by Amber Foxx
What had happened to her at eighteen? Why hadn’t she fought for her future? A psychologist would probably say it was some fixation on losing her father. Or some bad example from her mother. Or both. Putting some man and being in love ahead of her education. Always taking care of someone instead of herself. And not thinking straight. Rebound from Shawn to Mack—bad choice. And that dragged her down. Rebound from Mack to Hubert. Good choice. But as far as getting ahead in her life, it dragged her down again.
“I reckon I could have.” If Rhoda-Rae had been paying attention. If Mae’s father had still been around. He was a coach, he would have helped her find an athletic scholarship somewhere. And most of all, if Mae hadn’t married Mack. But that was water under the bridge. At least Rhoda-Rae was helping pay for this course, something she probably had to scrimp to do. The same mother who had made sure Shawn never dated her daughter again. Seeing Shawn, and now this question from Patsy, triggered deep old feelings in Mae about a whole list of wrong turns in life, both Rhoda-Rae’s and Mae’s own. She wondered if Rhoda-Rae’s unexpected bragging on her smart, athletic daughter had any of this regret in it, too.
Mae turned to Patsy. “What else does Mama say about me?”
“She said not to talk to you about some of my classes.”
“The alternative medicine class?”
“That’s the one.” Patsy’s grin suggested she found the request amusing. “I told her about this program we studied, a very successful program for reversing heart disease without surgery. It involves a low-fat vegetarian diet, exercise, yoga, meditation and group therapy, and she said that it was leading people to the devil.” Patsy shook her head. “I asked her if the devil was a vegetarian.”
Mae laughed. She liked Patsy. “It had to be the yoga. Mama thinks it’s some kind of pagan worship when they do sun salutations. My mother-in-law takes yoga at Health Quest and Mama’s worried about Sallie’s soul. Says when you meditate the devil can get in.”
Patsy said, “I’m taking a class this semester on non-Western healing. I thought it would be useful, with so many immigrants from different cultures. Your mother would think this course is even crazier. ”
“Is that what you’re taking tonight?”
“Yes, that’s my Tuesday class. Thursday I have epidemiology and Friday is Health Law.”
“These only meet once a week?”
“For three hours.”
“So I’ll have an hour to wait for you.”
“Plenty of time to study.”
Mae thought about it. Yes, she could study her personal training course materials while she waited. It would be a good use of her time. But she was also curious about everything Patsy was studying. Mae didn’t even know what epidemiology was. She might be more open-minded than Rhoda-Rae, but she was actually more ignorant than her mother. She wished she could slip in on Patsy’s classes for the last hour and just listen to what other people knew, even if it was over her head.
“Would I understand what’s going on in any of your classes?”
“Not law or epi, no, I don’t think you would. Those take a lot of background. But the non-Western health systems ...” Patsy looked thoughtful. “Understanding is a funny word for what happens there.”
“Why’s that?”
“We’re starting from the premise that there are things in the world that we don’t understand. But they still happen. And they still heal people.”
Mae thought of her Granma Rhoda-Sue Jackson, with her herbs and laying on of hands. “My Granma did something like that. She was a folk healer in the mountains.”
“Really?” Patsy’s eyebrows shot up. “How wonderful. Did she teach you anything?”
“No. Mama didn’t believe in it. As you can imagine.”
“That’s a shame. A tradition like that shouldn’t die out. Appalachian folk healers must be fading away like traditional medicine people in other cultures. So you don’t know how to do any of it?”
Mae stopped before she answered. She shouldn’t tell Patsy about the sight. First, she didn’t plan on using it outside of emergencies, and second, even Patsy might think it was spooky or impossible. It wasn’t mainstream like yoga or meditation. It was off the map. But she didn’t want to outright lie. “Nothing I can talk about.”
“Good heavens, what do you do, cast spells on people?”
“No.” Mae felt the tension lighten with Patsy’s joke. “Mama doesn’t like it that I can—well, I can find people. Or lost animals. I can see them.”
“So you’re psychic.”
“I reckon. Sort of. I keep it turned off most of the time.”
“Probably because of your mother?” Patsy watched Mae’s affirmative nod. “To heck with her. I’ll have to share some of the articles I’m reading for class with you. The first two are on things exactly like what you can do. How people can know things or do things over a distance. Dr. Tann and Dr. Pena say it’s to get our minds loosened up for the really strange stuff that comes later.”
“Stranger than what I do?”
“Strange? Phooey. To some cultures, that’s perfectly normal. Honestly, you need to get the heck out of Cauwetska.”
“I live in Tylerton.” It was a feeble joke, and Patsy blew right past it.
“I meant your mind, not your body. This certification is all well and good for getting a job, but you need more education than that. You’ve been raised in the dark. Time to turn on some lights.”
Patsy parked off campus in a residential neighborhood of older, somewhat neglected houses. “I’m already paying out-of-state tuition. I’m not going to pay for a parking permit, too.” As they got out of the car and walked in the cloudy, dim afternoon light toward the campus, Patsy pointed out the building where Mae should meet her, the new brown brick one with a huge satellite dish and antennae on the roof. “The classes are televised to a lot of remote locations around the country where people are getting degrees from CVU. Which works well for me because they record all the classes, and that means I can check out DVDs of any I miss if I can’t get up here.”
“Could I ever watch the DVDs?”
“I suppose. You’re really curious about this class, aren’t you?”
“I am.”
“I’ll see what I can do. Meet me in the second-floor hallway. We get done around six-fifty. Have a great first session.”
Following Patsy’s directions, Mae began a long walk across the campus. It seemed about as big as Tylerton, but with more people. The architecture changed as she walked several city blocks, from new, crisp modern buildings of tan and brown brick to old, mossy red-brick paths and columned buildings. Mae felt as if she were walking back through the college’s history.
Unlike Tylerton, the college appeared to be growing. Aside from Buddy’s garage, where Hubert worked, and the peanut processing plant next door to the garage, everything else in downtown Tylerton was boarded up. Main Street was dying. Mae’s next door neighbor, the mayor, didn’t have much to govern. She sometimes thought he had more cats on his peanut farm than he had citizens to take care of.
At home, she saw mostly the same people, mostly black people and a few white people, all dressed pretty much the same. Farmers in jeans and old work shirts. In Cauwetska she’d see a few professionals in suits or medical scrubs, and old-money people in their conventional preppy garb. Here on campus she saw Middle Eastern people, Arab men wearing headdresses like Lawrence of Arabia and women with headscarves. A girl with a facial tattoo and lip ring and a man with blue hair spiked up the middle and purple tails down his neck held hands as they passed the Middle Easterners.
Plenty of people on campus dressed in jeans and sweat suits and looked conventional, but Mae noticed they were often thinner and in better shape than folks back home. Her own vain, beauty-conscious mother and the organic farming health-nut Ridleys were exceptions. Good for her future career, of course, living in a county where some people even called her curvy, well-muscled build “skinny” just because she wasn’t fat. At CVU
, some of the fittest-looking people hurrying to classes wore military uniforms. Mae didn’t know you could go to college and be in the military at the same time. Her friends from high school that had gone into the services had all done it instead of college. It was another way out of northeastern North Carolina.
She arrived at the Health Sciences building with two minutes to spare and hurried to the third floor. On the broad stairs, grooved with years of wear, she passed two trim, coifed women in suits and dress shoes, talking on their way down.
“I’m sure he can explain,” one said reassuringly.
“I’m sure he can, too,” the other replied with sarcasm.
“Do you think Randi really wouldn’t know?”
“We’re talking about Charlie.”
Mae watched the tops of the women’s heads disappear down the angle of the staircase through the old wooden railings. Their tapping pumps and low voices fading, one of them said, “I wish he’d make my life easy and retire.” Sounded like colleges were as full of gripes and gossip as any low-wage place Mae had ever worked.
Entering the room where her course would meet for the next six weeks, Mae wondered if she would be the only one without a degree. Maybe it wouldn’t show, if she was.
At the front of the room, a stunning, olive-skinned blonde in a track suit and athletic shoes checked off names on a list and took payment from some students as they came to the front and identified themselves.
As she talked about tuition and registration, the husky, slightly scratchy quality of her warm alto took the intimidating edge off her beauty, and men registering for the course seemed to linger to flirt as they made their payments. Waiting in line, Mae could see the instructor expertly ignore the little jokes and clumsy attention-seeking. Rhoda-Rae would have taken a bath in it and flirted back.
“Hi. Your name?”
“Rhoda-Mae Martin-Ridley. But I go by Mae.”
The blonde checked her name off as Mae handed her the two checks, one from Rhoda-Rae for half the tuition and the other from Mae and Hubert’s joint account. “Good to go.” The instructor smiled. “Pick up your books and study guides over there.” She nodded toward a table to her left. Mae walked over to collect a thick hardcover book and two spiral-bound booklets. She was going to read all this in six weeks? But heck, Patsy was working and taking three graduate courses. If she could do that, Mae could do this.
“All righty. Let’s get started.” The blonde smiled and logged into a computer and turned on a projection screen. “This course will prepare you to take the American Council on Exercise Personal Trainer Certification Exam that’s being given in Geisert Hall on March 1st. So you’ll have a couple of weeks to study when it’s over, and you should. Some people fail this test the first time, even with degrees in exercise science. I’m teaching this course as if none of you do, to make sure it’s a thorough review. I’m not assuming you know anything.” Mae felt a surge of relief. “But it will help you get jobs, of course, if you have the degree. Especially if any of you are thinking of full-time careers in the fitness industry.”
A picture came on the screen, showing an older, overweight man working out on a seated chest press machine with a fit young woman in khaki pants and polo shirt standing by him, apparently supervising. The title said Overview of Personal Training.
“Before we get started,” the instructor said, “I guess I should tell you who I am. My name’s Randi Gilbert and I’m the fitness director at Oceanfront Wellness here in Norfolk and a graduate student in Community Health at CVU. I’ve been working in the fitness industry since I got out of high school. Life guard, group fitness instructor, personal trainer, and now management.”
Randi, Mae thought. The name mentioned by the women on the stairs as they talked about the troublesome Charlie one of them hoped would retire.
Randi listed her certifications, mentioned her undergraduate degree in exercise science, and began the first lecture, encouraging the participants to take notes in their study guides.
“One of the most important things I want to emphasize is professionalism. I’m starting with anatomy and biomechanics and exercise physiology, the knowledge base that makes you a professional, but we’ll also talk about how to communicate with and plan programs for your clients. Your role as a trainer is always to help your clients. It’s never about your ego, how strong you are or how flexible. You dress professionally, you keep your boundaries and watch your language, you keep good records, you know your scope of practice, you look up anything you don’t know, and you don’t date your clients.”
“Or your teacher?” asked a young man with a buzz cut and big shoulders, grinning.
“Seriously.” Randi met his eyes without a hint of a smile. “It’s not an option.”
For Mae the two hours flew past. Seeing herself as a professional with expertise in the near future kept her focused on every word Randi said, taking notes as if her life depended on it—and in a way it did. At the end of the session, Randi encouraged them not to miss any classes. The content would be intensive and they would also do some practice training sessions in the campus gym later, so every minute counted.
As the students filed out the door talking with each other, Randi checked her phone messages. She said, “Anyone walking over towards Spruce?”
“Space?” someone asked.
“Yes.” Randi cracked a smile. “Anyone walking that way?”
No one was, and the personal training students continued their exit.
Mae had no idea what they were talking about. It sounded as if most knew the campus. “I’m walking to the place with all the satellite stuff.”
“That’s Spruce,” Randi said. “People call it Space because it looks like it should be in orbit. Walk with me? I hate crossing the whole campus by myself at night.”
“Sure.” Mae hadn’t thought of that, and Patsy apparently hadn’t considered it either. “Isn’t it safe?”
“Oh, I’m sure it is. I’m just a big chicken. I’m a country girl.”
As the others left ahead of them, Mae and Randi walked downstairs more slowly. “Where’re you from?” Mae asked.
“Wisconsin. We moved here for my fiancé’s job. Do you go to school here?”
“No. I ride up with a lady who’s getting her Master’s. We’re from around Cauwetska.”
“Where’s that? I never heard of it.”
“Not much to hear. It’s in North Carolina, about ninety minutes from everywhere and two miles east of nowhere.”
“Sounds like my kind of place.” Randi sounded wistful. “I love nowhere.” At the foot of the stairs, where they could have stepped out a back door, Randi instead turned through double doors into a corridor and took a left down a hallway of faculty offices. Fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered, the only sound besides their footsteps.
“I have to stop by my office and Charlie’s office—I need to bring him something over at Spruce.” Randi stopped at the first office on the hall, which had her name on it, unlocked it and quickly checked the e-mail program that was already up and running on her computer. Her workspace looked to be about the size of a janitor’s closet. “Looks like I’ll be working late tonight.” She paused, shook her head, picked up a laptop, and relocked the office. “All righty. Charlie-land next.”
“You work here? I thought you were a fitness director at a wellness center.”
They proceeded down the hall, around a corner to another set of offices. Randi jiggled her key ring to make a key come loose from the tangle. “I’m also a teaching assistant. This course you’re taking isn’t even part of that, it’s still another job. And don’t tell me I have too many jobs. My fiancé says he’s going to de-fiancé me if I don’t find some time for him.” Randi smiled as she said it, as if his threats didn’t worry her much. Mae felt a tinge of envy at the idea of having too many jobs, as hard as it had been for her to find even one.
The next office door that Randi unlocked was tiled over with photographs.
“Th
at’s a heck of a lot of pictures,” Mae said.
“Charlie’s daughter and her husband, and his granddaughter. He does kind of show them off.”
Every inch displayed a snapshot of a dark-haired child, in stages from infancy to around Brook and Stream’s age, a young woman who looked to be her mother, and sometimes a young but balding man, or all three together. Mae had never seen such a congestion of pictures of someone’s family. She’d had a high school teacher who had his grandkids as a screen saver. But this was like wallpaper on the door. Overkill on being a father and grandfather. And the door wasn’t even for him to look at. It was for others.
Inside the office, Randi stepped past stacks of papers on the floor to get to a bookshelf.
Boxes overflowed with papers and books, and more books and papers covered a small round meeting table and the chairs around it. None of the books on the shelves looked new, but those in the heaps of papers did. On the top of the bookshelf, a pale, sprawling plant hung onto life without enough light, and a picture of Charlie’s daughter at her wedding had pride of place among its leaves. The walls held fewer pictures than the door, and a different orchestration of images. There were wedding pictures—all his daughter’s—and also paintings.
Mae asked, “How can you find anything in here?”
“You get used to it. It’s Charlie.” Randi seemed to think this explained everything.
Mae admired an impressionistic beach scene. “I like the paintings.”
“He did them.” Randi took a used-looking paperback from the shelf. She nodded towards a portrait of a blue-eyed, bearded young man who gazed at the viewer, looking serious and cold. “Self-portrait, if you can believe it.”
Snapshots taped randomly to the wall showed the man in the portrait at various ages in exotic locales: high mountain landscapes, thick jungles, and even the Great Wall of China. In some pictures, obviously those taken later, he became heavy as well as graying, sometimes extremely overweight, sometimes only slightly. He had been quite handsome in earlier years, and his face in recent pictures, though thicker and harder, was still compelling, with its strong nose and arresting blue eyes.