A Small Crowd of Strangers

by Joanna Rose

  Elizabeth said, “Is that artichoke-heart dip?” She stuck her finger into the bowl of dip. Michael’s eyes followed the finger to Elizabeth’s mouth, and to the bowl of carrot coins. Joseph looked down into the bowl of dip, and at Elizabeth sucking her finger.

  “What’s this?” Joseph said. “A momentary lapse of social grace?”

  “Sorry,” Elizabeth said. “I’ll never do it again.”

  “If you do,” Joseph said. “You shall be forced to sip Riesling at soirées for a social season to be determined by a jury of my peers. Where’s Simon?”

  She waved her fingers out into the crowd, and they all looked, although Pattianne wasn’t sure whom she was looking for. There was no place to set down the bowl of carrot coins. The sky had darkened, and there was a star. The party was enclosed by a wide circle of tall evergreen hedge and, standing close to the hedge, there was coolness, just a breath of it, down in the grass. Also mosquitoes.

  Harold, or Martin, she wasn’t sure who was who, touched Rachel’s elbow and said, “Time to rescue the babysitter.” They moved off into the center of things.

  Whoever was left, Harold or Martin, said, “Talk to you soon about that.” Something Pattianne could tell that she didn’t care about. Then he said, “Nice to meet you, Patty.”

  “Anne,” she said, and he went off in another direction.

  Elizabeth handed Joseph her wine glass.

  “May I?” she said to Pattianne, and she took the bowl of carrot coins. She dunked one in the dip.

  “So,” she said, “is this party going to get rolling, you think?”

  She bit the carrot coin in half, one tiny bite, and chewed. Pattianne wrapped her fingers around Michael’s elbow, felt for his pulse, in there where his skin was smooth and sweaty.

  “You mean,” Joseph said, “are we going to end up driving out to the Dew Drop Dead to go dancing?” He sipped her wine. His own glass was trapped in the hand with the artichoke-heart dip. “Definitely not. They have a cowboy band this weekend.”

  “We could start an argument about the new highway off-ramp,” she said.

  “Oh, please do,” he said. “That would be a good excuse to leave.”

  “Exactly.”

  A young man in a white shirt and black bow tie passed with a tray of glasses, and Michael took Pattianne’s empty wine glass and set it on the tray. The young man kept moving, and she couldn’t get one of the full glasses from his tray, except then she saw that he was just collecting empties, and the girl with the carafe of Riesling was nowhere around.

  Joseph said, “Of course there is that.”

  And them laughing, and other laughing breaking out nearby—other people, other laughing.

  Elizabeth said, “Which isn’t really.”

  And Joseph said, “It never occurred to me.”

  “And,” she said, “if it was, it would be blue.”

  And he said, “No doubt about it.”

  The laugh of their voices was a duet, him and her, and then just as suddenly they were back, at the party. Some odd swoop had just happened between them, and Pattianne laughed at them, them laughing too, laughing at a party, drinking too much white wine and laughing at a party.

  Michael’s hands, on her back between her shoulders, nudged her around until she was facing out at the party again, and he said, “I have to introduce Pattianne to Rick,” and she was once again being steered through the groups of people. Someone said, “Hey,” and Michael said, “Hey.” White shirts in the dusky dark, wine glasses shimmering in the light of citronella lanterns hanging from a wire strung overhead, and the ground, different after laughing, especially at a party.

  “Who’s Rick?”

  “Rick Smith,” Michael said. “School chaplain.”

  She looked around once to Joseph’s face—how funny that she was about to meet Mr. Smith—but Joseph and Elizabeth were yakking it up, their faces close together. The sky had gone navy blue, and the citronella candles sent up curls of inky smoke.

  “This Rick Smith is great,” Michael said. “He’s from up around Bemidji, and his family raises horses.”

  Small night birds darted in the air above the circle of grass, above the evergreen hedges, and for an instant, the air was cool.

  “Horses?”

  She told Michael once that she’d always wanted to learn to ride a horse. It had never been true until that moment, wandering around in the spring sunshine, one of those what-do-you-want-from-life conversations. She tried to remember what it was he had always wanted, maybe to see the pyramids.

  “Rick, this is Pattianne.”

  Rick Smith didn’t look like a minister. He was friendly looking and small. She would have thought him cute if she hadn’t known he was a minister.

  “My wife,” Michael said, and his arm was on her shoulders, his skin on her skin. She stepped in close, put her arm around Michael’s waist, his body hot under his shirt. Reverend Rick offered his hand.

  “Pattianne,” he said, and then something about finally meeting her, and she held out her hand and touched his fingers.

  A man right behind them said, “No, it goes like this,” and he started singing a song in another language. It sounded like German. A woman said, “They’re not swifts, they’re bats.”

  Pattianne looked up, into the circle of night sky. She was slightly high, in that woozy white-wine way. “That sounds great,” Reverend Rick was saying. “I was just going to round up Lily and get going.”

  That flat Midwest talk, like every vowel is a short E, and every word is clipped off at the end, kind of like Swedish.

  “Have Lily call Pattianne,” Michael said, and goodbye.

  After that, the party got thick-feeling, and they went around saying goodbye, nice to meet you, see you Monday, good night, good night.

  Once they were in the O-Bug, driving, Michael said, “So that’s Simon’s wife?”

  She leaned her head by the open car window, looking at the sky, and at the dusty leaves in the headlights along the side of the road. The air smelled bitter and grassy, and, driving slowly along in the dark, there was coolness, a definite coolness in the air.

  In the morning, Michael got up early, nine-o’clock Mass. There was a kiss on the cheek, some words, his, some words, hers. She slept long after he left. The wine had settled into her bones, and she just couldn’t get out of bed. It settled in her eyelids, and she just kept falling back asleep because she couldn’t open her eyes.

  When she got up, the sun was high and the rooms were all in shadow. She poured the last of the orange juice into a glass and sat at the kitchen table, and the glass slowly sweated. Michael had said football, soccer, something. She went into the living room and sat down on the cool, bare floor. There was a long, rose-colored rug in the window of the JCPenney’s store. The rug could go longways across the living room, or the other way, kind of leading from the front door to the kitchen. She could go look at curtains. Except she hated curtains. The phone rang six or seven times. It was probably her mother, or maybe Mrs. Bryn—it was never Mr. Bryn—and she was sorry but she couldn’t talk on the phone to anyone, just wanted to be quiet.

  Thank God for Sunday. She couldn’t bear the thought of being near a single person. There was not a smile or a hello left in her. All she wanted was to stay home alone and let her face be still. Laughing, white wine, the grassy coolness around her ankles in the perfumed night. Now there were mosquito bites there, and she scratched and then just sat still. There was the quiet around her, her house, her yard, the dusty road, the weekend. No birdsong. She went back to sleep in the afternoon.

  She started out dusting the books on the Dreams shelf, and then moved on to the Light of the World table, and there was this book, on the beautiful chair. One guy had a purple face, like dark wine, and a happy smile. Four arms. The next guy was blue, two arms. The blue one seemed to be having sex with a white one, two arms. The names were mysterious, Ks and Vs and odd vowels that didn’t give any real clue how to say them out loud. There was a
lways a book—today it was this book—to fall open. She hung the feather duster on its hook at the side of the glass case and laid the big book open on the desk. The binding creaked and cracked. The end papers were brilliant violet, the pages thick and slick.

  Books were starting to sprout at home like strange fungi, poetry books stacking up next to the bed, small, thin paperbacks that slid away underneath, maybe three or four poetry books under the bed. Maybe five or six. Tribal Rites of the Lake People, a photo-biography of eastern Apache elders, Ojibwa Indian myths, all sitting on the chair that stayed tucked against the wall behind the kitchen table.

  The bells on the door rang in a very small way, and a girl stepped into the bookstore and stood under the blue arch. Long black dress, bare shoulders, pale face, black boots, gliding, moving, stopping at the glass case. The cranes hung still.

  She said, “May I look at the tarot cards?”

  Red lips.

  The glass case had glass doors that slid sideways across the back. Opening it was a sharp glass-against-glass sound.

  “All of them?”

  Her black hair fell over her round shoulders.

  “That one,” she said, long thin finger bones under the white skin on the back of her hand. “And that one. And the one on the end.”

  Pattianne’s hand was fluorescent lavender inside the case. She laid the boxes, one at a time, on top of the case, in a row.

  “Thank you.” The girl’s red lips made her teeth look yellow.

  Pattianne went back to the desk.

  The girl held her hand flat, palm down, above the boxes of cards, moved her hand over the boxes, and then her red mouth smiled quick—“Thank you”—and she moved across the store in her black boots, out the door. The cranes hung still.

  Pattianne sat back down at the desk, and the front of the store, the blue arch, and the cranes disappeared. The pages of Deities of India were glossy. Eight arms. Two arms. Four arms. Ten arms. The desk chair rocked a little bit, two arms, smooth green leather.

  Elizabeth’s message pad had Joseph, 5:00 written on it in green ink. If they were having an affair, they weren’t being very sneaky. They should go away, to a city, St. Paul or Minneapolis, a big, four-star hotel, or maybe one of the little cabins that happen in clusters along the edges of the ten thousand lakes.

  It would be easy to disappear here, the whole Midwest spread out so far. All a person would have to do is walk away, along one of these roads, just straight and away, over a little rise, though wood lots and between fields, and disappear, under this flat, open sky. The trees on either side of the two-lane roads were heavy pine trees, the woods blue in the distance, and if she were to walk in under those trees, she would disappear into blue Canada. At the front of the store, two girls stood in the sun by the astrology books, high-school girls, leaning into each other, looking at a big book. The cranes moved in a slow circle.

  The girls were dressed alike, blue jeans hanging low on their skinny hips, and brown, dusty sandals, the way girls that age dress alike. Pattianne was not there to them, and wouldn’t be until they wanted to buy the book, or ask a question. Kids did that now, didn’t see her, like some invisible change had made her invisible.

  She could hide from Michael, stand very still and watch him, the happy air around him that drew all eyes to him, and sometimes he couldn’t see out through that air. Sometimes he looked for her and his eyes moved right past the place where she stood. In Montclair, she could take three or four or six steps away from him, and then no one would see her.

  Michael never hid. There was always the glittering self of him.

  The girls were making little animal noises together.

  Whenever Simon called, Elizabeth held the phone in both hands, turned away, talked in a low voice. Like lovers. When Joseph called, she would say, “You’re late,” or “Where’s my copy of William Blake?” or “Busy, darling, call me later.” Nobody said darling and meant it.

  The girls were gone after a while.

  Pattianne could hear her own heart. The motes were making the most noise of all. Her hands were not attached to her arms, there was a gap of body. No arms, feet, brown shoes with one broken shoelace tied in a knot. Being here. No deity, not even one with only two arms, would have shoes with a broken shoelace.

  When she was five, she learned how to tie her shoes. They were red sneakers, and she was wearing red plaid pants, and she was having a fight with her mother about the red plaid pants. It was a loud, static-filled remembering, and Pattianne hated it, all that remembering that was her being a child, nobody talking, her just hiding out in her bedroom and wondering what was going on, and nothing was ever going on.

  Elizabeth came in, jingling the bells, sending the cranes swirling, jingling and swirling herself, all in pale blue-green and bracelets and beads. Bright as a mote. She tapped a button and flute music started out slow, stayed slow.

  “You know,” she said, “you can play those CDs in the case. They’re for sale, but you can play them.”

  She lifted the red hair off the back of her neck.

  “Have I been gone long?”

  All those bracelets, no watch.

  The bead curtain did not chatter to Elizabeth when she went into the back room. But it might. It might chatter, We Love You, Elizabeth. You Are the Queen of the Bookstore. Pattianne had figured out that she didn’t like jasmine tea but hadn’t figured out how to say that to Elizabeth.

  “A girl came in and looked at the tarot cards.”

  “What deck did she get?”

  “She didn’t buy any.”

  Elizabeth stood at the hotplate watching the kettle. She had taken off her sandals. Her toenails were polished copper. “Did she wave her hand over the boxes?”

  “Yeah. So how does that work?” Pattianne waited, ready to laugh or not laugh.

  “She can sense them,” Elizabeth said, and she touched her forehead. “She can sense if it’s a deck she can work with.”

  Not laugh.

  “She’s pretty good,” Elizabeth said. “I want her to give classes here, but I haven’t really talked to her. Quiet. Doesn’t like to talk.”

  If Pattianne took off her shoes, her toes would look bare and white.

  “I dusted Dreams.”

  “Always an important task.”

  Laugh. “And some girls came in. High-school kids it looked like.”

  “Oh yeah?” Sweaty lines of dirt crisscrossed Elizabeth’s feet now, instead of her sandal straps. “Two of them? Look alike? Long hair?”

  “Sounds like them. They didn’t stay long.”

  Pattianne worked off one shoe with the toe of the other shoe. Her toes didn’t look too white, not against the blue stars in the carpeting.

  Elizabeth said, “What did they steal today?”

  “Steal?”

  “What were they looking at? Bet you anything it’s gone.”

  “Astrology.”

  Elizabeth passed through the beads, and Pattianne followed, the beads chattering Bad Bad Bad, up front to the astrology shelf, to an empty spot on the shelf.

  “The ephemeris,” she said. “The purple Bantam ephemeris. They’re getting bold.”

  They were so quiet, there and then not there. The bells didn’t even ring when they left. Or when they came in.

  Pattianne said, “Oh, no.” But it wasn’t enough to say, and she didn’t say it very loud, didn’t even know how to say it so that it sounded like she meant it.

  “Oh, no.” She should pay for the book. “Was it expensive?”

  Elizabeth moved the other books together into the gap. “Not as expensive as this one.” She put her finger on another purple book. “Not as good, either. Kind of illustrated. This one is just tables.”

  Pattianne didn’t even know what an ephemeris was.

  “I’m really sorry.” Bad Bad Bad.

  The row of books was neat and straight now. No wide empty spot now. Elizabeth would fire her now.

  “Oh, they’re good,” she said.
>
  “They’ve done it before?”

  “Yep.” She raised her arms, letting her sleeves fall back, pulled her curls off the back of her neck. “God, is it hot out,” she said. “Do you think you could come in the morning on Thursday and Friday?”

  “You know who they are?”

  “Not by name,” she said, and went back to the desk. “They’ve been in a few times before. Once they stole a candle. Imagine burning a stolen candle. Good way to start a fire.” She took a catalog out of the drawer, opened it on the desk. “$29.95,” she said. “That’s a lot of karma.”

  The middle of Pattianne’s stomach was a wide, empty spot.

  “I should have warned you about them.” Elizabeth put the catalog back in the drawer. “Now you know. You have to watch them.”

  Pattianne didn’t know what to say.

  “I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry. It didn’t occur to me.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Come here.”

  Twelve long steps. Six steps each, bare foot, shoe, bare foot, shoe.

  Elizabeth reached her hands out, put a warm palm on each cheek.

  “Don’t be sorry,” she said. “They’ll be sorry. It’s their karma.”

  Her red hair, her thick pale eyelashes, and Pattianne looked at one eye and then the other, not knowing where else to look, or what the proper way to stand actually was, being touched on the cheeks, or where her own hands were.

  “Besides,” Elizabeth said. There was fine gold hair along her upper lip. “Maybe they’ll cast somebody’s horoscope with that ephemeris and something wonderful will happen.”

  Her hands left Pattianne’s face, left tears pressing behind her face.

  “Are you okay?” Elizabeth shook her hair. “Breathe.”

  Pattianne did, and said, “I’m fine.” Now if only she could look away.

  “Can you come in the morning on Thursday and Friday?”

  She breathed again, said yes.

  “Good.” Elizabeth stepped back another step, and another, and Pattianne breathed in and out.

  “You know”—and now Elizabeth was frowning—“you only have one shoe on.”