by Todd Johnson
“Margaret Clayton.”
“C-L-A-Y…” he labored over a computer keyboard. How could anyone be such an idiot, I thought.
“T-O-N,” Mama finished gently, as though sincerely coaching a young child.
“Room 603.” He handed us two stick-on tags with the room number scribbled on them and blinked his eyes several times again without acknowledging when Mama said, “Thank you.”
We stepped out of the elevator as a ringing chime marked the doors’ closing, and Mama stopped momentarily. “April, she looks bad, real bad. I want you to know before we go in.”
“I’ll be okay,” I reassured her, knowing full well that she had unconsciously said as much for her own sake, to prepare herself, more than for me, her daughter the physician. I had not seen Mrs. Clayton in so long that I didn’t know exactly what to expect in her appearance anyway. Her bed was on the far side of the room, by the window, and passing her roommate, I noticed the absence of any cards, acknowledgments, or personal touches of any kind. The occupant of the bed, an ancient white woman with almost no hair, slept, oxygen tubes in her nostrils. Pulling back the curtain slightly, I allowed Mama to pass ahead of me. On Mrs. Clayton’s side, there were several vases of flowers of all colors and sizes. From a group of five or six women around the bed, an attractive one in her sixties stepped away and toward us, her face immediately beaming, and reached for Mama, hugging her tightly.
“Lorraine, thank you, she will be so glad you came. She’s been dozing off and on, but she’ll wake up soon.” The woman turned to me. “I’m Ann Clayton, Margaret’s daughter.” She extended her hand. “Are you April?”
“I am. I’m glad to meet you.” Who was that impatient woman downstairs, I wondered, who nearly snapped at having been inconvenienced by a few minutes’ wait? Standing here now, I felt exposed, the layer of whatever made me feel separate had been peeled away, and we were here together with someone in need, all of us, even me, a relative stranger, embraced and included, one in the intention of well-being.
“April, you are so kind to come with your mother. I don’t know what Mama would do without her.” Ann Clayton still held my hand. “She is the wisest person I’ve ever known.”
Mama interrupted. “Well I can tell you your Mama don’t think that. She’s spent too many years telling me what I ought to do about everything you can name.”
Ann laughed. “I know it, what in the world would we do if Mama didn’t know everything, Lorraine? We probably wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning.”
“Is that Lorraine there? I can’t see her,” a crackly but firm voice said from the bed.
Ann winked and whispered to me, “Speak of the devil,” and took Mama’s hand, pulling her toward the bed, where the other women parted to make room. “Bring her in here so I can see if she’s gotten fat,” Mrs. Clayton barked, to which Mama replied, “Fat enough to sit on top of you if you can’t behave yourself.”
I faded back, not feeling unwelcome, but rather as a witness to a liturgy that I wanted to remember in every detail, as attentive an observer as I could be. I studied the circle of women, now encompassing my mother as one of their number, young and old, family and neighbors, perhaps single, married, widowed. It is as though they arrived on a timetable, like a flock of migratory birds, their schedule neither agreed upon in advance nor communicated, as much as felt in the subtle first change of seasons. This is simply what they do. They come. They are called to stand watch, oddly, with no male presence. It is perhaps not that the men, with few exceptions, can’t take the pain. It’s the ambiguity that they can’t abide. And there is that to be sure, endless hours of waiting. Surely these stately creatures are the same everywhere, perched around every bed where someone lies helpless. They arrive one at a time, or in pairs, and they bring smiles and stories and concerned brows and open hearts, and most of all they bring time, they have all the time in the world, poured out like water, crystalline and pure. They lower their shoulders, they place their purses on chairs, and they assume their places, familiar by instinct, either sitting or standing, circling the sick with wings of prayer and patience, protectors and mediators, watchers, slow and graceful, with the singular purpose of a great blue heron wading in shallow water, saving all effort for when it is most needed, the split second at which it catches a swimming fish in its beak, finally lifting off in flight, with no regard to the weight it carries, rising, as hope must, lighter than human breath.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
RHONDA
It used to be in the movies that after having sex people smoked cigarettes or fell asleep. Or maybe they smoked cigarettes and then fell asleep, I don’t know. Anyway now I guess the Hollywood bigheads don’t think they ought to show too many young lovers smoking cause that’s bad for people, especially teenagers who go to the movies. So usually what happens instead is they show us a really hot sex scene with all the right moves and sounds to go along with it, and then boom, the next scene, we wake up in the morning and see the worn-out lovers lying in bed in a perfect ray of sunlight, with their hair messed up just enough to still be sexy rather than look like a hawk has nested in it, which is how mine looks when I wake up. I must move around a lot during the night, so much that in the mornings, Mike sometimes asks me, “How was your trip?”
Well I don’t smoke anymore, which I do miss, I’ll tell you that right now. I’m not one of those people who acts like she found religion because she ain’t involved in the disgusting act of smoking and so she feels the need to tell everybody that she can’t imagine how she coulda ever put that foul crap into her lungs in the first place. Puh-leeze. It’s one of the worst things I ever did for my health, I know that, even if nobody else acted like it, but I loved every second of it when I was doing it. We all pick our habits, just a matter of what and when. Back when we were still dating, Mike and me got in the routine of getting up out of bed after sex and having a snack. Usually it was ice cream or a couple of cookies if we had any homemade. I don’t care if you’re not supposed to eat and then go right to bed. Hell, I stopped smoking, I can’t stop everything. When my jeans get tight, I’ve got a choice, either cut back or start looking for new jeans, and since I ain’t interested in an assortment of jeans I can’t wear, I do without the Edy’s for a while. It ain’t that hard to figure out. I love that snack time because it’s when Mike and me talk. Not just serious stuff like making plans; we talk about whatever comes up. It’s the best talking time we ever have, in the middle of the night. It’s like we’re sneaking around, it’s our secret time that the rest of the world will never know one thing about. I hope we keep doing it no matter how old we get.
“Thank you, baby,” Mike said the other night, taking out a half gallon of chocolate chip and two big cereal bowls while I sat at the kitchen table. I never heard anybody but him say thank you after sex. I used to think it was weird, it made me kinda uncomfortable, like he was buying gas or something, so one time I asked him about it. He said, “Sweetheart, I ain’t thankin you for sex. I’m thankin you for being with me instead of all the other places you could be. Sex ain’t nothin but a period at the end of the sentence.”
He handed me a big tablespoon. “You want one scoop or two?”
“One and a half,” I said. “Will you turn off the light? The stove light’s enough.”
We took a couple of bites in quiet. I held mine in my mouth and let it slide down my throat seeing how long I could make the cold last. That’s the only bad thing about chocolate chip, it doesn’t slide as good as other flavors that don’t have little pieces of stuff stuck in em.
“What’s that?” he nodded to a slip of paper I had put down beside my bowl. “Honey, I love you but I don’t think I can go over one of your lists right now.”
“I found it in the dresser stuck in our wedding book.”
“What?”
“You’re gonna think it’s dumb. It’s a thank-you note to Bernice and Margaret. I am so stupid, I musta never sent this. I wanted it to be perfect.”<
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“Read it to me,” he said. I was quiet. “Or let me read it.” He reached across the table and took the flimsy folded paper. “Is it okay if I read it?” he asked.
“Yeah. It’s fine.” I knew exactly what I wrote, it was meant for somebody else to read anyway, not me. I told him to read it out loud.
Dear Mrs. Stokes and Mrs. Clayton,
Thank you both so much for being part of my wedding day. The picture y’all gave to me is sitting in our living room and I will always leave it right there. I will never forget you telling me Mama would have been proud of me, and I feel like she was there because of you. No one ever paid attention to me like y’all. I know that is more than three things, Miss Margaret, but I can’t help it because I feel too thankful to reduce it down. Maybe this is a new kind of thank-you note.
Love, from Rhonda
“That’s real sweet,” he said, half yawning.
“Well it’s too late now. Bernice is dead and Margaret’s close. That’s what I get for waitin rather than just sayin what I thought.”
“Honey, you loved both of em. I expect they know that.”
“How about knew.”
“It doesn’t go away just because they do, Rhonda.”
Now part of me gets sorta pissed when people say things that are either wise or supposed to be. I’m independent that way. But then I think just because I feel a thing doesn’t mean it can’t be good to hear it come out of somebody else’s mouth.
“Thanks for sayin that,” I told him.
Mike put our empty bowls in the sink. “You did good, baby,” he said and hugged me from behind. When I turned in my chair, his eyes looked bigger than usual, like he was asking a question. Maybe he thought I might not get the full meaning of his words. But I do.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
LORRAINE
I used to hope that if I went to church long enough, all my inside weight would go away. That ain’t right. Jesus may have come to take away our sins, but he left our feelings right where they’ve always been. I still have inside me some of what I’ve always had, built up over a lifetime. I just keep adding to it, every day, like everybody else, and hope the stew gets better the more ingredients I put in. My memories come and go now, like my regrets. Sometimes I see them, sometimes I don’t, and when I do see, I feel all over again whatever it was I thought had either died or lost its power over me. Time heals, it’s true, but it don’t erase.
I ought to be singing, everybody around me is.
Yet saints their watch are keeping;
Their cry goes up “How long?”
And soon the night of weeping
Shall be the morn of song.
We all sit when the music stops.
Before Miss Margaret left the hospital, she took my hand from the bed and said, “Lorraine, if you ever see me again, I want you to bring me a fish plate. I could ask Ann to get it, but she won’t eat anything fried and she won’t have any idea where to go. You know what I want.”
“I reckon I do. Catfish?”
“Yes ma’am, and the littler they are the better because they’re sweeter. They’re more trouble to eat but that’s what I want. And I want coleslaw not too vinegary tasting and hush puppies. And if they’ve got any good shrimp, and I mean fresh, Lorraine, I want some of them too.” She was weak as a kitten, but bossy as she ever was.
I told her, “All right then. But you stop sayin things like ‘if I ever see you again.’”
She tried to shoo me off with a weak hand, barely lifting it off the bed. “I know, I know. But you listen to what I’m saying. You know what I want.”
“You want the same as I like, ain’t no need to give me a menu.”
“Ann, bless her heart, wouldn’t know a catfish from a crappie and that’s what I want as my last meal on earth. I have always said I wanted to leave with the taste of something fried in my mouth.”
“I don’t want to hear that talk right now.”
“We’re all going, Lorraine.” She hardly had any voice left.
“Hush. You and I both know what’s goin on here. We don’t have to spend the time we have goin over it. Let’s do what we need to do.”
She died two days later. They knew she wouldn’t last, but Ann said she had to let her mother have her wish: to go home one more time. With full-time hospice care, and the comfort of her friends, she passed in the middle of the night. She didn’t talk much at the end. Ann stayed with her every minute, the whole time.
Althea takes my hymnal, still open, from my lap. She closes it and puts it in the pew rack. These are new hymnals I can’t read because they’ve got another language printed on top of the English. I thought it might be Spanish, but I feel like I ought to be able to recognize a few words of Spanish. Althea told me it might be Korean. All I can think is that they must have gotten these things on sale cause there ain’t no way something this hard to read cost the full price.
The congregation bows their head to pray. They’ll be that way for a while. Althea finally stopped singing in the choir, she said her high notes went once she got arthritis. I said her notes didn’t have nothin to do with her joints, but she told me I wasn’t a singer so I didn’t know. What really happened is the new director, a man from somewhere down around Columbia, pulled her over after rehearsal one night and asked her why didn’t she just move her mouth when she couldn’t hit the notes, and then come back in singin whenever she felt like she could. Althea’s feeling was they’d either have all her notes or none of em, and so she said “no thank you very much” and hung up her robe for the final time. I also believe she quit choir so she could spend Sunday mornings sitting in the congregation with me. She mostly likes to whisper about the women’s hair and clothes, but I try not to encourage her, especially when preaching is going on. We don’t even know anybody up there at the front anymore, the least she can do is be still.
Althea didn’t really want to come today cause she didn’t feel like it, but when I told her we were having dinner after, she said she believed she might be able to make it. I brought all vegetables, I don’t know why but I didn’t feel like making meat, they’ll be plenty of meat. I cooked us some sweet corn, fried squash, and buttermilk biscuits. Althea said she brought a jar of molasses in her pocketbook just so she could put it on my biscuits, she loves em so good. The two of us are getting so old sometimes I think one day we might have to start sharing a brain. We already share about everything else. We definitely share the chore of getting our bodies to move where we want em to go, one of us always helping the other one, switching back and forth. It’s a wonder we still get to church but we do. Althea drives us most days. I don’t enjoy driving a car like I used to. I don’t pay enough attention to anything except what’s on my mind, and that ain’t no way to start out on a highway.
Reverend Knowles passed years ago and I miss him, but I do like this young preacher. I can’t say his last name, he’s not from around here, but he always says call him Kenny so that’s what I do. I don’t know how much he knows about the Bible, but I swear he knows something about puttin on clothes and fixin himself up good. He’s got a good strong voice too. I think he’s reading from Isaiah, sounds like it to me. I’ve always liked the prophets.
I reach for my purse when the offering music starts. Althea is digging in hers too, and she puts her molasses jar on the seat between us so she can get to her wallet, crammed down in a pile of tissues, cough drops, and coupons. Besides my billfold, the only other thing in mine is keys, so I don’t have no trouble finding a five-dollar bill, but when the offering plate gets to me, I don’t right away know what to do with it. Althea reaches over me, puts a yellow envelope in, and grabs the money out of my hand and drops it in too. I pass the plate on, and Althea whispers, “You got up too early cooking. See, you’re wore out, ’bout to fall asleep.”
“I ain’t wore out,” I tell her. “I’m thinkin.”
“I’m thinkin too. About dinner.” She pinches my leg, and I slap her hand away. Althea has got to l
earn how to behave better in church, but I don’t know who’s gon teach her cause I’m too old and so is she.
Reverend Kenny will keep it short today cause he knows not to mix religion with mealtime. It ain’t a surprise to nobody which one wins out. “For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace,” Reverend Kenny reads. I know that is Isaiah. I love to hear it. Margaret Clayton and me took our joy and peace mixed together, all at the same time. As long as I’ve got a heart that can feel anything, I’ll see her as clear as daylight. My friend, alive.
We’ll all stand up in a few minutes and go downstairs to the basement where some busy women a lot younger than us have already put up tables and cloths and cups of ice and pitchers of tea. I wish April could be here for the food, my grandbaby too. Everybody in the whole church is goin to ask about her, they always do. They’ll say they know I’m proud, and I don’t argue. They think it’s because she’s a doctor, but it’s because she’s mine.
There will come a day when she will be the one who goes through everything that has belonged to me on earth. She will decide what to keep and what to throw away, she’s the one who will judge what was important to me and choose to hang onto what’s important to her. She will choose right about some things, wrong about others. And when she looks in my Bible, stuck somewhere in Isaiah, she will find her school pictures from every year, and a torn black-and-white one of my Thomas the week he was born, one Mama gave to me. She will keep it.
“Amen. Let’s eat,” Reverend Kenny raises his arms and a crowd gathers in the aisles. Standing together, Althea and me are swallowed up by the faces and the years.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
APRIL
Mama said, “We couldn’t have asked for a prettier day,” and I felt, with her, that those words made for a new beginning, morning light pointing to a new world unfolding, one minute at a time. The simplicity of her optimism was in the power of her ability to choose it. Even before she retired, osteoarthritis had begun to take its toll on her body, but her mind did not relent easily to discomfort, or even pain. In the coming years, she would be in for an uphill climb at a time when she was by many people’s standards still young. I learned long ago that her passions would not be quieted by inconvenience alone. She would have to learn to limit her battles, not bothering to wrestle with demons she couldn’t see and focus instead on what was in front of her, the groceries to buy, the shut-in visits to make, even her grandson. I waited while she went to the bathroom, knowing that my time was limited as sentinel only, and that someday I would be supporting her weight, unfastening her clothes, lowering her body into a position to relieve itself, and helping her again to her feet. Gravity would become her greatest enemy. Her defenses would arrive one at a time: an aluminum walker, a cane for days that were a little better, an elevated toilet seat, and a handrail to be installed in her hallway. If life is a concert piece, structured in contrasting movements, then the last strains are an invitation to dance with the most long-standing partner, mortality. We hear the end of the music coming, like a coda that says, “it won’t be long now,” only a few more well-defined and recognizable chords, and then the earned release, the comforting silence that, far from being empty, resonates with all that has preceded it. The only question becomes how good a dancer you are and if not, whether you can learn.