If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories

Every day, the angel faced this third power—faced it with the dawn as the pigeons stomped across her shoulders, and as the drunks gathered up their paper bags with bottles, as the dogs came sniffing around. Every night she held her vigil, pondering this power beneath the clouds or the stars, or the vaporous brilliance of Venus, or the hard bright spear-point of Mars, as the lovers wandered through the park, and as the dead children crept out of the memories where they’d been hiding, and gathered around her in the dark.

  Melody

  The street lights were on in the middle of the day, and the telephone lines were humming. What was the hell was this—a power surge, a magnetic storm, some sort of cosmic overload? It was two o’clock in the afternoon, a sky clarified as gin, blanched as death, easily a hundred degrees, not a drop of moisture in the air, and the goddamned streetlights were burning, and the telephone lines were humming.

  Tony Harmon had parked two blocks from the house, hoping he could walk off some of this nervous energy before he got to the front door—but the walk wasn’t working. He was grinding his teeth, he realized, something the dentist had warned him not to do. He put a hand to his jaw to force himself to stop.

  Except for the electric droning of telephone wires, the neighborhood was dead quiet. Even a yappy dog tied to a white birch tree in a front yard stood stone still—prim and proper, utterly silent, only its wet little eyes moving inside its white-whiskery head. Like a dog prop. A decoy dog. When he was already halfway down the block from it, Tony thought he heard it make one sharp yelp at his back, but when he turned to look, the dog was standing exactly where it had been, looking exactly the same, still watching him but not seeming capable of having made a sound. He shifted the birthday presents from one arm to the other.

  This was one of the blessings of being in Nowheresville, U.S.A.—of being in a place where no one knew anyone or wanted to know anyone. There was no one to stop him, to say, “Tony! How are you doing, old boy?” He’d lived among these people for years, but they would not have known him from Adam. There were no front porches, which helped. No one would be sitting on his or her front porch wondering who was that man walking down the street with a bunch of boxes wrapped up in Barbie-doll paper. Why, isn’t that Tony Harmon walking down the street on the way to his own house; now, what do you suppose that’s all about? no one would be asking.

  Here, no one had to be reminded to mind his or her own business. Your neighbors could be lying on their front lawn moaning in agony, and you’d just politely pull your curtains closed so you wouldn’t offend them by noticing. It was that kind of suburb in which, every ten years or so, something horrifying might happen. A kiddie-porn ring busted up. A body wrapped in plastic left at the edge of the driveway for the garbage man. Anyone who was asked for the paper, by the police, or on the television would say, “I never noticed anything unusual. They seemed like very nice people.”

  Did you ever talk to them?

  No.

  Tony was grateful for this as he rounded the corner of Periwinkle and Martin where there was a little neighborhood park—almost always empty unless some father, like himself, was pushing his kid, like his own kid, there on a swing on a Sunday afternoon for an obligatory fifteen minutes. Or if some teenagers were slumped stupidly on the teeter-totters.

  But it never filled up. Anyone in the park would move on as soon as someone else came to the park.

  It was hardly even a park. A thousand pounds of sand tossed between two benches—benches with little brass plaques screwed into them, plaques which bore the names of dead people whose families had donated money for benches in their memories. Someone had scratched FUCK with a key or a penknife into one of the plaques. DICK-HEAD over the other, if his memory served him right.

  But this afternoon the swings were hanging completely dead in the breezeless heat, so motionless and sober it took Tony’s breath away to see them, punched him in the gut—and then he was doubled over, presents tumbling out of his arms onto the sidewalk, at his feet, sounding hollow and absurd as they hit the sidewalk.

  He couldn’t breathe. Jesus. He couldn’t breathe.

  He couldn’t breathe.

  But his mouth was open, he was certain of that because a string of spit rolled out of it onto the cement between his shoes (his shiny work shoes, why the hell hadn’t he worn sneakers? this was a little kids’ party for chrissake and he might be expected to chase a ball in the back yard), and tried to calm himself down.

  It was okay. It was okay. It was just the goddamned park.

  The swing, he hadn’t seen the swing for seven weeks. Of course. It was the swing. It was okay.

  And then he was breathing again, swallowing whatever fluid it was that had flooded his lungs and face. He put the crook of his elbow to his eyes and shook his head into the bleached smell of his white sleeve.

  Deep inhalation. Slow exhalation. Calm down. He was just a man on the corner who’d dropped some packages. Just a few boxes. Maybe one, the one with the Prom Barbie in it, was dented on the side, but there was nothing fragile in any of these, nothing that couldn’t withstand a little impact. Nothing going horribly wrong here. Nothing which, if someone had seen it, wouldn’t have looked like a simple stumbling. The sidewalks were full of cracks. Maybe he’d caught the toe of a shoe in a crack and dropped the birthday present. Maybe he was an uncle visiting from out of town. Maybe he’d parked down the road from his house because he was planning to surprise the Birthday Girl (Here I am, just back from a weekend business trip!) Or maybe he was having trouble with his car, or was leaving enough room on the block for the other partygoers. In any case, he was just a man who’d dropped some packages and who was now bent over to pick them up.

  Everything was fine. Nothing out of the ordinary here.

  And, besides, what was ordinary?

  Everything was ordinary.

  Separation was certainly ordinary, as was divorce. Far stranger domestic situations than these were ordinary. Surely you could knock on any door in any suburb like the one he was walking through and find stories just like his, or much worse stories. He’d heard a joke not long ago:

  An elderly couple comes into a lawyer’s office. They tell him they’ve been married for seventy years, and they want to get a divorce. The lawyer starts the paperwork, but then looks up from his legal pad and says, “Can I ask you a question. Why, after seventy years, do you want to get a divorce now?” to which they answer, “We wanted to wait until the kids were dead.”

  It was funny, no doubt about it. People got married, they got divorced. They got married with all this hoopla. Miles of white satin, bad music, religious pomp, rice tossed all over the church steps. There were cans tied to the bumper of the car. Thousands of dollars worth of food and drink. A whole entourage of old pals in tuxedos and bridesmaids in lacy tents. Mounds of presents. Big, big, sacred promises sealed with hocus-pocus and a lot of waving of the hands, invocations of God and the four winds and the spirits of the ancestors—and then one day one of them just says, “Well, maybe it’s time to move on.”

  Move on!

  Shouldn’t the preacher who married the couple in the first place have to fly back in on a broomstick for that, too—that moving on? Shouldn’t there be some ritual involving a long walk over hot coals while all the guests who’d been at the wedding watched, weeping, throwing stones at your bare backs. Followed by the traditional Burning of the Gifts. Everyone would gather to watch the toaster and blender explode. Followed by the sacrificial drowning of a bridesmaid, the one who’d caught the fucking bouquet?

  The marriage counselor they’d gone to for the first few weeks of the separation, the one Tony Harmon had chosen himself from the list of possibilities Melody had compiled, and now wished he hadn’t (back then he’d assumed that a man would be on his side) had said to them in that imploring therapy voice, “It seems to me that the two of you have both really changed over these years, that maybe you’ve grown in separate directions, and—”

  “So, we should just go and get a
fucking divorce?” Tony had blurted out.

  Immediately, he regretted it. Cursing was one of his wife’s complaints about him. The therapist had inhaled and exhaled so slowly and completely that the breeze of it fluttered the pages of the notebook on his lap.

  “Separation,” the therapist had said. “I don’t usually give this kind of, well, specific advice, but I’ve listened to both of you for three weeks now, and I think that—”

  His wife was nodding (nodding, nodding, nodding) beside him. Tony could hear her earrings make a muffled rattling in her hair. She was all dressed up—pantyhose, high heels—and since she’d come straight from dropping their daughter off at school and was going straight home to read books about relationships and talk to her best friend on the phone, Tony had to assume she’d dressed up for the therapist.

  Still, he wasn’t jealous about that. The guy was frankly ugly—bulbous nose, shiny lips—so Tony doubted that his wife had dressed up because she had the hots for their marriage counselor. Instead, he figured, Melody was showing the whole world what a lovely piece of work she was: a woman who could have had any man she’d wanted, but who’d chosen, mistakenly, this idiot sitting next to her in a marriage counselor’s office.

  The pantyhose, especially. Tony wanted to turn and slug her hard in the face because of those pantyhose, but he also didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. He knew she’d just jump out of her seat with a big smile on her face pointing at him, looking to the therapist, bleeding and screaming, “See! See what I mean!”

  And in truth Tony had never once hit another living human being. He’d beaten up his sister’s stuffed panda once after his sister was dead, but even that had felt wrong and he’d ended up sobbing into its dusty smelling fur, begging it to forgive him.

  “It seems to me,” the therapist had gone on, “that you’ve come to a crossroads—”

  “Shut up,” Tony had said, “enough,” to which the therapist sat up straighter and opened his eyes wider, looking as if he’d just snapped out of a dream—a dream in which he’d been filing forms and listening to Muzak, maybe naked.

  “Tony!” Melody said, turning on him so fast he could tell she’d been waiting to do it all along.

  “Bullshit,” Tony had said. “I’m not paying this asshole seventy-five dollars an hour to tell me to get a separation. I’m paying him to fix this fucking marriage.”

  It was all he could think of to say. Really, he wasn’t sure what he was paying the asshole for. He wasn’t so stupid he really believed a marriage counselor could “fix” a marriage. Maybe marriage counselors were paid to tell you to separate. Maybe, for fuck’s sake, that was the best thing to do when you came to these “crossroads.” God knew that that he, Tony Harmon, didn’t know.

  But, desperately, Tony didn’t want to do anything. He was completely happy with his marriage exactly the way it was.

  Tony rounded another corner:

  There was his house.

  He tried to walk more slowly, look around him as he walked. La. La. La. Sky. Bush. Sidewalk. Then, stabbing light off the chrome of some bitch’s bumper got him right in the eye, and although he looked away as quickly as he could, for a good ten seconds he was a blind man. When he could see again he found himself halfway down the block to his house, blinking at the black silhouettes of two women in his driveway.

  Witches bent over some brew. Or suburban matrons spinning their car keys on their fingers.

  Was it his imagination or did they drop their voices to hushed whispers when they saw him?

  He kept walking, kept blinking, and the two silhouettes—taking on details now: fatness, thinness, lipstick—kept staring at him as if they didn’t recognize him.

  “Hi. I’m the birthday girl’s father,” he called out to them, and they laughed then, darting nervous glances at one another. The slim and attractive one seemed to look meaningfully at the one with an ass the size of her minivan’s bumper. They obviously hadn’t expected company, and didn’t want it. Their daughters (what were their names. Kari? Keeley?) must have already gone inside.

  “Howdy,” Tony said as if he hadn’t already greeted them, and they smiled identical frozen smiles back at him.

  “Oh, hi, Tony.”

  He smiled with his mouth closed before making a feeble effort to smile more widely. But his face simply would not cooperate. Something was wrong with his face. Tony felt as if it had been sprayed with glue. It wasn’t budging. No toothy smile for the ladies today. They exchanged glances again.

  “Too hot today if you ask me!” the fat one exclaimed as if someone had asked her.

  “Yes, it is,” Tony said, surprised and relieved to find his lips moving. “And these damn telephone lines are humming.”

  They looked at him blankly, as if they had no idea what he meant.

  But how could they not? That continuous flat-line of pandemonium going on over their heads—exactly what Tony imagined it might sound like in the last few seconds before the chainsaw cut straight into your skull. They didn’t hear that?

  Or, stranger yet, they did and it didn’t bother them?

  “Well, have fun!” the attractive one said. “It looked like the girls were already tearing the house up in there a few minutes ago.”

  “Oh, well,” Tony said, and stood there expecting them to say good-bye and head for their vehicles. But they didn’t, and then he realized that they were waiting for him to leave so they could continue their conversation or start a new one. In his driveway.

  He wasn’t, after all, the host of this party. It wasn’t his job to see them off. He’d already paused too long. The longer he stood there looking at them, the more their smiles began to loosen—a slow fading, slackening, a melting. As if they thought he might have been expecting them to keep up this facade of friendliness all day, and they were letting him know that they had no intention of doing so. Finally, he nodded, waved with the free fingers of his left hand, and turned, thinking smugly and reflexively, as he so often had in the last years, how glad he was not to be married to women like this—chatty Cathies, parochial suburbanites, uneducated half-wits who. …

  But it took only a moment for the cold fact to sink in that he soon was not going to be married to the kind of woman he preferred, either—a woman like Melody—someone natural, a little sentimental, whose taste in furniture and clothing ran from Third World garage sale to Victorian floral, who wouldn’t drive a minivan to save her life. (“What can they be thinking? That the world has an unlimited source of fossil fuel?”) A woman without a bad word to say about anyone but him.

  Well, maybe she was too sweet, he consoled himself. Maybe such positive thinking was its own kind of poison. Why, he wondered, hadn’t he come to an understanding of this in time to tell the marriage counselor, to make a little speech of his own: His wife was too sweet. Too sentimental. She’d never grown up. She was exactly the college girl he’d known in Great Women Writers at their little liberal arts college in 1981. She’d dismissed Emily Dickinson, preferring Christina Rossetti. She’d loved Pride and Prejudice, but never finished reading Wuthering Heights. And Tony Harmon knew why. It was the same reason she now had a bumper sticker on her Volvo that said Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty. “What are my other options?” he’d asked her when he saw that bumper sticker for the first time.

  “Just be nice, Tony,” she’d said, squeezing his arm. “Please don’t start in.”

  But the world just wasn’t like that. The world was dark and wind-swept with a lot of off-rhyme and very few jubilant endings. If Melody wanted to blame him for that, let her.

  And these awful women in his driveway gossiping viciously about him—well, maybe the men who’d married them had known what they were doing. Maybe it would work out better for them. And even if Tony had managed to make this little speech about what was wrong with his wife while it still mattered, it wouldn’t have mattered. The marriage counselor would have shaken his head, sighing. You just didn’t get it, still, idiot, tha
t soft little prick might as well have been saying out loud.

  Tony walked up to his front door.

  His front door—on which, he supposed, Miss Manners would advise him to knock and then to wait patiently until it was answered and he was invited in.

  Who, he might have asked Miss Manners, do you suppose is making the mortgage payments on this beast? Who, he imagined wagging a finger close to Miss Manners’s face as he went on, close enough to make her flinch, do you think is still paying back his parents for the fucking down payment they loaned him ten years ago to buy this noble family home?

  In Tony Harmon’s imagination Miss Manners had hair as hard and gray as a helmet and a completely featureless expression. His sister used to have dolls like that. Dolls without faces. All lined up on the shelf above her bed, inexplicable and horrible.

  Or, that’s how Tony remembered them. Which might have been a false memory. Because, why? Why would a little girl have dolls with no eyes or mouths? Had they been some kind of homemade doll—never finished, heads just stuffed socks?

  Well, what did he know. It’s just what he remembered. A whole row of little dolls without faces above his sister’s bed, seeming to be feeling nothing, thinking nothing.

  He stared at the front door, and then noticed a doorbell near his right hand. Had he even known he had a doorbell? Had he ever once rung his own doorbell, or gone to the door after the bell had rung? If he had, something had wiped his memory completely clean of this glowing button, which was like a tiny harvest moon or the orange eye of a lit cigarette.

  He shifted the birthday presents into his left arm, holding one of them steady with his chin, and then inserted his finger into the eye, and the sound it made might as well have been a gunshot, so loud he could practically feel the reverberation of it moving through the rooms of his house, a burning wind kicked up by that ding-dong, and imagined it knocking Melody’s makeup bottles off her dresser, clearing the kitchen of coffee cups and napkins, blowing the bath towels right off their racks. A cool sweat broke out on his neck, and he stepped back.