You Are Not A Stranger Here (20 page)

They arrive at accessories, Elizabeth fighting nervous excitement, recalling suddenly that the Lesters gave her a leather wallet for her wedding, embossed with her new initials. The Lesters, who came all the way from San Francisco and sat in the third row at Saint Andrew's Church, and danced at the club after dinner: the men in black tie or offi209 cer's dress, the women in chiffon or silk, glittering beneath the chandeliers, champagne on the porch, the sloping landscape of the golf course visible in the summer evening light, all of it just a bit more than her father could afford but what he and everyone wanted.

"A wallet perhaps?" she asks. "Cordovan with a silver clasp?"

"It looks kinda like my mother's wallet. I mean, she's got a cool wallet and all, but--"

"Of course, you're right, we need something . . . contemporary."

"Do you think it's stupid to buy her something? I mean, she hasn't even gone out with me."

They pause briefly in luggage.

"What is it about her, Ted, what captivates you?"

"Well, she's only been at school since the beginning of the semester, so she has friends but not really a clique yet. And she's like an alterna-chick, you know, with her nose pierced, but real small, just a little stud, really tasteful, and her hair's short and she wears great clothes, I guess like Euro indy-pop clothes. But that's only part of it. I guess I just want to figure out what's in her head, you know. Something about her makes me want to figure that out."

Hester disapproves mightily of the cosmetics department. Strumpets hawking vanity: this is what we have become. A month of humiliation wouldn't cleanse the body spiritual.

"Days of humiliation went out a long time ago, deary,"

Elizabeth mutters, "and besides, they suffer too," she reminds her old companion, sensing the fatigue in the smiles of 210

the brightly clad women behind the shimmering counters. And shimmer they do, so fiercely Elizabeth wishes she had brought her sunglasses: the way the light hits the polished steel and glass, the glare of the tall orange display of a football player and bride, the picture of an ocean coming at her from the left, the saleswoman's plucked eyebrow rising.

"Something for the holiday?"

Elizabeth breathes.

"Ted," she says, suddenly imploring the lights to dim,

"why don't you explain to this nice lady."

His cheeks flush red. "Well, ah, actually Lauren doesn't wear makeup."

Hester has noticed a large sign on the counter announcing a Thanksgiving Day sale for something called Egoiste perfume. Above the picture of the man's naked torso there is a turkey in one corner and the cartoon of a pilgrim in the other.

"Don't be silly," Elizabeth says, "it's just a bit of kitsch."

"But I thought you said we'd get her something good,"

Ted says.

"Oh," Elizabeth replies, grabbing the nearest bar of lipstick, handing it to Ted. "How pretty that is, don't you think? I think it's pretty."

"Ma'am, what are you doing?" the saleswoman asks.

"Nothing, nothing, it's just that some people don't like this--" She has the sign now and is digging her fingers at the frame, trying to get at the poster, the sound of her fingernails extremely loud, the air all around beginning to hum.

"Lady--you can't do that."

"Stop shouting," she says.

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"Mrs. Maynard," Ted says. "That's the store's display, maybe we should leave it there."

"I know, Ted, I'm sorry, I agree, it's just that it's a piece of trash and it offends people and it needs to be gotten rid of, even though we all know Thanksgiving is a nineteenth-century invention, so why she should object"--Elizabeth has it now and begins ripping--"I don't know, I guess the whole ego thing, just too much of it--"

"I'm calling security," the cosmetics lady announces in a voice octaves lower than a moment before.

"Come on," Ted says, taking Elizabeth's arm even as her hands tear the glossy paper into ever smaller pieces. He's afraid she'll start crying like she did the day a few weeks back when he showed her the picture he'd drawn of her. He gets them quickly out of the store and onto the escalator. She's finished ripping, no more poster left. She stares forward now in what appears to be dread. He's still got the lipstick in his hand but figures it doesn't have a detector strip so pockets it as they head for the exit to the parking lot.

Crossing to the car, Mrs. Maynard still resting her hand on his arm, he thinks of his mother, who sits alone upstairs all afternoon, all morning too, coming down only for dinner, barely saying a word, her face almost dead, and how his father and brother say nothing. None of them ever talk about her when they go to the movies on the weekends, or when the relatives come and she stays in her room, or when Ted has a play at school and all week she says tomorrow, I'll come tomorrow, and on Saturday night can't look him in the eye to say she won't make it. At first, Ted didn't want to come to Plymouth 212

Brewster as a volunteer. Enough already with the fucking mentally ill, for Christ's sake, enough, but something made him come, and then Mrs. Maynard, when she asked him to draw, and he got to sit there and draw and have her ask him questions about the books he was reading and what he wanted to do, and how his car sounded in the winter, and what oil he used, and how much he'd weighed when he was born, just to sit there and be asked a hundred stupid questions while he drew pictures: it was all somehow worth it.

"I'm sorry," Elizabeth calls out in a high-pitched voice as they get in the car.

"Don't worry," he insists, clenching the steering wheel.

"Don't worry."

Mrs. Johnson sees them from her office as they enter the lobby. "Oh dear," she says. "What happened?"

"Nothing," Ted replies. "We went to a store, that's all. Mrs. Maynard, she decided she wanted to leave--nothing's the matter."

"Elizabeth?" the director asks. "Are you all right?"

She nods. "You must be tired," she says, turning to Ted.

"You should go home and sleep."

"Sure," he says.

"Yes," Mrs. Johnson agrees, taking Elizabeth's arm, "it's time for your nap."

" D U U U D E , "
S T E V I E P I P E R calls out that night, "check
this
out." The bottom of a plastic gallon milk container has been cut off with a bread knife, a foil screen placed over its mouth, 213

the Davidsons' kitchen sink filled to the brim, the bottomless container lowered into the water, the pot lit on the screen, Stevie now slowly raising the handle, the motion drawing smoke down into the milk jug, which comes to hold an immense, dense cloud of marijuana. Stevie removes the foil, Ted puts his lips over the jug's mouth, following it suddenly downward as Stevie plunges the handle into the water, the air pressure forcing the huge mass of smoke straight into Ted's lungs, sending him reeling backward from the sink, against the corner of the granite countertop, into Heather Trackler, his feet catching on a half-full double bowl of cat food and milk, sending him onto the black-and-white tile, smoke billowing from his mouth, his butt hitting the strip heater with a harsh metallic crunch.

"Domestic FUCKING bliss!" Stevie cries, throwing his arms in the air as though he's just crossed the finishing line of some Olympic event conducted entirely in his own head. He begins rejigging the hydraulic mechanism for another round.

"Oh my
God,
you guys," Heather says, wiping Sprite off her cashmere sweater. "People live here."

"You know what?" Stevie says. "I bet they fucking do."

Ted nods apologetically, his mind beginning to sail. Lauren walks into the kitchen. He looks up at her from the floor, his hand splayed in a pool of milk, cat food all around him. He raises his hand to wave, feeling liquid drip down his arm.

"Looks like you're having fun," she says.

He experiences an overwhelming sense of gratitude that she is still wearing the orange cardigan.

214

"
Duude.
You gotta get up outta that food over there, man, don't let it waylay you, don't get detained by it."

With Stevie's encouragement, Ted rises and suddenly he and Lauren are face-to-face, as if conversation were now supposed to ensue. Stevie gazes at the two of them and with the wily eye of a stoner clocks their little tension. "So do you--," he begins, but unable to manage, dissolves into a fit of laughter. They watch him because he is something to watch that is not each other. "So do you come here often?" he finally gets out, folding over in hysterics, slapping the counter, weeping.

"You're
such
a loser," Heather says. "Come on, you guys, let's go upstairs," and she leads them up the back staircase onto a landing, from where, through another open door, they can see a fully clothed boy standing in a nearly overflowing bathtub swatting at a floating house plant with a tennis racket, cheered on in his novel sport by three other boys gesticulating furiously, tubside.

"This is all so meaningless and destructive," Heather says.

Ted risks a sideways glance at Lauren and is rendered momentarily inoperative by the realization that she was in fact already looking at him when he glanced, this causing their eyes to meet. At lunch--what seems a thousand years ago--she grinned twice at comments he made and none of her friends laughed.

Heather announces she is going to put an end to the bathroom vandalism and marches across the landing, calling out 215

ahead of her, "Hey there!" leaving Ted and Lauren alone by the banister. Acid house pumps from the living room up into the brightly lit stairwell.

Stevie has advised Ted that if he finds himself toasted and needs to simulate normal conversation, he should adopt a simple compare-and-contrast strategy: state an uncontroversial fact about yourself--who you have for history, what you did last summer, et cetera--followed by a question eliciting the same information from the other person. This is what people do in real life, Stevie always says. Just behave as if the given circumstances were real. The method seems partially effective until the music changes abruptly to Lou Reed, at which point Ted becomes convinced all remaining facts about his life
are
deeply controversial.

"Sorry Stevie was such an asshole," he says.

"Whatever. You're not joined at the hip."

Lauren's casual eloquence stuns him. "You're right," he says, "we're not."

Caged longing presses up through his chest and into his throat. He wants to tell her he's never had a girlfriend, never even had sex, only been kissed twice, and that this makes him feel like an ugly creature and a freak, but he concludes these thoughts are better kept to himself.

"I love your sweater," he says.

"Thanks."

"And I like that thing on your neck--what is it?"

"Jade," she says, touching it with her fingers.

"I bet it's warm. It must get warm when it hangs on your neck."

216

"This is criminal!" Heather yells from the bathroom.

"You'll do time for this."

"You want to sit down?" Lauren asks.

"Okay," he says.

They cross the landing into what looks to be a guest room. Lauren flops down onto a large white sofa. "I bet the Davidsons are drinking pina coladas in some beach hut on Aruba."

"Yeah," Ted agrees, "talking to friends about their good son Jack applying early admission."

"Exactly."

"My parents never go away," he says. "Do yours?"

"Sometimes. They're trite. They care about silly things."

"Harsh."

"Yeah," she says. "It is."

Ted perches on the edge of the couch. "You seem older."

She turns to look at him, her eyes slightly narrowed, slightly blurred.

"What do you mean?"

"It's like you've experienced all this before. The way you don't talk much, but like you're thinking something instead, something you're not saying. It's odd." He would like to put his hand behind her head and let it rest in his palm, perhaps taste the jade lozenge hanging round her neck. He wonders what he would know about her if they touched.

"I'm stoned," he says, leaning back into the sofa. "If I say weird stuff, you won't be offended, will you?"

She shakes her head. "I'm drunk."

Ted closes his eyes. He sees Mrs. Maynard asleep in her 217

room up on the hill. He's never mentioned to his parents or his brother that he visits her, but then they've never asked about the program he signed up for.

"I went to this store today," he says, "with this woman I visit over in Plymouth, for the volunteer thing. I draw for her usually, but we went out today. She kind of flipped out in the store. She ripped up this poster they had, and then . . ." He sees Mrs. Maynard's face as she gazed, terrified, onto the highway ahead of them. "In the car she told me there was a woman sitting in the backseat, but that I shouldn't look because she was angry. She said she heard the woman's voice a lot but she only saw her once in a while."

He opens his eyes and looks at Lauren. "The strange thing is," he says, "I wasn't scared. I mean, it was creepy, but I believed her."

"You thought there was really another person in your car that you couldn't see?"

"For her there was, yeah."

To this Lauren makes no reply. They sit on the couch a while, listening to Lou Reed singing from downstairs. The borderline defeat in his voice seems alien to the objects in the room: the coffee table books, the dried flowers, the wafflepatterned bed skirts, the beige clock and ruffled curtains--

these things they're supposed to want one day. The objects persist blandly in the bland intention of their owners. For Ted, they have the sadness of the things in his own house, the maple living room set his parents bought the year he was born, the dining room table they used to sit at when he was younger, reminders of old marital hope. He and Lauren are 218

just florid detritus in a room like this, drifting past on the dead river of time that never ceases here.

"I like you," Lauren says.

Suddenly, Ted's heart crashes into his rib cage. He hears George Clooney yell, "Lidocaine!" sees himself sped on a gurney toward a team of doctors, bright lights, IV drips, and he knows he is very high and all of a sudden absolutely happy.