We were halfway to Hoover Middle School, on the shortcut that bypassed the traffic on San Carlos, when the classic rock DJ announced that Roy Orbison had died. By then he was already a very old man. I was in the passenger seat of the old, tan Ford Escort that I would crash years later, after I had grown up a little. A regular, gloomy fall morning. It was cold. I had the window rolled up, a scarf around my neck. But Mom’s was all the way down, no coat, just her polyester-blend work dress. Her long arm dangling out the window, a Marlboro Light 100 between her red acrylic nails. She had been singing along with the radio, maybe it was Creedence’s “Fortunate Son,” or Heart’s “Barracuda.” She was light and cheery, but rushed. There was never enough time in the mornings. Something always went wrong, the coffee pot, the car battery. And soon enough she would be locked to the desk for hours and hours. Pushing paper, punching keys, filling out forms. Taking directions and picking up the slack for a manager ten years younger whose college degree trumped her decade of experience and dedicated service to the corporation. But for those rushed moments dropping me off she was still free, she still owned herself, and each morning found us singing along to the songs on the radio, excited about the day that was beginning.
But when the DJ announced the news about Roy Orbison, a darkness clouded my mother’s eyes. “Oh, Jen, that’s so sad. Poor Roy Orbison.” She drove along in silence, making the left onto Park. I watched as tears came to her eyes. At the next stop sign, she flipped open the visor and opened the mirror, blotting the tears carefully to stop the mascara from running down her cheeks. I pretended not to notice.
After she and I had made a slew of new mistakes, I became a teenager, and Grandpa moved in with us. Mom had almost rid herself of one responsibility when her own father finally went all the way blind. Between the vision and the diabetes and the inevitable orneriness, Grandpa became a second child for Mom and another responsibility for me, besides high school, after-school job, and dance team. Years later, he would lie down for a couple weeks before gradually drifting away. I was home from college when he passed. Like he had waited for a long weekend so I could be there for Mom. So Mom could be there for me. Mom’s black cat was so sad to see him go she lost all the fur on her belly.
But back when he was still almost at full strength, Mom would get up early to give Grandpa his shot, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, read the newspaper, particularly the editorials and opinions. She had always wanted to be a writer. One of the columnists, Murray Frymer, was the parent of an ailing old cat who was beginning that inevitable decline. His wife was forcing the cat into the garage at night because of his frequent vomiting and incontinence. To show his sympathy for the aged, decrepit animal, Frymer wrote a series of columns from the cat’s perspective, signed by Hershey Frymer.
For years, Mom would wake me up personally, calling “Jen” from my doorway, gently, at least for the first few times. From my dreams, her voice sounded like a nice warm blanket. After awhile, she would begin to sound pissed off, “JENNNN!” But when Murray Frymer wrote a column from Hershey’s perspective, Mom would come into my room, turn on the light, making me bristle at first, and sit on the edge of the bed to tell me what had happened to Hershey the night before.
As I slowly awoke, she was reading part of his column where Murray and Hershey have a conversation in the garage on a cold winter morning. Hershey tells Murray how cold and dreary the garage is, how he’d much rather be back in the house. Murray tells Hershey about the new carpet, about how hard it is to remove those stains. Ultimately, Murray thinks of all the parallels between himself and Hershey. He thinks about getting older, how death might be right around the corner for himself as well as the poor, old pitiful cat. When I was more conscious, we talked about Hershey. We both felt bad for him and wished Murray’s wife wasn’t such a hard ass. It was just carpet.
Mom’s cats were still young then. And she hadn’t adopted the dog yet. Bobby was a cocka-poo mutt with a big tumor and a really bad hip problem. He had the worst time standing up. Every once in awhile he would bite, not really because he was mean, but more because he was old and frustrated. But she loved that old dog for the last couple years of his life. Mom doted on Bobby more than anyone else had in his long, long life. She even bought him a Kansas City Chiefs kerchief to wear on Sundays. When I complained about him on my weekends home from college, asking her why couldn’t she just get a cute, young dog, Mom would just say, “Jen, he needs someone to love him.”
One morning, Mom came in, turned on the light, and said, “Jen, Hershey died.”
Even though I was usually a bear to wake, this morning I sat up immediately, frowning, saying “Oh, no.”
“Yeah, honey, he died this weekend. Murray said it was very peaceful,” she said as she sat on the side of the bed in her green robe and wrapped her arms around me. I hugged her right back, my cheek on her shoulder.
“It’s so sad when things die.”
“I know, sweetie.”
I hung there, draped over her shoulders like the little girl I once was. Her hair scratching my forehead, I breathed in her perfume. When I eased up a little, sitting back against the pillow, Mom read me some of the parts. We sat there for a little while, mourning Hershey, spending some of those precious before-school-and-work moments thinking about how Murray’s days with Hershey were always numbered. How quickly it all passes by.
When Mom got sick, in fact for years during her illness and after her death, I couldn’t handle hearing anyone whine about anything. The most intense or banal complaints were absolutely grating. Inside my head, I growled at the ease of everyone else’s life. I couldn’t take it. I barely concealed my wrath.
I stopped hanging out with that girl from grad school. We were at the burger place and she criticized a guy who walked by because of his ugly shoes. “Ew, I hate those Simple shoes!” she said. There was nothing wrong with them. Just plain sneakers. But what made my blood burn was her compulsion to always say something negative, kill my buzz, even though it was nothing that would affect her, even indirectly. But still she had to pipe up. Draw attention to the fact that her life was so easy and convenient and shallow that she would let someone’s shoes be important enough to her to interrupt someone else’s story.
Or that time we had to go to the emergency room. While she was safely upstairs, being treated, and I was running back to the car for something I had forgotten, those EMTs stood there, blocking the doorway, yammering on and on about their weekend and some bullshit shenanigans they were up to. I wanted to lunge at them, blowing past them like an NFL lineman. If they weren’t going to help my mom then they could just get out of the fucking way. Stupid young people. Did they really think any of that bullshit mattered?
Even when my old elementary school friend met the man of her dreams and her family invited my orphaned self to the family functions, knowing I had no family left, I struggled to avoid throwing drinks in people’s faces. They would bitch and carp about their petty inconveniences. Bullshit that wouldn’t matter to anyone but some pampered, bourgeois housewife. Sewing a throw blanket that was an “appropriate” thickness for the living room. Finding a responsible dog walker who would adequately exercise the three ill-trained dogs. Even the stepmom, whose mother had died a couple months earlier, drove me crazy talking about mourning and grieving. They were church types, his father a minister, so she was free with her talk of faith and criticism of vice. I always ordered an extra beer when I saw her coming.
“Oh, Jennifer, it is so nice to see you again. I’m so happy you could join us on this special day” she said, hugging me as soon as I walked into the restaurant. I forget the occasion, but we were all eating together at a restaurant downtown. After a few drinks, some mingling, the step mom came up to my end of the table and started a conversation with the soon-to-be in-laws. Quickly, she brought up the tragedy she’d just experienced. Her mom’s death. She had been out of state tending to her for several months. It was so hard to miss her and think about her all time. The sadness.
But all I could think was: what the fuck do you know about tragedy? About loss and sadness? Your mom was a little old lady, eighty if a day, who’d lived a long, full life. She was ancient and fragile and had nothing left to give to the world. In every way, except the death part, her story was the opposite of mine. I would have loved to see my Mom grow old, get weak, degenerate. Everything changed so fast. Only a couple of years earlier, we were partners in crime. She was setting me up with sexy GIs at the bar in Waikiki. We were dancing like girls at rock concerts. Very quickly, in no time at all, really, she had become a box of ash on the shelf.
I sat as long as I could, but then I tried to tastefully excuse myself to the little girl’s room. Later, she would point out how I had walked away in the middle of her story, for which I very politely apologized and ordered another drink. I couldn’t begin to show my hand, to let loose the deluge I just barely contained.
So when that dark-eyed girl came into my class a couple years later, I wasn’t surprised at all. I expected her to walk into my life sometime. And I felt like I could see it all right away.
“Hello, my name is Alaina and I am planning on majoring in . . .” and she kept talking, a real Scheherezade, gesticulating with her hands, not in an obnoxious way, but she clearly had energy. She was perched on a chair, sideways, next to the wall and though she made very deliberate eye contact with me, making me feel familiar with her from the first moment, she was working the rest of the class like a stand-up comic. “So, my mom’s Mexican and my dad’s Jordanian, so I’m down with all the darker people . . .” she says, getting a bunch of laughs.
Normally, our first-day-of-class introductions were more abbreviated, but this was a community college late-night class, starting late in the evening, replete with a contingent of late twenty to thirtysomethings going back to school after a variety of setbacks as well as a few in their fifties or beyond who were attempting to make a big change halfway through their lives. So I’d give them a little leeway. They were a spirited bunch, it was clear. And this was week one when we were still at full capacity. In the coming weeks, illnesses, family responsibilities, or sometimes just old-fashioned slackerdom would pull half of them away from the class never to return. But I knew right away that Alaina would make it. There was something so desperate in her face.
“ . . . so, a whole bunch of changes have happened in my life recently, and everything’s changed, so it is really important to me to get back into school, even though I haven’t done very good in the past.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re here, Alaina” I said, smiling. And when I proceed on to the next student, I knew I was a little quick to cut her off, but I gave her an earnest smile and knew I would get to know her well in the following weeks.
After class, Alaina walked up as everyone was leaving. It turned out that she also lived over the hill, near the beach, commuting to campus twice a week, even though the drive was long and a little dangerous. So, I asked her why she didn’t go to Laguna, the local college.
“Oh, I’ve taken some classes at Laguna before. See, I’m not one of these right-out-of-high-school kids.
“Oh, ok,” I say laughing.
“Yeah, I really like reading. I read all the time, even when I was a little kid. But then when I started at Laguna, it was, well . . . I just got distracted. And I would do other things. So, I’m twenty-six now and I’m just working at this pharmacy . . . and, you know, it sucks and so I really want to go back and finish now . . .” and she hesitates for a minute, starting and stopping whatever was on the tip of her tongue a few times. “See, I’ve been going through a really tough time because, well, my mom died of cancer four months ago . . .”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, thanks, I just, well, it was one of those things that she always wanted me to do and, well. . .”
“I lost my mom to cancer too and I understand. I mean, I understand as much as anyone can, but I’m really glad you’re here because this might be a really good way of dealing with everything.”
Tears were already streaming down her face, but she didn’t gasp or sob like some girls do. Just tears. Out of those grey eyes. Across the dark bags under her eyes, swept up quickly by the back of her hand.
“Yeah, I hope. I’m a little nervous about taking a class right now though . . . because this just happened.”
“I bet. But . . . at the same time, I don’t know if it really gets easier . . .I mean it’s been two years for me, and, well. . . .I probably shouldn’t be saying this.”
“Yeah, maybe this isn’t helping . . .” she said, almost laughing into her sleeve as she swept more tears away. Hurt, definitely, but her love of life was just barely hidden beneath the sorrow. She could still make jokes during the most uncomfortable moments.
“One thing, though, that I felt after my mom died was that back when she was alive, I felt like I only had to be a good daughter, or the kind of daughter she wanted—or I wanted to be—when she was watching. But now that she’s gone, I feel like I can’t hide. Like she’s watching me all the time. And sometimes, I’m like damn it because I don’t always want to do the right thing . . .” We both laughed that time. “So, I’m just saying that I’m sure your mom is glad you’re here and ready to do this.”
Alaina thanked me for my time and my encouragement and we walked out together that night. In the next weeks, it would be hard not to reach out and hug her and squeeze her, but to treat her like just any other student. Before Mother’s Day, she talked to me before class about how she and her brother were going to get drunk. I told her I thought it was a good idea. After her mom’s birthday, we also commiserated.
“Yeah, mine’s October 8th. I go out to Natural Bridges to see the butterflies. We did that together a couple of times.” I wouldn’t tell her about the year of the butterfly festival, the kid’s “entertainment” who sang that butterfly song to the tune of “My Girl.” I’d leave all that out and go back to it later, when we could be actually friends outside of class, beyond the student/teacher strangeness. Over beers and salsa.
The biggest challenge with Alaina was not looking at her the way people looked at me when Mom got sick, when she passed. The worst was my cousin, Kevin. Coincidentally, he and his not-so-new wife were visiting the Bay Area just weeks after Mom began treatment. She was in the middle of losing her hair. She wore a knitted stocking cap on that cold November day in San Francisco, more to hold in the hair from flying onto our plates rather than to conceal her bald patches. When she said it out loud, that she was sick and wasn’t going to get better, he looked right at me. Locking eyes with me, a pained glance that said it all. On the way home, I asked Mom if Kevin’s mom had died of cancer. She said yes. But I already knew the answer.
And that semester, I began crying again, not just for myself but for everyone. For the ugliness and heartache everywhere. For the sadness I saw in Alaina’s face. For the way I must have inadvertently looked at her, trying my best to conceal that look. But I was the future her and she was the past me. And it felt so good to finally grieve for someone else.
