“Kay took that,” I said. Climb up there, she’d said, and when I looked around hesitantly, Come on. Come on, Maggie Jean. Be a good soldier and do what you’re told.
From England, we crossed the channel to France. “Pretty dress,” she said, pointing to a picture of me in a frock and Kay in her coveralls, posing in a wheat field.
“Oh!” I said. “That’s a funny story. This dress I’d ordered before I went overseas found me in France. Red silk. Shame it’s not a color photo. It looked so strange against all that olive drab. Too much. Like Gatsby with his silk shirts.”
“But you tried it on.”
“I wasn’t going to,” I said. “It was from my old life. But Kay insisted. Then we all danced around the field while someone sang.”
“Kay sounds like fun,” she said, and I agreed that she was fun, rather than explain how inadequate that word is for all Kay was to me then: friend, sister, fellow traveler, the one who put her arms around me when I cried, the source of comfort and support. Jennifer turned a page and then another while I wasn’t paying attention, and then I looked down and saw my first shots of Germany, and I began to find it harder to breathe. I said, “Are we really going to sit here looking at this all day?”
She looked startled. She withdrew her hand. “No,” she said.
I reached over and shut the scrapbook, keeping my eyes on it so I wouldn’t have to see her face. Did she think I was overcome by sorrow? In truth I don’t know what it was that overcame me. Nothing so simple as sorrow. “I suppose you’re going to leave now,” I said.
“I can,” she said. “Are you tired?”
“I wanted to talk, but we were going too fast. You said you wanted to start at the beginning.”
“I—” Two lines appeared between Jennifer’s brows. Was that worry or confusion I saw?
“You said I should tell my stories.”
She took a breath. The lines deepened. “I thought you wanted to leave a record of yourself.”
“I said I hadn’t. Hadn’t is different from wanted to.” She wasn’t looking at me, Miss Jennifer, but in the direction of the door. Well, go on then, I thought. Nothing’s keeping you here.
She said quietly, “I still think you should tell your stories.”
“Why would I want to?” I demanded.
“I don’t know why,” she said. “I can just tell that you do.”
“I don’t have anything to unburden,” I said. “I don’t have anything to confess.” I’ll admit I likely said these things with a rude disdain, but I was unprepared for her to turn suddenly, a striking cat, to utter with some ferocity, “I didn’t say you did.”
Oh, that was interesting. And frightening, too. I will tell the truth—she’d frightened me. That whip-crack of anger in her voice! The uneasy feeling it gave me must have been what I’m only now putting in words: she is not actually calm. I have been fooled. Her calm is the mask her rage wears. I don’t cower, not I, so I said, “You implied it.”
She smoothed her mask. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
There was a silence of some length. Finally I said, “Maybe I do want to.” I said this somewhat haltingly. Because it was the truth or because it was a lie? Both. Because it was both.
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” she said wearily. “But I’m happy to listen to whatever you want to tell.”
“I will keep that in mind.” I’d inadvertently returned to a high-handed tone, and I was sorry, so I added, “I know I said I don’t need a companion.”
“Right.”
“I don’t need help to take care of myself.”
She nodded.
“But what about this, this record? Maybe I need help with this.”
“What kind of help?”
“Someone to ask me questions, to help me organize. I forget things now, you know. I get scattered. I might need someone to keep me on course, to write it all down. For my grandniece. For Lucy. She says she’s interested in my stories.”
She considered. “I could do that. Yes.”
“You’re willing to be my audience.”
“I could do that,” she said again.
I want to be alone. I don’t want to be alone. My days pop like bubbles. There is no one to remember the things that have happened to me. I said, “I’d pay you, of course.”
“No, no,” she said. “You wouldn’t have to.”
I’d like to think she meant that. It would be nice to believe she enjoys my company, that she actually wants to hear the tales of my adventurous youth. “I insist. I couldn’t ask you to volunteer. What do you think would be a reasonable rate?” She hesitated. I pressed my advantage. “One hundred dollars an hour?”
Eagerness flashed in her face, but she suppressed it. “No, really,” she said.
“Is that not enough?”
“Of course it’s enough,” she said, an edge in her voice. She softened that edge and added, “It’s more than enough.”