A Perfect Stranger

by Roxana Robinson

  But Molly was nice to us, and we liked her. That evening we pushed through the swinging door into the pantry and filed into the kitchen. Molly turned at once from the stove.

  “Ah, here they all are, then,” she said, her Irish accent thick. Molly’s mouth didn’t smile easily, but her eyes did. “Come over here and let me have a look at you.” We presented ourselves expectantly, waiting to see what she would find. “You’re growing,” she said warningly to Sam, as though this was something he should look out for, and to me she said accusingly, “Where’s that tooth gone?” I had no answer, but I knew she was not angry. She put her hands on our heads approvingly, as though we belonged to her, then she moved briskly back to the stove. “I’m going to take this out to your parents first, so you all sit down at the table and don’t make any trouble.” We didn’t need to be told that. Making trouble in Molly’s kitchen was the last thing in the world we would consider doing.

  We sat and waited for her to come back. Tweenie lay on a towel next to her bowl, which had milk in it. She eyed us disagreeably.

  “I hate Tweenie,” I said and made a face at her.

  Jonathan always disagreed with me. “She’s just a dog,” he said scornfully. “Why would you hate a dog?”

  “She looks like a snake,” Abby said. “Look at her.”

  We looked at her. Tweenie looked back at us, ready to bite.

  “Where’s Huge?” Jonathan asked.

  “In with the grown-ups,” Sam said. “We can’t bring him in here because he’ll upset Tweenie.”

  “Oh, Tweenie,” I said with loathing, rolling my eyes.

  Molly pushed through from the pantry, her low bosom and portly middle preceding her. Her neat lace-up shoes pointed outward when she walked. “Now, then,” she said energetically, “come get your plates and I’ll put some food on them.” We lined up, and Molly loaded our plates. We sat down again at the table. Molly was at the stove, her back to us.

  “Where’s Richard?” Sam asked her politely, his mouth full.

  Sam was the oldest, and could ask these questions of grown-ups. I would never have dared: Ree-ard was a comical figure to us, and I could not have discussed him with a grown-up. There were things that we talked about only among ourselves, and that was our true world—where we said the things we meant, and where we spoke freely and directly. Then there were the things we said to adults, and those were often false, or constrained and mannered. You had to be careful in talking to grown-ups, it was like talking to foreigners. They expected to hear certain things; they didn’t always understand you.

  I myself had little practice in talking to grown-ups. I was the youngest, and was seldom asked my opinion. I did not understand how to blend the two ways of talking, or how to bridge the gap that lay between them. I knew that if I asked about Ree-ard I would be scolded for being fresh. But Sam could do it with impunity, his face and voice ingenuous. He asked as though it were a serious question, as though we thought Richard were a serious person.

  “Oh, Richard,” Molly said, hissing the word, sounding bad-tempered at once. “Where is Richard,” she repeated rhetorically, and shook her head. She set the lid on a pot and wiped her hands on her apron, and we said no more about Richard.

  Besides Richard, Molly had a daughter named Margaret. We seldom saw Margaret, she didn’t live at Weldonmere. She didn’t even live in the Park. She lived somewhere else, in an apartment, and she worked in an office, for a married man. My father worked in an office, and he was a married man, but somehow these things set Margaret in a mysterious region, exotic and sinister.

  In the car, my father had spoken to my mother in a voice slightly lower, more private, than the one he used for the whole car. It made me alert at once, and I leaned forward, listening. My father said to my mother, “Margaret’s going to be there.”

  My mother looked at him and said, “And—?”

  My father, not looking at her, said, “I suppose so.”

  My mother turned away and said, “Poor thing.”

  I was listening to them as I always listened to my parents, in order to understand the world, though what they said often made things more confusing. The tone of voice my parents used about Margaret meant, I knew, that they would not answer my questions about her. If I asked my mother what she had meant by “Poor thing,” or why it was so serious and important that the man Margaret worked for was married, she would smile at me and make her voice louder and more public and say, “Oh, it’s just a conversation I’m having with your father, that’s all.” She would tell me nothing. I knew that this language I was trying to learn could not be learned directly, that it was something that had to be absorbed blindly and obliquely. I knew that we were to have no help with it. We would have to learn it through signs, inflections, looks and sighs and tones of voice.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, I watched Abby eating. If I didn’t eat fast enough, or if I didn’t eat the vegetables, she might tell on me, if she were in a spiteful mood. Now she was pretending to ignore me, but I watched her anyway, as I ate. I ate the soft pillowy lima beans one by one, watching Abby’s fork across the table. I looked at her face when I was halfway through and saw that she was watching something behind me. She picked up her milk glass and drank, still watching, her eyes intent. I turned around.

  At the far end of the kitchen was the back staircase that led up to the servants’ wing. I had never been up it. Now, sitting on the upper steps and looking at us, was a little girl, my age. She was pretty, with dark blue eyes and brown hair thick around her face. She was wearing a long pale blue nightgown, tucked down over her feet. Her hands were hidden in her lap, and she was watching us. I had never seen her before, this girl my age. She was with us here in the house, sitting on the back stairs, looking at us.

  The four of us watched her as we ate, not speaking. The girl did not move. She was watching us through the wooden banisters. Once she raised her hand to tuck back her hair, which had fallen across her face. Her skin was very pale. She put her hand back into her lap and then leaned her face against the banisters, looking through them as though they were bars.

  She was living here in the house. I wondered if she would be there in the morning, opening presents under the tree. Would she have a stocking? I felt a kind of private outrage rise up in me: how could there be a girl like me here, my age, my size, in our family’s house?

  Molly, hearing our silence, turned from the stove and saw our stares. She looked at the staircase and erupted.

  “You get out of here,” she said to the little girl, and started over toward her. “Get back up those stairs. You’re not to come down here, and you know that. I told you that, go on, get up there.”

  Before Molly could reach her, the little girl stood and ran back upstairs. She didn’t look at us; she fled. We saw her feet, which were bare, and the bottom of her pale blue nightgown, and then she was gone. Molly turned without looking at us and went back to the stove in a temper, banging the pots. We looked at each other in silence and went on eating.

  When we were finished, we were sent through the pantry into the dining room and then the living room beyond, where the grown-ups were. They were sitting in front of the fireplace, on big sofas and chairs covered in blurry flowers. Huge lay on the rug, and he raised his head when we appeared, his tail thumping.

  Coming into the living room, we passed the Christmas tree, tall and glittering. We stopped, staring at the packages beneath it, eyeing them for size, trying to decipher names on the tags.

  “I have more than you do,” Jonathan said to me under his breath.

  “You don’t,” I said, tilting my head sideways to look for my name.

  “Come over and say hello,” my father said. Sam was nudging a package with his toe, trying to shift it so the tag was visible. “And leave the presents alone. Don’t start pushing them around.”

  “I wasn’t,” Abby said virtuously and went over to sit on the sofa between Grandmère and Grandpère.

  “Sam,” my father said,
and Sam left the packages and went over, giving an athletic kick in the air on the way, to show that he had really been practicing soccer, not nudging presents. I went over by the fire, and I felt the heat on my face. Outside there was snow on the long lawn that sloped down to the pond and the creek beyond. I could see the Christmas tree in the corner, rising in shimmering tiers, fragrant, brilliant, intricate. This was the reason we were here—stockings, presents, the boundless glitter of anticipation—but it was all before us still. There was nothing to do now but wait. The night ahead was endless, and I felt myself tingling with impatience and excitement, but our parents and grandparents seemed content here, sitting by the fire and talking, indifferent to the time moving so slowly.

  I climbed onto the flowered sofa next to Grandmère. I loved the way she smelled, powdery and soft, and I loved her silvery curled hair. She smiled at me and patted my hand. “Sit here with me, Joanna,” she said, though I already was. Grown-ups were like this, awkward in their speech, saying things you already knew, or things you couldn’t understand. I smiled back at her and put my hands in my lap. She put her arm around me, and I leaned against her and gazed into the fire, and waited for it to be Christmas morning.

  My father was talking about his work. I don’t know when exactly I began to hear the noise from the kitchen. I looked across at Sam, who was leaning against my father’s chair. He looked back at me, and we both listened. No one else seemed to hear it, they were all listening to my father’s story.

  “It’s hard to get people from below the poverty level involved with community projects,” he was saying. “We try to encourage anyone who’s willing. We try to make it easy for them, and whatever they want to do, we try to help. Well, there’s a single mother, with two children, pretty far below the poverty level. She had volunteered once or twice at school, and then she told the counselors she wanted to set up a kids’ summer program.”

  In the kitchen, something was happening. I could hear muffled noises, bumps and crashing sounds, and then voices, but they were indistinct. It was hard to imagine anything boisterous going on in Molly’s kitchen. Unless—it was too much to hope for—Tweenie had attacked someone?

  “We told her we’d advise her, and we helped her set it up, but she was a dynamo, and she really did it all herself. And she paid for everything, supplies, and refreshments, whatever her costs were. She took eight children, five days a week for two months, and she charged nothing.” My father paused and took a sip from his coffee cup. He was sitting in an armchair across from Grandpère. “Well, I knew she couldn’t afford it, and I heard afterward she’d done a very good job. In the fall I wrote a report on the program and applied to the state for a small grant. Just a few hundred dollars, to cover her costs for the season and start her off for the next, if she wanted to go on.”

  I heard a real crash, now, in the kitchen. Sam and I looked at each other.

  “Tell about going to see her,” my mother said. She was holding her cup and saucer in her lap and watching my father.

  “She lives way outside town, and doesn’t have a telephone, so I couldn’t let her know I was coming,” my father said. “I got directions and drove out there. She has a trailer by the road, at the edge of a big field. I knocked on the door, and after a minute she opened it. She’s in her thirties, overweight, with a pretty face. She seemed a bit wary, but she invited me in and offered me some coffee. The trailer was pretty crowded. There were plants everywhere, in jars and coffee cans, standing under the windows, lined up on the floor.”

  There was more noise from the kitchen, a sort of subdued shout. I looked again at my mother, but she was smiling at my father.

  “I thanked her for setting up the program and congratulated her on how well she’d done it. She looked at me for a moment, and then she thanked me, but she didn’t smile. Then I told her about the grant; I was very pleased about it. I watched her face, waiting for it to change, but it didn’t. When I finished, she didn’t say anything, she just sat there. I thought she hadn’t understood me, so I explained it again. She had small, very bright blue eyes, very steady. She sat with her hands tucked tightly between her legs. When I finished the second time, she still didn’t answer for a moment. Finally she said, ‘I don’t want the money.’”

  Something, again, in the kitchen. I looked at Sam. His face was solemn.

  “She said, ‘I started this program, and it feels like it’s mine. But if I take money from the state, it will be the state’s program. I’ll start worrying if I’m doing it right, or if I should ask someone how to do it, and I’ll worry that someone will come in and start telling me how to run it. So I don’t want the money. I’d rather do it on my own.’”

  Grandpère was watching my father. He was sitting in a high-backed wing chair facing the fire, and I could see the firelight on his face. “And what did you say to her?” he asked. His face looked warm, as though he were about to smile, and it made me feel safe, watching my grandfather look that way at my father.

  My father shook his head, rueful, smiling slightly. “There was nothing to say. It was her program. I wanted her to have the money, but I couldn’t make her take it. And I admired her for refusing it. When I was thanking her and congratulating her she hadn’t said anything, she’d just looked at me. It had made me uncomfortable at the time, and afterward I’d wondered if I hadn’t been doing, myself, just what she was talking about, trying to intrude onto something that belonged to her and the children she’d helped, instead of being helpful.” My father shrugged his shoulders. “There was really nothing I could do. I told her I understood her position, and that if she wanted help we’d give it to her in any way we could. I thanked her for the coffee and left. She was a very impressive woman.”

  “My goodness,” said Grandmère, smiling. She shook her head. “A lady of principle.” She looked at me and patted my hand. I smiled back at her.

  Now the noise seemed too loud and too persistent to ignore. My father said to Grandpère, “Do you hear something in the kitchen?”

  Grandpère’s face had changed; he looked serious. He set his glass down on the little table next to the sofa. “I wonder what’s going on in there,” he said. “Sometimes Bud outdoes himself at Christmas revelry.” He stood up.

  I looked at Sam: Bud! The fabled Bud!

  “I’ll come with you,” my father said and stood up. Sam stood up too, but my mother shook her head.

  “I think you children should stay in here with us,” she said.

  The two men walked through the big arch into the dining room, toward the long portrait of Grandpère in his “pink” hunting coat. They pushed open the pantry door, and as it swung wide we could hear a voice, suddenly loud; then as it swung shut the voice was muffled again.

  Grandmère and my mother looked at each other. Grandmère looked worried; her mouth had lost its smile. “I hope Bud isn’t making trouble again,” she said, “it’s so hard on Molly when he does that.” She didn’t move. The living room was quiet. The fire hissed and murmured, and its light flickered on the silver ash-trays. On the mantel was a round clock with a white face, with a black sphinx lying on either side of it. In the silence we could hear its steady ticks. The Christmas tree towered, glittering, in the corner. My arm was getting hot from the fire, and I moved closer to Grandmère. She patted my shoulder, pulling me toward her.

  There was a roar from the kitchen. “You think I don’t know that?” It was a man, shouting, wild. Sam and I looked at each other. We heard Molly’s voice.

  “Bud, don’t, for God’s sake. For God’s sake.”

  Sam and I stared at each other. We would never have wanted to hear that tone of voice from Molly, pleading, imploring.

  Then we could see them. They had pushed open the door from the pantry, and we could see them, at the far end of the dining room, standing beneath the big portrait. There were four of them: Bud, Molly’s husband; Molly, strange in a blue dress; and Grandpère and my father, in their dark tweeds. Bud had pushed through the door, and a
ll the others had followed. He was a big man, not as fat as Ree-ard, but tall and heavy. His shoulders looked as though they had had air pumped into them. His face was swollen and red, and his small blue eyes were inflamed and pink. Molly, our Molly, the absolute ruler of the kitchen, was hanging on to one of his shoulders and weeping.

  “Get out of there, Bud,” she said, frantic. She was pushing at him. “Come along, get out of there. Come back with me.”

  Bud ignored her. He was staring at my grandfather. “You think I care about your fancy manners?” he asked. His voice sounded strangely slow, as though he didn’t know how to use his mouth. “You think I care about your fancy place?”

  “Ah, get out of here, Bud,” Molly said, her voice rising. “You’re not yourself. You’re not thinking. Come along with me.”

  Her voice was high and frantic.

  My grandfather said nothing. He was watching Bud, his head slightly lowered, his chin drawn in. His hands were down at his sides. He said nothing, but his eyebrows were low and drawn together.

  “Here’s what I think about your fancy place,” Bud said, leaning into Grandpère’s face. His hulking shoulders swam closer. Molly scrabbled at him.

  “Bud!” she said. “Leave this! Get out of here! Leave Mr. Weldon alone, for God’s sake.”

  But Bud was in the grip of something stronger than Molly. He leaned into my grandfather’s face, his own red face glowing, his little pink eyes lit up, as though waiting to see what would happen. Then I heard a noise from him, a disgusting noise. I couldn’t see what had happened, but I saw Grandpère blink and his head jerk slightly back.

  “That’s enough,” Grandpère said. Now he was very angry. “I will ask you to leave this house, sir.”