You're Not You

by Michelle Wildgen

  four

  WHEN MY ALARM WENT off I prayed it was early but it wasn’t. In the shower I leaned my head against the wall and wondered if I could call it off. The smell of stale cigarettes came off my wet hair. I was in terrible shape, nauseated, with a headache that felt like white sheets of light flashing behind my eyes. It was either drink a beer, which Kate might smell, or throw up before I left. I chose to throw up. It helped a little. Then I managed to brush my teeth and shuffle out to my car. On the way out I saw that Nate was sleeping on the couch, sprawled with one foot still on the ground. The trash can stood in the middle of the room, filled with beer cans, and the ashtrays had overflowed onto the coffee table.

  As I drove I tried to remember if I had called Liam. I didn’t think I had—Jill wouldn’t have let me, but then I might have sneaked away to do it. No. She had bullied me out of it. For a moment I was awash with gratitude for her, almost weepy at the way she looked out for me sometimes. You were always better off not calling. Why did I never remember that?

  It felt okay, even appropriate, being hungover on the east side, but the farther west I drove toward Kate’s house, the more overtly respectable the city became. My Honda puttered along next to gleaming minivans and BMWs and if I had been able to lift my head I would have noted how expensive and sleek everyone was. You could bet that no one else on this side of town had wet hair knotted in a rubber band they’d taken off the neighbor’s newspaper. I turned into their neighborhood, wondering as I drove how long she and Evan had been in their house, or in Madison, for that matter.

  It really was a pretty neighborhood, even if it did lack funk. I didn’t think anyone with the kind of money they had would want a neighborhood like mine anyway. Especially not if you were trying to maneuver a wheelchair around steep staircases and honey-colored but uneven floorboards. Everyone kept saying how lucky it was that Kate was married, but I thought it was lucky that she had all that money. Who knew what the equipment and caregivers cost? At least they had no kids to worry about. Maybe they’d meant to, till they’d found out, or maybe they’d never wanted any. It is important, though certainly not easy, not to let children take a backseat to the needs of the patient.

  I parked the car and left the windows down. Nothing was going to happen to my car in a neighborhood of BMWs. I sat there in the driver’s seat for a second, finding the warmth soothing for my headache. I didn’t have to stay. I wasn’t locked into this. They hadn’t said a word about the facts of her illness, what I was really signing on for, so they couldn’t blame me if I left now that I knew. I could deal with their disappointment, if they had any. I wouldn’t see them anywhere, any more than I would run into Liam’s wife at Bar Association meetings.

  I walked slowly up their driveway, my head pounding with each step. I thought it would be better once I got in there: I’d sit in one of their big armchairs, breathing the cool air that smelled faintly of lemons or the bowl of pears. I’d file some papers and sit very still. What a relief to walk into their living room. It was so calm and still that I thought I might even try and spend a little time in here today, lay my cheek against the cold belly of the stone girl.

  Kate was in the kitchen. She had a book on a tray affixed to her chair. A frame held the book open, and there was a little mechanical hook along the bottom of the pages. There was some sort of sensor involved, so that when she moved her head a certain way, the hook turned the page. She’d shown me the device the day before. Kate glanced up and seemed about to smile, but then she looked a little stricken. Obviously I looked worse than I’d thought.

  She said something, what I thought was, “Are you okay?”

  Embarrassed to admit I wasn’t fighting my way through the flu or malaria, I nodded. The nod hurt.

  “You look jaundiced,” she went on. It took me a second to get that word. Then I smiled a little when I picked up on it. It wasn’t the easiest word in the world.

  “I’m okay,” I said. She nodded toward the cupboard and when I opened it I saw a big bottle of ibuprofen. I tipped out two and she raised her eyebrows at me, so I shook out another and took them with a glass of Coke. She shook her hair out of her face and nodded toward the book apparatus and said something.

  “Should I take it off?” I asked. I was stalling. I knew perfectly well she’d asked me to remove it. “Or maybe you’d like to read for a while and give me something to do in the meantime.” A nice easy day around the house would be a godsend.

  “For starters, I was planning on the farmers’ market,” she said apologetically. “We’re having people over tonight.”

  Before I could stifle it I looked at her in horror: It was unspeakably sunny and hot and the market would be crammed with people. Why the hell did she need me so early on weekends? Nothing truly needed to be done right then. And where was Evan, anyway? Wasn’t the farmers’ market a couples kind of thing?

  “Oh, the market,” I said. “Uh-huh. Hey, what about that filing and insurance stuff? I could do that first.”

  Kate gave me an appraising look before she spoke. “No,” she said. “We’ll do this, please.” She backed up the chair and rotated, turning it toward the bathroom. Just before she turned the chair away from me she said, “Late night, huh.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted.

  “Okay. Fine. But I’m not rearranging my day around your parties, Bec.”

  My first thought was pure, pissy defensiveness. I could have walked out right then and there. What business was it of hers what I did when I left? I wasn’t so bad off that I couldn’t slap some pointless blusher on and hand over money for a bunch of parsley at the market. I watched her roll down the hallway toward the bathroom and stayed where I was, thinking seriously about whether I wanted to deal with her anymore. I thought I liked her, maybe even quite a bit, but she seemed imperious right now. I wondered if she was like this a lot.

  I took another gulp of my Coke and glanced at my purse slung over the back of the chair. She hadn’t made up her mind about me either, it suddenly dawned on me, and I could tell that if I was going to leave, today was probably the day to do it and get it over with. But I was too ashamed to act on it—her expression had had none of its usual humor when she told me to get it together. I pictured that shiny, unreadable fall of blond hair as she’d rolled out of the kitchen. She was waiting in the bathroom, calm and detached, idly wondering if she had to interview people all over again.

  She was probably debating whether to fire me. My awkwardness around her, my total lack of experience and confidence, seemed all the more vivid through my hangover: After several tries yesterday I still wasn’t very good at helping her in the bathroom—she had to tell me to wipe her harder, which seemed to cost her as much to say as it did me to hear. Twice I had lifted her so badly that she had had to tell me, her voice urgent and unintelligibly fast, to put her down before I dropped her. I splashed nutrition shake on her clothes because I looked the other way when I poured it. No doubt when she compared me to Hillary, who’d been with her over a year, I seemed even worse than I was.

  I went to the end of the hall. She was at the door to the bathroom, her chair pivoted so she could back in. When she saw me still standing several yards away she spoke, knowing, I was sure, that I would have to come to her to hear her. So I did. I started walking, interested to know what she was saying, before I even thought about it. As I came closer, fighting down another lurch of nausea, I saw her break into a grin.

  “It’s just a hangover,” she said. “I used to run races with hangovers.”

  “Races?” I clarified, repeating after her.

  She nodded, her face softening. “But you can take your time with the makeup until the meds kick in.”

  “Thank god,” I said, and she laughed for real this time, sending a rush of relief through me so fast it startled me.

  As I did her mascara I looked at her face, at the tiny lines that bracketed her wide mouth, and the freckles that showed across her nose. After a while she began to talk, and I paused and watche
d her so I could understand.

  “I kind of envy you,” she admitted sheepishly. “I’m too old for it now anyway, but I miss just going out to a bunch of places, having a drink, and going to the next.” I tried to imagine a night out with the Kate of ten years ago, knocking back shots and shouting in noisy bars, and for a second something plummeted in me. I had never been very good at facing up to the fact that some things were unfixable.

  Her eyebrows were a little mussed from when I’d taken off the book turner, and I smoothed them, one at a time, with my fingertip.

  “I don’t know if it’s as fun as you’re imagining,” I said.

  I FELT A LOT better by the time we reached the market. The stands circled the grounds of the state capitol, and people joined the throng moving counterclockwise along the sidewalk, ducking in and out of the horde to stop at the vendors. The tables were piled with food: orange carrots with plumes of thready green leaves; yellow, purple, and green beans; early scarlet strawberries piled in wooden boxes; blocks of white cheese and butter. I’d catch the scent of basil from one table, smoked trout from the next. I leaned over a stack of spinach and realized I could still smell the dirt on the roots.

  We kept near the lawn, so that Kate could pause her chair easily while I darted across to the tables. My arms were weighed down with plastic bags of radishes, strawberries, and bundles of skinny, blushing rhubarb stalks, fresh herbs, soft-skinned garlic. After a while I gave in to the slowness of the crowd and it was kind of fun. For one thing, it wasn’t my money, so if she pointed me toward a stand for goat cheese in herbed olive oil or venison sausage, I never had to count the bills in my pocket. I looked over quarts of strawberries much more carefully than I ever would have for myself. At home I usually ate them standing over the trash can and spitting any bad parts out, but now it seemed extremely important that each berry be perfect.

  The other perk was the samples, which I made it my business to research. Cheese, sausage, sweet peas, smoked fish. At a stand that sold beeswax candles, I took a spoonful of honey and then glanced over my shoulder at her. My constant nibbling was rude, I realized, and I held up the plastic spoon to her. She shook her head, but she was smiling.

  Halfway around the capitol Kate slowed her chair and nodded toward a little café. There was nothing on the list that corresponded so I bent down to see what she wanted.

  “Pastry,” she said. “You really need one.”

  I watched her from across the street as I waited in line for a chocolate croissant. I felt I shouldn’t look away from her, as though she were a toddler in a stroller. It was probably safe. No one was going to harass her, and I had her purse with all the money in it. She was sitting near the street, just out of range of most of the people, with big tortoiseshell sunglasses covering her eyes. She was dressed in a crisp blue shirt, a light skirt and sandals, and a silver bracelet that flashed in the sun. Her head was tilted to one side as she watched people go past. They glanced at her and then away, their body language showing that they didn’t want to stare, or else they smiled at her to show some kind of solidarity. I watched the smilers to see how they came off. I knew that’s what I would be, grinning away. Even from here they seemed a little fatuous.

  When we got back to Kate’s house it was still empty. “What’s Evan up to today?” I asked. I was getting her into her wheelchair in the driveway. I had to reach into the car, bumping my head several times and making her wince each time, and position her as when I got her out of bed: situate her legs and feet, bring her up to her feet, and then pivot.

  She blew at a wisp of hair in her eyes and I brushed it out of her face. “Just some errands,” she told me. She didn’t elaborate, so I got my hands beneath her arms and said: “Ready?” She nodded. As soon as I lifted her I knew by the pain across my back that I was in the wrong posture. Her head tapped the door frame.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “It was nothing,” she told me.

  Back in the kitchen we looked at everything piled on the counter. I’d been an idiot not to go to the market every week. We had little buttons of white cheese floating in herb-speckled oil, sheaves of spinach, trout that was faintly rosy at the edges from the smoke. I thought of the bags of wet, pre-peeled carrots I ate most of the time.

  “Would you believe this is the first time I got something besides pastry?” I asked her.

  Kate was looking fondly at some radishes, their roots ice-white. “Are you a convert?” she asked.

  I started to put the smoked trout and cheese away. “I think I am,” I called from inside the refrigerator. “What’s Evan going to do with all this?”

  She didn’t answer, and so I stashed the food on a shelf in the fridge and turned to look at her. She was giving me a big smile. “We,” she said.

  “ ‘We’?”

  She nodded.

  “I can’t cook,” I reminded her.

  “Don’t worry. This is mainly assembling.”

  I looked at all the food and back at her. I decided that as far as a day’s work went, making a meal might not be so bad. It all seemed terribly healthy, too. It occurred to me that my headache had been gone for a long time, possibly since the croissant. I’d have to remember that.

  Before we cooked I followed her to the stereo and looked over her CDs. She was into folk, it seemed, the kind of thing that relied on a good voice and an acoustic guitar. There was a shelf full of jazz and classical. As we contemplated it, me crouched next to her chair, I said, “Do you two have similar taste in music? Or are some of these Evan’s and some yours?” I thought of Liam and his wife meeting at a concert. I couldn’t tell what he would have thought of her music, but I thought he might have liked it, if only because I knew none of the names, which was frequently a positive sign.

  I turned to watch Kate answer. She was looking thoughtfully at the CD cases. “It’s hard to remember,” she said slowly. “I think our taste has merged.”

  “That’s kind of nice,” I said. I put in the CDs she nodded at. “It’s romantic.”

  She smiled faintly. “Yeah, I guess.”

  She looked at me sideways, said something I missed. She repeated it for me: She was asking what I liked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I told her. We headed back to the kitchen. “I tend to really love a song I hear once on the radio, then I play it into the ground and hate it in three weeks. I don’t think I actually have taste. I have flings.” Liam often brought me CDs, scratchy old recordings or bright Latin guitars. I’d fallen in love with one of them as soon as he played the first track. The band was a trio of saxophone, bass, and drum, with a singer whose voice was low and dark. His women were the sort who had daddies and drank whiskey and met in pool halls in the afternoon. “I like Morphine,” I told her. “Did you ever hear them?”

  She shook her head. “Bring it next time,” she said. “I could use some new music.”

  I sat down with Kate and we made a list of what to do. She was right; it wasn’t much actual cooking. Most likely she’d planned it that way on purpose.

  I taped the list to a copper pot that hung over the island so I could glance at it as I worked. Kate sat with her book apparatus on, a magazine in front of her, but after a while she didn’t read at all, but watched me and told me what to do for each thing—to tear the stems from the big pieces of spinach, to scrub the radishes but leave the tops on. First I washed almost everything and spread it on towels to dry. Then I trimmed and peeled and chopped. Some vegetables I cooked in a big pot of salted water, and other things I just sliced. Kate listened to the music as I dumped things into boiling water and fished them out again, cooled them in a bath of ice water, and drained them and wrapped them in towels.

  Everything was so bright in the kitchen, the gleaming copper, the skinny green beans, and the white dish of red berries. I fell into a rhythm of cutting and dipping and draining, sweeping the trimmings into the garbage as I worked to keep everything clean. I felt warm and bright and purposeful. I felt as if the things in my hands, th
e fruit and fish and cheese, had started off rough, but I was refining them. There was something elemental and simple about the piles of chopped vegetables in their dishes, the deep green hue of cooked things, the fat heft of the eggplant. I poured olive oil from a tin gallon with French writing on it and cracked peppercorns from a weathered wooden mill. Even the salt she told me to use was special: big sticky crystals spooned out of a linen bag.

  Kate moved her chair over when it was time to make vinaigrette.

  “Didn’t people used to have their own secret vinaigrette recipes?” I asked. “I think that that used to be a special thing.” I mashed garlic ponderously. “Or maybe it was just an old commercial.”

  Kate laughed and I watched her answer. “I know what you mean,” she said, nodding. I repeated it to be sure I had it and she nodded again. “Like pie crust,” she went on. “Classic kitchen skills.”

  I mashed a little harder. My wrist was getting sore. “Yeah. Aren’t French women all supposed to know some special vinaigrette recipe?”