Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

Sitting in front of this oddly compelling woman, he realized more clearly than ever before this was why he’d become a doctor: to organize his involuntary proximity to human pain. He could use his excuse of debt to leave his position at the clinic; he could even leave his profession, move away, anywhere, but still there would be this opening in him. Mrs. Buckholdt rose from the couch and stood by the window. As she raised the shade, more of the waning sun flooded the room. Her shoulders tensed at the sound of a knock on the other side of the kitchen door. Frank watched her take a breath.

“What is it, darling?” she called out.

“Can I come in?” a quiet voice asked.

She crossed to unlock the door. The boy edged his way into the room. Biting her lower lip, holding herself rigid, Mrs. Buckholdt managed to run her hand through her son’s hair.

“What is it, dear?”

“When are we leaving?”

“In a few minutes,” she said. “Go ahead and get ready.”

The boy stared for a moment at Frank, his expression as mysterious as before. He turned back into the kitchen and they listened to his steps as he climbed the back stairs.

“Mrs. Buckholdt,” Frank began, knowing that by saying what he was about to say he was committing himself to remaining here, to finding some way to scrape by. People like this woman needed him, needed a person to listen. “In situations like yours, it can help a great deal if you have someone to talk with. I couldn’t see you every week, but I could do it once a month, and if you were able perhaps to get down to my office, we might meet once every two weeks. We could sign you up for free care. The drugs can only do so much.”

She had remained standing by the door, her arms crossed over her chest. “That’s generous of you,” she said, taking a step into the center of the room.

After a moment’s pause, she looked again at the picture on the wall. “That print there,” she said, “it was his favorite. He picked it out at the museum in Chicago. He loved all the different characters, the bits of activity.”

Frank turned to look. In the left foreground, a tavern overflowed with townspeople, drinkers spilling into the street, following in the wake of a large-bellied mandolin player wearing a floppy hat. In front of him, the obese leader of the carnival sat, as if on horseback, astride a massive wine barrel pushed forward by the revelers, his lance a spit of meat. Opposite him and his train, somberly dressed people stood praying in some rough formation behind a gaunt, pale man propped up in a chair—Lent holding out before him a baker’s pole. He faced the leader of the carnival band, the two posed in mock battle. Behind these contending forces, the square bustled. Fishwives gutting their fish on a wooden block, boys playing at a stick and tethered ball, dancers dancing, merchants selling, children peering from windows, a woman on a ladder scrubbing the walls of a house. There were cripples missing limbs, almsmen begging by the well.

A man and woman made love. Another couple, dressed in Puritan costume, their backs to the viewer, were led by a fool through the middle of it all.

“Certainly no Arcadia,” she said. “Nothing lush about it, not the kind of painting I fell in love with. I’ve looked at it a lot since he’s been gone. My professors taught me Brueghel was a moralizer, his paintings full of parables. But that’s not what I see anymore. I just see how much there is, how much life.”

She looked at Frank. “The woman over in Tilden, she teaches Michael the violin now, and she won’t let me pay her. He’s not as good as his brother was, but he’s good.”

She bowed her head. “You seem like a kind man, and you’re kind to offer what you did. But I don’t want you to come back here. And I don’t want to come to your office. A few days a week I use those pills to get by, but there are days when I manage without them. Those are the better days. When I don’t look back, when I’m not afraid—better for my kids too. If you feel like you can’t write me a prescription, I understand. I’ll survive without it.”

The boy could be heard at the top of the front stairs. Frank rose from his chair and took a step toward Mrs. Buckholdt.

She turned to watch her son enter the room, carrying his violin case. Quietly, he took a seat in the wicker chair by the door.

“Go and get your father,” she said. “Tel him it’s time to leave.” He ran along the hall, into the kitchen, and out the back door.

Frank’s stomach tightened, the panic beginning before his mind could form the thought: he didn’t want to lose her, he didn’t want the telling to end.

Mrs. Buckholdt took her handbag from the front table.

“It really is recommended in almost all cases such as this that a patient undergo some kind of therapy, and given the extremity—”

“Dr. Briggs,” she interrupted, opening the front door to the view out over the yard and beyond to the empty road, “didn’t you hear what I said?”

A YEAR AFTER my mother’s suicide I broke a promise to myself not to burden my father with worries of my own. I told him how unhappy I was at school, how lonely I felt. From the wing chair where he crouched in the evenings he asked,

“What can I do?” The following afternoon, coming home from work the back way, he missed a stop sign. A van full of sheet glass going forty miles an hour hit the driver’s side of the Taurus. According to the policeman who knocked on the front door in tears, my father died with the first shattering impact. An aunt from Little Rock stayed for a week, cooking stews and Danish pastry. She said I could come and live with her in Arkansas. I told her I didn’t want to. As I had only a year and a half left of high school, we decided I could finish up where I was, and she arranged for me to live with a neighbor. Mrs. Polk was sixty, her mother eighty-five. They had between them a closet of fourteen blue flowered dresses, which the maid laundered on Tuesdays. They watched a considerable amount of public television and spoke in hushed tones of relatives in Pittsburgh. I was given dead Mr. Polk’s study with a cot in the corner. The ladies paid no attention to my coming and going and I spent as little time at their house as I could.

In industrial arts that fall, Mr. Raffello gave us a choice of projects: bookcase, spice rack, or a chest about the size of a child’s coffin. I picked the last of these, and because we had to pay for our own wood, I used pine. I took exact measurements and sanded each board with three grades of paper. All the equipment was there in the shop: hammers and vises, finishing nails and glue, planers and table saws.

The machines had shiny metal casings and made a deafening roar. If I had been allowed to, I would’ve stayed all day.

I found the class entrancing for another reason: the chance to be with Gramm Slater, an angry, cherub-faced boy who wore steel-tip boots and a baseball cap pulled over his brow. He stood a head above the other kids, already as large framed as my father, his forearms covered in a layer of golden hair. His lips curled easily into a sneer and his eyes were full of mockery. When he caught me gazing at him, he’d smirk knowingly, like an angel. Twice our shoulders had touched in the cafeteria line.

On a Friday afternoon a few weeks after my father died, Mr. Raffello began explaining the use of clamps. The thermos of gin I’d washed my sloppy joe down with at lunch made concentration a challenge but like a good student, I held on to my bench and remained upright. It struck me our teacher might be an inhabitant of some kingdom of middle earth, with his rickety frame and nose jutting over his mouth like a cliff above the entrance of a cave. His voice sounded like the bass notes of an organ.