How (Not) To Talk To Strangers

The other day as I was lamenting the dearth of dateable men in Quaint Coastal Village and its neighbors, Slightly Less Quaint Coastal Village, Route One Morass, and Dairy Farm Quagmire, I made a seemingly harmless comment. My exact words were, “I know it’s not like single men are just going to show up at my front door.”

Silly me.

A week later, as I was sitting at home during Snow Day 47 of the school year, there was a very quiet knock on my door. I was in the kitchen, not wearing my red fleece pajamas, though I was stuffing my face, hamster-like, with homemade bread. (I make very good bread. I defy you to try some without inhaling it immoderately.) Standing in my front yard was a man in snowshoes. He was sporting a beard— a big, brown, Ned Kelly style beard.

Right away, I have to get something off my chest. I hate beards. Everyone has their quirk, and mine is a complete intolerance for hirsute men. I have actually been known, unfairly and childishly, to make a sound very close to “Tchah,” when confronted with a bearded man. Beards are messy, uncomfortable in close quarters, imply questionable intentions, and offer too many opportunities to hang onto souvenirs of past meals and sneezes for far longer than necessary. My students are currently putting together a performance of Fiddler on the Roof, and every male cast member worth his testosterone is growing a beard for the part. It makes me nuts. Though in all other ways unlike Sweeney Todd, I find myself wanting to chase them with razors.

The Beard asked, “Are you Ms. Mouse?” Which, as my friend Nick pointed out to me later, is the point at which people usually pull out a gun. But since I’m not up to date on my television-based reality, I simply confirmed, though bemusedly.

The snowshoer’s name is Bernard. A couple weeks back, I attended a play directed by a friend. Apparently Bernard also attended this play. Apparently Bernard found something compelling in the way I sat there in the audience, watching the play along with everyone else. Apparently Bernard then asked around about me, discovered the location of my house, and then decided to snowshoe through the woods in order to find me.

This is the part at which I blame myself. At this point in the conversation, anyone with any wherewithal would have said, Excuse me? They would have said, Do you have any references? Could you take off your mittens so I can run a fingerprint check? I failed to say any of this. I was cold, standing there on my steps, barring the way into my kitchen. So the only way to end the conversation seemed to be to say, “Okay. Well, here’s my number.”

Yes. I deserve what I get.

In my feeble defense, handing out my number is not quite the rash move it might seem. This summer, my phone number landed in the wrong hands, and I found myself awake more than once to wave at two a.m. as it passed, listening to former students whose persistence and affection for Jell-O shots made for interesting—and difficult to end— discourse. It was certainly an unprecedented way to lose sleep. So the further distribution of my phone number hardly seemed a high price to pay in order to go back inside to my loaf of bread. I mean, it had raisins.

But the number, of course, led, to an offer to go snowshoeing. And a woman who cannot bring herself to hang up on drunken teenagers is certainly not a woman who can turn down a polite invite to go snowshoeing. When you’re off into the woods with a strange man, though, it’s good to have a backup plan, and I spent some time trying to figure out how casually I could pull off carrying a machete, until I decided that it would be hard to convince Bernard that I just wanted to cut a little wheat, maybe some rye, while we were out and about. In the end, I decided I’d be safe on the property of my neighbor Bob, whom I have seen use not only a machete, but a chain saw and, on one occasion, a backhoe, which could be easily converted into a weapon, or at least as a tool to bury the macheted or chain sawed corpse.

My first hint that things would not go well was when I asked Bernard to name a time. This request seemed to flabbergast him, as if time were something to be considered only theoretically, like the apocalypse, or a reunion tour of the Jackson Five. My insistence was for naught, though, because he showed up an hour late. But we set off, squeaking and crunching our way down my field, the dogs whinnying with excitement ahead of us.

It’s a good thing the dogs made some noise, because Bernard certainly seemed disinclined to converse. I forced myself through a rousing game of Twenty Questions, making heroic conversational leaps to keep a dialogue going (“Oh, a pinecone! That reminds me of that story on the news about Taiwan!”), but after that, gave up. There was nothing that appeared to fire him up, make him reciprocate, or lead us into a new topic. During this game I learned the following:

He did not attend college.
Well, that’s okay. Despite what I tell my students, college isn’t for everyone.

He used to paint houses.
Self-employment shows some initiative. That’s hard work, painting houses all day.

He is currently unemployed.
Hey, if you can afford it, why not?

Before that, he worked in Arizona.
So he’s traveled a little; bet he’s got some interesting stories.

Where he lost two fingers in mysterious accident.
…

He now spends all of his time writing poems and playing guitar.
Creative is good.

And the banjo.
Multi-talented. Wait. What does he play the banjo with? He’s missing entire limbs. Little ones, but still.

He now lives in a former carpenter’s workshop.
Great! He knows how to renovate.

Which does not have plumbing.
Ah. And that explains the smell.

I’m really not squeamish. But it is undeniable that the absence of plumbing did not come as a tremendous surprise. And like anyone who lacks a full grasp of scientific truths, I cling tenaciously to the little I do know, and what I do know is: people smell good to us for a reason. Smell is primal and atavistic and essential, and if you’re standing there delicately trying to aim your nostrils in another direction, you should probably move on to the next crazy snowshoer to show up at your door.

So we parted ways, I took a deep breath of fresh air, and that was that. The long silences born of a mutual disinterest had done their work. So I thought.

I was leaving for Mexico the next week, and told him I might be available when I got back, in same the tone you say that you might think about putting in a pool once the kids are off at college. But then came Snow Day 48, and a call from Bernard at 9 a.m. “I heard on the radio that you have a snow day,” he said. “Want to go snowshoeing?”

Well, actually, no.

Then came the call the day before I left for Mexico. “I’m about to leave town,” I said, mentally translating my words into Spanish in last-minute preparation. The phrase book I’d bought taught me, optimistically, how to say both “Which hotel is yours?” and “Let’s use a condom,” but, in a sunny prediction of a good time for all south of the border, did not offer suggestions for “Bugger off.” Which was unfortunate, because I was making no progress in English.

“Okay,” he said. “Want to do something tonight?”

This was my last chance, I saw later, to say, Dude. Back off. Play hard to get. It was my chance to say no to someone, to be direct. It was my chance to say, however belatedly, Screw you and your Jell-O shots. I want to sleep. But I failed. I made some excuse about packing, feeling guilty for actually having plans of my own. Maybe when I get back, I said. Smile, smile, smile. I will call you when I get back. And I intended to. I intended to call and say, I find you creepy. I just needed a week to work up to it.

Advice I received on this topic was completely split down gender lines. My friend Anne, whose equilibrium is bolstered by enough years of therapy that her advice is the soundest I can get, said, “You’ve got to tell him you’re only interested in being friends. And you have to make it its own conversation so he really understands.” Sitting under a tin roof somewhere outside Taxco, drinking out of a coconut with my feet up on a chair to avoid a casual flock of guinea hens, this sounded easy as paella. Such advice was seconded by my sister, mother, and my friend Kate. Be kind, be direct. Fight a lifetime’s worth of instruction on Being a Good Puritan Girl Who Puts Up With Everything, and tell him the truth.

The men I knew took a steeply different line. As my coworker Hank put it, “You should get a gun.” Or, as my friend Nick suggested, “You should get a gun.” Or, as a guy who overheard me relating this story to a friend said, “You should get a gun. Hey, you want to buy my .22?”

I demurred.

Hank said, “He shows up at your door, you can call me, but I’m 45 minutes away, and that’s a long time to pretend your door’s jammed.”

“If I had a gun, I’d just end up shooting something,” I told Hank.

He blinked. “That’s the point. That’s why people get guns, to shoot things.”

“I don’t need a gun,” I argued. “I have more appendages than this guy. And he’s an unemployed poet. In a fight, I’m bound to win.” I then made a very funny joke about how Bernard can’t even be that great an unemployed poet, because you need all ten fingers to write in iambic pentameter, and with two missing fingers, he can only write in tetrameter. Hank teaches accounting, though, so this flew right over his head. Mathematicians.

This was all before Mexico. I was all about the kind, let’s-be-friends routine. But when I got back, I had a message waiting for me. And the next day, before I could do anything about it, Bernard called me twice more. I came to realize that the let’s-be-friends speech would be a lie. I didn’t want to be friends. I wanted… well, I was starting to want a gun.

It didn’t come to that. In the end, I called Bernard, said something wandering and airheaded about not starting new relationships, and that was that. I’ve not heard from him since. I was direct— after some failed tries, anyway— and I’m now back to snowshoeing alone, my dogs floundering through the snow beside me, wondering when the heck spring will get here. There are major benefits to snowshoeing alone. Counting higher than eight. Deep breaths without compunction. And as much raisin bread as I want, all to my greedy, Bearded Bernard the Banjo Bard banishing self.