The New Neighbor (16 page)

“Carrasco,” I said. “Where did he get that name?”

She jumped. I think she’d forgotten I was there. She shot me a quick glance, swallowed, tried to smile. “Who knows?” she said. “Who knows with kids.”

“Indeed,” I said. “Who knows.”

After that she wanted me to go, though she tried not to show it. She chit-chattered and smiled—she of the neutral impassive politeness, the quick flares of temper like flashes in the dark. Who was this twittering creature, anxious as a bird, asking me if I needed anything besides the egg, if I wanted a cup of tea? I don’t even think she knew what she was saying.

Well, I am not one to overstay my welcome. Nor do I like the sight of a strong person made weak. In truth I am like a child: determined to take something apart to see how it works; dismayed, then, to find it in pieces.

I nestled the egg she gave me in an empty space in a carton. Because of course I actually had eggs. One always has eggs.

The look on her face when the child said
Carrasco
. When Rumpelstiltskin heard his name, he tore himself in two. Is that what happened to you, Jennifer? Oh, Jennifer, don’t you know that a good detective, given a clue like that, has no choice but to follow it?

T
hey were at
the top of the stairs. Or she was. She was on the landing. He was balanced on the top step, one hand braced against the wall. He was in a walking cast because he’d broken his ankle stepping drunk off a curb. They’d been fighting all morning and all she wanted was for it to stop. She’d gone upstairs to escape him—he’d been shouting that she’d never really loved him, in that way he did when he had no other argument to make in the face of her complaints. When his apologies weren’t enough, he’d try to make it her fault—his drinking, his cheating, his sorrow and guilt—and then when he couldn’t he’d sob. He’d beg forgiveness. He’d say he wished he was dead and she’d have to comfort him. She’d have to put her soothing hands in his hair. She felt too tired for that, she felt well beyond tired. So she’d tried to escape.

But he’d followed. He’d followed quickly, despite the way the boot on his foot hobbled him, and he seemed so vivid with anger that though he’d never hit her in all their many years together her heart was a rabbit in her chest, and she had the thought that maybe he loved her enough to kill her. “You can’t leave,” he said. “You know Zoe will stay with me. And you can’t take Milo. I won’t let you. I won’t let you go.”

“How will you stop me?” Her voice was strangely calm. She heard curiosity in it. She really wanted to know.

He shifted his weight, but he still looked unbalanced. He’d always been so at home in his body, even when he was drunk beyond sense, that it was strange to see him off-kilter. “I don’t think I’ll have to,” he said. “I don’t think you can do it.”

She stared at him. He seemed so certain.

“You’ve never been able to before,” he said. “All these years, you’ve never been able to do it.”

“I can do it,” she said.

“You can’t,” he said. “Stop trying. You’ll never leave me. I know you won’t. You don’t want to. That’s the problem. You really don’t want to go.”

He reached for her. Who knows what he intended? To hold her tenderly? To beg forgiveness? To grip her wrist like a handcuff and tell her,
You are mine,
you
have always been mine
?

She had a flash of pushing him, watching him tumble down the stairs. For a moment she thought it had happened, but no—he was still standing there, angry and forlorn. Slowly he let his hand fall to his side. She’d stepped back before he could reach her.

“You won’t go,” he said. Strangely, he said it sadly.

He was right. She knew he was right.

But not long after that he died.

Shall we continue with your story where we left off? he says.

I’ve forgotten just where that was, I say. This is not quite true, but I wish to see if he has really been listening to me, or just pretending to.

—M
ARGARET
A
TWOOD,
A
LIAS
G
RACE

O
nce upon a
time there were two girls. One was named Marilyn Kay, but everybody called her Kay, and the other was named Margaret Jean Riley, but they called her Maggie Jean. They were young girls, nurses. It was wartime, and the posters said someone needed them. When they got to the war, it wasn’t quite what they’d expected. When is war ever quite what you expect? For months they’d been getting ready. Basic training in North Carolina, field school in England, even sleeping in their bedrolls in mud near the channel—all this had taught them next to nothing about what would happen to them.

All their lives they had known things, Kay and Maggie Jean. They understood each other, the two of them, because many of the things they’d known were the same. When they were children they knew their mothers loved them and were reasonably sure their fathers did too. They knew their sisters didn’t like them much but in certain moods could be fine playfellows. They knew what they read in books. They knew they were smart. They knew their multiplication tables. And then when they were student nurses they knew such a host of things. Even before they’d learned how to insert an IV they knew what time they had to be up in the morning, what time they had to be back at the dorm, what chapters they had to study for the next day. After they found jobs they knew their patients’ names, what their vitals had been the day before, what meds they’d been given, even what they’d had to eat. It was all right there on the chart. In basic training they knew what bed they were going to sleep in that night. In England they knew not to say
bum
and what was meant by
biscuit
and where they could find the pub.

Then they got to the war. They got to the war, Jennifer.

This is how it is when you keep moving from the ordinary to the extraordinary and back again: the world expands to include a fleet of ships; a coastline; the sky, black with planes; and then contracts to the wet heat of your clothing, the taste of salt water in your mouth, and later the routines of helmet baths, amputations, waking to the whoosh and smash of shells, and all of that is ordinary, ordinary. The very ordinariness of it is the strangest thing you could have imagined.

I suppose the idea with training for what you cannot imagine is that when nothing else holds, when the world becomes a place you’ve never seen before, that training will keep you moving. Certainly we’d never practiced clambering down the side of a ship on a net, but we’d had plenty of practice in doing what we were told. The net must have swayed a little with the weight and movement of other bodies, but I don’t remember fearing I would fall. I remember I kept my eyes on the men still on the ship, and they grew smaller and smaller to me, as I must have done to them.

At the bottom I got in a smaller boat, a landing craft, and Kay was in there, too, and a few of the other nurses. I kept my eye on Kay. The night before, during the crossing, she’d fallen from a top bunk and done an injury to her back. She’d made me promise not to tell anyone. She was afraid the chief nurse would have her checked out, find some reason she wasn’t in shape to go on. The other girls in the cabin—Ada Dawson, Nina Hagenston—had been asleep, and when the noise woke Nina, Kay claimed she’d just dropped her helmet. Lucky it was Nina who woke, as she wasn’t the type to ask questions, such as what Kay was doing splayed out on the floor. I was sure she’d pulled something, or at least bruised herself badly, and that carrying all the weight of our equipment must have been twice as hard for her as it was for me. But she gave no sign that anything was wrong.

When we got near the beach they lowered the ramp on the front of the landing craft and we walked into the water. I had never been so hot, hunching through the water to the shore. It was like a steam bath inside my gas-impregnable clothing, and I was so weighted down with blanket and tent, gas mask and canteen, first aid kit and shovel that once I got out of the boat I couldn’t stand up straight. The equipment was arranged very carefully—you had to do it just so to make it fit—and it was all very well as long as you kept your feet but if I’d fallen on my back I would’ve been lodged there like a beetle. When I think about it now, I don’t know how I made it down the net in the first place with all that stuff hung all over me. Someone told me to go and I went, and that is what it is to be in the army, and sometimes just what it is to be alive.

What a mess that beach was, the sand churned up by feet and tires, strewn with vehicles and equipment, crisscrossed with lines of soldiers. If there had ever been anything beautiful about the spot it was gone, and if there would be anything beautiful again I couldn’t imagine it. Ahead of us up the hill we could see the concrete bunkers the Germans had built, squat and unlovely even if you hadn’t known how deadly they were. Behind us in the water the massive bodies of the ships.

Though the front line was only a few miles into France, the beach itself was safe. We walked up it and over the dunes with less fear than we’d had on our infiltration course way back in basic training. Only thirty-eight days before men had been slaughtered in that place by the thousands.

Dead bodies? No, there were no dead bodies. I just said this was D-Day plus thirty-eight. We didn’t wade through the floating dead, as I’ve read the nurses did who got there first. Do you wish I had? Would that be a better story? That’s not much of a thing to wish on someone. What I saw over there had horrors enough.

What I remember is that we hit the beach and had to climb a hill—
that
I remember well because it was so difficult. It was very hot. The foxholes were already there when we got to the top—I never had to dig a foxhole the whole time, after all the practice we had in basic training—and we slept in them that night and damn near froze to death. “Holy cow,” Kay said beside me when we flopped down at the top of the hill, and I laughed, though not because anything was particularly funny. For twenty-four years my life had been so small I could carry it in my pocket. Here I was in France, part of a thing so large it was beyond imagining. I was at war.

I’ve slept in a foxhole. I’ve sat on a hill in the dark and watched the tracer bullets go by. I say these things with a certain degree of amazement. Looking back it seems like someone else’s life.

I woke up just before dawn. I thought I’d heard something—a shell, an explosion—but now all was quiet. I’d slept balled up so tightly I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to straighten my limbs out again. I wanted badly to try—suddenly my whole body seemed beset with an unbearable cramping—but what if I really had heard something? I waited. And waited. Maybe I’d dreamed it. I gave in to the impulse to stand and all the bones in my body popped and cracked at once. I looked down over the beach. In the early light it looked like a graveyard, like all the vehicles had been abandoned to rust, like all the men were dead. I knew the fighting was ahead of us, now, but gazing at that beach, imagining what it had looked like a month ago, it seemed like everything that was going to happen already had.

On the other side of me a nurse named Evelyn was fumbling endlessly in her pack, muttering, “I know it’s in here, somewhere, or did I put it in the—” She cut herself off with an “Aha!” and turned to me in triumph to display a compact and a lipstick. “Found ’em,” she said. She flipped the compact open, studied her face in its mirror, sighed, and applied her lipstick with a steady hand.

People used to like to give me books about the war, imagining, I suppose, that I wanted to relive it, and in one of them I read about a nurse who used to let the soldiers watch her put her lipstick on. She said, “It reminded them of their mothers.” I thought, Yeah, sure, that’s what it reminded them of. I mean, were we really that innocent? Or were we just pretending? It’s hard to look back on that time without imprinting on it everything I know now. I can’t recollect it in what may have been its original purity.

In the foxhole beside me, Kay stirred, and then let out a startled sound—a hurt sound.

“Kay?” I whispered.

She didn’t reply for a moment. I couldn’t see her face. I could hear her breathing, which sounded to me like the breathing of someone trying not to acknowledge pain. “Good morning,” she whispered back.

“You’re pretty banged up, aren’t you,” I said.

“Maggie Jean,” she said. She got to her feet so that she could look down at me. “Don’t ever say anything like that again.” She studied my face, not smiling. “Don’t say anything like that to anyone.”

I was hurt, I have to say. She didn’t trust me. She thought I might go to the chief nurse about her. Maybe it was silly of me to be affronted. But I was affronted nevertheless, and I turned away so I wouldn’t have to look at her.

That was a strange day. We spent hours waiting for transportation. Twice the chief nurse made us all line up and do calisthenics. Kay stood at the back and did her best to fake it, waving her arms in a feeble imitation of jumping jacks. I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed, and then made myself stop looking. She struggled on, and I did my best not to watch her, not to appear concerned. I jumped and kicked and swung my arms from side to side, and the chief nurse shouted out, “One, two, one, two,” in her stentorian voice, and down on the beach a few people stared up at us and wondered what the hell was going on.

When we weren’t busy jumping around like lunatics, we sat and sat. I couldn’t absorb the reality of anything outside each moment. I was hot. The clothes I’d been wearing for three days were stiff with dried sweat and salt water. I was hungry, and then we broke out the K rations, and the crackers were tasteless, the fruit bar so tough and chewy I had to work my jaw over it like a cow. The water I washed it all down with had a sharp chemical taste from the purification tablets. The other girls were sweetening the water with the lemon crystals that came in envelopes in the ration boxes, so I did that, too. What was real—a sip from a canteen of sweet, warm water, the taste of lemon mixed with chlorine, the way the chlorine lingered in my mouth.