A Small Crowd of Strangers

by Joanna Rose

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  “Not to worry, I couldn’t remember what time you were supposed to be here anyway. How you doing? Isn’t it gorgeous out? Want some tea? With chicory and vanilla and stevia leaf—you’ll love it.” Moving near, away, moving around the store, her purple cape thrown over the beautiful chair, a dancing god with four red arms and a burning face.

  “There were people praying on the sidewalk. Over on Belmont Street.”

  “Yeah,” she said. She went through the beads. “Project Life. Planned Parenthood is there. They do abortion referrals.”

  Water, the teakettle, Elizabeth’s bracelets, the small sounds of the bookstore. A new feather, long and thick and white, lay neatly alongside the black feather on the tea ceremony table.

  Pattianne took off her coat and shivered in the warm air. “There were kids there.”

  “I know. Isn’t that sick? Maybe it will keep them from turning into thieves, though.”

  Pattianne followed her back through the beads.

  “Art of the Houses,” Elizabeth said. “Volume One. Gone.”

  Pattianne’s teeth bit down hard together, and she stood there so full of hate she wanted to stop breathing.

  The phone rang and Elizabeth said, “Give that about three minutes to steep,” and went back out front.

  Michael could be at Planned Parenthood right now, on his knees in the sun, with his hair blowing in the wind, the cold wind on the back of his neck. She wanted to ask him what the difference was between the condoms they used to use and the birth control pills she used now. What was he thinking then? That murder is okay if you’re single and don’t want to get pregnant? What if you’re married and don’t want to get pregnant?

  Elizabeth’s laughter came through to the back, and she said “Bye-bye,” on the phone. It had been three minutes, or maybe five. There was a clock out front. This was all about Michael’s father. She could call up Planned Parenthood and ask if they were still there. She could say, Please go tell the one named Michael to go home. Tell him I’ll meet him there. Tell him I love him.

  Elizabeth said, “Can you smell it?” and Pattianne jumped, the jolt going all the way down her arms to her fingertips.

  “Hey,” Elizabeth said.

  All the way to her forehead.

  “I just have a headache,” she said. “Those people praying, that weirded me out.”

  Elizabeth took the top off the teapot and sniffed the steam.

  “I know,” she said. She poured the tea. “It got truly theatrical out at the clinic on Highway 42 during the elections. Signs with colored pictures.” The steam catching in her curls, her bracelets chiming. “Praying through megaphones. They had those plastic fetuses that they laid out in the road. Planned Parenthood is low-key compared to that. They do actual abortions out there.” She held the mug of tea in front of her face, the mug in her small hands, a smile on her small face, everything that was beautiful, that was Elizabeth.

  She said, “Smell.”

  Vanilla. Tea.

  “I try to hate them,” Elizabeth said. “It doesn’t work.” And she went back out through the beads. “But enough. Here, look at our new feather. A swan feather. Joseph was up by Timber Bay yesterday. The swans are migrating. I had to beg and plead for it. He had a whole bundle of them.” She swirled the purple cape off the back of the beautiful chair and around her shoulders. “I’m off to the bank, and then I have to go try on a pair of boots I saw in the window of Winkelman’s. Blue boots. Suede.”

  It wouldn’t work for Pattianne to hate them either. She wanted to be married to him. Their little house on the prairie, their warm nights in a heap under the blankets, note cards to her mother every other week, and she could make dinner and make the bed and make love and just be married, and they would have this little life. They didn’t need babies.

  Even-Steven had just been a way to be alone and still have someone to sleep with. It was perfect. There was an Italian pre-med student named Vincent, and before that a depressed potter named David, just places to be for a while before she went back to being by herself. Working in the library, talking in whispers, pointing to books, looking things up in this database or that file, just sharing time and space and silent language with strangers.

  Now they had their own small crowd. Joseph. Elizabeth. Frankie and Bullfrog. They should get a dog. She hadn’t had a dog since Starla died. There was Reverend Rick and Lily. It was important to have people you don’t like in your life. She was someone to all of them. She had to let Michael have his praying, his father would get a new heart and be okay, and Michael would get up off his knees and come back to their life, tell funny stories, drink too much when it wasn’t a school night, play Scrabble, go hunting for garage sales on Saturdays. A small, good life with people around the edges and a calm space in the middle. She imagined a conversation with Jen: I love this place. I think we might stay here longer.

  She bought a bottle of Tullamore D.E.W. on the way home.

  A small yellow station wagon sat in the driveway, and Frankie was there, putting the coiled garden hose into the back. And Bullfrog was there. He bounced over to her, jumped up with his front paws, and bounced off her. He seemed like a very bouncy dog for being so low to the ground.

  “Hi, Frankie. Hi, Bullfrog,” she said, and she chirped, “Bullfrog, Bullfrog,” and Bullfrog wagged his bushy tail and stuck his nose between her legs.

  Frankie said, “Hey. Bullfrog, down. Out of there.” Frankie’s face went pink in the cheeks. “Sorry. Come here, Bullfrog. Sorry.”

  She pushed Bullfrog out of her crotch and rubbed his head. His long ears were cold, and as soft as silk velvet.

  “He always does that,” Frankie said. “Not just to girls. Women. Well, and girls. And guys.” His cheeks getting pinker by the minute.

  “New car?”

  “New to me,” he said. “Four hundred dollars.”

  The driver’s door hung open on the Fiat station wagon. The seats were covered with striped wool blankets. A big bunch of white feathers was tied in a bundle laid on the dashboard.

  “Hey, are those swan feathers? Can I see?”

  They were much bigger than the one on the tea ceremony table. They were tied up in a white shoelace, as white as the feathers. They were pure white, even the quills, which were thick as pencils. The feathers were stiff at the edges, and down toward the bottom of the quill they were soft like fur. A tag of brown paper hung from the shoelace, words in careful black ink: “Hope is the Thing with Feathers.” All of it inside a heart.

  “The mutes are gathering up by Timber Bay,” Frankie said. He took the feathers out of her hand. He pulled off the piece of paper and put it into his back pocket. “Friend of mine goes up there.”

  “The mutes?”

  “Mute swans,” he said. The bundle of feathers became something awkward in his hands. “That’s what kind of swans they were. Their tail feathers are a little longer than the tundra’s, or the trumpeter’s.”

  “Are they mute?”

  “No, they make all kinds of noises. I don’t know why they’re called mutes. They’re as noisy as any of them. Noisier even. Their wings make noise. Most swans are quiet when they fly.”

  The world is full of lies.

  She said, “Can I have one?”

  He held out the bundle and she tugged out one huge feather, and he tossed the feathers onto the car seat, onto the striped blanket.

  “Thanks. It’s so big.”

  “Okay, lowrider,” he said. “In you go.” And he clapped and pointed, and Bullfrog got his four fat legs going up and into the front seat next the feathers, over the feathers, over the gearshift into the other seat.

  “He’s smart,” she said.

  “Yep,” Frankie said. “Okay, see ya.” And he got in, too, shut the door, which bounced open, and he shut it again. After two tries, the Fiat started up, jerked into reverse, and they drove away.

  There was a message from Michael about debate practice, about coming h
ome late, and another message from someone named Father Chuck, about reading at Mass tomorrow morning, please call back. She played it back and listened, the Midwest slant of vowels, the clipped-off endings. She didn’t delete it. Not even by accident.

  He got up in the mornings and went to Mass. He prayed in a circle on a sidewalk somewhere. She didn’t think Catholics did that. The rooms of her house were empty and neat, the couch and the chairs set straight, away from the walls, and the wooden floor was shiny and clean all the way into the corners. There was nothing on the walls in the living room, nothing on the walls in the bedroom except the small dark stormscape and the wedding picture on the narrow wall next to the door. And the crucifix above the door.

  She tossed her jacket on the bed and laid the feather on the dresser. The dark sunset light filled the room. It turned the white feather pink. The world is full of lies. Some of them were beautiful.

  The crucifix had to come down. She wanted it gone. There was no reason it couldn’t be in his office. The hammer in the kitchen drawer was a cute, lightweight hammer, a girl’s hammer, he said when he found it at a yard sale. She dragged in the chair from his office.

  The crucifix wasn’t heavy at all. The face of Jesus was shiny, as if it had been touched again and again over the years. The rest of him was dark tarnished bronze. There may be a right way to hold a crucifix. She wrapped her fingers around the face and went after the nail with the claw end of the hammer. She tossed the crucifix on the bed, watched it bounce on the gray wool blanket. How Michael bounced her when he fucked her really hard sometimes and made her laugh, bouncing her. They hadn’t fucked like that in a long time. There was nothing more irreverent she could think of, a hollow in her chest where she didn’t believe in Jesus but where it felt like a terrible sin anyway.

  There was a nail hole in the white paint, and the phone rang. She went out there, listened when the answering machine picked it up, and it was Michael.

  “I’ll be home around seven. Let’s cook steaks. Pop some bakers in the oven, why don’t you? I love you.”

  The packets of birth control pills rattled in her jacket pocket and looked like tiny blue pills of pure headache. She stuck them down into the bottom of the box of tampons and made a pot of coffee and thought of another headache, of colors and sounds that hurt. She was afraid of getting pregnant. She poured the coffee and a big dose of Irish whiskey in on top. She was afraid to tell Michael that she didn’t want a baby. When did she start being so afraid?

  But she wasn’t afraid to say it to herself. That was a surprise. It was easy. She popped some bakers in the oven. The house was getting dark around her, and she made another Irish coffee, this one with a teaspoon of brown sugar. She lit one of the thick blue candles and set it in a saucer. She poured the whipping cream in a bowl and beat it with the whisk by candlelight. To call Miss Mimi and ask her why she never had children, what it meant, was not something she could do. It seemed almost taboo. A sorrowful thing. It didn’t feel sorrowful in that moment. This was more like understanding something she had always known. It felt like the third Irish coffee, going down easy and warm.

  The O-Bug’s headlights filled up the dark living room, and she ran around and turned on the kitchen light, the living room light, the porch light, kissed Michael, who was all cold air and red lips, who kissed her back, who said, “Were you sitting in here in the dark?”

  “Candlelight, tired cowboy,” kissing his cold cheeks. “And Irish coffee.”

  He dropped his coat on the couch and tossed the steaks in white butcher paper onto the counter and sat down into the chair as if, finally, there was a chair, a kitchen, the end of a day.

  She kissed the cold smooth skin of his forehead.

  “Tullamore D-E-W,” she said. “It’s the guy’s initals, Not, like, dew. Maybe it’s just the name, but I think it’s the best Irish whiskey. And the key to making Irish coffees is brown sugar.”

  It was there, between them, but she didn’t want to go there yet, and how can you say something like that, or did you have to? She didn’t know how people went about not having kids, how they made that decision without wrecking something, wrecking a whole marriage. She would think longer, and talk about anything else.

  “Hey.” She unwrapped the steaks. “Nice-looking steaks, where did you buy them? Rib eyes. I love rib eyes. New Yorks just don’t have the flavor.”

  She put the mug with Tullamore D.E.W. and coffee and whipped cream in front of him and he wrapped his fingers around the mug and just held it.

  He said, “You know what they had at the store? Pheasant. Well, you had to order it, actually. Have you ever had pheasant?”

  “Oh my God, those beautiful ring-tail ones like at the side of the road? That’s awful—they eat those?”

  “Ring-necked,” he said. “The kids hunt them with their dads or uncles. Bird season around here is a big thing.”

  “A ghastly ritual of death,” she said. “I would love to have one of those tail feathers though. Hey.”

  She went in to the bedroom. The swan feather lay on the dresser, white in the dark of the bedroom, and she took it back out to him. “See what I got?”

  He took it, held it, and he said, “I had to be an angel in this third-grade play.” He stared off into space. “My mom was supposed to make my costume. She found these wings from an opera. They were made of feathers like this, huge white feathers.”

  “Did you get to keep them? The wings?”

  “They were my worst nightmare. I threw a fit. I hated those wings. They were really more like wings for a little cherub, you could tell, and man, I almost punched Bobby Martin for making remarks. That kid was a smart son of a bitch, knew Latin in third grade. And I don’t mean Pig Latin.”

  She had no idea whether Michael had ever been in a fight. It seemed like something you should know about someone. It seemed like something that would bring Michael back to the here and now.

  “Blink, darling,” she said. “Have you ever been in a fight?”

  “Nope. I could weasel out of most things. There were a couple older brothers I had to seriously avoid.”

  He twisted the swan feather in his fingertips. “So, what’s with this?”

  “From Frankie. Joseph went up to some place where they’re migrating, and Frankie had a whole bundle of them, tied up in a shoestring. It was so pretty, with an Emily Dickinson poem attached to it, that one about hope is a thing with feathers.”

  Frankie had a bundle of swan feathers with an Emily Dickinson poem tied on by a white shoestring. Elizabeth had one, and she had to talk him into giving it to her. Frankie called Joseph his friend.

  “Hey,” she said. “Is Joseph gay? Cause I think him and Frankie might be, you know, maybe sweethearts?”

  Michael set the feather down and said, “What?”

  “He gave him a bunch of feathers, they’re swan feathers. I just thought of it. That white shoelace, the poetry thing—I tell you, I’m a regular Agatha Christie sometimes.”

  Michael sat up straighter in the chair and took a drink that left a sweet blob of whipped cream on his upper lip. He said, “You shouldn’t just go around calling someone gay.”

  “I’m not. It’s just a guess.”

  “Well, don’t go repeating that.”

  “What am I?” She set the steaks on the broiler pan on the counter. “Some old gossip?”

  The science tidbits Frankie was always coming out with, the poetry. It all added up.

  “It’s not against the law,” she said. She got out a dish of butter. “Oh, sure, there’s the Bible stuff. Just like mixing dairy and meat is against God’s law. And shellfish. And don’t forget about clothes buttons and servile labor on Sunday.”

  Just like birth control pills.

  “Here’s one way to look at it,” she said. “You think that, if there is a God, he would care who fucked who, or how?”

  Michael sat there with his mouth open, and she went to him and quick licked the whipped cream off his lip, and he jerked awa
y from her and he said, “If there is a God?”

  She got her Irish coffee from the counter and sat down.

  “Well, look at it this way,” she said. “With the whole universe, and whatever is beyond it, I think a God would have more to do than make deals with earthlings.”

  He reached across the table and took her wrist, hard, knocked over her Irish coffee, and it spilled over the table.

  “Listen to you.” His voice squeaked. “Is this the kind of bullshit you learn at that hippie bookstore?”

  The instant of rage that flared up into her face felt ugly, and what she didn’t say was Your priests are bullshit. Your Pope is bullshit. She didn’t say it because he said, “Oh, fuck, I’m sorry.” He let go of her wrist, and he looked straight up, at the light overhead, at the ceiling. Or maybe his eyes were closed, maybe they were full of tears. It sounded like it when he said, “What is going on?” He rubbed his eyes hard. He kept his hands over his face.

  She could feel his fingers around her wrist. The only thing she wanted to say was I’m sorry. Was I love you. She was afraid if she said anything, anything at all, it would be I don’t want to have a baby.

  Who knew how long they sat there quiet. A while. She listened, for the wind against the side of the house, for a car along the gravel road, for the small pieces of their life falling back into place. The phone rang, and they looked at each other until Michael picked it up on the fourth ring.

  A heart was ready, they were going to take out Mr. Bryn’s sick heart and put in a new one. They were going right into surgery.

  He said, “We’ll be on the next flight out.”

  He hung up the phone and leaned his forehead against the wall, breathing. Then he called the school secretary at her house. Pattianne sopped the Irish coffee with a pile of paper napkins and wadded them up in the middle of the table. He hung up. Then he called Father McGivens.

  It was a cigarette moment.

  Michael said, “We’ll meet you at the hospital. Claire is on her way there.” He was leaning his back against the wall and looking at her. His hair was sticking straight up in front. “Thank you, Father. Thank you. And we can be there for prayers at the clinic on Friday night.” He hung up, and his eyes stayed right on her.