The New Neighbor: A Novel

by Leah Stewart

  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?”

  I was startled by the question. “The beginning of what?”

  “The scrapbook. Do you mind if I look at the whole thing?”

  “Oh! Not at all.” Of course, I was pleased that she wanted to.

  The book is held together by a large piece of leather twine, looped through holes and tied in a knot at the front. At the top the twine has broken, leaving a dangling end. There were once hinges on the cover, but two are broken, one missing completely. The book is in danger of complete collapse. The first page is brown—from age? Or was it always brown? I no longer remember—and water-stained and marked at the top right corner $2.75 in some long-dead clerk’s neat handwriting. “Two seventy-five!” Jennifer said, touching the number with her fingertip like it was a sacred relic. Then she turned the creaking page.

  The next two pages have photos, laid out neatly, held in place with photo corners, labeled underneath in my handwriting—what it used to look like before it took on the shaky, old-lady quality it has now. Six photos to a page. Below the first it says Probie. September 1938. “Probie?” she asked.

  “That’s what you were called in your first year of nursing school. For probationary.”

  “So that’s you?”

  “That’s me,” I said. It is me, rendered the size of my thumbnail and dressed like a doll in a long white skirt, my hair slicked to the side, long black stockings and black shoes. All the photos on this page are of me or me and my friends—a row of identically dressed dolls, sitting on the stone steps between the white columns out front of the school.

  “You look happy in this one,” she said, pointing to the last one on the page, me alone, standing just to the side of one of the columns. I picked up the magnifying glass from the coffee table and my smile swam into view. Why was I smiling? We passed on through pages of doctors and nurses—Dr. Ted Pollack, Ruth Bratton, Miss Jones (Isolation)—until a loose envelope appeared, and she picked it up, glancing at me to see if it was okay, and pulled out a card that read The Graduating Class of the Vanderbilt University School of Nursing request the pleasure of your company at a DANCE Saturday evening, May sixteenth, eight thirty o’clock, Young Christian Women’s Association.

  “Did you go to this?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I said, though truthfully I have no memory of that particular occasion. Now that she was interested I was willing to fabricate to keep her that way.

  Next she stopped on a picture of me standing atop a tank, smiling, wearing men’s coveralls and a pair of giant goggles on my head.

  “Kay took that,” I said. Climb up there, she’d said, and when I looked around hesitantly, Come on. Come on, Maggie Jean. Be a good soldier and do what you’re told.

  From England, we crossed the channel to France. “Pretty dress,” she said, pointing to a picture of me in a frock and Kay in her coveralls, posing in a wheat field.

  “Oh!” I said. “That’s a funny story. This dress I’d ordered before I went overseas found me in France. Red silk. Shame it’s not a color photo. It looked so strange against all that olive drab. Too much. Like Gatsby with his silk shirts.”

  “But you tried it on.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” I said. “It was from my old life. But Kay insisted. Then we all danced around the field while someone sang.”

  “Kay sounds like fun,” she said, and I agreed that she was fun, rather than explain how inadequate that word is for all Kay was to me then: friend, sister, fellow traveler, the one who put her arms around me when I cried, the source of comfort and support. Jennifer turned a page and then another while I wasn’t paying attention, and then I looked down and saw my first shots of Germany, and I began to find it harder to breathe. I said, “Are we really going to sit here looking at this all day?”

  She looked startled. She withdrew her hand. “No,” she said.

  I reached over and shut the scrapbook, keeping my eyes on it so I wouldn’t have to see her face. Did she think I was overcome by sorrow? In truth I don’t know what it was that overcame me. Nothing so simple as sorrow. “I suppose you’re going to leave now,” I said.

  “I can,” she said. “Are you tired?”

  “I wanted to talk, but we were going too fast. You said you wanted to start at the beginning.”

  “I—�
�� Two lines appeared between Jennifer’s brows. Was that worry or confusion I saw?

  “You said I should tell my stories.”

  She took a breath. The lines deepened. “I thought you wanted to leave a record of yourself.”

  “I said I hadn’t. Hadn’t is different from wanted to.” She wasn’t looking at me, Miss Jennifer, but in the direction of the door. Well, go on then, I thought. Nothing’s keeping you here.

  She said quietly, “I still think you should tell your stories.”

  “Why would I want to?” I demanded.

  “I don’t know why,” she said. “I can just tell that you do.”

  “I don’t have anything to unburden,” I said. “I don’t have anything to confess.” I’ll admit I likely said these things with a rude disdain, but I was unprepared for her to turn suddenly, a striking cat, to utter with some ferocity, “I didn’t say you did.”

  Oh, that was interesting. And frightening, too. I will tell the truth—she’d frightened me. That whip-crack of anger in her voice! The uneasy feeling it gave me must have been what I’m only now putting in words: she is not actually calm. I have been fooled. Her calm is the mask her rage wears. I don’t cower, not I, so I said, “You implied it.”

  She smoothed her mask. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  There was a silence of some length. Finally I said, “Maybe I do want to.” I said this somewhat haltingly. Because it was the truth or because it was a lie? Both. Because it was both.

  “You don’t have to tell me anything,” she said wearily. “But I’m happy to listen to whatever you want to tell.”

  “I will keep that in mind.” I’d inadvertently returned to a high-handed tone, and I was sorry, so I added, “I know I said I don’t need a companion.”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t need help to take care of myself.”

  She nodded.

  “But what about this, this record? Maybe I need help with this.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “Someone to ask me questions, to help me organize. I forget things now, you know. I get scattered. I might need someone to keep me on course, to write it all down. For my grandniece. For Lucy. She says she’s interested in my stories.”

  She considered. “I could do that. Yes.”

  “You’re willing to be my audience.”

  “I could do that,” she said again.

  I want to be alone. I don’t want to be alone. My days pop like bubbles. There is no one to remember the things that have happened to me. I said, “I’d pay you, of course.”

  “No, no,” she said. “You wouldn’t have to.”

  I’d like to think she meant that. It would be nice to believe she enjoys my company, that she actually wants to hear the tales of my adventurous youth. “I insist. I couldn’t ask you to volunteer. What do you think would be a reasonable rate?” She hesitated. I pressed my advantage. “One hundred dollars an hour?”

  Eagerness flashed in her face, but she suppressed it. “No, really,” she said.

  “Is that not enough?”

  “Of course it’s enough,” she said, an edge in her voice. She softened that edge and added, “It’s more than enough.”

  “All right, then,” I said. And then, out of a fear I had betrayed my own eagerness, I said, “I’ll want a weekly invoice.”

  “You’ll get one,” she said. I heard that edge again. She is trying so hard to be sweet to me, because I’m paying her, because I’m old, but she needn’t make the effort for me. I don’t require sweetness. As she proved today, people are much more interesting when they have a bit of a bite.

  We agreed that she’ll come Monday morning. First a massage, then we’ll embark on our project. Our oral history.

  Unburden, I said. Confess. Those are the words I chose.

  Please Like Me

  It’s very expensive to see fish in Chattanooga. Jennifer feels a queasy panic as she shells out the money for aquarium tickets, Megan cheerfully suggesting she pay the $75 more it would take to get a membership. So far Margaret is the only client her flyers have yielded. She’s checked a couple of places where she hung them and found only three phone-number strips torn away. She doesn’t want to need Margaret, but Margaret’s all she’s got. One hundred dollars an hour to listen to war stories? Just how much money does Margaret have? Enough to feel entitled to that angry Queen Elizabeth air.

  It surprises Jennifer that Margaret can still make her voice that loud, still achieve that high-ranking-officer note of presumed acquiescence. Imagine what it was like to work for her. Those nurses must have stood at attention. She’d rather not think about Margaret, and finds that she keeps doing so anyway, her mind returning to what she feels when she puts her hands on the old lady: anger and grief, yes, and also guilt and loneliness. She can’t exactly identify the order in which those emotions appear, like a geologist working through layers of rock. What she does is not as scientific as that. But she does wonder, with Margaret on her table, what that order is, and whether the emotion at the bottom is the root of all the others, or the one Margaret most wishes to conceal. If it’s the former, Jennifer would guess guilt. If the latter, loneliness.

  “I’m screwed,” Megan says as they enter the fluorescent dimness of the fish tanks. She says this cheerfully, too, because that’s how she says most everything. She’s talking about how behind she is on her grading. It’s a Sunday. Tomorrow Jennifer starts listening to Margaret’s stories, something she anticipates with a potent mix of curiosity and dread. She feels a little screwed herself. Milo and Ben are a few paces ahead, shouting whoa! at the belly of a gliding manta ray. “I have a conference paper, too.” Megan groans. “I’m just so screwed!”

  “Sebastian’s at work?” Jennifer asks.

  Megan looks puzzled. “No,” she says. “Why?”

  “I just assumed.”

  Megan grasps her meaning. “He had a wedding yesterday,” she says. “He really needed time to decompress.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “And I love doing stuff like this with Ben. I love coming here. I’d rather be doing this than writing my paper. Or, God knows, grading.”

  Jennifer nods. She hasn’t yet met this decompressing Sebastian. Sebastian! Who in America, in Tennessee, is named Sebastian? Between his name and the sympathetic talk of his artistic exhaustion Jennifer might imagine him tall and wan, pressing the back of his hand to his forehead, but she’s seen pictures and knows he’s short and well built with large lovely eyes in a squarely handsome face, and strangely incongruous red hair that he’s in the process of losing. Watch out for the men with beautiful eyes, she thinks. Take a good long look into those eyes! You will never be enough for all the longing there. Can’t you see the inextricability of devotion and betrayal, of sin and apology?

  But Jennifer’s own history has left her jaded, seeing struggle where likely none exists. Megan’s life is attractive and well organized, if you set aside the nagging question of a second child.

  Milo pauses in front of the jellyfish and Jennifer stops beside him. Ben runs on ahead, Megan chasing after, calling, “Slow down!” The jellyfish pulse beautifully and stupidly in their tank. “Look, Mom,” Milo says.

  She doesn’t want him to call her Mom. She’d like to stay Mommy a little longer. “Pretty, aren’t they,” she says.

  Megan reappears, holding Ben by the hand. “What’s interesting about jellyfish,” she says, “is that they look so pretty in here, but if you see them near you in the ocean they just look terrifying.” She leans close to the tank. “Painful trumps pretty. Though maybe not always. My brother’s dating life is evidence of that.”

  “What do they do to you?” Milo asks.

  “They sting you,” Ben tells him importantly. “They sting you to death.”

  Megan laughs. “Not to death.” She looks at Jennifer. “Or am I wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” Jennifer says. She turns to Ben. “I’ve been stung and I’m not dead.”
r />   Ben looks her up and down. “Where’d they sting you?”

  “On my leg,” she says. “Swimming in the ocean.”

  “Did you cry?” Milo asks.

  “Oh yeah,” Jennifer says. “It hurt.”

  “I hate jellyfish,” Milo says angrily. “Jellyfish are jackass.” He turns away in high dudgeon and marches over to the octopus.

  “He said jackass,” Ben says gleefully, and then skips after Milo. “Milo, you said jackass!”

  “Slow down,” Megan calls, as Jennifer says, “Sorry.” Megan makes a no-worries face and follows the boys. Jennifer lingers a moment, watching the jellyfish contract and expand, oblivious of the world’s opinions. She likes to watch them drifting, glowing under the tank lights. They know nothing of danger. They have no curiosity at all.

  Milo says, “Mommy,” and Jennifer, startled, looks down to see him watching her from a few feet away, hands on hips and a scolding expression on his face. “You have to stay with the group.”

  “You’re right,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

  “We don’t want to lose you,” he says, and she presses her lips together so she won’t laugh. The preschool recently took a field trip to a nature center, which is, she assumes, where he got this language. “Come on,” he says, still in his chiding grown-up voice, and then turns and sprints off, abruptly a child again, nearly knocking over a woman to whom Jennifer has to apologize.

  She catches up to them by a large tank housing a swarming school of silver fish. They flash. They flit. They go this way, then that. Both boys stand with their little hands against the glass, opening and closing their mouths, glub glub, and giggling at each other. Megan says, “They’re lovely, aren’t they,” with a weird longing in her voice, and Jennifer makes a noncommittal sound, not because she doesn’t agree but because, these days, not committing is her habit.