The New Neighbor (11 page)

She came back from the kitchen and moved past her chair to set the water glass on my table. Then she rounded her chair again, coming toward me with hand extended. “What are you doing?” I said.

“I thought you might need help sitting down.”

“Oh. Yes. Thank you.” She took my arm and we shuffled around to my chair and then she helped ease me into it. “Sometimes it’s odd having you here,” I said. “I’m not used to this. Other people. Human contact.”

“I think we both like being alone.” She was turned away from me, picking up her notebook. I couldn’t quite see her face. I couldn’t quite make out her tone.

“Is that a good trait? Or a bad one?”

“I don’t know.” She sat. “What do you think?”

“I’ve spent most of my life alone,” I said.

“But you like that.”

“Yes.”

“So lucky you,” she said. “Maybe you should be glad.”

She’d surprised me again. Sue at the library would have said,
But you’re not alone, Miss Margaret. You have me
, with a face that exuded pity, and a desire to pat my hand. How many people would say I should be glad? Jennifer is a cave with a rock that blocks the entrance. What are the words that mean “open sesame”? I’ve never had a gift for them, the right words. This is perhaps obvious by now. What comes out of my mouth is too direct, too undisguised, and then the other person is startled, and I’m annoyed, or shamed, and after that the best thing is silence. For a long time I chose silence. I chose my solitude, even if now I grow restless in its echo chamber. I chose it. I would not call it luck.

She reached over and pressed the button on the tape recorder. She flipped to a fresh page and readied her pen.

I asked, “Are you divorced?”

“What?” She looked up quickly.

“You said I was lucky to be alone,” I said. “I thought perhaps you were thinking of an ex-husband.”

“Oh,” she said. “I was.”

“You’ve never mentioned a husband.”

“No.” And then she said, “Neither have you.”

“Me?” I laughed in a startled way. “I never had a husband to mention.”

“No?”

“I had romances.” For some reason it seemed important that she know this. “I wanted to get married. I wanted children. It just never happened.”

“In the war?”

“What?”

“You had romances in the war?” She wrote something down. What could she possibly have written down?

“In the war, before the war, after the war.” I wanted to laugh again, like a belle of the ball, but I couldn’t quite manage it. “There was a boy named Lloyd, for instance. Lloyd Kerr.”

“Lloyd Kerr,” she repeated, writing it down.

“Let the record show,” I said, “that there was a boy named Lloyd Kerr.”

She looked at me, pen poised. She has patience, that one. She could sit beside you in a foxhole and bide her time.

“I met him in basic training.”

“Where you met Kay.”

“That’s right, Fort Bragg.” I frowned.

She waited. “You could tell me about meeting Kay.”

“He took me to dances,” I said. “Lloyd Kerr. He squired me around. We were all very popular, you know. Not much on offer in the way of girls.”

“So you dated other boys, too?”

“Oh, yes. But Lloyd Kerr is the one I remember, because he found me again overseas. He popped up out of nowhere. That happened sometimes. Once I passed another soldier I knew in a jeep; he was going one way, I was going the other. We waved. I hadn’t seen him in months and months.”

“But that wasn’t Lloyd.”

“No, Lloyd just appeared one day. Somehow he knew where I was. This was in France. He took me to see a movie in an old château we’d taken back from the Germans.
Casanova Brown
—a silly romance with Gary Cooper and Teresa Wright. They put up a screen in the entry hall. And sitting on the marble floor watching that silly movie were hundreds of dirty unshaven GIs with guns in their hands. Topsy-turvy.”

“What happened to him?” Jennifer asked.

“He was in the infantry,” I said. “Somebody shot him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” I repeated. I looked at her. Was she sorry? People always say that. They say it automatically. “How I found out was, the sergeant handed me a letter at mail call, and it was one I’d written to Lloyd, and across the address there was a red stamp that said
deceased
. All in capital letters.
DECEASED.
” I leaned toward her. “Here’s a little confession for you,” I said, “since you seem to want one. I used to tell people about Lloyd, because people thought I was strange for never marrying, and so he was my excuse. My beau who died. My tragic romance. I’d say I was in love with him, but I don’t even know if that was true. Poor old Lloyd.”

She looked at me, so serious, a line deepening in her forehead. Was that an expression of judgment or concern? “I don’t blame you for that,” she said.

I sat back in my chair. “Well, I opened my letter and read it. I’d written the usual prattle:
These cigarettes are horrible – but I am slowly learning to drink beer – Our food is pretty good.
What a ninny I was. When I wrote it he was probably already dead. You know what I think about sometimes? All the things he never had any idea about, because they happened after he died. He never saw a television. He never heard of the Internet, or an iPod. He couldn’t have imagined an iPod. He never even heard of Elvis! He didn’t know we’d win. He didn’t know that war wouldn’t be the last. He didn’t know about Korea. Vietnam. The Gulf War. Iraq. Could he have imagined 9/11?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“That’s a disappointing answer.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Well, someone shot him dead and after that nothing mattered. That was that for poor old Lloyd.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“Stop apologizing. It doesn’t matter now.” I felt angry. “If he’d lived I might have married him and had a passel of brats and a dog. Who wants that happy ending?”

“A lot of people.”

“It’s bullshit.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

“I don’t know what else to tell you,” I said. “I don’t know why we’re doing this. I don’t know what it is you want to know.”

“You told me you wanted to leave a record,” she said, keeping her temper when I was doing my best to make her lose it.

“But you must want to know something, or you’re only listening for the money, and then I don’t want to do it, Jennifer. I won’t pay for attention. I won’t. I told you I won’t. Tell me that there’s something you want to know or this little project is over, and you can kiss your one hundred dollars an hour goodbye.”

“Okay,” she said evenly. “Tell me about Kay.”

I felt myself flinch. “You need that money, don’t you?”

Jennifer looked at me a long moment and then she sighed, sinking back against the chair. “This is too upsetting for you, Margaret,” she said. “It was a bad idea.”

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t.”

“I should go.”

“No, no, don’t do that. I’m sorry. Really. I’m old and cantankerous. I told you I’m not used to people. I’m sorry. I’ll tell you a story about Kay.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to,” I said. “Really. I have a story I want to tell. I’d like someone else to know it. Write it down. Come on.” I waved my hand at her notebook. “Write it down.”

So she did.

In Germany, when
we arrived in a new town, the boys would choose a house and go in and tell the people to vacate, and just like that the place would be ours. In Zietz I stood outside a house next to Kay with my bedroll at my feet and my hands in my pockets and stared at the sky while I waited for the owners to leave, thinking, Hurry the hell up, not much caring, when they finally came out, that they glared at us as they went by. The man kept showing everybody a letter that said he was a member of the Christian Science Church in Boston. He said, “You’re in a Christian home.”

Don’t steal my stuff
seemed to be his point, or anyway that’s what I thought at the time. Whatever his point, it was a strange thing to say, although I guess there’s no appropriate etiquette for addressing the people who turn you out of your home so they can sleep there. Kay and I moved into a dining room with a balcony. When I got up in the morning Kay was gone, and I went out on the balcony and spotted her wandering the garden, touching the flowers like she’d never seen one before. As I watched she glanced around like the owner might have spies, picked a flower, and then put it in her hair.

“Not exactly standard issue,” I called down, and she jumped, looked up at me, laughed.

“Everything’s in bloom,” she said. “Come see.”

I went downstairs and out the door and let her lead me around the garden and tell me the flowers’ names. At that time I didn’t know much about gardening, so when she told me what the flowers were called, I said, “Red one, purple one, blue one,” and she laughed again.

“Red would suit you,” she said, looking around as though we were in a hat store. She put a finger to her mouth, considered me. “Yes, red.” She reached beside me and plucked a large red flower, one that had bloomed long enough to look as though it had flung itself open, one right at the moment when beauty is heightened by the knowledge that it’s about to fade. I was wearing my hair in two braids at that point, pinned at the back, and she tucked the stem of the flower under one of them. “Beautiful. You’re beautiful,” she said.

As you might imagine, Jennifer, I saw a lot of bad things in Germany. But I wish you could see—not against all that, but existing at the same time, cupped in the palm of my hand—a German garden in the spring, and Marilyn Kay with a flower in her hair, her face open as a rose and shining in the light.

M
egan wears a
smile of conspiratorial delight, in her hands plates bearing an array of sweet things: pie, cookies, chocolate torte. She approaches the table by the window where Jennifer waits, and the sunlight coming in plays peekaboo with her face, now you see her, now you don’t. “Can you believe all this?” Megan asks, clattering the plates onto the table. “The girl gave me the wrong things, and when I told her said just keep it, and gave me the right things, too.” She slides into her chair. “It’s like that Monopoly card. Bank mistake in your favor. Wasn’t that it?”

“I think so,” Jennifer says, though she remembers it being bank
error
.

“Bakery mistake in your favor,” Megan says. “We should wait until after the food.” But then she picks up a fork and takes a bite of the torte anyway. “Oh my God this is good,” she says, on her face an expression of such sensual delight that Jennifer feels the moment might be too private to witness. “I never get to eat dessert,” Megan says. “But I have
such
a sweet tooth.”

Don’t think about it, Jennifer tells herself. Don’t ask what she means when she says she never gets to eat it. Don’t assume it means Sebastian tells her to watch her weight. Don’t suspect everyone is secretly unhappy. Don’t be sad.

After her morning with Margaret, Jennifer went home and cried. It’s so exhausting to be with her: the relentless niceness in the face of Margaret’s prickly need, the struggle not to react to Margaret’s efforts to provoke. Perhaps Margaret doesn’t really exist. That house in the woods, only Jennifer can see it. It’s a dream she’s wandered into, a spell sent to punish her. She can almost believe this. Except Sue the librarian, a solidly real person, is the one who first told Jennifer Margaret’s name. Margaret watches her too fiercely. Margaret pays too much attention to everything she says. Margaret talks, and somehow Jennifer feels as if she’s the one being exposed.

She didn’t allow herself much time for tears. She washed her face and practiced smiling and came to meet Megan for lunch. This is their first outing without the boys. Megan suggested it yesterday. It would give them a chance to talk, she said. That’s fine with Jennifer, as long as Megan does most of the talking.

Megan takes a substantial bite of the key lime, smiles at Jennifer as it hits her tongue, and then closes her eyes with pleasure. Jennifer looks away just as a college-age boy stops beside their table, a boy with the wild curly hair and lumberjack beard many of the students sport, rich kids pretending to be mountain men. “Professor Summerfield?” he says, and Megan’s eyes pop open. She reaches for her iced tea, washing down the rest of the bite. “Adam,” she says. “How are you?”

“Good, good,” he says. “How are you?”

“Doing well, thanks,” Megan says.

The boy gives her a mischievous grin. “Looked like you were enjoying that pie.”

Megan laughs like she’s taking the comment in stride, but the slow flush that creeps up her neck betrays her. “It’s delicious,” she says. “You should order some.”

“Well, I’m not much for key lime,” he says, “but if you say it’s good it must be true.”

Megan inclines her head and smiles in both recognition and deflection of the compliment. “Are you having a good semester?”

“I am,” the boy says, and launches into an eager, animated description of the fascinations of the philosophy class he’s taking. He moves closer and closer to Megan as he’s talking, until he’s leaning against the table, and Jennifer notes with surprise that he seems to think he has a chance. She glances at Megan’s face, her wide-eyed attentiveness, her mobile mouth, and wonders how often Megan’s willingness to listen is mistaken for something more. Or is Jennifer the one making the mistake? Maybe this Adam does have a chance. She reminds herself that she doesn’t really know Megan, and even if she did, she wouldn’t know for sure, unless Megan said to her:
I am fucking that boy
. Even if Megan said,
I am not fucking that boy
, there would always be a chance it was a lie, or would become one.

“Okay, then,” the boy says. He gives the table a light slap as he straightens, like it’s a mount that’s pleased him. “I’ll see you soon, I hope.”

“See you,” Megan says. She smiles, smiles, smiles, but as soon as the door has dinged his departure she collapses back into her seat with a sigh. “Oh boy,” she says.

“He has a crush on you,” Jennifer says, and to her surprise Megan groans, “I know.”