Tom Perrotta - Nine Inches

On the way out she examines herself in the hall mirror. The outfit looks awful, even worse than she imagined. The brown and tan of the skirt clash with the peculiar maroon of Pat’s bulky pullover, and the thing on her head — it’s a torn vinyl rain bonnet, decorated with a print of faded purple daisies — barely even qualifies as a kerchief.

Oh my, she thinks, laughing softly as she slips out of the mirror’s grasp. Am I really going to do this?

The cold attacks her the instant she steps out the door, stabbing through her sweater, swarming under her skirt, doing its best to drive her back inside. She hesitates for a second or two on the stoop, mustering courage, reminding herself that it’s only a five-minute walk to the supermarket.

The sidewalks are empty. Nobody around here walks anymore, not even when it’s nice out. Rose leans into the heartless wind, thinking how nice it would have been to invite the girl inside for a cup of tea, to get to know her a little better.

I watch you, she would confess. Through the windows.

I know, the girl might reply, sniffing suspiciously at the tea. I don’t mind.

Go ahead and drink, Rose would say. It’ll warm you up.

We’re not supposed to. It’s a sin.

A sin? Rose starts to laugh, then stops herself. I don’t think it’s a sin to drink something warm on a cold day.

The girl thinks it over, then brings the cup slowly to her lips, allowing herself only the tiniest of sips. She looks up at Rose.

It’s good, she says, the blankness of her face giving way to shy pleasure. Thank you very much.

ROSE DOESN’T know if the Chosen girl is forbidden to drink tea. The idea just popped into her head, and she’s not sure if she’s confusing the Chosen with some other strange religion. She’s heard so many rumors since they began moving into town four or five years ago, she doesn’t know what to believe: they’re Mormons, they’re Quakers, they’re ex-hippies making it up as they go along, the men have multiple wives, the women aren’t allowed to speak in public, they don’t own televisions, they keep large sums of money hidden in their mattresses, and so on. All she really knows is what she’s seen with her own eyes and read in the paper about their zoning dispute with the town two years ago.

The Chosen bought a house on Spring Street, in a nice residential area, and applied for a permit to turn it into a place of worship. After a lot of angry debate and letters to the editor — some of the neighbors were concerned about traffic and noise and parking problems — a compromise was finally arrived at in which the Chosen agreed to sell the property and use the proceeds to buy a house in a mixed commercial/residential zone, where they wouldn’t cause so much of a disturbance. Since then a lot of the tension has died down, and the Chosen seem to have been accepted as a more or less permanent part of the community, both of it and apart from it at the same time.

Rose didn’t realize how accustomed she had become to their presence until Russell’s last visit, when he stopped by for a day at the tail end of a conference in New York City. Driving back from Home Depot, they pulled up at a red light in the center of town, right in front of a teenaged Chosen boy who was standing on the corner in a business suit, shouting at the top of his lungs the way they sometimes did, testifying to the passing traffic. Rose barely gave him a second thought, but Russell lowered the driver’s-side window and began gesturing to the boy, asking him what was wrong, did he need any help? The boy stepped closer — he was tall and good-looking, like most of the Chosen boys (the girls, for some reason, were another story) — and bent forward until his face was almost inside their car.

“They betrayed him!” the boy was screaming. There was a note of genuine outrage in his voice, as if the betrayal had happened just a second ago, and he wanted someone to call the police. “They betrayed him!”

“What?” demanded Russell. “Who?”

“The son!” the boy wailed. “They betrayed the son!”

By the time Russell figured out what was going on, the light had changed, and some of the drivers behind them had started honking. Russell stepped on the gas, glancing in bewilderment at his rearview.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “What was that all about?”

“The Chosen,” she replied, enjoying his confusion more than she would have liked to admit. “They do that sometimes.”

“The Chosen?”

“You’ve been away too long,” she told him.

ROSE TAKES a cart and starts off for the produce section, ignoring the hostile and questioning glances some of the other shoppers seem to direct at her. It’s mostly old people at this time of day, and she feels suddenly depressed to find herself in their company. I should be working, she tells herself. I should never have stopped. But they had kept changing the computers around on her at the office, and then her arthritis started flaring up. On top of everything else, her boss was replaced by a younger man who talked to her like she was stupid, and one morning she simply couldn’t bring herself to climb aboard the train. Now she’s here, part of a small army of retirees who watch the cashiers like hawks and stand motionless in the parking lot, poring over receipts as if they’re love letters from the glory days.

“Rose?”

Startled, Rose looks up from the bananas in her hand and sees an old woman peering at her with an expression halfway between confusion and concern. A dirty-faced toddler is crammed into the child seat of the woman’s cart, sucking regally on a lollipop.

“Rose, honey, is that you?”

Rose has to force herself to look from the child to the grandmother, to work her way past the mask of age to the real face underneath. Janet, she realizes. Janet Byrne.

“It’s me,” Rose confesses.

“My God.” Janet looks her up and down, smiling as if Rose has just told an unsuccessful joke. Janet leans forward, lowering her voice to a whisper. “I thought you were… one of them.”

Rose shakes her head, overcome by a sudden wave of embarrassment. She’d like to explain herself to Janet, to tell her about the Chosen girl — I just wanted to know how cold she was — but it all seems crazy now, nothing she feels free to discuss at the Stop & Shop. She turns her attention back to the baby, who is gazing up at her with glassy, placid eyes.

“Isn’t she precious?”

“I’m too old for this.” Janet shakes her head, but Rose can see the happiness in her eyes as she reaches forward to stroke her granddaughter’s cheek. “You forget how much work it is.”

Rose wants to tell her that she envies her fatigue, that it’s better to be tired from doing something than from doing nothing at all, but she and Janet have never been more than passing acquaintances.

“Such a pretty girl,” she says instead.

“How many do you have?” Janet asks.

“Just one. Cody. He’s eleven now. I don’t see him enough.”

“Cody.” Janet makes a face. “The names they give them. This one’s Selena.”

“Selena.” Rose wishes she’d had a little girl of her own to dress up and fawn over. Eliza they could have called her. Eliza Geraldine. They would have stayed friends, the way Rose had with her own mother. She would have kept close to home. “Such a pretty name.”

“You son’s in California, right?”

“Beverly Hills.”

“I hear he does face-lifts.”

Rose nods, though Russell’s actual specialty is breasts.

“Will he give me a discount?” Janet laughs merrily, tugging back the skin on both cheeks. For a disconcerting second, her former face rises to the surface, the slyly pretty young mother Rose remembers from Little League and PTA, the chain smoker with peasant blouses and tinted glasses.