The New Neighbor (5 page)

He laughed, a surprised laugh, and leaned his head back against the seat. She’d made him break his gaze, but she didn’t think about that triumph until later, recounting the incident to herself. At the moment she had her eyes fixed on his neck, caught in a vampiric urge to put her mouth on it. “Why are you looking at
me
like that?” he asked, and her surprised eyes darted back to his face. His voice was a murmur, warm breath near your skin, a hand on your thigh. “Do you want to sleep with me?”

“I’m only fourteen,” she said.

He nodded thoughtfully, narrowing his eyes in consideration. “Too young,” he agreed.

“Maybe next year,” she said, and he whipped his head toward her with a comic expression of genuine shock. She grinned. She knew this self-possession, this elation, flooding through her limbs. It was how she felt when she danced, and at no other time. At no other time until now.

They didn’t make it to the previews, or any of the movie at all. Tommy knew about a party, and Jennifer’s friend found herself outvoted. In a dark corner of the party Tommy kissed her. And that was how they came to be.

Being with him proved only to increase her yearning. Before she hadn’t known it was possible to get what she wanted and so had wanted it without much hope. But now she hoped. She hoped all the time, and it was terrifying. When he left her at her door she hoped he would come back to kiss her again. When he hung up the phone she hoped he would call her later. She hoped he would meet her in the hall between classes, he would name her his girlfriend, he would ask her to prom. And he did, and he did, and he did. She existed only to witness these miracles.

That summer she was going to dance camp for six weeks. This had been planned before Tommy, and even high on love she didn’t want to unplan it. Her life was too much his already. As the time approached she was filled with a fatalistic dread. He talked about how much he’d miss her, and how they’d talk every night, and what they’d do when she got back, but she believed down deep that he’d find another girl, that his interest was a fluke that couldn’t outlast her absence, that her departure would be the end. They parted with many protestations of love, and she cried, and then she climbed into her father’s car and stopped herself from looking back at him. He sounded anxious on the phone that night, as if he were the one worried she wouldn’t want him anymore, and he called her as much as he’d said he would, but still she doubted. Still she held herself apart. She threw herself into dance. The older girls taught her to survive on bouillon and celery and by the end of the six weeks she was skinny as a prima ballerina and buoyant with pride. She was cold to him on the phone the last week, so exhilarated was she by the conviction of her immaculate self-control.

Her parents, when they picked her up, had no comment about her altered appearance, but when Tommy saw her he took one look and said, “No.”

“No, what?” she asked. They were out in front of her house. He’d driven over as soon as he knew she was home, and she’d gone out with her chin lifted to meet him, determined, this time and henceforth, not to be overwhelmed.

“No to this,” he said, indicating the length of her body. “I won’t let you do this to yourself.”

“Why not?” She tried to sound haughty but her voice quivered.

“Because I love you,” he said. He sounded angry. “I love you, and you can’t do this to yourself.” He put his hands on her upper arms—arms he could nearly encircle, now, with one hand—and pulled her against his chest.

He’d told her many times he loved her but until that moment she’d never believed it. The force of the belief undid her. All those weeks of self-control—she saw what an illusion that had been. There was no self-control. There was need, only need. She sobbed against his shirt until the fabric was wet, while he stroked her hair and said again and again how much he loved her, and she had been half-alive without this, a plant without water. When she finally stopped crying, they climbed into his pickup truck and went to Sonic for cheeseburgers and tater tots.

She remembers this now, sitting alone at her kitchen table, miles and miles from there and then in her dark and silent house, drinking herbal tea while the son she had with Tommy sleeps. It’s a rueful amusement to think of the coda to that dramatic scene—the pickup truck, the Sonic, the tater tots. No doubt she tore a little slit in a ketchup packet and squeezed a careful dollop onto each tot, as was her habit. Sitting on the warm leather seat of his truck, her whole body still wrung out and shuddery from crying, Tommy singing along with the radio, looking at her with his meaningful eyes. Oh, Tommy. How he could make her cry.

M
y house has
two front doors. The first is a wooden one that opens onto a screen porch I use as a repository for houseplants and the larger souvenirs from my travels, the wooden coyote from New Mexico and the china elephant from Thailand. I went through that door, leaving it open; caned my way over to the second door, the one with the screen; and looked at her through it. She smiled when she saw me, but she has a serious face, and somehow the smile did nothing to make her look less serious. Her face is squarish, until the jawline, which is well defined and declines gracefully to her perfect arc of a chin and probably saves her from looking mannish. Her eyes are green and somber. Is she really a blond? I don’t know. Her hair is that blond that’s dark enough to be persuasively natural. Her eyebrows are brown, darker than her hair, but light enough that the hair remains plausible.

“Ms. Riley?” she asked, and when I nodded, she said, “I’m Jennifer.” She was holding a large contraption that turned out to be her massage table. Over her shoulder was a big green bag.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Jennifer,” I said. “Please come in.” I could hear my accent deepening, as it does when I’m being polite. My screen door opens out, so I began to push it toward her and she shuffled her burden out of the way and we did an awkward dance that ended, finally, in both of us being inside the house.

“I might be confused,” she said, resting the folded table against her leg. “I brought everything for a massage, but the woman at the library told me you needed someone to look in on you. I didn’t know if—”

“I never said that,” I interrupted.

“Oh, all right, I—”

“Sue thinks I can’t take care of myself, but I can. I called about a massage, that’s all. I don’t need some kind of paid companion. I don’t need any other kind of help.”

“All right, then, good,” she said. “Good.”

“I will not pay someone to pay attention to me.”

“I understand,” she said.

The silence was awkward, and I was sorry for it. Sometimes I am more snappish than I intend. “We’re neighbors of a sort,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Across the pond.”

“I saw you out on your deck the other day,” I said. “I waved.”

“That’s right,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you close up.”

“And you as well,” I said. I’d been hoping, I realize, for more reaction than she gave me to the news of this connection between us, but she stayed calm and businesslike. Only now does it strike me I’m lucky she didn’t ask how I knew the distant woman on the porch had been she, since my story was that I’d contacted her only because I’d seen her flyer and wanted a massage. One doesn’t want to tell a new acquaintance that one poked through her mail.

“So,” she said, glancing around, “if you’ll tell me where to set up, I’ll do that, and then we can talk.”

“Where to set up?” I repeated blankly.

“The massage table,” she said, indicating the contraption with a nod.

“Oh. Oh, yes, of course,” I said. I experienced a startling moment of panic. In employing this ruse to meet her, I had failed to consider the necessity of committing to it. In what room of my house was I willing to take off my clothes and have a stranger touch me? In no room at all. I must have looked as dumbfounded as I felt, because, trying to help, she asked, “The bedroom?”

When you live alone your bedroom becomes a sacred space. As if to stop her from insisting, I said, “The guest room,” and pointed to the hallway off the right side of the living room. She obediently went that way. “Be right back!” she called out in a cheerful voice that didn’t suit her.

I eased myself into one of my mother’s uncomfortable straight-backed chairs. When I’m alone I sit in my armchair and put my feet up on the ottoman, but it takes me a little while to get back up from that position, and the maneuvering involved is not something I’d care to perform in front of a witness. The armchair did not belong to my parents, unlike most of the furniture in the house. When my parents died in 1982, first one, then the other, I inherited many things—the antique couch with its carved crown and spiral arms, the looming, majestic sideboard in the dining room. At the time I still lived in Nashville, in a house fully furnished by my own things. I bought this house more or less to contain their furniture, and when I moved into it, selling my furniture and keeping theirs seemed the easiest choice. But my parents owned heavy, dark pieces, mournful and grand, and so my house never seems to have enough light in it, despite the skylight I had installed in the living room.

When she reemerged she had divested herself of everything but a folder and a pen. She gave me a professional smile and came over to sit in the straight-backed chair next to mine. I realize now that I was expecting her to pay me some polite compliment on the house or its furnishings and that the fact that she didn’t accounted for the slight irritation I felt as she perched beside me with the folder on her knees. The folder, I saw, had my name on it.
Maggie Jean Riley
, it said. I must have given her that name when she was asking all those questions on the phone—whether I was on medications (of course), whether I’d had a massage before (of course not). She opened the folder and poised her pen over the form inside. “I started filling this out when we talked earlier,” she said, “but some things I like to discuss in person.”

“Wouldn’t you rather work at a table?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” she said, but as she asked me questions about my aches and pains and I answered them she didn’t look fine, awkwardly repositioning form and folder on her knee, the pen pressing too far into the paper. This stubbornness increased my irritation. And why had I called myself
Maggie Jean
? That hadn’t been my name in many years.

“You can change that to Margaret,” I said, interrupting whatever question she’d been asking.

“I’m sorry, what?” she asked. Her voice so very polite.

I pointed at my name on the folder. “That should say Margaret,” I said. “Not Maggie Jean.”

But you told me Maggie Jean
, she should have said. Or,
Don’t take that tone with me
. She just crossed out the name, neat as you please, and wrote
Margaret
in small letters above it. Why do people let me speak to them so rudely? If they’d let me get away with less, I might think what I said mattered more. A few years ago one of my grandnieces tried her hand at my dead sister’s recipe for strawberry-rhubarb pie. I was allowed only one bite before she called for my verdict. “I’ve had better,” I said. No one slapped me, or snatched the pie away, as I deserved. They laughed.

I insisted on paying Jennifer Young up front, even though she said people usually did it after. I wouldn’t let her bring me my checkbook either. I made her watch me cane into the study to get it and cane my way back once I had it. So excruciatingly slow! When she could have popped there and back with time to grab a smoke besides. When you’re young you have to invent tasks to fill the time, while I can kill an hour just making myself some tea.

She had to help me onto the table. I took off my clothes by myself in the room. She said I could take my underwear off if I wanted to. This was a strange thing to be told. I left it on. I wanted to get on the table by myself, but I couldn’t manage it, probably because I tried to do it too fast, trying to outrun her threatened knock. I wrapped myself in the sheet, as she’d instructed, and she came in and helped me up. This was all so humiliating that I wanted to weep. It’s not as though I’m unaccustomed to being poked and prodded. I accept medical treatment with the not-quite-there dignity the sick and the elderly do their best to master. I suppose I just hadn’t wanted her first knowledge of me to be knowledge of my fragile, frustrating body. I hired her to do exactly what she was doing without expecting her to do it. Perhaps I imagined she’d recognize all I’d wanted was a pretext for meeting her.

Lying facedown on that table I was so tense I must have looked like a prisoner awaiting torture. I could feel her presence behind me, although she didn’t speak. I braced against her touch. After a moment I felt her lay her two palms flat on me, one on each of my shoulders. I thought she would begin to move them, but she didn’t. Then I thought she might say something, but she didn’t. I could feel the heat in her hands. I waited for her to do something. I opened my eyes and looked at my carpet and closed my eyes again. I watched each second pass like you watch each single, persistent drop from a leaky faucet form and fall. Suddenly the strangest thing happened—something in my shoulders let go. It was like caving in. It was like my shoulders had been brick and now they were pudding. I had had no idea.

She exhaled. “Good,” she said, and I felt as pleased as a child to have done what she wanted. “You keep a lot of tension there,” she said.

“You have to keep it somewhere,” I said, trying for insouciance.

She didn’t answer. She began to move her hands, gently, down my back. I must have drifted, honestly, because I don’t remember much else until she pressed a spot in my lower back, and a shock went through me, some kind of electrical pulse. I startled. “Hmmm,” she said. She rubbed a series of circles around that spot.

“You remind me of someone,” I said. I blurted it, stupidly, like the place on my back had been a button that released that thought. She stilled. I felt the wariness in her body, even without being able to see her. “An old friend,” I said. “Someone I knew a long time ago.”