You're Not You

by Michelle Wildgen

  The job was kind of a skilled maid position, with some cooking. I made tuna or chicken casseroles and tore up iceberg lettuce, steamed rice ahead of time for stir-fry. I tidied up the bathroom, the study, whatever rooms we had used that day. Barbara never needed me to do her makeup.

  I did not look forward to going to work. I didn’t dread it either, but arrived and left as somnolently as if I’d never quite woken up at all. I cooked what Barbara asked me to, cleaned this and that, took Barbara’s tiny feet in my hands and maneuvered her as required. Her husband was hearty and jocular. I could no more imagine him having an affair than voting Libertarian. They kissed hello and good-bye with pursed lips and resounding smacks. They were a relief to me.

  AS SEPTEMBER BEGAN I realized I finally felt used to my apartment, and to the strangeness of being back in my old neighborhood. It felt different to me each time I drove home after work in my quiet car. (I had never had the stereo fixed.) I didn’t know as many people here as I once had, and there seemed to be a lot more beer-littered lawns and sophomore parties.

  I saw Mark once, walking to his car. He only lived a few blocks from me. Sometimes I tried to imagine myself showing up at his door with a bottle of wine or a pizza. But I could barely remember what he looked like, and when I saw him as I drove past he seemed taller than I had recalled, broader, and it was disconcerting to be reminded that I had only known him for that month.

  One afternoon I came home from Barbara’s and couldn’t find a parking spot. I sighed, and circled the block one more time, hoping someone would leave, but I was stuck with walking a few blocks to my house.

  I walked slowly, enjoying the heat after Barbara’s turbo-cooled room. I never got warm there, but I thought I could lay odds it would be sweltering in the winter. Jesus, just the thought of winter in Barb’s house—the darkness at four o’clock, the schnauzers pissing idly in the snow—I tried not to think about it. I didn’t know what else I would do if I didn’t do this.

  I passed the park and turned onto my block. My favorite house was now right here on my street: a vampy-looking Victorian with a bright red door. I used to go out of my way to walk past it when I lived near here with Jill. Our old apartment was only five blocks away, right near the elementary school, whose mayhem I could still hear in my new place. I slowed down a little, looking around for something that was totally different from when I had lived in this neighborhood the first time. Sometimes the sense of displacement—or its reverse, of wondering whether I had left at all—was so powerful I had to stop and look around until it made sense again. I had only been gone about six months. I had lived in the house on Chambers Street for only four.

  I was walking so slowly it must have looked like trudging. Mostly I was dreading my un-air-conditioned apartment, the fact that I had nothing to do that night, no plans, so what was there to get started on? I came to my house, started up the front walk, and then slowed to a halt. I had some cans of chicken soup, saltines, and peanut butter for dinner. I’d go buy a six-pack and a movie, I decided. It would make short work of the evening. Maybe two movies. Maybe a twelve-pack.

  Once I had smoked some of Kate’s marijuana, having improbably convinced myself that sitting, stoned and alone, in my attic apartment, watching a movie by myself, would be as fun as an evening with Kate. As the high set in, a glittering buzz that darted around the edges of my vision, I had felt that same isolation I had in Kate’s bedroom the night she died. There was an unbridgeable distance between me and everyone else. The television’s noise was tinny and overbearing, the air in the room musty, heavy as a quilt. I called Jill, some of my friends I hadn’t seen in weeks, even Nathan. Jill and Nathan showed up separately, exchanged a look when they came upon me huddled in a corner of my couch and staring at the door, and hauled me out for fried chicken. No wonder you lost it, Jill had said. Nathan was in the men’s room. I’ll smoke with you.

  You hate being high, I reminded her. She handed me a paper cup of coleslaw and said, Oh, I’d be fine. She was lying, but I appreciated it.

  I turned around and went back to my car. It was a pretty day; I could have walked. At the video store I browsed the new releases. I finally chose a comedy I’d seen two or three times, and bought a Coke on my way out. I was at the door, opening the soda bottle, when I saw Liam walk by.

  I stood there, one hand on the window, and looked at him. He hadn’t seen me. I watched him turn into the Thai restaurant a few doors down, holding the door open for a couple walking out. His hair was shorter. He was wearing a blue shirt I remembered from last summer. I’d never liked it. I would never have guessed that seeing him now would feel so powerful. I felt weakened and warmed through, some current slipping palpably through me.

  Head down, I walked to my car. Once inside it I peered into the windows of the restaurant. The glare of the sun made it difficult, but I caught his shape stopping at a table, bending over to kiss the woman—it was a woman; I could make out the breasts and the swing of shoulder-length hair—before sitting down. For one sickening second I thought it was a girl, yet another girl, but then I got a better look. It was his wife. I remembered the shape of her, the way she sat, even from seeing her just once at the Union and once in front of her own home. They weren’t doing anything of importance, just flipping through their menus and speaking to each other as they read, deciding what to order, what they were craving, and what they were sick of.

  This was his real life; this was its fabric. Not the illicit stuff, the curtained restaurant tables and bedroom shades down in the daytime, but the mediocre Thai food they both sheepishly enjoyed, the liquor store they liked for buying beer but not wine, the roads they drove because they were convenient, and because they knew them so well.

  twenty-two

  I HAD NEVER BEEN to Lisa’s house before. She had always come over to Kate’s house, saying rightly that it was easier. As I drove to her house now, watching as she had told me to for a little white one with red shutters near the capitol, I felt jumpy and sick to my stomach with nerves. I felt as though I were on a date, or going to a party at the popular girl’s house.

  Seeing Liam had touched something off in me. The first was some mild form of self-awareness: I did not buy the twelve-pack of beer. Self-awareness was the worst thing to happen to a person at loose ends. Without it, like someone who hasn’t yet seen the ink splotch on her cheek in the mirror, I could pretend that the existence I had been slogging through for the past month was fairly normal. I could overlook the evenings I spent in front of the television set, parceling out the night half-hour by half-hour, delighted when a show I liked enough to stare at took up a whole hour. I had tried to go for walks around the neighborhood I thought I’d missed so much, but I had a tendency to make it down the block to the park, choose a bench, and stare balefully from behind my sunglasses at the kids on the playground as they hollered and knocked one another to the ground. My comfort was the fact that at least I wasn’t working with children.

  The other effect was nostalgia. Maybe that longing for the past year’s life was connected to the understanding that my current life was shit. I could have sworn that I used to have a certain amount of comfort and even minor luxury, of amusement and challenge. That had been Kate’s doing—that had been Kate’s life—but I had fit well in it. I thought I had. I had liked her friends, and I thought they’d liked me, and I had liked her habits and her books and parties. Yet here I was, utterly severed from what had felt an awful lot like my life as well.

  Lisa came to the door before I had a chance to ring the bell. She hugged me briefly, her shoulders broad beneath my hands. I squeezed her harder than I meant to, and she gave a little sound and then a nervous laugh, her shoulder hunching between us as she turned aside.

  “Come on in, have a seat.” She waved over her shoulder around the room, at a futon and an armchair. “I’m just getting some iced tea.”

  I sat in the armchair and waited, holding my purse on my knees. She came back, setting a couple glasses on the coffee ta
ble and seating herself on the futon. She drew her legs up under her.

  I sipped at the tea for something to do. “You must be looking forward to poncho weather,” I said, inanely.

  She smiled. “I donated it,” she said, and shook her head. “Kate gave me such a hard time about that thing. She liked to tell me I looked like I was drowning in Holstein.”

  After a moment, she asked, “How have you been?”

  “Okay,” I said. Then I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “It was a bit of a shock to hear from you,” Lisa tried again. “I know I should have called or something, but I just—”

  “That’s okay,” I interrupted. “You wrote.” She looked startled, then recovered, as if she had forgotten all about it. Maybe she’d had to get drunk to write to me. The letter, it was true, had been short but disjointed, as though she had been plucking ideas out of the air randomly and committing them to paper. It had said Kate was lucky to have me with her, that she hoped I would be okay. It had also said something about duty and fate, and sharing good wine.

  “I thought I saw you downtown the other day,” I said. She looked skeptical. “Or just someone who looked like you, and I wondered how you were. I used to see you so much, and it felt strange to have no idea how you’re doing.”

  She was nodding, but it wasn’t the enthusiastic agreement I’d hoped for. It was more resigned, as though she’d known something this uncomfortable would happen.

  “I really am sorry to bug you,” I said wretchedly. I seemed to be watching myself talk from a great distance. “I’m living in my old neighborhood again, on Jenifer Street, and . . . I don’t know, sometimes it’s like I never left. It’s not that I’ve forgotten anything, but I just—I can’t believe how fast it all went.”

  “I understand,” Lisa said.

  “Oh good,” I said. “I thought you would.”

  She didn’t say anything. She sipped her tea, her brow knit.

  “Um . . . how’s Helen?”

  “She’s all right,” Lisa said. “She and I were never very close, you know; she was more Kate and Evan’s friend.”

  “Yeah, I remember. I just thought, maybe . . .” I drank from my cup. I was glad that at least she’d blown off Helen, too.

  “Do you,” I began. She looked up at me. “Do you ever talk to him?”

  When I first went home I’d waited for him to call me, or sue me, or something. And when I came back to Madison I kept waiting, but I hadn’t heard a thing. I had begun to realize that whatever he thought, I’d never know. If he hated me, if he knew what I had done, he was not planning to say so.

  Lisa went still for a second, then nodded. “I do,” she said. “We’ve managed to talk a little more these days, as a matter of fact. I still don’t exactly invite Cynthia to dinner, but . . . you know. We go way back.”

  This surprised me. I had thought she would say something cutting about him, indicate that she would never lay eyes on him again if she could help it. I had a sudden image of Evan and Lisa embracing, of me seeing them a year from now, holding hands. “Sure,” I heard myself say, my voice a little higher pitched than I’d meant it to be. “Right. How is he?”

  She made a little face, a teeter-totter motion with her hand. “Better now, I think. I think he felt relieved once he sold the house, and he and Cynthia have moved too. So both those houses belong to someone else now.”

  “I wonder if they left the ramps,” I said. “If people in wheelchairs bought them.”

  Lisa poked at her tea bag with the tip of her spoon. We drank our tea and looked around at the folded blankets on the back of the couch, the books of photographs on the coffee table.

  “Well,” she said. “It’s September. Are you back in school?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m working as a caregiver again.”

  Her face did the most extraordinary thing then. It was like I’d told her I’d bought the house on Chambers Street. She was so shocked I could practically see the distance between her features increase. Her whole face just gave in, like she’d let go of every muscle. Then she recovered herself and put a hand to her mouth. She said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I reacted that way.”

  I fumbled to put down my tea and it slipped and spilled some liquid on the table. I swiped it away with my hand and tried to reach over to touch her arm. “It’s okay,” I started to say, but she scrambled back from me, one hand held up.

  We waited, and then she breathed deeply. “I’m sorry,” she said definitively. “Please don’t take it personally. It just shocked me, somehow, to think you can do that for someone other than Kate.”

  “People do,” I said defensively. “People do it for a living, and they don’t work for just one person.”

  “I know,” she said, “but I didn’t have that feeling about you. I just thought you might . . . I don’t know. Something basic while you finished school, something just totally different, I don’t know what.”

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” I admitted. “I thought it might make me feel better to work for someone else.”

  “Helping others?” Lisa said, a bitter edge in her voice.

  I set down my teacup. “No,” I sighed, worn out by her. “Another person to concentrate on, I guess.” I stood up. To my satisfaction, Lisa looked chagrined and apologetic.

  “I’m sorry,” she began. She seemed surprised. “I’m way out of line.”

  She’d been indulging herself a bit, I realized, probably repeating the kinds of things she stewed about all the time. It made me feel a little better, to know she was doing just as badly.

  I KEPT OFFERING TO do more of Barb’s errands—getting groceries, taking the car in for an oil change. It was just an excuse to be alone. Her cheer could be downright virulent.

  I spent the morning picking up little items here and there, a flashlight, some Magic Markers, toilet paper. When I ran out of excuses to be away, I headed back to the house. There was another car parked in the driveway, yet another friend.

  I headed to Barb’s room to let her know I was done for the day. Near the closed door to her room, I paused. I could hear a voice, tearful and tremulous, and someone making soothing sounds in response. A voice dipped to a hiss, then rose to a sob. I couldn’t make out any words. I assumed it was one of Barb’s friends crying, and for a moment I simply felt regretful. Who knew what problems people poured out to Barb, who believed in common sense and God and was probably comforting in a bracing way.

  Another murmured exclamation came through the door. It sounded like Barb. The scene I had had in my head reversed itself: I saw Barb’s friend holding her good hand, stroking it, and Barb sobbing inconsolably. I stood for a moment in the dark hall, a stunned, panicky dread overtaking me. There seemed no logical reason for this to shake me the way it did. People cried, even cheerful religious people who had the comfort of God and husbands and schnauzers.

  I backed away from the door, nearly tripping over one of the dogs dozing in the hallway. It leapt to its feet and stalked away.

  I hadn’t realized how fragile the peace in Barbara’s house was for me, how much I had relied on its stability, the pure, boring momentum of her husband and her friends, with their casseroles and their roomy tunics and jazzy earrings. I felt as if I had just come upon a bag of heroin in the desk drawer. I didn’t have it in me to face that sort of anguish again. I saw what would happen if I stayed at this job. I’d be in her life more and more, till I couldn’t help colliding with that Something, whatever it was I didn’t know yet and that had nothing to do with me, but that I’d try to fix anyway.

  “HEY!” JILL SAID. “you bring the wine?”

  I shook my head as I came up her steps. She and Tim had moved into one half of a duplex near campus. The neighborhood wasn’t like our old one. It was more like the one around Chambers Street: families, retrievers, SUVs. If anyone was smoking pot they were doing it indoors.

  “Oh, right . . . I didn’t quite get it together. I brought money, though.” I
had thought I would stop by the liquor store Kate and I used to go to on my way over, but as I had neared it I kept driving. I hadn’t bought a lot of wine in the last several months, and I didn’t want someone asking after Kate.

  Jill looked perplexed. “All right. We’ll walk over to the store around the corner, okay?” She stepped out and closed the door behind her.

  We put our hands in our pockets and started down the sidewalk, kicking leaves away as we went.

  “What’s for dinner?” I asked.

  “Oh, just pasta and some salad. Tim bought biscotti and ice cream. Nothing like you make.”

  I snorted. “Boy, you haven’t eaten at my house in a long time,” I said.

  “Oh, what, are you not roasting the beef bones before you make stock?” she teased. I was eating frozen okra and white bread spread with Nutella and bananas, but I knew she wanted me to laugh, so I did.

  Jill said, “So how’s Barbara?”

  “She’s fine,” I said. “She’s looking for a new caregiver but fine.”

  “You quit?” Jill said.

  “Yeah,” I said. It was a relief to say it, an even sweeter one to know I didn’t have to go back.

  I had phoned Barbara, intending to invent something about a family emergency, or some incredibly well-paying job opportunity. The lie hadn’t come out once I heard her voice. “Barb—I’m not ready to do this again,” I said. “I thought I was but I’m not.”

  I heard her sigh. “Okay,” she’d said simply. “Okay. My daughter can help out till I find someone. Good luck, hon.”

  “It was going all right before,” I told Jill. “It was boring but it was okay. I thought I would be so glad to be caregiving again, but I can still hear that voice.” I zipped up my jacket. “Maybe if I’d heard what she was saying it would have turned out to be nothing. Maybe she’d just seen a really sad movie.”