by Todd Johnson
Next month I’m flying to Las Vegas to go to a hairdresser convention for three whole days. Mike asked if he could come and said he would take vacation from UPS, but I said, “Hell no, you’re not comin. I’m takin Connie. You go on fishin or somethin.” He acted like he was disappointed but I know he wasn’t. He don’t want to do one thing in Vegas except sit at a blackjack table, and he knows I ain’t gonna stand around while he does that. Connie will be w-i-l-d fun. She’ll do anything and drag me with her. I haven’t told her yet that I’ve reserved us on the Gene Autry Sunset Steak Dinner Ride and Sing-along. I thought it sounded like a bargain. You get to ride horses for five hours through the desert, they feed you, and then they take you back to your hotel. Connie will hate the singing part, but the only other option is a breakfast ride and there is no way she will go on that after staying up all night partying. When we get back we’re goin to see Martina McBride at the MGM Grand. She’s expensive, but I got tickets as soon as I knew I was taking the trip because I love her. There’s gonna be a lot of beauticians around so everybody oughta look real good if you think about it. I hope I come home with some new hair ideas too. I’m always looking for new possibilities.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
APRIL
Do you mind if I hold your hand?” I asked, not sure whether he might slap me away as he had his own daughter. He did not answer. I should be used to this by now, but it always felt like something was being pulled up by the roots inside my stomach.
“Mr. Massey, do you mind if I hold your hand while the nurse takes your blood pressure?” I asked again, as gently as I could.
“She’s leaving me here!” he barked. “There was not another living soul besides me to raise her after her mother died, but I did it. I did it by myself with these two hands. I don’t understand it. I never spoke a cross word to her in my life.”
I looked at Mr. Massey’s daughter, Denise, a well-dressed woman in her midfifties who, in spite of trying her best to remain composed, was reduced to sniffling and dabbing the corners of her eyes. She did not speak.
“You’re going to be taken care of here, Mr. Massey. Denise asked me many times what I thought, and I told her I thought it was a good idea. You’ll be safe here, where someone can look in on you whenever you need something.”
“Bullshit.”
“Dad!” Denise was embarrassed.
“It’s normal.” The nurse tried to comfort her and exited the room.
“Let him talk,” I said to Denise over my shoulder. “That’s right, Mr. Massey. It is bullshit whenever anybody has to leave his home against his wishes. What else do you want to say about it? Tell it.”
“She doesn’t know,” he ranted. “I’m fine by myself. This is all because I forget things sometimes, is that it? It is, isn’t it?” He turned to Denise. “I hope no one ever abandons you. I hope you never know what it feels like to be left alone, pulled out of your own house, and not told where you’re going.”
Denise interjected. “That’s not true, I spoke to you about this. Several times, Dad. I’m doing everything I can, you don’t see that? But I can’t…I…” She broke off in sobs.
“I took care of you, my only daughter, and for once I need you to take care of me. Is that what you can’t do? Can’t any daughter who feels anything for her father do that?”
“Mr. Massey.” I was still calm but it was time to intervene. “We’re all going to do the best we can. Denise and I, and you too. We’re going to have dinner this evening, sleep through the night, then we’re going to wake up tomorrow, and we’re going to do the best we can. We have to try to do that.”
“Well I won’t stay here. I know my rights and I’ll find a way to get out. You will not do this, Denise, not to me. I may be feeble of body but not of mind. No! I still have a mind and I don’t intend to lose it in this place.”
He had become a caged leopard, clawing to get out, scratching to draw blood; he would do anything if he thought it could change the reality of this day and the life that would follow.
“Denise, why don’t you go ahead?” I placed my arm around her. “I’m going to give your father something to calm him until they bring supper. It’ll be more important that you come tomorrow.”
Denise approached the bed and bent over her father, kissing him lightly on the cheek. She was about to speak when he whispered through clenched teeth, “The kiss of Judas.” She had been shot by a bullet that she could not dodge even if she had seen it coming a mile away.
“Go on,” I said to her and I gave Mr. Massey a mild sedative. “She’ll be back, Mr. Massey. And I am still your doctor, so if you have any complaints or questions or you need anything, you pick up that phone by your bed and you call my office. I am the doctor; all these people are just trying to run a smooth organization and they have to pay attention to a lot around here. The only thing I have to pay attention to is you. So you call me.”
“What can you do? You can’t do anything for me.”
“I can tell you that it will get better, but we’re all going to have to work at it. This is a big change, and neither you nor I is stupid enough to think that it will be easy.”
“Bullshit,” he mumbled, now emotionally spent.
“I know,” I said. I would wait until he nodded off.
My mother is at home now thinking about dinner. She will probably reheat the barbecue plate that she couldn’t finish yesterday when I took her to lunch and shopping. It’s our Wednesday ritual, now that she lives close by. I always pick her up around eleven fifteen in the morning and we drive all the way to Sturgess Barbecue, which has been in the exact same location for as long as I can remember, on a lake in a grove of pine trees about twenty minutes from where she used to live. I try to get her there by noon because that is the time that she feels lunch should be served everywhere in the world, or at least in North Carolina, regardless of what happens in the course of a person’s day. I think it’s as much about regularity as it is food, although Mama is not shy at all about ordering enough for two people. And she always gets exactly the same thing: a pork barbecue sandwich, chunky and vinegary the way it is done down here in the eastern counties, with french fries, slaw, hush puppies, a side order of Brunswick stew, and always a copious serving of pie, usually lemon chess if they have it. I wouldn’t go all the way to Sturgess’s if Mama didn’t insist. It’s not that I don’t feel welcome, even though there are not only no other blacks, but no Mexicans, who have become the new Southerners, the new backbone of hard labor. In fact, Mr. Sturgess always speaks to Mama and me by name and puts us at whatever table we pick. And his waitresses, all of whom are white, are nice and down-to-earth. Those are Mama’s words, not mine, but I do agree with her. Still, my body feels smaller when I’m in that pine-paneled dining room where tobacco farmers have come to eat since before I was born. I think about the generations of black field labor, Mama’s ancestors among them, who never sat at one of these tables. I can feel the ghosts of those who, even now, wouldn’t want us here, standing close to the walls, leaned up cross-legged, sneering ever so slightly and looking at us from a distance, wishing us back to another era in which they are the guarantors of where all boundaries lie and content with their chalk-drawn lines of existence. I look around me and there are smiles, warmth. Thankfully the world is not run by ghosts, but I believe they’re never far away.
I am grateful for this simple ritual. I want sameness. I want permanence. When I see Mama shuffle as she rises to her feet or dip slightly, favoring a weak knee as she steps out of my car, or the slight tremor of her hand as she raises a spoon, her lipstick unevenly applied, I am aware of change, the time for giving up what is. And I can’t bring myself to speak about it. I keep silent before that which scares me, the inevitability of a slowing march, then no march at all, a crawl, infant-like. She will need me more and more. I will hold this fact at bay for as long as I am able, if only because of the visible language of its fierce encroaching. And so next Wednesday I will pick her up again and complimen
t her on how pretty she looks. And it will not be patronizing; I will mean it, because I will be even more determined to keep her in my heart’s eye as she is, a gallery-worthy marble statue of my mother, teacher, my friend, the woman who was the first person to ever love me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
LORRAINE
April was walking ahead of me to get through the crowd, holdin my hand cause I guess she thought I needed draggin or else get lost. I had to yell to make her hear me.
“Honey, I don’t want to sit too close to that band. I’m gon go deaf or crazy, I don’t know which one.”
“I think they’re almost finished,” she screamed back, and a tall woman beside me laughed so loud it scared me to death while she reached her arm way across in front of my face and took a full champagne glass from a waiter, then handed him her empty with the other hand. I got the idea it wasn’t her first time.
“Don’t you want something to drink?” April yelled again when she let go and planted me at a table in one corner away from the party.
“Yes I do. I’m ’bout to thirst to death.” She started to head for the bar, behind her, crowded with people, like bees in a hive.
“What do you want?” she said. “I know you’re not going to drink champagne.”
“And you ought not be drinkin liquor this early either, but I know you’re gon do exactly what you want to. Bring me Dr Pepper. And not diet.”
“Mama, we’re on vacation.”
“Don’t I look like I’m on vacation?” I pulled a pair of sunglasses out of my pocketbook and put em on against the last light of the afternoon.
“They might not have Dr Pepper. Is Coke all right?”
“Yes, and see if they got somethin to nibble on too. They ought to, much as you paid for this trip.”
It was her idea that we should go on a cruise in the first place. Now April of all people knows I don’t think much of water, and the only time I’ve ever been on a boat was a ferry at Jamestown, Virginia, that was enough for me. But you can’t tell my daughter anything, she’s got a mind and will to go with it. She brought in some picture brochures after I got home from church one Sunday.
“Mama, you won’t even know you’re on a boat, it’s so big. You’ll love it,” she said. “There’s plenty to eat and you don’t have to walk much. Now can’t I make these plans? It’ll be a belated Christmas present, we’ll spend New Year’s in the Caribbean.”
“It costs too much. You ain’t told me but I know it does,” I said.
“Don’t worry about that,” she said.
“Hmm.”
“Oh Mama, come on. Now how about if I invite Althea to go with us? If she will.”
“Althea will go to a dog fight if somebody’ll take her.”
“Does that mean you’ll go?”
“I want a room near the lifeboats.”
And that was the end of it. April said she had always wanted to take me on a big trip and there wasn’t no better time, so I let her. Althea decided she couldn’t come at the last minute, she got the flu, but April got trip insurance so she said that was all right, she’d get her money back. I’m the one who told her to get it, she might have on her own, I don’t know, but I’ve read too many articles in the newspaper about people who wanted to go somewhere then they got sick or something and was out every penny they spent.
April came back with two glasses and a little dish of food. “Dr Pepper.” She sat down a tall frosted glass in front of me.
“What’d they put this skinny straw in it for? I ain’t so old I need to drink a soda with a straw.”
“It’s just the way they do it, Mama.” She pushed the little plate over to me. “I got you some canapés so you don’t get hungry. I already ate a couple while I was waiting for the drinks.”
“When do they give us supper on here anyway?”
“I’m afraid not for a little while, so eat all you want. We’re about to sail away.”
“I knew it, April. I felt somethin move and I thought to myself I can feel waves rockin this thing and we ain’t even pulled out of Miami yet.”
“Are you determined to be seasick by talking about it? It’s a lucky thing you travel with your own personal physician, although I think she may have to retire after this trip.”
“Don’t you worry ’bout me, baby. I said I’d come, I’m here, and as long as we don’t drown I’ll be all right.”
“Good because I’ve got a surprise for you.”
“I hope it’s not one of those pictures they took of us gettin on, April. My eyes were closed every time. I wish you’d go back and ask that boy with the camera for that buoy ring or whatever it was he wanted us to hold up while he took our picture. I told him if it was a extra one, I’d like to take it to my cabin. Where was he from anyway, somewhere in France or Europe, that’s all I could tell from hearing him talk. Seem like maybe he said Norway.”
“There are a lot of Scandinavians in the crew, I think,” April said.
“I don’t blame em. If I lived anyplace that cold, I’d be tryin to get to Florida as fast as I could too.”
A group of waiters and waitresses were all in a clump at the bar, filling up trays of champagne as fast as they could. We’re gon have us a bunch of drunks anytime now, I thought. The music finally stopped; I reckon everybody needs a break sometime. I never heard this music before, but I haven’t ever thought much of a steel drum. I know a lot of people like it, it’s a real island sound, but it don’t do much for me. The bald-headed man with the microphone kept on singing the same words, somethin about red, red wine, and I’m tired of it. I wonder if they’re gon play a steel drum at church service on this boat. April told me they did have a church service if I wanted to go but I said I believed I’d pass if it was all right with her.
“I think the chaplain is a Catholic priest,” she said.
“Honey, different don’t bother me and hasn’t for a long time. I’ll do my own church just the same.”
April also told me I ought to call it a ship, not a boat. I asked her whose feelings I was gon hurt, the captain, who had taken the microphone from the red wine man and was talking about where all we were gon go and that the weather was expected to be fine for the whole trip.
“Don’t you want to know what your surprise is?” she whispered while the man in white spoke.
“I figured you’d tell me when you were ready.”
“I’ll be right back. Close your eyes.” April got up and scooted her chair in. “I mean it Mama, close your eyes!”
“In the middle of this crowd of people?” I asked but did what she told me. I love that girl so much I can’t stand it, and seein her so excited tryin to do something nice for me breaks my heart. A dark-skinned woman in a long silver gown took over at the piano, and some people started dancin. I folded my hands in my lap and took a deep breath with my eyes closed. The music was light and jazzy sounding, I liked it. My daddy always said he would love to go to New York City just one time and stay up all night going around listening to jazz. If he had lived long enough maybe I would have figured out some way to take him. I like that picture, Daddy and me walkin around New York like we owned the place.
“Open your eyes!” somebody screamed right in front of me, and before I could say anything, Althea was trying to kiss me flat on the mouth, wearing a hat big enough to use as an umbrella. Every time she leaned in, the low brim cut into the bridge of my nose.
“Girl, you’re gon kill me with that hat. It’s pretty but it’s dangerous.”
“You want me to take it off?” she looked like she’d been cut to the quick.
“No honey, just keep it on a leash. I see you got over the flu, you musta had a miracle healing.”
“I lied in the service of the greater good.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Surprise,” a quiet low voice said behind me. Hands over my eyes, Taylor bent down and kissed me on the cheek from behind and took a step around to where I could see him straight on. “Mama thought she needed my
help watching you with all this partying goin on.”
“You come here to me right now!” I said. “I ain’t studyin no party but you.”
I held his cheeks in both my hands and a few short dreadlocks fell down over his eyes. I didn’t think I would get used to his hair that way, but I did and I liked it on him. He let it grow out at school when he went up to the University of Chicago. At first April wanted him to go to college closer to home, he even got some kind of a scholarship at Duke, but he had his mind set on gettin out of the South for a little while. I stayed out of it, even when April tried to get me to chime in. I just said, “Baby, that child is your son and he’s gon do what he wants and it’ll be fine. The apple don’t fall far from the tree.” But I know how she felt. We didn’t see him for months at the time.
The ship’s horn was loud and sad, the sound an elephant would make if it could cry. Strings of white lights came on over our heads, Althea squealed like she was sixteen years old, and the band started up again. The crew tossed confetti, snowing in rainbow colors, and we were movin. I knew it this time. For a minute I sat still, waitin for something to happen. I don’t know what, some kind of disaster I reckon, but the main thing was I didn’t feel sick and April was right, I didn’t feel any rockin. Althea had gotten her hands on two glasses of champagne and gave one to me. I took a sip to be polite and set mine down on the table behind us.