Encounters XI: Invisible and Invincible

Susan Johnson

The neighborhood kids shush me when I walk by and wave hi. They’re hiding from another neighborhood kid. It’s that game where you duck down behind the one in front of you who ducks behind a tree, and there’s no way anyone can see you, as long as you don’t move or giggle. I almost want to join them. The older I get the younger I seem, to myself. I’m not that sixty-year-old neighbor walking by; I’m one of these kids, tucked down low, pressed against bark and leaves, hiding from the world, residing in that kid-world where you’re invisible and invincible.  

I switch up my morning walk because the pond is too buggy. They always aim for my eyes, unless they want my ears. The back of my neck is popular as well. I cautiously continue along the busy road where the shoulder is narrow and often there’s poison ivy. But there’s also two old farm houses I love: one perched on a hill, one nestled in a hollow. Both are reached by driving through a column of trees that stretch back centuries when farmers were certainly pestered by biting bugs—and kept on farming, as I keep on walking.  

A guy is out painting on this already-humid early morning. Walking by I say, “Hi.” He responds, “Good morning,” as if genuinely happy to see me. “Good morning to you,” I say in return. It’s odd how gratifying this feels. I wanted to acknowledge him because he’s working but it’s him who ends up engaging with me, a simple pedestrian who prefers to be in the background. A pedestrian pedestrian.

Today two men are painting the gazebo. Each bend forward with a brush in one hand, can in the other, and a cigarette pinched between pursed lips. Both in suspenders, they move in synchrony tracing the edge of a baluster, the way a caterpillar would. They could be characters in a Samuel Beckett play. I watch the ash accumulate at the end of each cig and think: they could use a third hand. Will the ash fall in the paint? Will they mistakenly put the brush to their lips? I had a professor in college who, during lectures, would raise the chalk to his lips, hoping for a deep draw of pleasure but instead tasting dry powder. He too seemed an actor in some play, one where the know-it-all makes a grand exit, and then walks into a closet.

The guy in shorts year-round. The guy who crosses the street barefoot. The one with blue hair wearing a skirt. They look like cast members, these men I can’t help but notice at the women’s college across the street. Who obviously want to be noticed. I wonder if, in a role reversal, they’re office workers and need some way to stand out as opposed to my typical stance of looking on from the sidelines.

I can’t say I’ve ever been completely comfortable in my role as an academic. In a conference once in New Orleans, I stepped into a session and told the woman next to me I had just walked to the river. “What river?” she asked. What river? In New Orleans? I couldn’t believe it. Who were these people? Do they not go outside?

It’s busy on the trail today. A couple with a dog, a couple without a dog, a sullen teenager who’d rather be anywhere else. We take turns stepping aside for each other. Then, a woman awkwardly stops and stands in the middle of the path. I get it right away. That’s her husband, I’m guessing, trying to hide as he pees behind a tree. It’s a golden rule thing: look away as you would want others to look away.

Stopping to chat with neighbors, I tell them I once dropped the F-bomb on their son when he was little and their dog was a puppy. I had paused to pat the puppy and it had wound itself around my legs then peed on my boots. I couldn’t extract myself and their son, holding onto the leash, was helpless as well, so out it came. “Oh, he’s heard it plenty,” they say. Still, I feel bad. I mean, a kid with a puppy. It’s like he was a Norman Rockwell painting and I was throwing rocks at the canvas.

Coming in from my two-hour morning walk, I say “Good Morning” to the cat. “I can’t hear you,” you say from the basement. “I was talking to the cat,” I say. “I can’t hear you,” you repeat. I stand at the top of the cellar stairs and say, “It’s nothing.” And it is nothing. You don’t have to hear everything I say; I’m just glad you’re still listening.

My husband and I pedal up a steep hill on our old Raleigh three speeds. A woman coming toward us actually says, “It’s easier going down.” Oh really. I never would have expected that. Similarly at a trailhead one winter, a guy pushing his stuck Jeep turned to me and said, “This ice is slippery.” Gosh, you don’t say. It isn’t that I’m always profound, but is there any need to say the obvious? I think the need is to just say something, to avoid silence.  

After two days of watching the air drain out of a tire in a car parked off-road, I watch a man blow it up with a bicycle pump. Up and down, up and down. I didn’t know you could get enough pressure with a bike pump for a car tire. We usually do the opposite—use an air compressor for our bikes. By the time I get to the end of the road, he’s pumped the tire enough to drive by me. How far will he get? Why not put on the spare? Not that I’m an expert. I used to carry a spare tube when I cycled, along with a small hand pump, but I never mastered it. And I always hated it. Getting a flat always seemed bigger than it was, an unnecessary interruption to my day.   

Two days in a row, in the same spot downtown, a car comes to a complete halt in front of me, signals right, then turns left. It’s like they got caught in some vortex that makes people drive terribly. I should be sympathetic to confused out-of-staters, but I’m too impatient for that. Go away, I say to a car blocking the road. Just go away.

Frames without paintings, paintings without frames all lie piled along the road—the aftermath of tag sales. We tire of our surroundings, I think, but want others to find our taste interesting, so we offer it for sale. But no one wants bad, discarded art. Sometimes all we want is a blank wall. 

In a bookstore where I used to work, we discuss another bookstore where I used to work. The owner would come in at closing, grab a twenty from the till, buy a bottle of Jameson, and then sit and write poems on paper bags. They were his favorite blank canvases he loved to fill. “I’m going to send this to the New Yorker,” he’d say. Right. It was often quiet in the store until he showed up with his “literature in action” display. A drunk man’s idea of literature in action. He liked to think of himself as a tortured artist. In reality, he was a tortured bookstore owner who wanted a life beyond retail.

I don’t wish for a life beyond hiking, yet I do aspire to be more coordinated. If and when I do trip, I always make sure to return and walk by the evil place and then continue on, to show that I am in control, unscathed. As if the place “scathed” me. Once inside a grocery store, wearing sunglasses to cover a black eye I received from a clumsy fall, a woman approached me and said, “I get nauseous from the bright lights and see you do as well.” “Actually, I have a black eye and don’t want to freak people out,” I told her. Then a man approached and said, “I just thought you were famous.” “I am famous,” I answered and left it at that.

On my morning walk, I was grateful no one pointed to my black eye and asked, “What happened?” I want their concern but I don’t need people pointing out the ugliness of a bruise. No one wants that. A week later the bruise drifted down and my cheek turned green. “Where will it end?” I wondered.

At sixty, I have the same scabbed knees I had at six. But the key is to keep going. Like the sculls on the river this morning that silently glide, slicing the calm surface. None of the back-and-forth chop of paddling a kayak. They appear to ride on rails of light. I picture myself doing the same, leaving nothing disturbed. 

Though I was camping by the ocean weeks ago, the open water is still in me, in my lungs, eyes, and skin, as if I’ve absorbed the sharp salt and piercing light, the metallic sound of gulls, and the sight of seals periscoping to look out over waves, to look at me. How the waves never stop arriving, then retreating, back to the horizon. Every day different and every day the same.