If a Stranger Approaches You

In Laura Kasischke’s first collection of short stories, she grabs you from the beginning, making you catch hold of your breath in anticipation. And I mean from the very beginning. The first line of the first story (“Mona”) reads: “They’d all warned her not to snoop.” Already, we are just as curious as the mother in her teenage daughter’s bedroom. What will she find? And in addition, what will we, as readers, find between the pages? This collection speaks of the unknown. What is your daughter hiding from you? What are the lives like for the people in the houses you pass by each day? What will happen when you grow up and are no longer a child? What lies ahead of you after death? And yet, what we find isn’t necessarily answers to those questions. I found arresting images, ones that allow both the darkness and the light to live within the same text.

In Laura Kasischke’s first collection of short stories, she grabs you from the beginning, making you catch hold of your breath in anticipation. And I mean from the very beginning. The first line of the first story (“Mona”) reads: “They’d all warned her not to snoop.” Already, we are just as curious as the mother in her teenage daughter’s bedroom. What will she find? And in addition, what will we, as readers, find between the pages? This collection speaks of the unknown. What is your daughter hiding from you? What are the lives like for the people in the houses you pass by each day? What will happen when you grow up and are no longer a child? What lies ahead of you after death? And yet, what we find isn’t necessarily answers to those questions. I found arresting images, ones that allow both the darkness and the light to live within the same text.

I had never read Kasischke’s prose before, only her poetry, but I found that the alignment of images and memories alongside each other carried the story more than the plot. Certainly there are interesting situations: a father attends a birthday party for his daughter at the house of his ex-wife, whom he is still in love with (“Melody”); children hide their father each time the officials come because he has lost his passport (“Our Father”); a daughter must tell her father he is going to die (“You’re Going to Die”); and a man travels to Florida to meet the mother of his fiancée—a fiancée who is fourteen years older than he (“The Flowering Staff”). But what I found even more compelling was the back-and-forth of imagery. Kasischke’s prose is the perfect example of the idea of showing, not telling.

In “The Barge,” for example, the young female narrator has a coming-of-age of sorts (unlike any other story I’ve read with this theme). A barge gets stuck under a bridge, and the children are entertained all day by it. The narrator carries around a rag doll, old and ugly. Her friend Rachel’s older brother wants to throw it onto the barge:

Once, this boy had snatched a piece of watermelon out of my hand and eaten it in front of me while I screamed. Once, he’d grabbed the tail feathers of a dead bird in a ditch, and flung it at me. Once, he’d stuck a handful of snow down the front of my pants—keeping the hand there as the snow melted, staring into my eyes as if he were seeing into my brain.

That bird he’d flung managed to fly, flapping its wings mechanically over my head for a few seconds before it fell in front of me in a soggy heap to die a second time, and the soggy heap of that bird was what he saw inside my brain.

Here, Kasischke doesn’t need to tell us how the narrator felt about the situation, she simply shows it. And what’s more fantastic is how this weaves right back into the main plot without the reader realizing it had ever strayed. In all of her pieces, she seamlessly makes the transition between the main narration and the past events or memories from the characters.

The story from which the book gets its name, “‘If a Stranger Approaches You about Carrying a Foreign Object with You onto the Plane,’” is a perfect example of all of these ideas. Kathy Bliss is in the airport waiting to board a plane to Maine. While simultaneously worrying about her sick baby at home with her husband, she is approached by a man who asks her to do exactly what the announcements at the airport advise her against: he wants her to take a small gold package on the plane with her. “Oh my God,” she says, “All these years I was wondering if anyone was ever going to ask me that.” She decides to take it with her to deliver to his brother when she gets off the plane, but after she boards, she gets a phone call that her baby is in the hospital. Long after the child is healthy again, she finds her bag from the trip:

She got down on her knees and pulled the bag to her, and removed the umbrella, and the pink makeup bag, and then the folded black sweater, the brother’s name, Mack Kaloustian (but hadn’t the stranger said he was his mother’s only son?), and saw it there, the box, in its gold paper, and recognized it only vaguely, as neither a gift nor a recrimination, a threat or a blessing.

She didn’t open it, but imagined herself opening it. Imagined herself as a passenger on that plane, unable to resist it. Holding it to her ear. Shaking it, maybe. Lifting the edge of the gold paper, tearing it away from the box. And then, the certain, brilliant cataclysm that would follow . . . She’d been a fool to take it with her onto the plane. It could have killed them all.

Or, the simple gold braid of it.

Tasteful. Elegant. A thoughtful gift chosen by a devoted son for his beloved mother. And she imagined taking the necklace out of the box, holding it up to her own neck at the mirror, admiring the glint of it around her neck—this bit of love and brevity snatched from the throat of a stranger—wearing it with an evening gown, passing it down as an heirloom to her children.

But Kasischke doesn’t allow us to find out what’s inside. She gives us portraits of the many unknowns in life and reveals the raw human urge to discover those mysteries.