Read by Strangers

by Philip Dean Walker

  She picked up a picture on his desk of him and his wife and two college-aged children. It was one of those Olan Mills shots with a stuffy library in the back covered in hardbound classics, like the kind she used to read after school sometimes in the special collections section of the library. The ones she’d look at once, steal a glance at a couple pages in the time it took to wait for whoever it was (Bill or Hank or Drake or LeRon or whoever) to finish football practice so they could go hook up in the back of their car or behind the school. There was a brick wall that she’d hold onto while they did her, a wall with holes in it where bricks were missing or had just crumbled out over time. And sometimes she’d bring the page back up in her mind, the one from the library, and she’d read it right there.

  As she wiped down the picture with a wet rag, she heard the door open.

  “Not my best night,” Mr. Howell said, the man in the picture, shorter than she would’ve imagined, but handsome.

  “Oh, well, I’m—”

  “The night we took that picture. At the country club in a room I’ve never been in more than twice before and we all had to act like it was our cozy little house.”

  “Your children are beautiful.” She wanted to think she was still beautiful herself. Even with the weight and the dowdy uniform the service had her wear like she was the black Hazel or something. She wanted to still look good.

  “Thank you very much. And you are?”

  “Karen.”

  “Karen,” he said like he’d invented the name himself.

  THE LAYOVER IN Memphis was only supposed to be an hour and a half. Sherry and Karen had both packed their entire belongings for the business trip in one suitcase. Black, efficient Samsonites, standard stuff. But Lita had checked an unwieldy suitcase and had carried the gigantic purse with the big straps on the first flight leg.

  “She doesn’t even know how to travel for business,” Sherry whispered to Karen as the two of them trailed behind her en route down the terminal plank.

  “We have to try the barbecue here. My guidebook said that Memphis is known for it,” Lita looked back at them. Karen realized for the first time that day that Lita’s lipstick was the same happy shade of pink as her jumpsuit.

  “Are you telling me that you consulted a guidebook for a city we were going to be spending an hour in?” And not even Memphis proper. The frickin’ airport!”

  “Always be prepared!” Lita answered with a wink. Karen looked at Sherry and the two rolled their eyes in unison.

  “Ridiculous,” said Karen. “Just utterly ridiculous.” And she wasn’t simply referring to the guidebook barbecue which was absolutely not in her diet plan.

  In just three months at the firm, Lita had managed to make herself stand out in all sorts of hideous ways for which neither of the gargoyles could have foreseen nor planned. For one thing, she showed up for work impeccably dressed every morning, walking through the door like she was sashaying down a catwalk. It was like night and day from that raggedy outfit she’d come in wearing the first day. Karen had actually begun to suspect that it had all been an act coming in dressed up so sloppily, something to throw Karen off her game. Mr. Howell, so immoveable in his likes and dislikes, so hard to please (both of them had thought) took to her like she was some sort of siren, whispering incantations into his ear as she handed him his coffee and collated his presentations.

  “She’s so stealth,” said Sherry, watching Lita pass by the two of them on her way into the office, with a careful, courteous nod Karen found steeped in condescension.

  It wasn’t just that she dressed better than the two of them, not an especially difficult feat these days (Karen felt her wardrobe options dipping ever closer to a large, printed tablecloth with a cloisonné belt fashioned out of her granddaughter’s Play-doh and twisted paperclips.) No, it was more than just clothes. Clothes Karen could handle. It was the way Lita wore the clothes and what it meant for her in the office. It was that with each passing day, Lita’s neckline seemed to plunge just a little bit further down, her skirt stopped just a smidge higher above her knees, her blonde bob took on just a little bit more of a sheen. Everything about her was rising. Karen knew what she was doing. She’d done it herself. And there was nothing stealth about it.

  And what was that offensive scent she wore now? Karen would catch a whiff of it as she passed Lita’s desk on her way to the kitchen to make Ramona’s coffee and would feel the urge to pass out, vomit even. It was some type of flower-candy-vanilla crap as if the woman had dipped her face and neck in a milkshake before she left the house. What was it about that smell that made Karen hate her even more? It reminded her of young girls in malls, prowling around in packs, hungrily looking for boys. There was something almost feral in the way she flitted around the office so efficiently like her feet didn’t even touch the ground. As if the simple laws of physics did not apply to her.

  Sherry felt it, too, perhaps less keenly than Karen. (But wasn’t that always the case with Sherry? Latching herself onto Karen like a tick, with never quite enough bite of her own?) Lita only rubbed her the wrong way, tangentially; her very existence didn’t seem to be the direct affront it was to Karen. Sherry had provided the invaluable tidbit that Lita had a boyfriend though.

  “He’s possibly a fiancé. Have you noticed the ring that she wears?”

  “I didn’t really think much of it,” Karen had answered, although she most certainly had noticed it. She just didn’t want to allow for the possibility that Lita was engaged on top of everything else. Engaged, while Karen sat home with Lulu’s daughter, her granddaughter Casey, never married, just knocked up and thrown on the refuse pile. She couldn’t see her toes she’d gotten so fat over the years. “Well, what does Prince Charming look like?” she asked, through gritted teeth.

  “Just like you’d imagine. Tall, young, handsome, kind of perfect, really. There’s a picture on her desk. What else did you expect?” Sherry had answered with a certain amount of baiting to her voice Karen was loath to hear.

  “He probably beats her,” she’d said, and left Sherry alone in the break room.

  The first time that Mr. Howell brought Lita along to Denver to meet with a client, the gargoyles knew something was slipping irretrievably out of their grasp.

  “Have you ever heard of him taking a personal assistant with him to a client meeting? What can she do that I can’t? I just don’t get this,” Karen barked at Sherry, who seemed to shrink behind her monitor for protection as if Karen might breathe fire.

  “No, I definitely haven’t heard that before,” Sherry answered.

  A UPS man walked through the door carrying a package. “Excuse me, ma’am.”

  “What?!” Karen yelled.

  “I have a package for Lita Day.”

  “Oh, god,” Karen said, shaking her head.

  “I’ll sign for it,” Sherry said, looking over at Karen as she signed the man’s electronic tablet.

  “Wonderful. It’s finally arrived,” Mr. Howell said as he walked towards the gargoyles’ desk.

  “What’s finally arrived?” Karen asked, as Mr. Howell began ripping the package open. He pulled out a leather briefcase with gold clasps and a big “L” monogrammed on the front.

  “Lita’s congratulatory briefcase. I’ve promoted her to head of accounts,” he said.

  •

  ALTHOUGH TRAVELING FOR Karen was somewhat of a novelty—she could probably count on one hand the number of times she’d even been in an airport—she did have a distinct feeling of nonexistence in an airport terminal. They were almost like purgatories, all these people walking about aimlessly, waiting out their allotted sentences before being granted final passage through the pearly gates of heaven or across the River Styx into a new kind of hell. Anything seemed possible there and, at the same time, nothing seemed possible. Do I really need that pack of cards with Elvis’s face emblazoned across the King of Spades? Why am I holding this foam beer cozy? Other passengers they passed as they walked down the halls of the terminal
had a similar glazed, herded look as if they were only following the rest of the crowd, not really knowing where they were going or why, just that they must move, they must eat, they must wait in a long line outside of a bathroom they’d never seen before with strangers they’d never see again.

  The gray cinderblock walls, low ceiling and dim fluorescent lighting made the Memphis airport feel as desolate as a rural middle school. The people were glumly filing down the hallways in rows. She saw a large black woman, not unlike herself, wearing a standard-issue smock. She was on her hands and knees cleaning up what looked like a pile of vomit outside of a bathroom. Her hair was ratty and hung in her face and she seemed to be gasping for breath at the stench of the mess in front of her, dousing it with a bottle of yellow ammonia that she then set on a large gray cart beside her stocked with toilet paper, paper towels, soap dispenser refills, and a wilted mop. She looked up at Karen and her eyes were moist around the edges, tears from the fumes of the cleaner.

  Karen knocked into a motorized cart haphazardly parked in the middle of the concourse. “What the fuck?”

  “Girls, let’s try this place.” Lita motioned them over to Sara Jane’s BBQ Palace where a few huddled groups sat around a cascade of open containers of slaw and barbecue, shoveling it into their mouths in a kind of fugue-like ecstasy. “This looks delicious.”

  Then Karen saw the young man that had been on their flight. He was sitting alone at a table at Sarah Jane’s. She’d noticed him catching glimpses at them through the half-closed first-class curtains. It had actually been what prompted her to come up with the little game of giving themselves sexy aliases for the trip. Him, and the pre-flight cocktails. It was her attempt to put all three of them on the same level again, shorten the distance that Lita’s promotion had seemed to put between them. As she walked down the aisle of the plane on her way to the bathroom midway through the flight, she caught his eye and wanted to offer a smile. But she instantly got the impression that she was now in his way. In fact, he was staring right past her, through her it felt like, so that he could watch Lita who had occupied the aisle seat, her legs crossed and her knee bouncing up and down a little like she was laughing. And she could tell that Lita could feel his eyes, too. Arching her neck back as she laughed and bringing her hand up to the small hollow above her sternum in that faint, delicate—frankly white—way that made Karen just want to strangle her. It had taken all she could not to knock into the young man with her fat as she inched her way to the cramped bathroom at the back of the plane. That look on his face was unmistakable. A virile man, starving for a woman.

  “I just got hungry,” she announced to Lita. She pushed Sherry into Sarah Jane’s with the weight of a guided hand.

  “What?” Sherry gave her a puzzled look that Karen quickly met with a slight lift of her eyebrow. If nothing else, Karen was certain that Sherry could follow a lead when she saw one. What a dull crone she was. Karen could’ve gotten her to jump in front of a bus if she just asked her to.

  Karen sat them down at the table right next to the young man and made sure that Lita was facing him. Doesn’t she look delicious, sir? Like a pink powdered honeybun, she wanted to say.

  “What can I get y’all?” asked a waitress. She had that disinterested, vacant look of someone who works in an airport, watching people come and go but never being able to leave herself. Her brown hair matched a swatch of gingham that she had pinned to the lapel of her shirt with a name tag that said “Ella.” Karen could imagine “Ella” spitting in their food without a moment’s hesitation if she didn’t like them.

  With glee, Lita said, “Oh, let me order for everyone!” She opened the laminated menu in front of her like a children’s book, her melon-like breasts caressing the beverage and dessert sections separately. Karen looked over at the young man. He was quite handsome, but there was something she couldn’t place about him that looked familiar. Maybe he reminded her of one of the boys from her high school. That one that was named Carl who she’d notice looking over at her from across the school cafeteria, eating pretzels and drinking fruit punch in a can. He’d wipe his lips with the sleeve of his shirt and he wouldn’t look away when she met his stare head-on. He was blond with the pinkest, most perfect lips and who was she not to give him what she knew he wanted?

  They did it at his place since it was just around the corner from school and his parents both worked. Carl laid out one of his mother’s knit afghans on the couch in the living room and Karen would get on her back. He’d rip off his t-shirt and straddle her, his legs locking hers together so she would get all squirmy, wanting to open them up and get him inside her.

  “You want this?” he’d say, one of his blond curls falling in his face so that he’d have to blow it away from the side of his mouth, just like he’d do when they’d smoke a cigarette afterwards.

  Ella the waitress came back to their table with empty plastic cups emblazoned with the smiling face of Sarah Jane, a sister to Aunt Jemima, Karen thought, with her big smile and plates of hot, steaming barbecue surrounding her like she was cooking up right along with them.

  “I’ll fill these up at the beverage station.” Lita rose from the table. “Sweet tea good with everyone?”

  “I’ll take mine with a splash of lemonade,” Sherry said.

  “Sweet tea sounds just fine to me,” said Karen.

  As Lita walked over to fill their drinks at the beverage station, Karen followed the young man’s eyes to Lita. Her back looked curved and slender in that pink jumpsuit and she had it zipped down just low enough to reveal the color of her brassiere—a sort of dull egg-shell color, like some kind of special edition Victoria’s Secret nonsense.

  “She likes you, you know,” Karen said to the young man. It took a second for him to realize that she was talking to him and it was still like he had to keep one eye on Lita while the other tried to focus on Karen and what she was saying. Lita was picking through a small dish of lemons with a pair of tongs like she was performing surgery.

  “Oh yeah? How d’you know, huh?”

  “She told me, that’s how I know. In fact, she knew that you were watching her on the plane. And she loved it.” The young man inched off his seat closer to her. “Go down the hall to the ladies’ room past the jewelry kiosk. There should be one of those “Caution: Wet Floor” yellow signs next to it. Just wait for her. She’ll be the wet floor.” He scurried away, taking his backpack with him and leaving his tray behind.

  “What are you doing? Are you crazy?” Sherry said.

  “Do you want to go to this client meeting as one of her two office grunts?”

  “No.”

  “Then just shut your mouth and let her do all the work. I can guarantee she’s fucking Howell and that engagement ring on her finger doesn’t mean shit. A little funny business in an airport bathroom is just the kind of thrill a girl like that loves, believe me. We’ll sic security on them and she’ll get dragged out of here like the little whore she is. Easy.”

  “What if he tries something with her? What if she gets hurt?”

  “Him? He’s as harmless as a schoolboy. We’ll send security in there before anything gets out of hand.”

  “I’m back,” said Lita, carrying the tray of iced teas and setting them in front of the two women. “They have the cutest stuffed lamb at the cash register. I might have to get one.”

  “Oh, shit,” Karen said as she knocked over her drink into Lita’s lap. “I am so sorry.” Lita’s tea had splashed down the front of her jumpsuit. Ice and a puddle of liquid was pooled in her lap. Sherry and Karen threw down whatever napkins were on the table.

  “It’s…fine. But I better go get cleaned up,” she said.

  “There’s a ladies’ room right down there on the left. Again, I’m so sorry, Lita.”

  “Accidents happen.”

  They both watched her as she walked down the concourse until she disappeared. Even if Mr. Howell wasn’t sleeping with her, the minute he found out about the incident in the airport, he’d
fire her. No one was going to believe she hadn’t initiated it herself, the way she was carrying on in that tight, pink little jumpsuit, all zipped down with her tits hanging out. And probably drunk on top of everything. And that young man was obviously flirting with her from the second he saw her and she hadn’t exactly been discouraging it.

  Karen started to imagine something else though. What if Lita wasn’t turned on by this young man at all? She might just like to parade herself around for the attention. It didn’t necessarily mean she wanted to bend over, grab hold of a guardrail in a handicap bathroom and take a ride. Or what if he was a registered sex offender? She knew the ones in her neighborhood because she got e-mail alerts and then always, always looked at them. She had a granddaughter and had to be on top of these things. His curly blond hair, and his face that seemed too young for a man in his mid-thirties, that hungry grin she’d mistaken for virility, but could really be viciousness.

  Karen got out of her chair and dashed for the exit. She had to push through a crowd of large people all wearing patriotic paraphernalia, large American flags stretched wide across their bulging bellies, and gigantic pins affixed to their shirts that said “America First!”, a caricature of Donald Trump with a big head and tiny hands and extra orange face winking exaggeratedly with “You’re Fired, Obama!” underneath. They were waiting to be seated and blocking the door. Karen, too big herself, could barely pass through. “Watch it, you black bitch,” a skinny peroxide mother holding a mewling infant said as she accidentally knocked into her.