TOM ROTH

Don’t Be A Stranger

There is a brown woman in Michael’s house. She comes in the morning just before his wife has left for school. “She’s all alone and she needs some company,” Claire has told him the first times he argued. He once had asked Claire if this neighbor spoke any English. But his wife knows how to settle him down and touch his good side, especially when he is in such a fragile state of forgetfulness for his age at seventy. “It’s the least we can do. Don’t be a stranger.” He loves Claire and he considers himself a good neighbor, and Claire is right in the end—he should never be a stranger.

Sometimes, though, the sight of such a woman still feels like a dream to him, how she appears in a long maroon dress he can never name.

“A sari,” she reminds him.

It takes a while to remember her, it takes an afternoon in late winter. He stands at his living room window and looks at the snow and thinks he should shovel the driveway even though he has just finished. The white and the gray disturb him, and he almost loses complete sense of place until he sees the deer pass through his backyard. Three fawns and a mother. They raise their heads when the wind brushes dust through their legs. A trail of tracks forms in the snow. He feels clear and calm when he sees their path behind them, and he knows he will remember them later, and suddenly, her name comes to him.

“Ananya,” he calls in the house. “Come here, quick. Ananya.”

When Ananya finds him at the window she first does not look out at the deer. She holds his eyes in hers. She is about the same age as him, but she moves and speaks without trouble, naming things like fork and tree, reminding him to turn off the stove, driving him to the golf course to meet his friends. “Why they wear those red things?” A golf-buddy had asked that once about the bindi between her eyes. Her graying hair is pulled back, tied tight. It seems there is great time and trust between them. They had already spent a month together, every weekday, but he can no longer collect and keep moments, he can no longer retrace the missing steps that vanish from his tracks again and again. And yet, here he is now, saying her name.

“They’re beautiful,” Ananya says.

“You see them everywhere,” Michael replies, “but they always surprise you.” A moment comes: he is in the yard with his son and grandson. It’s warm and sunny. Jet streams cross the clear sky. He takes his grandson from his son and tells the baby boy that could be you one day. His son Dominic has thanked him for watching DJ. “You have kids?”

“Yes, I have a son,” Ananya says.

“So do I. Two of them.”

“My son is a doctor, you know, like you.”

It is a conversation they have at least three times a day. He finds out her son lives in California and that he was born here in Ohio. She misses him. When he asks about her husband, Michael learns he was also a doctor, that he had died a long time ago.

“He was a nice man,” Ananya says. They are drinking tea in the kitchen. Michael had always been a coffee guy until now. He brings the mug to his face and smells the steam. Cinnamon, nutmeg. “More stubborn than a cat but nice.”

He often wishes for a dog in the house. They had a couple when Dominic and Vinny were growing up. A golden retriever, then a black lab. Girls. Angie and Layla. Named after his favorite rock songs.

“I’m more a dog person myself,” Michael says.

“Sid also likes dogs.”

“Who?”

“My son,” Ananya says. “Siddarth.”

“You have a son?”

And they begin once more. Strangers again, only for a second. He plays Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. on his record player in the basement. They listen together and look at pictures on the wall: his sons in football uniforms, family vacations at the beach, Cleveland sports memorabilia.

“I know who Bruce Springsteen is,” she says back at him, hand on hip, annoyed like one of his sisters. “Have you heard of Shankar?”

She takes his phone and googles a dark-haired man holding a sitar. Another picture shows Shankar smiling beside George Harrison.

“He played at Woodstock, you know,” Ananya says. “I was there.”

“You were?” Michael asks.

“No,” Ananya laughs, shaking her head. “No, I didn’t come here until after we were married.”

The image of her as a girl in another country forms in his head. A child on a busy street, people everywhere, an elephant in the road, a bucket of water or fruit balanced on her head. His thought of her is absurd and assuming, even misconceived, and he soon moves to his own image as a boy. He carries a baseball glove or a football down the street to Mr. Lombardi’s corner store. He sees Lombardi chewing on his cigar and he hears the bell ring on the door and he smells the bread baking in the ovens. He can still see the tiny cigar bits falling in the flour and dough. “Take it back,” his mother would tell him when she found anything in the loaf he would bring home. “Tell Lombardi to get that gosh darn thing out of his mouth.” He would have to visit her every day near the end of her life and help her the same Ananya helps him now.

“The Beatles went to India,” Michael says.

“Yes, The Beatles went to India.” Ananya rolls her eyes. “I do like some of their songs. They’re catchy.”

“But The Beatles ain’t rock,” Michael adds. “They’re pop.”

“So?”

“I’m just saying.”

He wants to be insightful, articulate. He feels he should say more, that he isn’t done. So much of his ideas and sentences seem caught in a web, tangled in a knot, released in the wind like aimless balloons. He often thought of his patients. Children would sit on the plastic sheet of the exam table. “What seems to be the problem?” he’d ask them, and after listening to the child’s shy, painful answers, he would turn to their parent for clearer words. He was a friendly and trusting doctor, and he could make the child and the parent smile at the same time with a little joke, a brief story, a funny look. He could see the calm he brought to people just from the stillness in their eyes, the confidence and the promise that things were going to get better soon. It always hurt him to hear a child crying after a shot, and he’d tell them he and his own sons never liked needles. When did the right word become so hard to find? When did this game of hide and seek with his own thoughts begin? When did he forget how to say what he feels and how to show what he thinks?

“I like that song, ‘All You Need Is Love,’” Ananya says.

Michael makes his hands into a trumpet and mimics the brass section of the song.

“That’s the one,” Ananya laughs.

It feels good to make someone smile. It feels good to know something by heart again, or rather, in the heart again.

“There’s a part in there about learning how to be you in time,” she says. “Everyone’s either always doing that or not doing that. Learning to be themselves at some point. We make it so hard sometimes, how to be, but in the song, they say it’s easy to do.” She sings the pre-chorus and swings her hands side to side. “I like that.”

They end the day with a walk. At first, it’s a surprise each time to him. Ananya suggests they take one, and Michael says a walk sounds nice right now. He doesn’t look like a man who needs someone to watch him. He walks tall, keeps a full head of dark hair, can still whack a golf ball farther than any of his friends. Walking with Ananya reminds him of his jogging days. Ananya has always enjoyed a good walk and she is glad to share one with him. She and her husband used to walk early in the morning, sometimes before dawn. Now, when she isn’t with Michael, she walks by herself. Her son rarely comes home from the west, and when he does he just sleeps and eats in the house, her place only a hotel for him, before he is out somewhere with friends. She wants grandchildren, but he is not married. Sometimes, she fears she has put too much pressure on him as a child in school, as a man in the world, and this has led to the distance between him and her. She keeps her guard when she tells this to Michael, and he learns not to pry the second she looks down at the sidewalk.

“Family can test you,” Michael says, “especially when your kids are grown.”

There are looks he cannot unsee, he cannot change no matter what he might try. He forgets the name of his son. “This is Dominic,” Claire says after Dominic steps through the door with his grandson. It’s a Sunday and they’re about to eat spaghetti. Her smile, so grave and empty, leaves him speechless, suspended. “Our son.” He doesn’t know what to think when he wraps his arms around Dominic. It feels like standing outside a locked door in the cold, knocking on a window, saying hello to no one at night. He knows there is something here he should recognize but he can’t see it. The neighbors understand he confuses their house as his own. They are nice enough to direct Michael back to his door and tell Claire what’s going on.

“Are you hot in that?” Ananya asks about his coat.

“A little.”

Like that, the snow has already melted. It’s getting warmer. Michael has difficulty judging the weather. At least they have more sunlight now. So many walks have been under gray skies. He slips off his coat. He feels the air on his arms and he can smell the grass for the first time. Baseball. He wishes he could coach one more season with his sons, he wishes he could go back to when they were just beginning to become teenagers. He wonders if any parent might need some extra help this season. He sees himself in the dugout, watching one of his pitchers, and when he looks over to the parents in the bleachers, he sees Ananya in the front row by herself.

It won’t happen. He can’t fully understand why, but he feels it as Ananya walks beside him. “What seems to be the problem?” he asks himself. The question has always made him uneasy when he’d hear himself say it. Seems to be. He cannot answer it either, and he has strange images of examining himself. He sticks a tongue depressor in his mouth, checks his ear with an otoscope, places that thing with the metal disk and ear buds on his heart. What is it called, the thing around every doctor’s neck? Nothing comes. A jar of cotton swabs fills his brain as he looks down at a golf ball on the course.

“This is your ball,” his golf friends say. “You just shot, Mike.”

They try their best to be patient. Halfway through the course, he becomes anxious and restless, asking over and over if this is the last hole, and he can no longer decide on his own which club to use for each shot. He can’t listen to them either. Lying bastards, he snaps at them, you fuckers, you little mother fuckers. They tell him to calm down—it’s just golf, it’s us—and his head feels full of cement, he’s so tired he sometimes naps in the cart. “Look at him,” he hears one of them say, his friend’s voice choked up, near tears, when they think he is still asleep.

“Ananya!” he calls at night. He has just made tea. The house smells of cinnamon. “Ananya!”

“Who’s Ananya?” Dominic asks. His son spends a few nights a week in his old bedroom. Claire has called him about Michael’s outbursts. She has never heard her husband speak like this, the anger and fear in every word. She has never believed that she would meet such a strange and alternate side of him, as if he was under the possession of some malignant spirit.

“Who the fuck are you to ask?” Micheal says to his son, then turns to Claire. “Why is he still here anyway?”

Michael pushes past them. Claire touches her son’s arm. Dominic calls his Dad.

“Ananya!” he yells down the stairs, waiting for her to appear in the foyer. “Where the hell is my phone?”

They have taken his phone. In the middle of the night, he calls his sons and his friends and tries to talk about golfing, sports, the weather. He begins to shout and cuss at them when they say he should go back to sleep. Claire tells him to calm down as he paces the house. He loses track of time and believes it is morning, it is evening, and he must get ready for the day, for tomorrow. He has always been an early riser, like his father, who broke his back laying cement for him to go to college. “You stay in school,” his father said in the hospital bed after back surgery, “so you don’t have to deal with this when you’re older.”

Sometimes he is quiet enough to let them sleep. These are better mornings, when no one is following him and telling him to go back to bed. He writes a list and checks it off: do laundry, clean records, organize garage. He almost writes drop off bread, check on Mom, and he closes his eyes when he remembers finding her frail body on the kitchen floor. In his head, he writes one more—tell Claire you love her, first thing—and it echoes in hopes he will remember. He has done all of these things two, three times a day, but Ananya reminds him with a kind patience: “Already done. What’s next?” Every day is its own year, too quick and full of so many things you might miss. Where does it all go, and why always so fast?

“There’s my house,” Ananya says during a walk.

It’s like the others. Two story. Brick. Many windows. A big place for one lady.

“You live in this neighborhood, too?” Michael replies. “I didn’t know that.”

There is soon a day Ananya arrives with a blue mask. She keeps her distance, only waves to Michael and Claire, and she doesn’t come inside. Claire hasn’t left for school and she has been on the phone with administrators, teachers, and parents all morning. Every conversation she has sounds frantic and bewildered, and Michael has asked her multiple times what’s going on after seeing the news. Ananya says hello. The only part of her smile he sees is around her eyes.

“It’s not safe,” she says when Michael says to come in. “People are getting sick.”

“I know,” Michael replies, “I know.”

“It’s nice to see you, though,” Ananya says. “I’ll be back soon.”

“Don’t be a stranger.”

“Never.”

And it is not long until he is inviting her to sit down and have some tea. He partly knows why she can’t come in, why Claire can’t go to school, but he won’t accept all of it, he needs more, and he wants Ananya right now. Claire is too tired to explain everything to him again. She comes home from the grocery store with a mask on her face. She sits in front of her laptop and talks to faces on the screen. Michael reads online this could go on for years, but it already feels that way to him. He can’t remember the last time he saw his golf-buddies or his grandson.

At night, he leaves the house. He takes the same route he went on with Ananya. It’s near summer. The night buzzes and chirps with a chorus of insects. He turns the wrong way and heads in another direction. He looks for her house. He wants to know if she has any children. He wants to speak to her without any mask, to see her face in full again, to be with her like before.

And her name? He can’t remember it. He walks for hours and he looks in the sky like her name might appear among the stars or in the trees. He knocks on doors and wakes up strangers and asks if she’s there. A policeman soon knows the routine.

“Come on, Mike. Let’s get you home.” The officer’s mask only covers his chin.

“Do you know who I’m looking for?” he asks the officer.

They are riding in the cruiser. He has never been picked up by the police until now.

“Who? Your wife Claire. Yes, she’s wondering where you go.”

“I go…” Michael said. He remembers Ananya listening to music in his basement. It’s easy she sings and swings her hands side to side. It’s enough to let the rest of the night be for now. It’s enough to close his eyes until the ride is over.

“You can’t keep wandering off like this, Mike,” the officer says as he pulls into the driveway.

When Michael tries another night, he meets his son on the couch. The young man wears no mask. Before he can ask the man what the hell he’s doing in his house, he sees a scared and tired child. It is the face of his own sons, when one of them would wake him up at his bedside and whisper he was afraid to sleep and then he’d crawl between him and Claire. Michael would stroke his son’s head and watch the boy rest and feel so certain of everything.

“Go back to sleep, Dad,” Dominic says.

There is one night he finds deer in the snow. He passes his son asleep on the couch and enters the cold, quiet dark. Low clouds reflect the lights of the houses and travel over the roofs, shapeless and strange, and he thinks of weird golf balls and cotton swabs floating in the air. The snowfall shines with a crystal glaze, solid and bright, and it looks like it will never go away. He walks through it in only sweatpants and slippers, his feet going numb. He turns down the exit street that runs along the frozen pond.

And there they are.

At least a dozen deer crossing the pond, heading for the main road that lays outside of the neighborhood. He watches them move and step without sound. One notices him standing there, and then they are still, all of them, looking back with their black eyes. His hand reaches out, and the deer pick up their pace, galloping over the fence, and they are gone.

“You’re gonna freeze to death,” the policeman will say. “Get in, Mike.”

He will sit in the back seat and tell him about the deer.

“What tracks?”

“Over there.”

Michael will point out the window, but he will find the snow unmarked and blank, a perfect white. He will wait for one more to appear on the pond, not listening to the officer’s lecture about how he could’ve died if no one had found him.

Her name. He feels cold and empty beside the pond. He shivers and rubs his hands and thinks about the deer tracks across the road and the houses on the other side. Did she live there? he wonders. Her name. What is it? He is nearing the road when he remembers her dress. He can’t remember, and he wants a picture of her. He can barely see her face, but he recalls her beside him, wearing a red dress he can never name, and it feels like it was yesterday they saw deer, and it feels like she might arrive in the snow tonight for one more chance to meet, to learn her name, to begin once more.