The Pilgrim

It started the night we gave the party to celebrate our new apartment. I noticed it as I helped her prepare for our guests--she was nervous. When the guests began arriving, she greeted them self-consciously and then escaped to the bar to fix drinks. She was an uncomfortable hostess. During the evening she moved constantly through the crowd, smiling, never pausing long with anyone. The young men watched her secretly as they sipped their drinks. Some reached out to touch her and smile as she walked among them--she was still a beautiful woman. She spent the evening in motion, fetching drinks, giving directions to the bathroom, nodding, smiling, never pausing for more than a moment with anyone.

Later, when most of the guests had gone, she retired into a corner of the living room with two of her friends and a famous entertainer. I sat in the dining room with some of my friends from work. I watched her laugh, animated and at ease now with the three women. The entertainer taught her a tap dance step.

She came into the dining room where we had just finished eating cake with pink icing.

"Why didn't we get any cake?" she asked.

She carried four cake-laden plates back to the corner and distributed them to the women. She scraped the pink icing off before she ate hers.

After everybody had gone, she placed a camp stool in the center of the living room and sat upon it, thinking. I brought her an apple. After an hour, she moved the stool one foot nearer the door and sat upon it again. An hour later, she repeated the one-foot move toward the door. I went to bed, but during the night I heard her making her one-foot moves every hour on the hour.

By morning, when I left for work, she was out in the hall, still sitting, still thinking, still moving a foot every hour. I tried to reason with her, but all she said was, "You've got to let me try". I brought her knapsack, filled with apples, and she wore it on her back.

It took her a week to reach the lobby.

The day she moved outside the building, I brought her yellow roll-up rain hat and her white golf umbrella. She emptied a weeks-worth of apple cores out of the knapsack into a sidewalk trash container.

"You'd be surprised at how much I've learned," she said. I brought more apples and put them in her knapsack.

"I've got to try," she said.

She set her course toward a bright spot on the horizon. She must have made it, because I don't think I ever saw her again.