Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

“Wow,” he says, “you got a lot of my pictures up here. Did you have all these up last week?”

“I took down some of their dreadful watercolors so I have more room now. I like the portraits. They’re very good.”

“How was your week?” he asks.

Weirdly, the little brochure Ted got when he signed up for the volunteer program said this was the sort of question you weren’t supposed to ask the residents, because usually their weeks did not vary and it was best to focus on positive things. Ted has decided this is a crock of shit and figures this woman has lived through a week as sure as anyone else.

“Oh, it was just riveting, ” Elizabeth says with a big smile.

“Gladys Stein nearly expired in the midst of a bridge tournament. She was upset with Dickie Minter telling stories about Mussolini.”

He’s learned it’s okay to laugh at this stuff even if he doesn’t get it.

“And the food?” he asks.

“Factory fresh.”

They chuckle together, friends enjoying their joke.

“I kinda had this idea,” Ted says. “I was thinking instead of me drawing today, we could go for a drive. Would you be into that?”

Since her parents died, Elizabeth’s old friend Ginny is the only one who takes her out, down to Plymouth Harbor or for a walk on Duxbury Beach, no more than twice a year.

“That would be wonderful,” she says.

Donning the fur coat and hat her grandmother gave her as a wedding present, she leads Ted down to Mrs. Johnson’s office. There are only voluntary residents at Plymouth Brewster; it is no mental hospital with locked wards, but a place where people come to live structured lives. Elizabeth has never been much trouble to anyone at the facility. As long as they are back before dinner, Mrs. Johnson says, it would be fine.

“I USED TO drive a station wagon like this,” she remarks as they pull onto a highway she has not seen before. “Has this road been here a long time?”

“I guess like, yeah, since before I was born.”

Elizabeth laughs. “Ginny doesn’t want to upset me, you see.

They tell her familiarity is a good thing, so she takes me on the old roads. It would make sense if I were senile, I suppose, but really it is quite interesting to see this road.”

Soon they will pave it all, every marsh and fen. The animals will die and we will die with them. How much must be destroyed before people are satisfied?

She is quite an environmentalist for a seventeenth-century woman, Elizabeth thinks, but a hypocrite too, she tries telling herself: remember the diseases you brought, dear, remember the dead natives.

You think you haven’t profited from that? Hester stabs back.

“I was thinking maybe you could help me out with something,” Ted says. Elizabeth looks across the seat at him. His hair is a mess. He hunches forward over the steering wheel, racked with a worry she finds adorable. She is here in the car with him. No slowing paste in the brain.

Seconds come one after the other.

“By all means,” she says. “What can I do?”

“Well, see, there’s this person—she’s a girl. She goes to my school. And somebody told me it was her birthday soon…”

“You want to buy her something.”

“Yeah,” Ted says, relieved. “Yeah, exactly. But what?”

“I’m charmed that you would ask my advice,” she says. They pull off the first exit and into the parking lot of a giant mall, another place not ten miles from the Plymouth Brewster Elizabeth has never seen.

“We will find you the perfect gift,” she says, stepping from the car. “My mother was a great shopper. We would take the train down to New York and spend the afternoon picking out dresses at Bergdorf’s and then we’d have tea at the Plaza and stay the night there and examine shoes in the morning.”

She barely recognizes the playful tone she hears in her voice.

“I know a good piece of merchandise when I see it.”

“Cool.”

Elizabeth is able to dispense with the entirety of a store named T. J. Maxx in under five minutes. “Not us,” she says, gliding into the sunlit atrium, amazed at how easy it is to be gliding into the sunlit atrium, amazed at how easy it is to be here among people.

“What’s her name?”

“Lauren. But she’s not exactly, at the moment, you know, like my girlfriend.”

“Ah-hah, I see. Yes. This information is helpful. Here we are, good old Lord & Taylor, I think this will do nicely.”

“Oh, yeah, and her family—they’re rich. But what’s cool is she didn’t take a car from her parents, even though her stupid brother drives an SUV.”

“And does she live in a grand house?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty big. Down at the end of Winthrop Street, kinda near your old place. I’ve only driven by it a couple times.”

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 officer’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 Euroindy-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 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.”