Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

“I don’t care,” Elizabeth says, though it isn’t true and she can’t help seeing Hester in the woodshed. Her responses go unheeded now in any case. She starts up a rise she can remember being driven along by her grandfather in his Packard.

Eighty years the owners of a sawmill and merchants through the Revolution, and of course, you know the cellar was fitted with a second cellar covered with a boulder lowered from an oak beam by rope, where our family hid during raids by the British, relying on the appointed neighbor—should he survive—to come and lift the stone when the soldiers had quit their burning. And merchants still in the early days of the Republic, selectmen at town hall, teachers, a judge, a colonel, a daughter ended in the river, never mentioned, a graveyard full of us. On the sidewalk, she shakes her head back and forth, back and forth. “I know this. What does it matter?”

Witnesses by news and action to the slaughters here and abroad; money in the banks that made the wars; snobbery; polite unspoken belief in the city on the hill and our place at its center; disdain; a preference for distant justice; lives of comfort made from other people’s labor; and don’t tell me it doesn’t matter, that it’s all too complex now, because it isn’t and you know it and we always have. One eye on heaven, the other blind.

At the top of the rise, Elizabeth sees the factory where they make cranberry juice and she remembers walking in the fields behind the house with Will, past the old bogs, thinking to herself how they would one day walk those paths with their child, how once he was born, life would be about the future.

The oval Ocean Spray insignia is painted in red and blue on the side of the building, perched there on the shore against the icy, churning sea.

Farther from the center of town, traffic lights hang over deserted intersections. She walks on and on past fields and houses, another group of stores, a liquor market, a fast food restaurant. She crosses the town line out of Plymouth and keeps going, the snow coming faster. At the highway overpass there is no more Howard Johnson’s, some other motel now.

“He’s out this evening,” Ted’s father said when she called from her room. Then she remembered him telling her he and Lauren were spending New Year’s together. At the end of Winthrop Street, he’d said her place was, the day they visited Lord & Taylor.

Brickman’s Funeral Home is still there, and the Catholic church, and the convenience store at the top of the hill.

Crossing the river, she walks by the old shoe factory, shops and apartments now, built on the ground of the ancient sawmill. She can barely feel her cheeks in the cold as she turns down her family’s street.

The old house sits back from the road, steep front roof with the long sloping back covered in a layer of white; weathered shingles detached in places; the shutters the same dark red they’ve always been. Her brother has never been able to bring himself to sell it, so it’s rented to people who usually don’t stay long. The crab apple tree still stands in the front yard, buffeted by the winds of another snow, and she thinks the house looks much as it must have the night she lay upstairs in the front room. Once the doctor told Will and her parents that a third of babies were born with the cord wrapped once around the neck—twice less often but not never—whatever unspoken suspicion they had ended. But the trouble was Hester didn’t leave that night. She stayed.

And occasionally Elizabeth couldn’t help yelling at her for not uncoiling her son as a midwife would. After a week, Will left to see his family. Her parents took her to the psychiatrist. In the fields she used to play in as a child—sold now—there are other homes, outsized in every way, their wide circular drives paved, lights sprayed down over the yards as if from the walls of prisons. Huge, gaudy places that dwarf the crumbling saltbox.

At the end of the street, she sees Ted’s car parked in front of the blue imitation of a château. She walks up the drive, past an empty fountain.

“WHAT ABOUT YOUR room?” he asks, passing it in the hall. She shakes her head. “We’ll use my parents’.”

They enter a room with dark satin walls, a canopy bed, undistressed, the carpet thick and plush. Lauren goes straight over and pulls the comforter off, throwing it onto the floor, leaving just the white sheets and lots of pillows. He wishes they were at least a bit drunk. This premeditation is unnerving. Standing beside the bed, they start to kiss. It’s harder than they’ve kissed before, their teeth knock, their tongues squirrel deep into each other’s mouths. The remove Ted felt on the highway is with him here again, his mind somewhere behind them, committing the scene to memory.

She takes his hand, puts it on her breast. He starts unbuttoning her shirt, wondering if he’s moving too fast, but her hands are rubbing the small of his back in encouragement and he guesses this is how it is done. The material is silky to the touch and the buttons come apart easily. When he has her shirt off, Lauren reaches over her shoulders and removes her bra. Her breasts are small, her nipples darker than he expected. He’s not sure what to do.

Neither of them is moving. He has no erection and doesn’t know why. She bites her lip and stares at the floor.

“Don’t you want to do this?” she asks.

Suddenly, awfully, she doesn’t seem older. Her knowing expression is gone. Replaced by awkwardness or confusion, maybe even anger, he can’t tell. He feels alone.

There’s a halfnaked stranger in front of him. He’s the desperate guy he always imagined he was. Being here feels wrong, but somehow too late. He’s supposed to know how things go and he doesn’t. He leans down and tries kissing the side of her face, which works more or less, their bodies moving closer, her breasts warm through his shirt. He never imagined she might not have done this before. The thought terrifies him.

“Yeah,” he replies, “of course.”

He sits on the edge of the bed and Lauren starts undoing his shirt. He doesn’t want to take his T-shirt off, but she tugs at the back of it, so he pulls it over his head, exposing his slender chest. They shift farther onto the mattress and he lies back. He’s expecting her to climb up and kiss him but she doesn’t. She unzips his jeans, which finally gives him his hard-on back. It’s almost as he imagined it: her on top of him, this inscrutable look on her face, only it’s not distance, nothing like that, and he’s not asking her about where she’s been or what it’s like to come back from faraway places, even though these childish questions are the ones he still wants to ask. He thought somehow he would ask them now.

But neither of them speak. There is the weight of her crushing his leg, a mole his fingers discover on the back of her shoulder as she kisses his stomach. It is weakness and helplessness he feels as she pulls down his jeans and boxers. They haven’t talked about sex, only Christmas night outside her house, as her parents watched from the kitchen and she waved to them and then turned to Ted and whispered, New Year’s, let’s do it then. Naked now before her, he wants to ask if he is actually male in the way other men are, or if he is missing something he’s never been able to see. His back arches sharply at the moist warm touch of her mouth on the head of his penis and he senses he can’t let her do this or it will be over, so he pulls her up by her armpits and rolls her onto her back. He looks at her mouth but avoids her eyes. Still they say nothing.

Lauren slips off her pants and underwear. She makes no sound as he leans down to kiss her nipples, but once he’s started, she puts her hands in his hair and guides his head into her chest. He shudders at the taste of salt on her flesh.