Company

Hollis's sister came up on the second Friday, and it is a great help, and I want to be honest about that, because Della is good to me and I am going to be unkind about her in a page or two and I would like the record to show the good part first.

She came for the summer, the season the family calendar calls wedding season, because the cousins marry between June and September and Della is the one who goes to all of them, and because she took the year off from a job she was good at in order to be useful, and because when Hollis calls she comes, and she never asks him why.

She is a wonderful housekeeper and hopes for no better profession, and I verily believe she thinks it was the writing that made me sick. She tidies the notebook when she finds it, and puts a coaster under it, and once, memorably, she asked me whether I had considered that "the creative thing" might be part of the whole problem.

But I can write when she is out, and from up here I can see her a long way off, down the road, before she is anywhere near the house. One window commands the road, a lovely shaded winding road, and one looks off over the fields.

There is a spot in the pattern with a sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, because you can only see it in certain lights and not clearly even then. But in the places where the paper is not faded, and where the sun comes in at exactly the right angle, I can see a strange provokingly formless figure that seems to sulk along behind the silly, conspicuous front design.

There is Della on the stairs.

The visitors came on the Thursday. Dov is my cousin and talks for a living, so he talked; Ines is his wife and reads faces, so she read mine; their children took the house apart one room at a time; and Hollis's mother came up from the city in the second car with a covered dish and a bottle of something for the nerves. I did not lift a finger. Della saw to everything, and Nita had August, and I sat in the good chair on the porch like a woman in a hospital window, waving at people as they came up the steps.

Ines asked me on the second evening, with a plate balanced on her knee, whether I was sleeping, because I looked like a woman who was sleeping. I said that I was sleeping beautifully. Behind her, Della made a small correction with her eyebrows that Ines did not see.

Hollis's mother sat on the arm of my chair and held my wrist the way you hold a wrist when you are really taking a pulse, and said that the lake air had always been good for this family, and that the last woman who stayed in this room had lasted about as long as I have. I asked her what woman. She said, "Oh, before your time, dear," and then Della came in with the coffee, and the mother took her cup and said nothing else about it for the rest of the visit, and talked to me from the other side of the room.

By the third morning I noticed that nobody was sitting in the chairs that face the north wall. Nobody said anything about it. It simply happened, the way water finds its way around a stone.

But it tired me all the same. It tired me so much that on the Monday I could not hold the baby, and I had been able to hold him on the Friday, and I saw Della notice the difference and file it.

Hollis says that if I do not pick up faster he is going to send me to Marbury in the fall.

I do not want to go. I had a friend who was in Priscilla Marbury's hands once, and she said she was exactly like Hollis and Rowan, only more so. Only quieter, and with better furniture, and with a great deal more patience for a woman who is not cooperating.

Besides, it is such an undertaking. An hour from an airport that flies to one city, an intake process, a waiting list, and a version of this summer that lasts five months instead of three.

I do not feel it is worth turning my hand over for anything at the moment. I am getting dreadfully fretful and querulous. I cry at nothing and I cry a great deal of the time.

Of course I do not do it when Hollis is here, or when Della is in the room, or when Nita can hear. Only when I am alone, and I am alone a great deal just now. Hollis is kept in the city very often by serious cases, and Della is good, and lets me alone when she can tell that I want her to.

So I walk a little, in the garden or down that lovely lane, and I sit on the porch under the roses, and I lie down up here a great deal.

I am getting really fond of the room, in spite of the wallpaper.

Perhaps because of the wallpaper.

It dwells in my mind so.