Margaret’s cataract occludes her left eye, and she lets me stay in her mother-in-law suite, though I suspect there never was a mother-in-law. On the walls, one impersonal painting of a horse hangs. Its tail is majestic, flowing as though caught in a zephyr, and I can almost see it lift. I can almost smell the earthy tang of its shit plopping to the ground.
The only rule is give nothing away, so each night I dust and scrub and vacuum Margaret’s mother-in-law suite. I lower my eyes to the sink and peel each strand of hair off the basin and out of the drain. I wash the bowl with bleach. I press my face against the scratchy carpet, seeking out any dead bits of skin left behind by the vacuum. I wear socks and scrub myself raw in the shower. My hairs and fingernail clips are in a jar. I bury the contents of the dust bag in a hole in the yard. I take a cloth and polish all the doorknobs. When I first arrived, I wore black, latex gloves until Margaret saw me and tried to bite my hands and would not stop screaming until I revealed the skin beneath. A small price.
Margaret is different from everyone else. Margaret doesn’t ask questions she doesn’t want answered. Margaret doesn’t ask questions at all. When she looks at my face, she sees an opal. Each time we see each other, she christens me with a new name. What a gift it is to finally be seen.
I don’t pay rent to Margaret. Her money erupts from some invisible, eternal source. She gives Isabelle cash for groceries and thanks Kate upon their return then she invites Anna to sit down for lunch. I am not ungrateful. I clean Margaret’s house, too. Everything shines and smells of almonds and incontinence. Margaret needs a caretaker, a crystalline fact found inside the endless loops of her conversations. Sometimes, she bestows upon me a name that allows me to change her out of her piss-soaked night gowns, but, more often, she dances down the halls with her arms wrapped around no one, perfuming the air with the scent of ammonia.
Perhaps I should be ashamed, but, before, Margaret was alone, and now she has so many.
Sometimes Margaret does not answer to Margaret, but she does answer to Hera, Elizabeth, Catherine, Cleopatra. Margaret knows something I don’t, and I worship her sagging skin and cloudy eye. She pats my hand and calls me Sarah. Martha. Kaylee.
I do what I can for Margaret. I fetch her food and dry cleaning but not her pills because the pharmacist wanted to know who I was, and it was all I could do to stand ossified and not grab him by the shoulders and tell him what a farce it was that anyone thought they could know anyone else, let alone themselves, that most unknowable creature of all, but then he would have asked, “who are you, really?”
Who am I, really? Why put a name on it?
So, I collect Margaret’s pill bottles and read their cures and promises and buy her tinctures and balance chopped up garlic on the tip of her tongue. I think of the pharmacist and I think of all the other people who wake up every single day in the same room in the same house next to the same person. I think of those same people eating the same stale toast and sighing the same sighs in the shower and walking to the same job to do the same thing over and over and over again, and how they call that a life. How they call themselves people.
I want to ask them: don’t they know? Don’t they know you can disappear all your cash from an ATM, buy a train ticket and show up someplace else, give a name that is not yours, say you did things you’d never done before, know things you couldn’t possibly know? Didn’t they know that no one could contradict you in that vast and ever elsewhere? No one could hold you down to the truth when truth was nothing but an agreed-upon hallucination, anyway.
Margaret’s car needs gas. She gives Lisa $100 for it and tells her to pick up a cake from the bakery. “For your birthday, silly,” she says when I ask what the cake is for. “What am I going to do with you, Virginia?”
I drive to the gas station in the town center. People walk the streets alone or in pairs, shoulders hunched. Cars murmur by. A lone crow sits atop a power line. The trees are rust colored. The air is brisk; the breeze bites. Margaret gave me a moth-eaten flannel coat. I think I love her.
A bell announces my entrance. The gas station attendant reads, or pretends to read, a magazine splayed open on the counter. Behind, the television mumbles, near mute. My face is on the screen. The word: anniversary. The word: still. The word: missing. Another photo is beside it. Age progression. It’s not what I look like. The gas station attendant looks over her shoulder.
“Hey,” she says. “That’s you.” Her finger points.
This, again. “No,” I say. “Forty on pump four.”
My face asks, how would you know? It says, tell me who I am, stranger.
In fear, she reveals her teeth. Laughter. She won’t look at me anymore. “I must be mistaken,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
I want to tell her that identity is not skin but a dress, easily removed.
The bell announces my exit.
When I arrive back at Margaret’s house with cake, she asks me what it’s for. I tell her for her birthday, and she claps with delight, a young girl all over again, and invites Helena to sit down for coffee. She eats cake by the fistful, artificial pink frosting smeared across her cheeks, and when she vomits, the puddle is just as pink.