The New Neighbor: A Novel

by Leah Stewart

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, her name was Barbara. We got along. I don’t know why we never came to be better friends.”

  “Mmmm,” she said.

  I pressed on, perhaps too forcefully. “I’ve never seen the inside,” I said. “Have you changed it much?”

  “Not really,” she said. “Not yet. We’ve only been here a month.”

  I waited a beat, but nothing else was forthcoming—by which I mean, no invitation to tea. “I wish Barbara and I had thought to visit. We just stuck to waving at each other across the water. It does seem a shame.”

  “But maybe it isn’t,” she said. “Maybe you liked each other better with the pond between you.”

  I didn’t want to agree with that. There was a silence, and she shifted forward in her chair, a prelude to departure. I still wasn’t ready for her to go. “I’ve lived here twenty years,” I said. “Before I retired I was the vice president of a hospital in Nashville.”

  “Oh?” she asked, politely, holding still.

  “I bet you wouldn’t have guessed that. People don’t assume a woman my age had a career, but I did. I kept on working after the war. I went back to school for my doctorate. I was head of all the nurses at the hospital.”

  “That’s impressive.”

  “I haven’t spent my life teaching Sunday school,” I said. “I got a PhD. I published articles. I’ve slept in a foxhole. I’ve sat on a hill in the dark and watched the tracer bullets go by. I landed on the beach at Normandy.”

  “Really?” Now, at last, she looked at me with real interest.

  “D-Day plus thirty-eight. Bastille Day—July 14.”

  “What was it like?”

  “What was it like?” I used her trick of repeating the question—not on purpose, but because suddenly I wasn’t sure how to answer. Now that I had introduced this topic, what did I want her to know? “It was a mess,” I said.

  “You must have a lot of stories.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “I meant about the war. Everyone doesn’t have those.”

  “No,” I said. “Everyone is lucky.”

  She let a silence lapse before she spoke. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “Bringing up a painful topic.”

  “You didn’t. I did.” I didn’t like her mentioning my pain. “I don’t mind telling my war stories. Nobody asks.”

  “What about your family?”

  “I told them some things. I wrote letters home. But all the people who got them are dead.”

  “There’s no one left?”

  “One nephew, two grandnieces,” I said. “One of them I like.”

  “No kids?”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t left much of a record of myself.”

  What a serious face Jennifer has. She looked at me like this was terrible news. “You should write your stories down.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Why would I do that? Who would I do it for?

  After she left, I couldn’t concentrate on my book, an old Martha Grimes I’d somehow missed. Though it took considerable, exhausting effort, though even now my right elbow hurts from that effort, I dragged my army trunk out of the guest room closet. It’s where I keep all my memorabilia from the war. My souvenirs. I used to have real souvenirs—empty perfume bottles, framed postcards of girls from different regions of France—but I divested myself of all that bric-a-brac long ago. Here’s what remains: the letters I sent home to my parents; the frayed, folded map on which I tracked my movements; a photo album I never open because I pressed a flower inside; my scrapbook. I pulled out the scrapbook, which is a heavy, fragile thing these days. It’s probably sixteen inches tall, more than a foot wide, with a cover made of fake boards, complete with wood grain. On the front it has a drawing of two mallards in flight, one large in the foreground, one small in the back. Above that are the words Scrap Book in an old-fashioned cursive. Scrap book used to be two words. Now it’s one. So many changes happen without our noticing, without our say-so. The pages are crisp and brown, decorated with menus and postcards and pictures held in place by photo corners, or slipping out of them. All the things I thought worth saving. So brittle now. I turned the creaking pages carefully until I found the first picture of Kay.

  These photos are tiny. They’re snapshots, “snaps” we called them, from the forties, three-inch-by-two-inch black-and-white rectangles with thick crimped white borders. And my eyes are not what they used to be. So I can’t swear by the resemblance. Kay’s hair was dark, a rich brown, almost black, not blond like Jennifer’s, and she wore it rolled back, pinned, and curled, as was the fashion of the age. Her eyes were dark, too, and mischievous, and she had a sardonic grin, a way of flashing it at you like she knew exactly what you were thinking. These things I remember without the aid of photographs. I’d forgotten how slender she was, how small she looked encased in men’s coveralls and a gas mask, how short. When we stand together in a photo I look a good five inches taller, and I was only five six myself, before I started to shrink.

  Still, I think it is Kay she reminds me of.

  Ghosts

  When she’s alone at night, that’s when Tommy visits her. Or, more precisely, that’s when she lets him come. The rule is that she’s not allowed to think of him during the day, though this is a rule she sometimes breaks. He’s there all the time, leaning against the curtain, insisting she notice him. She can see the outline of his form, and all day she looks away, looks away, looks away, and then at night when the world is stripped bare and the woods are humming she relinquishes effort. She lets the curtain rise. Sometimes he stands there as he was at the end—the eyes never quite focused, the redness in the nose, the hand that shook at ten in the morning. Sometimes he is as he was at the beginning, in their mutual enrapture, in the days of wonderment. Which is worse?

  She’d been right, back when she watched him from the corner of her eye, to imagine Tommy was more complicated than he seemed. His easy physicality, his cowboy boots—she’d expected a father in the military, a broad-shouldered sergeant, or a contractor, maybe someone who worked with livestock. But his parents owned the local supermarket and two others in neighboring towns. They both had business degrees. Tommy’s house was one of the nicest she’d ever seen, bigger and plusher than her own perfectly nice one, but he almost never had his friends over, preferring to shoot hoops in their cracked driveways, hang out in their cramped untidy basements. Most of his friends had the kind of dad she’d imagined for Tommy, before she met his father, and saw his polite and distracted smile, his glasses and his suit. Tommy’s parents didn’t want him to work in the summers—they said there was plenty of time for having a job—but he did it anyway. He told her this with indignant pride. He’d been working for a guy who remodeled kitchens since the summer after his freshman year. The guy wanted Tommy to go into partnership with him after he graduated. This, not college, was Tommy’s plan.

  Tommy could tell you anything you wanted to know about his boss—how in high school he’d been a rodeo bull rider, where he’d met his wife—and he had an equivalent level of knowledge about the janitors at school, the cashiers in his parents’ stores. They’d run into the guy in charge of produce and she’d stand there smiling while Tommy talked music, sports, how the produce guy had a kid who was learning to drive, can you believe it? Tommy talked and laughed and she smiled politely. He’d have his arm around her waist. His fingers would brush her skin just below her shirt. His thigh would brush her thigh. She didn’t mind standing there while he worked his charm. He was so good at it. She can’t pinpoint the moment when her admiration became resentment, though she knows they were married by then. She thought it was sweet that he liked everybody, until it struck her that maybe he just needed everybody to like him. He always had to be the bartender’s best friend.

  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 m
onths 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.

  Fairy Tales

  This 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 oth
er 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.