Other People We Married (11 page)

“None taken,” James said. “Always a pleasure to meet one of the city’s bravest.” I hadn’t even noticed that the firelady was pretty, but she was. She had curly dyed-red hair, and crumbs all over her bottom lip, which was rather pouty and plump. The suspenders interacted poorly with her breasts, which were also rather plump. I wanted to remind James that we were no longer living in a city of eight million, and that you probably didn’t have to be all that brave to rescue cats from trees and save college kids from mishaps with their barbecues, but instead I excused myself and went to find the cookies. I made a mental note to call friends at home and tell them about our yard: it existed. They could come over and we could stand in it, eating cookies, even if we were too afraid to commit to buying lawn furniture.

The Nelsons had framed photos on every available surface. They enjoyed skiing in the winter, sailing in the summer, and smiling all year round. Even the teenagers were pimple-free and well-adjusted. I nodded a hello to all the ladies with sensible haircuts who were gathered in the living room, and pushed through the swinging door toward what I hoped would be the kitchen.

A thick-bodied wall of a teenaged boy sat on one of the stools, facing the back window. I recognized him from the yard. Margaret’s oversized son. The Nelsons lived on the better side of the street, the lake side, and their kitchen windows overlooked the water. Outside, people sped by on small boats, laughing. The athletes—the ones with the bulging arms and
the spandex unitards—steered kayaks and canoes. It made me tired just to watch.

“Hi, I’m your next-door neighbor,” I said.

The boy grunted. He was wearing his orange hunting cap, which I realized I had never seen him without, despite the oppressive heat. He spun around on the stool and faced me. “I’m Mud,” he seemed to say. He looked less like a teenager from the front. His jaw was too wide, his forehead too big.

He’d said either
Mud
or
Mutt
, both of which I was fairly sure were not names that nice people gave to their children. “I’ve met your mother,” I said. “She brought us some iced tea, my husband and I.”

“Whoop-de-do,” Mud said, spinning back around.

“Know where the cookies are?” I was actually enjoying this, the first sign of unfriendliness in a month.

“In the living room, with all the freaks,” he said. “But they’re probably poison. The Nelsons eat babies. I’ve seen them. They used to have like twelve kids, you know.”

“Poison, huh. I’ll take my chances.”

He raised and lowered his hunting cap, as if saluting the happy people scooting by on motorboats, and mumbled something about karate.

Back in the living room, the firelady had moved on to the bald guy from three doors down. James had acquired a mug full of alcoholic cider. The whole room smelled like nutmeg: Christmas in August.

“I think the boy who lives next door is a serial killer,” I whispered.

James nodded. “Good cider,” he said, unimpressed by my discovery.

Mrs. Nelson and the local policeman appeared in front of us. “Jim, Sally, this is Officer Sheffield. He’s been in charge of our little neighborhood for, oh, how long is it now, Greg, ten years?”

Officer Sheffield nodded. “And not a B&E since. One stolen car, and even that turned out to be a mistake. City towed it around the corner. Mrs. Dearborn never did leave the house too much.”

“Murder? Rape? Animal cruelty?” I said, thinking of everything my mother warned me about when we moved to Brooklyn. Mud had been of age for at least a few years, and I couldn’t imagine there wasn’t a pile of missing cats somewhere.

Mrs. Nelson clasped a fist over her sternum. “Oh, gosh, no! Where did you think you’d moved, Milwaukee?” Her cheeks had darts of crimson in them. “Course, you probably won’t be here long. That pink house is just a revolving door, honestly.”

“It’s a rental,” I said, realizing when I said it that our house was the only rental on the block. Maybe something unseemly had happened there: adultery, Judaism, modern dance.

Behind them, Mud skulked out of the kitchen and toward the plate of cookies on the mantelpiece. He took three and returned to the kitchen before the announcements began. There was going to be a potluck over the holidays, and not everyone could bring dessert. There were audible sighs.

James and I held hands as we crossed the street and walked back to our house. “Don’t you think,” I asked, “that if that party had been in New York, the cookies would have been an ironic stroke of genius?”

He nodded and pulled a folded napkin out of his jacket
pocket, sending crumbs to the sidewalk in front of our steps. “Unironic cookies taste better.” He opened the napkin and showed me a short stack of pilfered baked goods.

There’d been some kind of run-in with a telephone pole over on the south side of town, and Mud’s car was totaled. I’d seen him roar up and down the (one-way, dead-end) street, and wasn’t surprised to hear the news. I was surprised, however, to hear it from Mud himself. James was at school, and I was alone at home, ostensibly looking for a job, which meant that I was spending all day in my pajamas watching daytime television. Not that there weren’t opportunities open to me. Craigslist thought that I should be a shot girl at a bar. I could spend my evenings pouring Jägermeister down the throats of eighteen-year-olds while wearing a whistle. I could work at the mall by the airport, twisting strips of dough into pretzels, or photograph crying babies for Christmas cards. James thought I should join a book club,
You know, to meet some people
. The only book clubs I found were for lonely lesbians and at-risk youths. Maybe I could cut my hair. The doorbell surprised me.

“Hey.” Mud was wearing his orange cap. Something in his pocket seemed to be moving, and it took me a few seconds to realize it was his hand, jiggling around some loose change. “Can I have a ride?”

“Now?” I was wearing pajama bottoms patterned with flying pigs and a faded T-shirt. “Where?”

Mud nodded. “Got to get to work.” He paused. “Nice pigs. I used to be able to fly, too, before my mom went all psycho on me and cut off my wings. You see the X-Men movie?” He kicked the porch hard with the toe of his sneaker.

“I’ll change. Just give me a minute, okay?”

James and I had seen Mud at work—he bagged groceries and stocked shelves at the giant grocery store on the outskirts of town, out by where all the chain restaurants went to procreate. He usually added the store’s logo baseball cap over his own, which made his ears look like they were made of orange felt.

When we were about halfway to the grocery store, Mud cleared his throat. “I need to make a stop first. Pull over up there?”

He motioned toward a small strip mall on the side of the four-lane road. It housed a Thai restaurant, a decaying ballroom dance studio, and a place called the Pleasure Emporium. It was after lunchtime, nearly three o’clock. I could guess where Mud needed to go. I pulled into an open space in front of the restaurant and put the car in park. “Hurry up,” I said.

He looked almost beautiful with relief. Mud’s face was round and lumpy, full of hydrogenated oils. He was at least eighteen, that much I knew, and so, really, who was I to stop him. It took him three minutes to get back in the car, with a small brown paper package in hand. Lucky he works at the grocery store, I thought, otherwise the bag would have looked awfully suspicious.

“If you open that bag in my car,” I said, but chose not to finish my sentence. I turned back onto the highway. The car groaned as I accelerated. It was getting colder.

James and I ate dinner on the porch, using fold-out TV trays, our laps kept warm by two woolen blankets, gifts from
James’s mother. She’d heard the word
Wisconsin
and immediately sprung into action, sending boxes of down-filled winter apparel and frozen red meat. We liked to watch the neighbors scuttle past, their dogs pulling the arms out of their sockets. Sometimes they would wave and try a stab at our names, but most often they’d just grab a stick and throw it farther down the sidewalk.

In lieu of buying a replacement automobile, Mud had taken to using his mother’s bicycle. The bike was pink and white and had a large basket hanging off its handlebars, in which Mud placed six-packs of beer and other important objects from the outside world. We’d see him ride to and fro, his round cheeks always flushed with the cold, his orange ear flaps flopping against the wind. He looked altogether too heavy for the bike to support; I was waiting for the day the metal frame would collapse beneath him like a soda can.

“A boy just can’t ride a bicycle,” James said. “He’s never going to get a girlfriend.”

“He lives in his mother’s basement and bags groceries,” I said. “I don’t think the bike is his problem.”

James took a sip of wine. Like most things, it was cheaper in Wisconsin, and we’d bought too much, as though we had friends to help us drink it. James was on red, and I was on white. We were having a race.

“And anyway, lots of glamorous people ride bikes. Think about Audrey Hepburn—a born bicyclist.” I pictured Mud in capri pants and ballet flats, plucking a ukulele on his fire escape, a handkerchief knotted over the crown of his hunting cap. A ukulele would fit in his basket, for sure.

“Einstein rode a bicycle.” James opened his mouth wide and packed in a mouthful of mashed potatoes. Someone—a second cousin, or a first cousin once removed, we were never sure—had given us an electric potato masher for our wedding, and the dish had become one of his specialties. “But,” he said, his fork in the air, “Einstein was a genius.”

Across the street, a handful of Nelsons erupted in a cheer. One of them, a boy of about twelve, was wearing a football uniform, complete with helmet and shoulder pads.

“Look,” I said, “the Incredible Hulk.”

James examined the mound of beaten potatoes on his fork. “Do you think that the water here contains more nutrients? You know, like the water in New York makes better bagels?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think they’re trying to build a better man. Isn’t Paul Bunyan from Wisconsin? Maybe that’s what they’re going for.” I drank the rest of my wine and peered up into the empty glass.

“Imagine the sticks they’d need to throw for an ox.”

I reached over and pulled James’s head closer to mine and gave him a kiss. He had the cheekbones of a movie star, sharp enough to maim.

Mrs. and Mr. Mud were retired. Mr. Mud was an elusive creature and seemed to leave the house even less than I did, which was saying a lot. He was tall and thick, like his son, with silvery hair that caught the sun like in a shampoo commercial. Margaret had worked in real estate, selling houses like ours to people like her. They had two flags in front of
their house, Irish and American. Sometimes Mr. Mud would rake the leaves, but mostly that was Mud’s job. I was surprised his mother trusted him around her flower beds with a weapon as dangerous as an aged, rusty rake.

Behind their house, next to the garage, the Muds had a toolshed, which I had always thought was a metaphoric term for the drawer in the kitchen with the screwdriver and the tape measure. I couldn’t believe anyone had enough square feet, let alone acreage. Most days, Mud would spend a few hours walking around the house with his BB gun, but sometimes just with a big stick that he’d poke the ground with, as though he were looking for intruders hiding in the grass. Every now and then he’d raise the gun or the stick to his shoulder and take aim at an invisible enemy, or a particularly brash chipmunk. He would mouth the word
pow
, even if he wasn’t going to pull the trigger.

I looked out the open window in the kitchen and watched Mud rake up a few dozen leaves that had gathered behind the house. He then set the rake down on the driveway and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. I thought for a moment that he was going to set the leaves on fire, but instead he just lit up a smoke, leaned back against the toolshed, and shut his eyes. It was a warm day, and the orange cap was set back on his head, leaving room for some air to circulate. It took a moment for the smell of the smoke to snake under my open window, and another moment for me to realize what he was smoking was not, in fact, a cigarette. I went outside.

Mud started to look a little flustered as I approached. “Hey, it’s cool,” I said. “Can I take a hit?”

He blew out the lungful of smoke and coughed. “You’re weird,” he said. “You’re like this totally weird lady next door.”

“Same to you,” I said. “Cheers.” I took a hit of the joint and held it.

“I’m not a lady,” Mud said. “I’m a Mud.”

“An excellent point.” Around our feet, the collected leaves were being blown about by the wind. Mud and I watched as they scattered around the yard, crackling. Mud already looked stoned. Under the raised brim of his cap, his small eyes seemed to have receded into his skull.

“How long have you worked at the grocery store?” I asked.

“Since I was sixteen. Back then it was just on the weekends.”

“And how long ago was that?” I tried to guess.

Mud held up his fingers and counted. His nails were short and clean. “Eight years, on and off.”

Mud was only seven years younger than I was; he didn’t look twenty-four. “That’s a lot of groceries,” I said.

“No shit.” He stepped on some leaves, making a good dry noise that reminded me of fall. “What kind of name is Sophie?” he asked. “It sounds like a cat or something.”

I shrugged. “It was my grandmother’s name. What kind of name is Mud?”

“You think my name is Mud?”

I wasn’t sure if he was joking. His potato face was blank, with no hint of a stoned smile. “Yes.” I said. “Yes, I do.”

Mud nodded, and said, “It’s cool, right?”

“Right.” He had asked me a question, and I had given the correct answer. He looked pleased. I wondered what other names had come and gone. Snake. Hot Rod. Lucky.

*  *  *

The closest coffee shop was hiring—they stuck an index card on the door saying so. I’d poured coffee in high school, and I figured it might be a good reason to get out of the house, especially now that it was getting cold and there was nothing else to do that didn’t involve snowshoes. Counter Culture sold six different blends, all with names that were supposed to be political puns. Jessie, the girl who hired me, had defected from her graduate studies at the university. She had blond dreadlocks and emitted the faint scent of spoiled coconut. She told me that she’d found a new path, and that the path was coffee. “I just want to make people happy,” she said.