The Me You See (12 page)

The irony of her statement almost made me laugh, since what
I wanted basically opened itself up in front of me and begged.

“What is it that you want, Stefia?”

“I want someone to hold me and mean it. I want someone to
talk to me because I’m me, not because I’m Stefia.”

The way she said it made me cringe. The simplicity of her
words up against the complexity of what they meant disturbed me and I stopped
playing mid-song.

“Don’t stop playing. Please.”

“You don’t have to say please,” I smirked.

“Yes, I do,” she said, with more weight in her words than
seemed necessary. “I’m not special. I don’t deserve special privileges.”

“But you are special,” I said, setting my mandolin down.
“Don’t you get that? You are so goddamn amazing, Stefia. You…”

“Don’t.”

“Why?”

“Just…don’t.”

And there was that look again. That fear. That heavy burden
of something bigger than she could explain with words but couldn’t hide if you
got close enough to really stare into her eyes.

I wondered how many people had gotten that close.

“Let’s not talk about it anymore,” she said, sitting up and
zipping her hoodie. “It’s not worth arguing over.”

“Were we arguing?”

She didn’t answer.

 “Can I ask a question?” I said.

“Sure.”

“How did you know who I was?”

Stefia smiled.

“Why wouldn’t I?” she said. “Your parents own the theater.”

“But I’m never around. I’ve stayed hidden.”

She paused before speaking, allowing a thoughtful smirk to
dance across her lips.

“One can see a lot from up on stage,” she said.

“But I’ve made it a point to hide.”

“Sometimes we think we’re hiding,” she said. “Those can be
the times we are most exposed.”

A yawn finally escaped from Stefia’s tiny perfect mouth. I
checked my phone. 2 am.

“Time to shut this party down?” I asked. “Don’t want your
chariot to turn into a pumpkin.”

“I’m no Cinderella, Kristopher.”

I opened the stage door and let the both of us into the crisp
fall air.

“Thanks for playing for me,” she said. I was surprised that
in all the events of the last three hours, she chose to talk about the music.

“You’re welcome,” I said. “Anytime.”

“You mean that?”

“I do.”

I didn’t know if I should kiss her. I didn’t know if I
should open her car door or follow her home or what. I still didn’t understand
exactly what had happened or where any of it had left us.

“Kristopher?” she asked.

“Yeah?”

“Let’s not tell anyone about this.”

“Oh.”

I tried to hide it. I tried to hide that I’d hoped she
would say we could just vanish together. Or that I could be the person she
chose to walk next to her; the one who everyone else knew was her protector.
The person to breathe her in every night and lift her up every morning. I tried
to hide it but there was just enough pain that eked through in my pathetic
oh
.
And she heard it.

Shit.

“Shit,” she said, at almost the same time I muttered it
under my breath. “Kristopher. I don’t…”

“No, it’s okay.”

“I mean, I’m not sorry it happened. Don’t worry about the…”

“Okay.”

“It’s just that…”

“You don’t have to explain it, Stefia,” I said. “I get it.”

“You do?”

“Yeah.”

“Really?” She laughed. “Because you know what?”

“What?”

“I don’t. I don’t get it. And I couldn’t explain it if I
tried.”

She leaned her back against her driver’s side door and
looked like she was going to cry. Real tears. Right there, in front of me.

“Shit, Kristopher, I hate this. I don’t want to have to
fucking worry about what anything looks like. I’m sick to death of worrying
what people think and who will say what and how it will affect things that
shouldn’t even matter.”

I wanted to throw up. My guts were turning and my throat
was tight and I had to close my eyes because seeing her lash out made my
insides come unglued. Watching her was like seeing a crystal ball shatter
against a brick ledge.

“Stefia, it’s okay. It’s…”

“It’s not okay, Kristopher. Stop saying that.”

She put her head down and started shaking—little tremors that
swelled and surged—and when she finally took a breath I could tell from the
catch in her inhale that she was crying. Real crying, not blocked out stage
crying. I didn’t know this side of Stefia existed. I mean, she was Stefia.
Solid and sure.

I couldn’t stand it anymore. I hadn’t understood anything
about the night so far; I didn’t know if I ever would. How was it that I’d
shown up with the intention of taking everything I wanted, and ended up ripped
apart because I realized she was hurting? I don’t know why I cared. And maybe I
should have, but I did.

 Life is a funny thing.

I slid up to her, wrapped my arms around her shoulders, and
pulled her into me. My long fingers weaved through her hair. I held her. I just
held her and thought about how life twists and changes more than it stays the
same and yet it catches us off guard every time.

“Just once,” she said, “I want to be the one who writes the
script.”

I didn’t answer.

“I’m tired of reading the lines other people make up,
Kristopher.”

I knew she wasn’t talking about the theater.

If she could have melted into my chest, if I could have
tugged her into my being, if I could have wrapped her up and pulled her into my
heart I know I could have kept her safe from all the hurt she was feeling. And
standing there with her head fit into the curve under my chin, her soft hair
like a safe cushion for my thoughts, I felt like I could.

But I forgot that every now and again, things have a way of
happening unexpectedly. And therefore, I completely failed at protecting her
from the one thing she needed protection from.

Herself.

I miss drinking coffee from a ceramic cup. For most of the
past one hundred and seventy-two days, I’ve drank coffee from Styrofoam. I’m
not supposed to have a ceramic mug in my room because they are afraid I will
drop it. I’ll admit I threw a bit of a temper tantrum and then Rowena, my
nurse, she showed me right where they had written in The Policy that residents
are not allowed to have ceramic cups in their room.

I don’t like the coffee here. By the time it gets to my
room it’s lukewarm and my hazelnut powdered creamer doesn’t mix right. I said
to Rowena why can’t you bring me hot coffee? Rowena said something back about
The Policy and me dropping my Styrofoam cup and burning myself.

I’ve been drinking coffee longer than Rowena has been
alive. I told her that. She just smiled and left for the next resident’s room.

I’m a resident now.

The four walls of my room are pink. The first time Stefia
came to visit she said the room reminded her of a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. I
told her the first time I ever drank Pepto-Bismol I threw up. She giggled at
that, and I knew we’d get along fine.

**

I didn’t know why Stefia came to visit me. She wasn’t
family. I hadn’t known her before I became a resident.  All I knew about her
was she acted at the Crystal Plains, she worked at the coffee shop in town, and
she visited me once a week on Wednesdays. Sometimes you don’t need to know
everything about someone to talk about everything with them.

And oh, did we talk. About
everything
.

“I’ve got this situation with a guy,” Stefia said the third
time we met, “and I’m kind of wondering what to do about it.”

“Stefia, dear,” I said, sighing. “Have you ever raised
goats?”

“No. What does that have to do with a guy?”

“Everything,” I said and laughed. “Stay away from goats.
And guys. Then you’ll be fine.”

One of the best things about Stefia’s visits was she always
brought a thermos of hot coffee and a blue and green striped ceramic mug for me
to drink it out of.  The fourth time she came to visit, Stefia stuck a small
cardboard box in my closet and told me that was where I was supposed to hide my
ceramic coffee mug when I was done using it.

“You’re a rebel,” I said with a giggle. “Why do you bring
me coffee anyway?”

“Because I work at the coffee shop and I know coffee,” she
said. “And you deserve coffee that’s warmer than piss.”

That made me laugh.

Stefia served me the best cup of coffee every Wednesday. We
laughed a lot on Wednesdays, which is good because as a resident you don’t
always laugh a lot.

Being a resident wasn’t all it had been cracked up to be. I
had family that visited occasionally. Bill and his wife, John and his kids,
Diana and her daughter when they come home for holidays. James and Mary only
dropped by when they didn’t have some fancy thespian event to attend. When I
was first put in the pink room, my family would visit all the time. But the
longer I stayed, the less often they came. I could see the change in people.
I’m resident and I won’t ever
not
be a resident. They know this is where
I will spend my end days.

These are my end days.

You could tell it in change of the way they talked to me.
It was all together different. Like I was a two-year-old instead of their
eighty-three-year-old mother. Grandmother. Great-grandmother.

I’m still here. Don’t you see me?

I have lived a full life of a million things and yet they
treat me like I don’t know anything. They turn their voices up into cute
phrases and talk louder than they need to. They want to talk about the football
game we just watched or someone’s cookies we just ate or who came to visit me
yesterday as if my memory doesn’t go back any further than twenty-four hours
ago. It’s the same for every resident here. I’m desperate to tell you about my
life. I’m desperate to talk about the things that have mattered to me. None of
the women in here are sweet little old women who knit to pass the time. That’s
just what we look like to you because that’s what you want to see.

I am not the me that you see.

I was a painter, you know.  No, you probably didn’t know
that. No one did. Because I painted pictures of flowers and horses and
mountains I’d never seen while the kids were at school and then I burned the
canvases so no one would know. And I wrote poems. I would stand at the sink
doing dishes while Helmer was out doing who knows what and the kids were
running through the house chasing each other. I wrote a lot of poems.

Stefia said I could still paint now. When I confessed to
her that I used to paint, she asked why I stopped and I said because no one
ever knew I started.

She said I might have been the next Picasso.

I told her there was no point in talking about regrets once
you’re a resident. Because at that point you can’t do a thing about what you haven’t
done. And besides, everyone just wants me to sit in the corner and knit,
anyway.

My grandson plays bluegrass. He’s an absolute genius on the
mandolin. I like bluegrass. Even the new progressive stuff. He once played me
his favorite song; deep and pretty and something about how to grow a woman.
Then there was this one line that talked about old folks in a home and
even
though you love them you can’t wait for them to go
. He stopped playing and
apologized when he got to that part.

“Oh, shit, Grandma. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…” he had said.

“No worries, child,” I had responded. “I get it.”

“You do?”

I nodded.

I told him not to worry his head and to just keep playing.
I know my family loves me, but now I’m just a resident. That’s the way it is.
You can’t change the way it is.

You can lie about it, but you can’t change it.

On the eighth Wednesday that Stefia came, I asked her why
she came to visit me every Wednesday. She had never made me feel like a pity
project, and as far as I knew no one had bribed her to come chat with me. I was
the only one of forty-three residents with a predictable visitor every
Wednesday at 3 pm.

“Aw, now Anna Marie, you know why I come here!”

“Nope, I don’t.”

“I heard there was someone here they were serving piss-warm
coffee to, and I knew that just wouldn’t do!”

“They are serving piss-warm coffee to everyone here,
Stefia,” I said as I laughed.