Read by Strangers

by Philip Dean Walker

  Billie stops looking at Anna in the eye. She’s staring right past her, out the grating of the wheel car. At first Anna thinks she’s simply angry at her. She had meant the things she said, but she hadn’t intended to say them.

  Then Billie says, “My God, look at that.”

  Anna turns around. Off in the distance, she sees a large black cloud that seems to be leaching out the sunlight and the airy brightness they had experienced when they first got onto the Ferris wheel, sucking it out of the air and making everything dark, like a black nylon over a nightstand lamp. The accompanying winds whistle around them so hard that they shake the car, a car that suddenly feels much more like a cage.

  “We’re finally going down again. That must mean they’re going to start letting people off because of the weather,” says Billie.

  Anna can only nod as they begin their descent. She hears Wade and the others hollering in the car behind them. What an adventure this must be for them. She only has to look down once to get that feeling again. They always say that people walking around on the ground look like ants from a distance. To Anna they look like earwigs, those little brown sticks that pick themselves up off the ground and announce to the world that they’re animated. If she had a shotgun, she thinks, she might take aim at one of them, just to see if she could hit the target.

  “Wait, they’re not letting us off. Why aren’t they letting us off?” Anna can see one of the scabs working the controls of the Ferris wheel with a dull, blank expression. She’s wearing a yellow T-shirt with a Mountain Dew logo and white Keds. To Anna, she looks very eighties and very stupid. “You need to stop this thing so we can get off! Right now!” she screams in the girl’s direction. The girl only vaguely looks at them as she grabs a gray hooded sweatshirt to shield herself from the sudden onslaught of cold. Anna feels a few drops of rain blow through the grating. They have completed another revolution and are making their way straight back up to the top.

  “Settle down. I’ve been up in a hot air balloon that blew out half of its heat source, and I made it out fine,” Billie says.

  “Well, it seems you always land on your feet.”

  As they get closer to the top, Anna senses a small swinging motion in the car, as if it’s trying to tip her out. Some of the high school girls below scream. It’s unmistakable.

  “Anna, hold on to the handrail on the side here. Steady yourself. Everything is going to be fine.”

  She suddenly can see how good a flight attendant Billie must have been back in the day, soothing nervous passengers, bundling up children with blankets.

  Anna looks out the grated window, a compartment that feels smaller than when she first got in. The entire sky has turned a grayish black, and the rain comes down in cross-cut sheets across the sky, erupting like a furious curtain of water. The wheel car rocks with more regularity. Billie looks out from the grating behind them then quickly looks back, searching for Anna’s eyes so she can hold them steady. The Ferris wheel isn’t moving. They’re frozen at the top.

  “You just saw something. What was it?” Anna asks.

  “People are climbing out of their cars,” she delivers calmly.

  “What?! How?” Anna says, starting to peer out the window grating herself.

  “Don’t look down. Their door must’ve become unlatched or something.”

  “Wade! Wade, it’s me! Can you see Wade? Is he one of them?” Anna screams.

  “Wade is fine, Anna. He’s fine.”

  Anna feels herself cave into a panic. The screaming around her has become even more manic and frightened (and not exclusively female, which scares her even more). She can’t hear Wade’s voice over the shouting and the creaking of the wheel car as they rock back and forth, not like she could hear it before. She prays they’ll get out of this alive. Then, almost immediately after that, she prays she’ll be struck by lightning before falling out of the car and landing on the cement near the base of the wheel.

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” Billie says. “I saw some sort of maintenance crew on the ground. I’m sure they’re trying to fix the problem.”

  “What’s happening?” Anna asks. “What’s happening?” But the question suddenly isn’t just about the Ferris wheel and whether they’ll get off. Billie leaves the seat facing Anna and moves to sit next to her.

  “I’m not lucky, Anna. I know it’s probably easier for you to think that about me. To look at me and my life in comparison to yours and think how fabulous and fun everything is. But I’m not lucky. You’re the lucky one.”

  “How am I lucky?” Anna asks, looking at her more closely.

  “You’ve had our mother your whole life. You have Hank and those wonderful boys and—”

  “Yes, I can see how much you like Hank,” Anna interrupts her.

  “Oh, Anna. No. Really? Listen, I don’t want your husband. You’re all new family to me. I’m just trying to make the best impression I can.” Billie sits back in the cushioned seat and places her hands on either side, palms facing down. Anna does the same so that, for a moment, they’re mirroring each other side by side, like together on a swing, except Anna is leaning forward, not back. “Do you know what I would’ve given to be able to wake up in your house every morning the last however many years? To spend the holidays with you and Mother? To even have a mother? Do you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re expecting to get out of this with her. Whatever it is, you’re going to be disappointed. Gloria is selfish to her very core.”

  “Is that where you get it from?” Billie looks away, out through the grating toward the clouds. “I’m sorry for that. Why don’t you just let me find out for myself?”

  “She didn’t look for you, Billie. She never even looked for you.”

  Billie tells Anna about when her adoptive mother became pregnant almost immediately after she and her husband took Billie in. From then on, she was like an extra child around the house. Never allowed to forget that she wasn’t their biological daughter. “Do you know what that does to a person? To feel like a stranger in your own home? It’s devastating. When they died,” she said, “they left me almost nothing. My sister Alicia got it all.”

  Anna grabs hold of Billie’s hand. Something feels right to her about doing it. The bones of her knuckles are very pronounced, but her hand is warm and silky. It has the feel of an artist’s hands or what Anna imagines an artist’s hand might feel like. Together they stare into the blackness of the cloud that hovers over the Ferris wheel, shaking their car. There’s no way to stop the cloud from moving closer, and Anna feels a sense of calm from finally being able to recognize that.

  There Is a Light That Never Goes Out

  SHEILA’S HAIR WAS blonde but whitish and thin, as if she’d been frightened into it overnight. Her cleft chin gave her a cartoonish profile. Her nose was fine, but her dull brown eyes crowded above it, too close together in a predatory descent. Three small moles sat under her left eye, but other than that, her face was entirely without blemish, not even the vestiges of acne. Her forehead had a slightly Neanderthal look, though, the way it jutted out beyond reasonable facial standards. If she were a straight man, she honestly wouldn’t have looked at herself twice.

  She drove a 1984 Toyota Celica with vanity plates that read “YO ADRIAN.” No one could drive it but her. This was the only rule she enforced, the one pillar against which she stood firmly planted.

  “That car is the one thing that has never let me down,” she told Scott in the kitchen as he dug through a drawer, searching for chopsticks.

  Sheila had struck its occasional lapses in motion from a near spotless record. How could she possibly fault a car for breaking down when it had been the thing that had brought her to Scott? “What can you say that about in your life?” she asked him in an unusually defiant tone. Tonight was a night she wasn’t backing down on anything.

  “Well, you, I guess,” he answered.

  “Take me out tonight,” she said, grabbing his shoulder and pulling the white carton
of General Tso’s chicken out of his hand. Some of his friends were hosting a party, and she wanted to go. He claimed an almost rhythmic ignorance about it, so for proof, she went and got the invitation that lay on the foyer table.

  “I want to stay in tonight,” Scott said.

  “You don’t want to be seen with me. That’s the real reason you don’t want to go to the party.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “How am I the one being ridiculous?” Sheila said. “We’ve been dating each other for well over eight months, and the only time I’ve ever spent more than a passing moment with someone you know was when your friend Zack ran into us at Safeway and practically chained you down to the produce section so you’d introduce me. It was embarrassing.” Her forehead was sweaty, and she stole quick gulps of air rather than appear winded.

  “You met Ron and Augusta, didn’t you?” he asked.

  “If you call meeting two people staring at them through a windshield trying not to look like a complete idiot then, yes, I’ve met them.”

  She and Scott had been walking up to her car in the parking lot of the Target when he’d spotted the couple circling around in search of a space.

  “I’ll just be a second,” he’d told her.

  She’d watched him flag them over to where her car was parked as she climbed into her driver’s seat. He leaned on the driver’s-side door of Ron’s BMW and crossed his feet, casually resting the toe of his left foot on the pavement in a haughty way, as if he were a raconteur entertaining several adoring fans. The couple nodded along at what he was saying, seemingly enraptured. He beamed. Sheila had remembered sitting with him in a restaurant in Carmel and seeing that same look of adoration on the eyes of fellow patrons, the quick, enthusiastic replies of the waitress as she openly blushed at his questions about the menu. He had that way about him that she so clearly lacked—an ease with people, a confidence.

  The woman, Augusta, a name Sheila found pretentious and undeservingly royal, had darted several glances her way while Scott spoke to them. She saw Sheila watch them, then quickly gestured her way to alert Ron of the soon-to-be-vacant space. Somehow it had failed to enter the woman’s mind that Sheila was actually with Scott (a man Augusta once had tried to make a move on herself, Sheila later learned). When Scott followed Augusta’s pointed finger, Sheila saw a cold stare looking back at her, a glare he might’ve given her had she not been his girlfriend or, even worse, had she been a perfectly benign stranger, vacating their parking space at the Target. For a second, it had knocked the wind out of her.

  Now she went into her closet and sifted through thin plastic bags from the dry cleaners.

  “How about a movie?” Scott suggested brightly.

  “No, we’re going to this party.” She chose a cranberry cocktail dress she’d bought impulsively but had never worn, intimidated by the spaghetti straps and sheer tulle rectangle that hinted dramatically toward her small breasts.

  “You’re going to wear that?” he asked.

  “Yes. And I’m driving too.”

  She made him change out of the T-shirt and jeans he was wearing into a tight, ribbed turtleneck that accentuated his torso and pinstriped pants she’d found in a high-end vintage shop downtown off U Street. She remembered finding an old caramel in the pocket of the pants on her way home, then eating it without much thought, surprised at the enduring flavor of its chalky crème center.

  As they approached the exit on the interstate, Scott rolled down the window. He lit one of Sheila’s cigarettes with the burning stub she’d left in the ashtray. As he smoked, he leaned against the limp shoulder strap of the broken seatbelt. He thrust his hips against the frayed strap that hugged his middle and pulled absent-mindedly at a loose panel on the door. Sheila looked over at him. She enjoyed him this way—tied down for the evening or at least appearing under the illusion of bondage.

  The driveway of the house was lined with candles placed in brown paper sacks, symmetrical designs Rorschached on both sides. It was just the kind of festive suburban touch Sheila wished she could think of herself. She recognized the danger in fooling herself that she was one of these women but felt a cool taste of glory being this close to the places they lived.

  The entire house was lit up and filled with people and noise. It looked like one of those Thomas Kinkade paintings that respond to changes in light. Sheila had bought one during their trip to Carmel. The man in the gallery had told her they were fashionable to have in the dining room. When they had returned from their trip, she hung it up at Scott’s, then spent the whole dinner that night jumping out of her seat to dim the lights, changing the little country cottage in the painting from daytime to night, candles alit in the upstairs windows like the house was just waiting for someone to come home. She had caught her reflection in a silver water pitcher and stared back at it triumphantly.

  Pulling into the driveway, Sheila ran one hand down the side of her dress, checking for creases (momentarily forgetting the dress never had been worn) and gripped the steering wheel with the other. She spotted an empty space in the turnaround but hesitated before taking it—they’d most likely be blocked in. She heard noises from the house—the sounds of people and laughter. There were shadows cast against the walls. She maneuvered her car into the empty space.

  Scott took her coat out of the backseat and helped her into it. Her high heels made muffled clinks on the brick walkway, grinding atop the remains of late-winter sandings. When she pressed the doorbell, Scott’s hand quickly clasped hers.

  “Scott! Welcome, welcome! I see you’ve brought Sheila. Please, both of you, come inside.” The voice was so gracious, so hospitable that it took Sheila a moment to register that it belonged to Augusta. She was the hostess of this party—Augusta, whose small hands she now felt around her side, already taking an arm out of her coat like Sheila was at a fancy restaurant. Augusta led her toward the living room with such steady briskness—the smile on her face never changing from a perfect, balanced fullness—that Sheila could only faintly register Scott’s sudden absence from her side.

  Someone handed Sheila a drink, a man (Augusta’s Ron perhaps, although, she’d forgotten what he looked like entirely). She latched on to it with a spidery grip. She could see from the dark, flat amber and soda that it must be whiskey, although there didn’t seem to be enough soda mixed in; the pieces of ice bobbed up and down like chips of plastic that would never melt. She held the red cocktail napkin to the bottom of the glass and took a quick gulp; the liquor burning her throat on its way down.

  She pulled her lips into a half grimace but then quickly produced a look that was almost satisfaction. That delirious sense of abandon she had felt when she’d wriggled herself into the cranberry dress at home had mysteriously disappeared on their way to the party. Now, surveying the other women, she wished she had stuck with something a bit more low-key. A little black dress maybe. Something ingratiating that would’ve allowed her to blend into the crowd, the unobtrusive color of typing ink.

  The couch was occupied. Sheila took another long sip, groped for the cushioned edge, and sat down, crossing her legs. This is going to be okay, she told herself. Already she felt things were moving along swimmingly.

  The group on the couch was seated boy-girl-boy-girl, yet no one seemed to be romantically linked. They were just a group of friends—early-to-mid-thirties professionals. Sheila felt she easily could blend in.

  They were discussing a current film she had not seen. It was one of those art-house movies that always seemed to be playing in a small theater stuffed between a used record store and an Indian restaurant in a part of the city Sheila was not accustomed to visiting.

  Sheila was utterly resistant to buzz of any kind. She heard about movies years after they’d come out, in outdated film guides in waiting rooms and on late-night showings on television. Turned off by the dreary subject matter, she mostly avoided art films altogether, preferring more traditional fare—comedies with irascible yet endearing old people; mysteries set i
n small, backward towns where the detective always learned something new about himself, eclipsing the predictably melodramatic conclusion of the case in importance.

  She once had thought of her own life as a movie, especially when she’d been in the hospital. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by way of My Fair Lady—a movie you couldn’t help but watch over and over because the lead character was just so endearing. Of course, she wouldn’t have played herself. Even the plain girl in the movies had something to tweak, some raw potential for a possible mid-plot makeover.

  When Scott had entered her life so serendipitously—pulling over that day to help her on the Beltway when she’d stupidly run out of gas, driving her to safety, then doing the sweetest thing of allowing her to take him out for a thank-you lunch, this gorgeous Good Samaritan—it had all only heightened what she always had privately viewed as the cinematic quality of her life.

  After the beginning months of their relationship, however, she began to feel as if she were perpetually ensconced in a grand mix-up. As if only having been asked to run lines with a gorgeous actor, she had suddenly found herself pushed under the stage lights, playing out a scene for which she hadn’t rehearsed. A character far, far out of her range. As the movie played on, she watched Scott’s character change. He became someone different from the person he’d been in their first scenes. He had transformed into someone she didn’t recognize: an antagonist. Someone she had started not to like yet felt very eager to please. Even their conversations felt scripted now, with her own lines veering toward the role of the fool, the fall guy. Their love scenes were stale, undeserving of her steep, one-sided climaxes.

  “What did you think about the ending?”

  “Excuse me?” Sheila answered, clutching her drink closer.

  “The ending of the movie. Was it a suicide or an accident?” the man asked, leaning toward her, his eyebrows hatefully arched.

  “An accident,” she said. “Most definitely an accident,” she added for emphasis.