total stalker

BY BARBARA JEAN TANNERT

Hindsight tells me I should have at least pretended to be from the East Coast, if not Eastern Europe, but the  girl looked so cute and normal (like the hostess at Red Lobster or Miss Amalgamated Corn Products) that I figured she was harmless, if a little too thin. I actually told her this when we met in the Designer Corner of the Act Two Consignment Shop. She was culling Size 0 black rayon cocktail dresses from the rack with the speed and precision of a woodpecker, while I selected my Talbots tartan jumper and a white silk bowtie blouse at a more leisurely pace. (I've a good eye for vintage finds and am savvy enough to know that that late 80's fashions are back). As she hesitated over a tiny wool knit skirt suit by St. John (cardinal red, trimmed with a wide band of cream), I just had to speak up.

"You're just the right size for the little suit," I told her. "Which means you're way too skinny! Seriously, that's such a bargain. I tried it on last week but it was way too small. It looked like a bathing suit on me but on you..."

At that moment, a burly little woman hurtled towards us brandishing an elaborate black lace gown. "Lacey, look at this!" she shrieked at the Corn Queen. "This is stunning!"

"Oh my God, Mom," Lacey shrilled, in a funny high pitched voice. "It totally is. But it looks like a wedding dress. Who would wear a black wedding dress?"

"A vampire," I offered.

They stared at me briefly, then Lacey informed her mother, "I'm gonna go try these on." Then she bolted herself into Act Two's only dressing room.

Lacey refused to model any of the cheap rayon cocktail dresses, which was a shame since I was waiting to try on the tartan jumper and bowtie blouse and wouldn't have minded a little diversion. So, to pass the time, I made small talk with her mother, who was still holding the black lace gown.

"That would make a wonderful Halloween costume," I informed her. "It's very Twilight..."

"Mom! Come in here!" Lacey called with some urgency, opening the door to the dressing room just wide enough to admit her mother and the black gown and then slamming it shut again. I was just contemplating if I should maybe take my jumper and blouse and try them on in the little bathroom with its tiny mirror when I heard Lacey say, quite distinctly: "She's a total stalker."

A tableau of images immediately scrolled through my mind -- a series of geographically and historically diverse memories -- with each and every one involving that weird compulsion of mine to make small talk with total strangers.

To the cheerful pot-bellied girl behind the concession counter at a Washington D.C. multiplex upon her presenting me with a "small" popcorn and a "small" coke:

"Oh my God! Are these considered small? We're doing like those natives did on Easter Island. It's like driving Hummers. Oh, and some Milk Duds, too. They're an essential foil for popcorn. Three-fifty! They used to cost 25 cents! Of course, the box was smaller and this was back in 1975. I'm going to have to eat all this myself, too. My husband's too much of a Puritan to eat during a movie. That's him crouching over there behind that potted plant thing. Is that real?"

To an elderly couple at a McDonald's somewhere on I-95:

"Can you believe we have to fill our own cups? Everything's self-service these days. It must have been different in your day. I still wait for the gas station attendant to come out and fill my tank and squeegee my windshield. He doesn't though."

To a tollbooth operator on the Illinois Turnpike:

"We've been lost for an hour! We're so stupid! My husband here is having some kind of breakdown. We didn't buy a car with a GPS and I can't ever tell my left from my right! Is that SUV blowing its horn at us?"

To a young dapper Kennedy spotted ordering a Bud Light at the Beachcomber in Wellfleet, Massachusetts in 1984:

"And what bacchanalian revelries are you plotting this evening?" (My recollection is that he generously ignored my remark and was on the verge of inviting my college roommate and me to an after-hours party in Hyannis Port when Katie, a gin-soaked ringer for Marcia Brady, lost her own head in propinquity to celebrity. "You're one of the Kennedys!" she announced, accusingly, and the young man, who knew that already, recalled to his senses and evaporated into the crowd.)

My own darling children are also unsympathetic to this foible of mine, frequently informing me that I'm "way too chatty" and, when I defend my natural exuberance spilling out all over the place, proceed to make disturbingly precise distinctions between "chatty-normal" and "chatty-weird" and "normal moms" and "you."Of course, my first instinct upon overhearing the "total stalker" remark was to knock gently on the slatted door of the Act Two dressing room and announce with a sort of exaggerated patience:

"I am not a total stalker. I am a part-time lecturer in English. My husband has recently published a book. I have a scholarly interest in vampires and vintage clothing. If the two of you were not so limited in your scope of the world, if you had had any experience beyond the tanning salon and the high school football game, you would have been previously exposed to eccentric and ironic and educated people like myself. I am not being classist here; there are many rude and horrible people in academia who are similarly narrow-minded and who, it is true, have judged me for wearing too much makeup and dressing in the style of the late 1950s. I have a small waistline and I enjoy feeling feminine. This does not mean that I am a Republican. In short, I am a mass of contradictions as we all are. I apologize for judging your limitations in manners, taste, and education. As I have often reminded my creative writing students, even stupid people can have complex emotions. I did not mean to imply that either of you are stupid. Merely that we, educated or not, are all struggling to express the truth of who we are without alienating those around us, and who understands this dichotomy better than we women? And yet, we are cruel to one another, yes, and that is why your thoughtless stalker remark is so upsetting. If you could see me now, you'd notice that I have tears in my eyes and that I feel like we're all back in the seventh grade and that I've been cast out for trying to make friends. I am a friendly person. I was just trying to be friendly. I was not stalking anyone. I am not a stalker. You are using the term incorrectly. If I ever see either one of you again, which is highly unlikely, I will run away from you very fast, screaming."

As I contemplated the best tenor for this address, I realized that conveying such albeit heartfelt and genuine sentiments aloud might also indicate that I had crossed that somewhat hazy line that separates chatty from crazy. My husband has many times assured me that I crossed this line some years ago.

"People don't want to talk to you," he snorts at me, exasperated. "Just stop talking to strangers. I don't ever talk to strangers and you never see me have any problems."

This is true. It is also true that he no longer talks to anyone, at all, period, and has become a hermit taken to yelling, when the phone rings: "Don't get it! It might be someone we know."

Happily, I have a benchmark for my sanity or, as I prefer, a "crazy meter" with which to gauge my interactions with strangers. It's simple. If they respond too eagerly or with a disproportionate desire to keep talking or, God forbid, continue a conversation, I will cut them off with a polite but firm remark. Most people understand this intuitively, like the woman on the plane who told me all about her exploding ovaries and her sexless marriage and her scented candle business, while I happily chimed in with my family history of alcoholism and husband's mood disorder but who, once the plane touched down, and thereafter in the ladies room and at the baggage carousel, as if by mutual and tacit agreement, cut me dead.

The incidental encounter with the stranger while shopping is, however, in my experience more difficult to gauge on the "crazy meter." Say, for example, you're in the grocery store and initiate the following conversation with a reasonably normal looking, middle-aged female shopper:

Me: "I hate to buy Frosted Flakes, but it's all my kids will eat. Who knows? It's probably healthier than this $7 organic granola."

Shopper: "We make our own granola at home."

Me: "Oh, really? I bet it's delicious. I used to make my own bread, but I've gotten busy lately."

Shopper: "We make our own bread, too." (Shopper laughs eerily to herself). "We don't like store-bought nothing. I'm only here today because of the infestation out at the compound. My name is Enola."

Me: "How awful for you. Oh! I just remembered I need extra cat sand."

Thereafter, you bustle off to the checkout line feeling renewed and virtuous and normal, for, in this context you are not the over-sharing weirdo. Such reassurance is short lived if, at that moment, you cannot resist the urge to defend your groceries (say, four gargantuan boxes of Frosted Flakes, a package of roach traps for "medium to large roaches," a 12-pack of toilet paper, and two 2-liter bottles of wine) to the cashier.

"Well, this looks like a party, doesn't it?" you might say, jovially.

"I can't ring up all your alcohol," announces the teenage cashier, loudly.

Then, as you await the manager, old Enola Granola comes trundling behind you with a cart full of bottled water and unprocessed millet, looking like the soul of discretion.

I wish I could be the soul of discretion, but I'm afraid I'd go around all day and simply ignore people I don't know, which seems so unfriendly, not to mention lonely. Is it possible to sit and look through the pattern books at Jo-Ann Fabrics and not tell any of the assembled company that you are planning to sew your own bathing suit this summer? And let's say, for the sake of argument, that you do attempt to make it from a vintage pattern and that (for reasons you are still too traumatized to discuss) you fail so spectacularly that you grow sullen and defeated and grab the first department store suit you can find (black with a pink and lime and purple hibiscus print, a lattice work back, and an extraneous flap of material that is neither skirt nor ruffle), and when you finally wear it to the municipal water park and immediately spot another woman hiding in the shallows by the slide and geysers wearing the identical suit would it really be so terrible if you were to splash up to her and shout: "BUSTED!"?

In retrospect, I can understand her terror. As I exploded through one of the geysers it was not immediately clear that she and I were wearing matching suits, but once she understood that I was not bent on any type of physical assault -- once she got the joke that is -- you'd think she would at least have laughed.

"That lady might have laughed," my eldest son hisses through clenched teeth, "if you were, like, 4 years old. But, mom, you're 40 years old or something awful like that. Normal people just can't cope with you."

Coping. Let me tell you about coping. It's been three days since the consignment shop incident and this is one total stalker still afraid to leave the house.

Barbara Jean teaches writing at Knox College in Galesburg, Ilinois. Her fiction has been published in various literary magazines, including Rose and Thorn and Paradigm. She can be reached at: bsmith@knox.edu.