If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories

  Outside, he could hear the neighing turn to screaming—some kind of whining followed by a shout, and then what sounded like a chant, a few girls chanting a nursery rhyme in a chorus. Through the window over the kitchen sink he could only see the sun on their hair. Shining and whipped about, the flash of a rope, light bouncing off something rubbery and white that must have been the sole of a little girl’s shoe tossed into the air.

  And children!

  What fools they’d been to think that they should have one, and in this way! That their child would blossom and bring them joy if they raised her in this place. Mall rats and sitcom watchers. They should have moved to Greece, had a baby there, lived near the sea. Or bought a little farm. Home-schooled her. Shoot Your Television was a bumper sticker Tony actually loved. He should have shot their television. If he bought a gun, he still could.

  “I don’t think this is a good time to talk,” Melody said.

  “When would be a good time to talk?” Tony asked.

  When he’d called a few weeks ago and told her he needed to talk to her she said she didn’t want to talk on the phone. He’d hung up and immediately gone to the west corner of his apartment living room and ripped a large strip of the wall-to-wall carpeting up. Under that carpet, there were just ugly plywood boards, sawdust, loose tacks.

  “When would be a good time to talk?” he repeated.

  “I don’t know,” Melody said. She threw the silverware she’d been scraping into the little basket in the dishwasher and stood up, facing him.

  Jesus. She was a hundred times more beautiful than she’d been when she was younger. Back then, he’d have had to admit, there was something a bit blank, slightly asexual, about her face. Unformed, unopinionated, a fresh slate. He could still see her sipping that chocolate shake or whatever she’d had in that lidded paper cup at Pizza Bob’s, that sweet-seeming thing she was sucking up when he’d met her, and the first glimpse he’d had of her childhood bedroom when she’d brought him home to meet her parents. That narrow white shelf on the wall lined with paperbacks—Go Ask Alice, Love Story, Jaws, The Bell Jar, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And a banner tacked to the flowered wallpaper. THE CLASS OF SEVENTY-NINE.

  Tony had known instantly that, had they gone to the same high school, he would have despised her, that she was precisely the kind of girl he would have despised. He’d been editor of the newspaper, constantly on the verge of being expelled for something he’d published or written. He’d played drums in a jazz band. Hated music you could hear on the radio. The girls he’d liked had smoked cigarettes and written angry poetry, listened to Patti Smith. It’s why he’d been attracted to that other girl, the history major with her sleepy eyes, radiating dissatisfaction. She could have been a novelist’s wife. Either that or she’d have knocked the stupid notion of writing a novel out of his head in one biting remark, and he could have gotten on with his life.

  But somehow, and wonderfully, over the years, Melody had become that history major. Now, sure, there were lines around her eyes, some kind of tugging going on there, and she looked her age, but she also looked like a woman who knew things about the world, things she’d rather not divulge, but could divulge, if push came to shove. There was something, too, he supposed, about mothers. All that potential ferocity. Touch my baby, and I’ll rip your throat out.

  And her body. Completely familiar, every curve and freckle, the smell and the taste of it. He could have made his way blindfolded through a stadium full of naked women and found his way to her. She had been one part of what he’d wanted, back then, and now she’d become the other part as well. It was incredible, really. He put his hand on the side of her face, and it surprised him that she didn’t flinch away. “Please,” was all she said, shaking her head, sending those dangling pearls swinging in their slow arcs.

  “Please what?” Tony asked.

  “Please don’t make this so much harder than it has to be.”

  “I just need to say a couple of things, that’s all,” he said.

  “Parents are going to start pulling in here to get their girls,” Melody said. “This isn’t a good time to say them. Maybe next week we can. …”

  “No,” Tony said, and pushed his fingers more deeply into her hair. “Next week you won’t want to either.”

  Melody inhaled and was about to say something—perhaps say it softly, perhaps make some kind of offer—when the fucking doorbell rang.

  He let his hand drop. He sneered. “I’ll get it,” he said.

  It was the fat one.

  “The girls are around back,” Tony said pleasantly enough, and then he shut the door.

  “You could have invited her in,” Melody said when he got back into the kitchen. She was latching the dishwasher with one hand and the other hand had found its way to her hip. In the few seconds since he’d left, everything had changed.

  “Why would I have invited her in?” Tony asked.

  “Because she’s the mother of one of our daughter’s friends.”

  “Well,” Tony said, heart pounding hard at the tone of her voice, “excuse the hell out of me.”

  Melody flushed. He could even see the blood splashed on her chest, just above her breasts. When the dishwasher was safely locked behind her, she clipped past him out the kitchen door, headed, apparently, for the dining room table where the girls’ hot-dogs were still half-eaten and moldering on their Barbie Birthday plates. But before she crossed the threshold, Tony grabbed her arm, hard, without realizing how hard until he saw the look on her face, the quick surprised flash of pain.

  “Don’t touch me,” she hissed.

  But he couldn’t help it. He yanked the arm harder, and Melody stumbled into him. What looked like tears started up in her eyes, but they might just have been stinging from the pain, or dilated in the bright kitchen light, or narrowed to glare at him. She pulled away, but when he just held on tighter she whimpered a little and went limp.

  “I want to talk,” he said, close to her face.

  There was a smell females had when they were scared, and she had it. Some kind of adrenaline. He’d smelled it on Melody before—beside him at the doctor’s office when they’d been told that she was pregnant, once when they were broadsided by a sports car at an intersection downtown. He’d smelled it before that on his mother on a plane during turbulence, on Amy Malone beside him on the roller coaster at Cedar Point. And he’d smelled it on his sister when he tried to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the Vandermulen’s back lawn the night after her high school graduation when, one minute, she’d been drinking a beer on the sloped roof of the Vandermulen’s house with her boyfriend Mick, and the next she was lying on that lawn.

  Tony himself had been drinking a beer, staring at the sky. Someone had car doors open and a stereo blasting “Stairway to Heaven” into the twilight while a low plane’s red eye blinked slowly across their suburb. He was so stoned that the guy he was joking around with on the patio seemed to be speaking to him without moving his mouth when he said, “Your sister’s on the roof, man,” and Tony Harmon said, “Cool,” and when he looked up he could see that his sister was rowing her arms in the air.

  Wow, he’d thought, his sister was going to fly, she was going to fucking fly right off the roof. Cool.

  “Talk,” Melody said. “Just hurry up and talk.”

  “I’ll take my time,” he said.

  And then the doorbell rang again, so loud this time he dropped her arm without intending to, and Melody hurried away from him toward the door. One of the dining room chairs was knocked over on its side when she bumped into it, and it fell with a dull empty sound onto the carpet, hardly a sound at all.

  It wasn’t a tackle, exactly, just one arm around her waist, but Melody had been moving fast and the force of his intercepting her caused her to stumble over his arm to her knees. When she tried to get to her feet again he had to throw his weight into it to keep her down.

  “Let me up!” she yelled, too loud. They were only yards from the front door,
and some girl’s mother was standing just on the other side of it, so Tony Harmon put his hand over his wife’s mouth and pushed her into the carpet. They lay like that for quite a while. The doorbell rang one more time, and then he heard voices. Must have been the fat one again. “The girls are around back,” someone said, and then there was the sound of another car pulling into the driveway.

  Melody was panting, furious, but if she’d really wanted to she could have bitten his hand, the one covering her mouth, and she didn’t. He felt grateful and a little sad, somehow, that she didn’t. He stood up then and pulled her to her feet, and when he said, “Get upstairs and stay there or I’m going to make a scene nobody around here will ever forget,” it almost made him weep, the way she did it, the little slumping resignation of her thin shoulders, as if he’d said it in such a way she wouldn’t dream of refusing.

  Had he?

  One of the earrings had fallen off and it lay near the toe of his shoe on the carpet. He picked it up and handed it to her and said, “I’ll be right up.”

  Tony stepped outside, where the attractive one and the fat one were standing in exactly the same attitude in which he’d first encountered them, though now they were in the backyard instead of the driveway. The girls were still running around in some kind of choreographed chaos that must have been a game, the rules of which they’d internalized. “Oh, hi there,” the attractive one said. “Must have been a good party, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” Tony said, nodding and finding himself better able to smile casually than he had been a few hours before. He put his hands in his pockets in what he thought would appear to be a fatherly and ordinary manner. “I think the girls burned off some energy. Ate a lot of cake.”

  “Oh, that’s great,” the fat one said. “Thanks for having them.”

  “Hey,” he said, “thanks for bringing them. My daughter made out like a bandit.” Tony nodded in the direction of the laundry basket full of presents she’d ripped into before they’d lit the candles on her cake. “Oh,” he said as if he’d just remembered something. “You know, I wanted to ask you if it might be possible to send my daughter off for a sleepover with one of yours tonight. Melody and I have some, well—stuff to iron out, and. …” Both women began to nod gravely and pleasantly at the same time, confirming what he’d known all along, that they were privy to every detail of his marital troubles.

  “Oh, she’s welcome to come with us,” the attractive one said.

  “Well,” the fat one said, “as a matter of fact, we were going to invite any of the girls who wanted—”

  “That would be great,” Tony said, shaking his head and sighing. “That would help so much.”

  “Well, why doesn’t she just come home with us now. The girls can take a swim in our pool, and then—”

  “If I picked her up about, say, ten o’clock tomorrow morning, would that—?”

  “She can just spend the day, too, if she wants to!”

  Tony Harmon called his daughter over and told her the plan, and her reaction was simply to hop up and down on one foot cheering.

  “I’ll go inside and ask Melody to get a few things for her,” Tony said. “You know, jammies, toothpaste.”

  The matrons were all smiles. A few more just like them found their ways into the backyard (“Oh, here you are. I rang the doorbell—”) and each shook his hand heartily and then stood uneasily in his backyard, watching the girls dash around shouting unintelligible words at one another. Beetleblood. Askmedoodle. Everyone commented on the heat, but no one said a word about the humming of the electrical lines until Tony finally insisted that they all stop and listen.

  “Listen,” he said, holding up a hand. “It’s there. It’s terrible. You’ve just gotten used to it.”

  Three or four matrons cocked their ears to the sky, and Tony could see the sound of it register on their faces. Oh, yes, they agreed, that high whine, that incessant buzzing. Really, it was something.

  And, now, as if in response to being heard, the sound swung and surged, widened and narrowed. It was the sound he imagined someone being electrocuted would hear. Wires and heat penetrating a brain in waves. Excruciating. But numbing. And Tony felt good. He’d gotten them to stop, to listen. Even the little girls had begun to gather around, and were silent now, intent, their faces turned up to it, all of them hearing it—the daughters and their mothers looking from the wires to the sky and then back to Tony, focusing in on him as if they could tell that he was a man at the height of his powers, a man who heard things others couldn’t hear, and he felt quite sure that they’d always remember him, and that day, and the way he’d stood there listening to the lines with them, and how, then, as if calling them back to the things of this world, he’d started to talk about the weather, so casually, in his own backyard, as if nothing were the slightest bit out of the ordinary here.

  Our Father

  After our father lost his passport, we had to hide him. By then, this was easier to do than it would have been earlier, before so many other fathers had gone missing. The factory still blew its whistle—some programmed and mechanized cry that couldn’t be stifled—but we never saw any fathers shuffling off to work any longer. That old, gray migration through the ashes with their lunchboxes was over. Now, it was all frantic mothers out there in the streets, trying to look pleasant but with ashes of their own on their lips and under their eyes.

  When there was a knock on the door, one of us would shake him awake, tug him by the arm from the couch, and shove him into the bedroom. The other would wait until the all-clear signal (a faked sneeze) to open the door.

  “Is your father home, little girl?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Who’s that sneezing back there?”

  “That’s just my sister, sir.”

  The wind seemed to move around in the mouths of these official men at our door, as if they’d been wolfing down nothing for so long they couldn’t keep it from coming back out. Old newspapers seemed to blow around behind their official eyes. You could see headlines and obituaries fluttering back there. The expressions on their faces were like car alarms that had been screaming for days and had just that moment gone silent. Some said it was due to the estrogen in the water, these changes in these men’s faces.

  These men, we felt sure, were nobody’s fathers. The actual fathers were not wearing suits like these. They were hunched and exhausted by exhaustion and secreted away under beds and inside bells, as clappers too soft to make a sound.

  “Well, here’s my card. When he comes back—”

  The card always bore a name and an eagle and a blazing bonfire in the traditional colors of red and black.

  “—he’s to check in with his Official. He will of course need to bring his passport.”

  His passport.

  Poor Daddy.

  Every time he crawled out from under the bed after one of these visits, he was covered with dust. It clung to his face and to his arms and back, and no one bothered to brush it off. What would have been the point? There would just be more dust to come. There was no one to sweep the floors now that our mother spent her long days holding her tongue in meetings, or standing beside the conveyor belts. Our father couldn’t do the sweeping because he was busy suffering, and we were too young.

  So, for years we hid our father when there was a knock at the door, and we looked for his passport. We looked under the dustbin and in the ashes and beneath the piles of gray rags that had been left to rot in the kitchen cupboards since our mother had started her new job and we ate nothing but bread and peanut butter.

  We couldn’t find it.

  “Dad, God, where did you have it last?”

  He shrugged. He wiped his eyes. He said, “I’m so sorry, girls. That’s just how I am. You know your old dad. His keys. His glasses.”

  “But this isn’t keys, Dad. This isn’t glasses. This is the only proof of your existence we have.”

  And then they sent our mother to the War, where she was killed in an ambush within
a few hours of stepping onto foreign soil. A group of terrorist-mothers had laid in wait at a train station. We were heartbroken, but at least we knew we weren’t alone. We saw the other children’s mothers also lain out in a row on what looked like a filthy floor, dirty sheets over their faces, their shoes looking as new as our mother’s had the day before she left for the War.

  Since we had no proof of a father, we received our Orphan Benefit packages every third Saturday in a box. Tissues. Rice. Bottled water.

  Our father lost his sense of humor about his situation soon after that. The rags spilled out of the cupboards, onto the floor. We didn’t even know where they were coming from, the rags. They looked like used bandages—not bloody, just sooty. They were dingy and good for nothing except covering up our father, who was completely camouflaged there on the gray couch under the gray rags.

  Soon, we received our notices to report to the Division in which our mother had worked before she was drafted. In a way, it was a relief, getting out of there during the day. Even when the boss was in a bad mood she’d let us joke around with each other. And there were a lot of jokes. So many women standing around a conveyor belt all day—you can imagine.

  Then, after a few years, they declared amnesty for all the fathers who’d lost their passports. The President said she couldn’t think of any reason to go on punishing such long-forgotten mishaps. Fathers were absentminded. It was time we just admitted it, got on with our lives.

  But we didn’t tell our father about the amnesty. What difference would it have made? It might have made him actually feel worse. So we let him go on thinking he was in danger. Sometimes one of us would pretend to knock officially on the door so the other could pretend to hurry him into hiding. It got harder and harder to get him off the couch and then back out from under the bed, so we didn’t do it very often. Just often enough. Things went on quite well like this for quite a long time.

  Surely, we thought, they wouldn’t send us both to the War, being that we were orphans, as far as they knew—but, why wouldn’t they, of course?