A Part
Nancy Hale
Old Isabel Lanier, the actress (remembered for her Viola and Portia) backed her Audi out of her friend Esther's drive. She paused. For a moment something stopped her from driving home to her own retirement cottage, identical to Esther's except for the roof over the front door. The thing that stopped her was her host and hostess, still standing outdoors after bidding her good-bye, slowly moving about their yard. Esther had spied some neighbor and was strolling toward the boundary fence. John was picking up random branches. They looked, in the dusk of early spring, ineffably beautiful to Isabel, so that she did not want to move.
Yet it was the end of a very long day. After her morning's regular ballet exercises, there had been necessary shopping in the shopping center—dishtowels—and the kind they carried nowadays were horrid, made of Turkish toweling; after lunch a tiring session with the dentist. Lying stretched back, with no place to spit, if there had been anything left in her mouth to spit after the thorough vacuum cleaning given it by the dentist's assistant (was she a nurse?) made Isabel unhappier than anything little Dr. Bellows, looking about 18, could do to her. How she did miss her own old Dr. Ross in New York, exuding confidence and reassurance, with, at her elbow, a nice basin to spit into. They said growing old was not for sissies, but the world kept finding new and disagreeable things to make it harder.
Going to tea at Esther Green's had been just what she needed after that. She loved Esther. As she went to sleep at night, she loved to visualize her new friend in her own little cottage here, with her aging, handsome husband, John; she
