The New Neighbor: A Novel

by Leah Stewart

  “What happened to him?” Jennifer asked.

  “He was in the infantry,” I said. “Somebody shot him.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry?” I repeated. I looked at her. Was she sorry? People always say that. They say it automatically. “How I found out was, the sergeant handed me a letter at mail call, and it was one I’d written to Lloyd, and across the address there was a red stamp that said deceased. All in capital letters. DECEASED.” I leaned toward her. “Here’s a little confession for you,” I said, “since you seem to want one. I used to tell people about Lloyd, because people thought I was strange for never marrying, and so he was my excuse. My beau who died. My tragic romance. I’d say I was in love with him, but I don’t even know if that was true. Poor old Lloyd.”

  She looked at me, so serious, a line deepening in her forehead. Was that an expression of judgment or concern? “I don’t blame you for that,” she said.

  I sat back in my chair. “Well, I opened my letter and read it. I’d written the usual prattle: These cigarettes are horrible – but I am slowly learning to drink beer – Our food is pretty good. What a ninny I was. When I wrote it he was probably already dead. You know what I think about sometimes? All the things he never had any idea about, because they happened after he died. He never saw a television. He never heard of the Internet, or an iPod. He couldn’t have imagined an iPod. He never even heard of Elvis! He didn’t know we’d win. He didn’t know that war wouldn’t be the last. He didn’t know about Korea. Vietnam. The Gulf War. Iraq. Could he have imagined 9/11?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “That’s a disappointing answer.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “Well, someone shot him dead and after that nothing mattered. That was that for poor old Lloyd.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  “Stop apologizing. It doesn’t matter now.” I felt angry. “If he’d lived I might have married him and had a passel of brats and a dog. Who wants that happy ending?”

  “A lot of people.”

  “It’s bullshit.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

  “I don’t know what else to tell you,” I said. “I don’t know why we’re doing this. I don’t know what it is you want to know.”

  “You told me you wanted to leave a record,” she said, keeping her temper when I was doing my best to make her lose it.

  “But you must want to know something, or you’re only listening for the money, and then I don’t want to do it, Jennifer. I won’t pay for attention. I won’t. I told you I won’t. Tell me that there’s something you want to know or this little project is over, and you can kiss your one hundred dollars an hour goodbye.”

  “Okay,” she said evenly. “Tell me about Kay.”

  I felt myself flinch. “You need that money, don’t you?”

  Jennifer looked at me a long moment and then she sighed, sinking back against the chair. “This is too upsetting for you, Margaret,” she said. “It was a bad idea.”

  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t.”

  “I should go.”

  “No, no, don’t do that. I’m sorry. Really. I’m old and cantankerous. I told you I’m not used to people. I’m sorry. I’ll tell you a story about Kay.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to,” I said. “Really. I have a story I want to tell. I’d like someone else to know it. Write it down. Come on.” I waved my hand at her notebook. “Write it down.”

  So she did.

  In Germany, when we arrived in a new town, the boys would choose a house and go in and tell the people to vacate, and just like that the place would be ours. In Zietz I stood outside a house next to Kay with my bedroll at my feet and my hands in my pockets and stared at the sky while I waited for the owners to leave, thinking, Hurry the hell up, not much caring, when they finally came out, that they glared at us as they went by. The man kept showing everybody a letter that said he was a member of the Christian Science Church in Boston. He said, “You’re in a Christian home.”

  Don’t steal my stuff seemed to be his point, or anyway that’s what I thought at the time. Whatever his point, it was a strange thing to say, although I guess there’s no appropriate etiquette for addressing the people who turn you out of your home so they can sleep there. Kay and I moved into a dining room with a balcony. When I got up in the morning Kay was gone, and I went out on the balcony and spotted her wandering the garden, touching the flowers like she’d never seen one before. As I watched she glanced around like the owner might have spies, picked a flower, and then put it in her hair.

  “Not exactly standard issue,” I called down, and she jumped, looked up at me, laughed.

  “Everything’s in bloom,” she said. “Come see.”

  I went downstairs and out the door and let her lead me around the garden and tell me the flowers’ names. At that time I didn’t know much about gardening, so when she told me what the flowers were called, I said, “Red one, purple one, blue one,” and she laughed again.

  “Red would suit you,” she said, looking around as though we were in a hat store. She put a finger to her mouth, considered me. “Yes, red.” She reached beside me and plucked a large red flower, one that had bloomed long enough to look as though it had flung itself open, one right at the moment when beauty is heightened by the knowledge that it’s about to fade. I was wearing my hair in two braids at that point, pinned at the back, and she tucked the stem of the flower under one of them. “Beautiful. You’re beautiful,” she said.

  As you might imagine, Jennifer, I saw a lot of bad things in Germany. But I wish you could see—not against all that, but existing at the same time, cupped in the palm of my hand—a German garden in the spring, and Marilyn Kay with a flower in her hair, her face open as a rose and shining in the light.

  The Lonely Woods

  Megan wears a smile of conspiratorial delight, in her hands plates bearing an array of sweet things: pie, cookies, chocolate torte. She approaches the table by the window where Jennifer waits, and the sunlight coming in plays peekaboo with her face, now you see her, now you don’t. “Can you believe all this?” Megan asks, clattering the plates onto the table. “The girl gave me the wrong things, and when I told her said just keep it, and gave me the right things, too.” She slides into her chair. “It’s like that Monopoly card. Bank mistake in your favor. Wasn’t that it?”

  “I think so,” Jennifer says, though she remembers it being bank error.

  “Bakery mistake in your favor,” Megan says. “We should wait until after the food.” But then she picks up a fork and takes a bite of the torte anyway. “Oh my God this is good,” she says, on her face an expression of such sensual delight that Jennifer feels the moment might be too private to witness. “I never get to eat dessert,” Megan says. “But I have such a sweet tooth.”

  Don’t think about it, Jennifer tells herself. Don’t ask what she means when she says she never gets to eat it. Don’t assume it means Sebastian tells her to watch her weight. Don’t suspect everyone is secretly unhappy. Don’t be sad.

  After her morning with Margaret, Jennifer went home and cried. It’s so exhausting to be with her: the relentless niceness in the face of Margaret’s prickly need, the struggle not to react to Margaret’s efforts to provoke. Perhaps Margaret doesn’t really exist. That house in the woods, only Jennifer can see it. It’s a dream she’s wandered into, a spell sent to punish her. She can almost believe this. Except Sue the librarian, a solidly real person, is the one who first told Jennifer Margaret’s name. Margaret watches her too fiercely. Margaret pays too much attention to everything she says. Margaret talks, and somehow Jennifer feels as if she’s the one being exposed.

  She didn’t allow herself much time for tears. She washed her face and practiced smiling and came to meet Megan for lunch. This is their first outing without the boys. Megan suggested it yesterday. It would give them a ch
ance to talk, she said. That’s fine with Jennifer, as long as Megan does most of the talking.

  Megan takes a substantial bite of the key lime, smiles at Jennifer as it hits her tongue, and then closes her eyes with pleasure. Jennifer looks away just as a college-age boy stops beside their table, a boy with the wild curly hair and lumberjack beard many of the students sport, rich kids pretending to be mountain men. “Professor Summerfield?” he says, and Megan’s eyes pop open. She reaches for her iced tea, washing down the rest of the bite. “Adam,” she says. “How are you?”

  “Good, good,” he says. “How are you?”

  “Doing well, thanks,” Megan says.

  The boy gives her a mischievous grin. “Looked like you were enjoying that pie.”

  Megan laughs like she’s taking the comment in stride, but the slow flush that creeps up her neck betrays her. “It’s delicious,” she says. “You should order some.”

  “Well, I’m not much for key lime,” he says, “but if you say it’s good it must be true.”

  Megan inclines her head and smiles in both recognition and deflection of the compliment. “Are you having a good semester?”

  “I am,” the boy says, and launches into an eager, animated description of the fascinations of the philosophy class he’s taking. He moves closer and closer to Megan as he’s talking, until he’s leaning against the table, and Jennifer notes with surprise that he seems to think he has a chance. She glances at Megan’s face, her wide-eyed attentiveness, her mobile mouth, and wonders how often Megan’s willingness to listen is mistaken for something more. Or is Jennifer the one making the mistake? Maybe this Adam does have a chance. She reminds herself that she doesn’t really know Megan, and even if she did, she wouldn’t know for sure, unless Megan said to her: I am fucking that boy. Even if Megan said, I am not fucking that boy, there would always be a chance it was a lie, or would become one.

  “Okay, then,” the boy says. He gives the table a light slap as he straightens, like it’s a mount that’s pleased him. “I’ll see you soon, I hope.”

  “See you,” Megan says. She smiles, smiles, smiles, but as soon as the door has dinged his departure she collapses back into her seat with a sigh. “Oh boy,” she says.

  “He has a crush on you,” Jennifer says, and to her surprise Megan groans, “I know.”

  “He’s cute.”

  Megan laughs. “Maybe somewhere,” she says. “Under all that hair.”

  “Does that happen a lot?” Jennifer asks. “Crushes?”

  “Not really. Or if it does I don’t know about it. I can tell with him because—he didn’t do it this time, but usually—he leads around to personal questions, like what do I like to do on the weekends, and as soon as I mention Sebastian he looks a little stricken. It’s exhausting talking to him, trying to be nice without being at all encouraging.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “He’s a sweet kid. Bright. But . . .” She blows out air like a horse. “I guess I had crushes on professors, even just intellectual ones. But I went to much bigger schools. I didn’t have the same kind of access. I didn’t run into them having lunch.”

  “I didn’t go to college,” Jennifer says.

  “Oh!” Megan says, clearly shocked, and then to cover her shock she returns quickly to the topic. “Sometimes I get tired of being so recognizable. I long for the anonymity of a big state school. I’d like to be able to swim at the rec center without encountering a student in my bathing suit. I feel like I’m under constant surveillance. And anything could be used against you. Professor Summerfield was buying prunes! Oh my God, do you think she’s constipated? I don’t want them sitting in my class thinking about how I’m constipated.” She sighs, then adds, “I’m not constipated.”

  “Okay,” Jennifer says.

  “I buy the prunes for Ben. He has issues sometimes.” She rolls her eyes at herself. “Not that you needed to know that.”

  Jennifer could tell Megan a thing or two on the subject of surveillance. Furtive glances, open hostile stares. The time a woman came up to her in the grocery store, Milo a toddler kicking his heels in the basket, and said—loudly, like she wanted the whole store to hear her—“Someone ought to take that child away from you.” Milo’s face transformed into the look of betrayed astonishment he wore when he got a shot, and Jennifer wanted to round on that woman, wanted to grab the can of tomatoes from her cart and bash in her head. She walked away, whispering to Milo, “Don’t worry, sweetie, she’s a crazy lady,” while behind her the woman called, “It’s shameful that you still have that child. Shameful, shameful, shameful. Imagine what you’re doing to him!”

  What about what this woman was doing to him? That didn’t seem to matter. Milo has recently learned the word hypocrite, and now he’s trying out the concept. He asks Jennifer: Is my teacher a hypocrite? Is the president a hypocrite? Is Batman a hypocrite? “I don’t think so, honey,” Jennifer answers again and again, but what she really wants to say, is Yes, yes, yes. They are all hypocrites. There is not a soul who isn’t.

  “What about you?” Megan asks. “Do you go in the post office and run into a client? And suddenly they’re, I don’t know, asking you about the kink in their neck?”

  “Um,” Jennifer says as the girl at the food counter calls first Megan’s name, then hers. Megan starts to rise but Jennifer waves her down. “I’ll get them both,” she says. Picking up the plates, she lets out a slow breath, banishing the memory of the grocery store woman, for which Megan is not to blame.

  When Jennifer sets down the food, Megan looks at her like she’s decided something. “You and I should plan an outing,” she says.

  “An outing?” Jennifer repeats.

  “Just get away for a day. Or maybe even a weekend. Farther away than Nashville. Have you been to Atlanta?”

  “Funny to think of getting away from the getaway.”

  Megan sighs extravagantly. “Sometimes you just have to get the fuck off this mountain,” she says. “Breathe some less rarefied air. Let’s go somewhere no one will recognize us.”

  Jennifer thinks: I already did.

  “Where would you want to go?” Megan asks.

  “I don’t think I could go anywhere,” Jennifer says. “I don’t have a sitter.”

  “Oh, of course.” Megan produces another of her slow flushes, a blotchy red creeping up her neck. The places the flush doesn’t touch are weirdly fascinating—like someone’s pressed their fingers hard against her throat. Why is she so embarrassed? It’s not as if Jennifer forgets she’s a single parent unless Megan points it out.

  Jennifer crunches a bite of salad. She’s surprised by even this hint of dissatisfaction from Megan—get the fuck off this mountain. Should she ask if something’s wrong? What if Megan says yes? Yes, something is terribly wrong. Sebastian screams at her and locks himself in the bedroom for hours, Megan sobbing outside the door; Sebastian beds the women of Chattanooga in his photography studio, posing them this way and that. Megan, though—she gets her own back, all her adoring students, those pretty pretty boys. From what she knows of Megan so far, this last notion seems so outlandish that it might as well be impossible, like alien life or time travel, like Megan growing a second head, or Megan’s friend being a murderer. “Did I tell you about Margaret?” she asks abruptly. “My client?”

  Megan cocks her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “She’s ninety, and she’s a World War Two vet.”

  “Really! How interesting.”

  “She was a nurse, near the front lines. I’m doing massage for her, but also she’s asked me to . . . help her with her memoir, I guess.”

  “About the war?”

  Jennifer nods. “We started this morning—she told me a story, I took notes. But I think it’s going to be difficult. She wants to talk about it, but then she doesn’t.”

  “What do you think that’s about?”

  “I don’t know, the stuff you see in a war.”

  “The people she lost.”

&nbs
p; “Right.”

  Megan reaches over her salad for more pie. “Maybe there were patients she thinks she should have saved.”

  “That could be.”

  “Everyone who goes to war must have those kinds of regrets.”

  Jennifer takes another bite of salad. I had an affair once, she thinks. She thinks it at Megan, but clearly neither is telepathic because Megan just takes another bite of pie. He was one of my clients. Megan! Can you hear me? Megan!

  “Oh my God, this is so good,” Megan says. “I can’t believe you’re not eating this.”

  “I will, after my salad.”

  “If there’s any left.” Megan rolls her eyes at herself. “I have the willpower of a flea.”

  The man, the other man, was a regular, someone she thought about mostly, preaffair, as her Tuesday at nine a.m. He spent his weekends and any other time he could get on a bicycle, and the massages were part of his whole cycling lifestyle, along with his shaved calves and the spandex she assumed he wore.

  “That’s why I can’t have dessert in the house,” Megan says. “I eat it without even knowing it. I’m at home grading papers and then suddenly I’m in the kitchen with Oreos stuffed in my cheeks.”

  “So what?” Jennifer says. “You look great. You’re so skinny.”

  “Constant effort, my friend.” She sighs. “Back to the salad.” She playacts an unwilling, listless bite. “Mmm,” she says. “Delicious.”

  One Monday afternoon her client called with a weird tension in his voice and said, “I have to cancel our appointment.”

  “Do you want to reschedule?” Jennifer asked, already reaching for a pen.

  “What I mean is I can’t see you anymore.”

  “Oh.” They were both silent, and she considered the quality of the silence, debating whether to ask. “Is something wrong?”

  “The truth is,” he said, “I’m too attracted to you.”