The New Neighbor (27 page)

She has good memories from high school. She and her father chase Milo in the backyard. He’s wearing a little yellow sweater. He laughs his delighted baby laugh. Her father catches him and throws him in the air and Milo screams with joyful terror, and then her mother pokes her head outside and says, “Be careful,” and they all stand very still, like deer, until she goes back inside. “Baby catch!” her father says, and tosses Milo to Zoe, and she catches him with a hand on either side of his solid little torso and he looks at her with a face that says yes yes yes, a face full of trusting happiness, and she kisses him on his little nose and then turns him around and tosses him back to her father.

But this is stupid, this has always been stupid. Listing her memories, marking off her life. It’s all a lot of blah blah blah. She did this, she did that. Time progressed, like it does.

And then she walked into a room in search of a hairbrush and found her father dead.

L
ast night I
had a dream that I’d gone to an enormous building, where all the surfaces were shiny, the floors were enormous conveyer belts, and everywhere I went someone gave me exactly what I wanted. I carried a cup that was repeatedly filled with silver liquid, like mercury.

I don’t know what this means. Maybe that’s my odd little notion of heaven. It was one of those dreams so vivid they compete with actual events in your memory, insisting on their realness. I look down and feel faintly surprised not to see that cup of mercury in my hands.

An actual memory: When I was small I spent some weeks quarantined in my room, sick with a fever. In the morning I listened as my father left the house and at night I waited to hear him return. My mother said that after I got better I started telling everyone, “I go to work someday,” which, depending on your point of view, was either a shocking or an amusing thing to hear a little girl say. You might wonder if I became a nurse because I’d once been ill, but there’s no need to apply psychology to that particular decision. There weren’t many careers open to women back then.

The reason I didn’t join the army right out of school is because my father kept telling me to wait. He’d been in the First World War. There was a framed picture of him on his study wall, shaking hands with some general, and the look on his face, of joy and admiration, was not one I ever saw in person. I told him I wanted to enlist long before I did it.
Wait
, he said,
wait
. He wrote,
This war is going to last a long time
. He said, and he was right, that I didn’t have the remotest idea what it was going to be like. I was so innocent. Or dumb. I was still in nursing school then, and it really was like a convent. All you did was you got up and you worked and then you went back to the dormitory and you had to study, because you had classes, and then you went to bed. You didn’t go on vacation, take trips, go abroad. You didn’t do any of that stuff, because you didn’t have any money, but it didn’t matter because what did you know of another way of life? We scrubbed furniture and soaked linen. We had two weeks’ annual vacation, and other than that not a single day off in three years. We had to get written permission to be out past ten o’clock. We got five dollars a month.

When I graduated, they kept me on at Vanderbilt. My friend Grace and I rented a furnished apartment with two other girls. It was so small Grace and I had to share a bed, and we took turns sleeping on the lumpy side. It’s funny to think about people who were once the same as you. Grace stayed stateside. While I was overseas she got married and moved to Montana, where all manner of things doubtless happened to her. At Vanderbilt, I worked on the medical ward, although I would rather have been on the surgical one, where Grace was. There, nurses shaved skin for surgery, prepared recovery beds, changed dressings, wished people well and forgot their names. It felt like progress. People on the medical ward had diseases, cancer and pneumonia, and so many of them just wasted away.

Every day on the way to work I saw the same recruitment poster, with a nurse gazing down at her patient like she was about to kiss him, and lettering that said,
SAVE HIS LIFE AND FIND YOUR OWN—BE A NURSE.
I didn’t feel like I was saving anybody’s life. Maybe good nursing care did save the pneumonia patients, like the head nurse said, but I always felt like their recovery had more to do with natural resilience, and the healing properties of time. Ever since Pearl Harbor, I’d been living in one of those dreams where you know you’re supposed to be somewhere but you just can’t get there and time speeds by while you stand at the mirror, trying to pin up your hair. Every time I got on the bus to go to work, especially if I was late and had to dash for it and climb aboard disheveled with my cap bag swinging in my hand, and all those people looked at me, I seemed to hear what they were thinking: there I was, still in Nashville, unable to even make a bus on time, when I should have been at war.

Then one day in 1944 I stumbled off a train into the near dawn of Fayetteville, North Carolina. The platform was deserted and dark, my bag was heavy, I was supposed to get to Fort Bragg. I’d expected someone to be there to meet me, but no one was. I’d expected that person to tell me where to go. I considered sitting down on my bag and crying, until I imagined the look my father would give me. So I didn’t cry, I didn’t wait for someone to show up to rescue me. I dragged my bag across the street to the Fayetteville Hotel, a tall building with a single dim light in the window, and pushed through the lobby door. And there she was, Marilyn Kay, my fellow soldier. Waiting for me.

Lucy called yesterday. Fairly early in the morning, considering she’s on California time.

“Hello, darling,” I said, so pleased to hear her voice.

“Hi, Margaret,” she said. “How are you?” There was a hitch in her tone, a slight formality, that told me what I didn’t want to know. She could have hung up without another word and I would’ve known she wasn’t coming. We had to play out the conversation anyway, because that is what people do.

“How are you?” she asked.

“I’m lonely,” I said.

“Oh, Margaret, I know, I’m sorry,” she said. “And I can’t come see you any time soon, and I’m so so sorry about that. I really wish I could.”

She sounded weary and sad about it, and I believed she was. I was angry at her anyway. “All right,” I said.

“Is there any chance you could come out here?”

“It’s been a long time since I traveled.”

“I know.”

Then we both were silent. Maybe I could go out there—clear it with my doctor, pack my bags. The thought is terrifying. I was upset that she’d suggested it. I don’t like to be reminded that I’ve lost my taste for adventure.

“I really would like to see you,” she said. “I love you, you know.”

“That’s easy to say,” I said, though I of all people know it isn’t. “If you really loved me, you’d come.” Then I hung up.

Don’t think I report any of this with pride.

As for Jennifer, she meant what she said: no more unburdening. She’s come three times since she made that decree, and every time I thought she might relent, but she didn’t, and trying to think how to compel her I was so tense and unhappy under her hands that I felt worse after the massage than I had before. So I said we’d take a break from that, too. Instead of looking sorry she said, “All right,” and told me to call her if I changed my mind.

I have thought ever since about changing my mind.

It is easier to be alone when you’ve been a long time used to it. When you’ve forgotten the other possibility. But I don’t want her to come if she doesn’t want to come. That has been my position all along. The paper with Zoe’s number is still right here on the desk. I took the paper from Jennifer’s house even though she might’ve noticed it missing. Perhaps I wanted her to notice. But I shouldn’t call. I know I shouldn’t call.

I’m lonely
, I said to Lucy. It strikes me that I’ve never said that aloud before. How very sad it is to be honest only when I want to hurt someone.

I don’t know
why I did it. I tried to ignore the idea. I wrote down that I shouldn’t do it, like that would vanquish the urge. I made some tea and drank it. I made many valiant efforts to read my mystery. But the mystery I really want to solve is not in the pages of that book. I want to know whatever it is Zoe knows. That must be why I dialed the number, pressing each big button on my old phone slowly, as if to give myself time to change my mind. One ring, then two, and the girl answered. Her hello was abrupt, clipped, reluctant. Or did it just sound that way to me? At any rate, whatever I might have said snagged on its way out. I breathed into the phone, and then I hung up. I sat for a moment with my hand on my heart, like a startled old lady on a TV show. When the phone rang shrilly a moment or two later, I’m glad no one was there to see me jump. I answered. I tried to say hello, but I hadn’t spoken a word aloud since I talked to Lucy yesterday, and the sound emerged a whisper.

“Hello?” an answering voice said. The girl’s voice, of course. I can’t really say more about it than that—not the sound of it, not her tone as she said the word—because I noticed little beyond my own confusion. “Is someone there?”

I didn’t speak, but neither did I hang up.

“Who is this?” the girl, Zoe, asked. “The least you could do is say something.”

I hung up.

Sometimes I forget the basic facts of what the world is now. Of course I know that there is no longer such a thing as an anonymous phone call. Of course she’d seen my number on her telephone. I should have anticipated all that. But many things have been true and then no longer true in the years that I’ve been alive. The years and years, the many, many years. Surely it’s no wonder I sometimes forget.

She called back. I didn’t answer. My answering machine picked up—a robotic voice, announcing my number. A beep. Her voice: “Pick up.” A silence. Then: “I just got a call from this number. Is anyone there?”

“Yes,” I said aloud to the machine.

There was a long, whirring silence. Then she said, “Mom? Is that you? I don’t know why you would call me if you didn’t want to talk to me.” Then she hung up.

Dear girl, I don’t know why either.

I thought that would be the end of it. But she called again. This time she didn’t wait for the machine but hung up midring. Silence. The clock ticktocking. Then she called again. This has gone on ever since. The phone is a live creature. I have woken a beast.

Now it rings again. The persistence of this girl, the utterly terrifying persistence. Is it anger or desperation that drives her to insist again and again on my attention? If I were indeed her mother, and if I were to answer, what would she want me to say?

Why did I call her? I’d be hard-pressed to explain my behavior, even if you put me on the witness stand and I swore to tell the truth. Which I’d take seriously, as my civic duty, and not because I think there is a God to help me.

We all want
to satisfy our curiosity, and the little voice that tells us it’s wrong to peep and pry is one trained into us from childhood, and nothing natural about it. We will all satisfy our curiosity when we can, which is any time we think no one will catch us.

The phone rang
for the last time at midnight, but I can’t sleep. I just lie here, waiting for it to come again and break the silence.

S
uspended animation. That
was her condition. And then the phone call woke her up. It’s not particularly rational to feel that way, Zoe knows that. And it certainly wasn’t rational to call back so many times. Sometimes Zoe is glad she has no friends, as she’d hate for anyone to be paying attention to some of the shit she does. It could’ve been a wrong number. But then wouldn’t the person have just said so when she called back? Instead of breathing in a frightened way and refusing to speak? There was too much weirdness for a simple mistake. Also in favor of Zoe’s theory is the pure clarifying conviction she feels. In the grip of it she couldn’t stop herself from calling again and again.

There you have it, folks. Zoe’s private, personal craziness, from which she’s spared you, her resolute unfriendliness a kind of martyrdom. Even without evidence, she is certain that it was her mother who called. Her mother has never tried to contact her before, not since Zoe moved in with her grandmother in the wake of her father’s death. After Zoe went to the police, she heard nothing from her mother. No accusations, no self-defense. No apologies. She saw her only the time when she and her grandmother came by to see Milo. Then her mother and Milo vanished.

But now: a phone call. And a refusal to speak, which must be proof of guilt, or if not that then some other strong emotion. An irresistible longing. An unvanquishable loneliness. Proof of something her mother feels. Proof that her mother feels something. She realizes now that this is what she’s been waiting for.

She has dance class today. An exercise class is among the college requirements, and she thought she might as well take something she could manage to pass fairly easily.
Do the minimum
has been her philosophy, but today she flings herself into every kick and turn. It feels good, she has to admit. To let her movement meet the music, to get those kicks up high, to sweat. Halfway through the class she notes the teacher watching her with barely repressed astonishment. But she pays no attention. She is not dancing for the teacher. She is just dancing.

After class the teacher comes up to her and says, “Zoe, I feel like I’ve never seen you before.”

“I’ve been here.”

“No, you haven’t.”

Zoe can’t really argue with this. “Well,” she says.

“You have enormous natural ability. Has anyone ever told you that?”

Zoe shrugs. Yes, they have, but it seems obnoxious to say so.

“And this is your first class? It’s a shame you didn’t start training earlier.”

“I danced when I was little. It’s just been a long time.”

“Well, those fundamentals don’t go away. You must have had good teachers.”