A Small Crowd of Strangers

by Joanna Rose

  “No. I got a cabin and I’m waiting for it. I have to watch for it at night.”

  “A cabin? Like with an address?”

  The wind picked up off the ocean, and she tucked into the phone booth.

  “I’m in an actual phone booth.”

  The old lady inside the store was working on a crossword puzzle at the counter on the other side of the window.

  “Wow. And the cabin?”

  “It’s a one-room place with no bathtub. There’s kind of a shower. There’s a woodstove. I can see the ocean.”

  “What, you’re turning monk now that you’ve dumped the Catholic boy?”

  “Not too monkish. I’m fifty steps from a little market that sells pinot noir and merlot for under ten dollars a bottle.”

  “So you what, just drink wine and drive around and wait for this silver tide?”

  “Kind of. Except the Fiat’s starter is shot.”

  The wind was wet and warm, and it smelled like something she couldn’t remember, and she decided not to try to explain this.

  “Sounds like you’re screwed,” Jen said. “If you didn’t have that dog, you could get yourself back home. What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing.”

  Jen snorted. “Good plan. Mom will love that.”

  “How they doing?”

  “They wondered if you have a new address in St. Cloud,” she said. “Do you? In St. Cloud? Or wherever you are?”

  “They can write to me care of Lamplighter. I told her that. And the dog has a name.”

  “No, it doesn’t. It has a label, and it’s not even the right label.”

  “It’s a he, not an it. He’s Bullfrog. He’s a very cool dog, if you ask me. Not that I want to use up my phone card telling you about Bullfrog.”

  “So why are you using up your phone card?”

  Pattianne didn’t know. “This place is wild,” she said. “There are eagles, pairs of eagles even, and there are these huge crows that follow you on the beach and make the weirdest sounds, like someone’s knocking on the door. And huge black rocks all over the beach, big as cars. It’s wild.”

  The rain blew sideways in sheets, and she couldn’t even see as far as the beach.

  “Got it,” Jen said. “Huge. Wild. So, are you going to get that car fixed?”

  She didn’t know, but she said yes because she could hear how she sounded, like some crazy woman who has returned to the wilderness or something. She said she’d call again soon, and Jen said, “Don’t be a feeb.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m just saying this is no time to start.”

  The old lady in the grocery store had pure white hair. Pattianne liked that. It was pulled into a thin, wispy clutch at the back of her neck, held by a hairnet that had tiny colored beads here and there, and she liked that too. She was very small, smaller than Pattianne. Pattianne liked small people. She liked everything about the old lady except that she called her dear.

  “So,” she said. “How are you settling in, dear?”

  “Fine. We’re settling in fine.”

  Her apron was blue flowers on a pink background, white polka dots in the pink, and all trimmed in pink rickrack, and she was dusting cans of tuna fish with a dust cloth that was all yellow daisies, a former apron surely.

  She said, “How is that mattress, a little damp?”

  “No. Well, a little, but I like damp.”

  She turned from her cans of tuna fish and squinted through her glasses.

  “Fine,” Pattianne said. “Everything is fine.”

  “Got a cold?”

  “No.”

  “Did Mr. Bleakman get that heater working?”

  “It works okay.”

  The one electric heater along the wall warmed up the floor of the house after about an hour. Then the coils inside the heater started to glow, and when she turned it off, and the wall above the heater would be warm to the touch.

  “It’s supposed to have a thermostat. He fix the thermostat?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You got to keep after Mr. Bleakman,” she said. “He’d sooner not than do.” She folded the yellow daisy dust rag. “Me, I like to keep moving. My secret to eternal youth: you got to keep moving.” She wore blue running shoes. “Most folks think that means going on walks for your heart or doing some exercise class, but that’s not what it means. It means you got to get up out of the chair.” She crossed the aisle to an open box on the floor and started taking small bags of potato chips out, clipping each bag to a rack on the front of the shelf. Her fingers were swollen straight, and large purple spots spread across her wrists.

  She said, “Maybe not eternal youth, but a good long old age, which is not a bad thing if you do it right, especially considering the options.”

  Pattianne chose a can of tuna fish and a loaf of bread, the loaves on the shelf all lined up, the twisted ends of the bags all in rows, and she got a small carton of milk. She paid in colored bills.

  “There you go, dear,” the old lady said. “Is that all you need?”

  Good Lord, no.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  She wondered what the old lady’s name was. It seemed like she learned it when she’d gotten the furniture from her back room, but she didn’t want to ask. The old lady would ask her name in return, and she didn’t know what she would say.

  She said, “Thank you.”

  Outside, in the sideways rain, she thought about mayonnaise to go with the tuna fish. She looked back into the store. She remembered the old lady’s name was Mrs. Taskey.

  At home, she opened the tuna fish, and Bullfrog wagged at the can opener sound and then sat patiently, focused and sure that good things would come to him, that the world was in good working order, his sad brown eyes gazing, his ears paying attention, not quite the agony of anticipation, just the peace of patience. She drained the oil onto kibble and gave it to him. So far, what she had observed was that he loved tuna-fish oil better than anything except cat food and M&M’s. She sat on the bed and ate the tuna fish out of the can, watching him, and it eased her bloody beating muscle that he ate all his kibble and then pushed his chow bowl around the room, licking it. She gave him the tuna can to lick out, and she lay back on the damp smelling mattress. The curtains were open to sky and clouds. The tuna can scraped on the floor. She pulled the sleeping bag over her.

  Miss Mimi used to paint in oils. She painted clouds mostly. Clouds above meadows. Her oil-painted clouds never looked real. They were as unreal as the real clouds of the real sunsets out over Pennsylvania, out over the meadows that edged the neighborhood on the other side of the woods. She would call their house, and Pattianne’s mother would answer the phone in the kitchen.

  “Have Pattianne look out the front window. Have her call me back.”

  “What colors did you see?” she would ask when Pattianne called her back.

  Magenta.

  Copper.

  Lemon.

  “And cerise,” Miss Mimi might say. “And gold, pure gold, there at the end.”

  There was a town over there, to the west of their neighborhood, and at night, Pattianne saw the dim glow from the town’s lights in the low sky. There were hills and fields and meadows and a state line between her and that town, but at night, she knew exactly where it was. On nights when the sky was cloudy, the clouds were part of that low light, dark lit purple under all the rest of the sky, Atlantic thunderheads gathering up that dark light.

  “Paint that,” she would say to Miss Mimi. “Start with all black on your canvas.”

  “Ah,” Miss Mimi would say. “A lover of dark clouds.”

  Pattianne had never dreamed clouds could be so dark. She would write Miss Mimi a note about this place.

  Bullfrog barked low friendly grunts in the doorway, his tail wagging across the wooden floor in low sweeps. The dusk outside the door was the dark dusk of inland, and if there was color in the sky behind her, out over the ocean, it didn’t show i
n the face of the old woman standing in the yard, wrapped in her gray blanket.

  Pattianne said, “Who are you?” and wondered at the rudeness.

  The old woman said, “Don’t sleep,” and then she said, “If you sleep, only your sad story will be real.”

  The way they talked here, sounds clipped at the ends of words, more like Minnesota than Minnesota.

  The woman smiled with her eyes, and turned away, down the hill, disappearing behind the huge rock.

  Pattianne got back under the sleeping bag, and it was still warm under there, down by her feet.

  In the morning, the door was still open, and it was raining, a soft, fine rain that stopped and started, falling straight down onto rocks and grass and straight down onto the roof of the cabin. Bullfrog never said whether it was a dream, or if it was, why. When the rain finally seemed to let up, when the sky seemed to get lighter, she went to shut the door and the Patel daughter stood there in the watery light, black hair, her black eyes too big for her face, her lips too big for her face, her face too real for the early morning, all right there at the bottom of the three steps.

  Pattianne said, “Hello?”

  Bullfrog sniffed past her out the door, sniffed down the step, past the Patel daughter. The girl held out her hand, and lying flat in her palm was the silver chain with the small silver cross set with its amethyst.

  She said, “Is it yours?”

  “It used to be mine.”

  “I found it.” She held her hand still, the dark silver against the skin of her palm, her fingernails painted with a pearly lavender color, and bitten short. “It was in the grass, on the path.”

  Pattianne closed her hands together behind her back and decided this for sure was not a dream.

  The girl said, “I drove here. Daddy’s in Vancouver. We’re out of milk, so I, like, drove? Plus to give you back this. What are you doing? Did you just wake up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is that coffee?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m allowed to have coffee.”

  The wet black rocks steamed in the sun, and so did the roofs of the buildings. High clouds layered the sky, vaguely pink, and the sun would soon slip back behind them.

  Pattianne said, “What’s your name?”

  “Lakshmi.”

  Lakshmi poured the silver chain from one hand into the other. It made a thin silver sound, and she said, “It’s so beautiful, so tiny and all.”

  “Why don’t you keep it?”

  The chain dangled from her fingers. “Don’t you want it back? We’re not Christian anyway. Hindu. From India. Well, Vancouver. But not Pakistan Hindu.”

  She held the cross up to her neck, and looked down at where it hung on the pink T-shirt, not down as far as her small breasts. There was pink glitter on her eyelids. “Won’t Daddy be mad!” She slipped it back into her palm. “But I don’t think I should, really.”

  Mr. Bleakman stepped out the back door of the post office and dumped trash into the can there. Lakshmi waved at him.

  She said, “That guy is such a creep.”

  “You want some coffee, Lakshmi?”

  She swung the cross around on her finger, and she said, “Yeah, I love coffee,” and she leaned in the doorway while Pattianne poured hot water into the other cup, spooned in instant, stirred.

  “Milk? Or sugar?”

  “Yes, please.” The giggle. “A lot, please. Of each.”

  So Pattianne put in a lot of each, and maybe this was not okay, but they would sit outside in full view of Mr. Bleakman and the rest of the world. She took the cup out and sat down on the top step, and Lakshmi sat down next to her, taking the coffee. The chain and cross dangled from her wrist and slid down to her elbow, and she slopped the coffee on the step.

  “So you live at the motel, what is it, the Dolphin?”

  “Pink Dolphin,” she said, and a giggle slipped out like breath. “When it’s holidays and we get off school and all that, we go to Vancouver. All the aunts and uncles and, like, cousins live there? They come here a lot. I might go to high school in Vancouver next year, instead of Port Alberni, but Daddy says there’s, like, drugs and all. Where are you from?”

  “New Jersey.”

  “Is that by New York?”

  “Yes, right by New York.”

  “I have a friend named Leah from New York City, and she saw Woody Allen walking on the street. You know who that is, Woody Allen? I never saw any Woody Allen movies, but Leah’s, like, if you live in New York he’s this movie star and all, plus she’s Jewish, and he makes Jewish movies. She says stuff that he says all the time, and he’s all, like, funny?”

  “Yeah,” Pattianne say. “I like Woody Allen.”

  She says, “Are you Jewish?”

  “No.”

  “Just American?”

  “Yeah.”

  She doubled the chain over her wrist like a bracelet.

  She said, “Is Bullfrog a very old dog?”

  “Yeah, pretty old.”

  She said, “Here, Sugarlips.”

  What’s your cat’s name, what do you do in school, how do you get that glitter off your eyelids. But the girl just chattered away at Bullfrog, filling the space on the step with herself.

  When she left, Mr. Bleakman leaned against the back door of the post office, watching Lakshmi go down the path, bouncing in her big white sneakers, around the rock. She went to the store, and he went back inside the post office and Pattianne and Bullfrog sat on the step until the pale sun rose into the midday clouds, and there was more rain in the warm breeze.

  In the mornings, she looked out at the ocean first, because she could, it being right there. She didn’t even wait for her eyes to open all the way. She didn’t even wait to be all the way awake. Then came one morning when what she saw was the western sky out over the ocean colored like sunrise, as though everything had gotten turned around while she slept and the sun now came up in the west. This western sunrise didn’t fool the seagulls, though, they were all sitting, maybe standing, lined up along the beach, spaced wide apart, each turned inland, each puffed up, white breasts tinged faintly pink, and so was the wash of sea foam behind them, and so was the light layer of clouds out over the ocean. When the sun was finally all the way up, behind the trees of the island to the east, her sense of direction settled calmly back into her body. It was slightly disappointing.

  Days were stringing along behind her.

  A card came from Michael’s mother, in a peach-colored envelope, which she pulled open with excruciating care because she didn’t want to open it at all. Personal stationery with her initials in gold, and a message: We miss you. Come back home. She tucked the card back in the envelope and laid it gently in the drawer between the stove and the sink.

  The town happened around her. In the morning the children appeared, heading up the hill in pairs, or small groups, or sometimes a single child straggling, toward the school building out near the highway, set back in a wide, muddy lawn. The maroon station wagon from the Pink Dolphin Motel drove up and parked in front of Ruby’s Roadhouse. The daughters got out and went into the store, and then on up the hill to the school, and Mr. Patel went into Ruby’s Roadhouse. Even when she wasn’t watching, even when she was hiding away from the window with the door shut, and didn’t see the station wagon full of Patel daughters, she heard them. She heard their giddy, screaming laughter. If one of those children were hers, she was afraid she would insist that the child not ever scream like that. She would hide behind the door.

  One quiet morning, a big white feather was in front of the door in the grass. All her breath rushed away. She dropped to her knees, wet knees instantly, and she touched it before she picked it up. It was as long as her forearm. She was sure it was an eagle feather and she wanted it. She carried it in her two hands and walked with it, not believing it, it was so big and so white, the quill as thick as her finger. Then she wanted to hide it when she saw Mrs. Taskey and the pink-faced, dark-haired young man in the priest
’s collar walking down the sidewalk, him holding her arm. Bullfrog got it into his head to be Mr. Sociable, and he wagged right up to them, running ahead of her.

  Mrs. Taskey called out, “Hello, dear.”

  The priest tucked his hands into the pockets of his canvas jacket, and he looked happily at the feather.

  He said, “Lovely.” His voice was soft and high.

  Mrs. Taskey held onto his elbow with both hands, and she said, “This is Father Lucke.” And, to him, “This is Pattianne Anthony Bryn.”

  The sound of her name surprised her, disappointed her. She was thinking that maybe no one knew it, except Mr. Bleakman.

  Father Lucke’s dark hair stuck up in wavy cowlicks all over his head, especially in front.

  She said, “Lucky?”

  “L-U-C-K-E,” he spelled. “Here from Nova Scotia. Same side of the continent as yourself, eh? All the way from New Jersey, Mrs. Taskey tells me.”

  Mrs. Taskey said, “Will you come for tea after Mass, Pattianne?”

  Apparently it was Sunday.

  She said, “I can’t.” And then it seemed like she had to say why not, and she couldn’t think of why not, and Bullfrog just stood there wagging, no help at all.

  “So what are your plans here in Tofino?” Father Lucke said. “Any interest in the choir?”

  “No. Can’t sing a lick.”

  “We have Mass in Ruby’s now,” Mrs. Taskey said.

  Since the church burned down.

  “Lovely acoustics,” she said. “And Father Lucke is a fine tenor.”

  She said it more to him, how old ladies do, flirt with priests.

  “Fair tenor,” he said. “Good cantor.”

  Pattianne said, “Well,” and they both said, “Well,” and he said he hoped to see her again soon, and have a nice Sunday, and he reached down to pat Bullfrog, who sniffed his fingers, and it was all goodbye, thank you, and they didn’t say anything else about the feather. She put it into her pocket, careful not to break it or crush it or hurt it. There was a cluster of people, a church cluster, on the porch of Ruby’s Roadhouse.

  Pattianne went down to the beach angry. Being this close to church, to a priest, made her angry, and it wouldn’t go away. She didn’t even know it was close again, this God thing chasing her across Canada. She thought it was fire, or maybe guilt, or maybe Michael Bryn, and here was God, taunting her. Look at all those people on the porch. You can hear them singing if you listen. Here, upon the wind I will bring to you songs of My glory. Try and ignore Me.