The New Neighbor (8 page)

The first time they had sex, she was fifteen. It was right after his father went to have a mole checked, and they told him in six months or less he’d be dead. Even if she hadn’t wanted to sleep with Tommy, which she very much did, how better to demonstrate that she was alive and would never leave him? When his father was still at home, Tommy would pick her up and they’d drive around and then they’d park somewhere and he’d take her face in his hands and search it. Then he would kiss her. That was always how it started. She never asked what he was looking for, just succumbed to relief when again and again he found it. Then once his father was in the hospital, she’d hold Tommy’s hand during the increasingly awful visits, and then they’d go back to his house, so often empty now, and climb into his bed. Tommy’s mother didn’t care if she spent the night. Her parents cared but didn’t try very hard to stop her.

One night she woke to the sound of Tommy whimpering in his sleep. She put her hand on his head—hot, damp with sweat—and he stirred, then settled without waking. For a moment she was filled with a profound understanding of her purpose. Then came a wave of painful, incomprehensible agitation. She got out of bed and, unsure what was wrong, unsure what to do, went down to the kitchen for a glass of milk. Tommy’s mother was sitting at the table, drinking a brown alcohol. It smelled like paint thinner. “Want a drink?” his mother said, then laughed in a sad kind of way.

“I’m getting some milk,” Jennifer said. “Is that okay?”

“Is milk okay?” his mother said. “Milk!” She put her face in her hands and laughed again.

Jennifer poured the milk. She wanted very badly to leave but to do so seemed cowardly. So she eased into a chair at the table. It had been a mistake to leave the safety of the bed, and she felt all the panicked regret such a mistake occasioned. If Mrs. Carrasco didn’t look up by the time Jennifer counted to one hundred, she’d allow herself to go back to bed, where Tommy would stir and pull her close against him and say in her ear how much he needed her. That was, once again, all she wanted. She got to sixty-five before his mother lowered her hands and leaned in, her expression so intent that Jennifer’s discomfort ballooned. She took a quick glance down at her sedate pajamas. There was no open button. There was nothing to see. “I shouldn’t be letting you do this,” his mother said. “You’re so young. It’s irresponsible of me.”

“No, no—” Jennifer started.

“But I see how you make him feel better,” his mother said. “And I can’t resist. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Jennifer said, confused. “All I want is to make him feel better.”

“Be careful,” his mother said, closing her eyes. “I think you mean that.”

Jennifer did mean it. Why wouldn’t she mean it?

“Where did he come from?” His mother shook her head and opened her eyes again. “In high school I was such a nerd. How did I produce a boy like him?”

“His father?” Jennifer ventured, because his mother was staring at her like she owed her an answer.

She laughed, a sharp, quick sound. “No. I always thought that’s why they don’t get along. Tommy’s every boy who gave him shit in high school. Every boy who took the girl he liked to the prom.”

“Oh,” Jennifer said. Tommy always said, “My father doesn’t like me,” casually, as if it didn’t matter, and Jennifer always said, “That’s not true, you know that’s not true,” but maybe it was true. His mother seemed to be saying it was true.

“Who wouldn’t rather go with Tommy to the prom? Look at him.
I’d
rather go with Tommy to the prom. Clearly you know what I mean.”

“I love him.” Jennifer was torn between indignation and dismay. Did Tommy’s mother think that was all he was to her, a good-looking boy? “I love him,” she said again.

His mother flopped back in her chair and sighed. “I know you do, honey.” Her voice had softened. “And he loves you. He just adores you. You two are so in love it’s like looking into the sun. His father says . . .” She shook her head. “But sometimes these things last.” She said this as if to herself. Then she seemed to remember Jennifer. She straightened up and gave her a motherly smile. “Go on back to bed now,” she said.

Jennifer obeyed, though the whole thing was terribly, excruciatingly weird. She’d just been ordered by her boyfriend’s mother to climb back into bed with her boyfriend. She lay there blinking at the ceiling, feeling for the first time that in spending these nights with him she was doing something wrong, feeling for the first time, but not the last, that when it came to Tommy she might not be the best judge of what the right thing was.

He stirred again, and this time she didn’t touch him. After a moment, he rolled toward her and pulled her against him, as tight as he could, as tight as possible. He murmured in her ear, “Where’d you go?”

From her vantage point in the future, in a house in the woods, at her own kitchen table, Jennifer looks back and imagines that in that moment she had a prophetic vision. In that moment she understood that Tommy’s need for love would be impossible to satisfy. She saw that she’d spend years and years trying to convince him, finally, that he was loved enough, and when that didn’t work she’d spend years and years trying not to love him anymore, but the habit would be so deeply ingrained, so
primal
, she wouldn’t be able to stop. She would never be able to stop.

Do you, Jennifer, take this man?

She thought when she came up here to the Mountain she’d be without him, truly without him, for the first time in twenty-seven years, as if she could tap the roof of her car to set him free, like the denizens of Sewanee send their angels home. But maybe ghosts are less cooperative.

Her parents tried to separate them once, sending her to New York right after high school to become a dancer, when what they really wanted was for her to go to college. Not that they ever said it was about him, of course. If they disliked him, they never said so to Jennifer, though she could see in the looks they exchanged that they discussed it when she wasn’t around.

She was a lyrical jazz dancer, not the best in the world, she knew even then, but she could make people watch her. This was something she could do only when she was dancing, an unconscious ability she didn’t know how to control. Her parents put all their hopes on the notion that she still wanted something besides her boyfriend, and off she went to New York City, eighteen years old and knowing no one. It seems like she must have been brave but she doesn’t know if she’s ever been brave, so she wonders now if it was fear that drove her, the same fear that drove her parents: that her love for Tommy was terrifyingly total, that if she stayed with him she’d never be a separate person.

She signed up for a beginner class with a prominent teacher, and he saw something in her, made her a scholarship student and then part of his company. Who knows what might have happened? What did happen is that she came home for a visit, and Tommy was there at the airport. He dropped to his knees right there at the gate and pulled out a ring. Everybody applauded.

The dance teacher called and asked her to come back, but it was like that possibility already belonged to another life. For a long time after she and Tommy got married, she forgot New York, and the time apart. She remembered being with Tommy like she’d never had a single doubt.

Who would she have been without him? She has wondered this, now, for ten years or more, and she thought when she came up here she’d finally find out. But this is a fantasy. Let go of your hopeful delusions. She’ll always be the person Tommy made.

T
his morning I
felt restless and impatient, wishing my appointment with Jennifer were at nine instead of three. If I weren’t so old I would’ve paced the room. I was even too restless to read, which is distressing, as without my mysteries what would I do with my time? The one I tried and failed to read today is from a series about a woman park ranger. She is resourceful, this woman, and unable to escape adventure, but I couldn’t concentrate on her and all the problems she knows she must solve. I gave up and called one of my grandnieces. The one I like. Her name is Lucy, after my sister, which I can’t hold against her. She has told me the name is making a comeback, like many other names from my childhood, though apparently not mine. But when they chose that for her, it seemed old-fashioned. She is an anomalous Lucy, misplaced in time. When she answered the phone I said, “Why don’t you pay more attention to me? I have all this money.”

She laughed. Not in a mocking way. In a surprised, amused way. A fond way. She always laughs at me, this Lucy. The original Lucy never understood my sense of humor. She never understood my anything.

“Are you offering to pay me for attention?” she asked.

“I’m thinking of changing my will in your favor,” I said. This was a lie. I already changed it, years ago, and most of what I have will go to her. Who else would it go to? There isn’t anybody else. I left a little something to her parents and her sister but I just don’t like those people.

“That’s nice,” she said. “But I’d rather have you around.”

“You don’t care if I’m around. You never come see me.”

“Margaret,” she said. “I have three kids and a full-time job and I live on the other side of the country. The last time we came to visit you couldn’t wait for us to leave.”

“I don’t know why you think that.”

“Because you told me! You said, ‘I like seeing you, but by the end I can’t wait for you to leave.’ ”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You did. You said if you were around my son any longer you were going to have to smack him upside the head.”

“I don’t know why you let him behave the way he does.”

She sighed. She said, “I don’t know either,” which is her way of saying she’s not going to discuss how she raises her children with me. Of course she’s under no requirement. I’m not her mother, not even her grandmother, and what do I know about disciplining a child? Besides that I remember being disciplined. After she brought it up, I did recall how irritating I found her children the last time they came, especially the little boy. She was patient with both of us, my good Lucy. I told the child to shut up in a restaurant, and she asked me politely not to use that phrase. She waited until the children weren’t around. I said her grandmother and I were raised to be seen and not heard, and she said, “That was eighty years ago,” and I was stunned into silence by the enormity of that number. The weight of it, the
distance
. There have been so many wars since I was a child.

I shut up, back then, and today. Or at least I changed the subject. “Do you still have that family photo wall?” I asked her.

“Of course,” she said. “My collection’s not quite complete, though. I’m still missing your grandmother.”

“I’ll send you some photos,” I said, though I have the feeling I’ve promised her this before and then failed to deliver. She is our family archivist, with a wall in her living room devoted to portraits in black and white. She is the one who might care about the old letters, the diaries, all my little treasures. She listens to my tales of family history with what I think is genuine interest. But still it’s not real for her; how can it be? How can she picture my early life in anything but black and white? There I am posed before a tank in shades of gray, when actually there was olive drab, there was blue sky and bursting green, there was bright red blood. And my hair was much darker than it looks in those pictures. There is no record of the exact shade of my hair. “You’re lucky,” I said to Lucy, “to have your memories preserved in color.”

“I love black and white,” she said. “Though maybe it makes things seem a little less real.”

This is why I like her: she understands what I mean. “They were real,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

“Any story I told you would just seem like a fairy tale.”

“I remember you telling me about getting a permanent in France, the shop windows blown out, and you’re sitting there practically in the street, with that machine like snakes coming out of your head. All the MPs stopping to talk to you. That was very vivid.”

Oh, she was right. That was what happened. Later I saw one of those MPs and he asked how my hair turned out. I had to take off my helmet to show him, and he said he’d been skeptical when he saw me looking like Medusa under that machine but clearly he was wrong, and we talked in a slightly wistful way about the importance of optimism. I can feel that moment. It’s still there. “I didn’t know I told you that. I didn’t know I’d told you anything about the war.”

“You’ve told me several things.”

“Why?”

“I asked!”

“But do you care?”

“Of course,” she said.

I could feel her exasperation through the phone. I’m sorry, Lucy, but I have to ask. I have trouble believing you, you see, even though I’d very much like to. Perhaps because of how much I’d like to. “You could come see me without the children.”

“I’d love to,” she said. “Let me try to figure that out.” She said she’d call me soon, and I said all right and let her go. I resisted the urge to say that she better make it snappy because I might die soon. I hope she gives me credit for resisting, though maybe, being so much younger, she doesn’t understand how hard it is not to spend all your time thinking about how soon it will end.

Before Jennifer came
I moved the scrapbook from my bedroom to the coffee table in the living room. I left it open to a page with a picture of Kay.

When I emerged from the guest room after the massage, Jennifer was standing by the coffee table, tilting her head to look at the pictures. I admit I was pleased to see the success of my little stratagem. She glanced up and flashed a quick smile. “I was just looking at this,” she said, as though that weren’t perfectly obvious.

“By all means,” I said. I made my way over and settled on the couch, patting the cushion beside me so that she came around the table and obediently sat. I pointed at Kay. “This is the one you remind me of.” I watched her face intently as she leaned in for a closer look. I don’t know exactly what I was hoping to see. She studied the photos closely, like she was memorizing them, and then she asked, “Can we go back to the beginning?”