A Small Crowd of Strangers

by Joanna Rose

  “You know,” he said. “Those gals they got flagging now, they’re pretty sharp.”

  The neat collar of his pinstripe shirt poked at the thick red skin of his neck.

  “Course,” he said, “they had to redo all the signs. Used to be the signs said ‘flag man ahead.’ But that’s okay. Gals got to work. A sign isn’t any big deal. They say ‘flagger’ now, ‘flagger ahead.’ Every once in a while, I see an old sign, never got redone. Ho.”

  He looked at her, and she said, “Well, I have to admit, I’ve noticed those new signs.”

  He said, “I wouldn’t want my girl working flagging. Dangerous. Now, working in a bookstore seems like a good job for a girl right out of college.”

  “She’s looking for a job?”

  “Nope,” he said. “Got one. She works out at the clinic, and sometimes at the Planned Parenthood. I’m just trying to run her life, that’s what the wife says, run her life. I got to go pick her up soon, the wife. She’s at the hair salon, then we got to go out to see her dad, he’s in the Castle Home. Nice place, not like you’d think of an old folks’ home being. I got the Buick.”

  Instead of her center of gravity, she thought of looking for her soul chakra. It was down there somewhere too. Maybe there was a story-listening chakra.

  “The wife, she doesn’t like me driving her around in the truck. She says seems like folks will start following us, leastwise looking at us.” He edged around the Light of the World. Kali wasn’t lit today.

  Pattianne gave him a laugh to let him know she was listening.

  “Ho,” he said, “That’s not so dang far-fetched of a notion. I’m out there, the flagger gal waves me on out, and out I go in the pilot car, or in this case, pilot truck of course, and I got five or six in line. Right behind me, I got a hippie fella in an old GMC. Little gal in a Rambler station wagon behind him. Older couple in a newer-model Ford. Nice looking cars, those new Fords.”

  None of the Hindu Gods were lit today, only the red votive on the Japanese tea ceremony table.

  “I get to the south end of the project, two lanes again, all the way to town, and the other flagger gal, she’s got no cars lined up down on that end. I’m in the left lane, and I pull off to the shoulder, right there by the old Tanner Place?”

  “Never been there.”

  “It’s a wide gravel turnout,” he said. “Mack Tanner drove an eighteen-wheeler.”

  He sat down in the beautiful chair. He laid his thick hands along the thin arms of the chair. His knees were big, shiny squares in his gray slacks.

  “Well, he sold it. Went to work in the hardware store when the kids started coming along, so as not to be gone all the time.” He ran a finger along one purple stripe. “Five of them eventually, five Tanner kids. So, I pull in there, into Tanner’s turnout, and does that hippie fella cross the lane and head on south into town? He does not. He follows me right into the turnout, and then so does the little gal in the Rambler, and the folks in the Ford, well, they’re stopped in the middle of the road—it’s a wide turnout but still can only me and that hippie fella and that Rambler wagon fit in there. This Ford looked to be from down near the Cities. Well. Everybody just stops.”

  He shook his head.

  Her story chakra was balanced and happy on the stool. “Ho,” she said.

  “I couldn’t even get my own self out of that turnout without I would have had to go up on the Tanners’ walkway up to their house,” he said. “And that flagger gal, she’s just looking. There’s a beat-to-heck Corvair, you don’t see too many of them, finally pulls out from the end of the line and goes on down the road like he ought. The couple in the Ford pull out after him. They don’t ever look at anybody, that’s how I’m thinking they’re from the Cities, how city folks just look straight ahead? Then the Rambler pulls out. That little gal waves at me going by, see, that’s what folks from around here will do, give you a little wave.”

  His fingers wiggled on the arm of the chair.

  “And that hippie fella? He’s just laughing and laughing. Kind of banging his head on the steering wheel.”

  End of story.

  “Ho,” he said.

  His eyes were unfocused on something above the Light of the World. His eyes were blue, his head nodding.

  “That’s a good story,” she said.

  He stopped nodding, and his eyes came back to the here and now. “That was no story”—his eyebrows busy again—“that really happened. Happened just like I said.”

  One eyebrow went down. The other didn’t. He said, “You think that hippie fella was high on drugs?”

  “Could have been. But maybe not. You never know.”

  He laid both hands flat on his knees and said, “That’s right, you never know.” His fingers were short. There was a gold ring. “I noticed,” he said, “There’s some hippies got a fairly odd sense of humor. My girl has some hippie friends used to come out to the house. They’d laugh at stuff wasn’t even funny. And they couldn’t of been high on drugs, it would be at oh, say, six in the morning sometimes. They used to show up for breakfast. They liked to come over real early, her hippie friends. Liked to make cinnamon rolls out of those tubes? You whop the tube on the edge of the stove, and the rolls pop out, and you just bake them on the cookie sheet. Smell up the whole house. I’d call them whopping biscuits, that’d make them just laugh and laugh. They’d eat every one while they watched the sun come up out back over the Tuckfields’ bean field.”

  Nodding. Him nodding. Her nodding. Then he stood up quick, how quick and easy-footed some large men were, and he said, “Got to go pick up the missus.”

  Pattianne nodding. The cranes all circling after him out the door.

  How those cranes moved. They circled slowly, slower and slower, and she never noticed when they stopped, only that they were hanging suddenly still, like they had only just that second stopped moving. Like they were still moving, and if she watched, she would see one more small movement.

  7: THAT KIND OF CATHOLIC

  The November sky over Newark Airport—glimpses of it out long windows over the tarmac, over rows of blue runway lights, red lights on towers, yellow lights on trucks—was solid and low and flat and mean. Pattianne and Michael walked down the long, tiled concourses, and then went underground, finally, down a long, narrow escalator. Wars escalated. Tensions escalated. She thought down escalators should have a different name. Michael waited for her at the bottom, off to the side. One of his pet peeves was people who get off an elevator and just stand there in the way, and it surely applied to escalators as well. She didn’t know how he kept getting ahead of her.

  The turkey was home in the freezer, and when they got to the Bryns’ she had to remember to call Lily Smith and cancel herself and her spice cake for the faculty wives’ Thanksgiving brunch. Michael hadn’t brought any clean shirts. He loved clean starched shirts. He said it was embarrassingly true. But he’d only brought dirty shirts. She would take them to a twenty-four-hour cleaner’s in Edison. That would help.

  She had asked for a red rental car. Red cars were safe. The woman on the phone said they didn’t list them by color, and she offered a brand-new Mustang convertible.

  “It’s November,” Pattianne said.

  The woman said, “It might be red, though.”

  The car they got was a Mercury, dark blue outside and gray velour inside. It looked like a dad car. Michael opened the door and she got in, and in the time it took for him to get around to the driver’s side, she knew that it smelled like a dad car, too, and that she loved dad-car smell. He got in. Started the car. Closed his eyes and laid his forehead on the steering wheel.

  She said, “Want me to drive?”

  He raised his face to the two yellow arrows pointing the way out of the underground garage. His eyes were glassy. Maybe from no sleep, maybe from the fluorescent lights. He shifted into drive. The car was so smooth she thought it had stalled.

  The gray sky outside the car was any time of day except really early or real
ly late. The hours had worked themselves into a hopeless tangle. Michael had picked up the telephone when it rang, sometime after he got home from school yesterday. That’s when the hours started to get tangled. Mrs. Bryn was on the telephone. Mr. Bryn was in the hospital. Michael was on the floor, sitting against the wall under the telephone, and for a long time after that, he stayed sitting there. Pattianne booked the first flight she found. She called Reverend Rick, told him that Michael’s father was in the hospital, and Michael would call from New Jersey.

  Rick would tell Lily, and Lily would know she wouldn’t be at the faculty wives’ Thanksgiving brunch with spice cake.

  He needed a new heart. He was going to have a heart transplant. They were going to take out Mr. Bryn’s heart. She was back in New Jersey.

  All those words were in her head. It was raining.

  She and Jen used to believe that a hobo lived under the bridge where you turned off the turnpike into Newark Airport. Cranbury was a long way from Newark Airport, but all the neighborhood kids knew about the hobo. Their father was the one who first told her, just him and Pattianne in the car, as they passed under the bridge one time. It was dark and she couldn’t see anybody. She had asked him if she could tell Jen about the hobo, and that made him laugh.

  Michael drove, and the car was so quiet it was more like he just steered. There were three bridges, and she had no idea which one was the bridge with the hobo. She had no idea if Michael had heard of the hobo, him being from Edison. She had no idea if Michael would want her to ask him about the hobo now.

  Her parents didn’t know she was here. There hadn’t been time. She hadn’t wanted to. She’d had to get Michael up from the floor under the telephone. She would call from the Bryns’. She would ask her dad about the hobo. For one moment she was glad it wasn’t her dad in the hospital. For a moment she thought, What if it was? What if it was her mother?

  “Michael,” she said.

  Sour watery spit filled in the back of her throat. She needed to swallow, get different air inside her, say something.

  “Michael,” she said. “Have you ever heard of the hobo under the bridge?”

  His face opened into a laugh, and then he held his breath, slowing, steering the car over to the paved shoulder lane, and he stopped and set the brake. He turned his whole body and put his arm around her, pulled her face into the wool of his sweater, so tight she could feel his breath, held in and then let out in one small cry that broke off short.

  Outside the car was the whole world of New Jersey, the wet highway, trucks that went by and made the car shake. They were sealed inside of it, just Michael and her for a few more miles, a few more minutes. She could do things, go to the cleaners, make coffee in Mrs. Bryn’s big silver coffee pot in her blue-and-white-tiled kitchen. She could figure out how to be helpful. It was weird how you stopped sometimes, stopped being yourself and started just moving around within your skin, used your fingers to make phone calls, heard your voice stay even, felt your heart beating inside your chest. Not pounding or racing or breaking or loving. Hearts beat, and then they stopped beating. That’s all they did.

  Michael sat up and drew his arms back into himself. He faced the highway.

  “Of course I’ve heard of the hobo under the bridge.” And then, “I just don’t want to cry in front of Claire.”

  “Good,” she said, with that sinking feeling that what she was about to say is the absolute wrong thing. “Because you sound like a wounded seal, and you would scare the shit out of her.”

  Not the wrong thing.

  “Okay,” he said—a small word that was a reach for breath and had a smile in it. Just a small one to get to the next moment, one moment after another. He looked in the rearview mirror and moved his foot to the gas. The engine revved.

  “You’re supposed to put this kind of car in gear,” she said. “Then you drive.”

  Wrong thing. His shoulders dropped then, and he said, “Goddamn it.”

  “Maybe not just yet,” she said, and her hand twitched on her leg, wanting to touch him.

  When she cried, her eyes got red and bleary, and tear trails streaked her face, and her nose turned red. Michael’s eyes got bright, with tears that dripped down his cheeks like rain down clear glass.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “This kind of surgery is pretty advanced. He’s young, really.”

  He said, “I know,” put the car in gear, and drove.

  Pumpkins decorated the base of the gas lamp in the front yard—ordinary-sized, round pumpkins, next to the flagstone walk leading up to the Bryns’ front door. Michael opened the door, set down their two bags on the flagstone floor of the entryway, and she followed him in. Inside were six stairs up and six stairs down, and as you stood there, under the huge carriage lamp hanging in the tall space, you had to decide, right away, up or down. Every time you came in the front door was a decision.

  A note lay on the table there. Michael read it, put it in the pocket of his jacket, and said, “Will you stay here and wait for Claire? Mom’s at the hospital. And there’s a vigil.”

  Then he left.

  She went up the six stairs to the wide hallway, to another decision, the living room through a wide archway on one side, or the dining room through a small archway on the other, the kitchen past that. There was rain, the world was muffled. She went through the dining room. Another, smaller carriage lamp hung over the table where she’d once sat across from her mother, next to Michael’s great-aunt Alice, and her father on the other side, all of them together in that room of gray carpet and dark, shining wood. Great-Aunt Alice talked to her father about Pittsburgh Steel, and she gave Pattianne her recipe for hot milk cake. Once, on a February morning with surprising sun coming through the leaded-glass window, Mrs. Bryn stood there folding dishtowels and pillowcases on the table.

  The kitchen table was small, round, tiled like Italian crockery, like the dishes. An unfinished crossword puzzle, a coffee cup half-full of black coffee, and the phone waited there. She tapped in Jen’s number. Her answering machine said, “When you hear the beep, you know the drill.” She hung up and stared at the phone, and it stared back at her, and she tried to think of who else to call.

  Lamplighter Books would be closed. Elizabeth would be home with Simon, or out with Joseph. The road worker would be watching cranes or reading his Buddhism book. Her small St. Cloud life. It would be nice to talk to that guy.

  Talking on the phone was too hard, though, the sound of any voice so small and disembodied, the real world around her too distracting. She always had to close her eyes to hear. For years, she hadn’t even had a phone. When she finally got a cell phone, she used to leave it in her car. She doesn’t even know what happened to that first cell phone.

  Her mother answered on the fourth or fifth ring, just when she was about to hang up.

  “Hi, Mom. It’s me.”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “I’m at the Bryns’.”

  There was the sound of the TV in the background, a game show, or a talk show.

  She said, “Well. This is a surprise,” like it wasn’t a surprise, like she hadn’t been surprised by anything in years.

  “Mr. Bryn is in the hospital.”

  She said, “Is he all right?”

  Yes, Mom, he’s fine, they just put him in there for the hell of it.

  “We just got in. It’s his heart. There’s going to be a transplant. Michael went right over there.”

  “Oh my God.”

  Pattianne had never heard her mother’s voice jump like that.

  “I’ll call when there’s any news.”

  She said, “Okay, dear, call when you have some news.”

  Pattianne waited for her to ask something else. Anything. She didn’t want to hang up. But they were done. She wanted to ask her how she was. How is your heart, Mom? How is Dad’s heart?

  She could put away their clothes in the closet of the yellow guest room at the top of the next set of stairs. She could look in the refr
igerator and think up something to make for dinner. She could snoop around. She remembered a photo album in the bottom of the bookcase in the living room. She’d like to look in Mrs. Bryn’s top drawer. She could make more coffee. The coffee maker sat on the clean, tiled counter. It looked like a miniature spaceship, and had a panel with little diagrams instead of words like Off, On, or maybe Brew.

  She could just wait for Michael to come back. Or Claire, who would be getting in from Slippery Rock sometime, maybe any second.

  French doors led to the deck out back, where the gas grill was covered with a neat black cover, and the flower boxes were empty, and rain bounced on everything. Mr. Bryn had built the deck himself, and the flower boxes, and the picture frames that held the photographs lined up above the French doors—Claire in a yellow wading pool, Mrs. Bryn pregnant and laughing, Michael and a black Labrador retriever and a ball, one of their black labs. Michael said they always had black labs when they were kids.

  Last summer, on an early evening, the air not even close to cooling off, Michael and Mr. Bryn had been outside there, the flower boxes full of nasturtiums. On the kitchen counter, salmon steaks were dressed with dill—pink salmon, lacy green dill, blue platter, a dish of lemon wedges. She and Michael’d had two vodka tonics before they came over. She’d worn a short, flowered dress with little straps. They had been late. They had made love in the shower. It was okay, just a picnic on the back deck, her in-laws, summer. She’d picked up the platter of salmon steaks and Mrs. Bryn had touched her arm and said, “Wait.”

  Michael and Mr. Bryn stood one on each side of the gas grill. Mr. Bryn’s hands were in the pockets of his khaki shorts.

  Mrs. Bryn said, “Let me show you how I make that salad dressing.”

  It was just balsamic vinegar and rice wine vinegar and olive oil. It was just pressed garlic and a little ginger. Pepper and salt.

  “See?” she said. “I press the ginger through the garlic press. It’s better than grating it.”