I talked about Louis, a married professor who hosted me, his phrase, from time to time. Stupidly, I had fallen in love with him. He’d written a book about the early female mystics, the ones who starved and hurt themselves, called: How Did Julian Find His [Sic] God? He asked me questions about my two years of anorexia. Three if you counted another year I didn’t get my period. “It was my sick God,” I told him. I was like that—up for it, sporting.

“You’re young,” he said, putting his hand on my knee. “But you should take yourself more seriously.”

I told my friends what he’d said, and we laughed. They’d always told me I should try the opposite.

There were things I didn’t tell anyone. Today I got on my hands and knees in Ms. Z’s bathroom and scrubbed away urine stains left by her dying dog. Today I watched Ms. Z make her housekeeper cry. Unsaid, rephrased: Today I got paid to watch a grown woman cry.

I compressed my days neatly into appetizer courses. I worked as a personal assistant for a woman with a reputation for treating people like shit, and she treated me like shit. I couldn’t spin witty versions of the rest. In the darkness I began caring for my collapsing grandmother. She wasn’t being inspirational or having sex or treating anyone like shit. She was just getting old.

I went to Grand Central after work, on alternating days, and took the train to Greenwich. The cars were crowded with suited commuters riding to the suburbs, heading into their twelve-hour furloughs, loosening their ties. Beside them, I lurched into the hardest hours of my day: helping Grandma Lucy walk around the block, fixing Coronas with cuts of lime, her single indulgence, spreading creams and potions across the crinkled paper of her rosacea-blooming cheeks.

Outside the train windows, Connecticut unfurled into an endless spread of lumberyards and fenced-off freight ghettos, graveyards for retired buses and port-o-potties, all the wreckage hushed under sudden dusk. Sometimes I rode in the bar car, where men tucked away plastic cups of watery gin to brace themselves for the trials of their wives and children. You’d rather be alone? I thought. You sure? I imagined Grandma Lucy watching the door for my entry, perched like a bird in her silent apartment full of colors: yellow walls, blue carpet, purple couch, these cloying shades her only company.

All these hues had come with age—a concession, perhaps, to the quiet desire for cheer in solitary circumstances. Her old living room in Los Angeles had had white walls and a white couch, invisibly matted with the white fur of her white cat, Boo. He’d had a brother named Radley, a tabby who’d gone to live with new owners a few months after Grandma Lucy got him. I always wondered if he was sent away because of that couch. Boo died when I was sixteen. Grandma Lucy kept his ashes in a silver box behind her best china.