by Lila Savage
“Yes,” Jill had said, “here I am. Here I am. What? What?” Which almost made sense, but it was difficult to tell if that was by design or coincidental. Ella had made her voice smile but tried to keep her cheer from seeming patronizing, and so she hadn’t simplified her language. It had seemed to Ella that Jill found her friendliness overfamiliar; Jill’s caution came close to registering as dislike. This made Ella dislike herself a bit, looking at herself through Jill’s eyes. It was Jill’s weary sternness that read as the clearest evidence that she was a mature person enduring hardship, and Ella’s disinclination to acknowledge those cues seemed somehow invalidating. But there would be ample opportunities to strike a better tone in the future.
Now, settling into a routine, it was still difficult to tell what Jill understood and what she didn’t. This remained slippery to navigate until, eventually, each trail of clues led to the same emptiness, the same barren field. Only that was later, much later. At this time, there was still a painful, lingering uncertainty about Jill’s depths, nourished by hints of awareness, like bread crumbs dropped from her restless hands.
While Ella had been hired as relief for Bryn, so that he might have time for things other than caring for Jill, it was several months before he was willing to leave the women alone in the house together. He didn’t want Jill to feel abandoned; he was hoping that she would come to recognize Ella and feel comfortable with her. Ella’s first shifts, therefore, were spent with both of them, like supervised visits, only not really, because Bryn was watching not to see how Ella would do, or even how Jill would do, but to ease them into acquaintance, like a matchmaker, or like a host at a party. He offered up little facts about Jill, with space to breathe around them, like “Jill was a social worker” or “Jill always liked to run in the morning,” as though the silence between them was an oversight on Jill’s part, like all they needed was the right jumping-off point, so that Ella could follow up with “Oh, my uncle’s a social worker, what sort of social work do you do?” or “You must be very disciplined—I’m not much of a runner or a morning person.” Of course, questions directed at Jill, if they were acknowledged at all, could be answered in only the most rudimentary fashion, and even that was only in Ella’s early months, or maybe even only the early weeks.
One day when Bryn was preparing their tea, Ella tried, instead of neutral friendliness, a more wry tone, one that reflected the combination of sharpness and resignation Jill’s posture suggested as she sat with one denim-clad leg casually crossing the other, wearing sunglasses that didn’t appear to be hers, the arms trapping her hair against her temples instead of sliding under it. Ella said, unsmiling, “It’s so hot out. I’m so sweaty.” Jill didn’t smile either, and Ella couldn’t see her eyes behind the sunglasses. “Would you like to take off that jacket?” Ella asked, because Jill was wearing her usual fleece zip-up, and her bangs were damp with sweat. “No. No. I don’t know. I don’t know! Say say say,” Jill responded, turning her head away from Ella and then standing to reach for the water glass that sat on the table. She slipped her fingers in purposefully, as though testing something, and then began to flick the water in small splashes over the cup’s rim.
* * *
—
Jill couldn’t really converse, not in any meaningful sense. She would repeat phrases over and over. One was “Everybody has their story. Everybody has their story. Everybody has their story.” Sometimes Ella would respond, “What’s your story, Jill?” and Jill would reply, “Me? I helped the women. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. Everybody has their story.” That was about the extent of any sort of exchange of ideas. As the next best thing, Ella began to respond to Jill’s circular rants as though they were friends chatting, responding in a steady, sympathetic murmur, as though the natural back-and-forth of conversation were occurring.
“Of course I agree,” Ella would say, “but is that really the important part? I suppose we each have to decide for ourselves. And I really am fond of cookies made with molasses. But you know I never make them. Were you ever much into baking?”
“Say say!” Jill would respond. “The children. The children. And we have to come back. Yes. It’s mine!”
“Of course it’s yours,” Ella would say. “It’s your house. I’m only a guest, although I’m very glad to be here. And I noticed there’s a bowl of strawberries from the garden on the buffet, I can smell them from here! The little ones are always the sweetest, don’t you think? Red right up to the stem. I wonder how many berries you would need to make jam? That fly is so annoying—I wish you had a cat to kill it. Have you ever owned a cat, Jill?”
“It’s mine. It’s mine. And we go all the time. Say. Say. And the children! I helped the women. I don’t know.”
“I used to have a cat,” Ella would say. “His name was Clarence and he was very fat and grumpy. He had big puffy fur and a big puffy tail and it was a lot of work to brush him. It was nice to brush him outside in the summer because the wind would just blow the discarded fur away, it would just tumble across the grass. I like your socks today, Jill, red is my favorite color. Do you have a favorite color?”
“It’s mine. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s what we do.”
“When Bryn comes back, we’ll have some tea. I hope we have strawberries.”
Eventually Bryn asked Ella if she really understood what Jill was saying, and Ella explained, a little embarrassed, that she didn’t. She thought the pretense might make Jill feel less isolated, like she could still connect with other people, but it became clear that this wasn’t so, especially in the weeks when she began to seem concerned that Ella was mocking her. She would become agitated and tearful, and any efforts to connect were regarded with suspicion bordering on fear. At that point Ella tried to give her a wide berth, interfering only if she started trashing the kitchen, or tried to leave the house, or clutched her crotch, suggesting she needed to use the bathroom.
Did Jill become more comfortable with Ella during those first few months? Yes—at least it seemed so, to some negligible degree, but really, these compensated klatches (the three of them always drank cheap, bitter tea from mismatched mugs, the tannin coating their tongues in chalky sheaths) served mostly to make Ella more comfortable with Jill. Paying her to spend time with both of them wasn’t really necessary, Ella would think each time Bryn walked her to the door with a gentle thank-you and a few discreetly folded crisp twenties. She wasn’t thirteen; she wouldn’t panic if they were left alone together and Jill cried, or rattled the baby gate on its hinges, or didn’t make it to the bathroom. If Ella and Jill didn’t need to become acquainted, and did so only in the most superficial sense, the tea parties did serve another purpose, which was that Ella and Bryn became friends.
They would sit, triangulated around the sunny, bare dining room table, and if at first Ella was formal, with both shoeless feet flat on the floor and her mug lightly gripped, mostly forgotten in one hand as she made polite inquiries and appropriate responses, it wasn’t more than a week before her knees were tucked up to her chest, both hands wrapped around the mug’s warmth, an easy laugh on her lips. This both surprised and did not surprise Ella; one is not a professional companion for long without a gift for easy camaraderie, or at least a skillful impression of such. She was accustomed to being interested in what she was told and also of being bored, and in either instance she gave the same impression of friendliness, sympathy, good humor, admiration—whatever the circumstances required. Once in a while Bryn would talk at length about something of only moderate interest to Ella, but she forgave him that because she never provided the usual cues of just-visible boredom or distinctly polite interest, the way she would with a friend who wasn’t paying her to listen. However, there was, as Ella had predicted at the interview, a natural ease between them; they were both agreeable people, meaning mostly pleasant, mostly considerate, attentive, modest, kind, and this reduced some of the barriers—of age, of gender
, of station, of the muttered sounds of loss seated between them.
Still, it was a strangely limited intimacy, it always was, no matter how much Ella loved a client, loved their family, because there was always a degree of withholding that came with being paid for her time. When Ella was working, she was like a therapist: she listened carefully; she cut short her own anecdotes when she sensed wandering interest. If any client had seemed genuinely more interested in listening than talking, Ella might have told them almost anything, for she was a naturally forthcoming person, but nobody ever was. Ella didn’t blame them; she knew she would be the same in their position. Ella considered herself-as-listener the greatest unstated benefit to employing her. She drew people out with the skill of a reporter, the difference being that she wasn’t trying to get any particular dirt. Instead, she was feeling her way toward the stories that most wanted to be told, and when people allowed themselves to sink into the telling, it was with pleasure, and relief, and almost a feeling of moral affirmation. Their lives, with Ella-as-listener, felt significant and sometimes even righteous, or so she told herself.
With some clients, Ella almost felt as though she were collecting their memories before they lost them; it was like the Dixie Chicks lyric about the woman with Alzheimer’s: “I will carry it on / and let you forget.” Over time, the stories would repeat, sometimes through hundreds of increasingly garbled retellings, and Ella would no longer seek to draw those clients out. They would have developed a taste for the telling that was almost a solitary pleasure, and Ella could daydream quietly, murmuring appropriate responses as if accompanying a familiar recording. Even if she hadn’t liked Bryn (and she truly did) she would still have found it a relief to have a new conversation each time they met, and to have someone remember what she had said to them, so that it wasn’t like speaking into a vacuum, sharing thoughts and feelings that could have been almost anything, so briefly were they grasped before swirling down the mental drain.
Ella’s knowledge of Bryn grew daily, even though he told more about his life than about how it made him feel. She saw him look at Jill with a forced smile of real affection that whispered of grief. Like so many men of her father’s generation—indeed, like so many men—he could better express anger and frustration than other emotions. Still, she learned, more and more, about his most profound losses, his fears, and also his deepest loves, and he knew nothing of hers. Bryn’s view of her life was that it was like a trolley car, always heading around the same track. One day the trolley might pass a hot-dog vendor, or a woman with a poodle waiting to cross the street, or a car almost hitting a bicyclist. Although the weather could vary, the route never did. What Ella had done over the weekend or an interesting bit of news she had heard on the radio, the latest thing she was reading or the new recipe she was hoping to try: these were the trivial bits of herself she offered up.
Ella assumed that she was merely following Bryn’s lead in the surface pleasantries of these conversations, but there was evidence to the contrary. For instance, Ella made frequent mentions of “Alix and I,” casual references to the structure of her outside life. One day she became confused as to whom Bryn was referring when saying he, and then it occurred to her that he meant Alix. She didn’t correct him. It wasn’t that she wanted him to believe she was partnered with a man, or that she had any reason to think it would make any sort of difference to him, it was just somehow peculiar, unpalatable, to broach the subject, “Excuse me, Alix is a woman, I’m queer, you see.” It felt, in a way, too late, as though this could only have been addressed immediately or not at all, as if, at the time of their meeting, it might have been absorbed as easily as Ella’s other, relatively inconsequential biographical details, but time had shifted the dynamic. It would now become a pronouncement or a confession, something unsettlingly private. She didn’t generally share that part of her life with her clients, who were often—besides elderly—religious, conservative, and disinclined to examine their prejudices this late in the game. Never mind that Bryn matched only one of those descriptors: that of client.
· 5 ·
Nowadays, Ella would come, they would visit for a bit, and then Bryn would slip from the room for an hour or two, to putter around in the garden or the basement or the garage. At first Ella wasn’t sure what to do when this happened; she’d never been in quite this position before, except when babysitting, on the rare occasions parents had things to get done around the house. It seemed wrong to simply sit in the same room with Jill, charging an hourly rate for her passivity, with Bryn so close at hand. She got some books from the library that listed activities for the memory-impaired. Almost all of them seemed beyond Jill, whose favorite hobbies included washing silverware without any soap and folding the same three towels over and over. One day Ella brought a muffin tin and a tub of antique buttons, with the idea that she could sort them together by color, but Jill just pushed them around carelessly before losing interest. Next, Ella asked Bryn for some family photos, hoping they would mean something to Jill, that they would spark recognition, a connection. Jill just picked through them as messily and blindly as she did a catalog or magazine, seeing them without really seeing them, but Ella examined each photo with an avidity that almost felt impolite.
The first photos Ella saw of Jill were post-accident, taken during an impaired but higher-functioning time. In them, Jill stood with Bryn and Nick, her gaze and smile somehow off, as though she were at a slight remove. She was a little plump in those pictures, and the weight looked wrong on her, like a thin person slightly bloated, clothes selected by someone uninvested, makeup only contributing to the dissonant picture.
* * *
—
Ella and Bryn sat side by side in the brilliant noon sun, every bit of the yard gilded by the light. There was no wind today and so the sun felt just on the cusp of too warm and the flush and shine of it on skin and hair seemed decadent. Jill stood a short distance away, facing them without noticing them, her nervous energy stilled for the moment without a discernible cause. Her hair looked a more vibrant shade of red than usual with the sun pouring over its asymmetrical mass, the left side squashed oddly to her head, as though she’d spent the entire night sleeping on it, the right springing in random snarls and tendrils just long enough to reach below her jaw. Ella felt she could see Jill’s freckles multiply before her eyes, as though they would burst like sped-up buds captured by time-lapse photography. The speckles covered every bit of exposed skin. Jill’s eyes were close to the color of both her freckles and her hair, a warm brown that just fell short of rust. If she’d had higher cheekbones her face would have looked more beautiful, more ethereal, despite her graying teeth and the anxious, unhappy tilt that confusion and distress gave all her features, but her cheeks hung hollow and a little loose below her eyes, and her mouth was a thin line. Her shoulders stooped in a way that hinted at masculine dejection, or perhaps in the absence of long-practiced feminine postures: Jill no longer carried herself with the burdensome knowledge of continual assessment womanhood so often brings. Her chest appeared flat under the loose chambray shirt, and her jeans hung from her narrow hips, sitting in permanent accordion creases behind her knees, and mismatched socks, one red, one gray, were visible under her maroon velour slippers.
Eventually Ella found pictures of young Jill, of a slender and pleasant-looking but not quite beautiful woman with wind in her long seventies-style hair, laughing, with willful eyes, and then a stark black-and-white photo of young Bryn shuffled to the top. He looked searingly, impossibly handsome, chiseled, fearless, with a mountain rising behind him, and Ella lingered with the photo in her hands as though she hoped to memorize it. It changed how she saw him, even though he was still good-looking. He was tall, his body was still lean and strong, his silver hair thick and shaggy. The sculpted bones of his face, once achingly beautiful, retained their graceful architecture under the more rugged skin of late middle age.
Bryn’s most appealing feature,
however, was his smile, and Ella now understood why: it was the smile of a beautiful person, a person accustomed to receiving one in return, for who could resist matching the smile of such an attractive man? He smiled easily, even facing these wrenching circumstances, and the warmth reached his eyes. It felt almost flirtatious without being sexual, it defaulted into a playful quality that Ella found familiar because she navigated the world in a similar way, but there was a difference: Bryn charmed because it was habitual, because he could; Ella charmed because she wanted to be liked.
Bryn had carried the photos up from the basement, jumbled in a shoe box, and somehow the modesty of this vessel struck Ella as more heart-wrenching than any of the haunted images it contained. It seemed symbolic of their whole situation, or maybe, more specifically, of Bryn himself, of how he bore the burdens of remembering with a distinctly masculine lack of ostentation. For a moment his strength and his vulnerability seemed indistinguishable, and Ella recoiled, ever so slightly, from the abrupt intrusion of this knowledge. She couldn’t unknow it, and now the wince in his stride would always be visible, even in the periphery of her vision, even, perhaps, when her gaze was averted.
One day, with a sort of studied carelessness, Ella told Bryn, “You know that black-and-white photo of you with a mountain in the background? You were so handsome. You looked like a movie star.” She had thought this would be like telling a grandfatherly figure that he had once been as dashing as Clark Gable, a throwaway compliment that Bryn might dismiss with gruff pleasure. It didn’t feel like that at all, Ella realized too late, with heat creeping across her face. It had been weeks since she had held the photograph, but she remembered it so clearly. Bryn just grinned and said, “Thank you,” as though it weren’t a surprise, as though it were deserved but unsought, which it was.