Read Online If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories by Laura Kasischke - Free Book Online

then she cocked her head in that crazy-robin way she had that made him want to kill, and mouthed, “What, are, you, doing?”

     
    “What are you doing here?” Melody asked. It was early evening by the time he got down to the cabins. It had only taken an hour or so for him to walk the rutted dirt road to the Welcome Cabin, but by then the sun was in the middle of the sky bearing down in green-gold beams of light that crisscrossed each other in the clearing, where an old school bus was parked and empty. (He’d even stepped inside, to make sure it was empty.) There’d been no one in the Welcome Cabin to welcome him or to tell him where he might find his girlfriend who was a counselor at this camp, so Tony had started walking down a footpath he’d chosen from three other possible footpaths, and had walked down it for a long time until it dead-ended at a very small dark lake on which a few rowboats knocked against a weedy dock lazily in the light breeze, and he stopped.
    There had been a humming overhead—cicadas, but not like the ones he usually heard in jagged bursts in the summers where he grew up. Here, there were hundreds and thousands of cicadas humming invisibly overhead, making a somehow shiny and impenetrable music, the kind of music an orchestra full of mirrors might have made.
    Tony stood at the edge of that lake and watched the random knock-knockings of the rowboats for a while, and then went to the edge, and pissed into it—a bright golden arch which hit the surface of that darkness and smashed it into jigsaw pieces.
    Tony opened the door and handed the ice bucket to Melody and carried the soda bottles, their necks dangling between the fingers of one hand, out into heat. At the picnic table his daughter was doing what looked like some kind of Irish jig on the picnic table bench. She had pink icing all over her mouth.
    “I’m here to see you,” he’d said.
    Melody was wearing the cutoffs he loved more than everything else in the world put together. There was a frayed rip right under theleft cheek of her ass, which gave a glimpse of the white flesh there and made his heart race every time he noticed it again. There were seven or eight depressed-looking teenage girls around her—every one of them butt-ugly—and Melody, at the center, like a lily in a field of thistles.
    “Oh,” she said. She started shaking her head. “Oh my God.”
    “I need to talk to you,” Tony said later, back in the kitchen, after Melody had cleared the mess off the picnic table and left the girls to run in insane circles in the backyard neighing like horses. Her back was to him as she leaned over the garbage can, hauled out from under the kitchen sink. She was scraping frosting off a fork with a knife. It was one of those hopeless activities, one of the millions of Sisyphean tasks Tony had watched his wife perform in the years since she’d become a mother. Pointless, endless tasks. She always had a bottomless list of chores that would only get done in order to need to be done again. Feed the baby, wash the clothes, water the plants, wipe the counters, load the dishwasher.
    Surely it was this life of mindless detail that had turned her against him—not anything he’d done, not a lack of love. She just didn’t know it. She was such a good woman, the kind of woman who would want to believe she loved her own virtues, who enjoyed her duties.
    But who could love these duties? For God’s sake, Tony had learned that much about women in college. That they hated housework and blamed men for it. He’d read The Women’s Room. He’d read The Awakening. Melody, who’d quit reading as soon as she was out of college, had understood herself less than he understood her. The Feminine Mystique. Herland. He knew what she wanted, what she needed.
    “I need to talk to you.”
    She said nothing.
    “Look,” Tony said, touching her arm lightly. She didn’t pull away, but she didn’t stop what she was doing either.
    Outside, he could hear