When you live alone your bedroom becomes a sacred space. As if to stop her from insisting, I said, “The guest room,” and pointed to the hallway off the right side of the living room. She obediently went that way. “Be right back!” she called out in a cheerful voice that didn’t suit her.
I eased myself into one of my mother’s uncomfortable straight-backed chairs. When I’m alone I sit in my armchair and put my feet up on the ottoman, but it takes me a little while to get back up from that position, and the maneuvering involved is not something I’d care to perform in front of a witness. The armchair did not belong to my parents, unlike most of the furniture in the house. When my parents died in 1982, first one, then the other, I inherited many things—the antique couch with its carved crown and spiral arms, the looming, majestic sideboard in the dining room. At the time I still lived in Nashville, in a house fully furnished by my own things. I bought this house more or less to contain their furniture, and when I moved into it, selling my furniture and keeping theirs seemed the easiest choice. But my parents owned heavy, dark pieces, mournful and grand, and so my house never seems to have enough light in it, despite the skylight I had installed in the living room.
When she reemerged she had divested herself of everything but a folder and a pen. She gave me a professional smile and came over to sit in the straight-backed chair next to mine. I realize now that I was expecting her to pay me some polite compliment on the house or its furnishings and that the fact that she didn’t accounted for the slight irritation I felt as she perched beside me with the folder on her knees. The folder, I saw, had my name on it. Maggie Jean Riley, it said. I must have given her that name when she was asking all those questions on the phone—whether I was on medications (of course), whether I’d had a massage before (of course not). She opened the folder and poised her pen over the form inside. “I started filling this out when we talked earlier,” she said, “but some things I like to discuss in person.”
“Wouldn’t you rather work at a table?”
“I’m fine, thank you,” she said, but as she asked me questions about my aches and pains and I answered them she didn’t look fine, awkwardly repositioning form and folder on her knee, the pen pressing too far into the paper. This stubbornness increased my irritation. And why had I called myself Maggie Jean? That hadn’t been my name in many years.
“You can change that to Margaret,” I said, interrupting whatever question she’d been asking.
“I’m sorry, what?” she asked. Her voice so very polite.
I pointed at my name on the folder. “That should say Margaret,” I said. “Not Maggie Jean.”
But you told me Maggie Jean, she should have said. Or, Don’t take that tone with me. She just crossed out the name, neat as you please, and wrote Margaret in small letters above it. Why do people let me speak to them so rudely? If they’d let me get away with less, I might think what I said mattered more. A few years ago one of my grandnieces tried her hand at my dead sister’s recipe for strawberry-rhubarb pie. I was allowed only one bite before she called for my verdict. “I’ve had better,” I said. No one slapped me, or snatched the pie away, as I deserved. They laughed.
I insisted on paying Jennifer Young up front, even though she said people usually did it after. I wouldn’t let her bring me my checkbook either. I made her watch me cane into the study to get it and cane my way back once I had it. So excruciatingly slow! When she could have popped there and back with time to grab a smoke besides. When you’re young you have to invent tasks to fill the time, while I can kill an hour just making myself some tea.