You're Not You

by Michelle Wildgen

  We drove over to the new place about once a week, watching as the workers set the ramps in place and reinforced them, installed the mechanical doors, and tore up the carpet of the front room, uncovering a honey-colored maple floor. (“I knew it,” said Kate.) The two bedrooms at the back of the house were now a sunny yellow and a robin’s egg blue. The kitchen, though it wouldn’t fit an island, had vast expanses of counter space and a skylight. I tried not to add up the bills as I wrote checks for them, but the whole project was astronomical. The numbers, in fact, no longer meant anything to me. I found myself making very blasé statements about “what quality costs.” It was enough to let me forget that my own money managing had its drawbacks—last month I had bought a new leather jacket and then bounced a check for ramen noodles and frozen corn.

  But I was enjoying myself, and as the days passed I didn’t even notice Thanksgiving was on its way until my mother called. I hadn’t planned on going home this year. Thanksgiving never changed at my house and I had offered to be with Kate that day. My mother wasn’t pleased.

  “If you say,” she began, “as I have a creeping sense you just might, that this woman you work for needs you on a holiday, then I am assuming the next thing I hear will be the astronomical sum she’ll pay you.”

  I’d evoked my mother’s angry scholar tone: the twisting syntax she navigated effortlessly, the clipped pronunciation and long words. You would never guess, when she got going this way, that she had never even finished college. I admired her for it, when it wasn’t directed at me.

  “I offered, as a matter of fact,” I informed her. “And she said she’d pay time and a half.”

  “I’d ask for double.” My mother sighed. “What about your father and your grandmother?”

  “I can see everyone at Christmas.”

  “What does she need you for on Thanksgiving?”

  “Just to go to a friend’s house for dinner.”

  “No one else can do this for her?”

  I held the phone to my chin while I took off my jeans. Actually, Simone had offered to do it. Thanksgiving means nothing to me, she had said. Although I sometimes find that sculpting on holidays leads me to some very intriguing conceptuals. I was about to agree to let her take a long shift that day when I saw Kate close her eyes. I knew she wanted to say innocently, What’s a conceptual? I didn’t think she wanted to be with Simone on a holiday, not when they’d be at Lisa’s house and it could be pure fun. There had been a long pause while I mulled it over. I almost never minded taking on extra shifts, and it was true that Kate hadn’t asked me outright. But sometimes I thought it would be better if she did. I could read her so well that I never got to just be oblivious anymore, even when I wanted to be. Sometimes she let me intuit what she wanted me to do without asking, and when that meant, Offer to leave me alone in the bathroom for a while, it was fine. But when it was, Don’t stick me with Simone on Thanksgiving, I wished I were blind to her, like someone who doesn’t waste time on household chores because she doesn’t notice the crack in the window or the dusty picture frames. Still. It was her first holiday without Evan and I wanted her to have fun, so I said to Simone, No, no, I’ll do it; you sculpt.

  “Look, Mom, I’ll be there for Christmas,” I began, but she interrupted.

  “You know your grandmother is looking forward to showing you how to make her pie crust,” she informed me. “Now that you’ve taken such an interest. She switched to frozen crusts years ago, Bec, but the woman has me buying lard so she can show you the old-fashioned way—”

  “I’ll come!” I blurted. “God! I’ll call Simone.”

  I RETURNED FROM THANKSGIVING bloated with apple pie and beer and faintly ashamed for having flown the coop and even having a little fun. I’d gone out a couple nights while I was there, having run into some girls I knew from high school at the grocery store, where we were both in line with cans of cranberry sauce and bags of sliced almonds. I always wondered if the people who still lived there felt as regressed as I did, notebook paper with shopping lists in our mothers’ writing stuffed in the pockets of our winter coats, waving outside our parents’ cars.

  I still had a few old boyfriends strewn around town, but I no longer appraised them as a possibility for an evening or a few weeks. Even my favorite high school boyfriend, Mike, now greeted me like a cousin. You’d never guess that over Christmas break our freshman year in college we’d spent every night together, right back to eating fish fry at the Gasthaus and going to movies just to have something to do, trying to show off new maneuvers to bluff each other into believing we’d slept with hordes of people in the first four months of college. (Maybe he had. I chose the tactic of referring endlessly to unnamed “guys,” all of whom were actually a single boy in our dorm who, Jill still delighted in reminding me, had gone by the newly adopted name of Dylan.) It had been a depressing exercise in the end—suddenly we were calling each other when our families weren’t home, driving out of town to buy condoms. I found myself bumming clove cigarettes, chattering in his ear at bars, and stealing up behind him to wrap my arms around his waist as though I was hoping to borrow his letterman’s jacket. By New Year’s Eve of that winter break I had regressed so far I almost teased my bangs.

  This visit was better. For once I enjoyed telling people what I was doing these days. It sounded so much better than waitressing.

  “So, how was it?” I asked Kate the next week. I was helping her back into the car after we had driven by Chambers Street. I tried to move quickly and get her out of the cold as fast as possible, or else it took her forever to warm up again. She was so thin that she was always cold, so I took to carrying a chocolate-colored cashmere shawl everywhere we went. She looked beautiful in that shawl; it brought out her eyes and made her cheeks pinker.

  It was amazing how few people noticed how lovely she was. They glanced at us and instantly turned in the other direction, as though it would be rude to linger. Two years ago, I was certain, people had gazed appreciatively at her all the time. I tried to make up for it with incessant compliments. I told her her eyes looked especially bright with the shawl on, that her hair color, recently dyed a slightly darker, richer tawny blond, flattered her skin tone. I said she didn’t need lipstick, just gloss, because her lips had such color. I said her new earrings looked lovely when her hair was up. I said, You look so pretty today, and I said it a lot.

  “We had a great time,” she said, and she seemed to mean it. “I ate a little apple filling.”

  “Really?” I said. “Simone was cool?”

  Kate nodded. “She was great. It was nice of you to offer, though, Bec.”

  “Sure,” I said. I went around to the other door and got in. “Is Simone getting ever so slightly better or is it just me? Much less about conceptuals, for one thing.” I couldn’t resist adding that.

  Kate looked pained. “I’ve been feeling guilty about a couple things,” she began. She looked at me to be sure I’d caught it. I nodded and she went on. “Simone is really improving, and I haven’t always been fair to her.”

  I sighed. “I do the same thing,” I admitted. I turned the key in the ignition, and though it was in the single digits outside the car started right up. I never stopped appreciating that, compared to my Honda.

  “I drew you into it,” she said firmly. “And I let you do too much for me. We get along so well that it’s easy to let you handle everything, and it isn’t fair. To you.”

  “It’s not like I mind,” I said. She was looking at me carefully. “I don’t, really. It’s just the job, that’s all. I’m just being you.”

  “Say no to me sometimes,” she replied. “You can, you know.”

  “I know.” I turned the radio to a rock station, glancing at her to see if she liked it. She nodded.

  “What are you doing for Christmas?” I asked. I didn’t want her alone, Evan off across town drinking champagne with The Replacement.

  “I think I’m going to my parents’,” she said. “They’ll come and get me.” S
he smiled grimly. “This is like eighth grade.” Then she kept talking, but I couldn’t get the words.

  “Sorry?” I had been glancing behind us for traffic and now I stopped and concentrated on watching her.

  She said it again. I thought maybe she’d said “pretend,” which baffled me. Patiently, she repeated herself for a third time.

  “Am I going to my parents’?” Finally, she nodded. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “I always do. They’d freak if I didn’t come home for that.”

  We drove in silence for a few minutes, and then she said, as we stopped at a light, “Is it harder for you to understand me lately?”

  I shook my head. “No, I think that was just me being thick. Why?”

  She looked away. “Because it’s harder for me,” she said. “I’m really working to talk lately.”

  I stared at her. “I’m sure it’s just that you’re tired,” I began. “The house, and—”

  She shook her head and interrupted me. “No,” she said. “I held steady, for a few months, but I know this feeling. My legs are harder to work too.”

  I didn’t know what to say. The truth was I had noticed some changes, but I’d thought maybe I was mistaken.

  “Is there anything you need me to do?” I asked. “What about Christmas? Or New Year’s? Are you positive you won’t need me then?”

  “WHAT’S KATE DOING FOR Christmas?” Jill asked. We were sitting on a couch beneath a huge fake oak tree festooned with little white lights. The bar, which had opened recently, was beset with university people here to check out the new place: guys in rugby shirts, sorority girls, and a squealing group we knew was a bachelorette party because of a girl wearing a veil with her jeans and a fake penis pinned to her shoulder. It dangled, limply, over one breast.

  Jill and I were here for the jukebox. The rest of our friends liked it for the tree. Every time Nathan passed by it he touched the bark like he thought it might be made of velvet.

  Jill took a sip of her beer, a cloudy amber from somewhere in northern Wisconsin. She made a face.

  “That’s what you get for ordering pumpkin beer,” I told her.

  “I thought it would be Christmasy. Sam kept going on and on about how it was like drinking pumpkin pie.”

  “That was a point in its favor?” A Neil Diamond song came on the jukebox and a general cheer went up among our friends, who had recently decided to find him cool. I watched Samantha raise her beer in the air and do a little shimmy.

  “We have to quit listening to our friends,” I told Jill. The bachelorette was perched on a stool, being kissed on the cheek, one by one, by a bunch of guys in cable sweaters and hair gel. “Although I can’t quite decide if I like this place or think it sucks.”

  “I know. Is it possible I’m too mature to enjoy it?” Jill sipped her beer resolutely. We were not of the mind that you threw away a bad beer once you’d paid for it, and it would never have occurred to us that we could ask for a new one.

  “Oh,” I said, recalling Jill’s question. “Kate’s going to her parents’ house.”

  “Is she close to them?”

  “Not really. I met her mom a couple times and she thinks Kate’s about twelve. I don’t think she was like that before she got sick, but she just is all over her now.”

  “What do you mean? It’s not like Kate can do that much for herself,” Jill pointed out.

  “No, but there’s an attitude to it. You know what I mean—like she’s a toddler, not a grown woman who needs help.”

  “Oh.”

  The bachelorette was in tears. One of her friends hugged her.

  “They better be careful,” Jill noted, watching them. “They’re gonna squish that nice penis.”

  “Want to hear something weird?”

  Jill’s eyebrows darted up. “What?”

  “It’s nothing crazy. It just happened when her mom was there last time and she’d had all these home movies put together on videotape. So they were watching them, while I was doing some filing, and her mom called me in to watch part of it.”

  Before they called me over I had been nearby but not watching, when I caught the unmistakable sounds of a wedding reception, people talking to the camera about marriage and offering honeymoon advice. I heard Kate’s mother say, “I feel like an idiot. I’d already ordered the tape,” so I walked a little closer in case they needed a translator. Kate had replied, “That’s okay, Mom; it was nice of you.” Her mother had looked my way, an apologetic smile on her face. She had had a difficult time comprehending Kate during this visit, apparently worse than usual. I pitied her, so I gave her an exact repeat instead of paraphrasing. “ ‘That’s okay, Mom,’ ” I said. “ ‘It was nice of you.’ ” Her mother had looked relieved after a moment, but I saw that the exact repetition hadn’t had the right effect: I’d wanted to let her hear Kate as clearly as possible, and keep my voice out of it, but instead what Kate’s mother saw was a total stranger turning to her with a little grin and calling her Mom.

  Anyway, I had gone to the study to file some insurance forms, but Kate’s mom called me back a few minutes later. I sat next to Kate on the couch. Her mother was on her other side, Kate’s empty wheelchair pushed away near the table. Kate nodded toward the television. Before the segment there was a computer generated placard saying 34TH BIRTHDAY. The screen lit up on a kitchen filled with people. It must have been an office kitchen, too white and plain to be in someone’s house. The camera was focused on a door. The sounds were all disembodied conversations from the people milling around. Someone peered out into the hallway and turned back to the room, flapping her hands and shushing, and everyone got quiet.

  In Kate’s living room, her mother and I were quiet too. The three of us sat there on Kate’s couch, Kate in the middle. Her mother stroked her hair. Kate leaned her head back against her hand.

  In the video the door opened and Kate came in. It had taken me a moment to realize what was different: She was walking. She had this fast, bouncy stride, and she was turned halfway around, talking to another woman as she walked, and when people yelled, “Happy birthday,” she gasped, her hands flying up toward her face and her whole body leaping in a flutter of surprise, and then she leaned against the woman next to her and laughed. When they raised their cups in a toast, you could see just the slightest tremor in her hands. And in the video you could tell she saw it too. As her cup gave a tiny lurch, a shadow of confusion flickered over her face, and she looked around to see if anyone else had noticed.

  I had put the remote beneath Kate’s fingertips, and now she hit the pause button and turned her face to me. On the screen the image flickered of her and her cup.

  “That,” she said, “is when I started to wonder.” She made a face, as though she disagreed with herself, and then said, “To know.”

  JILL HAD FINISHED THE pumpkin beer. Mine was still pretty full.

  “It’s amazing to think her own mom can’t understand her,” she said finally.

  “It might not be her fault,” I said. “Kate thinks she’s getting worse.”

  “God,” said Jill. “In a way I want to say how could she?” She blushed. “I’m sorry; that was awful. I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “I know what you mean,” I told her. “You’d think it’s almost as bad as it could get.”

  “Doesn’t it make you paranoid?” she mused. “Every time you have a cramp or tremble or something?”

  “It kind of does,” I said. “Except that the odds of the caregiver and givee with the same disease are pretty slim. If I did get sick I’d just glom onto her and we’d boss the other caregivers around, share a forked feeding tube.”

  “Don’t joke about that,” Jill said.

  “Oh come on,” I said. Kate would have laughed. “What if it’s a good joke?”

  WE GOT KATE INTO the new house shortly after New Year’s. I reeled a little at how quickly it had all been accomplished: Even as close as Christmas Eve, when I’d told my family about the move as we nibbled on herring and rye bread
and boiled shrimp at my grandmother’s house, I hadn’t really believed we’d pull it off. But it turned out this was one of those problems that responded briskly to a shower of money. The movers did everything for us, even putting books on shelves and dishes in cupboards. The house was almost completely in place when we walked in. Kate had painted the kitchen the same butter color as her old one, but the other rooms she did in a series of bright colors: a crimson wall in one room, azure in another, a rich grassy green in the living room. As you walked through them they looked like a series of jewel boxes, with that air of surprise.

  “It’s like those myths where fairies do everything,” Simone had said, gazing around at the paintings on the walls and the fruit bowl on the end table.

  “I’m sure the moving men would appreciate that image,” Kate said. But she was grinning. The house looked perfect.

  A few days later, as I got her into bed, I said, “What else do you need? Do you want the remote?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t want to ask you this,” she began. I turned aside, laying a blouse on a hanger, to hide a flare of annoyance. What could there be that I couldn’t do?

  “But . . . it’s in that drawer,” Kate said, turning her chin toward the bedside table. I opened it and saw a blue butterfly, modeled out of some smooth, cushiony rubber. Its wings were attached on either side to two loops of black elastic. When I picked it up I saw there was a compartment for batteries. I turned it over a few times, looking at it.

  “The loops go around your legs, like underwear,” Kate said.

  “My legs?” I said. I had realized what the butterfly was for, and I had a terrifying flash of myself standing at the foot of Kate’s bed, stark naked except for black straps slung over my hip bones and a butterfly buzzing brightly between my legs.