Dear Life

welcome to rest there.”
    Informing her by some dryness of voice that this is not a park but private property, and that he himself is not a village employee but the owner.
    “I should have asked your permission.”
    “That’s okay.”
    Preoccupied, bending and snipping at a plant that is encroaching on the path.
    “It’s yours, is it? All of it?”
    After a moment’s busyness, “All of it.”
    “I should have known. It’s too imaginative to be public. Too unusual.”
    No answer. She is going to ask him whether he likes to sit here himself, in the evenings. But she better not bother. He doesn’t seem an easy person to be around. One of those who pride themselves, probably, on that very fact. After a moment she will thank him and get up.
    But instead, after a moment he comes and sits down beside her. He speaks just as if a question has been put to him.
    “Actually, I only feel comfortable when I’m doing something that needs attending to,” he says. “If I sit down I have to keep my eyes off everything, or I’ll just see some more work.”
    She should have known right away that he was a man who doesn’t like banter. But still she is curious.
    What was here before?
    Before he made the garden?
    “A knitting factory. All these little places had something like that, you could get away with the starvation wages then. But in time that went under and there was a contractor who thought he was going to turn it into a nursing home. There was some trouble then, the town wouldn’t give him a license, they had some idea there’d be a lot of old people around and make it depressing. So he set fire to it or he knocked it down, I don’t know.”
    He’s not from around here. Even she knows that if he was he’d never talk so openly.
    “I’m not from around here,” he says. “I had a friend who was, though, and when he died I came up just to get rid of the place and go.”
    “Then I got hold of this land cheap because the contractor had left it just a hole in the ground and it was an eyesore.”
    “I’m sorry if I seem inquisitive.”
    “That’s all right. If I don’t feel like explaining something I don’t do it.”
    “I haven’t been here before,” she says. “Of course I haven’t, or I’d have seen this spot. I was walking around looking for something. I thought I could find it better if I parked my car and walked. I was looking for a doctor’s office, actually.”
    She explains about not being sick, just having an appointment tomorrow, and not wanting to be running around inthe morning looking for the place. Then she tells him about parking her car and being surprised that the name of the doctor she wanted was not listed anywhere.
    “I couldn’t look in the phone book either because you know how the phone books and the phone booths have all disappeared now. Or else you find their insides ripped out. I’m beginning to sound quite silly.”
    She tells him the name of the doctor, but he says it doesn’t ring a bell.
    “But I don’t go to doctors.”
    “You’re probably just as smart not to.”
    “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”
    “At any rate, I’d better get back to my car.”
    Standing up when she does, he says he will walk with her.
    “So I won’t get lost?”
    “Not altogether. I always try to stretch my legs this time of the evening. Garden work can leave you cramped.”
    “I’m sure there’s some sensible explanation about this doctor. Do you ever think that there used to be more sensible explanations about things than there are now?”
    He does not answer. Thinking perhaps of the friend who died. The garden perhaps a memorial to the friend who died.
    Instead of being embarrassed now when she has spoken and he has not answered, she feels a freshness, a peace in the conversation.
    They walk along without meeting a soul.
    Soon they reach the main street, with the medical building just a block away. The sight of it makes her feel somewhat less easy, and she does not know why, but after a moment she does. She has an absurd but alarming notion that the sight of the medical building has provoked. Whatif the right name, the name she said she could not find, has been waiting there all along. She moves more quickly, she finds that she is shaky, and then, having quite good eyesight she reads the two useless names just as before.
    She pretends to have been hurrying to look at the assortment in the window, the china-headed dolls and ancient skates and chamber pots and quilts already in