Regular Visitors

Abstract

Regular Visitors Monica Ferrell (bio) inside every body is a blue wardrobe, and inside the wardrobe is an unremarkable lockbox, and inside Mila's was a picture of the man behind the counter at the café called Regular Visitors. His skin resembled a lamb's—that is, if you took a lamb and butchered it, then sheared it free of hair and massaged into it expensive toners and those moisturizers from Korea or Kiehl's that even the straight men among millennials seemed to wear. About as long ago as this man was old, she and her college friends used to play a game called Killed in the Initial Attack. There was nothing to the game beyond a mean-spirited hypothetical conjecture in which you imagined a scenario like the one from that movie Red Dawn, where America was being invaded by a foreign enemy. Who among them would go down first, stupidly wounded by the first tank, innocently stepping on the first grenade? Now Mila had a good answer for a game she no longer played. The man [End Page 5] behind the counter at Regular Visitors would. His teeth, presented in a smile each time he slid a coffee across the marble toward her, were guileless. "What will you have?" That's the way he took an order. It was so deferential, so Old World, especially in combination with the starched white apron he always wore, the half pencil he'd occasionally lift from the nook above his ear to jot down complex instructions on a little flip-top book of graph-lined paper, furrowing his fine forehead with the effort. He seemed to self-identify as a kind of writer; now and then she'd spotted him putting that poor mustard-colored notebook through its paces even when only she was around, and this one time when she rested a novel she was reading on the countertop as she poked in her wallet for her regular-visitor punch card, he'd twisted his long torso around to her side to read its title, sounding its words out with effort like a child. "Is this a good book?" She could see the bluish muscle working in his neck as he spoke. "He's Norwegian," she said, idiotically. Puckering his lips, the man on the other side of the counter put his hands to either side of the cover and studied it as though it were going to be on a test. "I've heard of him. Do you pronounce the K?" "Yes," she'd breathed. He nodded. "I thought so," he said, and grinned, a gymnast who'd stuck his landing. When her college friends used to play Killed in the Initial Attack, they'd rank Mila among the last to go, as she remembered, one of the final survivors. They said something about her spying—no, it was that she would turn double agent, using her sexual wiles to save herself with whichever side won. Mata Hari, they'd called her. It was vaguely dishonorable, the light they'd cast her in, tinged with a generalized racism made worse by the fact they clearly didn't know Mata Hari wasn't Indian, or even a real Asian at all. Odd to think how she had lost her wiles so thoroughly that she was now beneath the invaders' notice and could escape their bullets by simply not being seen. She had attained the fabled power of [End Page 6] cockroaches, she guessed, since like them she had become imperishable, a survivor who would persist through anything. ________ on tuesday mornings, Mila made breakfast for and dressed her five-year-old son and one-year-old daughter, then gathered them into coats, hats, gloves, and shoes and carried the littler one while holding hands with the bigger one down two flights of stairs. On her arms were threaded five bags: bag for Lily's daycare, bulging with diapers and wipes; bag for Jeet's school, heavy with lunch and snacks; bag with the breast pump, adapter, brick-sized ice pack, and bottles; her own work bag filled with books and papers; and her handbag. Sometimes Jeet would pretend to...