Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

“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.

“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 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.”

“DUUUDE,” STEVIE PIPER calls out that night, “check this out.” The bottom of a plastic gal on milk container has been cut off with a bread knife, a foil screen placed over its mouth, 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.

“ 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 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.