The Sweet by and By (31 page)

Ada Everett’s announcement for holiday dinners is the only time anybody ever talks over the intercom unless they have a medical emer- gency. She is cheery like a bird, as always, in fact her voice sounds like a bird. “Good afternoon everyone, and happy, happy Easter. It’s a beautiful spring day, and I’d like to welcome everyone to the dining room for our annual Easter luncheon. See you there!” You got to give her credit, she sounds happy in her work.

I check on several of my patients who don’t need my help to make sure they’re dressed and ready to go to lunch. When I get to Miss Mar- garet’s room, she is in pajamas, sitting in an armchair with sunglasses

on. I don’t have no idea whose sunglasses she’s got, maybe her daugh- ter’s or somebody who came to see her and left them, in a hurry to get out and back to whatever they were doing. “I thought we decided you were gon put on some clothes,” I said.

“
We
didn’t decide a goddamn thing.”

“I know you’re not gon talk like that on Easter Day.”

“I’ll talk whatever I want whenever the hell I want to, Lorraine.”

I know when to back off. “All right then, Miss Margaret, I’m gon leave you be ’til you can talk to me like I’m talking to you.” I start for the door but she stops me.

“I can’t get up from here. I don’t feel like it, and I don’t have any clothes fitting to wear.”

“I told you I’d help you.”

“You can’t help me. You think you can help me? You can help me go to lunch with a bunch of people worse off than me. That sure sounds like a happy Easter, doesn’t it?”

“Would you eat something with me by ourselves?”

“In here? Mama and Daddy have already left, ages ago.” Her mind’s skipping some.

“I haven’t seen them, honey, but they’re all right wherever they are. I’m talkin about with me. In the dining room. I been puttin out f low- ers since breakfast and I made a table off to one side. Ain’t room but for two people.”

“I don’t want to see them, Lorraine.” Her voice breaks, weaker now. “They’ll look at me and think, ‘she can’t do anything.’ ”

“The only one looking at you is gon be me. I have to look at you whether I want to or not.” I try to pull a smile out of her.

“Don’t say what you can’t promise.”

“I promise. Now take off them sunglasses.” I reach for her hands, and she raises them as high as she can, not quite to shoulder level, but enough for me to take hold below her wrists and pull her to her feet so

I can pull down her pajama pants and underwear. I sit her back down, it’s painful for her, then take off her top. Her bra looks brownish. I know she has clean bras. I know Ann does her laundry every few days and brings it down here herself, so this means somebody sorry didn’t put a clean one on her. I get her changed and then take a few different things out of the closet so she can pick. We’re gon be late but this is more important. I want her to know what she’s doin and know what she’s wearin and know that it’s Easter, and she’s not going to if I don’t let her be part of the little things that go along with it.

“I like the pink, Lorraine. But it might be too young-looking . . .” She was waiting for my opinion.

“I think it suits you real good.” We struggle to get her into the skirt and jacket top and she declares she’s gon wear a shoe with a heel. It don’t matter cause she can’t walk all the way down there anyway. I unfold the wheelchair in the corner. I reach for her hands and she looks up into my face. “Rise up,” I tell her.

“That sounds like Easter. Have you been to church?” “No, I can’t go, but I know it’s Easter, don’t you?” “We ought to have hats.”

“Wouldn’t that be a sight,” I say, “us prancin in there with Easter bonnets on?”

Our table is waiting like I left it. Everyone else is already eating, so we sit and one of the boys from the kitchen brings us plates. It’s ham with a pineapple slice on top, with some garden peas and mashed po- tatoes. Without asking, I unfold her napkin and put it in her lap, then set her plate in front of me. I cut up the meat into pieces a little child could swallow and raise the fork to her mouth.

“Thank you,” she whispers. She opens.

“Chew real good now,” I tell her, but she doesn’t answer me. I slide my plate to the side and push some mashed potatoes onto her fork. She raises her left arm, reaching for the lilies in the middle of the table. She

might knock the whole thing over before we’re through, but I’m not gon study that. She wants to touch them, so I move the vase closer to her. “Happy Easter, Margaret. Is it good?” She’s still chewing, she has to swallow slow, and only a little at the time. Her sitting here is her thanking me. We’re gon take it bite by bite, however we can.

c h a p te r th i r t y- on e

Margaret

H

ey, Mrs. Clayton, glad to see you again.” The waitress smiles. She has more teeth than any normal person is sup-

posed to have. Bright shining white teeth.

“Thank you, same to you. I declare I think I could eat every- thing in this restaurant, I’m so hungry.” I haven’t eaten one thing I like today except for some candy that Lorraine gave me because it was good and chewy, exactly the kind I’m not supposed to have because it gets all in my dentures. Everybody else brings me some sort of crème-filled old-people candy that tastes like coconut and cough syrup mixed up together inside a chocolate shell. I also have a strong dislike for those big orange sugar peanuts that seem to find their way into every room in this place. Why in the world they make them to look like peanuts I don’t know, because there’s nothing peanut about them, especially not the taste. “What’s on special today?”

“I’ve got some of the best country-style steak you’ve ever had, gravy too.”

“Is it hard to chew?”

“There’s not anything I serve that ain’t easy to eat if you want it.”

“All right, I’ll take that with just a little gravy poured over it and I want some snap beans too. Have you got sweet tea?”

“I’ll bring you some tea. But you’re not gon have supper ’til five.

Just lay your head back and close your eyes.” “She said she had country-style steak.” “Who said?”

“The black-headed woman with the big teeth. She owns the place.” “Who is she? Do you know her?”

“She’s running an all-night diner. I thought Bernice ought to have been there but I didn’t see her. This woman is nice, real nice.”

“Were you looking for Bernice?” “I don’t know.”

“It’s hard to know sometimes, isn’t it?”

“She told me to come back and I said I would.”

“That’s all right, then. Go on, close your eyes and I’m gon bring you something to drink.”

“Who are you?”

c h a p te r th i r t y- t w o

April

I

told her several times I would drive her to the hospital. Mama said she could drive herself, but something in her face tugged

at me, sending a different message from that of her words. One of her patients is dying. To call Margaret Clayton one of her patients is an understatement because she is Mama’s friend, close friend, and they have had intimacy forced upon their relation- ship by nature and age, yet rather than turn away from it, have walked through it, Mama supporting her all the way, younger in years but somehow older in days. Mrs. Clayton has uterine cancer and refuses to have an operation or chemo, and she is in the hospital now because she has periods of profuse bleeding that are becoming more frequent. She will die, there is no other pos- sible outcome, and she is fighting mad. Mama says her friend has held on as long as she could. She pictures her on a rope behind a ski boat, but the boat is going faster now, and she’s falling, and she will have to let go or be pulled under. She will turn loose soon whether or not she wants to, but for now she is still managing to stay on top of the water, shifting in and out of the wake, wherever she can keep her balance. I suppose that, in her frailty, her will is the only thing she has, and she feels anger toward anyone who cannot understand it or will not succumb to it, even over the simplest things. I could have let Mama go alone, but going with her, taking her in fact, was a way for me to say that I understood

the weight of the moment, not because someone was dying, an inevi- tability to which I had been forced as a doctor to become accustomed, but rather, because my mother’s friend needs her now.

We arrived at the hospital just after dinnertime. She had suggested we stop on the way at Burger King because it was the only read- ily available option without taking time to go in somewhere and sit down. We did not talk as we exited the parking deck elevator, through the glass tunnel into a large reception area with rows of industrially upholstered chairs and sofas. I followed her, a few steps behind, and it struck me that she walked with the pace and tranquillity of a Buddhist monk, completely present in each step across the diamond-patterned carpet of pale green and coral. Her shoulders were held back, her neck was long, and her stride was seamless. She knew what she was there to do. Mama believed that everything you bring into a sick person’s room is what you leave behind, and she insisted that a person try to keep the chaos of the world and his own heart at bay in the presence of someone not well. In her experience, hurry and general anxiety were two unwelcome accompaniments for the more visible offerings of f lowers, candy, and get-well cards. Mama stood at the reception desk with me now beside her. The young black man behind the desk did not look up. She waited, this was not unfamiliar territory to her, she would accept the fact that maybe the receptionist thought, “I am at my job, not here to serve you, and the world is not going to stop just because you’ve arrived, so you’ll have to wait and let me finish what I’m doing or pretending to do at the moment whether you like it or not.” Mama was nonplussed. I, on the other hand, did not share her patience. “Excuse me sir, we’re here for visitors’ passes.”

“I’ll be with you in a minute.” He spoke in a vaguely Caribbean accent. He was crossing off names on one paper and adding them to another.

“We don’t want to miss visiting hours. My friend is very sick,” Mama added, with cultivated calm. He didn’t answer. Mama placed

her hand lightly on my arm as if to say, “Don’t get angry.” She had always seen, even nurtured, the fighter in me and was well aware of the signs of when it began to rear its head. I made no apologies for it. It’s one of the things that got me through med school as a single mother with a baby, it’s one of the things that steels me against every unspoken judgment of the caliber of the professional qualifications of a black woman doctor in the South.

I was pissed. “I am a doctor,” I added, then immediately wished I hadn’t. I was ashamed that I had tried to pull rank when the two women standing at that desk ought to have been able to expect common courtesy, whoever they were.

“Do you have a staff pass?” the man asked through rapidly blink- ing eyes.

“No. Look, I’m sorry, my mother and I would simply like to visit a patient as soon as possible.”

“Name of the patient?” he asked in a strangely disconcerting new voice as though we had not had any previous interaction.

“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 un- consciously 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, acknowl- edgments, 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 f low- ers 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 inconve- nienced 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 encom- passing 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 f lock 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, crystal- line 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, pro- tectors 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 swim- ming fish in its beak, finally lifting off in f light, with no regard to the weight it carries, rising, as hope must, lighter than human breath.