PRIVATELY STRANGE PEOPLE
I judge people based on what they think is valuable. Everyone does this, but I’m the kind of person who admits it.
There’s a group that people watches with me, and we pay attention to what someone picks up and leaves behind. Marisol is the loudest of the group, and Brenda is the tall one. I’m not sure how old they are, but I know they are both older than me.
We record what we see in our log—indicate the item, the day, the place, a brief description of the person. We like to include a note about who we think they are. If they’re someone who arrives too early to parties, if they don’t drink, if they come from a wealthy family.
Our group meets in Marisol’s apartment. She is big on litter.
“Look at that man,” she says, pointing out her window. “He walked right past that water bottle.” She shakes her head. “Some people have no class.”
“I’ll pick up the bottle later,” I say.
We both know that good deeds don’t count if someone tells you to do it.
“You’d think he would be more considerate,” Marisol says.
I think people would be more considerate if they knew we were watching them.
Marisol’s eyebrows are shaved, and she pencils them in. Today they are high, thin arches. Other times, they’re scribbled in dark rectangles or have long tails.
Marisol moved into one of those industrial places where the pipes stick from the ceiling. Her apartment is too small for our group, but no one complains. It’s especially too small because Marisol has so many things.
We are in her living room, and there is an ironing board with all her jewelry on it in cardboard boxes. She has a dresser in here she says belonged to her grandmother. Each drawer has folders or bookmarks or tablecloths or posters or extension cords or tools or batteries, and Marisol says all these items are special to her in a different way.
She uses the pipes in the ceiling as extra closet space. Her blouses and work pants dangle from wire hangers. I’m sitting on the floor now, my back against the armchair with an empty fish tank on it, watching her khakis sway in the soft stream of the AC.
I can’t picture Marisol in her work clothes. In those clothes, she is a different person. A person with polished shoes and pearl earrings. Now, in her long purple skirt that kisses the tops of her bare feet, she is the Marisol I know. Though I wonder if I know the real Marisol. Maybe she acts different around us too.
Brenda, the tall one, sits on half of the loveseat. The other half is covered by a stack of magazines. Today Brenda wears her orange hair in a beehive, and it’s loose because she keeps dodging Marisol’s hanging clothes.
“Anyone pick up the sand dollar yet?” Brenda asks.
Brenda plants items on our path to see if anyone stops for them. Today she placed a sand dollar on a street that’s hours from any ocean. Last week, it was a tie clip and cufflinks. I asked her where she got those because they looked like they were worth something, but she let a man with a dark beard stuff them in his pocket at the bus stop.
“I think he’s someone pretending to be something he’s not,” Brenda had said as we watched him walk away.
Marisol says now, “The sand dollar is still there.”
Brenda brushes her hair back. “Maybe I hid it too well. It could be more in the open.”
“Leave it where it is,” Marisol says. “It’ll take a special person to find it.”
Brenda reaches for her tea. The china chafes the saucer. “Dear,” she says to me. “Did you bring something to hide this week?”
I shake my head. “No. Maybe next time.”
“Yes, maybe next time,” Brenda says, frowning.
She is the only one of us that is married, but I’ve never seen Brenda’s husband. She doesn’t talk about him. I only know she’s married because of the petite ring on her finger. I don’t even know Brenda’s last name, maiden or otherwise. If she changed her name.
One of Marisol’s blouses slides off the hanger and falls on her record player. She has a power ballad on, but it’s turned down. The sound pops through the speakers sometimes, and I jump. The inside of this apartment traps everything inside it. Sound is like a living thing here that swallows you, as if you’re in a whale’s belly and all you hear are echoes from the outside.
“Oh, look,” Marisol says, tapping on her window. “Someone threw the bottle away. Better in the recycling, but oh well. The intention’s there.”
She grabs our formal log and balances the book on the back on her thigh as she writes.
Marisol smiles. “Our hundredth entry. How about that?”
“Who was it?” Brenda asks. She teeters to the window, her block heels clunking. “What did they look like?”
“He’s obviously a father,” Marisol says. “He was so careful about picking it up. Only children can soften a man that way.”
“Was it that man there? In the green coat?”
“Hmm,” Marisol says. “I don’t think it was green. Maybe blue?”
“Light hair?”
Marisol nods.
“Oh, I see him,” Brenda says. She motions for me to join her. “Come look. He’s rather handsome.”
I go to the window. Nobody on the street looks the way Marisol described, someone soft with the possibility of children. If I didn’t know what I was looking for, I would never know he existed. I do think he’s attractive once I find him, but I bet that’s because he did something nice.
“I was wondering who would pick up that bottle,” Marisol says. “I hoped it would be someone worthy of our book.”
People who find our things, that pick up other people’s things, are special. Someone who looks at the ground and finds value there makes that person seem…well, better than anyone else. But we don’t share what we collect with anyone. We agree that nobody will understand us privately strange people. What do they know, anyway?
✺
I think every time I see Marisol, her face shifts. Like, if she sleeps wrong, one eyelid will be droopy. Sometimes her upper lip disappears under a bed of mushy skin. Today I’m at her apartment, and there’s a mole on her cheek. If Marisol is alarmed, she doesn’t say anything.
“Where’s Brenda?” I ask.
“Oh, she can’t make it today,” Marisol says. “Something about an unexpected appointment, I think? She sounded sick on the phone. Her voice was stuffy.”
“What kind of sickness?”
A three-legged cat jumps on the counter in front of me. Where the fourth leg should be is a bulging red stub. Its gray tail twitches, and it growls.
“Shut up,” Marisol says to the cat.
“When did you get a cat?” I ask. I think maybe he’s hidden in here all this time, and I never noticed. It would be easy to hide here. Maybe that’s what Marisol does too.
She shrugs. “He was in the alley, and he came inside. I think he smelled my tuna sandwich.”
The cat hisses at me.
“You can’t keep him,” I say, backing up. “He’ll maw you in your sleep.”
Marisol grabs the cat’s stomach, ribs slated like train tracks, and throws him onto the floor. It yowls. “He just needs to learn who’s boss,” she says.
I sit on a barstool so I can get away from the cat. It runs behind an end table.
Marisol rolls her eyes. “He’s not very nice, but I think he’ll learn.”
I don’t think he will.
“Anyway,” I say, clearing a space on the counter. There’s a stack of mismatched empty dishes, crusted with dark sauces and bits of parmesan cheese. “What happened to Brenda?”
Marisol sighs. “I don’t remember what she said. While we were talking, I was chasing him out of the bonsai pot in the dining room.” She glares in the direction of the cat. “I think he wanted to piss in there.”
The cat growls, like he knows we’re talking about him.
“You can’t keep that cat,” I say again. “He’s feral.”
Marisol laughs. “I think I’m my own entry,” she says. “Beautiful woman picks up cat from street. What does that say about me?”
“That you have a death wish.”
“No,” she says. “It means I have a kind heart. I can sense when someone’s in need.”
I hope she did not write this in our book, but I don’t ask.
Marisol goes to the cabinet and grabs a wine glass. “Like I can sense you need a drink,” she says. “Am I right?”
I don’t want a drink, but I take it anyway to make her feel better about herself. She pours me a glass. A few seconds later, we hear the cat peeing. When Marisol realizes, she yells, “Bad cat! Bad boy!” It darts into the other room but not before she throws my wine at it.
✺
I wake to the phone ringing in the middle of the night. My eyes are bleary with sleep. I rub them with cold fists and stumble from my bed to the kitchen. I don’t turn on the light.
“Hello?” I say. My voice is hoarse. I lean against the wall. No one says anything. “Hello?” I ask again.
“Is this…”
I can barely hear the voice. “Is this who?”
The voice sighs. “Dear, it’s Brenda.”
“Brenda? Why are you calling me at—” I look at the clock on the wall. Gray moonlight makes a stripe across its face, and I stand on my tiptoe to see the numbers close up. “It’s two in the morning.”
“I’m sorry. I know it’s late. Did I wake you? I figure young people go to bed late. But it is rather late.” There are muffled sounds on her end. Her voice doesn’t sound like Brenda. It twists in her throat like a recently caught fish.
“It’s fine,” I tell her. “Why are you calling me?”
I hear a car door slam on her end, followed by the roar of a distant engine.
“Brenda? Are you there?”
“Now that I have you on the phone, it seems silly. Really, this whole thing is so silly. Don’t worry about me.” Her voice prickles with laughter.
I blink into the darkness of my kitchen. This is the first time I’ve spoken to Brenda outside of our weekly meetings. I can’t tell if I like it or not.
“Something is wrong,” I say.
“What makes you think that?”
The car engine is gone now. I hear what I think is her door open, the whine of it, and then it shuts.
Like drink, I know late night makes people honest. We are here now, peering over the edge into another type of intimacy between us. One we can never take back.
I hear her take a breath, and I think she’s smoking. “My husband just left me.”
“Oh, Brenda.” It comes out high-pitched, like I’m trying to console a child and not a grown woman.
“This was a long time coming, I think.” She exhales, and now I know she’s smoking. “We had a fight this afternoon. That’s why I didn’t show up to our meeting.”
“Well, that’s alright. I know this must be hard.”
“You don’t know what it feels like.” It is not mean. She is stating a fact. I do not know what it’s like to have a husband leave me. To have anybody leave me. “I feel like I’m going to die,” she says.
The frayed hem of my nightgown brushes the back of my calves. My hair is heavy down my neck, and I pull it around my shoulder.
“You’re not going to die,” I say. “Not now. Not yet.”
Brenda sniffs. “I have no one.”
“Brenda, I’m here.”
“Nobody else is going to take me,” she says, talking over me. “He was the only one who could put up with someone like me.”
“That’s not true.”
I picture Brenda with a mess of frayed orange hair, tangled with sleep, stepping into her bedroom to see what her husband took. What he left behind. She opens his drawers and sees his shirts, the ones she’d said looked good on him. She sees his golfing bag and realizes he never liked to play. Maybe when he said he was going to the course, he was going somewhere else. She sees the pictures of them that are facing up but have, over the years, scooted farther and farther from the bed. The escape was efficient, and Brenda will figure during their marriage he had determined what was valuable and what he could live without. It will sting that he left almost all of it. Including her.
“Sometimes we had these moments, you know? That made all the bad stuff seem like it wasn’t so bad. I never thought it would actually be over.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
“And you know the saddest thing?” She is doing what grieving people do—talk to hear themselves speak, and it doesn’t matter if I’m listening. “I don’t think he loved me that much in the first place.”
I don’t know what to say. I just let her cry into the phone.
I hear the whir of my refrigerator, the coo of an owl, all soft the noise that surrounds us.
And then she hangs up. At first, I don’t realize she’s gone because her sobs were quieting, but then the dial tone hums.
“Brenda?” I ask, even though I know she’s not there.
I consider going to her house to make sure she’s okay, but I have no idea where she lives. I didn’t even know she had my number.
✺
Next week we are back at Marisol’s. Brenda is there, and it’s the first time I’ve seen her since the call. I don’t know if I should bring it up. She is all smiles today, saying things like, “it’s such a beautiful day, don’t you think?”
Marisol asks if we want coffee, and Brenda says of course she would love some. Marisol prepared us tuna sandwiches with tomato, and they’re sitting on an ottoman. The cat is here, hopping on its three legs and hissing. It scratched Brenda’s leg badly enough to draw blood. There’s a thick, white bandage on her thigh now. When it happened, she looked at the cat and said, “what a cutie pie. Isn’t he?”
When Marisol leaves to make coffee, I look at Brenda and say, “how are you fee—"
“What did you do this weekend, dear?” Brenda asks.
She leans for a sandwich, and I watch her grip smash the bread. She takes the smallest bite I have ever seen.
“Um. I went to a movie.”
“Which one?” she asks. “I should really go to the movies more.”
There’s a loud clang of Marisol’s dishes. “It’s alright,” she calls. The sink turns on.
“Uh, it was You’ve Got Mail,” I say.
“Is that the one with Tom Hanks where he emails Meg Ryan’s character, and she doesn’t realize she knows him in real life? Even when he’s sitting right in front of her face?”
I nod.
“Did you like it?”
“No, not too much,” I say.
Marisol isn’t here, so I don’t know why we’re pretending. I’m sitting under a pair of Marisol’s work pants, gray and pressed. I feel sweat dampen my back as I lean against the armchair. Brenda doesn’t think her feelings are valuable. She would walk right past them if she saw them on the street. She squeezes her sandwich, and a tomato wedge falls and makes a wet slap on the floor. Brenda doesn’t notice.
I pick it up. “This fell out of your sandwich,” I say.
Brenda stares at the tomato. She stares at me.
The coffee pot gurgles from the kitchen, and Marisol calls out, “coffee should be out shortly,” and before I can respond, Brenda snatches the tomato and shoves it in her mouth. She looks at me with tears while she chews.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
Brenda swallows the floor tomato and wipes her eyes with the sleeve of her dress. “Look,” she says. She holds out her left hand. The ring is gone.
My stomach summersaults. “You didn’t.”
“It’s on a newsstand out there.”
“Please tell me you’re joking.” My jaw is slack. I don’t know this Brenda. I didn’t know she was capable of something like this.
“I don’t care.” She shakes her head. “He didn’t care, so why should I?”
“Brenda,” I say. “You have to stop this—”
Marisol comes back, claps us to attention. “Now, back to people watching, hmm? Anything interesting happen while I was gone?”
I look at Brenda. Her mouth is full of tuna, and her eyes are glassy. She walks to the window beside Marisol and smiles in her face. “No, you didn’t miss anything.”
“Glad we’re on the same page,” Marisol says.
Today Marisol’s eyes are green. I don’t remember what color they were before today, but I didn’t think they were green. I would have said brown. But there they are, looking at me in all their greenness.
Marisol thinks everything is valuable, but all her clutter in here is junk, and Brenda doesn’t think anything is valuable, and I feel like that’s just as bad.
We all stand at the window, waiting for something to happen. There is a glint from the top of the newsstand, but I don’t bring it up. Brenda doesn’t either. People on the street pass below us. I watch them, and I feel like I don’t know anybody.