A Stranger in This World (15 page)

She said, “I’m sorry, I’m being pushy, aren’t I? You go ahead and do whatever you want. I just thought that was a fine thing you did back there and it was like nobody even noticed.”

“That’s all right.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Well, it bothered me. Sure you don’t want a ride horne?”

Kenny was about to say no but he thought for a minute: how would he get home otherwise? Maybe there was nothing too wrong with his knee but he wasn’t looking forward to riding his bike. And there was this other thing, a vague memory of Mrs. Jordan when she was still in his imagination, before she started to talk, before she turned into an adult. It wasn’t much, like a faint perfume. He said, “I guess I could use a ride, if you don’t mind.”

“I’d be delighted to,” she said, smiling, getting her way. He followed her up the gravel drive, shoving his bike. It fit without fuss into the trunk of her Crown Victoria, dark blue with a cream interior. The locks unlocked automatically, the windows all rolled down. Everything was obeying Mrs. Jordan. She swung the big Ford out into the noonday traffic and the cars seemed to part, to make way for her. In her good clean clothes, in her confident driving, she was an adult now, powerful. Kenny felt like what he was: a kid in dirty shorts clutching
a Kleenex to his knee. Kiss it, make it better. His own weakness irritated Kenny.

“That blue boy,” Mrs. Jordan said, and Kenny knew what she meant, exactly, his smallness and the strange, wrong color of his skin. He seemed so quiet and self-contained. In Kenny’s memory, the child sleeping under the water would fit inside a teacup. Then he understood: she wanted to talk it, needed to put it together in her mind. She had held the little cold body too, and the two of them were the only ones who knew.

“What happened back there?” Mrs. Jordan asked. “How did that happen?”

Fuck it, Kenny thought. He said, “I was stoned. I didn’t even see him.”

“Hmmm,” Mrs. Jordan said, then drove calmly onward for a few blocks. Kenny, beside her, was terrified at his own confession. What if she turned him in? The manager wouldn’t be happy till he was behind bars. He didn’t feel stoned at all, he hadn’t since Mrs. Jordan’s dive.

“Stoned on what?” she asked at a stoplight, eyes forward.

“Just smoking dope.”

“That’s not too good of an idea, is it?” A brief glance, enough for him to see she wasn’t angry. “This is a disappointment.”

“Why?”

She considered a moment. “It’s one thing to save a child from circumstance,” she said. “It seems like another thing entirely when it’s just carelessness, right? I really want to believe that I saved that child’s life.”

“You did.”

“But only from you.” She smiled brightly at him, then
pulled away late from the green light. Kenny realized that her words, her manners, were as well thought out and as artificial as her clothes, or her hair. He admired this, too, stuck as he was in sincerity. Brightly, Mrs. Jordan said, “You’re bleeding on my upholstery, there.”

“Shit,” Kenny said, cupping his hand over the wound, wishing away the red-brown stain that had already dried onto the car seat. “Shoot, I mean. I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s OK, say what you want,” Mrs. Jordan said. “You know what I’m going to do?”

Kenny didn’t reply but she went on anyway: “I’m going to stop by my house if that’s all right, put a bandage on that and then get you some ice. I’m afraid it’s going to start to swell up on you if you don’t look out. Is that OK?”

“Sure,” Kenny said, dirty jokes running through his head,
Playboy
cartoons about grocery boys. What did she have in mind? Nothing, he knew: she was doing him a favor and nothing more. But he couldn’t be sure. There was always that other possibility and she looked fine driving down the avenue with her hair all gold again. Mrs. Jordan was sort of coming and going, fading in and out. Kenny found himself looking at the outside of another person, wondering what was going on inside that skin. What was it like to be Mrs. Jordan, what was she thinking? Or: what did she do when she was “thinking”? Was it the same thing that Kenny did, or was it another thing altogether? Kenny thought of the inside of his own mind as a small deserted island, well-worn paths through the tired bushes. The mental landscape of Mrs. Jordan, on the other hand, he imagined as dense with foliage and flowers, a perfumed jungle roamed by wild and dangerous animals, bright eyes glittering elusively.

——

“Here we are,” she said, pulling the Crown Victoria into the drive of a big bland colonial, an exploded dollhouse. As they crawled up the blinding white clean concrete driveway, the garage door rolled obediently open, into the gasoline darkness, and then shut again behind them.

“Would you like a lemonade, or a Coke, or a cup of coffee? We have everything,” she said. “Would you like a beer?”

A beer, he thought immediately, something to calm him down. But he lacked the nerve. “Iced tea, if you have any.”

“We do,” she said. “Of course we do.”

She left him bleeding in the backyard, an even carpet of green punctuated by flowering shrubs, like covered chairs. Beyond the yard rose the edge of a deep, tangled forest. No one could see in, they couldn’t see out. Dappled sunlight, a cool intermittent breeze. Kenny knew this place in dreams: the place of no excuses, no explanations. Everything was perfect. In a moment Mrs. Jordan would come out barefoot and she would stand at the edge of the grass and take her earrings off and then loosen her white shorts and let them fall to the grass and she would step gracefully out of them. Or she would call to him from the upstairs bedroom. Or he would be walking down a hallway, for some reason he couldn’t figure out, and accidentally see her through a half-open door, half-naked, changing out of her damp bathing suit, and she would look up and see that he caught her and look at him with that same open look he had seen at the poolside and then she would open the door and take him by the hand, her own hand still damp from the bathing suit, the white flesh where the sun
didn’t reach … Kenny wondered: where does the shit in my head come from?

“Lemonade,” said Mrs. Jordan, and poured him a glass, though he seemed to remember that he’d asked for something different. Next to the pitcher of lemonade she set a metal roll of adhesive tape and a couple of gauze pads in aromatic waxy envelopes that smelled like Band-Aids, that made him feel like a small child again.

“I’m terrible at first aid,” Mrs. Jordan said. “I’ll try my best but I flunked my merit badge, I’m afraid.”

The fragrance of Band-Aids: Kenny remembered an ordinary afternoon, home from school, contagious but not really sick, eight years old, ears buzzing with fever, reading at the kitchen table—reading a Superman comic book, with Mr. MXYZPTLK as the villain—and his mother boiling hot dogs for their lunch and his father calling, some trivial reminder, and his mother hanging up the phone and sitting silently at the table for a moment, raging, and then standing up and dashing the pan of hot dogs against the wall, splattering the kitchen with boiling water, burning her own hand badly—he remembered the scarlet stretched-tight texture of her skin as she rubbed butter into the burn, not looking at him. Kenny was unhurt, a few tiny droplets landing on the skin of his arm, in places he could still feel: there and there and there. The opposite of this orderly, sunlit yard. I’m not one of you, he thought, looking at Mrs. Jordan’s golden head.

“All done,” she said. A spotless square of gauze was fastened to his leg with tidy strips of tape, a haze of antiseptic school-nurse aroma. “All better,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said, trying to will his attention away from her body. But he had fucked her so many times in his
thoughts that it was hard to stop, and she wasn’t wearing much, and she was right there.

“It wasn’t that bad to start with,” she said. “Jesus, I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“What?”

“That boy, the way he almost drowned.” She eased into a chair, across the glass-topped table from him, and stared off into the woods at the edge of the lawn, thinking. Kenny stole intimate glances of her body while she was unaware. Assuming she was unaware.

She said, “It’s just so many million-to-one shots: if I hadn’t happened to look, if you hadn’t known how to do that breathing thing, if he’d been down there a minute longer. It makes you wonder how anything ever happens at all.”

“It makes me wonder why his mother wasn’t watching him,” Kenny said.

“Or the lifeguard, Kenny,” she said, with a little cold smile.

“How did you know that?”

“What?”

“My name? How did you know my name?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I heard it at the club, I suppose, or you told me. Why? What’s so strange about that?”

“Well, I don’t know yours,” he said, a little amazed at his own audacity, fearful. He was asking for more than a name. Mrs. Jordan seemed to know this, too; she hesitated for a moment before answering.

“Linda,” she said. “Linda Lavinia Jordan. I’m very pleased to meet you.” She extended her hand across the table, formally, and Kenny shook it. Her hand was small, soft, vaguely perfumed.

“Lavinia?” he asked.

“After an aunt,” she said. She seemed to have explained this many times before. “Everybody’s got to have some kind of middle name. What’s yours?”

“Milton,” he said ashamedly. “Kenneth Milton Kolodny. My mother was an English teacher.”

“Was?” asked Mrs. Jordan. “She’s passed away?”

“Oh, no,” Kenny said, then found that he couldn’t go on. His mother was in the hospital, on that day, at that hour while Kenny sat enjoying his lemonade in the clear light of Mrs. Jordan’s patio. He thought of the hallways more than anything else, pale green linoleum, smells of rubbing alcohol and old clothes and vomit. Where she was likely to remain. The man in the next room would scream as if he were being murdered, any hour of the day or night. Kenny felt like an imposter, like any words he cared to say would be a lie, anything but the unsay-able truth: I am the son of people in trouble, I carry this sickness with me.

“It’s all right,” Mrs. Jordan said, looking at him curiously. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

“It’s complicated,” Kenny said. He felt the distance between them again, two lives, two silences. At the same time, he felt an obscure victory: this confusion was at least his own, it was something Mrs. Jordan couldn’t know. It was one thing he was better at. For the first time since he had breathed the boy back to life, Kenny felt that he had his own shape, a person after all. He was learning something here. At least his problems were his own.

“We should get going,” Mrs. Jordan said. “I have some errands to run this afternoon, and I’m sure you need to get going. You’re all fixed up.” She didn’t seem anxious to go,
though. Her drink was only half-finished, she stayed in her chair. Kenny wanted to ask her why she had brought him here, though he suspected there was nothing like a reason. He imagined himself moving to touch her, standing behind her chair and letting his hand caress the soft skin of her neck, her shoulders, while she bent her head to welcome him.

She said, “That was a remarkable thing today, wasn’t it?”

“That was amazing,” he said. “You were amazing.”

“It wasn’t much,” she said, ducking her head, pleased. “I just don’t know how I managed to see him. I don’t know what made me look up.”

“You were awake?”

“Oh yes,” she said, “I’m always awake.”

The questions sprang to his mind but he didn’t dare ask them: What are you thinking? What are you doing?? He saw her on the chaise lounge, every curve of her gold bathing suit, every line of skin, like a photograph in front of him. The face that was turned toward him now seemed superimposed on that memory, so that he saw two sides of her at once. How many Mrs. Jordans?

“A remarkable thing,” she said again, softly, like a door closing. Then, in a sudden burst of energy, she drained her drink and assembled everything onto the tray again: tape, scissors, disinfectant, lemonade. “Time to get going,” she said, rising. “But thanks for coming by. I’m going to remember this day, I think.”

“Me, too,” Kenny said, following her into the bland interior of her house, sofas and coasters and pictures of relatives in elaborate frames. Purse, telephone, refrigerator.

“I’ll be back in a second,” she said, and disappeared upstairs.

Kenny stood in the kitchen door, next to the winter coats, men’s and women’s woolen overcoats hanging on their pegs like abandoned persons. In the dead of summer these coats seemed exotic as sponge divers’ outfits. There was a man’s good gray overcoat hanging on the rack, a husband’s coat. Kenny felt an obscure jealousy, as if he were married to Mrs. Jordan, as if the child sleeping under the water had been their own child, born into the air again. On an impulse, Kenny put his hand into the pocket of the overcoat, a soft, solid pocket meant for a bigger hand than his, and brought out a passcard for the Washington subway, a white cotton handkerchief, a scrap of gum wrapper and seven dollars, two singles and a five. Kenny kept the money and the passcard and stuffed the handkerchief back into the coat pocket, the yellow gum wrapper fluttering to the floor in his hurry. Now this ordinary hallway felt dangerous, as if it had suddenly been raised fifty feet off the ground, so that walking it required care. Kenny didn’t know why he had taken the money. He wasn’t a thief. The money was part of something that belonged to him. He wasn’t stealing so much as taking his own back. Mine, mine, mine.

“All set?” asked Mrs. Jordan, sweeping into the room, bending by the coats to pick up the yellow, guilty scrap of gum wrapper. Kenny felt his throat close, certain he was caught, but she only dropped it carelessly into the wastebasket. She held the door to the garage open for him, then locked it behind her while he stood in the half-lit darkness, not sure what to do with himself. The motor of Mrs. Jordan’s big Ford was ticking as it cooled. The stolen money felt hot in his pocket and he was getting away with it and he knew something that he didn’t know before: that all you had to do was reach out your hand and try for it. Kenny fell out of his childhood in an instant,
as soon as he saw that all the rules and all the things you were supposed to do were made-up things for children. That was what his father knew, and Mrs. Jordan, and now Kenny: that you just did what you wanted, you opened your hand and tried to grab for it and the rules didn’t matter.