The Southerner among us is Chatten Gaines. She will take a chair in the sun and produce a bottle of lotion, her Swiss Performing Extract, and Warren will ask, “What does it do—cartwheels?” Chatty will say to watch out he doesn’t become an outpatient.

The definition of outpatient here is: a person who has fainted, who has passed out.

I believe that moisturizing has become as important to Chatty as accessorizing—that retail verb. I can tell you that both activities are crucial to me.

* * *

The vegetable garden is open to us all, and all are encouraged to cultivate something in it. Consequently, there are rows of trendy lettuce, beans climbing poles tied up like tepees, tiny yellow tomatoes shaped like lightbulbs, kale not even the moles will eat, and my own contribution—nothing so literal as a vegetable, but row after row of perfect dwarf zinnias. This is not bragging; given the soil here, you can shake the seeds out like salt on a baked potato, tamp not a spicule of soil on top of them, and up they will come to a height greater than you would want.

I am not quite myself, I think.

But who here is quite himself? And yet there is a way in which we all are more ourselves than ever, I suppose.

I have made friends with the Southerner. Chatty is not one of those ironic nicknames as when a fat person is known as “Tiny.” Chatty says that when she was a girl away at school and the holidays were coming, her mother would ask if she was bringing home any listeners. Chatty talks about the poltergeist and what will it do next—turn up the stereo in the music room, run an upstairs shower, turn on the fan above the stove if it doesn’t like the smell of our dinner cooking?

The nearest neighbor is not so near. Still, you can hear his country music, faint from down the road, till all hours of night. The nearest neighbor is from the South, and how he knows if he likes you is he puts on Hank Williams and do you know who that is singing? Coming in so low when you are lying in bed awake—it is the pleasure of keeping the radio on all night when you were just able to have a friend stay over, and all you cared to drink in the dark was ginger ale.

Sometimes in the dark a person will call out, “Where am I?” and really want to know. What must be the nines and tens?

Have you noticed there are no second sheets? I use the blue letter paper with my name at the top of every page. I do this because of a dream I had the first night I was here. In the dream, I went to pick up the stationery I had ordered for myself in waking life. But in the dream, there was a different name at the top of each sheet.