You're Not You

by Michelle Wildgen

  I opened the refrigerator: some bottled water, a jar of jam. I had had it stocked full of vegetables before I left, but of course that would have spoiled by now. I shut the door.

  “This really is a lovely house,” my mother said. She was standing in the middle of the living room, gazing around at the bright walls, the photographs in their frames. In her shorts and tennis shoes, her dark hair, streaked with gray, falling from its ponytail, she looked baggy and out of place. Well, she should feel that way. I wanted her to see what it had been like—that it wasn’t drudgery, that I had lived in a pretty house on a welcoming street. She had never once accepted an invitation to visit us.

  “Such a lovely color,” she went on, looking toward the living room wall. She glanced over at me and gave me an innocuous little smile. I didn’t understand how she—how anyone—could look at me as though I were still myself, or even made up of the same stuff they were. I felt as conspicuously different as if my skin had changed color overnight. Even my face looked wrong these days, my eyes stark and gray, my mouth colorless and somehow a whole new shape. I believed that Kate had sunk into me like a sunburn, rooted herself in my skin like a pelt, but everyone refused to acknowledge it.

  “Let’s go,” I said. I turned my back on my mother and went down the hall to my room.

  My room hadn’t been touched. My clothes were still piled on a chair, the bed unmade. The day of the wedding had been chaos, I recalled, and I had left it a mess as I tried to finish Kate’s hair and makeup.

  “I’ll go get the boxes,” said my mother.

  When she was gone I went to Kate’s room. The shelves were cleared of photos and statues, the plants removed. But when I peeked into the top drawer of the bureau I saw that the cleaning had only been a surface sweep, maybe by the real estate agent, and her clothes were still in there. I moved aside the underwear and lace bras, and found the Chinese lacquer box. I put it in the pocket of my jacket.

  I opened up the nightstand drawer too, and found the wedding ring we’d put in there, and the blue butterfly in its little box. I left the ring and took the butterfly. I was planning on throwing it away somewhere, or just hiding it. I didn’t want Kate’s mother, or Evan, turning it over in their hands and figuring out how it was used and who helped. It wasn’t any of their business.

  I was back in my room when my mother returned. She stood next to me, folding my things and placing them in the boxes, moving them to the floor as we filled them. She was very strong. She knew to bend her knees and not to use her back. She could carry heavier boxes than I could.

  I had to keep telling her what to take and what to leave. I just borrowed that from Kate, I said, as she held up books stacked by the bed and a sweater draped over a chair. That’s not even mine.

  twenty-one

  WHEN I AWOKE THIS time I could tell it was well after midnight. There was no sound—no cars on the street, no television on in another room. I was sitting up in bed, and suspected I had been for a while. Even in the dark I could see the shapes of clothes and towels all over the floor, some empty soda cans, and a glass I’d been drinking water from, cloudy with fingerprints. The clock said 2:43 A.M.

  I sighed, rolled over, stared at the lavender wall, and then got up.

  I could still walk through this house in the pitch dark and find my way. I moved through it slowly and carefully, easing open the back door and leaving it ajar.

  The lawn was wet and cool. My feet picked up grass, but I kept walking out to the center of the backyard. I was in a T-shirt and shorts—dressed, at least, even if it was a little odd to be out here in the middle of the night.

  I paused and looked around, wanting to sit down, or stretch out, and look up at the sky. I thought of Nathan a year ago, drunk and feverish, lying down on my car for the dew that had settled onto it.

  I could see the dark windows of the houses on either side and across the backyard. I didn’t know these neighbors. I saw them sometimes, on their way to cars, coming up the drive with a handful of mail. Who knew if any of them were watching me now.

  I’d begun coming out here instead of trying to get back to sleep. Walking around the yard, even around the neighborhood, in the total hush of the middle of the night, was strangely exhilarating—just opening your door at this time of night was so taboo, yet once you were out here you felt the breeze and the quiet and you didn’t see why anyone tried to do anything in the crowded daytime heat. The air tonight was cool and damp and smelled of cut green leaves.

  I went around the house, the occasional firefly zipping past, and slipped my wet, grass-pelted feet into a pair of flip-flops I’d left on the front porch. I was about to walk down the driveway when I heard the front door open.

  My mother’s head, her long hair rumpled, poked out the front door. She was still tying her robe, and with one hand she motioned to me to come to her. I stood in the driveway, disappointed not to be alone any longer. She stepped out, shutting the door carefully behind her, and walked over to me. As she neared me her expression came into focus: eyebrows drawn together, lips set in annoyance.

  I turned away and began to walk down the driveway. She fell into step next to me.

  “Is this what you do at night?” she asked lightly. “Prowl the neighborhood?”

  I glanced at her profile. She was looking straight ahead, swinging her arms, as though we were on a power walk. “It’s better than staring at the ceiling,” I said.

  “True, I suppose,” she admitted. “Though you could also read.”

  We walked to the end of the block and turned right onto Eucalyptus. Beneath the thin rubber soles of my flip-flops I felt the crabapple berries squashed on the sidewalk, the grit of the concrete. My mother’s hair was twisted over one shoulder. Her white robe flapped as we walked. When I looked down I realized her feet were bare.

  “Don’t you want shoes?” I said.

  She shrugged. “I’ll be careful. I haven’t gone barefoot in years. It’s rather pleasant.”

  We came to the end of Eucalyptus and took another right up the hill onto Pine.

  “I still think of this hill like a mountain, practically,” I said. Riding a bicycle down it had been terrifying.

  She smiled wryly and did not look over at me. “I remember that. You would tell me these very dramatic tales of near misses on some craggy mountain and scare the bejesus out of me. I thought you were leaving the neighborhood and riding your bike down some other hill. You got very angry with me when I realized you meant this one and I said it wasn’t steep at all.”

  We were halfway up the hill now. I looked up at the sky to see if it was light yet, but it was still a deep cloud-streaked navy, the moon a calm yellow orb. Next to me I saw my mother’s profile lift as she followed my glance. As we neared the turn to our street, she paused, one hand braced on my shoulder, and checked the bottoms of her feet, briskly brushing off the soles. I heard the sound of gravel dropping to the pavement.

  When we began to walk again she said, “It’s time for you to leave, Rebecca.”

  I listened to the sounds of my flip-flops slapping on the sidewalk.

  “Do you realize how slowly you move?” she said. “You used to charge around here and now I watch you pull your shoulders up to your ears, practically. Look how you tuck in your arms.”

  I became aware of my elbows folded in, my hands clasped lightly below my breasts. I made to swing them easily, but it felt showy so I let them drop to my sides.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  LATER THAT WEEK I found a cheap enough place on Jenifer Street, the top floor of a mint-green house with lavender trim. It was the kind of place that telegraphs a landlord’s shoddy intentions from a mile away, the way it’s not really an apartment space but can be forced to bring in money as if it were. Even the stairway changed once you reached the landing of my floor, becoming narrow and low-ceilinged, painted a uric yellow.

  When the landlord opened the door for me, I smelled fresh paint and cedar. Most of the place consisted of one lon
g room the length of the house, its walls painted basic off-white, plus a small bathroom and a sort of sleeping alcove. It didn’t have a kitchen so much as it had the elements of a kitchen stashed in various places: a small stove in a corner toward the back, a sink on the opposite side of the bathroom wall, a countertop near the half-fridge beneath the window. There was a tiny clean bathroom, cheaply outfitted with a plastic shower that looked as though it had been built from a kit. The lavender carpet matched the paint on the house. As I walked across it, it made fizzy sounds beneath my feet.

  I paused and looked at the landlord. She was olive-skinned and wiry, somewhere in her forties. She and her husband lived across the street.

  “Is there foam or something under here?” I asked.

  She took a few tentative steps, hands on her hips. “Huh,” she said. “I bet Daniel laid some down and didn’t tell me.” She looked up at me, all delighted surprise. “This feels great,” she assured me. “You won’t need slippers.”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t expecting a lot from this place anyway, and it was month-to-month. It was also the first place I looked at.

  I’d hoped I might move in with Jill again, since her roommate had talked of moving out for the summer, but then it turned out Jill was moving in with her boyfriend.

  No doubt there were better places out there. But this was my old neighborhood. It was hot and dusty and I sneezed just breathing the air. When I told my mother about the place that night, she asked, “Are you sure?” I felt too tired to make the case for an apartment I didn’t much like, either. I just said, “Yeah.”

  So I bought a mattress and put it on the floor of the tiny bedroom. I bought a couch out of the newspaper, and set next to it a little maple table my father had brought home from a garage sale. Then I went to the grocery store and tried to remember what I would need. Cereal and toilet paper, shampoo, and soap. The thought of stocking up a real cooking kitchen was overwhelming, so I got a few boxes of macaroni and cheese, some frozen spinach and peas, and a couple of cans of soup.

  I had some savings in the bank, and I used it to pay two months rent right off the bat, so I didn’t have to bother writing more checks. I had to think about a new job. I could have lived off the savings for a while longer, but it seemed a shame to waste the money. I’d need it somewhere down the line. Kate was the one who had bugged me to open a savings account when I moved in with her. For someone who hadn’t needed to worry about money, she had taken some pleasure, I often thought, in the management of it. It appealed to her organizational side.

  Anyway, I didn’t have Kate’s financial acumen or her trust fund, so I began setting my alarm in the mornings with the belief that I would rise early and walk over to the coffee shop on Willy Street, read the paper, and circle classifieds. In actuality, I woke up indolent and baffled each morning, resetting the alarm until finally I got up at eleven instead of eight. This was probably better anyway. That way I didn’t waste time or money eating breakfast, only lunch. My days were filled with these sorts of solutions: the stretchy sweatpants I could wear to bed and throughout the day as well, the knife that just stayed in the jar of peanut butter instead of being washed.

  It was August before I actually got out of the house in the morning and down the block to the coffee shop as I’d planned. The summer was practically over already. I paid for my latte and scone and settled myself with the paper at a table near the window. I sipped my coffee, prepared to look at the ads, uncapped my pen, and for a shimmering second believed that I slipped back to a moment more than a year ago, when I had come to the same café, ordered the same cinnamon scone, and sat here, my pen poised above the paper and the fleshy side of my hand getting smeared with newsprint as I skimmed the ads. I stayed utterly still, the steam from the coffee rising into my face, the unchewed morsel of scone cupped in my mouth.

  It would have been understandable if that feeling had made me want to crumple the paper and go back to the safe distance of waitressing, as though I could simply back up and veer around the experience of caregiving altogether. But instead I felt hopeful, and immensely relieved. Inside that little pocket of time, if nowhere else, I felt that I could do everything again. The outcome might be no different, but that seemed insignificant. The whole experience didn’t have to be so finished.

  Moments like this had revealed an embarrassing, previously unknown mystical side of me. I had never spent much time clarifying what I thought of an afterlife. My brief church attendance had been more about the immediate. But at times Kate seemed so near to me, her presence palpable but just beyond my field of vision, that I found myself thinking I had some inside track on finding out what happened after death—as if Kate would let me know once she got acclimated. She herself had always refused to guess. It seemed to me that whole religions were based very justifiably on this refusal to believe that your contact with a certain life, a certain person, was simply over. And I was so accustomed to ordering my life around Kate that the habit persisted.

  The déjà vu passed, after what felt to be several minutes but wasn’t even long enough for my coffee to stop steaming. I looked around: I was seated at an old table painted green, nicked and gouged and a pack of matches keeping the legs level. It was too early for the lunch rush, and the only other customers were a woman and her child at a table nearby, the toddler crumby and chapped around his mouth. The café window seemed filthy. How I had ended up back here?

  IN THE END, HALF-HOPING nothing would come of it, I placed an ad in the paper, advertising the services of a helper. My mother perceived it as a “get-back-on-the-horse” gesture, and Jill said, “Well, if you think you want to do this, I guess you have to get used to losing people. Maybe you should go to nursing school.”

  It was more that I could not imagine myself doing anything else. I wasn’t sure I even remembered how to do restaurant or temp work or sales.

  I missed the routine of my days at Kate’s, the way I could see the results of my efforts so quickly: a person fed, clean, comforted, moved. I found it hard to recall how uneasy I had been the first few weeks on the job. Surely it hadn’t been that bad. Anyway, I knew what I was doing now. I could be better, smarter, quicker to respond to problems, efficient, and brisk, if someone let me.

  The first call came from a man in Sun Prairie, who needed round-the-clock. Here I faltered. It was foolish to believe crises would only occur after dark, but I did, and I knew as soon as he asked that there was no chance I would try nights again.

  The next one was a woman on the east side with multiple sclerosis. She needed someone to help with her physical therapy, to keep the household running decently. Her house was a one-story brick ranch with a switchback ramp going up to the front door. I parked on the street and looked it over. The neighborhood was bustling and loud, nothing like Kate and Evan’s had been, with the synchronized sprinklers on the empty lawns.

  I put my hair into a ponytail, anticipating a lot of bending and reaching, and went up to the door.

  This woman was much older than Kate; in her late fifties was my guess. She had bright silver hair that fell in short curls around her cheekbones, cut close at the back. I noticed how tan she was, the skin around her dark green eyes notched deeply with lines, her teeth yellowed at the edges. When she spoke it startled me. How clear and loud her voice was, how perfectly she enunciated. She had a faint Southern accent.

  “Come in, come in,” Barbara said. “You’re younger than I thought, hon, I have to tell you.” She led me into her kitchen and turned her chair to face me. “But you say you have a year’s experience?”

  I nodded. “I worked for a woman with ALS,” I said. “Live-in and visiting.”

  She nodded. One hand lay, clawed, in her lap, but with the other she could grip a thick pen, and with her hand curled around it she took laborious notes. “And you did that until this May, you said.” She looked brightly at me over her glasses. “What prompted you to leave?”

  “She died,” I said.

  She set her pen down.
“How sad,” she said. “That’s a tough one.”

  A tough one. It sounded like such a minor setback when you put it that way, reminding me of Kate designating her illness as simple bad luck. Why did people resort to such sporting, blithe language when they should have hauled out the real words? A tough one was a math problem. A tough one was a steak. It wasn’t that I wanted hyperbole. I just wanted someone to say the right words: Dreadful. Catastrophe.

  I WENT TO BARBARA’S four days a week to begin. Her physical therapy was much as Kate’s had been, massage and moving her limbs whether they wanted to or not. She wore brightly patterned sweaters and elastic-waisted pants, her legs still plump in the navy blue fabric.

  On my first day I walked her two miniature schnauzers, watching their stumped tails quiver. I had taken an instant dislike to them. Every now and again one turned a wet-bearded face my way and yipped. “Oh shut up,” I said.

  It was not a good sign, directing my hostility at a couple of dogs, but I spent all my energy trying to be kinder, happier, saner than I felt, showing Barbara and my mom and Jill and Nate and Samantha and whoever Jill brought to my new place for occasional endless, awkward visits that I was just fine. So I relished this small chance at surliness, and sank into anger like a soft, cool bed. When I petted the dogs’ heads and scratched their chins, which I did perversely, to see if they knew how I felt about them, their beards left viscous threads of saliva on my skin. They snorted grumpily in my direction.

  What sort of dog might Kate have had? Maybe a soulful, gleaming retriever, a stately Alsatian, or a silvery wolfhound stalking silently around the room. The schnauzers woofed at me and turned away.

  “I would not have let you slobber all over Kate,” I crooned poisonously. “I wouldn’t have let you near her.”

  Barbara’s friends appeared most days around three, calling greetings in the door and striding into the back room with a cursory wave to me and a hug for Barbara. They talked about children and grandkids, commiserated over husbands. I tuned them out while I wiped down the counters and fetched Baggies to clean up after the schnauzers.