“All right, then,” I said. And then, out of a fear I had betrayed my own eagerness, I said, “I’ll want a weekly invoice.”
“You’ll get one,” she said. I heard that edge again. She is trying so hard to be sweet to me, because I’m paying her, because I’m old, but she needn’t make the effort for me. I don’t require sweetness. As she proved today, people are much more interesting when they have a bit of a bite.
We agreed that she’ll come Monday morning. First a massage, then we’ll embark on our project. Our oral history.
Unburden, I said. Confess. Those are the words I chose.
Please Like Me
It’s very expensive to see fish in Chattanooga. Jennifer feels a queasy panic as she shells out the money for aquarium tickets, Megan cheerfully suggesting she pay the $75 more it would take to get a membership. So far Margaret is the only client her flyers have yielded. She’s checked a couple of places where she hung them and found only three phone-number strips torn away. She doesn’t want to need Margaret, but Margaret’s all she’s got. One hundred dollars an hour to listen to war stories? Just how much money does Margaret have? Enough to feel entitled to that angry Queen Elizabeth air.
It surprises Jennifer that Margaret can still make her voice that loud, still achieve that high-ranking-officer note of presumed acquiescence. Imagine what it was like to work for her. Those nurses must have stood at attention. She’d rather not think about Margaret, and finds that she keeps doing so anyway, her mind returning to what she feels when she puts her hands on the old lady: anger and grief, yes, and also guilt and loneliness. She can’t exactly identify the order in which those emotions appear, like a geologist working through layers of rock. What she does is not as scientific as that. But she does wonder, with Margaret on her table, what that order is, and whether the emotion at the bottom is the root of all the others, or the one Margaret most wishes to conceal. If it’s the former, Jennifer would guess guilt. If the latter, loneliness.
“I’m screwed,” Megan says as they enter the fluorescent dimness of the fish tanks. She says this cheerfully, too, because that’s how she says most everything. She’s talking about how behind she is on her grading. It’s a Sunday. Tomorrow Jennifer starts listening to Margaret’s stories, something she anticipates with a potent mix of curiosity and dread. She feels a little screwed herself. Milo and Ben are a few paces ahead, shouting whoa! at the belly of a gliding manta ray. “I have a conference paper, too.” Megan groans. “I’m just so screwed!”
“Sebastian’s at work?” Jennifer asks.
Megan looks puzzled. “No,” she says. “Why?”
“I just assumed.”
Megan grasps her meaning. “He had a wedding yesterday,” she says. “He really needed time to decompress.”
“Oh, okay.”
“And I love doing stuff like this with Ben. I love coming here. I’d rather be doing this than writing my paper. Or, God knows, grading.”
Jennifer nods. She hasn’t yet met this decompressing Sebastian. Sebastian! Who in America, in Tennessee, is named Sebastian? Between his name and the sympathetic talk of his artistic exhaustion Jennifer might imagine him tall and wan, pressing the back of his hand to his forehead, but she’s seen pictures and knows he’s short and well built with large lovely eyes in a squarely handsome face, and strangely incongruous red hair that he’s in the process of losing. Watch out for the men with beautiful eyes, she thinks. Take a good long look into those eyes! You will never be enough for all the longing there. Can’t you see the inextricability of devotion and betrayal, of sin and apology?
But Jennifer’s own history has left her jaded, seeing struggle where likely none exists. Megan’s life is attractive and well organized, if you set aside the nagging question of a second child.
Milo pauses in front of the jellyfish and Jennifer stops beside him. Ben runs on ahead, Megan chasing after, calling, “Slow down!” The jellyfish pulse beautifully and stupidly in their tank. “Look, Mom,” Milo says.
She doesn’t want him to call her Mom. She’d like to stay Mommy a little longer. “Pretty, aren’t they,” she says.
Megan reappears, holding Ben by the hand. “What’s interesting about jellyfish,” she says, “is that they look so pretty in here, but if you see them near you in the ocean they just look terrifying.” She leans close to the tank. “Painful trumps pretty. Though maybe not always. My brother’s dating life is evidence of that.”
“What do they do to you?” Milo asks.
“They sting you,” Ben tells him importantly. “They sting you to death.”
Megan laughs. “Not to death.” She looks at Jennifer. “Or am I wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Jennifer says. She turns to Ben. “I’ve been stung and I’m not dead.”
Ben looks her up and down. “Where’d they sting you?”
“On my leg,” she says. “Swimming in the ocean.”
“Did you cry?” Milo asks.