by Todd Johnson
“April, make sure everything’s turned off!” Mama was calling to me from the bathroom.
“I already did.”
“Where’s Taylor?” Mama loved saying her grandson’s name out loud.
“You know he’s at school,” I answered. “We’ll get home about the same time he does. Do you need some help?”
“I don’t need you watchin me like a hawk. Please get my pocketbook so I don’t forget it.”
I had known months ago exactly what I wanted to do for Mama’s birthday this year. I took two days off because I thought it would be too tiring for Mama to make a car trip, even a short one, in one day. I’d pick her up and she could spend the night with me after our outing before going back to her house. My partner would be on call for emergencies. I was never good at keeping surprises. I think about the way I blurted out that I was pregnant. Maybe it’s more that I was never good at surprising her. Her life had given her a sort of sight that was beyond vigilance, beyond knowing, and revealed itself neither in agitation nor worry, but in a spirit of calm that said she had seen much and that consequently, the needs and motivations of people no longer surprised her. Instead she looked around and, in looking, found a small part of herself in everyone else. She called it “looking hard” at another person. I learned that it was compassion she was living, a desire to see and be seen fully, which is the work of human life. Is that part of what it means to let go, to release the white-knuckled grip on whatever pulls us along, if we’re lucky, for seventy or eighty years? Maybe we figure out that the only thing we wanted all along was that simple and elusive kind of revelation in which all is known, all is forgiven, and most important, all that’s left is celebrated with a victory cheer.
Mama reminded me that we had our picture taken at the Old Well on the day I graduated from medical school. It was the most famous landmark in Chapel Hill and she wanted to see it again.
“Do you feel like walking a little?” I asked.
“Child, I could walk to heaven on a day like this.” Her eyes smiled, and I couldn’t help thinking that she talked a lot less than she used to. The daffodils alone, scattered with a planned haphazardness across the old quad, made my breathing change. The grass was more like perfect carpet than something that could possibly grow in ordinary dirt. I used to come here with Taylor and spread a blanket when he was a baby. He would fall asleep, I would study, eventually taking off the light sweater I had worn and letting the sun warm my torso, feeling my heart expand with its touch, like warming up for a workout. At the time I had never been more tired in my life: raising a baby, being in med school, and working when I could fit it in for the extra money. I parked by Hill Hall, the music building. It was Taylor’s favorite place to play outside when he was little. If we were lucky, the Carolina Choir might be rehearsing with the windows open, the music inside procreating with sounds of nature. “I want to go where the songs are,” Taylor said whenever he saw me round up a blanket and start to pack a bag with books and containers of food.
The azaleas were borderline arrogant in their display of fuchsia and white, prideful and not giving a damn what the rest of the world thought about their flamboyance. Mama clasped her hands and rubbed them lightly together against the slight chill of a spring breeze. “You know, April, I never wanted to go anywhere. That’s the truth. Only thing I ever wanted to see was people. But I am glad you brought me back here.” She squinted into the sun at the Well. “This here is like a sign to me.”
“What kind of sign?” I asked, wondering whether she might say something less than lucid.
“My daughter’s a doctor and the University of North Carolina says so. That’s one big ‘Why Not’ to me. Why not a doctor? Why not anything?” She patted one of the columns lightly, looked up at the sky with her eyes closed, and said without looking at me, “What time is that show?”
I had not thought to tell her what to expect at a planetarium, and I had not had the time to look at what the particular program offering might be. It had never occurred to me to think of it as a show. To me, a show is something that has real people in it. There was a part of me that didn’t want to leave the perfect outdoor world for an artificial one of stars and planets, created to show us ourselves in the galaxy by looking at it above our heads, fixed and controlled, manipulated for our wonder if not edification. I’ve always been aware that it’s not a real sky. The real sky doesn’t place us at the center; it is so clearly apart from us that there’s no mistaking that it has anything at all to do with our small minds.
We took our places in the angled seats when Mama struggled to cough up some mucus into several tissues, which I carried in my purse at all times when she was with me. I remember being young and thinking that carrying tissues around was an unappealing mark of old age. I was right, but they are essential. Feeling better, she leaned back in her seat, and I had the image of an astronaut strapped in and ready to go, in the final seconds before blasting off. “I like this chair, April. I don’t think I can get out of it, but I like it.”
“I don’t think you would want one in your house, Mama.”
“Don’t never know. I might change my style.”
“Shh. They’re turning the lights down.” I don’t know why our conversation concerned me because there were at least fifty school-children around eight years old to our left, and even with four adults at the helm, their voices were at an excited pitch. When the lights went completely out, there were a few short squeals and giggles, and then surprisingly, quiet throughout the room. Slowly a night sky appeared over our heads, the stars gradually becoming brighter until you could almost believe you were lying on your back in a field with no artificial light for miles around. I looked up and thought of so many summers at my grandma’s, in the orange last light before a fiery day would be cooled slightly by blue-black darkness, waiting for Mama to come home from work, having already eaten my dinner and gone back outside to play some more, building forts for dolls out of scrap wood.
“Keep your eyes open for black widows, girl,” Grandma said whenever she saw me by her woodpile. “I don’t need to be goin to no hospital right here at bedtime.”
Any time after the sun went down was bedtime to her, leftover from her days farming with Granddaddy before they had the store, when they started their back-breaking work so early that they couldn’t keep their eyes open after dark. Unless she was on the night shift, Mama would come in around dusk, it was the job of the day shift to oversee feeding the patients dinner then get those who needed help into pajamas or whatever they slept in. I could hear her car before I saw it. She always tapped the horn to let my grandmother know that she was pulling into the driveway. I ran to meet her before she got to the porch steps, that was my game every night. We went inside, she ate a little something, and if she wasn’t too tired, we would go sit outside and look at the sky until mosquitoes wouldn’t leave us alone or I fell asleep nestled in her warmth.
“Find me the Big Dipper, baby,” she said, and I could always find it. Always. Then she would show me the North Star. I don’t know how Mama knew the North Star, but she had a reverence for all stars, like they were the million eyes of God looking at us all the time.
“What are they made of?” I asked her more than once, sensing that she didn’t know the answer.
“Stars are places for your dreams to land, baby, when they can’t find a home down here,” she said, holding me close. I think of the sky over her head spangled with her thoughts and dreams all the time, sparkling like keepsakes in a giant scrapbook. By looking into a clear night sky, she could hold all of them without ever touching any of them. I took her at her word, and for years, I have pinned my own dreams to stars overhead when no human ear could or would hear them.
A woman’s recorded voice, a soothing alto, began narrating the changing visuals overhead. She began by telling us that the planetarium isn’t simply the building, it’s the name of the huge telescope-like machine in the center of the room. On cue, the apparatus turned slightly as chim
elike music mixed with the sounds of otherworldly wind played from speakers on all sides of us. Shooting stars raced across the sky. An explanation of a galaxy followed, specifically describing our own Milky Way. Mama had raised her hands up slightly, palms open, fingers spread, almost like when she was in church. I alternated between watching her and the ceiling, wondering why, for my whole life, I always believed she saw something different from me, even when we were looking at exactly the same thing. And I wondered whether, when the time came that she could no longer live on her own, she would see that too in her own way. Her retirement from the nursing home had been sudden. She had announced it to me over the telephone, out of the blue.
“Did something happen?” I asked, certain that her decision must have been provoked by something specific.
“We got bought by a chain of nursing homes. They said I could have early retirement.”
“You’re gonna take it?”
“I’m old and they don’t want me, April. It’s all right. I’m gon take a break from sickness and dying.”
She didn’t do anything of the kind. In the time since, she may as well have worked full-time between church obligations and volunteering at the county senior citizens’ center. When she first mentioned that she’d been to the center, I assumed it was as a participant, her age certainly qualified her. I soon found that she was in fact “staff,” doing much of what she had done in her old job, sustained by her interaction with all sorts of people, minus the more grueling aspects of having to deal with bedpans and personal hygiene. I could always tell when one of her new set of charges had to go into the hospital or a home. Her ordinarily unflagging spirit met with some manner of depression, invisible to most but evident to me, that lasted a day or two, before she recuperated by making plans as to how she was going to visit her friend in his or her new surroundings as soon as humanly possible.
“Isn’t that beautiful?” Mama whispered, nudging me slightly. “It looks like somethin I’d like to make a dress out of.” We were looking at a tremendous photograph of the Orion nebula, a reddish-pink “space cloud,” the narrator’s recorded voice called it, pointing out that what we could see was only a tiny part of the whole, and one might think of it as a birthplace for stars. “Baby stars, April,” Mama snickered, “how ’bout that?” Mama talked freely, if quietly, during the narration, it was her way of savoring the moment, not letting anything pass unmarked. The disembodied voice further informed us that nebulae are composed of gas and dust. “Hmm,” Mama grunted. “I ain’t never seen dust look like that. If I did, you wouldn’t see me clean house again, I tell you that much.”
From every direction, the hypnotic presence told us in stereo about the sun, the center of our solar system, around which everything revolves and which holds everything together. The voice explained that “apparent magnitude” is how bright a star looks to us here on earth, based only on what we can see, regardless of how far away it is, but that “absolute magnitude” is the true indicator of a star’s brightness, if all the stars could be viewed as they really are, at the same distance, as though lined up side by side. The dome above us burned fiery orange and red, and Mama’s face looked like it was glowing bronze from a furnace inside her chest. She laughed at the explosive surface of the sun and turned to whisper, “That right there is something I would like to see. I sure never saw it like that before, did you?”
“We’re too far away,” I answered.
“That ain’t gon stop me from looking harder.”
The continuing commentary brought back memories of science class in junior high, words I hadn’t heard in years. Blue giant and white dwarf. Supernova. Asteroid. Greek and Latin constellation names. For Mama, it was like finally having a translator to bridge a language gap between old friends, friends from a foreign place she had visited countless times in her imagination.
The car ride to my house took no time at all given Mama’s exuberance after leaving the “show” as well as the reward of my own satisfaction. She talked the whole time about the universe, especially the stars being part of a map so big you could never see the whole thing. As we pulled into the driveway, Taylor was shooting baskets, tossed the ball onto the grass, and came running to her side of the car. I had trained him well, I thought. Already big for his age, he grabbed her in a smothering bear hug before she could get the car door all the way open. With long lean arms, he helped her to her feet, and she made a sassy comment, as she always did, about how big he had grown. My son, my hope. I could see the man he would become, was already becoming. Watching them, I could believe in life, and God, seeing in them that age could be fashioned into a gold crown in the hands of love. And I could be assured that my mother’s wonder had rooted itself in me, so deeply that I would feel her presence always, in the dignity she bestowed as carelessly as rainwater or falling stars.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
RHONDA
The sign on the front of the shop looks perfect. I love it. It’s exactly what I wanted. Nobody’s hardly gonna ever see it because the shop’s in back of the house, but I told Mike, “I want a sign with my name on it. I don’t care if the only ones lookin at it are you and me.” He said, “Honey, it’s your dream, and by God it’s gonna be exactly like what you see in your head.” We’re making the inside colors a kind of peach and lime green. I told Mike I wanted it to look sort of like Key West in here. Kinda exotic. I know damn well I ain’t gonna be doing any exotic hairdos but I’ve always liked an island feel. I think it makes people relax, and if you can’t at least relax when you’re having you’re hair fixed, then I hate to tell you but you’re hopeless. Plus I like feeling like I’m on a little vacation when I come to work, even if it is only out our kitchen door and across the yard. Mike put some miniature palm trees in pots inside too, but I said, “I love em honey, but you know I can kill a plant by lookin at it, so these are your babies.” Hell, I thought he’d be taking em right back to the nursery, but do you know that man comes out here every morning before he goes to deliver the packages that everybody’s pulling their hair out for, and he waters any of those plants that need it? He doesn’t know it, but I heard him talking to em one time. He said, “Do your thing now, I’m dependin on you. Make her happy, that’s why we’re here, right?” I found myself a good one, didn’t I? Or maybe he found me, I’m never sure how that works, but I do know enough to be grateful. I’m sure Connie would be more than glad to take credit and that’s all right, she earned it.
I don’t go to the nursing home now. Sometimes I think I will again, but then there’s life. Just life, you know? I didn’t want to be there much anyway after Margaret Clayton died. That was the hardest part for me, I’d been meaning to get to the hospital but I didn’t make it. Then she was gone, it wasn’t like I didn’t know it was coming, but the longer it takes, you feel like the longer you have, and that ain’t the way it is. I did stop at Ridgecrest one time to see if anybody I knew was still there but I didn’t recognize a one. A young nurse, a jock sort of guy with a suntan, told me Lorraine Bullock had retired. She was one of the last people I knew there. He’d heard her house had burned down but that she wasn’t in it. “You’ve got to be careful with those old houses,” he said, “all the wiring, you know?” I answered, “Yeah,” thinking about how old my own house was and whether I could start a fire and not even know it. He didn’t know where Lorraine was now, maybe living closer to her daughter, and asked if I wanted him to try and find out at the nurses’ station. I told him no, that was all right.
I do miss my ladies. I put their picture out on the coffee table so every day I can look at the three of us, me standin in between Bernice and Margaret, all wearin Santa Claus hats like something crazy. Connie still asks me if I’m gonna keep it out all year long even though it’s a Christmas picture, and I still tell her, “Yes I am, Connie, and the answer is gonna be yes next time you ask too.” They wanted me to be happy, those two, they wanted it, and it happened. It’s happening now. I feel like they know. And I’d love to think that wh
erever they are they might bring some Christmas cheer to my old sourpuss of a grandma, but I reckon they’d all have to be in the same place to do that, and there’s no way those two sweet things are with her.
So things are good. Really good. I got a lot of people coming to the shop already. Some people who I used to do at Evelyn’s followed me out here. Evelyn don’t care, she’s about half retired anyway, and most of the time you can’t even find her cause she’s in her car headed to the beach. Mike and me have been talking about having a baby. Connie says I’m out of my mind, kids are for young people, but I tell her last time I looked I didn’t have one foot in the grave. Connie’s like that though. I love her to death, but she always tries to make what she’s decided to do the thing that’s best for everybody else to do too. It’s true that everybody we know is already done with the kid thing, but we might still do it. And if not, that’s all right too. I can take what comes. So can Mike. We’re the same that way.