If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories (8 page)

The cheater won the prize. A little goody-bag. The only thing Tony Harmon knew for sure was in that goody-bag was a whistle, because the cheater started running in circles blowing it so loudly he finally had to put his fingers in his ears.

“Cake!” Melody shouted loudly enough to be heard over it all as she stepped off the deck into the backyard bearing it, in flames. She placed the cake in front of their daughter, and Tony had to hold himself back from blowing out the candles, which seemed like an absurdly dangerous thing to put in front of a little girl with long hair. But his daughter blew them out faster than he could have, and then screamed, over and over again in triumph, clearly trying to over-shadow the game winner with her whistle.

The cake itself was like some sort of surrealist representation of a vagina—all pink at the center surrounded by pinker roses made of frosting but looking a lot like damp flesh, and a miniature Barbie doll doing a go-go dance in a bathing suit at the center. “Can you please go in and get the soda and the ice bucket?” Melody asked him wearily as he stared at it.

“Of course,” Tony said, and turned toward the house. There was certainly no reason for her to have said it as though she expected him to refuse, or to explode. He was only too happy to go inside and get whatever she wanted him to get.

Stepping through the sliding glass doors, the cold of the air-conditioned interior came again as a shock. He hadn’t realized, until it began to evaporate on his skin in the kitchen, that he was drenched in sweat. Tony stood in the kitchen and looked around until he located three big plastic bottles of soda waiting for him on
the counter, and the ice bucket, which was also sweating and had left a ring of water on the kitchen table.

Jesus.

That would take the finish right off the cherry, and Melody would probably blame him, but Tony couldn’t have cared less. There was no way he was going to wipe off that ring. Fuck the ring. Fuck the table. He grabbed the three warm bottles in one arm and the ice bucket in the other, and stomped through the kitchen. He was about to put everything down again to free himself up to open the glass doors when he thought about the water working away on the finish of the table:

No, it wasn’t his table anymore, but his daughter was going to be sitting at that table for the next ten years, he supposed. That little blotchy baby covered with blood and goop squirming under a heat-lamp would soon be a sullen teenager eating a lettuce leaf and a scoop of cottage cheese for dinner some night at that table, and she’d look at the water ring on what might once have been the family’s lovely kitchen table (her father and mother had bought it together at Handcrafters the year they’d moved into the house on Periwinkle Lane) and see how stained and shabby and ugly it had become in only a decade, and she’d think,
God, I hate this life.
Tony vividly remembered thinking similar things about his own life when he was a kid while looking at the plaid couch in the living room or his mother’s ratty slippers on the bathroom rug. So, he put the soda bottles and ice bucket down and went back inside, grabbed the rag Melody always kept tucked into the handle of the refrigerator door (“Don’t wipe your
hands
on that; it’s just for the counters”), and wiped the ring.

There.

He felt good about it.

He’d spared them something.

He was tucking the towel back into its spot, and then Melody was tapping on the sliding glass doors. “We, need, soda,” she said, mouthing on the other side exaggeratedly in case he couldn’t hear her through the window, although he could hear her perfectly, and then she cocked her head in that crazy-robin way she had that made him want to kill, and mouthed, “What, are, you, doing?”

“What are you doing here?” Melody asked. It was early evening by the time he got down to the cabins. It had only taken an hour or so for him to walk the rutted dirt road to the Welcome Cabin, but by then the sun was in the middle of the sky bearing down in green-gold beams of light that crisscrossed each other in the clearing, where an old school bus was parked and empty. (He’d even stepped inside, to make sure it was empty.) There’d been no one in the Welcome Cabin to welcome him or to tell him where he might find his girlfriend who was a counselor at this camp, so Tony had started walking down a footpath he’d chosen from three other possible footpaths, and had walked down it for a long time until it dead-ended at a very small dark lake on which a few rowboats knocked against a weedy dock lazily in the light breeze, and he stopped.

There had been a humming overhead—cicadas, but not like the ones he usually heard in jagged bursts in the summers where he grew up. Here, there were hundreds and thousands of cicadas humming invisibly overhead, making a somehow shiny and impenetrable music, the kind of music an orchestra full of mirrors might have made.

Tony stood at the edge of that lake and watched the random knock-knockings of the rowboats for a while, and then went to the edge, and pissed into it—a bright golden arch which hit the surface of that darkness and smashed it into jigsaw pieces.

Tony opened the door and handed the ice bucket to Melody and carried the soda bottles, their necks dangling between the fingers of one hand, out into heat. At the picnic table his daughter was doing what looked like some kind of Irish jig on the picnic table bench. She had pink icing all over her mouth.

“I’m here to see you,” he’d said.

Melody was wearing the cutoffs he loved more than everything else in the world put together. There was a frayed rip right under the
left cheek of her ass, which gave a glimpse of the white flesh there and made his heart race every time he noticed it again. There were seven or eight depressed-looking teenage girls around her—every one of them butt-ugly—and Melody, at the center, like a lily in a field of thistles.

“Oh,” she said. She started shaking her head. “Oh my God.”

“I need to talk to you,” Tony said later, back in the kitchen, after Melody had cleared the mess off the picnic table and left the girls to run in insane circles in the backyard neighing like horses. Her back was to him as she leaned over the garbage can, hauled out from under the kitchen sink. She was scraping frosting off a fork with a knife. It was one of those hopeless activities, one of the millions of Sisyphean tasks Tony had watched his wife perform in the years since she’d become a mother. Pointless, endless tasks. She always had a bottomless list of chores that would only get done in order to need to be done again. Feed the baby, wash the clothes, water the plants, wipe the counters, load the dishwasher.

Surely it was this life of mindless detail that had turned her against him—not anything he’d done, not a lack of love. She just didn’t know it. She was such a good woman, the kind of woman who would want to believe she loved her own virtues, who enjoyed her duties.

But who could love these duties? For God’s sake, Tony had learned
that
much about women in college. That they hated housework and blamed men for it. He’d read
The Women’s Room.
He’d read
The Awakening.
Melody, who’d quit reading as soon as she was out of college, had understood herself less than he understood her.
The Feminine Mystique. Herland.
He knew what she wanted, what she
needed.

“I need to talk to you.”

She said nothing.

“Look,” Tony said, touching her arm lightly. She didn’t pull away, but she didn’t stop what she was doing either.

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.