REDUCED CIRCUMSTANCES by Alice Hatcher

The truth of who you are always finds you in the end. Eleanor found me in the middle of Georgia, right at this table. I sit here, still, for that very reason. That said, I’d been avoiding her for weeks, since the day I heard her directing two men carrying her few possessions through the lobby and into the elevator. Certain reminders of the past were too painful to face, even after so many years. One afternoon, though, she overheard me speaking with one of the busboys in the dining hall and identified my accent. I wasn’t certain, at first, if she’d taken note of me. Cataracts had clouded her pale blue eyes, and she had some difficulty maintaining her gaze for any length of time. But then she approached my table and addressed me with a studied reserve that most Americans associate with English people of a certain class and temperament.
“You’re from Southern Rhodesia,” she stated, offering me little chance to fashion a lie.
I gestured to an empty chair. I was sitting alone, and it was the right, or at least the proper thing to do. Manners aside, disability and advanced age have left me in somewhat reduced circumstances. They’ve circumscribed my choice of companions. One need only look around this room or, really, any assisted living center to know this. And loneliness is a powerful thing.
“I spent my early years in Zimbabwe,” I said.
Eleanor stiffened for a moment and then sat down. “When we were children, of course, it was Rhodesia. And so I always say Rhodesia. It’s more faithful to the facts.”
For the first time, I noticed the trembling in Eleanor’s hands. “I say Zimbabwe to sound current,” I said. “The nurses might otherwise assume I’m disoriented.”
Eleanor had just opened her mouth to speak when Mrs. Daugherty, one of the center’s oldest residents, had what Americans like to call an ‘accident.’ The attendants are always pushing mops around to clean up unsightly spills of the sort caused by Mrs. Daugherty. One learns not to look out of basic decency, but Eleanor had grown agitated and lost her inhibition.
“I prefer to deal with the Nigerians here,” she said, watching a nurse wring out a mop in the rollers of an industrial bucket. “Even the Jamaicans are better than American blacks.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, leaning forward as if I hadn’t heard her.
“There’s something about the blacks here. The nurses born in this country.” She watched a second nurse peel off a set of latex gloves and rub Mrs. Daugherty’s arm. “They’re much too familiar. Touching us without invitation. Calling us ‘honey’ and ‘sugar.’ I can’t believe their cheek.”
“They’re just trying to comfort her. She feels humiliated every time it happens.”
“They could spare her the humiliation by not condescending. They don’t know their place. The ones raised with British influence, even the young ones, know better. They behave properly. They mind their business.”
“Because they’re outsiders here.” I paused. “Just like us.”
“Outsiders, yes, but certainly not like us.”
Eleanor smoothed the tablecloth, more to steady her fingers, it seemed, than erase any crease. When a janitor rolled the bucket away from Mrs. Daugherty’s table, I suggested a cup of tea. Eleanor’s hands were still shaking, and it seemed only kind to let her gather herself. That afternoon, we ate together for the first time. I kept our conversation to the selection of books in the library.
In the days that followed, I admit, I came to look forward to Eleanor’s company. She relieved a sort of loneliness I’d begun to wear like a second skin. I’d spent decades avoiding my compatriots, the other whites who’d fled Rhodesia in the years before Ian Smith’s segregationist regime collapsed. The comforts of the familiar hardly compensated for the pain of recognition, and in any case, I’d fled for very different reasons than most whites. In London, I shunned invitations from the Anglo-Rhodesian Society, not least because my father had been active in the Rhodesian Front in the 1970s and gained some renown, or depending on one’s perspective, infamy for his part in the counter-insurgency. He was quite known in expatriate circles, and so I assumed my mother’s maiden name and became Anne Hollister to avoid unwanted attention. I lived as neither fish nor fowl. White liberals and the blacks in London recognized my accent and reviled me, knowing or caring little that I shared their politics, and for some time, I accustomed myself to the life of a solitary exile. When the opportunity to emigrate to the United States presented itself, I left behind the grey of England and, I thought, the dead weight of history. How naïve I was.
For weeks, Eleanor and I limited our interactions to the exchange of simple pleasantries during lunch and our meandering strolls around the grounds. Eleanor was quite fit, mind you, despite her condition, and she insisted upon pushing my wheelchair whenever we visited the garden behind the dining hall. As she said, her country upbringing had nurtured a solid constitution. She gave me no reason for doubt.
The first time we spoke of Rhodesia at any length, we were admiring the garden in early bloom. Eleanor was sitting on a bench beside my chair, and at one point, she closed her eyes and gripped the wooden slats beside her hips. Her lips quivered and the side of her face twitched. Until she spoke, I thought she was having one of her episodes.
“The azaleas. They started me thinking of Rhodesia,” she said. “They grew along the streets of Umtali. Their scent. It was lovely.”
I leaned sideways in my chair and tried to detect the scent of a tired bloom folding in on itself but found myself distracted by the din of lorries rumbling past on the motorway beyond the wall. I thought then, and I think now, that Eleanor could see beauty anywhere, in ways I cannot. She could get quite emotional, too, between her neurological affliction and her keen memory. When she opened her eyes, her lids were rimmed with red, inflamed by the onset of tears. I’m ashamed to say that I’d spent so many years alone that I found myself unable to respond in an appropriate manner.
“Is that where you grew up? Umtali?”
Eleanor composed herself, as she often did, by massaging her hands. “Hardly. Umtali was the city for us. My brothers and I grew up between Odzi and Buhera. We had orchards. And you?”
“South of Lupane,” I said, adding “Lupani,” having gathered that Eleanor had never surrendered the colonial place names of her childhood, using the name Salisbury to refer to Harare, and Umtali for Mutare. “We were farmers, as well. We had cattle. My father and I. My mother passed shortly after my birth.”
I looked down at my lap and straightened my skirt to give my hands something to do. It seemed as though some bulwark had given way in my mind, and I feared that we’d be observed and taken for two old women indulging in tears. I suppose that’s what we were, though.
“I suppose neither of us have spoken of these things in years,” Eleanor said.
“It was a long time ago,” I said. “Shall we continue on?”
Four weeks passed before either of us alluded to the 1960s, when blacks from townships started taking to the streets with signs, and whites of a certain kind started amassing arms and joining the Rhodesian Front. It had grown humid by then, and Eleanor, I sensed, was having difficulty pushing my chair. Still, she refused all offers of help from the staff, at times with great vehemence. She wanted to talk freely, she said. A requisite time had passed, I suppose, and her reserve was giving way.        
“When did you leave?” she asked one afternoon.
“In 1965. I came to the States in 1982. I was in London for some time. On my own. Working in a bank.”
I said this as casually as I could manage. By 1965, the specter of black violence, what many called the ‘Emergency,’ had tarnished white liberals in Rhodesia. Many left to escape the censure of other whites. Most whites who left, though, simply feared the inevitability of black majority rule. Eleanor wouldn’t have known my reasons for leaving, and I imagine she had her curiosity.
“So you left London? The weather is dreadful, they say.”
“I had a series of disappointing relationships.” I turned my head and saw her hand, shaking and straining on the handle of my wheelchair. “I thought I’d try my luck here. Start again, if such a thing is possible.”
“It took some pluck, traveling on your own. It certainly took some pluck to stay at home.” Her voice had assumed an edge, and I resisted the impulse to twist around and look at her face. “The blacks had been running riot for years. Attacking farms. But I needn’t tell you this. You must have kept up on the news after you left.”
“As much as I could.”
“We had so little protection. My father and three brothers joined the counter-insurgency in our district.” She began pushing my chair down the pavement again, towards the dining hall. “They held out as long as they could. We all did.”
“Did they remain in Rhodesia? Your father and brothers.”
My chair came to a stop, and I heard her draw a sharp breath.
“My father had a heart attack in 1979. The timing was no coincidence. It was the month they lowered the Union Jack in Salisbury and gave us all over to Mugabe and his criminals. The British Government betrayed us, and it broke my father’s heart. He’d served in the war, you see.”
I spoke, then, partly to fill the silence left at the end of Eleanor’s remembrance. And somehow, I wanted to know. To know more about Eleanor. And by knowing her, maybe, to know something more about the father I’d left. “Was that when you left? In 1979?”
“My brothers and I stayed. To defend our way of life. I was going to say ‘the British way of life,’ but politicians in London, the appeasers, had already betrayed that. They mocked our concerns and ignored the intimidation we suffered daily. Called us bigots because we wouldn’t surrender what we’d built over generations.”
“When did you decide to leave?”
“Decide? It was never a decision.” I heard Eleanor’s breath catch, and I straightened in my chair. “We wanted to stay, though the farm was worthless. With all the unrest. So we lived in reduced circumstances. My oldest brother died defending our farm against Mugabe’s gangs.” Eleanor cleared her throat and continued onward, pushing my chair through bright sunlight. “The communists talked about atrocities. But my father only defended what belonged to him.”
“As did mine,” I said.
Eleanor stopped before a row of peonies, stepped around my chair and tapped the pale underside of a new bud with her finger, as if willing it to open. After a moment, she turned to face me. “Didn’t you say you left in 1965?”
“I left in 1965. My father stayed.”
“What was his name?”
“Roger Collins.”
“Such a small group of us remained. At the end.” Eleanor’s eyes began watering from the strain of concentration. “It’s possible our fathers knew each other. What was he like?”
“It’s hard to say,” I said, recalling every hard line in my father’s face as I’d last seen it, the smell of the sweat embedded in his jacket, the shape of his hands, twisted and scarred by work and growing acquainted, by the time I left, with the grip of a machine gun. “Maybe I’ve lived in too many places, but it’s hard to connect different parts of my life. When I was a child, the minister of our church used to say we’d all come together as one and be made whole in heaven. I thought I understood it at the time, but I don’t understand it now. It was so long ago. It’s almost impossible to imagine myself as that young child. Or my father as a young man. Us, as we were, living together.”
I remembered everything. I told Eleanor nothing.

* * *

I was eight years old, and we were traveling by train to Salisbury to visit my aunts and uncles and, as my father had said, to get away from the bush niggers for a week. The Second World War had ended, and with it, some of the rationing. After years of austerity, opportunity and even extravagance seemed within everyone’s reach. Of course, one might attribute that to the headiness that came with Hitler’s defeat and the false hope that a new world would emerge from the wreckage. My father, ever a practical man, sided with caution while his relatives in Salisbury indulged long-suppressed whims and appetites, buying new dresses and leather shoes, putting sugar in their tea whether or not they enjoyed sweet, and filling their cars with petrol for long weekend excursions. Again, my father was a practical man.
The night before our trip, he’d had our house servant prepare a lunch and set an alarm, so that we’d catch the earliest train possible to Salisbury. We lived quite far out in the country, and I remember waking hours before dawn and shivering in the back seat of our neighbor’s unheated car so we could arrive at the station an hour before departure. The platform was still nearly deserted at sunrise, when my father and I boarded the train and took two seats in an otherwise empty compartment. My father, concerned with making a certain impression on our wealthy relations, wore his best jacket and a tweed cap. I didn’t realize it at the time, but in Salisbury, he must have seemed a countryman, a farmer out of his element. I, for one, must have appeared utterly miserable on the train. My father had instructed me to wear my leather shoes and my dress coat, a thin frock that barely covered my knees and did little to keep out the early-morning chill. I would have welcomed the warmth of strangers.
Perhaps it was my sleepless condition or the fact that we’d rushed breakfast, but I felt ravenous almost immediately after we left the station. At my father’s feet was a large parcel of food wrapped in brown paper and tied with rough twine. Inside, I knew, our servant had placed jam and rolls, ham sandwiches with butter, a jar of pickles and several large pieces of pineapple cake, as well as a tin of biscuits intended for my father’s family. I knew better than to ask my father to open the parcel. He was a man given to discipline and rigid schedules, and I knew he’d planned on having supper in the early afternoon, after we’d transferred in Bulawayo to the Salisbury train. In any case, he seemed deep in thought, sitting stiffly in his seat, as if unmoved by the incessant rocking of the carriage. He seemed, in fact, oblivious to my presence, though he was sitting in the seat directly across from me. I spent the morning listening to the sound of wheels clacking on rails, holding the armrest to steady myself and wiping condensation from the glass with the sleeve of my coat while a thin drizzle of rain fell outside.
I saw the refugees just before noon, going by my father’s watch. Moments before, I’d seen rotting boards, rusted panels of corrugated tin, loose bricks and bits of shattered furniture lying half-submerged in muddy puddles.
“Your uncle said they’re extending the motorway outside of Bulawayo. That’s the start of it,” my father said. “They’re clearing the land. Clearing the rubbish.”
He wiped the window with the side of his broad hand and studied the savaged landscape sliding past.
“Those were houses, weren’t they?” I asked. “A town.”
He looked at me with a hint of anger. He wasn’t a man given to much discussion.
“That was a township. Not a town like Lupani or Lubimbi.”
He didn’t elaborate, and I asked nothing further. I settled against the armrest and pressed my hands between my knees. Moments later, my father considered my face and spoke again.
“Look at them,” he said, nodding at the window. “All they own is on their back. Pack animals. No different than cattle. That’s why they cleared them. Do you understand, now?”
I cut through the beads of condensation gathering again on the window and leaned into the glass. Beside the tracks, women carrying young children, men pushing carts, and boys with rough packs strapped to their backs were walking in a shallow rut glutted with mud, on shapeless feet bound in tattered rags. A heavy drizzle was falling, and their shapes seemed indistinct against the grey expanse to the east. They seemed like ghosts. I thought, then, that no one enduring such misery and surviving could be of flesh and warm blood. I suppose I was naïve in my understanding of suffering.
“Where will they go?”
“At the Tjolotjo Road, they’ll head south. Your uncle said they’ve been relocated.”
For a minute, I stared out the window, at the attenuated line of people trekking along a makeshift path carved out by hundreds or maybe thousands of feet. I lost sight of them just before the train stopped at a small station outside of Bulawayo. Our train’s arrival to Bulawayo, we learned from a conductor, was going to be delayed by a motorcar accident that had just occurred ahead on the tracks, and so we waited.
“Will we be stopped long enough for them to catch up with the train?”
My father furrowed his brow and leaned forward in his seat.
“They aren’t allowed on trains like this.”
“But there are so many seats.”
I realize, now, that I must have seemed a burden to him.
“Do they let pigs and cattle ride on the train?” He patted his side pocket and pulled out a pouch of shag tobacco. “Whites don’t mix with coloreds. I’ve told you this. Servants are one thing, but you keep your distance from the others. Birds of a feather flock together.”
“Don’t their feet hurt?”
“Their feet? They don’t feel anything.” He rose from his seat and tugged at the knees of his trousers to straighten his seams. “I’m going out to stretch the legs for a few minutes.”
I wiped the window and tried to peer outside. “Can I go with you?”
“The rain’s picking up, and I don’t want you sick. Stay in your seat. We’ll have supper when I’m back.”
Alone, I wiped my palms on my bare knees and shifted in my seat to relieve a hunger pang. Maybe it was the relentless damp or my weariness, or the rainfall growing heavier in the distance and obliterating the horizon, but I hardly felt myself. Almost without thinking, I slipped from my seat and crouched down beside the parcel, loosened the twine and peeled back a corner of paper to reveal a pad of hard butter pressed against the wax paper enfolding a sandwich.
How can I describe the mix of exaltation and dread I felt stepping into the small foyer at the end of the carriage? Through the door on one side of the train, I could see my father standing on a narrow platform with a small group of farmers in short-brimmed caps and slickers, drawing from his pipe and nodding earnestly. Beyond the door opposite, through a fogged window, I saw a stretch of field broken by scrub and windswept trees. I put the parcel on the floor, opened the door, and once I’d lowered myself to the ground, dragged the parcel from the train. It must have taken a minute, at most, to reach the rut, a narrow depression covered in water-filled footprints distinguished by neither treaded soles nor distinct toes – a palimpsest record of human misery wrapped in tattered rags.
I looked in the direction from which we’d come, toward a township razed at the premature start of rainy season, and saw vague forms coming in and out of focus through the mist. Should I be ashamed to say that I placed the parcel beside the rut as quickly as I did because I couldn’t bear the thought of looking into their faces? A moment later, I was pressed into my seat with my knees drawn to my chest, warming myself within the folds of my thin coat.
He noticed the parcel’s absence a moment after the train pulled away from the station. He scratched his chin, looked about the compartment, and then noticed the clumps of mud on the heels of my dress shoes. He looked through the window, then, and paled. I still sometimes wonder what my face looked like when he parted the folds of his jacket and drew his belt from the loops around his waist. Did I appear elated in my defiance because I’d done something humane and stood up, for the first time, to a man who inspired little more than dread on our farm, and in our house? Or terrified, as I was, that he’d never forgive me? It’s odd to be considering these questions at the end of life. He’s been dead for twenty years, and I haven’t spoken to him in thirty. I can’t remember feeling anything but fear when he ran his thumb along the cracked leather edge of his belt and brought its buckle down on my shoulder for the first of many times.
He didn’t speak until I’d stopped shaking.
“You need to know your place. That’s the only way the niggers will know theirs. And save your charity for your own kind.” He drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the sweat chilling on his brow. “You mix it up with the niggers, you’ll be known as an animal or a whore. If you disrespect yourself like that again, I’ll break this belt across your back.”
He left me, then, to consider my offense. Before he returned, I wet myself in fear and felt the first warmth of the long morning.
If asked, he might have said he wanted to protect me. He would have said that he went to the bar car and purchased a sandwich to eat in front of me because I needed to learn a lesson. He would have said that he was right to beat me as one would hardly dare beat an animal. He would have said he called me filth for sullying my best dress to give me a taste of a whore’s humiliation. He would have said that he loved me. That morning, I saw the stark shape of hatred for the first time.

* * *

I never stopped running from ghosts once I stepped from the desolate platform in Bulawayo and onto the Salisbury train. When my legs gave out and left me in this chair, I just ran deeper and deeper into myself. I’ve heard some women talk of glorious old age, when one loses all inhibition and speaks one’s mind, when one stops caring about the opinions of others. Perhaps I’ve reached that age. I certainly hadn’t when I met Eleanor. I never told her how I felt about my father. I’d lived in his shadow for so long, and after so much turmoil, I wanted to spend my last years in peace. And I would have missed the way Eleanor placed her hand on my shoulder – those times I closed my eyes and imagined what my mother might have been like. I would have missed our walks around the garden.
So, I never told her about the ghosts moving down the side of the tracks or my father’s rage. I never told her about the terrible fights I had with my father, the war hero; about the summer he and so many others called me an animal and a whore; about the day I finally ran away to Salisbury; about sleeping around with strange men to numb myself to the pain of exile, this even before I left Rhodesia. I never told her about London; about signing petitions against apartheid and marching in Grosvenor’s Square to support the embargo of South Africa; about the terrible loneliness and dread a familiar accent always stirred inside of me. I never told her about the sense of freedom I felt stepping from the plane in New York City.
“Do you ever miss it, now?” Eleanor asked, one afternoon, two months before her death. She’d surrendered her reserve by that point, most likely presuming that our brief discussion of my father had bound us in some sort of confidence. “Do you think about it much?”
We were in the garden, then. Recent rains had washed the dust from everything, and the colors seemed so vivid, even to my eyes. We’d just paused before a row of red impatiens, and I couldn’t help thinking of the poppies my father had worn every Armistice Day. I couldn’t help wondering if Eleanor was thinking of her brother.
‘‘It’s been so long,” I said. “And it must be such a different place, now.”
“But you must have missed it terribly when you left. Of course, there were so many Rhodesians in London. Who understood. They must have eased the sting of living away from home. Certainly you joined the Anglo-Rhodesian Society.”
They say that any good lie is based on a certain element of truth. That day, I told Eleanor what she wanted to hear without betraying something of myself.
“I suppose I do miss some part of it. After the war, I remember feeling that we’d gotten through something terrible. That Rhodesia stood on the cusp of some incredible change. I missed that flush of hope,” I said. Eleanor had started walking again. “Perhaps I’m just remembering what it was like to be young. The end of rationing. An abundance that never really existed. Having one’s health.”
“I miss it terribly,” Eleanor said. “What Rhodesia was when we governed it. Before the coloreds destroyed so much of it.”
“Before Mugabe destroyed so much of it.” I paused for a moment, measuring Eleanor’s mood by the steady movement of my chair. “One wonders how things might have turned out if the British government had negotiated with someone else.”
“So much was already ruined by the time Mugabe assumed control.” Eleanor turned towards the dining hall, and I both welcomed and regretted the end of our walk. “I fared well here, but I’ve had to accept reduced circumstances. Things that would have appalled my brother.”
I actually smiled, realizing how many of Eleanor’s mannerisms and phrases I’d taken on, soaking things up like parched ground in a rainstorm. I smiled, too, at Eleanor’s notion of reduced circumstances. I suppose she was thinking about the chipped tiles in the dining hall or the frayed cushions on the couch in the library.
“When I miss it,” I said, “I tell myself I lived in constant fear. Terror was a way of life.”
“Then your father must have had a certain prescience. Known the coloreds were arming themselves. Seen it all coming, as mine did. So many chose to remain blind to the facts.”
“But we all lived in terror,” I said, both appeasing Eleanor and speaking the truth. “Everyone did.”
She must have realized I’d just countered her in my own quiet way. Perhaps she, as I, was anxious to forestall any disclosures that would have spoiled our afternoon walks together.
“The hydrangea are such a lovely shade of blue,” she said, and I nodded.
One of the last times we had lunch together, three weeks before they took Eleanor to the hospital, I found myself studying her mannerisms again, moved by little gestures that, in Rhodesia or England, would have been invisible to my eyes. She was gripping her knife in her right hand while lifting the fork in her left, in the way that offends Americans of a certain class but escapes the notice of most others. I can’t quite explain it, but I felt a deep affection for her, watching her carry food to her lips with as much dignity as she could muster with shaking hands and drooping eyelids rimmed with red. By then, I felt comfortable with her, and with my lies. After so many years, I’d finally found some comfort in the familiar. Birds of a feather flock together, my father always used to say. So many whites recited that childish aphorism to excuse segregated bathrooms and a restricted franchise, townships filled with hungry children, bodies riddled by bullets and pushed into ditches, and ghosts wandering along train tracks.
It’s strange to say, but watching Eleanor struggle to finish her soup, I wondered if there wasn’t some truth in what my father and all of them had said. I wondered, and I sometimes wonder now, if everyone isn’t seeking familiarity, for something of home in the eyes and memories of others. I was musing in this way when Eleanor’s hand trembled and a bit of tomato soup spilled onto the front of her blouse. Exasperated, Eleanor let her hand drop to the table, and accidentally, I’m sure, upset a cup of tea standing beside a plate of peach pie. I reached for my napkin with one hand and struggled to release the brake of my wheelchair so I could assist her. Before I could round the table, Thelma, a member of the dining hall staff, appeared beside Eleanor and touched her shoulder. Eleanor, I’m embarrassed to say, recoiled. She shrank as a child would have if reprimanded, and just as quickly straightened in her chair. She was still shaking badly, though, and could barely control the twitches in her face. Anyone who didn’t know her would have assumed she was mortified or even afraid.
“It’s okay, honey,” Thelma said, rubbing Eleanor’s back. “Nothing but a spill. Nothing to get upset about.”
“There’s no need to discuss my feelings.” Eleanor’s voice had taken on an especially hard edge. “The only need is to clean up this mess. What passed for lunch today.”
Thelma drew a deep breath and began sweeping pieces of broken piecrust over the edge of the table and into a saucer filled with spilled tea.
“Tell you what I’m gonna do. I’ll get you another piece.” Thelma placed the saucer on the table and rested her fingertips on Eleanor’s shoulder. “Some pies just came out of the oven, and if you don’t help eat them up, Edna and I are gonna have them gone in five minutes.”
“Please don’t speak to me like a child. Just take your hand away and fetch someone to finish cleaning up if you can’t do it yourself. Isn’t that what you’re here to do?”
Thelma straightened her shoulders and drew back her head. “If that’s the way it’s gonna be, I’ll just leave you to your own business.” She dragged her teeth back across her lower lip and forced a stream of air through the spaces separating them. “Seems that’s what you been wanting for a long, long time.”
“I’ve said what I want and don’t want. It’s all very simple.” Eleanor pressed her palms against the top of the table, as if to rise. “You seem to be forgetting that this is my home. That you work here. You seem to be forgetting your place.”
I feared for a moment that Thelma might strike Eleanor, despite her age and condition. Thelma, though, just stood beside the table for a long moment, appraising us, and then placed the saucer before Eleanor. I admit that, more than anything else, I felt betrayed by Eleanor, whose sense of decorum had usually prevented her from speaking in certain ways in the presence of others. Our fragile acquaintance, after all, had thrived on silence, and in the privacy of the garden. I felt, too, a deep shame and need to apologize for an offense that somehow seemed mine as much as Eleanor’s. However, I was too stunned to offer an apology or even think beyond my own humiliation. I might have been eight years old again. How quickly we return to childhood in moments of shame.
I can’t say exactly what Eleanor was thinking when Thelma turned away from us with an expression twisted by disgust for two old white African ladies. Eleanor’s expression registered the anger inspired, I imagined, by a thousand betrayals, shaking hands that no longer bent to her will, insolent strangers and friends with clouded pasts, by life’s innumerable indignities. For some time, Eleanor and I sat in silence, unattended, watching pieces of piecrust dissolve in cold tea and a dark stain spread across the tablecloth. The only sound was that of urine dribbling onto tile. At a nearby table, Mrs. Daugherty had flooded her sanitary undergarments and begun leaking onto the floor.
In the garden, Eleanor’s symptoms flared. Her hands shook on my wheelchair grips, and she struggled to navigate familiar paths. Her speech seemed unfocused, almost unmoored from her surroundings.
“This is my house,” she said. I twisted around to find her staring at a feather of yellow goldenrod. “We cultivated everything here. Made it what it is.”
When I questioned her meaning, she recovered her poise.
“My condition worsens when I’m provoked,” she said. “All I ask on some days is to be left alone. To be spared their patronizing behavior. I’m perfectly fit to manage my own affairs.”
She began walking again, more steadily this time. I lifted my face to the sky, wishing the sunlight could burn away the shameful memory of lunch and framing the apology I delivered to Thelma later that afternoon. By then, the moment of injury, and of possibility, had passed. Thelma’s face remained impassive as we talked about Eleanor’s condition and its unfortunate effect on her mood. Of course, we both knew that Eleanor had given perfect expression to her deepest feelings, and I again embarrassed myself by lying.
Over the next few weeks, Eleanor took a turn for the worse. She missed lunch more often than not and, in this way, prepared me for the loneliness that lay ahead. I wasn’t with her on the afternoon she collapsed beside her bed. I was reading in my own room when she was taken to the medical wing, where she died two days later. I often wonder if she died peacefully in her sleep, and if such a thing would have been possible for someone in her state of mind. Mainly, I missed her. I missed the way she held her silverware, her turns of phrase, and her Umtali accent, so different from my own, though no American would ever recognize the difference between them. On my good days, I entertain hopes that, even now, I’m not too old to find unlikely companions among strangers. It’s hard to imagine, though. I tire so easily. This, mind you, is why I rarely provoked Eleanor. I’d spent too much time alone to fight with anyone. I’d already lapsed into silence.
I’m amazed, really, by the things I never told Eleanor. I never told her that I’d often seen Mrs. Daugherty sitting in the upholstered Winchester chair in the library, the one Eleanor claimed as her favorite. I never told Eleanor that, most likely, one of the colored American nurses would tend to her in the event of an emergency. Most Nigerians working in this facility are recent immigrants, and they generally defer to the Americans. I never broached the subject of dying. I could have told her that everyone dies alone, that we were already both dying alone, in separate worlds inhabited by different ghosts and darkened by different shadows. It would have been cruel. It would have broached the limits of decency. Certain things need not be said. This, I believe. My father, as did many Rhodesians of his generation, claimed to be more British than the British, and more loyal to Empire than any politician in Westminster. He raised me in his fashion. He taught me that I mustn’t grumble and instilled in me a certain English reserve. And so I left her to her illusions. It was the charitable thing to do.

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Alice Hatcher has published an essay in Gargoyle Magazine and a short story in Albuquerque Arts. “Reduced Circumstances” is her second published story.