Saturday Conversation

 

I see the neighbour walk towards his car in the driveway and quickly duck behind the chicken coop. The neighbour is friendly and relaxed, (too relaxed in my opinion, the day after they moved in I decided to welcome them with a bottle of wine and he answered the doorbell in his underpants and stood talking to me for a solid five minutes with a semi) but he’s a talker, and while I would like to be, I have a nervous stutter and so prefer to avoid things like saying words to people. 

He sees me duck and ducks himself, but not before there’s eye contact and we are caught out. His grin is sheepish and I imagine it matches my own. 

“It’s all downhill from here,” he says.

I’ve got no idea what he’s talking about. He gestures around him. “The weekend. We’ve had a lovely Saturday and now it’s just a coast downhill until Monday.”

I think this is quite funny and smile. “I only work three days a week, so I’ve got a few more days up my sleeve,” I say. So far so good. Voice is steady.

He leans on his car. The paint on the door doesn’t match the rest of it, and it reminds me of my very first car, the one I bought for $300 when I was seventeen. I was studying Spanish at university, and so I named her Lupe, short for Guadalupe. My own Spanish name I’d decided to take Lucia, which was a great deal more exciting than my actual name.

“Now Clare,” he says, and I am surprised that he’s remembered my name because I most certainly cannot recall his, “I thought we were going to be friends. But a real friend would not say such things.”

It’s at this moment that I realise my new neighbour is handsome, and although he’s too young to be interested in me I feel a flicker of regret that he brought along his girlfriend when he moved.

“What do you do, anyway,” he’s asking. 

“I’m a language teacher. For foreign students.” A chicken has started to peck at my bare feet and I nudge her away, but she keeps coming back. I worry sometimes that I will have a heart attack in the chicken coop, and when I come to the chickens will have pecked away at all my soft parts. Not that I’m in the bracket for a heart attack, but it’s something I think about. 

“I’m a teacher too,” he says, and I think he’s going to say he teaches maths or science at the local high school. “A pilot instructor.”

I make a face. “That’s far more exciting than what I said. Maybe I’m going to have to start lying about what I do. Can you ask me again what I do?” I’ve started to talk to fast, but at least my stutter is off duty for the moment. 

He smiles and folds his arms across his chest. He’s tall and has a nicely shaped beard. I wonder if he might be a hipster, but his clothes look daggy, and not self-consciously so. 

“Tell me Clare, what line of work are you in?”

“I’m an astronaut in training. That’s why I’m down to three days a week. They’ve cut all our hours. It’s hard to social distance in a shuttle.”

His grin broadens into a laugh. He says something and I don’t quite catch it, and so I smile. His face becomes puzzled, and I realise that the smile wasn’t the appropriate response, but it’s too late because the exchange is over and my neighbour is giving me a wave and getting into his car, and I wave back and push the chicken away and lock the coop after me. 

And I go upstairs and spend the rest of my evening worrying about what he did or didn’t say, and wonder how other people manage to form relationships with others when the most complex one I have is with a chicken who lets me stroke her feathers while she pecks at my toes.