t have laughed if I’d tried.

  “Well, I saw this movie on TV when I was a kid. It was about a man who, for some unknown reason, turned into a chicken. And it was called Epiphany. So I assumed that an epiphany was when someone changed into a chicken. I actually grew up believing that. God, can you imagine if I’d tried to use it in a conversation?”

  I shook my head, albeit gently. There was something so v
ulnerable about her, something so terribly raw, as if she were sitting there with all her nerve endings exposed. I wished I could take her in my arms and comfort her like the big overgrown child she was. “What’s the third word?” I asked instead.

  “Meros. It’s a flat surface between two channels of a triglyph.”

  “What’s a triglyph?”

  “I have no idea.” She laughed. “I only do three words, remember. Now that’s enough talking. I want you to relax and just enjoy being pampered. Something tells me you don’t pamper yourself nearly enough.”

  She was right. Being pampered was new to me. I’d worked hard all my life, first at school, then at my chosen profession, and even at home, looking after my mother. In some ways, I was grateful that I hadn’t had an easy ride, that my mother hadn’t spoiled me more. It made me that much more appreciative of the things I did have, more sensitive and caring toward others.

  “Okay,” Alison was saying. “So while this masque hardens, I’m going to start on your pedicure. I’ll be right back. Take deep breaths. Let your whole body relax.”

  A sudden silence filled the room. I heard her moving about the kitchen. What was she doing? I wondered, taking one deep breath, then another, feeling the tension of the day seep slowly from my limbs.

  “You have really strong toenails.” Alison’s fingers suddenly pulled on the big toe of my right foot.

  I realized I hadn’t heard her come back into the room. Was it possible I’d fallen asleep? For how long?

  “I’m going to cut them now, so try not to move.”

  My feet squirmed under her touch.

  “Don’t move,” she warned again.

  I heard the rapid snipping of the nail clippers as her fingers flitted expertly from one toe to the next. This little piggy went to market, I recited silently, then stopped because I couldn’t remember what had happened to the next little piggy.

  “Now comes the best part,” she announced, gently massaging my tired feet with lotion. The smell of apricots drifted toward my nostrils. “Feels good, huh?”

  “Feels wonderful,” I agreed, although I’m not sure I said the words out loud.