She said, “People ought to be careful what they call their kids. I’m just now starting to learn how damaged I was by my nickname.”

(Joy. She’s called Joy.)

“I kept trying to live up to it. Always had to be the happy one. It was the role assigned by my family.”

“How’d you get the nickname?” I asked as much to divert the flow of her ranting conversation as to get the answer. But it did seem strange that someone with the full name Jody would have a nickname. Almost as senseless as Jack for John.

“My baby brother had trouble with Jody. Made one syllable out of it. They tell me it sounded like ‘Joy.’ My folks went along with it.”

(I would rather have been alone right then, in my cozy study at work on some problem from the office or puzzle on the Internet. But what could I do? The woman sat at my dining room table, talking depressed. Her husband, my ex, was upstairs dealing with our shared son, and I couldn’t see a way to escape her company.

(In the one picture I’ve seen of Joy young, she looked typically pretty to me, but the small features and large breasts haven’t aged well. Of course she could recapture some of that streaky blonde cuteness with cosmetics, hair color, and a good bra, but Joy doesn’t seem to be into style. Most folks assume she’s gay. She always wears loose trousers and shapeless tee shirts. Her hair is dull uncombed. Her breasts swing like water balloons. She moves from the shoulders when she walks, and her Georgia drawl sounds redneck.

(A week ago my son told me he hates Joy’s body. I thought that was a provocative statement from a 16 year old, so I stopped what I was doing and asked him what he meant.

(“She’s never like this: open and happy” he demonstrated, pulling his chest upward and swinging his arms wide apart so he filled a corner of the kitchen. “She always slumps,” and he collapsed his arms inward, inverted his chest, and closed himself around his torso.)

That recollection made me pay attention to Joy’s present posture: arms crossed above her breasts, right leg twisted around the left, face drooping, eye almost twitching. I didn’t know what to say. I felt like shaking her out of it, except I didn’t want to touch her.

She spoke again. “You seem to be all right: living single,” and she looked at me, clearly waiting for a response.

“I’m pretty happy,” I acknowledged. “But then I don’t get much chance to be lonely, with the kids and all.” That was my attempt at self-deprecation; I really didn’t want to take off on how glad I was when the kids were with them, how relieved after nearly two decades to have a bed and bedroom of my own.

(Maybe if I stopped working so hard and smoking so much pot I would feel lonely, like I do in a hotel room when I force myself to vacation, alone in bed without my homey comforts. But here, now, with my stuff, home alone is like heaven.)

“Yeah, I was okay too, as long as the kids were around. But after my daughter left I started to sink. It might not’ve happened if I’d been working at the time – you know how a job can keep you together – but Bill was still paying alimony then, and I was staying in my house way too much. Smoking pot and tobacco and watching daytime TV.” She paused and twitched around so I knew she wanted a cigarette then, but no way was I going to allow that inside, and she didn’t want to go out (Joy avoids light like a vampire when she is depressed).

“Then I took to going to bars to try to meet guys,” she resumed. “That’s where I saw Matt. Under the circumstances, he was an amazing find.”

(Matt’s okay. Bright, not deformed, able to earn a living. But my ex-husband is fundamentally pessimistic, insecure, and boring. That’s why I didn’t keep him.)

“So we got married,” and she looked directly at me again. I remember Matt was so desperate that he would have proposed to any of many. Joy accepted. “And for awhile, life was great. Moving ‘cross country, being newlyweds, accumulating stuff together. I got a good job at the hospital. Maybe I should’ve kept that.”