If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories (4 page)

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,
that 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.

Now, Tony could hear girls shrieking on the other side of the door. Then, he saw the knob turn, slowly, counterclockwise, and then a purplish darkness cracked open between the doorjamb and the weatherstripping—which he’d nailed up there last winter (a really cold winter, the heating bills soaring so high he knew he had to do something, and this narrow strip of green felt was all he could think of to do) and which made the door so difficult to close that you really had to put some shoulder into it.

However,
opening
the door had never been a problem.

It opened.

And, behind the glass storm door (another source of conflict, because Melody had wanted screens, to which Tony had said why bother since as soon as it got warm they’d be turning on the central air-conditioning anyway) stood Melody, with one hand on her hip (her hip!) and the other still on the doorknob. She opened the door then, and stood in front of him, as if to block his entrance or to keep him from seeing something that was going on behind her, although she said, “Come in.”

“You’re in my way or I would,” Tony said, and she gave her head a little snap that sent her earrings swinging in slow arcs between her earlobes and her shoulders. The pit and the pendulum. He couldn’t help but stare. They were gold strands with little pearls at the ends.

“Can you give me a hand here?” he said, nodding toward the boxes in his arms.

He knew it had sounded accusatory by the way she narrowed her eyes and snatched a package from him, and turned her back.

But, Jesus God she was gorgeous. Even her
back
was gorgeous. Was there any thirty-eight-year-old woman on the planet who looked as good as this? She’d done it to spite him. Lost some weight. Done up her hair (that deep red, she knew it was exactly how he
liked it) and worn these tight jeans and some kind of exotic looking blouse. An armful of bracelets. Tony did not recall before in their years together ever once seeing his wife wearing more than one bracelet at a time—but there they were, a magnificent gathering of chains and bangles slipping around from her wrist to her elbow. She turned to see if he was following her and, it seemed to him, to show him that her skin was flawless. Radiant. Maybe she’d actually gone to the trouble of getting some kind of facial or makeover to torment him.

And the neck. It was a cliché, Tony knew it, but his wife’s neck was
exactly like a fucking swan’s,
and Tony knew precisely what it would smell like if he buried his face in the corner between her ear and her shoulder, there where the little pendulums were swinging as she inhaled. He stepped over the threshold, and she glanced down at the shoe.

She was, of course, thinking about the shoe.

The wrong shoe. The business shoe worn to a child’s birthday party.

To show her he could care less what she thought of his shoes, Tony butted the door (storm door!) open the rest of the way with his elbow, and then let it slam behind him. And then, fully inside the house, he was hit by a blast of air so cold he thought it might knock him right over, while his wife disappeared around the corner of their living room so quickly he considered chasing her, tackling her in the hallway, pressing her wrist (the one without the bracelets) against the ugly rug her mother had hooked for their anniversary years before, while the little girls screamed and his daughter shrieked, “Daddy. No. Daddy!”—
anything
to make her slow down, stop her from walking off into the house as if she had somewhere to go inside it without him, as if it didn’t make the slightest bit of difference to her that he was there (a guest, a guest in his own house!) and that, trying to find his way to the family room, he might become hopelessly lost.

“Daddy!”

Tony Harmon’s daughter tossed herself in his direction with such force it made him stumble backward, slipping dangerously for
a moment on the ugly mother-in-law rug (an accident waiting to happen, he’d always said. the floors were too slick for a rug without a pad under it, someone was going to break his goddamned neck) before his back was to the wall.

His daughter flung her arms around his waist, kissing his belly showily, making loud pretend-kissing sounds while the other girls watched from the family room. One child in particular—a dark-haired thing with olive skin—caught and held his eye. It seemed to Tony that she wore a disapproving look on her small, triangular face.

“Honey,” he said to his daughter, trying to smile, patting her hair with his palm, inching away at the same time while she continued to fake the kissing noises loudly, now in the direction of his face. Was it the light in the hallway, or was she wearing makeup? There was something strangely new and flamboyant about her eyes, batting up at him, a cartoon character.

And her hair.

There was no doubt about it now. It was getting darker. His daughter was going to be a dishwater blond like his sister. All that flaxen angel-hair of babyhood was gone. It had gone straighter, too. Not ringlets any longer. Not even, really, curls. Some kind of fineness that had frayed. Years before, when Tony had first realized that his daughter might not have golden ringlets all her life, it had occurred to him—horribly, unforgivably!—that he might stop loving her if she grew ugly, if she became a square-shouldered adolescent with bad skin and his sister’s mouse-gray hair. He’d been watching her on the beach, and in his mind had projected his little girl into the future—trying to picture her as a young woman already at the edge of that vastness, tossing a tiny stone into the water, a little speck of gravity which had vanished—and suddenly he realized that the grown woman she would be did not have, could not have, the flaxen hair of his little girl.

Would he love her, then, without that, as much as he loved her with it?

Well, of course he would! He’d loved her bloody and squirming
with a head shaped like a banana screaming her lungs out, jaundiced and hairless and toothless, just delivered like some kind of terrifying package sloppily addressed to him and Melody when she was born. Loved her completely. Monstrously. An annihilation of utter love. How could ever he stop?

“Daddy, daddy, daddy,” she said now in her phony little-girl voice.

“Hi there, silly,” he said. “Happy birthday.”

“Hi, Mr. Harmon,” the girl with the triangular face said, and it surprised him, his name on the lips of this tiny stranger. For one thing, almost none of his daughter’s friends actually called him
Mr.
Anything—not even Mr. H, which had been what his friends (the most familiar ones, the ones who hung out at his house every day for years) had dared to call his father so informally. His daughter’s friends had called him Tony from the start. He’d never encouraged that, feeling that children ought to at least
sound
respectful of the adults they addressed, but these girls seemed to have been born on a first-name basis with the world.

“Hello there,” he said, wishing he could remember the girl’s name. He knew she’d spent the night in his house more than once, and had a vague memory of his daughter lying on the floor beside this girl, the two of them propped up on pillows watching
The Wizard of Oz,
and Tony suspected that this girl’s mother was one of those two women who’d been standing in his driveway when he walked up. But that was all. After that, he drew a blank.

“Time for lunch!” Melody called from the dining room, out of which the smell of something flowery and chemical drifted—something canned, sprayed around, feminine. Cake. His daughter let go of him and called for her friends to follow. An elbow, a shoulder, a sharp small skeletal something bumped into him as they hurried past and disappeared, after which Tony stood for a few minutes in the entrance to the family room and looked.

Not a thing had been changed, and not a thing was the same. The wedding photos were gone, but they’d been gone a long time. Gone since that first bad fight. What had she done with them after that night? Tossed them in the garbage? Burned them? Crushed
them under the heel of her boot? Tony had never asked. He’d just come home after work that evening and noted without surprise that they were gone.

The videos had slid out of the neat tower he’d forever been struggling to build with them, and they sprawled between the TV and the bookcase, an avalanche of Pooh and Sesame Street and Kid Songs USA. Not one of those movies had his daughter actually watched, to his knowledge, in over two years, but she and her mother had refused to let him toss them out, building a firewall together around them whenever he mentioned the unnecessary mess. Shaking their heads.