World and Town Read Free Page B

They’re squares of spring green today, like handkerchiefs dropped down from someplace they use green handkerchiefs; Hattie likes the barns, especially. It’s hard to say why plain nature would be improved by a red barn or two, but she does feel it so. Maybe it is just the Chinese in her, always partial to the civilized, but she likes silver-capped silos, too, and farmhouses.
    Peace.
    Though look what’s floating from the crest of the hill today: the trial balloon for the proposed cell phone tower. A long long string with a white balloon bobbing at its top—the whole deal a-waft like a ghost in a kids’ play now, but just wait until it’s a lunky metal affair with trusses and uprights and baubled appendages. There’s a family hoping to make a killing on the thing, people say, as well as a big select board meeting on the subject coming up, to which—meeting-ed out as she was by her fervent youth—even Hattie will go.
    But first, her neighbors.
    The land is a swamp, but the trailer site itself isn’t bad. As nobody has built steps up to the front door yet, though, she has to step up onto a milk crate to knock, and even so finds herself knocking at the door’s knees. An awkward thing to do while holding a drawer, especially if you have a bag of cookies set in the drawer, as she does—butterscotch chip, nothing too extraordinary, though Hattie did use turbinado sugar in them instead of regular, seeing as how it was on special one week. Whatever turbinado even is or means. Anyway, the sugar gave the cookies a chew; and now here the door is opening, with a scrape—a half-gone hinge. The air has the mushroomy smell of rot.
    “Hello,” she says from her pedestal. She hoists the drawer before her like a popcorn vendor at a baseball game. “I’ve come to welcome you to the neighborhood.”
    Her audience being a half-stick of a man—looming over her at the moment, but not actually much taller than she is, which last she dared measure was all of five foot two. He has on a blue buttoned-up polo shirt, a black leather belt, and blue denim pants that look as though they are meant to be jeans but somehow look like slacks. His hair is white and thin, his skin pale and loose, and his face the fine result, she guesses, of a Pol Pot facial: One of his cheekbones sits a half-step high. She shivers. The man’s nose is likewise misaligned; his pupils are tiny; and his gaze has a wander, as if possessed of a curiosity independent of its owner. Nystagmus, she thinks—damage to the abducens nerve. (Recalling old science terms more easily than she recalls her grocery list, naturally.) His gaze lists left, like a car out of alignment, then jerks back—left left left again, and back. It is strange to think him around her age—younger than her, even. Mid-sixties, people have said. He looks, she thinks, to belong to his own reality; and who knows but that he thinks something similar of her, for he beholds her with a blankness so adamant that the closed door he’s replaced does seem, in retrospect, to have been friendlier.
    “Hello,” Hattie says, all the same. And, when he does not answer, “Do you speak English?”
    He gazes at the top of her head as if she is growing something there.
    “Do you speak English?” Slower this time.
    A pause.
    “Lit-tle,” he says finally. He pronounces the word with equal stress on both syllables.
    “Well, welcome to town,” she says, trying not to speed up. Half the trick with English language learners, she knows, being the maintenance of a certain stateliness. “My name is Hattie. Hattie Kong. I live across the way, in the red house. See it over there? The red one.”
    She inclines her head in the general direction of her place—a two-bedroom cottage, one floor, with aluminum roof flashing that does, well, flash in the sun. She isn’t the kind of city close where you can chat just fine without availing yourself of a phone, but by country standards they are cheek by jowl. Nobody would have