The Impropriety of Strangers

She found it so irritatingly unsettling to see people looking like that. You’d think they would have some personal pride. Care about how they looked. Don’t they ever view themselves in the mirror before leaving home? Catch a glimpse of themselves, so dishevelled looking, unappealing, in the window of any store they passed?

Actually, it represented a deliberate act of social insult, far as she was concerned, to appear in public like that. So … messy. Tidiness has its own appeal, it is an assurance that one can trust that the individual presenting himself believes in the social compact of external appearance reflecting internal values. What was the matter with some people, never been taught to be neat and tidy, take pride in their appearance?

She was never one, in fact, to judge others merely by their appearance. She knew better than that. Looks could be deceiving, and she never believed that clothes made the person. But for heaven’s sake, not simply for propriety’s sake, but to be presentable! Is that so difficult, so much of a personal imposition? She couldn’t help wincing, when she saw his lamentable state of dishabille, though she should by now have been accustomed to the way he appeared.

She’d got to know him well enough to venture her opinion on his appearance. He’d laughed, dismissively, obviously not taking her seriously. Likely considered it inappropriate on her part, but then, his lack of personal hygiene and disdain for the social contract did him no credit, none whatever.

She hadn’t any idea where he lived, although he well knew where she did. He had, in fact, accosted her on the street, while she was trundling her shopping buggy back from an expedition to get some decent food for her pantry. Just happened to get carried away, and got too much, the bags hanging loosely from the top of the buggy, threatening to spill. And spill the topmost one did. She stood there, angrily wondering what now? She hadn’t stooped in public for years, her aching limbs wouldn’t permit it. Should she just ignore the grapefruit and the two oranges that had slipped out, and walk away?

Before she could decide how she would react, someone had swooped down, picked them up, and offered them back to her, holding the grapefruit in one hand, the two oranges in the other, arms extended. She was surprised, to say the least. Would never have looked twice at anyone who looked like a … street person. He wasn’t, she knew that now (but really, what was he then?). He just liked to, as he said ‘hang out’.

He’d stuffed the three orbs back into the bag before she could even protest, his assurance gliding over her awkward thanks, then managed somehow to tuck the bags into her buggy more securely than she had, so nothing would slop over until she unloaded everything at home. And he had gently tugged the handle of her buggy toward him, telling her he’d be glad to trundle it along the street and accompany her home, just to make certain she had no further untoward incidents. Those were his very words.

She wouldn’t, she assured him, stiffly at first. She was more than capable of looking to her own interests, she repeated, attempting to restore the handle to her own knotty hands. He laughed, stood back to contemplate her and said “too proud to accept a little help from a well-meaning stranger?” And that stopped her. She laughed and relaxed. Said no, not too proud, and thank you very much.

At the double front doors leading into the lobby of her apartment, she thanked him again, and tried to tip him. He stepped back with a slight frown, said he hadn’t helped her for the money. She reminded him, he said, of his grandmother. That stiffened her back again; not his mother, his grandmother. How bloody old did he think she was? She did a quick calculation: he would be about mid- to late-30s, which would place his mother around her 50s, making his grandmother roughly in her 70s. Damn, he was right. She smiled tightly, said how much she’d appreciated his thoughtfulness, wished him a good day and pulled her buggy into the lobby, the automatic door swinging slowly shut behind her.

From that time on she had seen quite a bit of him. His tall, lean frame, his spikey hair that looked infuriatingly as though he deliberately groomed it that way, and his tiny goatee that she always found so irritatingly pretentious. His vocabulary betrayed a decent education, but his clothing always looked bedraggled, he walked with a shuffle, his head craning forward from his notable height as he walked. Had his 50-year-old mother, or 70-year-old grandmother never, ever cautioned him about the importance of a straight back and a proudly held head? Posture was important. And, she chided herself, she was a cranky old woman.

In time she began to appreciate those instances where he would appear as though he’d been awaiting her arrival, helping her back home with her shopping. By no means did this happen every time she went out, but regularly enough that she began to take his occasional presence and the help he offered, for granted.

She began inviting him in for a cup of tea, and when she served him, sitting awkwardly on her little sofa in her small living room, his long legs splayed awkwardly over the rug, she felt pleased she could also offer him some of her home-baked cookies and muffins. She wasn’t that infirm, not yet, that she couldn’t or wouldn’t do her own baking. And cooking, needless to say, none of that store-bought pre-prepared, salt-laden, fat-full pretend food for her. He expressed great admiration for her baking abilities, always asked for seconds, and that warmed her heart. He didn’t always accept her invitation to tea, but occasionally he did, and at those times she had someone with whom to talk, briefly.

The first time she had instructed him to leave ‘those shoes’ outside in the corridor, before entering the sanctum of her little apartment, he had wordlessly complied. She’d never had to remind him afterward. That first time, she had fretted about the state of his clothing, and as soon as he had departed, out came her hand vacuum and she assiduously sucked up all the ‘dirt of the street’ that must surely cling to him, and been deposited on her spotless sofa. But he turned out to be a very nice young man, and she learned to be more tolerant of his relaxed attitude about his garments.

And he could talk, intelligently and with an opinion she could respect, though their values did not always quite converge. That was a generational thing, of course. Who could understand young people of today? He worked, he told her, part time at a nearby auto-parts store. Though she had taken to trying to peer through the store’s windows into the long interior from time to time, and had never yet seen him in there. He’d left school before obtaining his high school certification, and was thinking of trying to complete his diploma, maybe taking a few community college courses, or something, probably in auto mechanics.

No, he hadn’t kept in touch with his mother he told her with what seemed like genuine regret. His grandmother wasn’t around either in his life, long gone. Siblings? Two, one out west working in the oil patch, the other, no one knew where he’d gone off to. They weren’t a very close-knit family, he said in an understatement, augmented by a grin. Followed by an indifferent shrug.

She had seen him on occasion with a group of other men, some younger some older than him. Up to no good, she was certain, from the looks of them. Distinguished by their collective aversion to work, else how could they be there, that time of day, wandering about the streets? Content to be street bums, unwilling to make an effort to make something decent of themselves.

When she saw him, accompanied by two others, all reflecting the same disregard for sartorial propriety, at the door of her apartment building much later, he speaking quietly and earnestly to the other two, she was quietly alarmed. Reminded herself that he knew precisely where she lived, and she had no idea where he lived. She nodded grimly at him, as she passed the trio on her way to the building housing the community centre for a regular seniors’ exercise program. He looked up from his conversation, his face creased in a wide smile, and he performed a sweeping bow as she passed, then turned back to his friends.

Their relationship suffered slightly after that. Although she accepted his occasional help in bringing her shopping back to her apartment, she no longer invited him in for tea quite so readily.

It was around that time that she began to note an odd odour in the first-floor corridor. Others in the building began to whisper about having found street people sleeping off drunks in front of the building. Close to the hot-air grates; it was getting colder as mid-fall gave way to a colder-than-usual late fall season. A few times several inebriated young men had been discovered sleeping in the lobby. The janitor had been alerted, and began to take closer note of comings and goings, but the elderly people who lived there were still alarmed. She divulged to no one her thoughts; that she might have been instrumental in her lack of caution, in introducing a certain street element to this, her home, a building she shared with so many others.

Despite the janitor becoming more engaged in perusing who came and went, he could not be everywhere at once. They had discussed, at a tenants’ meeting, the possibility of locking the front doors, ensuring access only to those with keys. And then, some of the tenants protested that would mean they’d have to carry their keys with them all the time, and what if they forgot, and what if they had problems with the lock, what then? So that recommendation didn’t carry. They liked things the way they were, being able to leave the building as they pleased, and enter as they pleased, their home with its open door that surely no one other than residents would have any real interest in entering?

And then some of them launched into stories about how their homes, when they were young, were never secured from intruders; never any need to be. Front doors, back doors, not only never locked, but in the summer months, left ajar, sometimes right open to allow cooling breezes to clear the interior air.

The intrusions continued, and the nasty, sharp yeasty odour of alcohol-fuelled urine persisted. Finally, she confronted her young man, and he reared back with astonishment at the very suggestion that he or any of his friends would engage in such uncouth behaviour. He felt deeply offended, he said. Gave her a disappointed look, and wandered off looking, for the first time she had ever seen, rather forlorn. She felt stricken. But not for too long, as her suspicions and her fears returned to assail her.

Could it have been “can I help you?” that she’d hear him shout out to her yesterday afternoon, she mused, or “Go to hell!” as she’d first thought. His voice drifting to her over the distance that separated them, he across the street, she just exited from the grocery store.

She felt exceedingly disturbed by all of this. Last night she’d had a miserably sleepless night, imagining all manner of dreadful things, from the indignity of his verbally abusing her, to the real fear of suffering some physical violence. Who could she tell of her apprehensions?

Who might believe her on the basis of her slim and many would say, unfounded suspicions?