by Lenzo, Lisa;
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that to my neighbors,” my mom says, even though my parents’ apartment is at the end of the hall, ten feet from their closest neighbor’s door.
“I can put it in my car,” I offer. Normally, my mom would protest, but now she stands still without speaking, her face blank except for a little tension, her lips parted. “I’ll put it in my trunk,” I say decisively. “It will be out of the way there until the power comes back on.”
“Okay,” my mom says. “That will work.”
I get up off the bed and find my shoes, gather up the handles of the bag. It’s still light outside, but the stairwells are windowless and the emergency lighting has failed—Jolene told me she walked up here without any light to see by—so I’ll need the flashlight for the stairs. By the time I find it and am ready to go, Jolene is sitting on the couch in the living room absorbed in her phone, texting. I have the laundry bag in one hand, the tiny flashlight in my other. Jolene looks up and says, “Do you want to take a baseball bat or something? Those stairways are dark.”
“No, I’ll be fine.”
Jolene looks dubious.
“The security desk only lets in people who live here, or their visitors,” I inform her.
Jolene lets her eyes do a slight roll, and I realize she doesn’t take it for granted that all the people who live in or visit my parents’ building are trustworthy.
But I’m not at all afraid. I’ve never felt threatened by anyone in this building in the twenty-seven years my parents have lived here. I go out into the hall with the laundry, turn on the flashlight, open the door to the stairwell, and enter. It is dark, as Jolene said, but my flashlight gives enough light. Light flickers from below, and I hear voices. People are trudging up the stairs. We smile and say hello as we near each other. “Do you know how long the power will be out?” I ask.
“No,” a deep-voiced man says, “but it’s widespread—covers half of downtown.”
“I heard most of downtown,” another man counters. He is holding the arm of an elderly woman as they slowly walk down the stairs ahead of me.
As I continue to descend, more flickering lights and more people rise into view, walking up. One of these, a heavy-set woman, groans. “What floor do you have to walk to?” I ask her sympathetically.
“Nine,” she says.
“Huh!” another woman behind her says. “At least it’s not nineteen!”
“You live on nineteen?” I ask.
“Sweetie, I live on seven. If I lived on nineteen, I would not be on these stairs.”
Laughter rises and falls from below and above.
When I reach the lobby, two elderly women are sitting on the upholstered chairs, one holding a cane and the other with a walker beside her. Another older woman is sitting in a wheelchair with a thirtyish white man holding onto the handles, and I wonder if he is a relative or a caretaker. The white man seems dismayed, but the three elderly black women look dignified and resigned. They are not happy with this, their demeanors say, but they will get through it without making a fuss. Near them on the lobby tables are bottles of water, provided, I assume, by the apartment staff. I consider going back upstairs and bringing these old women some of my homemade oatmeal cookies in case they are hungry, but first I need to go outside with my soiled bundle.
My car is parked on the street, a half block from the building’s entrance; as I walk toward it, I stop another of my parents’ neighbors to ask if he knows when the power will come back on. “I heard nine-thirty tonight, out here on the street,” he says, “but at the desk, they’re saying midnight.”
Channel 7 News has a truck parked in front of my parents’ condo, but they are not filming. A police car, lights flashing, is pulled up onto the median. By the time I’ve deposited the laundry in my trunk, both the news truck and the police car have driven off. Not far from me are a well-dressed man and woman, sitting separately in their parked cars, listening to news on their car radios with slightly annoyed looks on their faces: it seems they’ve been sitting there for some time, and their irritation is turning to boredom.
But it’s a beautiful evening. The heat of the day has lifted, and most of the humidity has disappeared. A breeze is blowing, stirring the red and white blossoms of the rose bushes planted along the street in front of my parents’ building. They are without fragrance, which disappoints me a little, as odorless roses always do—I can’t help comparing them to my great-grandmother’s wonderfully perfumed roses. Huge and full and of all different colors—red, pink, white, peach, and yellow—they reached, it seemed, ten feet tall, tended by my great-grandmother in the backyard of the apartment house in Queens where she and my grandparents lived and where my dad grew up. These fragrantless Detroit roses are much smaller and less varied in color, but they’re still pretty.
I want to linger down here in the breezy street with the sun about to set, but then I have a better idea: I will go back up and bring my mom back down with me. She’s strong enough to walk the six flights down and up again. The exercise and the fresh air and the evening itself will be good for her. I hurry back up the stairs to the apartment.
“It’s really nice out,” I say. “Cooling down a little, but not at all cold. It’s breezy, but the air feels perfect.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” my mom says.
“You should get some exercise, Mom. It’ll help you sleep better. And it’ll be good for you to get out.”
“Oh, okay,” my mom says. “Your dad’s sleeping anyway, and Jolene is here. A walk does sound nice.”
As we start down the stairs, my mom reminds me that her left leg gets a little sore if she walks too fast. When I’ve asked her what the problem is, and if it can be fixed, she has said, “It’s just old age. Even my doctor doesn’t have a better explanation.” She reminds me now of what her doctor told her to do when she walks up and down stairs: lead with her good leg when she’s going upstairs and lead with her bad leg when she’s going down. Her doctor suggested a slogan she can chant to remind herself how to step: “Up with the good, down with the bad.” It’s a chant that could be used, it occurs to me, during any kind of march or demonstration; it would work to voice any sort of protest.
My mom starts saying the slogan out loud now as we take the first flight leading down, seeming to relish the double meaning of the words as she says them: “Up with the good, down with the bad.” After a couple of repetitions, she is quiet again.
More people are using the stairwell. My mom pauses a couple of times on the stairs to introduce me to neighbors she knows and greet those she doesn’t. Then she starts walking down again, chanting twice, softly, as she resumes moving: “Up with the good, down with the bad.” Each flight is made up of two sets of stairs, and as we round the corners and head down the flights, I keep trying to walk behind my mom or in front of her when others approach, but my mom doesn’t seem to notice when people want to pass her, and she keeps trying to walk beside me, blocking others behind us until they manage to slip around us. I have noticed lately that my mom can get quite dogged about staying in a particular space, seemingly oblivious that she’s in my way or someone else’s—in the kitchen, in a store, or on the street. Is it because of her cataracts, which compromise her vision? I think it’s more likely because she’s overtired or exhausted—she is just single-mindedly slogging onward, taking care of her husband and herself, sometimes failing to notice what else is going on around her.
When we reach the lobby, two of the elderly women are gone, probably taken by relatives or friends to places with working elevators or no stairs, but the one with the walker remains, sitting alone, still looking dignified and stoic and as if she will last this out, no matter how long she must wait.
Outside, the light is just beginning to fade—the sun is behind the buildings now—and the breeze, still delightful, is sweeping along the street. It’s different than it was out here only fifteen minutes ago, but the same magical quality remains: a mix of temperature, wind, and light that feels like s
ome sort of blessing. I look up at the sky—it’s tranquil, yet in motion, a blend of various blues—and then I walk down the street, arm-in-arm with my mom, feeling more like we’re sisters than mother and daughter. As if the reins are slowly being transferred to me, so that ultimately we’ll switch roles, and I’ll take care of her. But for now, it feels as if it could go either way, and it does—we cook for each other, we help each other help the Old Man: my stubborn and precious father, the only man my mom has ever loved. Later tonight, he’ll wake up, agitated and confused, and then the following morning, he’ll wake entirely lucid, at once lively and calm. He’s back! my brother Zachary will email to the rest of our sibs, after talking with our dad on the phone. What seemed almost the end was simply an intestinal infection, from which our dad will shortly recover. He’ll live another six months before he leaves this world—he’ll die in January, on Martin Luther King’s birthday, surrounded by our family. But as my mom and I stroll down the street, we don’t know this yet.
We walk the length of the long block, past more fragrantless yet pretty roses, cross the street at the light, walk another, shorter block, and start crossing over the Chrysler Expressway. The light is fading minute by minute, and the blues of the sky are growing darker. We’d talked about walking to Greektown, only a couple more blocks away, but as we near the end of the overpass, my mom slows and then stops. “Maybe we should go back,” she says. “It’s starting to get dark.”
My mom is not suggesting we retreat because we are two small, aging women, one mostly gray-haired and one with hair that’s all white; she’s not suggesting we retreat because we might look weak and be seen as targets. She is suggesting we turn back now because we are the strong ones here, at this moment, in my parents’ world, and if we are made weak, if we are robbed and hurt in the process—well, we can’t let that happen. So we turn, still arm-in-arm, and walk back over the overpass. We cross that street and the next, then slowly continue down the long, rose-bordered block that fronts my parents’ apartment, and enter through the doors in to the lobby, where the lone older woman is still sitting, steady and calm, with her walker beside her. My mom and I step down the hall to the stairwell, and my mom grasps the handrail. As we start climbing the stairs, I join my voice with hers: “Up with the good,” we chant. “Down with the bad.”
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my writer friends for loaning me your clear eyes and brilliant minds: Andy Mozina, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Joan Donaldson, Glenn Deutsch, Jane Ruiter, Lynn Fay, Heather Sappenfield, and Jim Ray Daniels.
Thanks to the Quilters, with whom I’ve shared decades of dessert and tea and stories, yours and mine, and also a little needlework now and then: Judy Bowman Anthrop, Lena Aukema, Linda Charvat, Jane Dickie, Leslie Dokianakis, Joan Donaldson, Patty Dykstra, Helen Fortier, Mary Glass, Kelly Jacobsma, Margaret Longshore, Barbara Muller, Krista Dykstra Raffenaud, Kate Lamere Sarfaty, Roxanne Seafort, Robin Tinholt, Mary Van Andel, Fran Poposki Van Howe, Kay VerSchure, and Robin Williams-Voigt.
Thanks to my book club friends: Vicki Rosenberg, Eddie Parach, Larry and Jane Dickie, Jean and Curtis Birky, David and Alison Swan, and Charlie Schreiner. The world needs more dedicated book lovers and great cooks like you folks!
I’m grateful to the Saugatuck-Douglas Interurban Transit Authority for providing me with a steady job for nearly thirty years, as well as with friendship and camaraderie, and now a pension that allows me to write as much as I wish.
I couldn’t have hoped for a more talented or kinder crew than everyone at Wayne State University Press: thank you to Robin DuBlanc, Jamie Jones, Emily Nowak, Rachel Ross, Kristina Stonehill, Carrie Downes Teefey, and especially Annie Martin. I couldn’t be in better hands.
Thank you, Sheryl Johnston, my dedicated publicist and excellent ally and friend.
Thanks to my stepson Emerson Wierenga Schreiner, artist extraordinaire, for painting the cover art for this book.
Thanks to my entire big family for your steadfast love and support, especially my mother and father, Susie and Joe, my daughter, Cloey, my brothers and sister, Steve, Peter, Kris, Anthony, and Amy, and most of all, my husband, Charlie.
“Up in the Air” was a finalist for the Missouri Review’s 2016 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize.
“Losing It” made the top twenty in the Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award Contest for 2016.
“Spin,” in a slightly different form, was a finalist for Southern Indiana Review’s 2013 Thomas A. Wilhelmus Award and appeared in 2015 in the special Detroit issue of Transmissions.
“Lorelei” won First Place for Fiction in 2017 in the Seventh Annual Literature + Medicine Writing Contest and was a finalist for the Bellevue Review’s 2018 Goldenberg Prize for Fiction.
“Note to the New Owners” appeared in the fall 2017 issue of Arts & Letters.
“Marching” was a finalist in the 2014 Glimmer Train Fiction Open and an honorable mention in 2016 for the Cincinnati Review’s Seventh Annual Robert and Adele Schiff Awards in Poetry and Prose.
About the Author
Lisa Lenzo is the author of Within the Lighted City, chosen by Ann Beattie for the 1997 John Simmons Short Fiction Award, and of the 2015 Michigan Notable Book Award–winner Strange Love (Wayne State University Press). Lenzo’s other awards include a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, a Hemingway Days Festival Award, and First Prize for Fiction in the 2017 Literature and Medicine Writing Contest. Her stories and essays have appeared in Arts & Letters, Michigan Quarterly Review, Sacred Ground: Stories about Home, Fresh Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes, and on NPR.