“Your age,” Dr. Bell said mildly. She doesn’t react, that doctor. She and Jennifer Young must have gone to the same acting school. What a pleasure it would be to really piss somebody off, just to see my existence fully register on someone else’s face.
Massage is like a drug, and a heavy dose of it. I can’t keep myself present on the table, or fight the rolling fog of calm and goodwill her poking and prodding induces. I didn’t really try today, honestly. How often do I get to forget my body? My body is too much with me. “Late and soon,” as Wordsworth has it, though of course he’s complaining about the world. “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” etc. Thanks to Mrs. Smith, my tenth-grade English teacher, I still have that poem memorized. But Wordsworth and I do not agree on our difficulties. The world I can more or less get away from, as I think I’ve proven, and there’s so much of nature around me I’d be hard-pressed to long for more. Sometimes I wish the birds would shut the hell up. It’s not the world I can’t escape but my body. Not its demands so much at this stage, but its complaints and limitations. Its resistance and its pain.
After today’s massage, I came back to myself more quickly than I did after the first two, which I regretted. Perhaps massage, like a drug, is something you get used to. I think she knows, already, that I like her to sit for a few moments afterward, or perhaps this is something she does with all her elderly clients, knowing that part of what they pay for is a little bit of company. It’s her routine to give you a glass of water and ask how you’re feeling and remind you to take it easy, as though it were even possible for a person my age to take it hard. Today I was determined not to let her leave at the conclusion of all that. In anticipation of my own dazed state, I’d prepared a question that would keep her, and I asked it, feeling pleased that I hadn’t let the question slip away when I floated off the table into memory and dream. “What do you think of life here?” That was the question. Not a yes-or-no, you see.
“It’s peaceful,” she said. “I love living on the water, even if it’s just a pond.”
“You don’t find it boring?” I asked. “Or lonely?”
“Lonely?” She shook her head. “l don’t like people,” she said. She smiled immediately afterward, as if this were a joke, but it struck me as the truest thing she’d said to me so far.
“What about your little boy?”
“Well, I do like him,” she said.
“No, does he like it here? Does he like the woods?”
“The woods? We haven’t done a lot of exploring there. We’ve been to all the playgrounds. I guess I’m warming up to the idea of the woods.”
“Are you frightened of them?”
“Frightened?” She has a habit of repeating part of your question. Perhaps this is a way of giving herself time to consider her answer. She exhaled, wearing a small frown. “Milo’s not very careful with his body yet.”
“He’s too young to value it,” I said.
“Yes.” She sighed. “I worry about the pond. I lock the doors at night so he can’t slip out. But if I could I’d fence it off.” She looks out toward my deck, the water beyond it. “Sometimes I think I shouldn’t have rented that place.”
I was delighted by this confession—not because of its substance, but because it was personal information offered without my asking. I debated whether to ask why, in that case, she’d chosen the house. She is so careful, so guarded. There are locked doors in conversation with her, and no way to tell when you’re approaching one. Before I could decide she changed the subject. “But it’s a beautiful place,” she said. “An easy place to be.”
To be what? I wanted to ask. “And you like the house?”
“It’s quirky, but we like it.”
“I’ve been curious about it,” I said, “living across the pond from it all these years. I knew the woman who lived there before you.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, her name was Barbara. We got along. I don’t know why we never came to be better friends.”
“Mmmm,” she said.
I pressed on, perhaps too forcefully. “I’ve never seen the inside,” I said. “Have you changed it much?”
“Not really,” she said. “Not yet. We’ve only been here a month.”
I waited a beat, but nothing else was forthcoming—by which I mean, no invitation to tea. “I wish Barbara and I had thought to visit. We just stuck to waving at each other across the water. It does seem a shame.”
“But maybe it isn’t,” she said. “Maybe you liked each other better with the pond between you.”
I didn’t want to agree with that. There was a silence, and she shifted forward in her chair, a prelude to departure. I still wasn’t ready for her to go. “I’ve lived here twenty years,” I said. “Before I retired I was the vice president of a hospital in Nashville.”
“Oh?” she asked, politely, holding still.
“I bet you wouldn’t have guessed that. People don’t assume a woman my age had a career, but I did. I kept on working after the war. I went back to school for my doctorate. I was head of all the nurses at the hospital.”