Margaret's World — Summary

Margaret is seventy-four. She is in the kitchen. It is Wednesday morning, which she knows because the recycling goes out on Wednesday and the blue bin is at the curb. The light in the east window arrives at the corner of the table at approximately 8:15 in late May. Harold’s mug is in the cabinet. She does not use it. She reaches past it every morning. The reaching-past is not avoidance. It is proximity.

The refill notification arrived last night: her blood pressure medication has been processed and will be delivered Thursday. She did not call in the refill. The pharmacy’s system called it in automatically. She has not been inside the pharmacy since the automatic system started. She thinks sometimes about the pharmacist she used to see there — a woman whose name she cannot remember — who once told her, without being asked, that the combination of medications she was on could make her dizzy if she stood up quickly. Margaret still thinks of that when she stands up quickly.

The telehealth appointment at 10:30 lasts twelve minutes. The cardiologist is satisfied with the readings. She should continue as is. She has met this cardiologist in person once, three years ago. She used to see her previous cardiologist in person every three months. He had a photograph of his family on his desk that she noted across twelve years, the children growing up in the margins of their appointments.

Her neighbor Edie comes by at noon with a cutting from a plant she is propagating. They stand in the kitchen for twenty minutes talking about the tomatoes they will have later, the ones they had last year, the summer Harold was alive when the tomatoes were so good. Edie does not stay for lunch. She was here, for twenty minutes, and this is what Margaret has in the place of what the pharmacist’s name used to occupy in the space of being known.

Her property tax bill is on the desk in the living room. Her neighbor two houses down — a woman her age, there longer than Margaret — cannot afford it anymore and is determining what to do, which appears to mean leaving. This means leaving the house she has been in for forty years. This means that soon there will be one fewer person on this street who was here when Harold was alive and who therefore constitutes, without either of them having discussed this, evidence that her life with Harold was real and not only memory.

She does not know how to explain this to the property tax assessor.

The light is in the west window now. She makes dinner for one, which she has not become used to in the sense of forgetting it. She has become used to it in the sense of doing it every evening without it requiring a decision. After dinner she sits on the porch. The street is quieter than it used to be. She holds this the way a person holds a familiar weight: without examining it, without deciding what it means.

The civilization that built her house and educated her children and insured her health and organized her neighborhood and maintained the hardware store where someone will come fix your faucet in twenty minutes is reshaping itself around her in ways she can feel and cannot name. She does not need to name it. She is not the one who needs to understand the operating system. She is the one who lives inside it.

Harold’s mug is in the cabinet. The blue bin is at the curb. The light will be at the corner of the table again tomorrow at approximately 8:15.

She goes inside.