A Small Crowd of Strangers

by Joanna Rose

  “If you really think it’s murder, is praying and holding up signs really enough?” Pattianne said. “If it were Michael in there being murdered, I think I’d do a lot more than just pray.”

  There was a flash of yellow out the kitchen window, and she knocked the table getting up too fast. “There it is,” she said, and “Oh, shit,” when the wine glass broke, purple, and she went to the window and leaned over the sink. The yellow-headed blackbird was under the birch tree on the frosted blue ground. “It’s that bird I was asking you about.”

  Angela came to her side and looked out. “Why, I have seen those, I think, now that I see him here. He is a pretty boy, isn’t he now?” Her face was all joy and smiling again.

  Pattianne said, “You look so pretty in lipstick. Most women look dumb in lipstick.”

  Angela’s cheeks blushed. “Oh, you are so sweet. But I think any woman looks good with a touch of color. Here, come here and try this new color out, this is the Avon.”

  She set her purse on the table and groped around in it, looking sadly at the table. “We broke your pretty wine glass, Pattianne.”

  The white swan feather was now lavender. Pattianne wiped it off on the leg of her jeans and stuck it into the elastic in her hair.

  “I never wear lipstick,” she said. “It just doesn’t feel right on me.”

  Angela held up a gold tube and twisted off the cap.

  She said, “I guess it’s kinda red,” and they both laughed. They were back to laughing, God left behind in the conversation.

  “Just try it,” she said. “Here.” And she handed Pattianne a small round mirror in a red plastic daisy.

  Pattianne put on the lipstick. “I look like Bozo the Clown,” she said.

  Angela said, “Now don’t make me laugh,” and she put on red lipstick too. Pattianne didn’t make her laugh, and Angela’s hand was steady until a single loud knock at the door made Angela’s hand jump. Red lipstick across the top of her lip like a red Halloween mustache.

  Reverend Rick’s car was in the driveway. “Oh, shit,” Angela said. “I promised I’d get those flyers to him by the end of second lunch.”

  Pattianne gave her a napkin and said, “Here,” and tried to not laugh. “You get the door, I’ll get the flyers.” She went through the living room in a steady line, into Michael’s office, grabbed the manila envelope and scattered everything else, fuck it, and walked steadily and carefully back out to Rick and Angela, who had not done a very good job of cleaning the lipstick off her face.

  “Thank you again so much for driving Michael last night. I just talked to him. I mean, to his sister.” She had to put her sentences together very carefully, which is why she should never drink champagne in the afternoon, and which was maybe why there were no nice eye wrinkles in his face. She said, “Come on in,” and he looked past her, past the pillows on the floor, and the blanket in a tangle, and balls of Kleenex stuffed into the back of the couch, into the kitchen, at the broken wine glass, purple Parfait d’Amour in a puddle on the table, the half-empty champagne bottle. Him, Pattianne, and Angela all standing there in a silly triangle.

  “Well,” Angela said. “Maybe I should get myself going here.” She got her red sweater off the back of the chair. “The kids are at the center after school.” She slipped the sweater over her bare, white arms and started buttoning it up over her candy-striped breasts. For an insane moment, Pattianne thought of offering Rick a Mimi-mosa.

  Angela got down on her hands and knees and looked under the table. “Now where’s that button?” Her black stretch pants stretched across her butt.

  “Angela,” Rick said, no nice eye wrinkles in his voice. He looked Pattianne’s way now, not at Angela’s round black butt sticking out from under the kitchen table. “I’ll drive you home,” Rick said. “Max can pick up your car after debate practice.”

  Pattianne was glad she was not Angela. She was not sure she was glad she was Pattianne.

  The pearl button was in the corner of the kitchen. She put the broken wine glass in the trash, and the champagne in the refrigerator, and she wiped up the sticky purple Parfait d’Amour until the table was clean and empty. She put the sticky swan feather on the edge of the sink. The pillows back on the bed. The house back in order. She sat back down at the table. Mr. Bryn’s chest would be sewn back together. It must be huge, the incision, long and red. Black stitches. Think of it. She dared herself. They say the human heart is about the size of a fist.

  She would brush her teeth with her new toothbrush. Michael would call. He would come home. She would get up and go outside, under the birch tree, and look for a yellow feather, which she didn’t believe she would find.

  9: WHAT HEARTS DO INSTEAD OF BEING IN LOVE

  The road out to the Sears store went right past the clinic, where there were no picketers, or protesters, or people praying, nothing going on, just a low building set back in the smooth snow. The cedar siding caught the low light of the sun. It looked like your average dentist’s office, or real estate office, or abortion clinic. Then there was a feed store, and a row of self-storage units, and the cemetery, everything spaced out along the road until the intersection with gas stations on each corner, and then the Sears store.

  Christmas lights were her favorite part of Christmas, especially on the roof lines of houses at night, especially blue lights. There was a small peak over the front porch of their house, and she wanted to put blue lights up there, and maybe around the big front window. She would ask Frankie to help. She would surprise Michael when he came back.

  Pattianne was never at her best in a Sears store, but she found the Christmas-tree-lights section with no problem, up the escalator and next to housewares, and there were blue lights, strings and strings of them, tiny blue twinkle lights, big blue bulbs, and small zippy lights that looked like they were running around a track. She got the big ones. They seemed old-fashioned.

  “I have an aversion to those running lights,” she told the woman with the Sears badge that said Rosette.

  “Me too,” Rosette said. She was a gray-haired woman who didn’t seem old enough for gray hair, and she had two pencils behind one ear. “Now, I like those all-red ones too. They look like those red candies for decorating on top of Christmas cookies. Cash or on your Sears card?”

  Pattianne was surprised to think she must look like the type of woman with a Sears card.

  “Cash.” She stacked the four boxes of blue lights on the counter. “And I think I need an extension cord too.”

  “How about some of these too?” Rosette pointed to a display of boxes of small plastic clips right there on the counter. “You just hang these up over the edge of the gutter and then kind of clip the string of lights into these little doohickeys and there you go.”

  “Great, thanks, yeah.” She was Pattianne’s accomplice. “I’m going to surprise my husband.”

  Rosette put everything in a glossy white shopping bag with a poinsettia printed on it like a stencil. There were other shopping bags with holly stencils. The familiarity of Christmas, the words to the songs, the easy, pretty lights and glitter and wrapping paper. She would show Michael that she was not completely non-Christian. That she could be open-minded, that Christmas mattered to her.

  She called the school secretary when she got home. “I need to get ahold of Frankie.”

  The secretary’s name was Katrinka, and she said, “Can I have someone call you back, Mrs. Bryn?”

  “It’s not an emergency. I wanted to ask him to do a special job for me.”

  “How are you doing all alone?” Katrinka said. She had kind of a chirping voice, like someone named Katrinka might have.

  “Okay,” she said. “Thanks.” She had never actually met Katrinka in person. “Michael should be back pretty soon.”

  “That’s what he said when he called,” Katrinka said. “So, are you going to be home for a while?”

  “Yeah. I just need some help putting up my new Christmas lights outside.”

  “Oh, wel
l,” Katrinka said. “My boy, Scottie? His Boy Scout pack is having a Christmas-tree sale in the parking lot of the Kiwanis Club, and they’re doing stuff like that to earn money.”

  Katrinka didn’t sound old enough to have a boy who could put Christmas lights up on a porch roof.

  “He’d need a ladder and all,” Pattianne said.

  “That’s what they do,” she chirped. “They’re earning money to rebuild the fence around the playground at the St. Joe City Park.”

  “Well, Frankie knows where the plug-ins are and everything,” Pattianne said. “Why don’t you just have him call me? But maybe I’ll get my tree from the Boy Scouts.” Suddenly she was going to get a tree. “Where’s the Kiwanis Club?”

  “To be honest,” Katrinka’s voice got lower and quieter. “Frankie isn’t really working today.”

  She stopped and didn’t say anything next. The phone line sounded empty.

  Pattianne said, “Hello?”

  “I better have someone call you back.”

  “Okay,” Pattianne said. “Anytime. I’m here, or I’ll be right back.”

  “But, hey,” Katrinka’s voice chirped back up. “The Kiwanis Club is out on the highway going out to the lake? It’s Fourth Street in town and changes to Highway 3. You can’t miss it, there’s a red barn.”

  Pattianne knew about stringing lights. Her father was a model of efficiency when it came to Christmas. The strings of lights measured out and tested. She and Jen were allowed to hand him the ornaments for the tree one at a time, and he would position them on the perfect blue spruce, one ornament by each light. They never had all-blue lights. They never had outside lights either. “Italians,” her mother said, although the O’Learys had outside lights, and the Schmidts had outside lights, and the Kowalskis had outside lights. Jen smirked privately when their mother said things like that. Pattianne tried not to laugh. Jen’s smirk was a gold-star smirk. It could almost always get her, especially when it was about their mother.

  She laid the new blue lights out across the living room floor, one string at a time, and plugged them in. All working. Beautiful. She checked the extra bulbs that came in a box of four. All working. She checked to see what would happen if she took one bulb out of the string. All the rest working. Beautiful. She laid the lights across the back of the couch, up over the top of the bookcase and on to the top of the kitchen doorway, then around to the top of the front door, lots of lights, plenty of lights, more lights than her mother could ever imagine.

  Now there was nothing to do until Frankie called. She stepped across the strings of lights and went into the kitchen and poured a touch of schnapps over a single ice cube.

  A tree would require more lights, and she would need ornaments, and a Christmas tree stand. It was starting to seem like a lot of stuff, but the window in the living room had been so bare for so long, and now she understood why: it was waiting for a Christmas tree, a perfect blue spruce with blue lights that she would light up for Michael when he arrived. Maybe she could suggest a flight that would get him here at night. Apple cider and rum with cinnamon sticks. Gingerbread. She would make gingerbread so their house would be filled with the smell, and maybe she’d even get him an early Christmas present, and wrap it, have it waiting under the tree and make him open it, one of those weird Christmas ties maybe. It sounded like another trip to the Sears store. It sounded like a trip to the red barn.

  Back out the door, back into the O-Bug, and off to the far edge of town, north of the Sears store. She turned on the radio, mostly static, but she fiddled and fiddled, hoping for some Christmas tunes. What she found was “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” which is what she considered a fake Christmas song. Even “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” was better than those weird Bing Crosby / Pat Boone songs about Christmas in the fifties or whatever. She turned the radio off. Turned the turn signal on. Turned into the big red barn that said Kiwanis Club and Pack 254.

  The smell of fresh-cut Christmas trees was an instant hit of home in a way that never meant home, sweet and sad and far away, so far it was gone somehow. She would fill their house with that smell. Trees were leaned against makeshift fences strung around the lot, and the whole place was all about that smell. A short, skinny kid in a hat came up to her and said, “Merry Christmas, ma’am.” Smart-ass, calling her ma’am. Or probably not. This was, after all, a short skinny kid in a hat, a Boy Scout hat, and he had on a cute tie to boot. She could call him dearie. He just stood there.

  “Hey kiddo,” she said. “Merry Christmas yourself. Got any Christmas trees?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” There was weird dark fuzz on his upper lip. He held out his arm, waved across the lot. “They’re all right here.”

  There were bushy emerald green trees and dark green trees that were a little less bushy. The kid trailed around after her, sounding asthmatic. At the back of the lot were the blue spruces, one short row of them, and they cost twice as much as the others.

  “Do you guys sell rope, too?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I need some to tie a tree to my car.”

  He waved toward the trailer at the front of the lot. “We’re selling bungee cords,” he said. “Donated by Ace Hardware.”

  “What a scam,” she said. “I’ll take two.”

  “Two trees?”

  “Nice try, dearie,” she said. He grinned at her and turned red, and she was filled with joy. “One tree, two bungee cords.”

  Origami birds. That’s what she wanted on her tree. Origami birds and blue lights. White birds. Doves of peace, or cranes. On the way back into town from the Kiwanis Club, the snow flurries started, icy bits ticking against the windshield, teasing her. There hadn’t been any big snowstorm predicted, but there was hope in the dark, fat clouds piled up over the direction of the lake, toward Canada. A northeast storm. Sounded ominous. She turned into town and stopped at Lamplighter Books, parking up ahead of the store, a ways up the block where she hoped Elizabeth wouldn’t see the Christmas tree.

  She went in, under the cranes, and there was Elizabeth, her arms crossed, looking at her, looking out the window, the white day shining on her face. She said, “Celebrating the season in the traditional pagan style, I see.”

  It turned out that the Druids loved their trees, pointing to heaven. She had Elizabeth’s blessing.

  “I need to borrow your origami book,” she said. “And I need some origami paper. Where can I get origami paper? I want all white cranes on my tree.”

  “You can make your own paper,” she said. “You just have to cut the paper perfectly square.”

  Joseph came out of the back room. She started to say hello, but he turned and went back through the beads without a word.

  Elizabeth said, “You can borrow my paper cutter if you want.”

  She went back there and came out with the paper cutter.

  “There you go,” she said. “Be careful of that blade, it’s sharp as hell.”

  She set the paper cutter on the desk and folded her arms into her sleeves. She was all dark green today, and a red stone hanging around her neck on a black silk cord, and surely, surely, she wasn’t wearing red and green on purpose. Joseph stayed in the back room. Elizabeth did not shake her hair. She did not jingle her bracelets. She looked out the front window and said, “Happy season of Mithras.”

  “Oh?”

  “That’s where the old Romans got the idea of Christmas. They co-opted Mithras celebrations, the invincible Roman sun god. And that wasn’t until the fourth century, when Mithraism was the official state religion.”

  “So Jesus wasn’t a Capricorn?”

  Pattianne thought she would like that. She thought it would make her smile. But she curled one side of her lip up.

  “Capricorn. Ha. For one thing, if the shepherds were watching their flocks the night he was born, it was probably in the spring, not winter.” She took the origami book from the shelf behind the desk. “That’s the only time the shepherds stayed out all night, lambing season. But who kno
ws. There’s no record of any great census that might have gotten Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, anyway.” She tossed the origami book on the desk, and her bracelets jingled. “There you go. Birds for your Mithras tree.”

  Joseph came back out, and this time he gave her kind of a hello look, but his lips were weird, all straight and tight. He held his turquoise down coat by the sleeves, dragging it across the carpet, the turquoise swirls in the carpet like threads from the coat.

  Pattianne said, “I’m putting up lights around my porch.” It sounded like the wrong thing to say.

  Joseph sat down in the beautiful chair so that he was facing away from them. Elizabeth slipped her arms up inside her sleeves.

  “Blue lights.”

  Then Elizabeth looked at her and shook her hair. It was like they were in a play.

  “I was actually trying to find Frankie to help me with the ladder and all,” which suddenly felt like it was not the next line.

  “At one point it was declared a sin to observe the birth of Jesus,” Elizabeth said. That didn’t feel like the right next line either. “Being born was too ordinary, him being divine and all.”

  “Making up sins to suit their politics,” Joseph said. The right line.

  The shop was quiet except for Joseph’s breathing, which was slow and measured, and Pattianne was noticing it.

  “So,” she said. “I guess I’ll go home and wait for Frankie to call.” She picked up the paper cutter and the origami book. “So, I’ll see you Thursday?”

  One of Elizabeth’s hands came out of one sleeve and waved at her, like a small bird of fingers, like she was being dismissed.

  Then Pattianne got brave. “What’s going on?”

  Joseph stood up and faced Elizabeth, who stood still as a statue. Her hands had disappeared again. He put on his coat. The nylon swish of it was loud in the total quiet of Lamplighter Books.

  He said, “I’ll tell Frankie to call you,” and he went to the door, opened it so gently the bells never made a sound, and he closed it just as quietly. The cranes swung wildly, though, and he went past the window, up the street past the O-Bug with the Mithras tree sticking out of the trunk, and the cranes kept swinging in wild circles, and Elizabeth sat on the tall stool and watched him. The window light washed all the color out of her eyes. The white crane was the only one still bobbing when she said, “Joseph is on administrative leave.”