The New Neighbor (2 page)

“I’m sorry, baby,” she says.

“I want someone to play with me,” he says.

She says, “I play with you,” but this doesn’t stop the tears.

“I want to go to school,” he says, giving the last word an angry emphasis.

“School?” she repeats, as if she’s never heard of it. School, like birthday parties, is a relic of his past. He went to preschool at three and stayed six months. She’d assumed that, like so many other things, he’d forgotten it.

“It’s not
fair
,” he says. “I want to go to
school
.”

“What’s not fair?” she asks, but for this he doesn’t have an answer.

T
his morning there
was no sign of my neighbor, though I sat out on the deck reading longer than usual, hoping to glimpse her again. Her house used to belong to a woman named Barbara. I wouldn’t go so far as to say we were friends, but we waved to each other from our back decks and sometimes we made conversation at the Piggly Wiggly or the post office. She was about my age, and she’d had a professional life, like me, though I can’t recall what it was she did. I know she wasn’t a nurse, because if she had been we would’ve talked shop. At any rate she was funny and I liked her and then I noticed I never saw her anymore, and it turned out she’d died. This was some time ago—a year? Two?—and the house stood empty from that time to this, no one arriving to take the place of my friend until suddenly there she was.

But she—the new one—didn’t appear today. After I gave up waiting, I put down my book and prepared myself to venture out. Though once upon a time I was a sociable person, I find now that I have to steel myself for interaction. I grow impatient with chitchat. I’ve read that as we age we lose our internal censors, which perhaps explains why I find it so difficult now to be polite. Last week a woman in front of me in line showed me a picture of herself on her phone—why she showed me I have no idea, as I gave no indication of interest—and said, “It’s a terrible picture, isn’t it?” I said, “Well, we’re not always as beautiful as we think we are.” She registered the affront, but then she laughed, because I’m a harmlessly cantankerous old lady, I suppose. I would rather she had cursed me. I don’t want to be harmless. Who in the world would want to be that?

My gravel country road takes me to a paved country highway that takes me to town—or town as we understand it here, which is to say one gas station, one bank, one liquor store. I go right for Monteagle, left for Sewanee. Bumping down the road today, I took special note of the mailbox belonging to the house that once belonged to Barbara. It’s just a plain old mailbox. It said 936, just as it always has. I was driving at a crawl already; it wasn’t hard to stop. I sat in the car debating whether the effort of getting out would be worth the result, but in the end curiosity won. It seems I have become a snoop.

I won’t bother to describe how long it took me to inch my way round the car to the mailbox over the treacherous gravel. Of course I’m old and my footing isn’t always steady, but my problem is not my legs and feet, which work as well as can be expected, so much as it is my balance. On occasion I turn too quickly and am suddenly swimming in vertigo. No one can tell me why. So I try not to turn too quickly, and of course I try not to slip. I kept a hand on the car all the way around it, feeling those treacherous pebbles under the soles of my white sneakers. It was a journey, believe me. It was a mighty quest. My reward was a utility bill bearing her name: Jennifer Young.

I drove the rest of the way to the Piggly Wiggly saying
Jennifer Young
aloud to myself, trying to determine if I’d ever heard the name. Was she a relative of Barbara, someone I’d met many ages ago? Had some gossipy acquaintance seen me at the post office and told me she was moving in? I couldn’t recall. I know so many, many things—the tragic tale of Vivien Leigh, the capitals of all the states, how to find a vein—and yet I can access such an infinitely small portion of what I know. Someday they’ll download our brains into computers, and nothing will be lost. It won’t matter anymore what you’ve managed to remember and what you’ve managed to forget. None of it will matter to me, of course, because I’ll be dead. For me my death is the end of time.

When I got to the grocery store I couldn’t remember what I’d come for, so I poked my way down each aisle and put whatever struck my fancy into my cart. Thanks to the assorted populations of this place, you can avail yourself of pickled pig’s feet or organic preserves in jars with fancy labels. I stick to the middle. Bacon and Smucker’s strawberry jam.

It’s my general policy not to talk to the cashiers. Some of them call me
honey
, you see, despite being many decades my junior, and the youngest ones chew gum. But today I risked conversation to ask if they—the cashier and the bagger and another cashier one aisle over, who was bored and listening in eager hope of something to interrupt her boredom—knew anything about my neighbor. “Jennifer Young,” one repeated, and the others thoughtfully echoed her, their accents dragging out the vowel. It took them a long time to confess that the name was unfamiliar. They hazarded several guesses before I finally extracted myself. My question must have been the most exciting occurrence of their day. By the time we were done I felt tired and off balance, so I let the bagger help me with the groceries, though I wished I were able to decline.

I have a Southern accent myself, of course, but it’s not the twangy kind you hear from the mountain people. It’s no longer quite the genteel kind, either, like my mother had, the Scarlett O’Hara or Blanche DuBois kind, which is good for talking about the heat and ordering mint juleps and saying, “Oh, my.” In my years in Nashville my accent faded, so that now it’s down to cadence and those long Southern vowels. At least that’s what I think. One of my grandnieces, who lives in (of all places) Delaware, tells me I have “the cutest” accent. I dislike this, which may explain why I dislike her. I like the other one, her sister, who says my cap of white hair makes me look “cool.” It seems strange that I should care, at this late date, about “cool.” But there you have it. I wear my hair cut tight to my head. My glasses are turquoise and I have a bright red coat. I am a cool old lady.

My face—what can you say about that? It no longer looks exactly like my face. And my ears have grown enormous. If I live much longer I’ll be able to use them to fly.

And what of Jennifer Young? I wager her ears are still normal sized. Beyond that I can’t hazard a guess as to what she looks like, except to say she’s a white woman with blondish hair. I wonder how old she is. I wonder what she’s done with her life. I wonder what she’s doing with it here. There are only so many reasons to live in this place, in the woods, in the tiny towns. The Mountain birthed its longtime people, who seem to have no choice but to stay. The university brings the students and the professors, and the quaint old cottages in the Assembly and the big built-to-order houses in Clifftops bring the vacationers and retirees, those of us who flee up the Mountain into silence and cooler air and frequent sightings of woodpeckers and fawns. I myself moved here twenty years ago, one of the elderly evacuees of the working world. Those are my people—the no-longers, the once-weres. Jennifer Young is too young to be one of us. Perhaps she’s a professor of something or other, and her being here is easily explained.

But nothing is ever easily explained, is it? Nothing is ever easily explained.

I
s the woman
still there? Yes, she is. Today, like each of the last several, she’s there every time Jennifer glances out the glass doors to the deck. A white-haired figure on the other side of the pond, sitting and sitting and sitting. It’s early spring and the light is beautiful—perhaps the woman just enjoys the outdoors. But Jennifer had never noticed her until the morning she waved, and now there she always is. As if she’s watching. As if she’s waiting for her.

She forces herself to slide the door open. To step with confident purpose onto the deck will vanquish her paranoia. She strides to the railing and waves, because if the woman is watching her, maybe this will embarrass her inside, but the woman doesn’t wave back and now Jennifer can see, squinting, that she has her head bowed. She appears to be reading. She’s an old lady who likes to sit outside and read, that’s all, and yet Jennifer wishes fervently that she would go away. Behind her inside the house Milo bangs cars together on the floor of the dining room, that little-boy cacophony, but out here on the deck it’s utterly quiet. It’s a humming silent sound.

She chose this place, this mountain, this rental house, because of a conversation she had more than twenty years ago, at a party on a rooftop, during her brief sojourn in New York, when she was still trying to be a dancer. A girl from her dance class, a girl whose name and face she can no longer recall, told her about Sewanee, where she’d gone to college. “It’s like Brigadoon,” the girl said, and when Jennifer looked puzzled, she explained, “From an old movie, about this village that appears every hundred years. Whenever I go back, it’s like no time has passed. Everything’s exactly the same. And in the winter, when there’s fog on the Mountain, it feels like you pass through clouds to get there, and on the other side the rest of the world is just gone.”

“Did you like it?” Jennifer asked.

The girl shrugged. “There’s two kinds of people who graduate from Sewanee,” she said. “The ones who can’t wait to leave and the ones who spend the rest of their lives trying to get back.” It had the ring of a practiced remark. The girl wanted to claim the first category, and yet her wistful tone persuaded Jennifer she belonged to the second. This was why the conversation had stayed with her: the girl’s divisive longing, called forth by something she both loved and wanted to leave. Jennifer recognized it.

At any rate, the girl was right. Up here there is no rest of the world.

She thinks about shouting, “Hey!” across the pond. Nothing else, just “Hey!” Probably the word would echo, from the water, from the trees:
hey, hey, hey
. Does she want the woman to look at her or go away? She leaves her to her book, slides her glass door emphatically shut. Back inside she clambers onto her knees beside Milo and leans over him to pick up a car. “What do we do?” she asks, revving the car in the air. “Vroom, vroom?”

“No, Mom,” he says importantly. He takes the car from her hand. “You have to go up this ramp”—built of magnetic tiles—“and then you crash the building and you get points.” He goes on explaining the point system, but her interest in it isn’t strong. She puts her mouth on his jawline, where she knows he’s ticklish, and kisses him. “Mom,” he says, giggling. “Come on, Mom.” His voice has that tone of pleased annoyance perfected by little boys with doting mothers. “I need to do this, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, rocking back on her heels. “You do it.” She hoists herself up by a chair and then sits in it, watching him play. He is too precious to her. He is the only thing that breaks the silence. Already she can feel how someday that will be a burden to him.

“Milo,” she says, but he doesn’t hear her over his own noise, or he ignores her. She doesn’t want to ask this question. Or maybe she does want to ask it, because she’s hoping he’ll say no, and then she can stop feeling guilty for making him so alone.
Do you really want to go to school?
Please say no. “Milo,” she says again.

There’s a preschool
in the Episcopal church in Sewanee. She knows because they have a sign outside and a large, rambling playground that always draws Milo’s eye. She parks the car on the street, and she and Milo walk up to the school, she holding tightly to his hand. He cried the whole drive over because he’d dropped one of his cars off the front porch and into a bush, and Jennifer had been unable to find it. But he’s happy and skipping now. Children can be so very, very sad, and then that sadness can be so quickly forgotten. She wishes she knew that trick. Afraid of the tears returning, she tells him as they walk that he might not be able to go right away, there might not be room. She wonders if that’s what she’s hoping for. He’s so happy right now, but she isn’t. She doesn’t want him to go to school. The thought of it tightens her throat.

They do have room, though, and seem delighted at the arrival of a new pupil. If she’ll fill out the paperwork, he can start that day! At this news Milo drops his shyness—he buried his face in her hip while she talked to Miss Amber—and bounds over to the water table, where two little girls in enormous blue smocks are pushing around plastic boats. “This one is the fastest!” he says, pointing, with his cheerful assumption that people will like him. One of the girls says, “No, this one is,” and Milo calls over to Jennifer: “Mom, the water’s pink!”

“Cool!” she says, insisting on her own enthusiasm.

She lingers for quite some time even after she’s filled in every blank and signed her name to the check. Milo seems to have friends already, potential invitees to his birthday party. He is talking to two other boys, looking down at his Spider-Man shirt, which he holds out toward them, pinched on each side. Trying not to hover, she isn’t quite close enough to hear their conversation, and she wonders what he’s telling them. Tommy was the one who introduced him to Spider-Man.

Miss Amber comes over to her wearing a sympathetic smile. “See?” she says. “He’s doing great.”

“What?”

“I wouldn’t worry at all,” she says. “He seems like a very adaptable little boy.”

“He is,” Jennifer says. Miss Amber thinks, or is pretending to think, that she’s lingering out of concern for Milo. She doesn’t want to disabuse her, so she says, “Well, just call me if he needs me,” as matter-of-factly as she can manage. When she hugs Milo goodbye, he clings to her, the fabric of her shirt bunched tightly in his little fists, and she feels a surge of relief—he doesn’t want to stay, he’ll come away with her, they can go. But across the room another child calls his name, and just like that Milo is gone.

Out on the street, she blinks into the sunlight. She has no idea what to do with her freedom. How did this happen? The day began as every other day in Sewanee has, and yet suddenly she is alone. She has no job. She has no friends, and can’t make any, because friends want to hear your story. Where you came from and what you’re doing here. Why Milo has no father. Why she is so very alone.