The New Neighbor: A Novel

by Leah Stewart

  I said, “You do remind me of that friend, you know.”

  “I hope that’s good,” she said.

  I nodded. I fumbled for my water glass on the side table and took another sip.

  She said, “Let me know if you—”

  But I interrupted. I blurted, truth be told. “I was in the war.”

  She nodded as if this were to be expected. But I hadn’t meant to say that. “Which one?” she asked.

  “The second one,” I said. “World War Two. I met my friend in basic training.”

  “Basic training?” She looked puzzled, which was gratifying, because from puzzled it’s a quick step to curious.

  “We were nurses,” I said. “Army nurses. They put us through basic training, like soldiers, even though in the war we never pitched tents or did close-order drill or any of that. Ours was at Fort Bragg.”

  “In North Carolina,” she said.

  “Right,” I said. “Her name was Kay.” To my astonishment, my eyes grew watery.

  She nodded again, that irritatingly serene acceptance. “Was she killed?”

  “No!” I was so startled I nearly shouted. I wiped without grace at my eyes. “No, she wasn’t killed.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You lost touch after the war?”

  “Yes,” I said, and then suddenly I didn’t want to say any more. I looked into my water glass.

  “Where did they send you?” she asked. “After basic training?”

  “England,” I said, still watching the water. “Then France, and from there into Austria and Germany.”

  “So you were really in the war,” she said.

  “I really was.” I said this snappishly, I think, because after that she didn’t ask any more questions. She repeated her advice—bathe and hydrate, let the water wash it away—and said her goodbyes. I stopped her after she’d opened the door. “Can you come back tomorrow?” I called.

  I couldn’t see her from my position in the chair, but I felt her hesitation. After a moment she said, “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes. Would you, please?”

  She said she would. I’m embarrassed by how much I’m looking forward to it. It’s evening now, and she was here in the morning, but the effects have not worn off. How nice it is to go a few hours without pain. And tomorrow she will come again.

  Let Ugly Be

  Jennifer goes to Megan’s house for the playdate, despite her preference for a neutral site. The original plan had been to meet at the fire pole playground, but it’s raining, and Megan offered up her home like it was nothing. Jennifer hopes that this playdate doesn’t go well. She doesn’t want to have to reciprocate.

  They are sitting on Megan’s couch, the boys doing God-knows-what upstairs, with excited chatter and occasional thunks and thuds. “What do you think that was?” Jennifer asks, for the second time. She’s going to have to resist the urge to pose this question every time they make a noise.

  Some parents would shrug and say, “Who knows?” Once upon a time Jennifer would have. Megan smiles sympathetically and says in a confiding tone, “I’m not allowed to go see.” She settles back into the couch, tucking her legs up beside her carefully, so as not to spill her mug of peppermint tea. “It’s my own rule. It’s so easy to hover, when you only have one.”

  Jennifer nods. She, too, is holding a mug of tea, nearly full. Megan handed it to her moments ago, after a prolonged period in which she studied photos in the living room while Megan made the tea in the kitchen, calling out chatty remarks from time to time. Jennifer knew she should go in and offer to help, or at least talk companionably, instead of just calling back, “Oh, really?” through the doorway. But she hadn’t been able to resist delaying this full-on conversational engagement. She’d imagined that time spent with Megan would be time spent distracted by the children. She hadn’t meant to go to the other woman’s house, hadn’t realized there would be an upstairs playroom, didn’t want to be in this position of intimacy on the couch, blowing on her tea.

  “We’re having a lot of discussions about whether to have another one,” Megan says. “Of course being a sociologist I have to read all the studies—pros and cons of being an only child. Sebastian just says, if we want one we should have one. But it’s not as simple as want, is it? It’s about what’s best. What’s best for Ben, especially. Only children get more attention of course, and there are so many benefits to that, and all the old notions about how they’re cripplingly self-centered—well, the studies show those are mostly untrue. But on the other hand siblings are important. I don’t want to deprive him of what has the potential to be one of life’s most important relationships. And he’ll have these old parents, with no one to help him take care of them, no one who really understands what his childhood was like.”

  “I’m an only child,” Jennifer says.

  “Oh!” Megan offers a wincing smile. “Did I just suggest you’re cripplingly self-centered?”

  “No, you said that’s untrue.”

  “Well, you’re an excellent resource. Only child with an only child. You know it from both sides.”

  “I guess so,” Jennifer says. In truth Milo is not an only child. Even if she wanted to explain this—which she doesn’t—she wouldn’t, because she doesn’t want to say Zoe’s name aloud. She has a superstitious feeling that to say her name would conjure her. “I think I agree with . . . Sebastian? It’s about whether you want another.”

  “Sebastian’s my husband.”

  “I figured that.”

  “I don’t plan children with other men.” Megan grins. “Actually this whole place is a free-love commune. That’s why you came here, right?”

  Jennifer doesn’t know what to say. She isn’t good at banter. She musters an uncertain smile.

  Megan sighs. “Really the opposite is true. It’s kind of a traditional place. Coats and ties. Nuclear families. Guardian angels.”

  “Angels?”

  “Yes, the Sewanee angels. You tap the roof of your car when you leave the Domain to take your angel with you, then when you go back through the gates you tap the roof again to release it.”

  “What’s the Domain?”

  “All the land the university owns. I thought it was a funny name when I got here—so dramatic—but now I don’t think twice.” She cocks her head. “Is it the right pronoun for an angel?”

  “I don’t know much about angels.”

  “What did people do before cars? Tap the roof of their carriages? Smack their horse?” Megan touches her lightly on the shoulder. “But I’m making it sound like I don’t like it here and I do.”

  Jennifer nods. She sips her tea and Megan does, too, and now Jennifer really should think of something to say. She comes up with: “What does your husband do?”

  “He’s a photographer. Weddings and babies, mostly. He has a studio in Chattanooga.”

  Jennifer points at a framed picture on the side table, Megan with baby Ben. “Did he take that?”

  Megan turns to look. “He did. He’s so good at portraiture. But he also does art photography. Not so much lately, which is a shame.” She jumps to her feet. “Come on, I’ll give you a tour.”

  Sebastian’s photos are of city streets—startling in the nature-centric context of Sewanee. They’re black-and-white images of urban blight, hand-tinted in incongruous bright colors, an ancient neon sign on a closed-up theater rendered a bright salmon pink, the boarded window below it turned new-leaf green. Megan walks her down a hallway hung with his work, pointing out this and that. Jennifer makes murmuring sounds of interest and praise, but at the end of the tour Megan looks at her with a clear expectation of something more, and asks, “Isn’t he good? He was going to stack these in the attic but I insisted we hang them here.”

  “They’re great,” Jennifer says, though what does she know about art? She doesn’t know if they’re good; she’s not even sure she likes them. They make a garish beauty of the ugly. Maybe sometimes you should just let ugly be.

  “I know,” Megan says
, studying the one at the end of the hall like she’s never seen it before. “He’s still taking them, but he doesn’t really show me. He says it’s just a hobby now.” She leads Jennifer back to the living room. Over her shoulder she says, “I think once you’re a photographer you never leave your camera at home. Even if you leave your camera at home. You can’t help seeing the world in shots. If you don’t take the picture when you see it you abandoned something.”

  “Is that something you study?” Jennifer asks.

  Megan turns, looking puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “What people’s jobs say about them.” Why is Jennifer asking for details? As if Megan were someone she’s trying to get to know.

  Megan gives her a surprised, appreciative smile, like Jennifer’s smarter than she thought. “You’re right, I talk about that a lot. No, I write about sports and gender, or at least that’s the book I’m writing now. My tenure book, I hope. What do you do? I haven’t asked.”

  “I’m a massage therapist.”

  “Oh!” Megan’s eyebrows shoot up with interest. “And what does that say about you?”

  “I—”

  “Or maybe that’s a hard question to answer.”

  “I’m not good at talking about myself.”

  “Well, that’s a kind of answer,” Megan says. “You don’t have to talk to give a massage.”

  “No,” Jennifer says. “Though sometimes the client wants to talk.”

  “Really? Whenever I’ve gotten a massage I’ve just tranced out.”

  “Some people are like that. But some people—” She hesitates, sorry to have turned the conversation toward herself. “Sometimes when you work a knot, you trigger something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Emotion lives in the body,” Jennifer says. “A sore place can be anger or grief.”

  “And you can intuit that?”

  “Sometimes.” She thinks of the moment of contact with Margaret, the resistance under her skin, the longing that pulsed against it. Something about the old lady—her anger? Her grief?—makes Jennifer turn the memory aside.

  Megan thrusts her arm out, and Jennifer instinctively steps back. “I’m not trying to hit you!” Megan laughs. “I want to see what you can intuit about me. I’m really sore right here.” She runs a finger up and down her right forearm.

  “Ah,” Jennifer says. “You type too much.”

  “Is that all?” Megan makes a playful expression of disappointment. “How boring.”

  Her arm is still out. “I’m not a fortune-teller,” Jennifer says. But then she puts her hand on Megan’s arm. She presses her thumb along it. “You are really tense here.” In fact Megan’s tendon is so tight Jennifer’s thumb slips off it, and Jennifer senses that the tension there radiates throughout Megan’s entire body, as if Megan, who seems so easy with herself, is actually permanently braced against a blow. “Are you stressed about something?”

  “Oh,” Megan says lightly. “Always.” She steps back, pulling her arm from Jennifer’s grasp, like she’s the one reluctant for intimacy.

  But maybe Jennifer misread that reluctance, as five minutes later Megan is relating a morning phone call with her mother, apparently a critical and controlling person who never lets Megan get a word in edgewise. As she talks, Megan gets a sharp edge of anger and frustration in her voice and then, trying to pull back, accuses herself of overreacting, of being too sensitive. “My mother just wants the best for me,” she says. “But it would be nice if she found it possible to believe I might be the one who knows what that is.”

  Jennifer feels a sudden sharp longing for her own mother, for both her parents, her sweet bookish uncritical parents. Before she and Milo came here, they stayed with her parents for months. After the police finally gave up, in a kind of aggressive backing away that made it clear they still didn’t believe her, her parents grew cheerful. Her father resumed his habit of singing hits of the seventies—John Denver, Gordon Lightfoot, Cat Stevens—as he tidied up the house. She stopped him one afternoon as he was straightening magazines on the coffee table, in the middle of the chorus of “Sundown.” She put a hand on his arm. He turned to look at her, surprised at the touch. They were not a physical family. The love between them was strong, but its expressions were tentative. She said, “Dad.”

  He looked worried. “Yes?”

  “Aren’t you ever going to ask me if I did it?”

  “Did what?” he asked, though of course he knew, so she didn’t answer. She waited. He looked at the magazines in his hand, gave them a final tap, then laid the neatened pile carefully down. He shook his head. She waited for him to say he didn’t need to be told she was innocent to know it was true. He said, “No, I’m never going to ask.” She could tell by the determined way he said it that he’d come to that decision quite some time ago. He’d decided not to seek the answer, which meant part of him thought it might be yes.

  She cried. Her father put his arms around her and she wept against his chest. She might’ve been a child. All he wanted was to give her comfort. She wondered later if he took her weeping as confession. What it was, really, was heartbreak. Because at that moment she understood—completely, thoroughly understood—that no one in that town, not even her parents, would ever be able to separate her from that question. It didn’t matter who she’d been before. Now she was what the answer made her, and since yes could never be uttered and no could never really be believed, she would forever be the woman who might have. She was the woman whose own daughter thought she could. She imagined the moment—at ten, at twenty—when Milo would want to know whether she killed his father. And she knew she couldn’t let him become that. A person who had to ask.

  Clues

  Today is Tuesday, not that it matters. Today she made her third visit to my house. I don’t care about the days of the week anymore, except as they help me know when to go to the doctor and when not to expect the mail. I had an appointment yesterday, which is why she couldn’t come then. “You’re doing very well, Ms. Riley, considering,” Dr. Bell said.

  “Considering what?” I snapped, though I knew damn well.

  “Your age,” Dr. Bell said mildly. She doesn’t react, that doctor. She and Jennifer Young must have gone to the same acting school. What a pleasure it would be to really piss somebody off, just to see my existence fully register on someone else’s face.

  Massage is like a drug, and a heavy dose of it. I can’t keep myself present on the table, or fight the rolling fog of calm and goodwill her poking and prodding induces. I didn’t really try today, honestly. How often do I get to forget my body? My body is too much with me. “Late and soon,” as Wordsworth has it, though of course he’s complaining about the world. “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” etc. Thanks to Mrs. Smith, my tenth-grade English teacher, I still have that poem memorized. But Wordsworth and I do not agree on our difficulties. The world I can more or less get away from, as I think I’ve proven, and there’s so much of nature around me I’d be hard-pressed to long for more. Sometimes I wish the birds would shut the hell up. It’s not the world I can’t escape but my body. Not its demands so much at this stage, but its complaints and limitations. Its resistance and its pain.

  After today’s massage, I came back to myself more quickly than I did after the first two, which I regretted. Perhaps massage, like a drug, is something you get used to. I think she knows, already, that I like her to sit for a few moments afterward, or perhaps this is something she does with all her elderly clients, knowing that part of what they pay for is a little bit of company. It’s her routine to give you a glass of water and ask how you’re feeling and remind you to take it easy, as though it were even possible for a person my age to take it hard. Today I was determined not to let her leave at the conclusion of all that. In anticipation of my own dazed state, I’d prepared a question that would keep her, and I asked it, feeling pleased that I hadn’t let the question slip away when I floated off the table into memory and dream. “What do y
ou think of life here?” That was the question. Not a yes-or-no, you see.

  “It’s peaceful,” she said. “I love living on the water, even if it’s just a pond.”

  “You don’t find it boring?” I asked. “Or lonely?”

  “Lonely?” She shook her head. “l don’t like people,” she said. She smiled immediately afterward, as if this were a joke, but it struck me as the truest thing she’d said to me so far.

  “What about your little boy?”

  “Well, I do like him,” she said.

  “No, does he like it here? Does he like the woods?”

  “The woods? We haven’t done a lot of exploring there. We’ve been to all the playgrounds. I guess I’m warming up to the idea of the woods.”

  “Are you frightened of them?”

  “Frightened?” She has a habit of repeating part of your question. Perhaps this is a way of giving herself time to consider her answer. She exhaled, wearing a small frown. “Milo’s not very careful with his body yet.”

  “He’s too young to value it,” I said.

  “Yes.” She sighed. “I worry about the pond. I lock the doors at night so he can’t slip out. But if I could I’d fence it off.” She looks out toward my deck, the water beyond it. “Sometimes I think I shouldn’t have rented that place.”

  I was delighted by this confession—not because of its substance, but because it was personal information offered without my asking. I debated whether to ask why, in that case, she’d chosen the house. She is so careful, so guarded. There are locked doors in conversation with her, and no way to tell when you’re approaching one. Before I could decide she changed the subject. “But it’s a beautiful place,” she said. “An easy place to be.”

  To be what? I wanted to ask. “And you like the house?”

  “It’s quirky, but we like it.”

  “I’ve been curious about it,” I said, “living across the pond from it all these years. I knew the woman who lived there before you.”