You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [68]
THAT AFTERNOON SHE hears his voice coming up the stairwell from the front desk. Judith, the nurse, has bought her the Pepperidge Farm cookies she asked for and she’s saved juice from lunch along with two glasses.
Soon, he knocks on the open door. “Hey there, Mrs. Maynard.”
For years Mrs. Johnson has sent along the facility’s information to the high school volunteer program, inviting students to sign up for regular visits with an appropriate resident. Every autumn one or two come, but Elizabeth has never been lucky enough to have someone assigned to her. Until now.
He’s wearing a blue ski jacket she hasn’t seen on him before. His curly brown hair hangs down over the jacket’s high, puffy collar. The centers of his cheeks are red from the cold.
“You’re beautiful,” she says.
He glances back along the corridor, then down at the floor. “That’s cool,” he mutters.
“I got us come cookies. Would you like one?”
He steps into the room, shrugging off his knapsack. She holds the plate up and he takes three Milanos.
“Wow,” he says, “you got a lot of my pictures up here. Did you have all these up last week?”
“I took down some of their dreadful watercolors so I have more room now. I like the portraits. They’re very good.”
“How was your week?” he asks.
Weirdly, the little brochure Ted got when he signed up for the volunteer program said this was the sort of question you weren’t supposed to ask the residents, because usually their weeks did not vary and it was best to focus on positive things. Ted has decided this is a crock of shit and figures this woman has lived through a week as sure as anyone else.
“Oh, it was just riveting,” Elizabeth says with a big smile. “Gladys Stein nearly expired in the midst of a bridge tournament. She was upset with Dickie Minter telling stories about Mussolini.”
He’s learned it’s okay to laugh at this stuff even if he doesn’t get it.
“And the food?” he asks.
“Factory fresh.”
They chuckle together, friends enjoying their joke.
“I kinda had this idea,” Ted says. “I was thinking instead of me drawing today, we could go for a drive. Would you be into that?”
Since her parents died, Elizabeth’s old friend Ginny is the only one who takes her out, down to Plymouth Harbor or for a walk on Duxbury Beach, no more than twice a year.
“That would be wonderful,” she says.
Donning the fur coat and hat her grandmother gave her as a wedding present, she leads Ted down to Mrs. Johnson’s office. There are only voluntary residents at Plymouth Brewster; it is no mental hospital with locked wards, but a place where people come to live structured lives. Elizabeth has never been much trouble to anyone at the facility. As long as they are back before dinner, Mrs. Johnson says, it would be fine.
“I USED TO drive a station wagon like this,” she remarks as they pull onto a highway she has not seen before. “Has this road been here a long time?”
“I guess like, yeah, since before I was born.”
Elizabeth laughs. “Ginny doesn’t want to upset me, you see. They tell her familiarity is a good thing, so she takes me on the old roads. It would make sense if I were senile, I suppose, but really it is quite interesting to see this road.”
Soon they will pave it all, every marsh and fen. The animals will die and we will die with them. How much must be destroyed before people are satisfied?
She is quite an environmentalist for a seventeenth-century woman, Elizabeth thinks, but a hypocrite too, she tries telling herself: remember the diseases you brought, dear, remember the dead natives.
You think you haven’t profited from that? Hester stabs back.
“I was thinking maybe you could help me out with something,” Ted says. Elizabeth looks across the seat at him. His hair is a mess. He hunches forward over the steering wheel, racked with a worry she finds adorable. She is here in the car with him. No slowing paste in the brain. Seconds come one after the other.
“By all means,” she says. “What can I do?”
“Well see, there’s this person—she’s a girl. She goes to my school. And