A Small Crowd of Strangers Read online

  The window seat with cushions changed over the years, from blue velvet to green stripes and even Black Watch plaid for a while, and beyond the window seat, out the wide bay window, the sloping yard was all smooth green with smooth green shrubs here and there along the edges. Or a perfect smooth slope of snow. A tall slender pin oak scattered red leaves that curled palms-up in the grass every fall.

  They had coffee in the dining room before they left on their foliage tour, and Miss Mimi held the tiny painting in her hands, tipping it sideways, looking across the surface. “Exquisite,” she said. “A lot of paint on here, such brush strokes on such a small piece.”

  She handed it back.

  “So,” she said. “What kind of young man gives a lady a small painting as a gift?”

  “He’s a teacher.”

  And he’s careful about being sweet, and sweet about being careful. When he calls, he asks first if it’s a good time to talk, and he never calls at work. He has neat fingernails. He holds doors open.

  “He’s polite,” Pattianne said.

  Miss Mimi had a laugh that always ended in a cough. “What about the barkeep?”

  “Alas,” Pattianne said, and they both laughed.

  The Oldsmobile was like riding a couch. Gray velour seats, and the utter quiet of a new American car. Miss Mimi hardly ever drove it anymore, and she seemed to be getting too small for it. She turned on the CD player as they pulled out of her driveway. Mozart.

  “Symphony number 40,” she said. “Maybe not for today,” and she turned it off. “So tell me what you’ve been doing.”

  And as they drove along the rolling and winding roads of southern Jersey, along gold grass fields with rows of red oaks lining far-off creeks, past stands of dark red maples in yards, and golden honey locusts and purple sweet gums, Pattianne talked about Michael.

  He won’t wear new corduroy pants until they have been washed and washed and washed. He wears blue sweaters. He likes having his teeth cleaned. He was a summer-camp counselor for seven years straight until this year. He likes to drive to strange neighborhoods and park his Volkswagen and go walking around looking at the houses and the yards. He guesses at what kind of families live there. He likes spy movies, although he will go to any movie anytime, really.

  “We go to the movies a lot.”

  He hasn’t found a teaching job yet, still living by tutoring and subbing. He’d hoped to get a job in Minnesota, but hadn’t.

  “Lucky for me,” Pattianne said.

  He likes to take pictures of churches, but they’re just snapshots with a funky digital camera. He emails them to his grandmother in Pennsylvania.

  “He looks just like his father,” she said. His father has warm hands and smiles with his eyes, which she didn’t say.

  “Even my sister likes him,” she said, and Miss Mimi said, “Ah. But what about your parents?”

  They had offered him a drink and then they all went in the living room and sat together on the couch. Michael started a conversation about golf, about gas prices, about the new bridge over the Raritan River.

  “Hard telling,” Pattianne said.

  The parents met at Christmastime. Mrs. Bryn had a party every year, the Saturday before Christmas.

  “But Christmas is on Sunday.”

  And Michael said, “Silly bones,” which was apparently a meerkat expression of endearment. “We wouldn’t have it on Chrtistmas Eve.”

  So the Saturday before the Saturday before Christmas, Michael picked her up. He wore his blazer of midnight-blue corduroy and a white, pressed dress shirt, and the snow came down in a fine soft fall of “Silent Night.” He opened the car door.

  “Look in there,” he said. “It’s for your mom.”

  A waxy white box was propped behind Our Lady of the Bug. Inside, within a fold of white tissue, was a small white orchid, wrapped at the stem with a curl of silver ribbon that held a silver bell.

  He said, “She likes bells, right?” Pattianne heard herself telling that to Miss Mimi, how he’d noticed the collection of bells in the beige-and-gold living room.

  “You got my mother a corsage?”

  “My mom’s idea,” he said.

  The meerkat matriarch as gracious hostess. Pattianne wondered if she knew they were sleeping together. Maybe she assumed they were, or maybe she hoped they weren’t.

  Michael got onto the Turnpike and into the left lane. He reached over and touched her wrist. “This is special,” he said, looking over for a second and then back to the snowy highway. A semi rushed past on the right and he was saying something else, and she looked at the speedometer—they were only going about forty-five. The lights of another semi behind lit up the O-bug. She folded the box back up and held it. She couldn’t take her eyes off the road, as if she could drive them herself if she stared hard enough.

  “Never,” she heard him say.

  The semi pulled around them on the right, a moving wall of noise, a wash of slush across the windshield, and behind the Madonna the tiny Volkswagen windshield wipers slapped back and forth.

  “Always,” he was saying now.

  “Michael,” she said.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “Get over in that lane,” she said as loud as she could without shouting, and then the semi was past, and in the sudden quiet of its passing, she said, “Please.”

  Michael put on the blinker and got into the right-hand lane. Then he slowed even more and pulled onto the shoulder, shifted to a stop, and into park, and turned to her.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now. Is it okay with you? For me to say that?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I just meant we were going too slow for the left lane.”

  “Pattianne,” he said.

  He touched her ear, and then he tugged her earlobe, pulling her toward him, his fingers warm, and so was his breath, and he smelled like Dentyne gum. She was freezing, short dress, thin tights, little dressy shoes, and the damn heater didn’t work.

  “I love you,” he said. “Do you love me?”

  “Yes.”

  “We spend a lot of time together.” He took in a breath, let it out. “At your house.”

  His apartment was boring, and single-guy trashy. He did keep up with the dishes.

  “I know,” she said.

  “I just love you,” he said. “That’s all.”

  “I do too,” she said. “Love you.”

  It was intense, there on the side of the highway, and all she knew for sure was she wanted him right there, right then. He loved her. She loved him. And now tears and mascara, and she hated parties.

  “I mean, that’s okay, right?” she said. She didn’t know why she was all weepy. It had been coming at her all of a sudden lately, this weepy thing.

  “Silly bones,” he said, and he kissed her on the nose, which was often the second part of this silly-bones thing.

  He took a small white box out of his pocket and he handed it to her. She opened it. A small silver cross set with an amethyst. He took the silver chain and he fastened it around her neck and then he tucked it under her hair. A man who could fasten one of those tiny clasps in the dark. He unbuttoned her top button and tucked the cross under her coat collar. He started back onto the highway. He sang “O Holy Night,” his voice that loud, beautiful tenor, and he kept singing, more verses than she knew there were to that song, and then he sang it in Latin, and he drove straight to her parents’ house in Cranbury.

  Her mother wore a black velvet suit and a white blouse. Her father pinned the orchid to her lapel while she stood still, her hands held in front of her, her chin lifted slightly.

  “Very nice, Michael,” he said, and he touched her mother’s hair with one finger, tucked a stiff gray curl behind her ear. Her earrings were small gold bells.

  “It’s very pretty,” she said. She smiled once, and then again.

  “My mom’s idea,” Michael said, smiling smiling smiling. “You’re going to love my mom.”

  “We’re
very much looking forward to meeting them,” her mother said, two more small smiles, and they all stood in the middle of the living room, and her father said, “Well, then.” The TV was on, a laugh track laughing back there in the den. They stood in the living room with the bells, in the china hutch in the corner, and arranged on the tables on each side of the couch, and on the windowsill of the bow window. Thousands of bells.

  “Well, let me turn off the television,” her mother said, “and get my purse.”

  Her father turned to the mirror by the door and touched the perfect knot in his tie, a silk tie of white-on-white paisley with threads of red running through the design. She had given it to him for Christmas last year. His eyes in the mirror looked at hers for a second. Then her mother came back into the living room with her black wool coat over her arm. The curl of hair was once again in front of her ear.

  The idea was for her parents to follow in their car. Once they got off the turnpike there were a lot of twists and turns. Michael watched their headlights in his mirror, reaching over to touch her leg, her hand. Once he kissed his fingers and touched them to her lips. He pulled into a subdivision.

  “My parents kind of don’t know,” he said. “How much time we spend together. At your house, I mean.”

  It was more nights than not. His lovely pinstripe shirts were starting to take up space in her closet. There was a razor and shaving cream in the bathroom.

  He had the extra key.

  Maybe he wanted them to live together.

  He drove slowly, guiding them all through the winding roads, the treacherous cul-de-sacs.

  Nana Farley had just come right out and said it.

  “Are you and this Michael Bryn having relations?”

  “Nana.”

  She said, “Is he going to marry you?”

  It was in her kitchen, after church on the Epiphany. Nana Farley was measuring ground coffee from a canister into her ancient percolator, and the parents and the uncles and their wives and about fifteen cousins were all over the rest of the house, and Michael too, somewhere in all that noise. Uncle Bert’s loud cigarette laugh, thumps from the little kids going down the stairs on their butts. Some kid rang the long golden chimes that hung on the wall under the box of the doorbell, and Aunt Maureen yelled out, “You kids get off of those stairs.”

  Nana Farley held the red plastic scoop midair above the coffee canister and looked into the percolator.

  She said, “What number was I on?”

  “One for the pot.”

  She dumped in the last scoop. Plugged in the cord. Then she leaned on the counter. Shorter than Pattianne. Her white hair wisped out from her ancient, feathered, pillbox hat, and her chin, that Farley chin, stuck out. A dish towel was looped into the belt of her dress.

  She wasn’t even her favorite grandmother, but she was the Catholic grandmother, and Grandma Anthony was in a home since her stroke and didn’t talk anymore, didn’t even know them, and when she used to go to church, years ago, she went to Roselle First Presbyterian. Today, Michael had gone to Mass with the Farleys. On the Epiphany, her parents went to Mass with her mother’s family. Nana Farley, the uncles, their wives, and as many little kids as possible. Michael had looked at her with a question when she stayed seated in the pew next to the parents while everyone else received Communion, all the pews around them empty, except for one very small, very old woman sitting up very straight and sound asleep. Even Jen received Communion. Now Nana Farley tapped her fingernail on the counter.

  She said, “You were baptized and confirmed, Pattianne Anthony.”

  Baptized, tap, confirmed, tap.

  She said, “This boy is Catholic.”

  Catholic, tap.

  Pattianne poked her finger through the plastic wrapper on a store-bought coffee cake.

  “You can cut that and set it out on that plate.” Farley pointed her chin up to a platter on a top shelf. “Are his parents Catholic?”

  “Yes.”

  “Here,” she said. She took the dish towel out of her belt. “Wipe that off.”

  Pattianne wiped the china platter, wiped its pink roses.

  Nana said, “What parish?”

  “Christ the King”—wiping the gold edge—“in Edison.”

  “Are you trying to scrape the roses off the plate?” She took the dishtowel back. “How long has it been since you received Communion?”

  “Nana.”

  “Do you do your Easter obligation?”

  “Nana,” shouted Luke, and there he was, running into the kitchen, with an even smaller cousin, his brother Stephen maybe, right behind him, Sunday shirttails untucked from Sunday pants. “Nana,” Luke shouted. “I get to feed the goldfish.”

  Nana pinched the long sleeve of Pattianne’s blouse, and Luke wrapped his arms around Nana’s knees, and Stephen grabbed the back of Luke’s shirt and pulled, and Nana leaned close to Pattianne.

  “Listen,” she said. “You two get yourselves over there to Christ the King, and you talk to that priest, missy.” Her dentures hissed. And, “No,” she said to Luke and Stephen. “I already fed the fish. Here, take these spoons in and put them on the dining room table. And here, Stephen, take these napkins.”

  Luke took the spoons in both hands. Stephen put his hands in his pockets. Aunt Betsy came to the doorway with a baby in her arm and a small shoe in her hand, and she said, “Stephen James, put your shoe back on.”

  The boys ran out the door. Stephen grabbed the shoe on the way by, and Aunt Betsy shifted the baby to her other arm and she said, “Mother Farley, come sit down. I’ll bring that pot out when it’s perked.”

  Nana Farley handed the neat stack of paper napkins to Pattianne, and she limped to the doorway and put her arm through Aunt Betsy’s arm, then turned back once more.

  “That cake cover, missy,” she said, pointing her chin at the pink glass cake cover on the top shelf. “Bring that cake cover.”

  “I just love your grandma,” Michael said later, back in Montclair, cutting lemons at Pattianne’s kitchen counter, the back of his shirt crisscrossed with creases, half untucked. “This knife isn’t very sharp,” he said, and she said, “There’s a cutting board under the sink,” and he said, “I like olives.”

  He was making vodka martinis. He’d found a bottle of vermouth in one of the cabinets and got inspired by the martini recipe on the label. She had no idea where that vermouth had come from, it was dusty, and way up in the back behind some Tupperware.

  “Vermouth doesn’t go bad,” she said. “I don’t think.”

  “It was the training pants,” he said.

  She tried to burp quietly. She was full of coffee and store-bought coffee cake and bacon, and she kept burping.

  “Well,” he said. “That and the purple ducks.”

  Kid stories were like sitcoms, or like dreams—you had to be there.

  “Poo-poo ducks,” he said. “Do you have a hammer?”

  The wind blew icy bits, and it was three o’clock on the Sunday after Christmas, a timeless time if ever there was one. The icy bits were the only real indication that there was anything alive anywhere out there. Even the traffic on the turnpike had been sluggish and bored with itself. Not one car passed the O-bug, driving all the way home in the left lane.

  “No hammer,” she said.

  Now the wind hit hard at the side of the building, and the thin, white curtain on the window moved, the window by the big chair, where she was all wrapped up in her quilt, her nose dripping from the cold, and not paying attention. Her elbow poked through the hole in the quilt, and she wanted her sweater. She could move the chair away from the window, but her feet tucked under her were just getting warm, and getting up, moving the chair, going to get the sweater, rewrapping herself, getting warm again—it was too much trouble.

  Michael held a blue dish towel up in the air. “Clean?”

  “Yes, probably.”

  He dumped the tray of ice cubes into the towel and wrapped it all into a bundle.

  �
��Your Aunt Betsy is a doll.” He whacked the bundle on the counter.

  “And that Luke”—he whacked again—“what a terror.”

  “That was Stephen. Luke’s the one he was terrorizing. I think. There’s about fifty of them.”

  Michael picked chunks of ice out of the dishtowel and dropped them into a glass milk bottle. “I like this milk bottle.”

  “That was from Grandma Anthony’s house. My other grandma. My nice grandma.”

  “Nice grandma?”

  He poured vodka into the milk bottle, stopped, held the milk bottle up, looked, poured more vodka.

  “Why is she nice?” Then vermouth.

  How to explain that happy kind of being together, how it was always okay, no matter what they did, how Grandma Anthony would just smile at her, for no reason at all. “Because she liked me.”

  He shook the milk bottle just a little bit and then poured the martinis through his fingers into wine glasses. He twisted a lemon peel over each glass.

  “Voila,” and he walked in and presented her with the martini. His khakis were baggy and wrinkled at the knees.

  The martini didn’t taste like a good idea, but then the warmth of it started down her throat, and after a second sip, it seemed like a better idea.

  He said, “Nana Farley likes you, doesn’t she?” He held his martini up to the light. “Good martini? I think it tastes basically like a martini, I guess, anyway. Not quite like a bar martini. Maybe it’s the milk bottle. It skewed the presentation.”

  “Skewed?” she said. “Hey. Why don’t you get me a tissue from the bathroom?”

  He set his martini on the edge of the bookcase and went in the bathroom, and came back with the whole box.

  “I love how you say tissue instead of Kleenex,” he said. “Tissue sounds like a little tiny sneeze.”

  He picked his glass up and sat on the chair in front of the couch. His hair stuck out all over his head.