This morning there was no sign of my neighbor, though I sat out on the deck reading longer than usual, hoping to glimpse her again. Her house used to belong to a woman named Barbara. I wouldn’t go so far as to say we were friends, but we waved to each other from our back decks and sometimes we made conversation at the Piggly Wiggly or the post office. She was about my age, and she’d had a professional life, like me, though I can’t recall what it was she did. I know she wasn’t a nurse, because if she had been we would’ve talked shop. At any rate she was funny and I liked her and then I noticed I never saw her anymore, and it turned out she’d died. This was some time ago—a year? Two?—and the house stood empty from that time to this, no one arriving to take the place of my friend until suddenly there she was.
But she—the new one—didn’t appear today. After I gave up waiting, I put down my book and prepared myself to venture out. Though once upon a time I was a sociable person, I find now that I have to steel myself for interaction. I grow impatient with chitchat. I’ve read that as we age we lose our internal censors, which perhaps explains why I find it so difficult now to be polite. Last week a woman in front of me in line showed me a picture of herself on her phone—why she showed me I have no idea, as I gave no indication of interest—and said, “It’s a terrible picture, isn’t it?” I said, “Well, we’re not always as beautiful as we think we are.” She registered the affront, but then she laughed, because I’m a harmlessly cantankerous old lady, I suppose. I would rather she had cursed me. I don’t want to be harmless. Who in the world would want to be that?
My gravel country road takes me to a paved country highway that takes me to town—or town as we understand it here, which is to say one gas station, one bank, one liquor store. I go right for Monteagle, left for Sewanee. Bumping down the road today, I took special note of the mailbox belonging to the house that once belonged to Barbara. It’s just a plain old mailbox. It said 936, just as it always has. I was driving at a crawl already; it wasn’t hard to stop. I sat in the car debating whether the effort of getting out would be worth the result, but in the end curiosity won. It seems I have become a snoop.
I won’t bother to describe how long it took me to inch my way round the car to the mailbox over the treacherous gravel. Of course I’m old and my footing isn’t always steady, but my problem is not my legs and feet, which work as well as can be expected, so much as it is my balance. On occasion I turn too quickly and am suddenly swimming in vertigo. No one can tell me why. So I try not to turn too quickly, and of course I try not to slip. I kept a hand on the car all the way around it, feeling those treacherous pebbles under the soles of my white sneakers. It was a journey, believe me. It was a mighty quest. My reward was a utility bill bearing her name: Jennifer Young.
I drove the rest of the way to the Piggly Wiggly saying Jennifer Young aloud to myself, trying to determine if I’d ever heard the name. Was she a relative of Barbara, someone I’d met many ages ago? Had some gossipy acquaintance seen me at the post office and told me she was moving in? I couldn’t recall. I know so many, many things—the tragic tale of Vivien Leigh, the capitals of all the states, how to find a vein—and yet I can access such an infinitely small portion of what I know. Someday they’ll download our brains into computers, and nothing will be lost. It won’t matter anymore what you’ve managed to remember and what you’ve managed to forget. None of it will matter to me, of course, because I’ll be dead. For me my death is the end of time.
When I got to the grocery store I couldn’t remember what I’d come for, so I poked my way down each aisle and put whatever struck my fancy into my cart. Thanks to the assorted populations of this place, you can avail yourself of pickled pig’s feet or organic preserves in jars with fancy labels. I stick to the middle. Bacon and Smucker’s strawberry jam.
It’s my general policy not to talk to the cashiers. Some of them call me honey, you see, despite being many decades my junior, and the youngest ones chew gum. But today I risked conversation to ask if they—the cashier and the bagger and another cashier one aisle over, who was bored and listening in eager hope of something to interrupt her boredom—knew anything about my neighbor. “Jennifer Young,” one repeated, and the others thoughtfully echoed her, their accents dragging out the vowel. It took them a long time to confess that the name was unfamiliar. They hazarded several guesses before I finally extracted myself. My question must have been the most exciting occurrence of their day. By the time we were done I felt tired and off balance, so I let the bagger help me with the groceries, though I wished I were able to decline.