A Small Crowd of Strangers Read online

  ADVANCE PRAISE

  “This contemporary story, humorous and moving by turns, follows a young woman, Pattianne Anthony who, in the tradition of American travelers, finds she has nothing to keep her home. Her travels take her from urban New Jersey to a small town in Minnesota to little more than an outpost at the edge of Western Canada where she finds happiness among the people who have also found a life left of center. It is also a tale of the impossibility of becoming someone that someone else wishes you were (that you thought you could be), with an ending that is nothing but joyful.”

  —Whitney Otto, author of How to Make an American Quilt

  “Despite my natural pessimism, this book broke down my defenses and set me up to root for a well-earned, conventional kind of happy ending. But then it took a turn and became an altogether different story, leaving me to sputter along with the characters, ‘Unfair—this is not what I was expecting.’ I was crushed. And then it found its way to another kind of happy ending, a richer, more satisfying one than I’d wanted in the first place. Last year Lily King’s novel Writers & Lovers won deserved acclaim for its heartfelt, realistic portrayal of a woman’s intellectual and emotional development. If A Small Crowd of Strangers doesn’t generate at least as much, it’ll be a crime.”

  —James Crossley, bookseller, Phinney Books

  “In A Small Crowd of Strangers, the profoundly talented Joanna Rose creates a generous, compassionate, and vivid world. We drift along with Pattianne Anthony, newly married but barely tethered to her own choices. When the truth about her marriage gains an unexpected and inexorable momentum, it both explodes and saves Pattianne’s life. Piling detail upon shining detail, Rose builds her story of political strife, spiritual awakening, and feminist reclamation to a climax that made me laugh and cry and long for more. An important meditation on how our supposed missteps often create as much life as they destroy, Pattianne’s final destination rewards the reader as much as it does the character.”

  —Michelle Ruiz Keil, author of All of Us With Wings

  “A Small Crowd of Strangers is a lovely story about a young woman whose unchecked yearning leads her somewhere true—even if she takes the long path in getting there.”

  —Michelle Anne Schingler, Foreword Reviews

  “Joanna Rose’s A Small Crowd of Strangers is the story of Pattianne Anthony, a young woman who leaves home on a spiritual quest and―by shedding what husband, family, and orthodox Catholicism expect of her―learns to share ‘time and space and silent language with strangers,’ learns to live alone on the edge of ‘a crazy gathering of lost souls.’ Pattianne finds solace in solitude, ultimately realizing that she is ‘seeking wonder.’ She spends quiet, introspective stretches in the Pacific Northwest’s natural world, gaining a Buddhist sensibility suited to her soul. Joanna Rose’s beautifully lyric novel is a gift: the work of a true story-teller. Her quiet, careful wonderment nourishes our souls.”

  ―Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

  “If you’ve ever longed for the truth, but werecharacters and the honesty, complexity and beauty of this captivating story.”

  ―Anna Quinn, author of The Night Child

  “As a fan of Joanna Rose’s groundbreaking novel, Little Miss Strange, I was eager to read the next, A Small Crowd of Strangers. Lucky readers—this novel, too, is buoyant, tender, and it’s so easy to invest in her lively characters and the gorgeously described landscape. At the center of the novel is Pattianne Anthony, a quirky reference librarian who is smart and witty, but who also tends to make major life choices on a whim. One of those is to marry a charming schoolteacher, Michael Bryn, and move from her childhood home in New Jersey to St. Cloud, Minnesota. It’s Pattianne’s discovery of self that most captivates through these pages—her budding realization that she has let life lead her instead of her leading life. As Pattianne ventures out, we witness her profound discoveries about love, family, faith, and the abiding strength of an eclectic community, and in this way Rose’s novel becomes sweetly intimate, a joy to read.”

  —Debra Gwartney, author of I Am a Stranger Here Myself

  PRAISE FOR LITTLE MISS STRANGE

  Winner, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award

  Finalist, Oregon Book Award

  “An extraordinarily powerful first novel in which what is not said often seems infinitely more important than what is.”

  —Kirkus

  “This is a wondrous, uncanny book, like few others you will have read…. A story so assured and accomplished that it seems the work of a seasoned novelist at the peak of her talent.”

  —Floyd Skloot, The Oregonian

  “An amazing book.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “Little Miss Strange is a novel boldly reminding us that peace, love, and happiness weren’t the only things to come out of the sixties and seventies…a gloriously descriptive novel, packed with colorful details reminiscent of the dream, the era of free-love left behind.”

  —Molly MacDermot, Redbook

  “The ending alone may be as perfect as any novel written this year.”

  —Barbara Holliday, Detroit News/Free Press

  “A carefully and skillfully wrought tale of one young woman’s brave attempt to understand the secret of who she is.”

  —Robert Olen Butler

  “In Sarajean, Rose has created a narrator with an uncanny eye for the manners and mores of Denver’s hippie demimonde in the 1970s.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance these characters have to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  © 2020 by Joanna Rose

  All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced in any form, with the exception of reviewers quoting short passages, without the written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 9781942436843

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941492

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  Published in the United States of America

  by Forest Avenue Press LLC

  Portland, Oregon

  Printed in the United States

  Forest Avenue Press LLC

  P.O. Box 80134

  Portland, OR 97280

  forestavenuepress.com

  For Tony,

  with love

  ADVANCE PRAISE

  PRAISE FOR LITTLE MISS STRANGE

  Copyright page

  Dedication

  Title page

  I. MONTCLAIR

  1: THEY WERE CALLED PEEPS

  2: UNCHASTE, UNMARRIED SEX

  3: STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING

  II. ST. CLOUD

  4: MY ANGEL

  5: A GENEROUS SOUL

  6: A STORY-LISTENING CHAKRA

  7: THAT KIND OF CATHOLIC

  8: NEVER DRINK CHAMPAGNE IN THE AFTERNOON

  9: WHAT HEARTS DO INSTEAD OF BEING IN LOVE

  10: RED WINE ON BEIGE CARPET

  III. TOFINO

  11: THE DRIFTING FOG GAVE IT A FACE

  12: WALKING IN THE SAME RAIN

  13: SIXTEEN MILES AN HOUR

  14: IT SEEMED SO SIMPLE

  15: JUST STORIES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  A SMALL CROWD OF STRANGERS

  I. MONTCLAIR

  1: THEY WERE CALLED PEEPS

  It was things like reading all of John Updike, and all of Elmore Leonard, and doing the crossword in the middle of the afternoon when she didn’t have to work, with the all-classical station pouring out the windows of her apartment over the dry cleaner’s. That’s what being thirty was about. That’s what finally being
finished with graduate school was about.

  Pattianne kept her part-time job in the library of the education lab, which paid just enough, and technically made use of her shiny new master’s degree in library science. And she kept her sometimes-boyfriend, Steven. Even-Steven, she called him, because he was so even-tempered, which was really him not caring very much one way or another about her being his girlfriend, or them being a couple, or really anything besides arguing about almost everything.

  “The only good book ever written was Under the Volcano,” he might say, or something like that, after about the third scotch. He loved that book.

  “Yeah, if you’re a depressed drunk looking for a good reason to commit suicide,” she’d say, or something like that, after about the third vodka tonic. Pattianne hated that book.

  He also liked having just enough drinks to have really nice sex.

  “Nice?” he would say. “Nice?”

  He owned a tavern with a bunch of guys who had dropped out of law school together, a laid-back, uncollege type of place called the Truckyard.

  On a breezy afternoon in early March she stopped by the Truckyard on her way to work with a new find, Requiem in D Minor. She was discovering she loved Mozart. Even-Steven had played violin in high school and fancied himself a musician, even though all he played now was the stereo. He poured her a glass of chardonnay, and then he put Mozart in the CD player. He leaned against the back bar and stared through his smudgy glasses at the ceiling. It was the beginning of the part of the requiem mass that was called the introitus, coming on so low that she wondered if something was wrong with the CD player. Even-Steven leaned against the bar and ran his fingers through his thick dark hair. It stood up in a sexy mess. She got that dreamy, damp feeling and thought about calling in sick. Library jobs are like that, a little too easy to call in sick, but, at twenty-eight hours a week, also easy to catch up on work.

  About three minutes later, though, Even-Steven took the CD out and slipped it back into its case. He set the case gently on the bar in front of her and tapped his finger on it, leaving it smeared with grated cheese. He leaned over the bar and whispered in her ear, “That’s a shitty orchestra.”

  Two guys at the end of the bar watched.

  Even-Steven took out another CD and slipped it into the player. Same music, coming on so achingly slow.

  “This,” he said, with a grand gesture toward the stereo, “is the greatest recording of the Requiem in D Minor you’ll ever hear.”

  The guys at the end of the bar applauded. Pattianne sighed in what she hoped was a melodramatic way and picked up her CD.

  “You got cheese on my Mozart,” she said. She slipped off her barstool. “Off to work.”

  Even-Steven winked at her, cute and annoying at the same time, amazing how he could do that. As she went out the Truckyard door, Mozart blared behind her, Even-Steven jacking up the volume.

  The spring breeze blew grit into her eyes, along with the smell of the Passaic River. When she got to the library, she took the CD out and looked at it.

  “Alas,” she said to Melissa.

  Melissa was the intern at the table next to her, and she loved hearing Even-Steven stories. Melissa also loved black roses, had several, in fact, tattooed on her left arm, and she had a big plastic one pinned to her messenger bag. This one she now unpinned and handed over, saying, “Requiem for an afternoon of lust.”

  Pattianne made a shrine in her in-basket with the CD, its case with the blue-and-yellow painting of Mary and Jesus propped up reverently behind the black rose.

  And then, not an hour later, on a warm, windows-open-for-the-first-time kind of spring day, he came in to the North Jersey Regional Education Lab, wafting on a scent of soap. She’d seen him around. Him with his pretty face and black hair. She didn’t know his name until she saw it written there, on the pink request form, in perfect cursive. A breeze started to lift the request form off the desk, and they both reached for it. He touched it first and held it down with two fingers. “Hello?” he said. “They told me at the front desk that you could help me access this database. Are you Patty Anthony?”

  “No,” she said.

  He had red lips shaped like a bow.

  “I mean, yes. Database, yes, Patty, no. It’s Pattianne.”

  She was thinking, Access is not a verb, it’s a noun.

  She said, “Let me set you up with an access code.”

  If she moved her hand one inch, their fingers would touch.

  Michael Bryn. The neat peaks of his capital M. The round loops of the B. Michael. Not Mike. They probably knew some of the same people. Montclair was a small town. There were nodding acquaintances, people to say hello to or perhaps to avoid, if they’d been at certain parties where there had been too much to drink maybe. There was that argument about Genesis and penises. There was going home with the wrong guy and then his real girlfriend dropped by with bagels and flowers to make up in the morning.

  Mostly Pattianne stayed kind of invisible, sitting at some bar on the end stool and chatting up some bartender, eavesdropping on witty people telling witty stories, the way some people could hold all the words together until it was time for everyone to burst into laughter like applause. Michael Bryn was like that. She never even really followed his stories when she’d see him with some group of people from the Ed School who stood around him, waiting to laugh. She’d watch his mouth, the way he flicked the tip of his tongue across his lips.

  Melissa’s message appeared on Pattianne’s computer screen: Ask him out!

  Pattianne copied the access code on the pink request form and slid it toward him.

  “Thank you,” he said. “This is all I need?”

  There was chardonnay in her head, and warm spring air. She pulled the pink slip back and wrote her phone number under the access code. “You need this too.”

  “I do?”

  A tiny crease appeared between his eyebrows.

  “Well, and this.” She wrote Pattianne Anthony. Not quite perfect cursive.

  “Oh.” He looked at the form, then looked up at her. He had blue eyes, dark blue.

  Her face got warm, and she just knew it: those two round blushing spots were showing up on her cheeks.

  “We should get together,” she said in a rush. “Sometime.”

  Her cheeks felt that special shade of chardonnay pink, and she was just thinking Oops, wrong move when his wide forehead smoothed out.

  “Well,” he said. “There’s a film festival at the State Street Cinema. Tonight is the last night.”

  She loved that place. It was a funky little movie house with an actual curtain that opened and closed. They showed cartoons before the feature film.

  “Great,” she said. “I could meet you there. I get out of here at six.”

  “Okay.” He stood there and looked at her. She wondered if she had brushed her hair lately. She tried to remember what earrings she was wearing.

  “Well, good. And, well, so, I have to print out some grant applications,” he said. “How easy is this database? I need numbers on state test scores from Bergen and Passaic Counties, from the last five years. By grade.”

  “Graphs,” she said. “Simple.”

  He laughed. “You think graphs are simple? Awesome.”

  He had a nice laugh, kind of quiet. And so what if he used the word awesome?

  “Melissa?” Who was of course paying close attention. “Can you put together some numbers? Test scores? By grade?”

  “How soon?”

  “Now?”

  Melissa kicked her messenger bag under her workstation and came over. “Now works.”

  Michael Bryn looked back and forth at the two of them. Melissa had pierced eyebrows as well as many tattoos. He avoided looking at Melissa’s tattoos. It was harder to not look at her pierced eyebrows.

  “Follow me,” she said.

  “See you around six,” Pattianne said.

  He said, “Okay,” and followed Melissa into the maze of cubicles.

&
nbsp; He didn’t often get asked out by girls, mainly because he usually did the asking. When it got to that point in a conversation, or an encounter, where it seemed the logical next thing to do, he just did it. It wasn’t like it was an issue with him. Although now he wasn’t sure about who should buy the tickets. He’d get there a little ahead of time and just buy them.

  Melissa set him up and left him at a desk. He took out the pink piece of paper. Pattianne. Not Patty.

  She wasn’t at her desk when he left. The Melissa girl was, though. She said, “Bye-bye now.”

  He said, “Thank you.” The little picture of the Pietà on the CD in the in-basket with the Lenten rose was the one by Van Gogh. His mom had sent him an Easter card with the same picture his first year away from home. His mom loved the Pietà.

  She was walking up to the theater just when he got there. She was wearing red sneakers. She said, “I love Harvey Keitel,” a little out of breath, and handed the six dollars for her ticket through the ticket window. He could handle that, really. She had asked him out, but when they hit the concession stand, he gave a twenty to the girl behind the counter before Pattianne had even gotten the straw out of the dispenser. Then they went into the popcorn-smelling dark of the funky theater. He’d wanted popcorn, but popcorn on a first date could turn awkward―how much salt, or butter flavoring, and then there was the actual sharing. Who holds the bucket? And that thing where you both stick your hands in at the same time.

  If this really was a date.

  “Halfway okay with you?” she whispered.

  And actually, it wasn’t. He liked sitting in the very back. But she headed down the aisle, and it was a little repertory house, small screen, so really, it would be fine.